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Author's Chapter Notes:
Phantom Stranger: John Doe
Shades stood transfixed, staring across the room at what he saw in that mirror.

Still wearing the same leather jacket and jeans, looking for all the world as if he just wandered in out of the woods around Lakeside that very night.

Shades blinked, and it was gone, as if he had merely startled himself with the movement of his own reflection, some trick of the lighting, and he turned once again to see if he could find his a way up to either turret tower.

“Dude!” an eerily familiar voice called out to him from that room. “It that really you?”

“John?…” Shades turned and looked his old, long-sought friend in the eye, seeing him exactly as he remembered. “But how…”

“I don’t know…” he replied, “I just wandered in here, after getting lost in this big, scary forest all night… Am I glad to see you!”

Shades conceded that might be possible, what with the dimensional boundaries being so thin out there in the Woods, as well as whatever was happening the night of the Flathead Experiment, that even after all these months there was no accounting for the flow of time between worlds, yet the timing of this appearance still bothered him.

“It’s okay, man,” he continued. “I forgive you for leaving me all alone out there…”

“Before I could even apologize…” Shades mumbled, struggling against sheepishness as he felt himself slipping back into that night. Even more so at an epiphany he wished he had thought of many moons ago. A long driveway leading up to the house behind his neighbors, mostly concealed by a wall of trees and the rise of the bank, which was probably why it slipped his mind after that lightning-blasted tree fell. “If only I’d gone that way…”

Tried to remember if there was even any fence back there to bar his motorcycle…

“Come on, dude,” he urged Shades, gesturing to the door to the hall, “let’s get out of this creepy place and go find Amy.”

“I’m sorry, John,” Shades told him, barely noticing the sky darkening outside, dimming the light from the windows, barely heard the subtle pattering of rain against the glass, and the faint rumble of distant thunder, “but there’s a little girl trapped in here, and we need to find her, too.”

“She’s probably already dead,” he insisted. “Hell, I’m surprised either of us are still alive…”

“The John I know wouldn’t give up so easily.” Shades turned and started walking away. The more they talked, the more he felt a troubling fog drifting into his mind, and he feared it would fully engulf him if he stayed here. Struggling against the feeling he had just blundered into that one corny scene from a hundred B movies about this sort of thing. “Let’s get going.”

“Come on, Shades… You left me out there, in that storm, in the woods, with whatever the hell was going on out there last night…”

“That wasn’t my fault, that tree fell…” Shades fumbled, tugging against the twin fishhooks of guilt and shame attempting to reel him back into that room, into the fog… Then stopped and turned back as something he said earlier snapped both hooks. “Who told you about Amy?”

“Well…” he stammered, stepping back toward the mirror as Shades stepped toward him, “you did, remember? On the phone?”

Shades felt the fog beginning to fade at this inconsistency, as if dispersed by a fresh breeze, and as it lifted, he noticed a detail in the mirror behind them that he suspected had been there the whole time, seen even in the growing dimness.

Whatever stood before him had no reflection.

“No, I didn’t,” Shades informed him as he strode forward, all of his prior guilt and defensiveness having hardened into violated fury. The events of that night afforded him no opportunity mention his conversation with Amy at the mall earlier that day, and he knew it. Feeling something coalescing in his clenched fists. Found an immediate familiarity to this sensation, as if he’d done this before in a dream or something…

Recalling the feel of the battle-fire that sometimes swept over him in his dreams. As if he grabbed hold of something out of a dream and now held it in his hand, wielded it with his mind and will as he cocked back his fist. Held on to his burning rage at this thing that dared to wear his old friend’s face as he swung.

Felt something in that fist explode against his assailant, more than mere sensation. Felt his opponent as he crumpled and folded as if struck by a wrecking ball.

Smashed right through the looking glass into the other side, the glass cracking into a spider-web of silvery lines. Watched that limp form melt and sink into the floor on that side, even as the mirror shards tinkled to the floor one by one on this side of the looking glass.

It was only then that he remembered his stun-sticks, neither of which he even remembered sheathing to speak with that phantom impostor. Although, given that the place seemed to be slipping back in time with every chime of that ominous clock, he wasn’t sure if any damage he inflicted with them would actually stick anyway.

The thought of the clock tolling reminded him that time was a luxury he could ill afford in this place. In the aftermath of that strange confrontation, he discovered an unexpected clarity about the form and layout of the house. Realized that the mists that tried to close in about him during that encounter had been creeping up around him the whole time since he first set foot in this twisted place, and would soon be trying to worm their way back into his perception once again.

Just another time limit, he concluded, understanding that he needed to hang on to that clarity for as long as he could as he made his way back out into the hall, taking one last glance back to see daylight once again streaming in through those windows, and took what hope he could from it, to take at last some of that light with him into the dark depths of Vineholdt.