Beneath the Flat Line

Pressing into the mirror, I slid into shadow. Coldness suffused every cell of my body until the pain of freezing became numbness and unable to breathe, I drowned.

Ghostly presences, silent and eerie, faded in and out around me. Seeing details was hard, like looking through grease-smeared glasses. Even here on this side of the reflection, they moved like they were out of sync with the world. Some flickered in bursts of impossible quickness, this horrifying skittering almost strobing motion, as if someone had hit fast-forward on their existence. Others drifted languidly, slowly floating like a newspaper atop a sluggish current, seemingly aimless. As far as I could tell, each kind tended to stay the same. If they were agitated and frenetic, they stayed so. If they cruised lethargically, they tended to keep doing that. Only two broke this pattern, both switching from floaters to runners. I never saw the catalyst nor what became of them but the fact that they could change at all gave me a reason to keep looking.