Chapter 29
Mirror Images
Alex
The three began in unison, “I want out, I want out, I want—”
But it was Alex’s voice that lasted longest inside the attic. Again, Brooke and Maryanne cast out before her and she was left there chanting alone. They’d gone more quickly than ever this time. It was becoming second nature to them. Alex stiffened as she continued to tap and chant. She knew why the delay, of course. Her own fear was holding her back. Full memory of the assault was so close now, so frighteningly close... But she was a caster, dammit! And she wanted—
“—out.”
Suddenly she was. As always, Alex looked back at the slump of their three bodies on the attic floor. So defenseless lying there in the glowing candlelight. Brooke’s original’s right hand flopped to the side, weakly smacking Alex’s original on the ribs. That that was the extent of her physical ability didn’t seem to bother Brooke. Alex felt the tap, of course. It still was strange to her, this dual consciousness.
“Waving, Brooke?” Alex asked, turning to Brooke’s dark cast beside her.
Brooke laughed. “It still strikes me funny. How helpless we are in there, but how powerful we are out here.” She straightened her arms, fisted her hands as if they were rockets at her sides and shot up above the roof top. Then, just as quickly, she dropped back down to Alex’s side.
“Yeah,” Alex said. “Real funny.” Not. She loved the power their casts had out here, but God how she hated the vulnerability of the original left behind. Maryanne and Brooke didn’t share her worries. Alex hoped they never would.
Maryanne’s black form moved toward the river, and Alex turned toward her. She was skimming low to the ground, among the tall grass, which was good. At least one of them appreciated how cautious they had to be, especially now that the Heller rumors were flying. But why was she heading to the river?
“Hey, Maryanne! Where are you going?” she called.
Maryanne stopped. “To the oak tree for the copper bracelets.”
“Not tonight,” Alex reminded. “You don’t want to pull a Brooke, do you?”
“Pull a Brooke?” Brooke asked.
“Bounce your hand off the walls trying to pass through wearing copper and smack yourself in the head.”
“Nice,” Brooke groused, feigning injury. “Real nice, Robbins.”
Alex grinned.
Maryanne rejoined them. “So Connie knows we’re not coming tonight, right?”
“Yeah,” Alex said. “I told her.”
“When?”
“This afternoon.”
“Another daytime venture into the woods?” Brooke asked.
Alex shrugged.
She’d let the girls in on her daytime, copper-bearing excursions to Connie’s when they’d questioned all the copper now in her nest. But neither Brooke nor Maryanne had asked to go with her on those non-casting trips. She wouldn’t have let them anyway. Like so much else, this was just between Connie and her.
And it’s not like she went out to Connie’s home in the woods every day. She’d only been there in the daytime two more times. It would have been three, except she’d turned back one day, half-convinced she was being followed when she’d heard the sound of branches snapping behind her. She was probably being paranoid. But she couldn’t take the chance someone would hurt Connie. Or hurt her all over again.
“You guys ready for this?” There was an edge in Maryanne’s voice, as there always was when they cast. Brooke’s teasing of her being ‘hard-core’ out here really was bang on. But tonight there seemed to be a little trepidation in her, too. This wasn’t going to be an ordinary casting night. The girls descended to the ground floor, taking care to stay away from the windows.
“Should we try the... kitchen?” Maryanne whispered. They were just off to the side of the wide kitchen window, hiding in the shadowed bushes. Probably the same one Connie had huddled down in on the night she’d watched her mother.
“God girl, you don’t have to whisper!” Brooke said. “Only we casters can hear each other unless we’re shrieking.”
“Oh, right,” Maryanne said.
“Nervous?” Alex asked.
She shook her head. “Not as much as I should be. I mean, not as much as if I weren’t casting.”
Alex smiled. It was totally true. That’s why they had to watch themselves. Not carry that abandon too far like they had with the Walker horses. And speaking of watching...
“Brooke!” She was no longer at Alex’s side in the bushes, but over at the house. Specifically, she was at the kitchen window, looking in. But her face wasn’t just pressed to the glass, it was pressed through the glass as she scoped out the kitchen. Alex’s heart jerked. “What the hell are you doing?”
In response to Alex’s bark, Brooke withdrew her face. “Relax!” she called. “I’m just checking the place out.”
“I thought we agreed to stay away from glass?”
“Hey, it’s not like I was going to go through it. I just poked my face in a bit, just enough to look sideways.” Brooke soared back to join them. “By the way, Betts is in there,” she added conversationally.
Automatically, Alex and Maryanne lowered themselves further into the bushes.
“Holy crap!” Alex swore. “That was six kinds of stupid, Brooke!”
“God, Alex. Chill, already. Betts’s back was too me. She’s just sitting at the table with the lights out.”
“Having a midnight snack?” Maryanne asked.
“More like a midnight nightcap.”
“What if she’d seen you?” Alex demanded.
“She didn’t!”
“But if she had—”
“Then she would have thought she’d seen a shadow. Worst case scenario, she would have thought she’d seen a Heller.”
“The legend lives on,” Maryanne grated.
Alex let out a long sigh. She so didn’t want to get into a scrap with Brooke tonight. “Okay, okay. Let’s just do this.”
Alex didn’t have to say it twice. When she started around the house, the others fell right in behind her. The three of them glided below the windows as they passed the bottom-floor bedrooms. That would be all they’d need, to have Kassidy or someone else wake the house with screams. But damn it, it was temping to take a peek inside!
They stopped at the front door, which seemed the logical entrance. This late—well past lights out—no one should be standing there to get the shock of their lives.
“Ready?” She turned to ask.
Brooke and Maryanne both nodded, and with a sister on either side of her, Alex slipped into the moonlit foyer of Harvell House.
“This is crazy!” Maryanne said. Except for the Walker place on their Brooke-rescuing missions, they’d never snuck into a house. “I feel like a cat burglar!”
Alex did too. She couldn’t help it. She skimmed her hands just into the wallpaper as she moved into the foyer.
Brooke popped into, then out of, the coat closet. “Hey, one of the freshmen kids from Fredericton has a bag of weed in her pocket.”
Maryanne shook her head. “No way!”
“She better not get caught with it.” Okay, that sounded strange even to Alex’s own ears, given her history. Before anyone could remark on it, she added, “And we’d better not get caught here in the house.”
She waited for an answer from the other two. There was none.
And when Alex looked behind her to see what they were staring at, she was pretty damn speechless too.
Each one of them faced the tall, oval mirror that stood in the foyer.
The shimmery outlines of their casts, which were so visible ordinarily, were completely absent in the mirror’s reflection. All she could see of each one of them, including herself, was the darkness. The complete, utter emptiness. It was one thing to see Connie’s cast, during her daytime visits and to know intellectually that her own cast must look much the same. But holy hell, it was something entirely different to actually see
herself like that! This was how Mansbridge saw the Hellers. This was what the world witnessed, and feared. The foyer was darkened, but their casts were darker. Depthlessly darker, somehow. Alex felt a sudden urge to race back into her body, and by the tension she felt in the originals beside her in the attic, she wasn’t the only one spooked.
Had Connie looked in mirrors over the years at herself and seen this empty sight? How would it feel to know that was all there ever was? All there ever would be?
Alex pushed the nervousness aside. Fought it down. “Are you guys ready?” she asked. “Ready to do this for Connie?”
“Ready.” Maryanne’s answer came quickly, if a little shakily.
Brooke nodded, then turned back to the mirror again. “But first tell me, do I look fat in this?”
Alex and Maryanne both snorted a nervous laugh, the kind of laugh that could all too easily get hysterical. But Brooke was already moving away from the reflecting surface, sinking down through the floor boards. Alex and Maryanne followed. Carefully, strategically, they moved through the boards, between where the beams of wood should be, so as to minimize the number of nails they encountered. They’d learned the more iron content in the nail, the bigger the ripping pain. In a house this old, the nails probably had significant iron content.
With a minimum of nail exposure, they made it to the basement. Alex felt the change in the air immediately. Felt it shudder through her caster self as they floated downward. It wasn’t so much a coldness that a caster could feel, more a lack of warmth. There was a dampness to it too. Not unexpected, she supposed, especially with the earthen floor Maryanne had warned them to expect.
She looked around at the physical space. It wasn’t exactly barren, but no one could call it cluttered. It had to be John Smith who kept the place so tidy. Tools were lined up on the pegboard above the workbench, a black-marker outline around each to show where they belonged. There was lumber piled in one corner of the room, left over no doubt from some work he’d done around Harvell House. The yard tools were down here too, save for the lawnmower which Alex knew was stored in the small garage alongside Mrs. Betts’s Camry. But she spied rakes, hoes, old spades, and even the flower boxes that would be coming out in the spring.
“Wheeeeeee!”
Alex turned around.
With her hands wrapped around a copper pipe, Maryanne swung from the ceiling, like a kid on the monkey bars over at the park.
“Omigod!” Immediately Brooke joined her, and the two of them moved back and forth, laughing as they banged into each other. “It’s copper plumbing, right?”
“Will you guys quit it!” Alex hissed.
Brooke let go, then Maryanne. They floated down to Alex.
“You’ve got to try that,” Maryanne said. “I mean, we’re so... weightless.”
Brooke agreed. “Except when we bang in to each other.”
Alex would try it, but it would have to be another time. This night was about Connie. For Connie. “Maryanne, does it still feel... evil down here? Like you told us?”
Maryanne hesitated before she answered. “I don’t know. I mean, yes, it does, but it feels different. Here... but away somehow.”
Of course it would feel like that. Everything felt further away when they were out in cast form. Not non-existent, but removed. Even her pain of the rape. It didn’t leave her out here, but it was at a distance for a while. How different from when she cast in...
“What do you bet she’s buried here,” Brooke said. She knelt near the floor, running her hands in and over the dirt of it.
Alex nodded. Connie could be. She really, really could be. She’d known they were coming to kill her. The rumor she’d died in Toronto had been spread around town. Her murderers, faced with the task of getting rid of her body in winter, could so easily have buried her here. Alex was almost sure of it now.
“She could be right below us,” Maryanne whispered. No one chastised her now for her lowered voice.
“Somewhere below us, anyway.” Brooke said. With that they all scanned the huge basement. “Oh, man, we could dig for a month and never find her!”
Brooke was right. A sickening feeling that felt like lead dropped in Alex’s belly—in both her cast and her original—as she realized what she had to do.
“Alex?” Maryanne turned to her. “What’s going on? Why is your original suddenly sweating so much?”
They were huddled that close in the attic, able to feel one another. There was somehow an unspoken security in that closeness.
“We’re not going to dig up the whole basement,” Alex said.
Brooke scoffed. “You’re the one so hell bent on finding Connie’s body for her. Now you’re... ” Brooke stiffened as realization hit. “Oh shit, Alex! Don’t!”
Alex looked up at her. Then up at Maryanne who stood as still as Brooke did now, and watching her. She looked down at herself.
Her body was partially sunk in the floor, as if she were cut off at the knees. Of course, no dirt had been disturbed around her or beneath her. The lower part of her cast had simply vanished into the earth. And with her legs she could feel the earth as her cast moved through it. Feel the dirt and the stones and the darting of small bugs as they scurried away—even creepy-crawly things were afraid of casters, apparently. There was a bottle cap of some kind too. She knew it as she moved a foot and her toe slid through it.
“Get out of there, Alex!”
Maryanne reached for her, but Alex pulled away. She was determined to do this, though her heart was racing like mad up inside the attic.
“Are you crazy?” Brooke yelled.
“Don’t you guys get it?” she said. “We’ll never be able to dig up the basement. We don’t know where to begin. But if I go down into the ground as a caster, find her body—”
“You are completely batshit freaking crazy!” Maryanne shouted.
Both Alex and Brooke whipped their heads around to look at her. Maryanne never swore.
“What if you find more?” Maryanne said. “What if you find iron down there? Bang into an iron pipe or some old rods or a pile of broken machinery bits... anything. Hell, given how superstitious this town is, they could have buried freakin’ horseshoes here for all we know! Do you know how dangerous that could be?”
Damn it, Alex had been scared enough before. But she hadn’t thought of that.
“You’d be screwed,” Brooke said. “Completely and totally screwed! You couldn’t move and you’d be trapped underground.”
“And you’d dig me up,” she said.
“Yeah?” Brooke scoffed. “Wonder where they keep the copper shovels around here?” She turned and pretended to study one corner of the basement. “Let’s see, no, not in this corner.”
Alex stayed half submerged in the ground. “Then cast back in and dig me up.”
“When?” Maryanne asked softly. “When could we do that? It would have to be without anyone else around, because we sure as hell couldn’t get anyone to help us.”
God, that was true. It wasn’t like anyone else could unearth a trapped caster, dig down into that emptiness and find a buried Mansbridge Heller. If she did get trapped down there, she’d be trapped until Brooke and Maryanne could find her, and get her out without being discovered. That might take time. A very long time. What if they couldn’t, ever? What if something happened to them—an accident of some kind—and her cast was buried beneath the ground forever, while her original remained in the world? Vulnerable. Helpless. God, if there was any significant iron down there and she touched it, she would be trapped. Trapped with the bones of Connie Harvell.
Poor, tired Connie Harvell.
“I... I have to try,” Alex said. “I’ll be careful.”
“If you’re not back in—”
Brooke couldn’t finish the sentence.
“We’ll get you out.” Maryanne crouched down beside her.
Brooke lowered herself too. “Promise. Whatever it takes.”
“If I get stuck, don’t get caught s
earching for me,” Alex said. “There’s... there’s a lot riding on this.”
Maryanne nodded. “We know.”
With that, Alex descended fully into the ground, into the complete darkness of it. The smell changed. And she felt it too, the musty old feeling of the so-long undisturbed earth. She could see nothing, and though her cast didn’t breathe air, her original in the attic struggled down a shuddering deep breath for both of them as the claustrophobic feeling of being buried nearly overwhelmed her. She couldn’t imagine being actually trapped down here! But if there was iron... Her chest tightened.
Alex fought to conquer the panic, knowing her will would eventually prevail. She’d had lots of practice, after all. Hadn’t she fought that claustrophobic press almost every day since the rape?
Yeah, she’d fight it. For Connie and herself.
Six feet under. Wasn’t that where people always said they buried bodies? Though she couldn’t know for sure of course, chances were they’d buried Connie’s body a few feet down at least.
Alex began to move forward through the ground. Slowly, carefully. Stretching her hands out before her, then moving that arm’s length through the soil. Again and again she did this. Feeling slightly braver as she went, she began swinging her hands out to the sides as she glided through the earth. Something cold and speedy skittered past her hand. It took all the discipline she could muster not to shoot up out of the ground. It helped to remind herself that flesh couldn’t pass through her caster form. Bad enough to have those creepy-crawlies on you.
Finally, she felt the mortared stone wall. Though she was pretty disoriented by this point, she surmised it was the north wall, facing the river. She pressed both hands close to the stone edge of the wall and moved herself along it. Then she ventured again out through the earth.
Her chest was paining in the attic. Honest to God, if she were being chased by a man-eating tiger, she didn’t think her heart could hammer any harder. And then a new fear hit her.
What if I died up there? What if I had a heart attack and died? Would I be a caster—a Heller—forever, just like—“Connie Harvell!”
Alex almost screamed the name as her fingertips contacted something smooth and solid and round. Beneath her fingers, it felt like a smooth stone, but it wasn’t. It couldn’t be. Her caster hand would have moved through stone. It felt like... her fingers explored further... a skull.
Oh God, it was a skull! And her caster hand couldn’t pass through it. She’d known living flesh could be touched, but had just assumed that bones would be like any other inorganic solid. Well, a solid that wasn’t either copper or iron. Except it kind of made sense. Bones weren’t just inorganic mineral, if she remembered her biology.
Shivering, she touched the object again, discovering that it wasn’t as smooth as she’d thought. There were depressions where there shouldn’t be, as though the rounded vault had been bashed. She shuddered, but kept her hand in place. And opened up her mind.
Conviction came instantly. Yes. It was Connie’s skull, all right. Even though she couldn’t pass her hand through the bone like she’d done that pine tree, she knew it. Knew it just as surely as she’d known the essence of the pine. These grieving, sad, terrified and vehemently angry bones could belong to no one else.
Bones. So sad. These bones were all that was left of Connie’s body now, from when they buried her five decades ago. Where they’d buried her—oh God, no!—alive!
Alex’s hand recoiled from the skull, but the residue of Connie’s horror continued to echo in her mind. Whether they’d done it deliberately or not, they’d buried poor Connie in this hole even as she’d clung tenaciously to life.
On that horrific and horrifying realization, Alex sobbed and shot up through the dirt. She emerged just beneath Maryanne, toppling her over. As Maryanne fell, Alex opened her mouth as if to draw air but all that came out was a gasp of the unholy terror she felt.
“Did you find her?” Brooke cried.
Alex didn’t answer. She just shot up as fast as she could through the basement ceiling.