by Eva Chase
Like usual, Melody let out a playful huff. “I’ll convince you one of these days. You’ve got to let loose, girl! Especially now that you’re done with that drag of a job.”
“It’s more like they were done with me,” I pointed out. “And it wasn’t that much of a drag. I don’t know why I was one of the ones who got laid off. Everyone else complained all the time, but I kind of liked it, helping people get the info they needed. There weren’t that many jerk customers. I was pretty good at it too, you know.”
“Of course you were,” Melody said. “You never saw a problem you didn’t want to fix. Don’t you need a little break from taking care of everyone around you?”
I wrinkled my nose at her. We’d had this conversation lots of times too. “I don’t have to take care of you.”
“Not anymore.”
Maybe there’d been a bit of that element to our friendship when we’d first clicked in ninth grade. Melody’s parents had just gotten into what she now called “The Shouting Era,” a five-year lead-up to their eventual divorce. So I’d encouraged her to hang out at my place as much as she wanted, which ended up meaning nearly every evening. You’re always so together, she’d said to me once back then. Whenever I’m around you, I feel like anything that’s wrong, it’s got to be fixable.
In return, I could thank her for introducing me to my first alcoholic beverage (wine coolers, which I still liked), my first joint (which had also been my last), and my first party make-out session (with Tommy Milton, who hadn’t stuck around, but he’d been a really good kisser). I grounded Melody, and she pushed me to spread my wings. The balance worked just fine.
“Anyway,” Melody said now, as we wandered through the dining room and into the kitchen fitted with appliances that looked like antiques, “that’s not even getting into the real deadweight you just cut loose from your life. Adios, Brianito!”
“I know you didn’t like Brian that much,” I said. “But you could pretend to be sad we broke up.”
“Why bother? He showed his true colors, didn’t he? Good riddance. I’m glad you know what an asshole he is so you can move on.”
“I think I’m going to take a break from dating for a while.”
She laughed. “Who said anything about dating? Have a fling, a one-night-stand or two. It’s about time you lived it up. You’ve got a place to live and money to last you a little while. Just this once, you don’t need to worry about anything except what you want—and then go for it.”
I raised my eyebrows at her. “And what if what I want is to curl up on that velvet sofa over there with a steady supply of ice cream and binge-watch all of Netflix for a month?” I pointed toward the living room—or maybe that was the family room, or the sitting room. It was hard to keep track.
Melody brushed past me and tugged on a strand of my hair. “I know you’ve got more wildness than that in you, Lyss. Sometime you’ve got to let it out, or else you’re going to explode from bottling it up so long. Come on, let’s see what’s what upstairs.”
As we headed up the staircase, a small furry body tumbled onto the landing. A black kitten that couldn’t have been more than a few months old peered at us and meowed piteously. I clucked my tongue at him and scooped him up. Melody gave me a curious glance.
“The house came with pets included in the deal,” I said. “There should be a tabby named Dinah around here somewhere and a couple other kittens. Aunt Alicia hadn’t named those yet.”
“Are you going to keep them?” Melody asked.
I rubbed the kitten’s head between his swiveling ears. There was something comforting about the warmth of his soft little body. “I don’t know. I guess I’ll see what I end up deciding to do with this place. My apartment has a two-pet limit. I could put them up for adoption if I have to—it’s only Dinah I had to agree to keep.”
The second and third floors held a total of four bedrooms, a music room with a grand piano, a library, and a bathroom where the pipes hummed in a slightly unnerving way when I tried the sink faucet. If I decided to keep the whole house rather than sell it, I might want to invest in a few updates.
Every room held new mysteries—a closed wardrobe, a chest of drawers, a secretary desk. My heart beat a little faster with each one, even though we were just doing a quick survey of the place. I could explore the house in more depth once I’d gotten my bearings. Even though I’d never seen Aunt Alicia here, I felt her presence in the elegance and the neatness of the place. She deserved to have her belongings handled with proper care, not rummaged through as if I were looting the place.
So far I hadn’t come across any indication that she’d anticipated my arrival, though.
In the middle of the third floor, a wrought-iron spiral staircase led up into the high tower I’d seen from outside. We scrambled up and emerged into a small room much messier and shabbier than the ones below.
A couple of bookcases stood against the walls, the books on them strewn about haphazardly between dusty figurines. A few pieces of clothing had been flung over the rocking chair in the corner. Next to it stood a full-length mirror with a silver frame that was shaped like a leafy vine winding around the glass.
Melody let out a low whistle. “I guess she didn’t make it up here very often. Maybe those stairs got to be a bit much for her.”
“Yeah,” I said, only half listening. My gaze was stuck to the mirror. I stepped closer to it without thinking, and a quivering sensation raced over my skin. The hairs on the back of my neck twitched.
I froze, hugging myself. “Did you feel that?”
Melody cocked her head. “Feel what?”
She didn’t look at all disturbed. I shook my head. Taking all this in must be starting to overwhelm me. My heart was still beating even faster than before, but almost… eagerly. At the same time, my body balked at the idea of staying in this room with Melody one moment longer.
I turned toward the stairs. “That’s the whole house. I’d better get my grocery shopping done before the store closes. A town that small, they might not even stay open past five.”
“Hmm,” Melody said, following me down. “One potential downside to getting to live in a fantastic old house—can you even get pizza delivery here?”
We both laughed as we reached the bottom of the spiral stairs, and the tension inside me broke. But when I glanced back toward the tower, a faint tingling crept back up my neck that I couldn’t quite shake.
CHAPTER TWO
Lyssa
I t felt strange having a huge house to myself after a few years in pokey apartments, dorms before that, and my childhood bungalow before even that. Even when I’d lived in that last apartment by myself for the first several months before Brian had moved in, I’d always been able to hear my neighbors around me, thumping across my ceiling or hollering to each other on the other side of the walls.
Aunt Alicia’s house was out in the middle of nowhere. Other than the rumble of an occasional car passing by on the country road, I might as well have been the last person on Earth.
The pipes hummed, and the floors creaked—sometimes even when I wasn’t walking on them. The kittens scampered around with the rasp of their little claws. But somehow the space still felt vastly quiet from the moment Melody headed home. Even when I tucked myself into bed in the smallest of the six bedrooms, snuggling under my beloved feather duvet that I’d brought with me, the emptiness of all the other rooms echoed around me.
Maybe it’d been a little ridiculous, running right out here just a few days after I’d kicked Brian to the curb. I’d wanted a change in scenery, not to be hit over the head with my aloneness.
When I woke up the next morning, sunlight was already streaming through the thin curtains on the bedroom window, and the black kitten was tumbling across my duvet. Noticing I was up, he gave me his usual plaintive meow. I ruffled his fur and pushed myself out of bed.
Time to get into the deeper exploration. There had to be something there that would explain why Aunt Alicia had wanted me to
have the house at all.
The black kitten had definite ideas about where I should begin my survey. As soon as I walked out into the hall in my lounge-wear of lacy tank top and yoga pants, he darted toward the spiral staircase that led into the tower’s attic room. I hesitated, watching him hop from step to step.
“Are you sure you don’t want some breakfast first?” I called.
He paused, peered at me between the wrought-iron steps, and then kept bounding up.
I would have liked some breakfast. A cup of coffee would clear some of the just-woke-up mugginess from my head, and my stomach pinched, empty as all these rooms. But something drew me to those stairs anyway. Maybe it was the kitten’s determination to see his mission through. Maybe it was curiosity driving me to sort through the contents of at least one room.
Or maybe there was more to it, a tug on a level I wasn’t even conscious of.
I walked up the spiral stairs, gripping the cool metal railing. The small room at the top of the tower looked the same as it had yesterday other than the light coming in the windows slanting at a different angle. The air tasted dry and a little stale, but not musty, at least. The general disorder still struck me as odd. Aunt Alicia had kept the rest of the house so tidy. Was Melody right and the climb up the stairs had just gotten too hard?
I couldn’t help straightening out the books on the shelves, blowing the dust off them before setting them upright and in even rows. They were mostly children’s books, I realized: Narnia, Oz, Kipling, and more. My gaze fell on a wooden chest that I’d missed yesterday, tucked behind the railing at the top of the stairs. A toy box? Had Aunt Alicia stuck all the artifacts from her and Dad’s childhood up here?
To reach the chest, I had to pass that tall standing mirror. The sunlight glimmered off both the glass and the silver frame. Not a streak of dust had settled on its surface. That was a little weird.
The quivering sensation that had come over me yesterday crawled up my back. I couldn’t help glancing at my reflection as I walked past. That was some great bedhead I’d woken up with. I combed my fingers through my shoulder-length waves, walking on—and jerked to a stop.
I’d disappeared from the mirror. I wasn’t standing right in front of it anymore, but I was close enough that I still should have been able to see myself. With one step, the whole reflection of the room had blurred, and I’d faded away completely.
I stood stock still, staring harder. None of the shapes in the suddenly hazy glass would come into focus. None of them looked like me. What the hell was wrong with the thing?
The quivering ran over my whole body. My heart thudded, but I eased closer to the mirror. The blurred shapes shivered and swirled before my eyes. All at once, the thump of my pulse felt exhilarated rather than nervous, as if I could sense I was on the verge of an incredible discovery. So close. If I just—
My hand reached out of its own accord. My fingers grazed the slick glass. I leaned forward, peering at the blurred image, and my hand slipped right through that smooth surface. I only had time to let out a squeak of surprise before the rest of me toppled after it into the mirror.
I spun head over heels, plummeting downward so quickly my hair whipped across my face. A twisted version of the room I’d left shifted around me. Bookshelves curved, closing me in. Wrought-iron bars like the railing of the stairs crisscrossed over them. I groped for something to catch my fall, but my fingers never connected with anything solid. I careened on down and down, another cry slipping from my throat, toward darkness that was broken by a glint of light.
I flipped again and plunged into a thicker darkness that closed around me with the cold wet texture of… water? All of a sudden, I was surging upward instead of falling, even though I hadn’t gotten any impression of turning around. The faint light was expanding over the rippling surface above me.
I kicked my legs and swept my arms through the water, my lungs starting to burn. The currents coursed around me faster and faster…
With a gasp, my head broke into the open air. I sucked as much as I could into my lungs and got half a mouthful of salty water at the same time. As I sputtered it back out, I swiped at my eyes to take a clear look at where I’d ended up.
The salty flavor of the water had made me expect a broad expanse of ocean. What I saw looked more like a pond. I could make out the entire shoreline, from maybe twenty feet ahead of me to fifty feet on either side and a hundred or so behind me. Dark stones glittering with mica jutted along the water’s edge. The fronds of enormous ferns and huge waxy leaves from hunched trees shaded them. Over the top of one of the ferns ahead of me, I thought I made out a daisy bigger than my head.
Where the hell was I? How the hell had I fallen into a mirror? I couldn’t wrap my mind around anything that had happened in the last few minutes, but I definitely didn’t feel secure treading water here over unknown depths.
I swam for the nearest shore, up ahead, my feet never touching the ground. I had to haul myself out of the water onto one of the twinkling boulders. Drenched and dripping, I scrambled over the rocks onto a grassy path that led between the towering foliage. A rich floral scent wafted over me.
My clothes were soaked, but the beaming sun warmed me enough to keep me from getting chilled. I wrung as much moisture as I could out of my top and my pantlegs while I watched and listened. Nothing much changed.
I took one cautious step down the path and then another. After a few more, the foliage thinned enough for me to spot more gigantic flowers like the daisy protruding between the ferns. There was a lily I could have worn as a dress—and a decently modest one too. A tulip I might not have been able to wrap my arms all the way around. A begonia I could have used as an umbrella.
The head of the daisy turned toward me. Its petals bent to form a sort of mouth.
“Did no one ever tell you it’s rude to stare?”
My jaw dropped. If I’d been staring before, my eyes must have been just about popping out of my head now.
The tulip curled its… lower lip? “My goodness, they don’t teach the walking ones much in the way of manners these days, now do they?”
I managed to stammer out a few words. “I—um—I didn’t—”
The lily ruffled its petals and said in a matronly voice, “Now, dear, we’ll never understand each other like that. If you have something to say, do get on with it.”
My legs wobbled under me. I stiffened them to hold myself steady. “I’ve never met flowers that could talk before,” I said. Had I hit my head somewhere in that fall? Or before? Everything since I’d touched the mirror might be a bizarre hallucination. None of this could be real… could it?
“Well, it isn’t as if it’s all that strange,” the daisy said, sounding offended. “Why shouldn’t we talk? You can.”
“Never thinking about anyone but themselves,” the tulip murmured, with a disapproving shake.
I pressed the heel of my hand to my forehead, but the pressure felt completely real. Pinching my arm only made me wince. No, wait, that was for dreaming, not hallucinating. How did you wake yourself up from a hallucination? Could you?
I couldn’t think of anything I’d ever read about that. But the longer I spent talking with giant flowers, the more my head was spinning. I could at least move the hallucination along.
“Are there other people like me around here?” I asked. “The ‘walking ones’?”
“Oh, I suppose we aren’t good enough company, then?” the daisy said with a sniff.
“What did I tell you?” the tulip put in.
“You look rather out of sorts,” the lily said. “Perhaps it would be better if you put down roots for a little while.”
Not here. I sidestepped farther along the path. “I think I’ll go have a look for myself. It was very nice to meet you. Uh, goodbye!”
Then I swiveled on my heel and hurried away. The flowers’ voices carried after me, one or another remarking about how polite I’d managed to be when I was leaving. I tapped my ears as if they might be t
he problem, but I could still hear them.
The path opened up to a wider road cobbled with red and blue stones. Trees lined the road, their leaves so vibrant green—this one lime, that one more of a mint—that I had to blink as if a bright light had flashed into my eyes. I looked down the road to my right, saw nothing but more road and more trees, and then turned in the other direction.
A figure was standing there, several paces down the road: a man in a deep violet suit with a matching top hat. The shirt underneath the jacket was white, but his tie gleamed a rich olive green. The outfit should have looked ridiculous, but somehow it fit him perfectly, from his broad shoulders down his otherwise lean frame.
He was poised as if he’d stopped in mid-step to stare at me like I was staring at just about everything. As I took him in, he recovered himself. He strode forward with a swift grace that I wouldn’t have expected from his top-heavy physique. His eyes stayed fixed on me.
I crossed my arms over my chest, abruptly self-conscious. I hadn’t bothered with a bra for puttering around the house when I didn’t have much to hold up anyway, and my wet tank top was clinging to the unimpressive curves I did have. If I’d known I was going to be conversing with flowers and dudes who shared their fashion sense with Willy Wonka, I’d have picked my clothes a little more carefully.
I didn’t have anywhere else to go, though, and this guy didn’t look threatening, just intense. So I stood and waited until he came to a stop a couple steps away. Spiky tufts of dark blond hair poked from beneath his hat, and he had at least a couple days’ scruff on his narrow jaw. His eyes, still studying me, were nearly the same rich shade of green as his tie. I’d never seen any depiction of Willy Wonka I thought was hot. This guy was definitely several steps up, weird clothes or not.