The Looking Glass

by Jessica Arnold

  But he gave up on me, she thought bitterly.

  Alice’s version of the sitting room was mostly covered by mist, but she set up camp near an antique desk and mirror. The mirror itself was very old and surrounded by laughing bronze cupids, brandishing their arrows and kicking their baby feet. The mist obscured part of the frame, but Alice had a fairly good view anyway. Setting the witch’s books and the diary on the desk, she tried to read—opening then closing the covers, flipping through the pages. But mostly she watched George, waited for Tony to show up. The back of her neck tingled and she kept whipping around, half expecting to see the girl laughing at her from some dark corner of the room. When she didn’t appear, Alice was unprepared for the pang of regret that came over her.

  When Tony came into the room at ten thirty, he looked exhausted. Alice got to her feet, leaning over the desk to get a better view of him as he stumbled across the room and collapsed in a chair across from his dad’s. His hair was untidy and there were dark shadows under his eyes.

  George eyed his son. “Did you sleep at all last night?”

  Tony yawned in response.

  “You weren’t on the Internet until four in the morning?”

  Tony looked up, surprised.

  His father shrugged. “I’m a light sleeper.”

  Shaking his head, Tony said, “Fine, you’re right. I was up late—doing research.”

  “Tony, school hasn’t even started yet. Take some time off, for goodness’ sake.”

  “It’s not”—another yawn—“for school. I’ve been researching … curses.”

  “Really.” George frowned.

  “I’m not lying. Why do you always think I’m lying to you?”

  “When have I ever said I thought—” George began, but then stopped, hand tightening around the parenting book. He took a deep breath. He opened his mouth to say something, but then shut it just as quickly. Tony glowered.

  “Dad, if you have something to say, just say it.”

  George hesitated, then blurted out, “Does this have anything to do with a girl? I don’t care if you were up late chatting online—you’re on vacation. It’s okay.”

  “I don’t believe this.” Tony’s scowl deepened. “You’ve been spying on me?”

  “Spying on you? I’m allowed to talk to your mother sometimes, you know. And if she mentions that you have friends you like to keep up with on those websites and a few of them are girls … I’m allowed to know that. What makes you think I’m spy—” He cut off, mouth in a silent O, then leaned in and said confidentially, “Oh. I see. A girl here. You’ve met a girl at the hotel, haven’t you? Well. She cute?”

  Tony’s expression grew stonier the longer his dad spoke, but Alice thought she saw the tiniest hint of a blush crawling up his neck—pale as an unripe peach.

  “It’s nothing,” he said quickly.

  George stroked his parenting book absentmindedly. “You know, if we want to develop a genuine, trusting relationship, we have to start being honest with each other. You would tell your mother about something like this, wouldn’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Well,” George seemed pleased with this news despite himself. “Well, um … yes, you should tell her things. But you should definitely tell me. And now’s as good a time as any to start forming a lasting bond.”

  Tony’s forehead furrowed and his gaze dropped to the book on George’s lap. “Oh no,” he groaned. “You’ve been reading parenting books again.”

  Too late, George slid his hand to cover the title. Tony shook his head while George, seeing that the damage was done, confessed. “Yes, and I think I’ve learned some really useful things—things that can help us build our relationship.” He emphasized this last word, as though introducing an entirely foreign concept.

  “Well it certainly worked like a charm last time, didn’t it?”

  “We can’t dwell on the past, Tony.”

  “Why not? Last summer you were on that whole ‘meaningful conversation starters’ run. Remember how that went?”

  “I really don’t see why we have to—”

  “‘What was a moment when you felt truly loved?’” Tony interrupted. “‘When was the last time you had a serious conversation with a family member?’ Dad, this stuff doesn’t work!”

  “Maybe if you’d just give it a chance … ”

  “Maybe you should stop trying to be my best friend.”

  George drew back, hurt. Alice, watching, felt her heart sink a little in sympathy—then sink farther when she realized she had done the same thing to her mom before, told her off for trying to get close to her. She didn’t understand why she had done it—not really—except that she had felt smothered with expectations, as though her mother was trying to fix her. And though she could understand what Tony meant, she also felt for George, was surprised at how sharp the pain in his face was.

  “Well … ” said George, calmly, heavily. “Okay. Maybe you could explain what you mean by that, Tony.”

  Tony, who seemed to realize that he had crossed the line, said in a much softer voice, “I have friends, you know. And they’re nice. And I like them. But sometimes I just want … ” He paused, then continued. “I want a dad. And if you’re never there, if I only see you for a week during the summer, then I just don’t see how this is going to work.”

  George looked away for a moment, then asked, “Then what can I do?”

  Tony turned to the mirror. It was strange, making eye contact with someone who couldn’t see her. She thought she felt a real connection for a moment, as though a thread stretched through the glass from his heart to hers, transmitting his feelings like a tin-can telephone.

  Not that he deserves it. Tony had said that right before she disappeared and she hadn’t thought anything of it. But now, staring at his face, she understood why he hadn’t told George about her yet. He hadn’t been afraid of his dad’s reaction; he had been punishing him by holding back. But in the last ten minutes, George had proved himself somehow, and Tony’s resolve was broken. He was going to give his dad the only gift he had ever wanted.

  “You can help me,” said Tony at last.

  “With what?”

  “With a ghost.”

  George’s was one of those chubby, innocent faces that made adults look like overgrown children, and when he heard this his round eyes widened.

  At least I’ve made someone happy. It was strange that all the pain she’d been through could bring a smile to some stranger’s face.

  “That’s me—a real Samaritan,” she sighed.

  ***

  It wasn’t until an hour later that George and Tony stood up to leave the sitting room. The mist had crept forward while they talked, and Alice had developed a crick in her neck from standing with her head to one side for so long.

  “I still don’t know why you didn’t tell me earlier. For goodness’ sake, Tony! A real ghost—conversational and everything. Do you know what this means? If I document this correctly, my next book could very well change the way the world looks at death!”

  Tony looked a whole lot less thrilled about all this than his father did. “Dad, you’re forgetting why I told you this in the first place. She needs our help, remember? You can’t do tests on her. She doesn’t have time for stuff like that.”

  “Of course, of course,” said George, waving his son’s worries away. “We’ll do our very best to help her out … but while we’re chatting with it—”

  “It?”

  “I mean her. Sorry.”

  They walked out and into the lobby, and Alice followed them on her side of the mirrors. She had just reached one by the staircase when the hotel manager looked up from his desk. Just from the way his teeth clenched and his eyes narrowed, Alice could tell that he was in an irritable mood this morning. “Well, well, well,” he drawled, “do the ghost hunters return triumphant?”

  George was apparently too happy to pick up on the prickly undertones in the manager’s voice. “Just got a great tip,” he
said. “Tony here has seen the same ghost twice now.”

  “Really,” said the manager, eyeing both of them with obvious mistrust.

  “It’s the girl who got in the pool accident,” George said, before Tony could answer for himself. “He’s talked to her and everything.”

  At the mention of Alice, the manager’s face tightened even more. “The girl isn’t dead yet,” he said tersely, “though she will be soon.”

  Tony’s jaw dropped.

  “What?”

  “She’s been declared brain-dead. They’re pulling the plug day after tomorrow.”

  “They—they’re going to let her die?” Tony said. He had turned very white. “They can’t!”

  The hotel manager shrugged. “Well, what do you expect them to do? There’s no point in keeping her alive as a vegetable for sixty years. You’ve got to draw the line somewhere. Hospital bills are expensive. Especially when you’re pouring money into a lawsuit against an innocent hotel … ”

  Tony had already run into the library.

  “Tony?” George took off after him, leaving the hotel manager by himself at the desk. When he saw that no one else was around, the manager sighed and rested his head in his hands.

  The mist edged forward another inch, swallowing up all that was left of the mirror.

  They were going to kill her.

  Her own parents … how could they … why would they …

  She stood. Her entire body clenched—she shut her eyes, pursed her lips, balled her hands into fists. These were her blast doors, shutting one by one, trying to keep the explosion from bursting out.

  But why? Why should she keep it inside? There was nothing here to hurt, no one to see, no one to hear.

  She let out a scream and it wasn’t enough. Throwing the diary aside, she dashed forward and picked up the small wooden table next to the mist-covered sofa.

  CRASH.

  The table hit the opposite wall so hard that the framed paintings shuddered. A single leg split off and went flying into the mist. Alice bent over her knees, trying to catch her breath, but it seemed to have escaped her completely—flown from her lips—and she panted like a dog, a dying dog on its last leg …

  The leg.

  She straightened. Out of the corner of her eye, she had seen the table reappear next to the couch, as she had known it would. But unlike the other things she had destroyed, this one had not escaped completely unharmed. It wobbled on its three remaining legs, falling against the side of the couch.

  Alice’s breath rattled. She whipped around. The wall of mist not five feet away was still as winter. She turned back and grabbed the table again, pulled it up off the ground, threw it as hard as she could. It went flying into the mist and the white rippled like the surface of a pond. Alice did not breathe, stared at the space beside the couch, waiting.

  Thirty seconds later, the need for air became overpowering. She gasped it in.

  The table did not reappear.

  What went into the mist did not return. It was a one-way road and here was the gate and she could, too … if she could do it, if she could just push herself through … there would be an end …

  She sank to her knees—closed her eyes and tried to think, but her brain was awash in a wild mix of fear and excitement. She crawled to the side of the mist. The tip of her nose was only a few inches from it. Her mind spun; her hands pressed into the floor, sweaty against the smooth wood. A dull ringing sounded in her ears. She leaned forward, forcing herself to keep her eyes open wide. Her nose disappeared into the mist and she breathed in, ears ringing louder now, hands slipping across the floor. The mist had no smell—neither the fresh, clean smell of the mountains nor the heavy, asphalt taste of the city—the mist was without flavor. It simply was.

  Alice leaned back, then edged closer. The tops of her knees disappeared into the white. She stared at the whiteness the way a diver would stare at the water far beneath and then, taking a deep breath, she almost …

  But she didn’t.

  She threw herself away, shocked, almost ashamed. Was she really willing to give up that easily?

  The diary. She needed a distraction; she needed to get away from the mist. Alice jumped to her feet and her knees shook. A fit—a storm—that’s all it was. It had passed now, or so she told herself. But the mist was strangely insistent in its silence and she could hardly take her eyes off of it even now. Stay focused. She didn’t see the diary anywhere on the floor, and she knelt down to look under the couch. There was nothing, not even dust.

  She stood up, then knelt back down, then stood up, and the nervous fluttering in her stomach became more of a hurricane—bats instead of butterflies—and she turned once again to stare at that snow-white wall.

  “No … ”

  Falling to her knees in front of it, she stuck her arm into the nothingness and felt around for the familiar binding, but there was no floor on the other side of the mist, and there certainly wasn’t any book lying there.

  “No!” she said again, pulling her empty hand out and staring at it in despair. That book was not something she could afford to lose. Read me. The rules were clear: if she wanted to get out of here, she had to read the diary. And she was only halfway through.

  She breathed in, then out. The mist bent forward under her breath like an opening gate. And then—she couldn’t be sure whether she was imagining it—a tendril of white unfurled from the solid wall and brushed against her cheek and suddenly … she could smell it. Nowhere on earth was there a smell like this; it was inviting as fire and calm as glass and light as down … she leaned into it …

  Her head and shoulders were in the mist now; everything around her was all fog. But her fingers still clung to the floor.

  Perhaps she shouldn’t …

  Another whiff of peace washed over her and she closed her eyes. If this was death, it wasn’t bad. And without the diary, she was as good as dead anyway.

  She took one final, deep breath and pressed herself forward into the mist. Her knees were on solid ground for one more second. Then all that was solid simply slipped away.

  Alice could never fully explain what happened next. The only thing that she could compare it to was hanging in a zero-gravity room filled with floating mirrors. Everything glowed white, just like the mist itself. It was light as a summer day—maybe even lighter—and it hurt her eyes. There were no shadows, no darkness to relieve the inescapable brightness. The air wasn’t warm and it wasn’t cool. It was just there, no temperature at all, that indescribable smell rippling through it like ocean currents. And everywhere were the mirrors, so perfectly smooth, so flawless that she could not tell where one ended and another began. The same girl peeked at her from ten different places. It took her a moment to realize that this thin, tired face was her own—reflected again and again and again.

  Perhaps this was what forever felt like.

  Alice tried to walk, but there was no way to tell if she was moving forward at all. Swimming worked better, because she could feel her arms pushing the thick air behind her. She hurried up and forward, then dove down as best she could. Could the diary have fallen? How far down did the mist go?

  A desk floated serenely by.

  “No,” whispered a chorus of voices that cut through the brightness like a sharp, cold wind. They echoed through the emptiness, filling everything, rushing across her. Though they sounded neither threatening nor angry, Alice felt a chill run down her back.

  She stopped moving.

  “Who are you?” she called, as the air grew dense with whispers—or was it wind? No, it was definitely whispers—many voices hissing back and forth, too indistinct to understand. Frightened, Alice hurried to find the diary before she got so lost in the mist that she would not be able to find her way out. Already she wasn’t sure she knew which way back was. The whispers grew louder until Alice could hardly bear the sound of them pounding on her ears, bearing down on her as if she were surrounded by invisible loudspeakers. Still she could not understand what th
e voices were saying; it was as though they spoke a language known only to themselves. She covered one ear and continued making swimming motions with her other arm, gritting her teeth against the noise.

  “I’ve lost something,” Alice said, hoping an explanation would somehow appease the invisible whisperers. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw something beige and small and rectangular reflected in one of the mirrors—something that was definitely not her.

  She uncovered her ear and pumped both her arms, faster now; she tried kicking her legs. But there was no way to tell exactly where the diary was with the mirrors reflecting both distant and close things. Distance—space—folded in on itself like origami. When she reached the spot where she had seen the diary, the mirror was gone and the book itself was nowhere to be found. She looked around in a panic and caught another flash of it in a mirror close by.

  The hisses rose and fell in waves—sometimes unbearably loud, other times softer than Alice’s own breath. It was like drifting in the ocean, being carried closer to the land of the voices, then tossed farther away.

  It wasn’t until Alice had been swimming for what felt like at least ten minutes that she realized that, though she had been paddling furiously, she didn’t feel in the least bit tired. She wasn’t aching—wasn’t even out of breath.

  The whispers became suddenly loud, and for a second she thought she understood what they were saying.

  “Not yet.”

  Alice did not bother to answer this time; she dove downward and swam and swam and swam, following even the tiniest reflections of the diary. And then, at long last, she saw it, spiraling downward. She hurried after it and her fingers closed around the binding. She had found it. But this didn’t excite her at all. That’s odd, she noted, wondering if she should be alarmed.