The Looking Glass

by Jessica Arnold

  Alice knew there was no way she would be able to sleep—wasn’t even sure she needed to sleep in this not dead, not quite alive state. She wished she had experimented with the lamps downstairs when it was still light enough to see.

  There had to be one up here too. She ran her hands over the dresser first and brushed only dust, then felt around on the nightstand until her hands touched something cold. She grabbed it and traced the shape of it—a small, rounded contraption. Keeping one hand wrapped around the little lamp, she opened a drawer on the side of the dresser with the other. Her fingers slid past some dust and finally hit a box; she grabbed it and pulled out one of the matches. It was thin and felt a little too breakable for comfort, and trying to light it in the dark … she hesitated, but she didn’t have a choice. Taking a deep breath, she gave the match a quick swipe, and a flame erupted out of the end. By the time she got the lamp lit, the fire had almost worked its way to her skin. Her fingernail was smoking.

  For a minute she sat staring at the flickering light, feeling as though she had finally accomplished something. But somehow the room seemed even darker than before. The flame was a small, sickly thing.

  “What now?” she said out loud to herself, and the dank air stifled her voice immediately. She didn’t want to venture out of the room, but there wasn’t anything interesting there and she couldn’t lie around all night long doing nothing. Her mind wandered back to the bloodstained diary on the library desk.

  READ ME

  The flame jerked, then doubled in size.

  Alice jumped to her feet. Read me. The little book. She didn’t make the connection—it popped into her mind prepackaged—and yet she didn’t doubt it.

  Holding the lamp (now shining gold and strong) in front of her, she rushed out of the room, down the stairs, and into the library, her borrowed nightdress fluttering behind her like a red silk flag. Why she was running, she hardly knew, but the fact that something about this place was finally making sense gave her a burning hope. She passed scores of mirrors as she ran, and in every single one of them she thought she glanced the pale face of the girl in black. Shivers chased each other down her spine and she ran faster, keeping her eyes focused straight ahead. When she got to the library, she grabbed the book and sprinted back to the room, the way she used to run to her parents’ room when she couldn’t sleep at night. The whole time, she couldn’t escape the feeling that something was chasing her, that any minute now it would stretch out its cold fingers and grab her shoulder.

  Sissy. Jeremy would have laughed at her—she could see his wide smile and she almost smiled herself. Then she remembered where she was and the picture went out like a candle.

  By the time she was safely back with the door closed and locked behind her, she was so out of breath that all she could do was place the lamp on the nightstand and collapse back onto the bed. She held the book against her stomach, feeling its tiny weight as she breathed in and out. Stupid Jeremy, talking her into watching those horror movies—far more graphic even than her anatomy class (in which a supposedly fearless football player had fainted not once but twice). She was letting her imagination get the better of her. Cold fingers on her shoulder … she forced herself to laugh. Straight out of a movie, of course.

  Ignoring her still-pounding heart, she examined the book closer. Trying to ignore the blood spot, she turned it over a few times. A gold glimmer on the binding caught her eye and she held it closer to the lamp.

  “Lizzie Blackwell,” she read in a whisper. Elizabeth Blackwell—it had to be. With growing curiosity, she peeled open the stiff cover.

  Property of Elizabeth Blackwell, someone had written on the inside cover. The handwriting was elegant, tall, and slanted. Alice turned the page and did something she had not done of her own free will in a very long time—she began to read.

  April 23, 1883

  Tonight I wait for William. My case is all ready. Most of my things have been packed for days now. I gather everything at midnight, or whenever I can escape Father’s all-seeing eye. I think he noticed when I took my Shakespeare collection from the library, but he has not said anything yet and tomorrow it will be too late.

  William says that as soon as we are out of this city, he will take me across the ocean to Europe. He is going to help me establish an acting career in England. He says that once I become famous, we will tour the world together. Just imagine—me, a real European actress. It is all I have ever hoped for. William assures me that he has never seen such talent. I am very talented, of course. Everyone says so.

  It is a shame that Father hates William so. I simply cannot understand it. But Father never trusts anyone he has not known since the beginning of time, and William is a newcomer here. I remember when I met him after the final run of Hamlet. He waited for me outside of the dressing room. He is a good man—a man who can truly appreciate my talent. William likes to look at me and tell me how beautiful I am. I like to listen.

  I have already sent my valuables with William to take on the stagecoach. He took most of the luggage to the ship yesterday so that we will not have to be burdened with it tonight. We cannot waste time carrying bags out and risk waking my father. And so I wait here and start this new diary. Soon I will fill it with all of my great European adventures. And with William, of course. I will write all about William.

  It is ten minutes past midnight now and I wish that William would come. I am anxious to escape this attic. I did not choose it, but, because all of the other suitable rooms are reserved for our guests, it was the only option. Father lets me have this one all to myself only because no one else wants to use it. Even Lillian wouldn’t have it (she sleeps in the kitchen). But I am an actress and I will not sleep like a servant, no matter what they say happened here. You see, they say that many years ago, a witch lived in this room. They say that she killed herself—hung herself from this very chandelier—and one day the man who ran the boardinghouse came upstairs to check on her and found her hanging there, blue and rotting with a hole burned in the floor underneath her.

  They tell terrible stories about the witch—even worse than the ones they tell about Mother.

  I do not like to think about it, but I do not believe that the room will ever forget. Sometimes I think I feel someone creeping up behind me and I imagine that it is her. Father says that I am too old to have such fancies, but he has not slept here as I have. He does not understand. The witch may have left long ago, but this room still bears traces of dark magic. I feel it quivering around me—it is in the very furniture.

  The furniture is odd. I wanted Father to change it, but he says that it is valuable. I think that he wants to sell it to a museum one day. I wish I didn’t have to use it. Take the bed, for instance. Four-poster beds are common enough, but who has ever heard of a three-poster bed? This is the only one that I have ever seen. It is a perfect triangle. I usually sleep with my head to the wide side against the wall and my feet to the point, but I have to be very careful not to roll off in the night. It seems that everything in this room has either three points or six. The windows are hexagons and the desk is a triangle. The mirror is worst of all. It is a triangle divided into four smaller triangles by three bars of wood through the middle. I have told Father that there is something wrong with the glass, but he can see no problem. I don’t know why—it is so obvious to me. The glass distorts my face in strange ways. Some days my eyes look too large, some days too small. Once I had a terrible scare when it seemed my nose had doubled in size overnight.

  Oh where is William! It is almost one o’clock in the morning now. I have watched out the window constantly for the past half hour, but there is no sign of him. Where could he possibly be? I have kept the lamps lit, but I hate to risk the light. I often catch Father wandering around at night. Neither of us is a very good sleeper. What if he should see that my light is still on? I suppose I could say that I was reading, but he would see that I am still dressed. He would see the case on the bed and he would know the truth. Sometimes I am frightene
d of my father. He hasn’t been the same since Mother died in this very room ten years ago. She had just given birth to my younger sister. They say that she went mad. They say that she killed herself.

  My father has never spoken of it.

  William has not come, and I am afraid. I spent almost half an hour combing and combing and combing my hair. It is so long. It is beautiful—black and silky and curled. William always tells me how much he loves my hair. I braided it when my arm began to ache from holding the comb; I twisted it into a bun at the nape of my neck.

  Where is William? I am beginning to wonder if it has happened as I feared it would. I wonder if he has changed his mind.

  No. No, it cannot be.

  I went to the mirror to look at my face; it was distorted, but still beautiful. The candlelight flickered on my ivory brow and in my eyes. I am beautiful and William must come for me.

  I left the mirror then and hurried to my desk. My newspaper clippings are arranged in a neat pile and tied with a red ribbon. I began to read through them one by one, although I already have them all memorized. Each paper is soft and faded from so much handling; my fingers know the feel of them.

  “Miss Elizabeth Blackwell’s portrayal of Lady Macbeth was truly marvelous,” says one. “The lovely Miss Blackwell is the shining star of our local actresses,” says another. Some praise the nuances of my acting, some praise my stage presence, some praise my beauty. I have well over thirty of them and I receive more every month. Father clips them out of the newspaper for me. He never gives me any negative reviews and I do not ask to see any.

  Heavens it is late. I have kept the newspaper clippings out to keep me company. I am reading them for a third time.

  William is not here.

  William is still not here. I have thrown the clippings out the window and watched them flutter to the ground.

  I am frightened for William. He has never been late before. What if something has happened to him? I couldn’t bear it. But the sun is almost up and still he has not come. I don’t even need the lamps anymore. Soon my father will be awake and working on the garden. He has asked Monsieur Létourneau to come sometime soon—he wishes to have a painting of me as Ophelia for the drawing room. Father believes that it was my finest role. Monsieur Létourneau is a fine painter, but he is cheap and my father is a stingy man, so it is a perfect match. I do believe that Lillian will come to wake me; she usually does. She wants me to do her hair up for the dance she’s been asked to today.

  William has only been delayed, I am sure. I will wait for him tomorrow. Lillian is knocking now and I must pretend that I slept tonight.

  ***

  Alice stopped reading, overwhelmed. She wasn’t a voracious reader like Jeremy and she hadn’t ever understood what people saw in books, how they could lose themselves in a string of letters. But the diary … she had never felt this way about words before. They echoed through her mind and lodged themselves there—not words any longer but feelings—translated, reflected. The book was a mirror and when she read it she thought she saw shadows of her own past lurking behind Elizabeth’s strange world, peeping out from behind the walls.

  A sound jarred her from her thoughts and she jumped so hard that the diary slipped out of her hands and landed on the blanket. There had been a knock at the door. She was sure of it. But—no—it couldn’t be. Could it?

  On a sudden instinct, she tucked the diary under the covers. Shaking from head to toe, she walked over to the door. The room was quite bright now—the windows were letting in so much light that she could almost believe there was a real sun outside shining on them, that they were more than just the illusion that the rest of the house seemed to be. She’d spent more time reading than she realized; the woman’s handwriting was very difficult to decipher, though it looked beautiful on the page. She reached over and opened the door, half expecting to see Lillian waiting outside. But there was no one.

  “Hello?” Alice called. It was easier to be brave now that the house was light again. Her hands had stopped quivering altogether. “Hello!” she called again. There was no answer, but no sooner had she closed the door than she heard the knock again. There was a man’s voice now.

  “Anyone in there? Could you please let us in?”

  Alice realized now that the sound was not coming from the door at all, but rather from the mirror, which hung on a wall across from the bed. She turned around and hurried over to look through it, but the room on the other side was still empty.

  “Is there a problem?” she heard the hotel manager say.

  “This door is locked,” the same man said again.

  “Well, of course it’s locked. We do believe in some security here. Didn’t I give you a key?”

  “A key?”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve lost it already.”

  “You put it in your pocket, Dad.” Now it sounded as if a teenage boy had joined the conversation. His voice was steady. Alice liked it at once.

  “Oh! And so I did. Thank you, Tony.”

  The door opened and an older, balding man came in, followed by a boy (clearly his son) carrying two enormous plastic tubs, and the hotel manager, who looked harassed.

  “Is there anything else you need?” the manager asked, though it was abundantly clear that he hoped there wasn’t. He stepped through the door and right behind him stood the girl with the triangle bracelets. She wandered into the room and no one even noticed. Alice watched her walk forward to the mirror and run her fingers across the glass.

  “Hush,” she said. It was the first time Alice had heard her speak, and she was surprised to hear how high—almost childish—the girl’s voice was. The girl, her eyes closed, traced circles on the glass, and the back of Alice’s neck tingled.

  There was clearly something wrong with her, and Alice suspected that she wasn’t “all there” mentally. Maybe she was the hotel manager’s daughter, allowed to go wherever she wanted. Alice’s autistic cousin had always been allowed this kind of freedom (growing up Alice had almost envied him for it). But if the girl had been wandering around, why hadn’t Alice ever seen her before the accident?

  “Actually, there is.” The older man put his suitcase down by the bed and pulled a notepad out of his pocket. “Now tell me exactly what happened yesterday—just one more time.”

  Absentmindedly combing through her hair, the girl wandered away from the mirror.

  The manager pinched his lips together so hard that they began to turn white. “I have already told you everything. The girl dove when she shouldn’t have. She cracked her head and now she’s in a coma in the hospital.”

  The man wrote this down very quickly on his notepad; his son walked around the room, staring stonily at the walls, occasionally throwing his dad frustrated glances. He was nice-looking, but not in the way that Alice had come to expect from boys her age. Everything about his face was one extreme or another. The California surfer boys were all one shade of sandy bronze, from their hair to their skin. But this boy had skin almost as pale as Alice’s and black hair that fell in waves to the tops of his ears. His eyes were large and blue; his square, black-framed glasses made him look intelligent and older than Alice suspected he was.

  She liked the way he looked. She liked it too much. A second later he turned away and, staring only at the back of his head, it was easy to convince herself that the boy wasn’t nearly as attractive as she thought he had been. It was a trick of the light. That was all.

  “Crush,” laughed the girl.

  Remembering that her cousin would often say crazy, random things, Alice did what came most naturally to her and ignored the girl, pressing her hand against the cool glass, watching the boy behind it. He frowned again at his dad, as the older man tried to squeeze more details out of the manager.

  “But you haven’t answered the question—has there been any paranormal activity of any sort? Any strange noises? Anything out of the ordinary?”

  The hotel manager looked as though he had had just about enough. “Sir,”
he said through lips so tight that they hardly moved at all, “a girl was injured while playing in the pool. That is all there is to it. If you continue to badger me, I will kindly ask you to leave the premises.” He walked into the hallway and began to close the door. “Enjoy your stay.” It sounded more like a death wish than anything else. The door slammed shut behind him. The girl remained in the room and the man and his son didn’t seem to care. She perched herself on a fluffy pink armchair and observed the scene with glittering eyes, like a queen, like she owned it.

  The man shook his head and looked at his son. “This is what I’ve warned you about time and time again, Tony. Some people are so close-minded that they can’t see the supernatural when it’s right in front of them.”

  The girl laughed.

  “I wish you’d leave him alone,” said Tony, examining the pattern on the curtains.

  “How else am I going to get the information I need? I can’t base an investigation on nothing.”

  “It’s just … I don’t know. It seems a little … ”

  “A little what?”

  Tony shrugged. “Insensitive.”

  The man, George, shook his head. “You’re forgetting that what we’re doing here may help the girl. If we can appease the angry spirit, maybe it will release her.”

  Tony still looked uncertain. “Why are you so sure that this is supernatural, anyway?”