Laura took a while to calm down, but she eventually pulled herself together and decided to go home for a little while after I repeatedly assured her that yes, I would be all right for now. She looked almost as exhausted as I felt, and I really didn’t want to upset her any further. Apparently whatever had actually happened from her perspective last night had been pretty strange. Not that it wasn’t weird from my own perspective, of course, but if what she said was true — if I really had “disappeared” from in front of her… then yes, I could sort of understand her reaction.
I lay back on my bed and stared at the ceiling. The silence seemed oddly oppressive, but I couldn’t be bothered to get up and put on something that made noise. I was used to the silence by now. This house was always quiet. Most of the time I didn’t notice it, but for now it seemed particularly noticeable.
I blinked a few times and continued to gaze at the featureless patch of ceiling above my bed. My mind started to wander as I considered everything that had happened so far.
Things were starting to come together in my mind, but they seemed highly improbable, if not impossible. How was this all happening?
I made a mental checklist in my mind.
Okay, I thought. Let’s go through these things one at a time.
The main mystery was how on Earth I was suddenly able to see and speak with my sister. This was something that should be impossible, and yet it wasn’t. She seemed just as bewildered as I did at the concept.
That led on to the second mystery: our apparently different memories of what had happened in the past. My memory clearly believed that she was… gone, along with my parents. That was surely a fact that couldn’t be argued with. The house I was in was so silent right now because they were gone. If they were still here, I’d have been able to hear my parents talking and my sister probably listening to whatever God-awful pop group she’d seen on the television that week. But they weren’t I was here, alone.
And yet she seemed to think that I was the one who was not around any more. Her reaction to me was very similar to my reaction to seeing her again. She seemed to think that my presence was the thing that should be impossible.
That was the part that didn’t really make sense to me. How could we both be right? Because we both clearly believed that we were right.
There was only one real possibility, but I couldn’t even bring myself to think it, it seemed so ludicrous. And yet it continually crept in to the corner of my mind, begging me to consider it further.
“Ah,” came a familiar and unwelcome voice; an oddly-soothing voice. “So you’re starting to get it.”
I sat up suddenly and looked around. I couldn’t see where the voice was coming from. It seemed to fill my mind rather than my ears; to come from all around me, everywhere and nowhere.
“What is this?” I asked in an unsteady voice. “Who are you?”
“Oh, you’ve found your voice at last,” said the voice. It was taking a somewhat patronising tone that I didn’t much care for, but the feeling of fear was overriding annoyance at the moment. “Good. That will make conversing with you much easier.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” I said, trying to sound assertive but just ending up painfully aware of how much my voice was quavering.
“Calm down,” said the voice. It was as smooth as butter, and I couldn’t help feeling soothed by its tones, even though it also scared me. “My name is not important right now. I mean you no harm, though.”
Somehow I wasn’t entirely convinced, but I said nothing in response to it.
“Doubtless you are trying to make sense of what is, after all, a very strange situation, correct?” it continued. “And doubtless you are rapidly coming to the conclusion that something that appears to be fairly implausible must, in fact, be the explanation, yes?”
“Yes,” I said meekly.
“Tell me what you think is happening,” said the voice bluntly. “And then we’ll go from there.”
I paused. I felt ridiculous even contemplating saying these things out loud. And yet here I was talking to some sort of presence that may or may not be a figment of my own imagination. In for a penny, in for a pound, I thought.
“All right,” I said. “Clearly I am… going somewhere sometimes. Otherwise Laura wouldn’t have seen me disappear.”
“Go on,” said the voice, goading me.
“And when I… go somewhere, it’s a place where my sister is.”
“Yes.”
“When I meet my sister, she has no memory of… that night. Instead, she seems to be convinced that I am the one who… passed on.”
“Continue.”
“Therefore, the only possible explanation for all this is that…”
“Yes?”
“Is that…”
“Just say it.”
I swallowed, grit my teeth and remained silent for a moment.
“The only possible explanation,” I said again after a moment, “is that the ‘sister’ I’m seeing is… a different version of her to the one I lost back then.”
“Bravo!” said the voice. I heard what sounded like a slow clap, and a figure that absolutely wasn’t there before was suddenly standing by my bed. It was indeed giving me a slow clap. I instinctively recoiled and pressed myself into the corner of my bed, as far away from the figure as I could possibly get.
I could tell it was the same figure I’d seen in the mirror the other day. I avoided looking at it. It freaked me out then, and it was freaking me out now, not least because it had appeared out of nowhere and was now standing in the middle of my room as if it was the most natural thing in the world. It didn’t belong here, and I very much wanted it gone, but I had the feeling that wasn’t going to happen until it had finished whatever its business was with me right now.
“Yes, indeed,” it said, turning to face me. “And do stop cowering. I told you I didn’t mean you any harm and I mean it. You’re far too interesting for me to let you get hurt.”
Interesting? Me? I thought it, but didn’t say it.
“Yes, you,” it said, apparently reading my thoughts. This didn’t make me feel any better. “You’re an intriguing one, which is why I’m here now.”
“Are you… the one who is making these strange things happen?” I asked uneasily.
“Heavens, no,” said the figure with a ghastly laugh that chilled me right up my spine. “I don’t have that sort of power. I’m just… keeping an eye on things, shall we say. You see, the things that are happening to you are… a bit of a concern. They’re not supposed to happen, in short. You shouldn’t be able to do the things that you’re doing. But you are.”
“And… what am I doing?” I asked. I wasn’t sure I actually wanted to know, but I felt like the figure was expecting that I should ask it.
“Hmm, how to put this in terms you can understand,” said the voice in a condescending tone. “Basically every so often you’re crossing a ‘threshold’ — a boundary between worlds, I guess you’d call it — and that, not to put too fine a point on it, is causing problems.”
“What kind of problems?” I said.
“That’s… not important right now,” said the figure. “For the moment, I’m simply studying what is happening with you and then we’ll work out what the best thing to do is. In the meantime, you get to see your sister again when you thought that became impossible the moment she died. Pretty great, right?”
Something snapped in my mind and the fear was gone, replaced with anger. I looked at the figure for the first time. It was oddly androgynous, dressed all in black. I couldn’t tell from either its figure or voice whether it was male or female. Its skin was pale as snow, and its eyes, which were looking straight at me, were a sparkling ruby red. It was both beautiful and terrifying to look at.
“Pretty great, you say?” I growled. “Pretty great? Do you have any idea what I’ve been going through? How difficult this all is to deal with, how much of a complete and utter headfuck it is to be seeing Alice again?”
“Yes,” said the figure simply and calmly. “I’ve been watching all of this since it started. I’ve tried to appear to you a few times before this but you… well, you showed that you weren’t quite ready to process the information just yet.”
“And you think I am now?” I said, the volume of my voice rising. “You think I’m ‘ready’ for whatever your weird little plan is? Well, I’m not. I’m out. I just want some peace. I want a normal life. I want to be able to grieve properly for the people I have lost and move on. I want to be able to concentrate on my future rather than being constantly reminded of the most painful thing in my past. I just want to live, for fuck’s sake.”
I wasn’t sure, but I thought the figure looked slightly impressed at my outburst.
“Okay, okay,” it said, brushing something off its arm with a dismissive expression. “Perhaps this was a bad idea to come here and talk to you today. You’re still clearly… dealing with a lot of things. I will leave you in peace for now, but like I say, the strange things that have been happening to you are nothing to do with me. Or, rather, I should say, they’re not caused by me. And they are going to keep happening to you until you’re ready to deal with what’s going on. I’ll ask you one last time before I let you go back to staring at the ceiling with that vacant expression on your face: are you ready to deal with this?”
“No!” I yelled. “Please! Leave me alone!”
“That’s all I needed to know,” said the figure. Then it was gone.
I had no idea what had just happened to me. I wasn’t sure if I had actually just experienced that utterly bizarre conversation, and Laura wasn’t here to tell me whether or not anything strange had happened from her perspective.
Suddenly I felt very alone and isolated, and I didn’t know what to do.
I simply climbed under the covers of my bed and hid in the warm darkness. I would be safe here. Nothing could get me here.
It was a childish thought, of course — I used to hide under the covers when I was a kid and afraid of monsters in the dark. But right now, the monsters seemed that little bit too real, and I wasn’t ready to fight them head-on. I didn’t know if I would ever be ready. Perhaps I would get there. That strange figure, whoever it was, seemed to think I would. But right now, all I wanted to do was hide away from everything and never come out.
So I hid.
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