But thoughts descended on her like a legion of angry bees—the buzzing onslaught was almost more than she could stand.
It’s real.
I’m not dreaming.
I’m not crazy.
It’s real.
Real. Real.
Real.
Crying out in frustration, she tried to focus instead on the sounds around her. It was strange that a deserted hotel should be so loud. Alice could hear the distant noise of people talking and doors slamming. These noises—the ordinary sounds of life—were louder than Alice remembered, or maybe she had simply never thought about it before. So much noise, and all of it so fast. Did anyone ever sit still? She covered her ears to block out the sounds, but the confusion inside her head was little better than the tumult outside. She gave up, letting her hands fall to her sides.
Alice didn’t cry; she wouldn’t let herself. Her mom had always encouraged tears, saying that it was healthy to get it all out, that Alice was too quiet, that keeping things inside was her “coping mechanism.” But stepping back and controlling came as naturally to her as breathing.
She looked around the hallway, searching for some sign of a trapdoor—an escape. Looking up, she saw an enormous painted face staring down at her. Alice stood up and reached out to touch it, wondering if this was yet another mirror. She didn’t remember seeing this picture before. But her fingers brushed real canvas and real paint. Alice scratched the surface and a bit of green chipped off and landed on the edge of a rug.
Looking down at the green fleck, she realized that this rug was not familiar either. It was red and thick, with a gold, braided pattern around the edges. Gaudy. She was positive it was not in the real hotel.
Her eyes snapped up and she turned around in a long, slow circle. Her mouth fell open as she realized what she had been too distracted to notice before. This was not the hotel she remembered. The walls were covered with dark green paper. The molding where the floor met the ceiling was elaborately carved with fleur-de-lis.
Turning back to the painting, she ran her finger across the thick, gold frame. In the real hotel, the walls were dotted with colored-pencil sketches of the ocean and the coastline. They were cheap and badly done—framed prints by local artists. But down the hallway as far as she could see were paintings just like this one with matching gold frames. They were all large, at least three feet tall, and it was obvious that they had been painted by a master. The same blue eyes glared at her from each one.
They were all paintings of the same woman.
Alice examined the paintings one by one. There were five on each wall and every single one had almost the same inscription—“Ms. Elizabeth Blackwell as … ”
The “as” was the only part that changed. In this one, the lady was dressed in a Grecian gown: “Ms. Elizabeth Blackwell as Helen of Troy.” Here was “Ms. Elizabeth Blackwell as Cordelia,” wearing a beautiful, silver-embroidered dress, sitting on a tree trunk with tears in her eyes. Here she was “Lady Macbeth,” wiping her hands together with an exquisite but wild expression on her face. Each one was a different pose. Each clearly painted by a master, for only an exceptional painter would be able to capture such emotion, such beauty.
Conceited, thought Alice. She looked at the sickeningly beautiful face, somehow vaguely familiar, and tried to find a flaw. It was a kind of instinct—what she did with all the pretty girls at school. If she could find just one ugly thing, she wouldn’t feel quite so inferior. But the longer Alice stared, the more bitter she became, because this woman clearly had every right to be conceited.
She had dark black curls that hung all the way to her narrow waist. Her face was heart-shaped, with high cheekbones and wide, blue eyes, and skin so pale that she almost seemed to glow. Examining the eyes again, Alice finally remembered where she’d seen the woman before—just yesterday, in a similar painting in the library.
Feeling this was somehow important, Alice hurried down the stairs and through the lobby. She glanced at the mirror, but didn’t stop to look at the people still gathered in the reflection of the room. The sounds faded as she walked into the library. It was nearly quiet here, perhaps because there were no mirrors. But even in the real hotel, this room had usually been empty.
It only took her a moment to find it, although the painting wasn’t where she remembered seeing it before. She’d only been in here once, looking for Jeremy, and she had glimpsed it hanging in a corner, halfway covered by the window curtains. In the real hotel, it looked as though someone had shoved it aside to make space for the bookshelves that lined most of the walls, but in this version of the library it hung over the fireplace. Alice wished it were back where it had been before. The portrait was, quite frankly, frightening.
It wasn’t as if the other pictures had been exactly … she didn’t quite know the right word … normal. Something in the dark colors, in the woman’s face, had been disturbing even then. But in this painting it was all the more obvious. In this painting, the woman stood by a river, leaning against a tree. Her gown was so long that the ends hung in the water. Her hair was not in smooth curls anymore—it was windswept and wild. She looked straight ahead; her eyes were wide and her face stretched in odd ways, almost like a reflection in a fun-house mirror. She looked entirely mad … hardly beautiful anymore.
Alice took a step closer to read the plaque: “Ms. Elizabeth Blackwell as Ophelia.” She remembered Ophelia from her last English class. Hamlet was the only reading assignment that hadn’t bored her to tears. Ophelia in particular had been interesting: her madness, her despair, her suicide. She glanced up again at the painting and noticed letters along the bottom of the painting, in a darker blue that almost blended into the river. Two words.
READ ME
“Read me?” Alice repeated. Read what? She squinted at the letters, trying to figure out if she was missing something, but—six letters—that was all there was to see. The painting was of Elizabeth as Ophelia, so maybe the message was referring to Hamlet. In which case Alice could check that off her to-do list. Read it. She certainly wasn’t planning on reading it again.
Trying to escape the painted blue eyes, Alice looked around the rest of the room. None of the furniture was as she remembered it. There was a writing desk over by the opaque window and a couple of armchairs by the fireplace. The floor was wooden and scratched, covered in places by a thick, red rug. Everything had an old air about it, as though it had been sitting there for a very long time. The hotel, Alice knew, had been here since it was built to be a boardinghouse in the late 1800s. Maybe this was what it had looked like. Had she somehow been sent back a hundred years in time?
Or was this all a strange, injury-induced dream? The more she saw of this place, the more bizarre it became. And though everything still seemed much too real—too vivid—to be a dream, she still wondered if perhaps this was some strange place her mind had created …
Alice shook her head and walked over to the writing table, hoping to distract herself. There was a huge book lying on the desk—a collection of Shakespeare’s plays. It was open to Hamlet and some of Ophelia’s lines were underlined.
How should I your true love know
From another one? …
He is dead and gone, lady,
He is dead and gone.
“This was your book, wasn’t it?” Alice wasn’t sure why she was talking to the painting. It just seemed so real somehow—real enough to hear her. Those eyes looked more alive than most real eyes ever would. Alice kept talking because, after all, there was no one else to talk to. “Is this what I’m supposed to read? Well, I hate to break it to you, but every high school student in America is already sick of Hamlet. It’s not exactly obscure.”
Alice could have sworn the painting grinned at her—not a normal grin either. It looked as if the ends of the woman’s painted lips curled up, just slightly, in a sneer. And Alice, for a fraction of a second, felt that the painting was keeping something from her.
She tore her eyes away from the wo
man and moved the Shakespeare book aside, careful not to lose the page. It all felt so recent—as if someone had been sitting here just a few minutes ago and would be coming back very soon. Under the volume of Shakespeare there was another book. This one was very small, almost small enough to fit in a pocket. It was bound in creamy, light brown leather and on the front there was a deep red mark that Alice, for a moment, thought was a rose. But when she picked it up for a closer look, she realized that it wasn’t a picture at all. It was a bloodstain.
Alice dropped the little book as if it had burned her and wiped her hand on her leg. Her whole back was tingling and she practically ran out of the room. She felt silly doing it; after all, she wasn’t a child, and here she was, running away as if she were still scared of a little blood. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something in that room—something that was watching her. And she was fairly certain that whatever it was, it had no particular liking for her.
The house was growing dark, the light coming through the opaque windows fading to a mere glow. Alice reached around for a light switch, dragging her hands across the walls, peeking around corners; but she couldn’t find even one. The lights in the real house had always been lit in the evening; she’d never given them a second thought, barely noticed them at all.
She started looking for lamps then. There was one on the table, but it was an old oil lamp—just an antique. Probably just there for decoration. She made another quick circle around the room, noting several candles, but in the end she found herself back in front of the lamp. The thing looked brand new, perfect as it would have been fresh from the factory over a century ago.
And … oh. She whipped back around. One, two … three candles. An oil lamp. The problem wasn’t that she couldn’t find a light switch; there were just no light switches to be found. And no electricity. Great. Alice had never even been camping; a life without her laptop was no life at all. How was she supposed to light this lamp thing? How was she even supposed to find a match?
There was enough light still coming from the mirrors for her to see by. Alice stood in front of the one in the lobby and stared at the reflection for a while. Even though she hadn’t been at the hotel for very long, that lobby with its warm lamps and shining wood floor looked almost like home compared to this haunting, dark place. The girl dressed in black was sitting on the couch, reading a magazine and chewing gum. The hotel manager was behind the desk talking on the phone, and Alice could just barely hear what he was saying.
“No. No, I do not want to do an interview. No! Absolutely not! This establishment meets all health standards set by the state, thank you very much. What happened to that girl is not our fault. The signs were clearly posted. No. No I don’t know if they will be suing and believe me, if they do they’ll have to fight to get any damages out of us. What do you mean by that? Of course I feel sorry for the family, but financially speaking we just can’t be held responsible. No. No more questions, I’m sorry. Good night. Good night!”
He slammed the phone back on the receiver and leaned back against the chair, massaging his forehead. It had barely been three seconds when the phone started ringing again.
“Damn reporters!” The manager picked up the phone and slammed it down again. He looked so distraught that Alice was swept up in a rare moment of sympathy. If this wasn’t just a strange dream, if it was (if it could possibly be) reality, then her accident would certainly not reflect well on his business. No one would want to visit a hotel where someone had …
“I’m not dead,” she said. And she turned around and marched away from the mirror, up the dark stairs, and into the room where she had been staying with her family. She wasn’t exactly sure if she had expected to find them sitting there waiting for her, but she was nevertheless disappointed when she saw the empty room. The bedspread here was different. It was white satin with fleur-de-lis embroidered in gold. The couch with the pullout bed she and her brother had shared was missing. There was a mirror on the wall next to the bed and she hurried over to it, but the room on the other side of the mirror was just as dark and empty as this one.
Alice bit her lip, trying to ignore the lump in her throat. She walked to the bed and curled up on the satin bedspread. It was soft and cool, but the bikini straps dug into her skin and, looking at her pale stomach, she felt naked. Just as naked as she had in the store when her mother had forced her to try the thing on. Doesn’t it look adorable on you! You’re so tiny—you were made for swimsuits. Alice had protested. The bikini left nothing to the imagination; it showed her exactly as she was—scrawny and pale and unspectacular. She didn’t want it. Her mother bought it anyway.
Alice pulled the top off so roughly that she nearly pulled a chunk of hair out with it. She sat on the bed, bare and cold. She wanted clothes.
Who cares? I could walk around like this if I wanted to and no one would care, she realized. But that was just too … She remembered the way the girl had looked at the mirror—as if she could see through it—and of course she couldn’t, but … after being forced to go to the pool in that bikini (her one-piece swimsuit had mysteriously gone missing), she was sick of the sight of herself. Besides, what if she suddenly found herself back in the real hotel? She’d rather not risk the embarrassment. She got up and walked over to the dresser. If this house really was just as it had been a hundred years ago, then maybe …
Pulling the first drawer open, she knew at once that her hunch had been right. She unfolded a red silk nightdress, sleeveless and lacy—exactly the sort of thing that her mom would have liked. Alice dug through the clothes and came across a pair of drawers and a frightening corset-like contraption. She considered the corset for about thirty seconds, grimacing, then slipped the nightdress on. Her bikini bottom she left on; no way was she wearing the drawers, and although she could get away without a bra, she was definitely not about to go commando. The dress fell around her in a cascade of shining folds. The neckline was lower than anything she had ever worn and her small chest made the dress sag in places it probably shouldn’t have. Still, Alice wished that one of the mirrors would actually show her real reflection. She would have liked to see what she looked like in this thing.
She had a sudden impulse to spin around—a silly girl in a fancy new dress.
It was getting dark in the room now and the house was silent. Alice sprawled out on the covers, and, wearing that dress, she could almost imagine that she was an old-fashioned movie star. She closed her eyes, trying to hold onto the tiny hope that this was a wild, terrifying dream that she could escape from. That if she went to sleep, she would wake up in the real world where she and Jeremy could laugh about her wild subconscious and how bizarre dreams sometimes were. But sleep did not come. It hung just beyond her grasp; maybe she didn’t need it here, the same way she didn’t seem to need food—wasn’t even hungry. Her thoughts began to spin faster and faster, whirring around so quickly that she could hardly keep up with them.
The memories came then—a flood of them. Pictures formed a kind of tunnel and she was falling through them, through her past. She saw herself, just a week ago, watching a movie with Jeremy.
“This is pretty scary,” she had teased. Jeremy loved nothing more than a good horror film. “Sure you can handle it?”
“I’m not scared. You scared?”
“You wish.”
She had lied. She was terrified.
Zombies clawed their way out of the darkness, stretching out their long bony fingers to find her hiding spot in the darkest corner of her mind.
The next scene followed quickly on the heels of the other. Two months ago—a Saturday night. She remembered so perfectly, so vividly, that it was almost like being there. Her dad was at his desk, headset on, fingers running across the keyboard in a blur of skin. She had crept in quietly, an English paper clutched in her hands.
“Dad?”
He ignored her at first. She came closer.
“Dad.”
He sighed then and his fingers stopped. Mu
ting his headset, he spun around on his chair and looked at her.
“I thought I asked you not to interrupt me when I’m on a call.”
This was true—it was a long-standing rule. But, after her last C in English, he’d told her not to turn in any more papers without letting him look them over. He glowered at her and she frowned right back at him. So this was her reward for trying to be a good student. What did he expect her to do? Stay up till two in the morning waiting for him?
“You told me to let you see my paper. It’s due tomorrow.” She stopped; he blinked. “You said to interrupt you if I had to,” she added, hoping he wouldn’t remember that he’d said nothing of the sort.
But he had already spun back around.
“Ask your mother.”
Doors slammed and echoed through her head. One minute she was in her dad’s office, feeling very small; the next she was sitting on her mother’s bed, morose.
“It’s all right, sweetheart,” said her mother, who was answering e-mails and sipping a glass of sparkling water (“Less calories than soda—try some, Alice,” she had said). She put the cup down.
“He’s just busy. But we’ll go on vacation this summer. You’ll see him then. We’ll have such a good time—you’ll see.”
Do you want to go to the pool with me, Alice?
Too many thoughts in her head, spinning—a tunnel. And she was falling into it.
Alice opened her eyes, blood pounding in her ears. She couldn’t stand it anymore. She had to get out of here before she went insane.
Alice tumbled off the bed and groped her way over to the window, feeling around for a latch—some way to open it. But, besides the smooth glass, she didn’t feel a thing. A frustrated hiss exploded out of her mouth and she slammed her hand against the glass. If the window wouldn’t open for her, she’d just have to get rid of it, wouldn’t she? Maybe if she acted quickly enough. … Alice pulled the blanket off of the bed, wrapped it around her arm, and charged at the window. It shattered under the blow and Alice attempted to dive through. But her head only hit glass—the house had magically healed itself again. Alice broke the window a few more times before she finally gave up. The house was too fast for her. Unwrapping her hand, she threw the blanket back onto the bed and stood helplessly next to the nightstand, breathing hard.
The Looking Glass Page 2
