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“Maybe it’s a fetch.”
Jungwoo cocked his head to the side, trying the word out. “Fetch,” he repeated slowly.
His English-language teacher smiled indulgently. “Eff, Jungwoo. Enunciate the first letter more.” She was always like this. Jungwoo paid her enough that he’d have thought she’d keep her nitpicking to a minimum. It had only seemed to encourage her. He said the word again and asked her how that explained his situation. It sounded like the word for throwing sticks to a dog. Jungwoo wondered if he had a dog, would it be afraid of the haunted mirror in his new apartment? He was a little afraid of it still, but he couldn’t bring himself to get rid of it. He looked up from his laptop, from the Zoom language class, and caught some movement deep in the glass that reflected the hallway behind him, his bedroom door half-open and somebody walking back and forth in there. Somebody. Him.
She’d asked him to tell him something scary because it was October. He’d told her about the mirror. Now he wished he hadn’t. “What is it? A fetch?”
“Well, a ghost is a dead person but a fetch is alive. It’s like a ghost but of a living person, or a person who’s not a ghost. Like a doppelgänger,” his teacher said in her broad accent. Jungwoo knew this word from the American vampire drama he watched for English practice. “We have them in our folklore.” She looked troubled. “My Nana said she saw one once. It means the person you see is going to die soon, but all Irish myths are about people being about to die.” She shrugged like she hadn’t just chilled Jungwoo to the bone, scared him beyond the ability of the literal shade of a human he’d grown accustomed to sharing his reflection with in the antique mirror he couldn’t bring himself to sell. Having a name for the thing - a fetch - made it somehow worse. “Shall we continue our lesson?”
Jungwoo steeled himself and looked away from the mirror. “We shall,” he said. His teacher clapped patronisingly and congratulated him on his vocabulary.
Later, his English lesson complete and the evening sun setting outside his window, Jungwoo shut his laptop and watched the mirror. It was empty now, just his own shade reflected back. He used to watch television but it felt rude somehow. Would the man - the fetch - be able to hear it? Jungwoo could hear him, humming to himself sometimes and whispering to his reflection. He never caught the words, or he did but they weren’t Korean and he couldn’t make them out. He heard other sounds too. One time the man wasn’t alone. He was in the bedroom but Jungwoo saw nobody else through the reflection of the room down the hall behind him. He just heard it. He heard the man make a low, intimate noise and then there was a sudden telltale slap of skin on skin that drove Jungwoo to get up and shut his own bedroom door, his face burning in his reflection. He’d slept on his couch that night.
Now, he got up. He went to the grocery store. When he came back, he found the fetch sitting on the reflection of his couch. Jungwoo stopped on his way past and studied him. He was handsome, but then that had been kind of impossible to miss since Day One. His dark hair was tied back at his nape and he had a pair of gold-rimmed glasses on tonight. Jungwoo had never seen them before, but then the fetch only ever stood still long enough to check his reflection when he was going out. Those glasses had a comfortable, dressed-down look. As did his loose cream-coloured vest and dark joggers. Jungwoo found himself staring and blinked. He really wasn’t used to seeing the fetch look so at home. He shifted about on the sofa, but Jungwoo thought that it wasn’t his sofa he was shifting on, just something similarly shaped, whatever his sofa was. His glasses reflected a green glow and Jungwoo realised that the man was watching television. Something green… football maybe? There was a football match on tonight. Jungwoo walked his groceries to the kitchen then came back and turned on his own television. There it was, Japan vs Australia, halfway through the first half. Suddenly, Japan scored, and the fetch stood up, clapping. The sound punched through the mirror clearly and Jungwoo smiled. Were they really watching the same match? His teacher had said that a fetch was a living person. Jungwoo studied the man. It was possible. Then they both went back to watching the match.
Jungwoo made himself some dinner at half-time and in the mirror the man ordered food. Jungwoo made himself an omelette and watched the man eat tamago sushi directly off the take-out tray. Jungwoo wondered if maybe he too had recently moved. Maybe he’d never sat in front of his television before because he didn’t own one until now. Jungwoo knew that his new 10th-floor apartment was over-furnished for having only lived there a month, but then he’d never lived alone before and had rushed to make his place as comfortable as possible. His friends told him it normally took people a while to settle in beyond necessities like cutlery. Not everybody went out and bought antique mirrors at the flea market the day they moved in.
Australia scored and the man scowled. Jungwoo grinned and found himself rooting for Japan.
The match ended in a draw and as soon as the whistle blew, the fetch turned off his television. Jungwoo turned his off too. He had no other lights on and was plunged into darkness, illuminated only by the man’s phone in the mirror. Jungwoo heard him tutting to himself as he typed something, probably complaining about the match. He studied the man’s furrowed brow, his fine features knit in frustration. He really was very beautiful.
“I hope you don’t die,” he said aloud to the mirror.
Suddenly the man’s head snapped up. For a second, their eyes met. The man’s eyes went wide in alarm. And then the man vanished.
On the fifth floor, on his newly-arrived couch in the apartment he’d only been living in for less than a month, Yuta shivered. New places didn’t have ghosts, he reminded himself. New apartments five floors off the ground weren’t haunted by anything when there was nothing there before. He should know, he’d even checked with the building owner to make sure that the shapes - the shape, the tall man - he occasionally saw in the mirror he’d picked up at the flea market wasn’t the echo of somebody who was dead. He hoped the man wasn’t dead. The flashes of him that Yuta caught were enough to tell him that he was gorgeous, whoever he was.
He was starting suspect that the mirror wasn’t normal. One of a pair, the vendor had told him. He’d thought this was cool at the time. He’d started building romantic notions in his head about the story of the mirror’s lost twin. He’d started imagining conversations with the man on the other side. He was working up the courage to call out to him, to do more than just watch him go about his day.
But the man had never spoken to him before. Their eyes had never met before.
“I hope you don’t die,” the man had said in Korean, and his voice, gentle and musical, had rung out from the mirror clear as day. He hadn’t been there before, or Yuta hadn’t looked up from the television long enough to notice. But he was sitting there, on a couch that wasn’t Yuta’s, in an apartment that wasn’t his, like he was sitting right next to him. But he wasn’t.
“I hope you don’t die-” their eyes had met.
And then the man disappeared.