“It’s okay. Are you okay?”
Alice blinked, sat up. Fran helped ease her into a sitting position. Alice looked around blearily.
“Toilets?”
“Yeah.”
It usually was. Bathrooms, changing rooms. Anywhere with mirrors. Fran used to think that Alice’s fear of mirrors was irrational, but no fear is truly irrational. To the person who is afraid, it makes perfect sense. She understood better now. Something about mirrors seemed to trigger Alice’s condition. But that wasn’t all.
Heels tapped around the corner. Fran turned. A woman in a crumpled sales suit, scuffed stilettos and too much eye makeup walked in. She glanced briefly at Fran and Alice, walked straight past then paused at the mirrors and frowned.
Fran followed her gaze. She had been so focused on Alice that only now did she realize that one of the mirrors above the sinks was shattered. Shards of fine glass littered the floor nearby.
The woman tutted. “Some people.” She glanced back at Fran and Alice. “Is your daughter okay?”
Fran forced a smile. “Oh, yes. She just slipped over. We’re fine.”
“Right.” The woman nodded, offered a quick, tired smile and pushed open the door to a cubicle.
She was probably relieved she didn’t have to help. Most people were. They pretended they did. But really, no one wanted to put themselves out for someone else. We all live in our own personal fortresses of self-concern.
The woman in the scuffed heels and eye makeup would probably forget them before she washed her hands, sinking back into the folds of her own life, her own routine, her own problems.
But then again, she might not. She might remember the woman and girl on the floor in the toilets. She might mention it to someone; a friend or work colleague, an acquaintance online.
They had to move.
“Come on, sweetheart.” She stood and eased Alice to her feet, holding her arm. “Can you walk?”
“I’m fine. I just fell.”
Alice picked up her bag—clickety-click—and slung it over her shoulder. They walked toward the door. Alice paused.
“Wait.”
She turned back.
“What?” Fran hissed.
Alice walked over to the sinks, feet crunching on broken glass. Fran glanced nervously at the closed cubicle door and then followed. Her own fragmented reflection stared back at her from the remains of the shattered mirror. A black hole in the center of it. Hard to recognize the stranger in those splintered shards. She tore her eyes away and looked down, into the sink.
A pebble lay by the plughole, too large to wash down, although Fran had a childish urge to try and do just that.
Alice picked it up and slipped it into her bag, along with the others. Fran didn’t try to stop her. She couldn’t interfere in this ritual, whatever it was, wherever the pebble had come from.
The first had appeared almost two years ago. Alice had just suffered one of her episodes, crumpling into a ball on the living-room floor. When she woke, after twenty minutes, Fran saw something in her hand.
“What’s that?” she asked, curious.
“A pebble. I brought it back.”
“From where?”
Alice smiled and a frisson of fear skittered down Fran’s spine.
“The beach.”
Since then, every time Alice had an episode, she woke clutching a pebble. Fran had tried to think of a rational explanation. Perhaps Alice was picking the pebbles up somewhere else, hiding them and then, by some clever sleight of hand, producing one when she woke. Rational, but still not very convincing.
So where did the damn things come from?
The toilet flushed.
“We’d better go,” Fran said briskly.
They reached the door. Fran glanced back. Something else was bothering her about the mirror. The hole in the middle of it. Glass all over the floor but hardly any in the sink.
Had Alice thrown the pebble at the mirror?
But if you smash a mirror the glass falls straight down. It doesn’t explode outwards.
That would only happen if something was thrown through the mirror.
From the other side.
She sleeps. A pale girl in a white room. Nurses tend to her on a regular basis. Even though she is not in a hospital, she receives the best twenty-four-hour care. The nurses are well paid and not too much is asked of them except that they turn the girl, wash her, ensure she is kept comfortable. Aside from that, the machines monitor the rest.
Despite this, the turnover of staff is high. Most don’t stay more than a few months before moving on. The usual assumption is that the work is not challenging enough. They need more variety, more stimulation.
But that’s not true.
Miriam is the longest-serving staff member, here from the beginning. Before the beginning. Long enough to have formed an attachment to the girl. Perhaps that’s why she has stayed, despite everything.
It started a couple of years ago. That was the first time. She was downstairs, making a cup of tea, when she heard a single note. Played on a piano. Not repeated. Could she have woken? Impossible. But then, miracles did happen.
She hurried up the stairs and into the girl’s room. Everything looked as it always did. The sleeping girl slept. The machines whirred: all readings normal. She walked over to the piano. The keys were coated in dust. Nothing had disturbed them.
She put it down to her imagination. A week later, it happened again. And again. Every few weeks, that single note would ring out from the girl’s room. You never knew when it might happen, day or night.
Some of the staff began to talk about ghosts, poltergeists, telekinesis. Miriam wouldn’t hear of such nonsense. And yet she couldn’t summon up a better explanation. So she continued to do her job and tried not to think about it at all.
Tonight, when the note rang out, she walked wearily to the girl’s room. She checked the piano, the machines. And then she stood over the sleeping girl and stared at her white face, her mass of flaxen hair. Still just the same. She stroked her thin arm and let her hand drop to the bedsheets. She frowned. They felt gritty. But that wasn’t right. They had only just been changed. How could they be dirty?
She ran her hand along the sheets, raised it and rubbed her fingers together.
Not dirt.
Sand.
The pathway was narrow and muddy. Heavy woodland crowded in from either side. It didn’t strike Gabe as a particularly picturesque or pleasant walk, even on a summer’s day, let alone in the pitch black and freezing cold of a February night.