Short Story

           The Last Page

Most of of the  days feel like normal, nothing special or nothing great is happening. We are the kind of people  who make our lives busy to escape from the world of solitary. "Yes I'm mostly that kind of person. But after that one moment, everything changed upside down. I recently got a call from a place , I thought I'd never hear from. My heart sank the moment I answered the call. It was about her, 'my mother' The one I hadn't spoken to in years. She was slipping away. And now, she's gone. But what can I say? A part of me is still numb—stone cold. The connection was never really there. That’s just how she raised me... distant, guarded.

After the rituals , I returned to the house I swore I’d never step into again. The estate attorney told me she’d left everything to me, 'everything', including the decaying Victorian house she had refused to sell or abandon, even when her memory started slipping. 

She called it her "sanctuary."

I called it a "mausoleum."

The house felt too quiet. Too clean. Like all the grief had been swept out with the ashes, but none of the memories.

I stood in her room, untouched since she left, expecting to feel something. Anything. But that part of me, whatever feels, is still stone. Maybe it’s because love was always something she rationed, like it cost too much to give. I just sat on the edge of her bed, staring at the photo on her nightstand.

Us.

Smiling like we meant it.

Maybe we did. Once.

That night was hard to forget and sleep was hard to find. A dark, aching loneliness crept in , the kind I never wanted to experience again. Somehow, sleep came, brief and heavy. Morning arrived with chaos trailing behind it. People filled the house, offering condolences, praising her kindness, her warmth, her grace.

Maybe she was all that.

Just not to me.

They stayed through the night, faces I barely recognized, voices I pretended to listen to. Then one by one, they left. And just like that, I was alone again.

Like always

On this second night, I heard something dragging across the attic floor. I went up, expecting rats. I found a "diary" wrapped in a silk scarf that still smelled faintly of her perfume. It wasn’t dusty. It wasn’t even old.

And it wasn’t "hers".

It was "mine".

But I never wrote it.

The handwriting was unmistakable, curved, hurried, slanted just like mine. The diary told a story I didn’t remember living. But parts of it… felt real. It chronicled "An affair". A secret. A man named "Magnus" I didn’t know, but began dreaming of that very night. It detailed whispered conversations on balconies, late-night drives to nowhere, and a strange obsession with a room in the house I had never entered, "The mirror room", behind a door with no key. And then there was this line, three pages from the end:

“He says the house knows. That it remembers things we forget. That the mirror holds the versions of us we try to kill.”

The final page was dated "tomorrow".

“July 1, 11:59 PM. I hear his footsteps behind me. But it’s not Magnus. It’s me. The version I buried. And she’s come to finish what I started.”

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I kept re-reading the diary, trying to make sense of it.

At 11:23 PM, the doorbell rang.

I froze.

I opened it because I had to know.

He stood there, tall, rain-soaked, looking exactly like the Magnus I had dreamed of.

“I shouldn’t be here,” he said. “But you called me.”

“I didn’t,” I whispered.

He smiled, and it wasn’t kind. “You did. When you read the last page.”

He stepped inside.

He led me up to the attic. Past the old suitcases. Past the boxes of my childhood things. To a door I had never seen before.

“It’s been waiting,” he said.

The door opened with a slow groan, revealing a narrow room lit only by the glow of a mirror that covered the entire wall. My reflection looked wrong, older, hollow-eyed, fractured.

“She wrote everything,” Magnus whispered. “But the diary wasn’t for you. It was for her. For the version of you that never left this house.”

I turned toward him. “What version?”

“The one your mother kept locked up,” he said. “The one who saw. The one who knows.”

The diary hadn’t been predicting my future.

It was warning me of my "past".

The attic wasn’t just where I found the diary, it was where I had "died", emotionally, spiritually, maybe even literally, years ago.

The Magnus in the diary? He wasn’t real.

He was "the shape of my guilt."

And when I looked back into the mirror

I saw "her".

Me.

But different.

Smiling.

That was the most terrifying smile I have ever seen in my life. The lights flickered. Magnus stepped into the mirror and disappeared. My reflection stayed.

She raised a hand. I didn’t.

And then she stepped "out".

Everything tuned black. I didn’t hear a sound, not even my own breath. Just silence and the weight of something unknown pulling me inside.

I woke up in bed the next morning. Everything felt normal. Too normal. Just like I had stepped out of a dream. The diary was gone. But the scarf was still there. Fresh. Folded. In the mirror, my reflection tilted its head but... I hadn’t moved. And then I realized it wasn't a dream and about something that chilled me to the bone:

My mother had once said during one of her delusions:

“She’s not you. She never was. She’s just better at pretending.”

Epilogue: The Diary Returns

Six months later, a woman named Sasha bought the house. She posted a video online, laughing nervously, holding up a "diary" she found in the attic. She showed the last page and the last line written on the diary....

“She took my life. She wears my face. But she doesn’t know… I wrote a second diary.”