Sleep had always been a sanctuary for Lila. It was the place where her dreams offered peace, a release from the everyday monotony of life. But then the dreams began to change, growing strange, vivid, and unsettling. They weren’t just dreams anymore—they felt like memories.
It started subtly, with flashes of moments she couldn’t recall living. Lila would find herself standing on a sun-drenched playground, laughing with another girl who looked exactly like her. They held hands, shared secrets, and whispered promises of a lifetime together, a bond no one could break. The dreams filled her with warmth at first, like reuniting with someone she hadn’t realized she’d lost. But the other girl—her twin, it seemed—wasn’t just a figure in her dreams. She felt real, so real that when Lila woke, she half-expected to find her lying beside her, as if they had been inseparable since birth.
Lila brushed off the first few dreams, attributing them to her overactive imagination. After all, she’d been an only child her whole life. But the dreams persisted, becoming more frequent and consuming. They felt less like fantasies and more like memories bubbling up from a forgotten past. The other girl in the dreams—her twin—was everywhere. They shared birthdays, played dress-up in matching outfits, and blew out candles together. Lila could feel the sunlight on her skin, smell the frosting of the cake, hear the shared giggles. She had never been so certain of anything in her life: she had a twin sister. But how could that be?
When she confronted her parents, they exchanged a look of confusion, followed by firm denial.
“You’ve always been our only child, Lila,” her mother said, her voice trembling slightly, though she tried to hide it.
“No,” Lila insisted, her voice growing louder. “I remember her. I’ve seen her in my dreams. We played together, we had the same birthday. I know she existed. Why are you lying to me?”
Her father shook his head, placing a hand on her shoulder. “Lila, you’re imagining things. You’ve been under a lot of stress lately. Sometimes, the mind can—”
“No!” Lila pushed his hand away, the certainty in her chest now burning with frustration. “I know what I’m seeing! She’s real.”
But no matter how hard she pressed, her parents refused to give in. Their denial only fueled her determination. Something wasn’t right, and Lila was going to find out what.
The days passed in a fog of confusion. The dreams continued, growing darker, more fragmented. In one, she and her twin stood before a mirror, their reflections perfectly in sync. But when her twin smiled, it wasn’t a reflection—her twin moved first. And then her twin’s smile slowly twisted into something dark, her eyes filling with an unspeakable malice that sent chills through Lila’s spine.
Lila woke from that dream gasping, drenched in cold sweat. Her heart pounded, a growing sense of dread gnawing at her insides. This wasn’t just about a lost sibling anymore. Something far more sinister was lurking beneath the surface.
She decided to dig deeper. If her parents wouldn’t give her answers, she would find them herself.
Lila began her investigation in the attic, searching through dusty boxes of old photos and documents. Hours passed as she rifled through old yearbooks, baby albums, and family memorabilia, but there was nothing—no mention of a twin, no extra crib in the early photos, no second child in any of the pictures.
Just when she was ready to give up, her fingers brushed against something strange in the corner of the attic—a locked box, hidden beneath old blankets and forgotten furniture. She hauled it out, her heart racing with anticipation. The lock was old and rusted, but a few hard tugs broke it free. Inside, Lila found a stack of old, yellowed documents.
At first, they seemed like medical papers—standard birth records, health checkups—but as she flipped through them, she noticed something odd. Her name appeared on the documents, but it wasn’t alone. There was another name, one she didn’t recognize: “Eliza.”
Eliza.
Her twin sister. Lila felt the ground beneath her shift. Eliza was real. But why had her parents hidden this? Why had they erased her from their lives?
As she dug deeper into the papers, Lila’s blood ran cold. The documents weren’t just medical records; they were part of a larger file on an experimental cloning program conducted in secret decades ago. The file detailed chilling results: attempts to create clones of children had been initiated, but they had been swiftly abandoned. The clones were… unstable. There were reports of mental breakdowns, rapid aging, violent tendencies. The children born from the experiments were unnatural—flawed copies of the original, not truly human.
Her eyes darted across the page, her breath catching as she read the final sentence: “Subject: Lila. Status: Clone. Original: Eliza. Deceased.”
The room spun around her, the world collapsing in on itself. She wasn’t real. She wasn’t the original. Eliza, her twin, had been the original. And she—Lila—was just the shadow left behind, a replica born from a horrific experiment. Her memories, her life—it wasn’t even hers. It belonged to a girl who had died long ago.
The dreams were never about a twin that had been forgotten; they were echoes of Eliza, the real Eliza, trying to break through, to claim back the life that was stolen from her.
Over the next few days, Lila spiraled into paranoia. She felt her mind unraveling, unsure of who she was, or even what she was. The dreams became nightmares—vivid, terrifying. She could feel Eliza’s presence, lurking at the edges of her consciousness, waiting, watching. In every reflection, every mirror, Eliza stared back at her with eyes full of hatred and despair.
But it wasn’t just in her dreams anymore. Lila began to see Eliza everywhere—at the grocery store, walking past her window, standing at the foot of her bed at night. No matter where she went, Eliza was there, her twin that never was, whispering from the shadows, calling her name in a voice that was no longer kind, but filled with venom.
“You took my life,” the whispers would say. “It was never yours.”
Desperate and terrified, Lila confronted her parents once more. This time, her mother broke down in tears. “We didn’t know,” she sobbed. “We didn’t know the experiment had gone so wrong. We thought… we thought we could forget, that we could love you like you were our own.”
Lila’s world crumbled. “I’m not real,” she whispered, her voice hollow. “I’m not even your daughter.”
Her father hung his head, unable to meet her eyes. “You are, Lila. In every way that matters, you are.”
But it didn’t matter anymore. Lila knew the truth, and so did Eliza.
The final confrontation came one night when Lila could no longer tell if she was awake or dreaming. She stood in front of the mirror, staring at her reflection. But it wasn’t her reflection—it was Eliza’s. The girl in the mirror smirked, her eyes dark and lifeless.
“Give it back,” Eliza whispered.
And in that moment, Lila felt something inside her snap. She wasn’t real. She was never real. She was just a shadow, a fragment, a clone. She had taken a life that wasn’t hers.
Eliza stepped out of the mirror, her hands cold and clammy as they wrapped around Lila’s throat. The world around them dissolved into darkness, and for the first time in her life, Lila understood the truth.
She wasn’t the twin.
She was the ghost.
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