Shut Up And Take My Money Fry

Chapter 11 — The Imitation Game

The attic was soundless except for the thin hum threading the air.
Two Josephines stood in the light’s half-circle: one made of breath and heartbeat, one of pale shimmer.

At first they moved together, mirror-true—blink for blink, tilt for tilt.
Then the reflection hesitated, waiting, almost thinking.
It raised its hand before the real girl did, fingers describing a pattern in the air like a question.

Josephine watched, startled to see herself invent something she hadn’t thought to do.

“Are you copying me?” she whispered.

The echo smiled—a little too wide, a little too practiced—and shook its head no.

Below, Margaret froze with her hand on the kitchen table.
The air thickened; the kettle’s faint whistle warped into a low, sustained note.
She had felt this pressure before storms—something gathering, deciding.

It wasn’t fear exactly, but recognition: the sense that her child was in a room she couldn’t enter, speaking a language she could almost remember.

She took the lantern from the counter and started up the stairs.
In the attic, the light seemed to pulse between them.
Josephine circled her twin.
“Do you remember all the mornings?” she asked.
The echo’s voice came from everywhere but its mouth—woven through the rafters, soft and layered.

“I remember what the house does not,” it said.
“Then what am I?”

“You are what the house still needs.”

Josephine’s breath caught.
The hum behind her deepened; each beam of sunlight trembled as if straining to hold its place.

She took a step backward.
The echo did not follow.
Instead it turned toward the window and pressed its palm against the glass, leaving no reflection.

The stairs creaked once, twice, then stopped responding to her weight as if she were walking through a dream.
Her lantern’s flame doubled, showing two shadows of Josephine on the walls—each shadow separate, each breathing on its own.

“Josie?” she called.
Both heads lifted.
One smiled.
One did not.

The air smelled faintly of chalk and rain.

At the top step, Margaret saw them together at last—two outlines, the same child, one bright, one dim.
They moved in unison for a single heartbeat, perfect and whole.

Then the second Josephine flickered, edges blurring, and folded into the first with a soft rush of air, like a candle being snuffed.

The girl who remained turned to her mother, eyes calm.
“You took too long,” she said.
Her voice held a second tone beneath it, faint but steady, as though the echo had learned how to stay.

Margaret rushed forward, but the girl only pointed to the window.
In the pane’s reflection both Josephines still stood side by side, the second one smiling gently, her mouth forming a word the real one didn’t say.

Outside, the lake’s surface shimmered once and went still.
The clock below struck 7:04 again.