“You’ve failed!” Alice said. “So much for your revenge. Because you know what? It’s better if I die. He doesn’t deserve to have to put up with me! He deserves someone better. I don’t care! Didn’t know that would happen, did you?”
The woman in the painting stared and smiled a twisted smile, just as she always did. Furious, Alice took a fountain pen from the desk and, even though she knew it would do no harm, stabbed the beautiful painted face.
“I hate you!” she shouted, stabbing it again. Before she could say anything else, the canvas mended itself and the madwoman was standing by the river again. Staring at that woman, those black curls and wide eyes, something inside of her snapped.
“Damn it! Damn you! Damn everything!” she screamed, almost incoherent. She stabbed again and again and again, then sank down onto the ground, hitting her head against the edge of the couch. She just wanted it to end. She wanted the whole torturous ordeal to be over.
“I’m not going to get better,” she whispered to herself.
She thought of Tony and his blue eyes, the color of deep water. He would find some other girl—a girl who could give him everything he deserved. Not a phantom, hovering somewhere between life and death, heaven and hell.
“You can kill me just like you killed the rest,” Alice whispered to the walls. “Just do it. Do it now.”
Of course, there was no answer.
Alice fell backward onto the floor and felt a tear slip down her cheek. It felt so real, so warm, that for a minute she could have sworn that she was really, truly alive. She felt whole. It was strange that, now that she was about to die, she felt alive in a way that she had never felt before. She couldn’t explain it, but everything around her seemed so much more vibrant. Maybe she simply hadn’t noticed it before.
“I lose,” she said to the empty room. She had lost the game. She had lost her family. She had lost him. She couldn’t believe this was how the story ended; it felt all wrong—as if someone had dropped the pages of her life and picked them up at random and everything was shuffled together and none of it fit.
Or maybe this was the way it was supposed to be: her lips forever frozen an inch from his. Maybe this was the universe’s way of telling her that this wasn’t meant to be, and part of her agreed. The two of them were puzzle pieces that might never fit. It wasn’t him that she had a problem with. It was her—with all her imperfections—that she wasn’t sure about.
Could she actually deal with death? Being just herself forever? Would dying be as lonely as this past week had been?
“Oh God,” she whispered, and her eyes popped open in horror. She pulled herself to her knees and felt more tears drip down her cheeks and off of her chin. “I can’t do this.”
She looked up and was startled to see her own reflection staring back at her with wet cheeks and wild hair. For a second, she wondered if she really was starting to lose her mind, but she quickly realized with a jolt of relief that it was just the mirror that she had left propped up by one of the couches.
“This is your fault,” she said to it, and her reflection said the same to her. “You caused all of this! You drove her mad!”
The reflected face in the mirror was so distorted that she felt as though she was confronting all the evil inside of her—everything disturbing, everything that she had ever questioned. It made her squeamish; she didn’t want to look—she didn’t want to know—and yet she felt that she had no choice. Seeing that reflected in a mirror would be enough to drive anyone mad.
And maybe it had.
And then, with a suddenness that took her breath away, the thought came. It rushed through her—rushed through her veins and her bones and her very heart. It flooded her mind. It burned without a flame and without mercy.
It’s love that makes hate possible, that’s what Tony had said. But maybe she had been thinking of the wrong kind of love. For there was another person Elizabeth cared for, probably even more than she had loved William.
I am you, the witch had said. The witch was her. And if the witch had been her …
The witch had been Elizabeth—and the witch had shown her the worst side of herself. What if Elizabeth hated the witch—hated what she saw in the mirror? What if that was the answer?
The witch was Elizabeth. Elizabeth hated the witch.
And—oh! The fire burned her! It was so easy to be the witch. It was frighteningly simple. So terrifying. So many terrible things that Elizabeth didn’t even realize, that she feared were there, that she tried to hide inside herself …
But they had escaped.
At first it was a dull, dim kind of comprehension, but it throbbed and grew and grew and soon it was shooting through her like physical pain. It possessed her—ran through her in perfect, flawless, golden flames. It ate her up.
She knew.
The energy she had found before now left her in throbbing waves. It slid out of her body and floated away. Alice lay on the floor, exhausted, but she knew that there was no time to waste. With a strength that she didn’t know she had, Alice forced herself to roll onto her stomach and crawl toward the mirror. Dizzy with weakness, Alice held it in her hand and looked at herself. She saw the witch glare back at her, with barely open eyes and a huge, laughing mouth.
I am beautiful—Elizabeth had written that so many times. She had written about her talent, her brilliance. She had written about the reviews of her performances. And above all, over and over and over again, the constant refrain of beauty—repeated so emphatically that Elizabeth herself could not have believed it entirely.
The lady doth protest too much … Alice thought weakly of the lines from Hamlet.
Elizabeth’s greatest fear must have been that William had left her because she wasn’t beautiful enough, wasn’t good enough somehow. And then she had looked in the mirror and seen the terrible reflection of her face—the ugliness of distortion. The hideous witch that she feared to become.
Elizabeth hated the witch—the witch who was both the girl Alice had known and Elizabeth herself.
She hated her ugliness. She hated her powerlessness, trapped as she was on the other side of the mirror. Helpless to help herself. That was what Elizabeth hated.
She didn’t hate William, she hated herself.
If you would escape my fate,
You must understand my hate.
And Alice understood. She understood at last what she had to do. She had to hate herself, or at least the parts of her that she secretly knew about, but was afraid to reveal. She had to hate her inadequacy, her imperfections. She had to hate the parts of her that made her feel that she could never, ever earn the love of someone like Tony—or anyone else.
And yet there was something else, too—something that came with the understanding, something that she now saw so clearly—how had she missed it before? Hate, simple self-hate, would never free her from this curse. Hating who she was would leave her no better than Elizabeth. She would live a hollow life, going through the motions, never secure, never able to truly feel—to truly love.
You really don’t know what other people see in you, do you?
He had asked her that and she had been ashamed then, because she didn’t. She looked in the mirror now and couldn’t see anything worthwhile—only the ugliness, the faults, the broken parts of herself that she had so often swept under the rug but had never truly confronted.
You need someone telling you that you’re wonderful until you finally believe it.
He thought that she was wonderful. But other people had thought that Elizabeth was wonderful, too. She had had pages upon pages of praise to hold close to her heart, to try to feed off of until she could finally believe it herself. And despite all of it, she never had.
And then Alice realized that Tony could tell her she was wonderful all day long—he could tell her every minute, every second—and none of it would make a difference. He couldn’t make her believe that she was better than what she thought she saw in the mirror.
“It’s a li
e!” she shouted at the mirror. “That’s not who I am.”
A lie, a lie.
She thought she could hear a woman laughing—laughing wildly in the distance—and she whipped around. There was no one there but Elizabeth, staring at her from the painting, smiling her crooked, cruel smile. Hating her. Elizabeth hated her.
Alice looked back at the mirror and saw that nothing had changed. Because it wasn’t a lie—not entirely. There were things that she genuinely did not like about herself, and she knew that they would always be there, lurking. Every moment of her life they would be there, some things that she could change, some things that she could not.
Her face changed and there was the girl staring at her, her face young and bright again. “You see,” she said, “you can’t escape me. I’m inside of you.”
“No,” Alice whispered.
She turned the mirror over and threw it down; it landed dully, crushing the carpet underneath it. Her legs shook and she let herself fall to the floor, pulled her knees in against her chest, hugged them to her. She rocked back and forth, stinging tears pricked her eyes, tumbled down her cheeks, the cheeks that the mirror had so disfigured. So empty—she was so empty, and yet she was overflowing. Everything that she had locked away, every hidden thought, came streaming out, and she could not stop them.
She sat that way for many minutes—how many she did not know—and when the last tear fell from her chin onto her knees, she felt quieter. She opened her eyes and saw that everything around her was obscured by mist—the whole room was soupy white, as if a cloud were sitting inside of it. The realization hit her with surprising force: it was too late. The mist had come, just as she had imagined it. It was closing in on her. Soon there would be nothing but whiteness; she knew this because even now, with every passing second, the mist grew thicker and the furniture began to disappear. For no apparent reason, Alice grabbed the mirror from the floor and held it close to her.
Then came the other mirrors. They hovered around her and she turned away, looking steadfastly at the mist-covered carpet underneath her. She didn’t want to see her own reflection—didn’t want to be reminded. The witch’s mirror was cold against her body. But then, even as the chill of the mirror pressed against her, she felt a surprising warmth sweep over her. A pure white hand stretched out of the mist to touch her own. The sight of it clutching her fingers did not frighten her; it was almost comforting. Then, inside her own head, the voices spoke.
“Watch,” they said.
She looked up, hesitantly at first, darting frightened glances at the surrounding mirrors. But what she saw was not her own reflection. Many different women, all beautiful, stared down at her. A mirror swept down in front of her, taking her by surprise, and before she could look away she saw herself in it, reflected as she truly was. Strong and powerful and wonderful. Perhaps there were faults there, hidden in that shining person, but they were absorbed into the whole. They made the girl deep and meaningful and alive. And the other women in the other mirrors smiled at her and she saw them now too—didn’t just see, but also comprehended—how they were all different but all so very breathtaking.
She felt a twinge of fear, but also purpose now. She grabbed the mirror and turned it over. There she was again, staring back at herself, ugly, awful. She didn’t look away this time. She knew that she had to move now—had to act now. Because this was her last chance. The house was trying to stop her, trying to get to her before she got to it.
But she wouldn’t let it. Because now she understood.
Heart pounding, Alice raised the mirror in the air. It was so heavy—her arms were like lead and she could barely hold onto the thing. The higher she lifted it, the heavier it seemed to become, but she refused to let go. She looked up at it and there she was, staring back at herself—deformed and frightful. And as she looked, she felt the hatred flood her heart. All of her lies, her pettiness, her weaknesses … they all came rushing through her in a great wave. She saw them, she acknowledged them, but she knew also that she was more, that they were a part of her but that they did not define her. She closed her eyes and saw herself as she truly was—held onto that knowledge in that white room inside of her. That was the truth.
The waves surged; she tightened her grip on the glass. And, with a cry that tore through even the thickness of the mist, she threw it down at the mist-covered floor.
The mirror shattered, and as it did the whole house seemed to heave a great sigh of relief. The bits of glass hung frozen in the air, glittering like diamonds. Beams of light were tearing great gashes through the walls of the library; Alice shielded her eyes from the brightness. Then came the rushing wind that tore the room apart—it lifted the walls and tossed them, tumbling, into the distance. The floor was ripped from under Alice’s feet and she hung there next to the suspended fragments of the mirror. Then the glittering glass dissolved into the light and Alice began to fall.
She was spinning, spinning down an endless tunnel of blackness and tiny pricks of light. Voices echoed in her head, cracking her skull, and she couldn’t move to plug her ears. She tried to look down to find her body, but it was gone. She gasped, or thought she did, but she felt no air in her throat.
Was she … dead?
She felt horror, but had no body to react to the emotion. She had no stomach to lurch, no eyes to widen, no teeth to clench. What she felt was purely mental and stronger somehow—waves and waves of raw emotion with nowhere to go, ripping through this cloud, this nothingness.
“Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night!”
Another voice, female this time, shot through her mind. Alice felt as though she had heard it before, but she couldn’t remember where. The lines she remembered. They were Ophelia’s, the last she ever spoke.
“Good night!”
Alice continued to fall. Was there an end to it? Or was this an eternal rabbit hole? She tried to call for help, but she had no voice. She knew she was telling her body to move, but nothing was happening. If she could have screamed, she would have, but her cries never left this formless mass of thoughts.
“Good night!”
The voice rang in the darkness once more, and then, quite suddenly, it all stopped. The lights, the sounds, the voices. And Alice slept.
***
The first thing that Alice noticed was the pounding in her head. It overpowered everything else and she moaned. Her head was full of beeps and rustlings and whispers. She couldn’t sort them out and, for one panicked moment, she thought she was back in the darkness of the rabbit hole. But then her eyes popped open and what she saw was so wonderful and shocking and unexpected that she almost started to cry.
“Tony,” she tried to say, but her voice came out as a mangled gurgle from deep in her throat.
He smiled a smile so large that it seemed to split his face in half. “Hello, Alice,” he said. He reached out and stroked her hair. Alice closed her eyes again as his hand ran from her forehead all the way down to her ear. The warmth of his touch shot through her entire body and, for a moment, she felt completely happy. But, slowly, thoughts began to form in her muddled mind and uncertainty banished the warmth.
How was this possible? Was this another one of Elizabeth’s tricks? She had died, hadn’t she? Maybe this was some sort of heaven—an imaginary world where everything turned out just the way she wished it would.
“You aren’t real,” she gasped out. She wanted to reach out and grab this fake Tony’s hand; she wanted to make him stop stroking her hair like that. Having him touch her as if she were really and truly alive was more than she could stand. She had given up on him once; she wasn’t sure that she would be able to do it again.
Tony laughed.
“Of course I’m real.”
Alice shook her head as best she could; her body wasn’t cooperating as it should have. “I’ve died.”
He laughed again. “I think the doctors would disagree.”
At that very moment, a nurse came rushing into the
room.
“Did you call?” she started to ask Tony, but then she saw Alice and she stopped dead in her tracks. “I don’t—I don’t believe … Mrs. Montgomery! Mr. Montgomery!” Her voice echoed down the hallway, frantic. A second later, Alice heard the sound of running feet and her mom’s face appeared in the doorway, closely followed by her dad’s, and then Jeremy’s, with his tangled mop of bright red curls.
“Alice?” Her mom clutched at her heart. “Alice!”
And then Alice lost track completely of whose hand it was on her head or her arm and who was hugging her. She couldn’t understand a thing anyone was saying because her entire family was trying to talk, and laugh, and cry, and hug her at the same time. Tony watched from the side of the room with the nurse, who was wiping tears from her eyes.
“I don’t understand,” Alice said as best she could. Her voice still sounded strangled and tired. “How did I get here?”
“You hit your head in the pool,” her mom said, though she was crying so hard that it was a miracle she could talk at all.
“You’ve been in a coma!” Jeremy piped up, as if this were certain to impress her.
“But that’s not what I meant,” said Alice. “How did I get out of the hotel? What happened?”
Everyone except Tony smiled; they all seemed to think that this was an extraordinarily silly question. All the same, her dad sat down on the side of the bed and explained very patiently how someone had called the paramedics after the accident and they had put her on a stretcher, carried her out of the hotel, and then driven her to the hospital, where she had been ever since. Alice realized that her parents were not going to understand the question that she was really trying to ask, so she decided to give up on it and talk to Tony later. He, at least, would know what she meant.
The Looking Glass Page 23