He looked at his watch—the one he had been wearing when he jumped in to save the girl from drowning. The watch was not waterproof and when he looked at it he saw that it had stopped at precisely midnight. It was broken. His mother would be … his mother was not important right now. The girl had appeared at midnight and then—yes, he remembered now—she had disappeared just as the grandfather clock in the hotel had been chiming one. Exactly an hour. It was too precise for comfort. And the girl clearly hadn’t been expecting to disappear. Since when were ghosts bound by time? It was almost as though she was stuck somewhere, as though she wasn’t much of a ghost at all.
He closed his eyes. There was something very strange going on here, something that he wasn’t seeing. Alice Montgomery was in a coma. So she wasn’t dead—not really. Not alive either, because how was a coma—stronger and stranger than sleep—really life? And if she wasn’t dead and she wasn’t alive, then she had to be stuck. In limbo. Between life and death.
Or … and this thought made him stop outright … maybe the girl was in a coma because she was stuck. In which case what she really needed was something to help her move on. It made sense. She just needed to be nudged in the right direction and then she’d be free. A plan came to him then. He, Tony, could help her. He could use his dad’s equipment. He could help the girl to die.
Because if she was dead, then he could let her go.
He turned around in the middle of the road. This was the solution. He would help her cross over no matter what the cost, get her out of his world and out of his life. Out of his mind forever.
***
Alice didn’t know that she was crying until the girl pulled her hand away and she fell onto the floor, choking on words she didn’t want to say, tears tumbling down her cheeks.
“He wants … ” she couldn’t finish.
Tony didn’t want to help her live. He wanted to help her die.
“I just … thought … ” She hadn’t thought, had she? Alice pulled herself backward and hugged her knees to her chest, bracing herself against a wall as though it could swallow her up and end all of this. More than anything, she wanted to forget what she had just seen and move on as though nothing had happened. But her mind was a blackboard with no eraser, covered with miserable scrawls that she couldn’t remove, and the mess confused her and she rocked back and forth and back again because she didn’t know what else to do. There were no more tears now—nothing but numbness and the chill in the air around her.
The girl crept forward and put her hand on Alice’s knee. Alice stared at the hand blankly; she looked up at the girl’s face and saw what looked like sympathy in her eyes. At that moment—and for the very first time—she trusted her a very little bit. Maybe the girl did understand. Maybe she was the only one who could.
“Do you want to see more?”
Alice shook her head. More? She could barely handle what she had seen. More would surely break her.
The girl stroked her shoulder.
“It’s hard to know what they really think, isn’t it? Your parents … the boy … ”
Her parents were planning to let her die. It was true. Nobody cared—nobody at all. They were all willing to stand by and let her disappear. Or maybe they even wanted her to die; then they could sue the manager and get their money … a small trade, money for her life. Did she really mean so little to them?
“You mean something to me,” said the girl, and Alice wondered if she could read her thoughts. The possibility didn’t seem as outlandish as it once would have. “You know that, right?” the girl continued. “I know you, Alice. I know how much you hurt. That’s why I’ve been trying to help you.”
“Help me?” asked Alice, pulling away from the girl, sliding to a lonelier section of wall. “How—how could you say that showing me that was helping me? I thought that it would make me … ”
“Happy? Did you think that I would show you only what you wanted to see?”
The girl stared at her and Alice did not answer.
“How could I lie to you? You lie to yourself all the time. The last thing you need is a friend who goes along with it. I showed you what you needed to see.”
“You knew it would hurt me,” said Alice. She was angry and it felt better to hate the girl than to hate herself for going along with the whole thing. “You knew it would hurt and you did it anyway.”
“But that’s what love is,” sighed the girl, and though she sounded exhausted there was no anger in her voice. “Love is doing what you know is best for someone even if it’s going to tear them apart for a little while. You know that. You’re just too upset to see it right now.”
“How could that possibly help me? How could it help me to know that they … ”—her eyes stung—“that everyone wants me dead?” She surprised herself by yelling the word at the top of her lungs. It echoed. The girl did not budge.
“Because once you realize that there’s nothing holding you here, it will be easier for you to let go.” She said it so calmly, so simply, and Alice gaped at her, wordless. Death was still echoing around the room.
“You can leave all this behind,” the girl continued. “You can be with me. They don’t want you, Alice, but I do. And if you come with me, you can have what you want—you can be happy and there won’t be anyone there to stop you.”
Alice felt tears in her eyes. She was swollen with anger and when the girl spoke of happiness, Alice felt the deepest, purest pang of longing. This pain could be gone—wiped away into nothing. She could start over. The thought of a blank slate was so enticing that it pushed aside all hesitations and cautious questions. It was the only thing that Alice could see anymore, the only thought in her mind.
The girl’s eyes were wide and honest. Alice believed her at last. She wanted so badly to believe her.
“If my life doesn’t mean anything to them then why should it mean anything to me?” she whispered.
“It’s so easy to let go,” said the girl. “Just come with me and—”
But her words were cut off by the chiming of the grandfather clock. For a moment, Alice met her eyes. She didn’t want to be torn away from the girl, didn’t want to go back to a world that did not want or need her.
“You’ll be back,” the girl whispered.
Alice breathed in deeply, until there was no more air to breathe.
She was expecting the water this time, but that didn’t stop her from panicking when she emerged at the bottom of the pool. She immediately realized how foolish she had been to wear this dress. The long train weighed her down; her almost transparent hands couldn’t fight the pull of the heavy fabric, and she began to feel the familiar panic of not being able to breathe.
Just as the world started to grow fuzzy, she felt a familiar arm around her waist dragging her upwards. This time, she did not fight. “You came!” Tony said as soon as her head broke the surface. He was wearing swim trunks and a tight black shirt tonight.
Alice was too busy gasping for breath to answer. Tony put his other hand under her knees and carried her over to the pool deck, where he had not one, but three fluffy towels already folded and ready to receive her. As she tried to get air back into her lungs, he wrapped one around her shoulders and another over her legs.
“I didn’t think ghosts needed to breathe,” he said, helping to wring out her sopping hair.
“I’m … not … a ghost,” she gasped out. Not yet.
He reached under her towel, pulled out her hand, and held it up to the light. Alice could see every bone.
“Not a ghost,” he repeated.
“No,” she said firmly, though her voice was weak and strained. She saw his eyes wander to the waterlogged green silk. “Elizabeth’s,” she explained. “It was Elizabeth’s.”
“Oh,” said Tony, and for some reason he looked quite grim as he examined her. Before, he had seemed happy to see her; now his eyes searched her face with unmistakable concern. This was what she had expected—him looking at her as if she had caution tape wrapped
around her head, as if she were going to fall apart any second, go crazy, explode.
His eyebrows furrowed and she tried to read his expression. She knew what she was looking for—fear, discomfort—and she thought she found it there in the tightness of his lips. It was true after all. Deep inside, he’d been hoping she wouldn’t reappear. Because really, who would want their summer vacation bogged down with a ghost? She wasn’t his responsibility. Helping some random ghost-girl wasn’t something he should have to do.
“Did you find it?” she asked, clutching the towel tightly around her. “Did you find the key?” She tried to say it with real interest, but her voice sounded hollow—even to her. Her fingernails dug into the towel and she hated how solid it felt, how heavy it was around her.
Tony sat down beside her, his wet hair dripping onto his shoulders, neck, and back.
“What key?”
“You didn’t find it,” Alice interrupted. The sight of him made her sick to her stomach and she looked away. She missed the girl’s voice, the way the girl spoke to her.
“If you could just explain to me what’s going on—”
Alice cut him off again. “You don’t have the key. What else is there to say? She was right all along.” The key—what did the key matter to him? He wanted her to disappear. He probably hadn’t even looked for it. She’d been an idiot to think he would; fresh hot anger poured over her and she couldn’t tell whether she was mad at herself or at him. Or at her parents. Or at everything.
Tony muttered a few words, as though determined to make another stab at the sentence he had been unable to finish, but then stopped quite suddenly. Alice turned around to look at him again. She would be gone soon enough; there was little point in hiding from him.
“Alice? I don’t understand. Are you talking about the room key we found? … If you could just tell me … ”
She pulled the towel so taut that she felt it stretch against her shoulders, pushing into her skin, past her skin. “I need to call my family,” she said. Her hands were trembling and she held the towel even more tightly. Her dad would answer the phone … maybe her mom. She could hear their voices in her ears—Hello? Who is it?—and she wanted to scream at them, Why? Why don’t you care? Begging to live did not cross her mind; all she wanted to do was punish them for letting her go so easily. She would make them hurt as they had hurt her.
“I need to call them.”
Her voice faded. She heard a sound and whipped around, eyes wide, but it was only a bird in the bushes.
“Give me your phone,” she demanded, turning back to Tony.
But he didn’t move.
The buzzing of the crickets and the buzzing of her own mind blended into a feverish drone, crescendoing up and up until she could hardly stand it. She wished she could cut off her ears, her head, let it drain out. “You promised to help me!” she snapped. “Well, what are you waiting for?”
Somewhere, safe in a more serene, less panicked part of her brain, Alice knew that this behavior was quite unlike her. She wasn’t one to make demands, wasn’t one to be sharp. Why was she acting this way? He would never—could never—want to help her when she was bossing him around, cutting him off—not listening.
Did it even matter? Where had being kind ever gotten her? She wasn’t a bad person—was never mean—and still her friends were few. Still here she was, trapped and dying. Forget karma. She hadn’t done anything to deserve this; the wheel of justice was up in flames. Still …
“I need your phone,” Alice repeated, her harsh tone slightly softened.
Tony cleared his throat. “I don’t know if that’s the best idea,” he said, his voice quiet.
All of Alice’s snappishness returned immediately. “Why not?”
“Think how it would sound,” he said, more loudly now. “They wouldn’t believe me—or even you. They would think it was a prank.”
“You don’t want to help.” He was making excuses. He was lying to her face and all he wanted was to keep her trapped and to let her die. The girl was right. Everyone just wanted her to fade away. To leave them alone.
“I do!” He curled his hands into fists and dug his knuckles into the ground. “But think about it. I can’t call them, Alice. You can’t call them. And the hospital—it’s two hours away. And last time … last time you disappeared after an hour.”
He was right, of course. Right about all of it. She had been foolish to think it might work. As if her parents would believe that a boy they had never met was communing with their comatose daughter’s spirit. And even if they heard her voice … her parents were sensible people. They would think they were losing their minds or just delusional with grief. Her parents thought that the supernatural was a joke and they laughed at ghosts and God alike. Her father told her Santa Claus was a lie when she was two.
Tony was right, and Alice felt nothing but anger, frustration. She could have forgiven him for being wrong, but somehow the fact that he had corrected her—had seen what she could not—irked her to no end. Her frustration drained into hopelessness and hopelessness faded to despair; she loosened her hold on the towel and it went limp around her. Limp, lifeless, and cold.
“It’s really important, isn’t it?” he asked. “This key?”
She didn’t look at him; when she spoke, it was a mutter. “Clearly not to you.”
He was patient—didn’t even respond to the jab. “Care to explain?”
She rolled her eyes, irritated that he didn’t understand even though she knew there was no way he could.
“Your dad told you about Elizabeth Blackwell, right?”
“Yeah, but … ” He stopped. “How did you know that?”
She realized that she was going to have to start from the beginning. And really, what was the harm in explaining at this point? It didn’t matter, but he might as well know. She spoke through clenched teeth (her head felt hot), explained how, after hitting her head, she had woken up in a different version of the hotel with no working exits. “I can see your hotel through the mirrors in mine,” she told him.
“So you’ve been watching me?”
A wave of embarrassment welled up inside of her, but was quickly forced back by a rising tide of contained fury. Normal Alice would have apologized, cheeks blushing, but this Alice—with her ringing ears and her head on fire—didn’t even answer. She simply continued with her explanation. “Elizabeth’s diary is in my version of the house and I’ve been reading it. I think that she did something to the house—something that made me get stuck there, and if I can figure out how to break it then I can get out. There’s an attic room in the house, but it’s locked. If I can just get up there, I could find the witch’s books. She might have written how to break the curse.”
“Why do you think the key would be out here? Wouldn’t it be in your hotel?”
“Elizabeth’s sister threw it out the window about a century ago. If it’s anywhere, then it’s still buried in this lawn. There’s no way we’ll find it, though, not so deep underground.”
“Well, there’s a thought,” said Tony softly, but she barely heard him. “Maybe,” he began, then trailed off. “I have an idea—if you want to hear it.”
But she wasn’t listening and he, waiting for an answer, was silent.
The key isn’t important anymore, she tried to tell herself. Neither is Tony. There isn’t a reason to be upset. I just need to think clearly.
But she couldn’t! It was like wandering through a fog, unable to concentrate, constantly distracted by dark shadows, by sounds, by passing ideas. She couldn’t control her mind. She couldn’t stop it. The real Alice—calm Alice—hid in a corner, held prisoner in a brain that wasn’t quite her own. She thought she felt a small hand on hers and looked down, but there was nothing there. Still, she couldn’t quite shake the feeling that the witch’s hand was still wrapped around her fingers, that something was pouring thoughts and feelings into her and she couldn’t get away, couldn’t make them stop …
Alice jumped
to her feet and walked away from Tony; the towel fell to the pool deck. Her legs needed to move; she needed to use some of this terrible, pent-up energy that was flooding her. Tony followed her onto the nearby lawn and, when she sat down, he followed suit.
“Alice?”
She didn’t answer for a moment; there was a bird landing in a pine tree nearby and she could see its silhouette as it glided down and disappeared into the darkness of the pine needles. It was nothing to her—only a bird—and she wondered if that was the way Tony saw her. Something distant from himself, for observation only. And if she died, would he even blink? Would he feel anything at all, besides relief?
“Tony?” she said, and she was surprised by how calm her voice was. “I know that you want me to die.”
“What?”
“You know, forget it. I … I don’t want your help!” she cried, even as most of her mind screamed back that she wanted his help more than anything. “I just … want … I want to be left alone.”
This was the right choice. To be alone, where she couldn’t get hurt. She was dead either way, so why make it more difficult?
“You can’t be serious.”
No. Her lips formed the word, but her breath caught in her throat, as though it had run up against an invisible barrier. No, she didn’t want his help. Did she?
Did she?
And then everything inside of her went hard. Her breath—her heart—everything seemed to stop, as if she had become a statue of steel with no moving parts. She felt cold, too—so cold—as though if she were breathing, her breath would be ice in the warm air. But when she spoke her words were fire, not ice, though they came from the freezing hole inside of her.
The Looking Glass Page 14