The Looking Glass

by Jessica Arnold

  “Why am I sure? You’ve seen the evidence. You’ve read the newspapers—always the same story. Girl injures herself, falls into a coma, dies a week later. In 1890, a guest fell out of a second-story window; 1905, off a ladder; 1926, down the stairs … 1960, 1983 … you know how it goes. Now this girl’s hit her head on the bottom of a pool and—big surprise—comatose in the hospital. I’m no doctor, but I give her a week.”

  He paused and Alice gulped over the lump that had formed in her throat. She felt suddenly dizzy and grabbed the side of the mirror, forcing herself to stay standing.

  George shook his head and asked, “Can you honestly say that’s just a coincidence?”

  As he had been speaking, whenever he said a date, the girl had put up a finger. Now she was wagging five fingers in the air. “Then the last one,” she said, lifting another finger. “And you forgot the first.” She put up a seventh finger. “Seven!” She had an unsettling laugh. “That’s important. Seven.”

  Then she turned and looked straight at the mirror. Alice, whose arms were already covered in goose bumps, had a sudden desire to duck out of sight. “She’s just babbling,” she told herself. But then the girl’s grin widened, as though she had heard Alice talking and was amused by it.

  Alice reminded herself to breathe. Slowly, not daring to take her eyes off the girl, she edged her way to the side of the mirror. Leaning against the wall beside it, she pressed her hands against her stomach and closed her eyes. If the girl could see and hear her through the glass … that was a good thing. A really good thing. But the girl’s eyes … the way they shone … her pointy-toothed smile … Alice wanted to run and hide, even though she knew she should be throwing herself against the glass and begging the girl to tell her what was going on here.

  Tony was grudgingly answering his dad’s question. “Well … it is a little hard to explain.”

  “Exactly—you can’t. And we’re here to figure out why it’s happening.”

  “I just don’t see how—”

  “This is our first trip together. Are you going to spend it doubting what I do for a living?”

  “Are you going to write a book about this case too?” Tony said.

  “Of course. It’s going in my newest collection. I think I’m going to title it Spirited Away: The Unhappy Dead. What do you think?”

  “It’s nice.”

  Alice took a deep breath, opened her eyes, and peeked around the edge of the mirror, only to see the girl standing not five inches away from it on the other side—just standing there, grinning from ear to ear like the Cheshire Cat. Screaming, Alice jumped backwards.

  “Boo,” said the girl.

  And in that moment, just for a second, Alice was reminded of Jeremy. He would make a game of sneaking up on her, scaring her half to death. She could almost see him there—shorter than the girl, his red hair wild, wearing that same glee on his face. Alice blinked and there was the girl again, but at least for a moment Alice was not afraid of her at all.

  She rushed forward. “Tell me what’s going on,” she demanded. “Tell me how to get out of here.”

  The girl didn’t answer.

  “Tell me!” Alice pressed a hand to the glass.

  Sighing, the girl wandered back to the chair, acting as if she had not heard anything. Alice lifted her hand and curled it into a fist to bang on the glass, as though she could knock down the wall. But when the girl sat down and started examining her nails, Alice froze, then put her hand down. This too was something Jeremy would have done, just to egg her on. Well, if the girl was going to play like that, Alice wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of a response.

  Crossing her arms, Alice bit her tongue and didn’t say a word. Silence was a game Alice was good at.

  The father, sitting on the bed by his son, rocked back on his hands. “You’ve wanted to come with me on an investigation since you were just a little boy. Aren’t you excited that Madeline’s finally let you tag along? She’s always so worried about you, thinks I’m going to corrupt you or something. But you’ll see. And she’ll see too. We’ll have a wonderful time.”

  Whatever the boy was feeling, it was far from excitement. He smiled anyway, and Alice could tell that it was forced. She’d used that same smile on her parents plenty of times.

  “Yeah. It’s really going to be something.”

  Alice snorted at the boy’s pained expression. Stop playing the martyr. As if it were such a terrible burden to have your dad thrilled to spend time with you. Alice could hardly have a decent conversation with her distracted father, who regularly multitasked his relationships to death.

  “That’s my boy! You bet it is.”

  Tony smiled again, though this one was no more genuine than the last. “So. Where do we start?”

  His father fumbled through his notes. He finally stopped on a page toward the front of the notebook. “Ah yes, here we are. We start with Elizabeth Blackwell.”

  “The actress.”

  “Yes, the actress. She was fabulous, according to the newspapers I’ve looked at. Quite famous, in fact; she was on the road to stardom before she died. She stayed in the attic room for many years, then suddenly went mad. The attic burned down in the fire, though—never got rebuilt. It’s unfortunate too. I would have killed to look around up there.”

  Attic? Alice hadn’t seen an attic.

  Tony crossed his legs on the bed and leaned back, giving his father his undivided attention for the first time. “She went crazy?”

  “Lies,” said the girl, sitting up straighter now.

  Alice, figuring this broke the silence war, tried to call the girl over. But the girl didn’t react—not even with a glance. She was focused completely on Tony and his dad, though they seemed unaware of her.

  George was nodding. “Oh yes—she lost it. No one knows how it happened, but they say that before she died she started fooling with things she shouldn’t have. Her sister, Lillian, died years ago, but I got my hands on an interview someone did with her just before she passed away. Lillian inherited the boardinghouse after Elizabeth and Mr. Blackwell died. She said some pretty interesting things.”

  “And you’ve been researching the story all this time, hoping someone would get hurt,” the boy said, frowning.

  “Well, I wouldn’t say hoping necessarily. I was just waiting, on the lookout, you know?”

  Yeah, like a vulture after carrion, Alice thought.

  Tony didn’t look entirely pleased with this answer either, but he let it go. “So she went nuts?” he prompted.

  “Yes. Anyway, Lillian said that whenever she went up to see Elizabeth, she was reading strange old books, chanting things.”

  “Magic,” said the girl, pacing the elaborate rug.

  “Why?”

  “That,” said the man, “is the mystery. Sometimes I think that Lillian knew more than she admitted to, but who’s to say? If we can isolate Elizabeth’s spirit, we may be able to get the answer straight from her. ”

  “How did she die anyway?”

  “Suicide—nasty business. She almost burned the house down. They found her drowned in the pond with a knife through her heart and the attic in flames above her. Her father … well, they found him dead too. Burned to death tied to a bedpost in the attic.”

  Tony grimaced and Alice gulped. She looked at the lump in the bed where she’d hidden the bloodstained diary. Elizabeth had held that diary, written in it. Alice felt suddenly very close to her and it sent a horrified sort of thrill through her. When she looked up, the girl was looking at her. Finally.

  “We are all of us alike,” whispered the girl. She turned around before Alice could respond.

  “I know you can hear me!” said Alice, so forcefully that specks of spit dotted the mirror. But once again the girl walked away from her. Alice threw both of her fists against the glass.

  “And no one knows what happened?” Tony asked.

  His father shook his head. “No one ever figured it out. The police investigated for a
while, but found no one with motive. The sister was less than cooperative. And the real story was never told.”

  They sat in silence on the bed for a moment, Tony looking somber, his dad eager. Then George jumped to his feet and reached for the nearest plastic tub.

  “You ready to start setting up?”

  Tony nodded; George opened one of the tubs and started pulling out some strange-looking contraptions. Alice had never seen anything like them. Tony was screwing rods together while his father ran microphones around the room and tried to get a tiny video camera mounted on the dresser. He turned on a funny-looking flashlight and tiny pricks of light littered the wall across from him.

  “This will help us check for disturbances in the air—any spirits walking by,” the father explained. As he did, the girl exaggeratedly tiptoed up behind him, laughing like a maniac. She waved her arms and made as if to poke him in the back of the head. Her finger never actually touched him; it stopped an inch from his hair. No one’s crazy daughter—not even the hotel manager’s—would have gotten away with that unnoticed. They couldn’t see her; Alice was sure that, like her, the girl was visible to no one else.

  Stepping away from the mirror, Alice sat down on the bed. All those girls in comas, she thought to herself, and all of them died a week later. Had the other women been trapped in this house as well? Had they slept in this bed—read this same diary?

  And what about her? Would she die too? Would she somehow float out of this phantom house and into … somewhere else? Would it hurt? Alice had no idea and she found herself watching Tony and his father with something like hope. Maybe they’d be able to free her—if she couldn’t find her own way out.

  She stepped up to the mirror and caught the girl’s eye. The girl stopped turning the lamp on the nightstand on and off and stared straight back.

  “Tell me how to get out,” begged Alice, holding onto some silly, fragile dream that the girl would open her mouth and answers would come pouring out.

  But the girl did not answer. She looked at the mirror for a moment longer, then turned on the heel of her jet-black shoe and marched to the door. Yanking it open, she walked out and disappeared into the hallway.

  Alice threw herself back onto the bed and sank her fist deep into one of the pillows.

  She didn’t turn back to the mirror for a few minutes, just sat breathing heavily, feeling the sharp bite of air hissing between her teeth. Slightly calmer then, she watched the boy and his father mount video cameras on tripods and carry them out of the room.

  Both the man in the mirror and Elizabeth’s diary had mentioned an attic. Tony’s father said that it had been demolished after Elizabeth died, but if this was in fact how the house had looked during Elizabeth’s life, then perhaps the attic room still existed. If Alice could get to it, then maybe she could find a way to communicate to Tony’s father what he needed to know—the details that might tell him what was really going on here and how to get her out. There had to be a way to break through the glass. After all, ghosts could go where they wanted. If she could figure out how to communicate with the real world, then there would be no one better to talk to than someone who made a living examining the supernatural.

  The room in the mirror was empty now and Alice left her room as well. The silk lingerie was cool against her skin. She glanced at the mirror in the hallway as she walked by, but neither Tony nor his father were anywhere to be seen. At the top of the staircase Alice stopped. The second story of the boardinghouse only covered the back half. Was it possible that the attic room was somewhere above one of the lower-level rooms? Or was there a third story? She closed her eyes and thought back to the night when her family had driven up to the hotel to check in. But it had been so dark and for the life of her she could not remember whether there had been another floor or not.

  As she looked around, searching for something (she didn’t know what), her eyes stopped on the tapestry hanging from a rod at the end of the hall—one that she knew hadn’t been in the real hotel. It showed a deer in a forest, framed with a fringe of gold thread, and there was an odd lump on one side, just where she would expect a doorknob to be. She hurried over to it and lifted the fabric.

  Eureka.

  She tried to open the door in the paneling, but the knob refused to turn. Only then did Alice notice the keyhole, and she knelt down to take a closer look. The opening was two inches tall, and she placed her eye to it, but could see nothing on the other side. Sitting back on her heels, she stared at the copper plating, sure that she should be looking for a large, old-fashioned key. She was tempted to try to pick the lock, but she didn’t dare mess with it. When she was younger, she had tried to pick the lock on her parents’ door once and the bobby pin broke. The locksmith hadn’t arrived to free her parents until three hours later. Alice wasn’t sure if the house would heal itself from a jammed lock.

  She let the tapestry fall back over the door. Where would Elizabeth have kept the key? Alice couldn’t exactly ask her.

  The diary. Maybe she wrote about it in the diary.

  She started walking back down the hallway, but halfway to the room, she heard loud voices coming from one of the mirrors on the hallway wall and ran back to see what the fuss was about.

  “I don’t care if it’s life or death!” the hotel manager was shouting. Tony’s father was running wires across the carpeting; he wiped his hands on his jeans, then stood up.

  Tony slunk behind his dad. It couldn’t have been clearer that he didn’t want to be involved in this.

  “I didn’t say life or death,” George said heavily, as though he thought the manager was being deliberately slow. “I said it’s important for life that we know more about death.”

  “Good Lord!” The manager threw his hands up in despair. “I don’t give a … look—what is your name again?”

  George bent down to adjust a cable, clearly insulted.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter who you are. I’m going to have to ask you to clear up this … this mess, or I will have you removed from the building.” Alice saw the girl peeking out from behind him and clasped her hands tightly behind her back, biting back the urge to shout at her.

  Very slowly, George got back to his feet and turned to the red-faced hotel manager. Alice could not see the expression on George’s face, but judging by the way the hotel manager’s eyebrows went up, it wasn’t friendly. Tony snuck a bit farther away. A few people down the hall stuck their heads out of their rooms to see what was going on.

  “Do you understand the significance of what we are doing here?” said George at last.

  “We?” said the manager, throwing a pointed glance at Tony, who was looking more embarrassed by the second. This was obviously not the right thing to say. George stuck his finger right into the manager’s chest and started speaking very loudly.

  “Now look here. I know that this may be hard for a close-minded man like yourself to understand, but my son and I have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to witness the supernatural as it has never been seen before. Would you stand in the way of that?”

  The hotel manager looked entirely unfazed by the news that he might be disturbing a paranormal phenomenon. He pushed George’s finger away and pointed furiously at the floor, waving his arm around as he spoke. “I will stand in the way of anything that disturbs my patrons, sir, and I have been receiving complaints about your little setup here. This is a health hazard and I will not stand for it! If you want to create a spiderweb of trip wires in your own room, you are welcome to do so. But this hallway is a public area, and I will not allow you or anyone else to booby-trap it.”

  “Already a trap,” said the girl.

  She’s messing with me—just like Jeremy does. Like a bored kid poking a worm with a stick, the girl was trying to make her squirm. But Alice began to back away from the mirror all the same, eyeing the wires on the other side. They couldn’t affect her, could they? If she couldn’t touch that world, surely it couldn’t touch her.

  The hotel manager
whipped around and marched down the stairs. “You have half an hour before I contact the police.” The girl stepped out of the way as he passed, then pointed her toe at one of the wires on the floor, winked at the mirror, and ran down the stairs.

  Letting her nerves get the best of her, Alice began to back down the hallway, craning her neck to see what was going on in the mirror. She could still see George—he had turned around, his face scrunched up and red.

  “Some people have no appreciation for anything beyond their miserable lives. None!”

  “We should probably take it down,” said Tony. Unlike his father, he didn’t seem at all disappointed by this sudden turn of events.

  But his father ignored him. With a quick glance downstairs to make sure that the hotel manager wasn’t watching, he turned around and grabbed a plug.

  “We have thirty more minutes. You better believe we’re going to use them.”

  With that, he stuck the plug in the nearest outlet. In the shadow house behind the glass, Alice screamed in agony.

  Alice had never felt pain like this before. It felt as if someone were sticking knives up her feet and spilling fire through her body. It hurt so terribly that she couldn’t move; all she could do was yell at the mirror.

  “Stop! Please stop! Turn it off!”

  No one heard her. George was bent over a square device with an antenna and a flat screen.

  “I’ll be damned. Tony, get over here—you’ve got to see this!”

  Tony walked over slowly … excruciatingly slowly—every moment was interminable and Alice, gasping, thought she would not, surely could not last any longer. Finally, he reached his dad’s side and took the monitor George was shoving in his face.

  “Do you see that heat signature right there? That’s a person if I ever saw one, only a few feet away.” He was speaking softly—reverently. Alice’s ears were ringing; she could hear her heart. His voice sounded distant and strange.

  Tony peered more closely at the screen, as though he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. Then he looked up at the spot where Alice was standing in her version of the house.