A buzz by the toaster broke the silence. Mum looked up.
‘That’s Alice’s phone,’ she said. ‘Strange that she’d go out without it.’
‘Do you think she’s all right?’ I asked.
‘She looked fine when I saw her,’ Mum said. ‘Why wouldn’t she be?’
I shrugged. Alice didn’t talk to Mum like she did to me. I knew things about Alice that Mum didn’t, and wouldn’t ever know, because Alice had made me promise. Sometimes I didn’t know if this was a good thing.
‘No reason.’ I glanced at the phone. ‘She’s just forgetful, I suppose.’
‘Have you decided who you’re going to make a Likeness of?’ Mum asked.
‘Not yet. I was hoping Alice would help me.’
‘I can help you,’ Mum offered. ‘Or we can get it started anyway, but I need to pack this afternoon, I’ve got an early flight tomorrow.’
My head snapped up. ‘Flight? To where?’
‘Brussels, Midge. It’s the book fair – I did say.’
‘Oh. That,’ I said, making a face. ‘How long will you be gone this time?’
‘Only for three days. Don’t look so gloomy! You’ll be fine with Alice. I know how she spoils you when I’m away.’
It was true. Alice did spoil me. We stayed up late, watched bad TV and ate too many sweets. On the good days. Mum wasn’t around enough to notice the bad ones. The ones when Alice forgot to wash her hair, hardly spoke, and dinner was beans on toast that I’d have to make myself.
I’d just finished my last pancake when I caught sight of the tip of a black tail sailing past the table behind Mum. In an instant, I knew it wasn’t Twitch, because she was on Mum’s lap, sniffing her plate. I jumped up, knocking the table.
‘Midge, be careful!’ said Mum. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Thought I saw next-door’s cat,’ I blurted out. I ran for the back door, hearing the squeak of the cat flap, and looked through the window just in time to see a black blur vanishing over the garden wall. Quickly, I unlocked the back door and ran to the gate, unlatching it and stepping into the alley that ran between our house and next door’s. At first, I thought the cat was gone, but then I caught a small movement towards the front of the house. I crept out of the alley and into the street.
Tabitha was sitting on next-door’s front wall, totally still except for her tail, which swished from side to side in a figure of eight. I approached and was about to speak when I saw what she was looking at.
On the other side of the road near the corner shop was a girl with long, blonde hair who had a notebook tucked under her arm. She wore a black leather jacket that I didn’t recognise, but I did know her. Relief rushed through me.
‘Alice!’ I called, waving. ‘Mum’s made pancakes – still some left!’
Alice looked behind her, then back at me, but didn’t return my wave.
‘Alice!’ I shouted again.
She continued to stare blankly in my direction. Weird. Mum said she’d waved at Alice, too, and she hadn’t seen her . . .
I crossed the road and went towards her, not caring that I was still wearing my pyjamas and slippers. ‘Alice,’ I said again. ‘Are you all right?’
She looked at me with a puzzled expression. There was something odd about her eyes. They looked different to normal, but I couldn’t figure out why. She appeared prettier somehow: her cheeks and lips pinker and her hair glossier, with tiny plaits woven in here and there. I’d never seen her wear her hair like that before. I waited for her to answer, but instead she took out a pen and wrote something in the notebook. She held it up to show me.
I’m not Alice, it said.
‘Very funny. Why aren’t you talking? Do you have a sore throat?’
Alice gave a strained smile and wrote something else.
I don’t know who Alice is. You have the wrong person.
I waited for her to laugh or wink, but she didn’t. I stared into her eyes and finally saw what was different about them: Alice’s eyes were blue, like mine. This girl’s were bright green.
I backed away from her, gasping as my foot slid off the kerb and into the road, almost tripping. The girl grabbed at my hand to steady me, but I brushed her off and got my balance, my skin crawling where she’d touched me.
A squirmy, knotted-up feeling had started in my tummy, the sort of feeling I’d had at my granddad’s funeral when I was just seven. Of not fully understanding what was going on, but knowing it was something bad and that things would never be the same again.
My gaze was fixed on her face. Everything about her was almost exactly like Alice. It was only the eyes that were really different, but it was enough to convince me. The girl underlined something and held the notebook up again.
I’m not Alice . She turned away from me and began to walk off. I watched her round the corner and vanish into the next street, now certain she wasn’t my sister.
But if she wasn’t Alice then who was she?
4
The Museum of Unfinished Stories
WHEN I GOT BACK TO the house, mum was sniffing around in the living room.
‘Was it next-door’s cat?’ she asked, coming into the kitchen.
‘Oh, er . . . yeah,’ I said.
Mum picked up the water-spray bottle that she used to mist her pot plants. ‘Well, I can’t smell anything. But if you see it again give it a squirt with this.’ She went into the living room with her cup of tea, leaving me alone.
I stood for a moment, trying to calm down. My breath was coming too quickly, like I’d just run really fast, and my knees felt all shaky. I put a hand out in front of me and saw it was trembling. Who was the girl I’d just seen, the not Alice?
After a minute, I went into the living room. Mum was sitting down with Twitch curled up on her lap. I blinked, remembering the reason I’d gone outside in the first place – Tabitha – and wondered if she would come back, half wishing I had shut her in the attic. I pushed the thought away. Talking cat or not, this was more important.
‘Mum?’ I said. My voice came out thin and squeaky. I coughed. ‘Mum, something strange just happened.’
Mum dunked a biscuit in her tea. ‘What’s that, love?’
‘When I went outside just now, I saw Alice. Only it wasn’t Alice.’
‘Is this one of your riddles?’ Mum said through a mouthful of biscuit. ‘Because you know I’m hopeless—’
‘It’s not a riddle.’ My hands were clammy with sweat. ‘There was a girl standing on the corner by the shop who looked like Alice. Exactly like Alice. Except for her eyes. They . . .’ I hesitated.
Could it have been a trick of the light? I’d been so sure of what I’d seen a few minutes ago, but now I was starting to doubt myself.
‘They what?’ said Mum.
‘Maybe I imagined it.’
Mum waited, saying nothing.
‘They were green.’
Mum rolled her eyes. ‘People’s eyes don’t change colour, Midge. Maybe it was someone who just really looked like Alice.’
I shook my head. ‘You don’t get it. She was Alice. Everything about her, except her eyes. Her hair colour, the way she frowned. But . . . it wasn’t her. She didn’t know me, didn’t recognise me. And she said she wasn’t Alice.’
‘Oh, Midge, don’t be daft. Of course it was her,’ said Mum. ‘Playing a trick, or doing some sort of weird research for whatever story she’s working on. She’ll come whizzing through that door in a minute and shut herself up in the attic, writing for hours. You know how she gets.’
‘But her eyes—’ I began.
‘Contact lenses,’ said Mum. ‘Although she shouldn’t be messing around with those when her vision is perfectly good. I’ll be having words with her about that.’
Mum took another biscuit out of the tin and crunched it, dropping crumbs on Twitch’s head.
Perhaps Alice was just messing about. I wanted to believe what Mum was saying, but she hadn’t seen Alice last night. I went upstairs, chewing my lip as
I looked at the ladder up to the attic. Then, before I really knew why, I started to climb it, pulling myself through the hatch.
I went to Alice’s desk. On it were college prospectuses, with some pages bookmarked. Mum had been on at Alice for months to pick a course, but so far Alice had hardly looked at them. She’d decided to take a year out between school and college to write, and I knew Mum was worried that she might not go at all.
I reached for a stack of notebooks, flicking through a few. Some were dog-eared and grubby, filled with pages of character notes, story settings, spidergrams, flow charts and stories, each with Alice’s trademark ‘THE END’ printed and underlined where a story finished. A few were blank and unused. I put them back and lifted up a folder. The knot of worry tightened in my tummy when I saw what was underneath it.
Alice’s purse. I picked it up and opened it. There was some money, her bank and library cards, and a little photo of the two of us that was taken a couple of months ago.
I put it down and looked round Alice’s room. Maybe it was because I wasn’t used to being there without her, but I felt her absence more strongly than ever. I was surrounded by her things and yet without her the room was so hollow that it seemed as though a loud noise would echo.
A memory of a story Alice had written last year came back to me. I looked over my shoulder, uneasy, but the attic was empty, of course.
What if, I thought, the girl I’d seen was one of those things Alice had written about in that story? Those people who look exactly the same as someone else. It was a funny word, one I’d never heard before that tale. Alice said everyone has one, somewhere in the world. Not a twin . . . a doggle something? Wait, no. A dopp . . . doppelgänger.
That story had stuck in my head. It had been about a boy who started seeing an exact version of himself in the town. At first, he’d wondered if he had a long-lost twin, but it turned out to be his doppelgänger. Slowly, the doppelgänger took over his life, worming its way in and stealing the boy’s family and friends. In the end, the boy had saved himself only by the use of a clever riddle proving that he was his real self.
At the time, I’d loved it. Now, though, the thought of another Alice – an almost Alice – walking around was just creepy. Who was she? And did she know anything about where the real Alice was?
I turned the doppelgänger story over in my mind, picking at the threads of what Alice had told me. It still didn’t make sense. If it was a doppelgänger, then surely it’d be pretending it was Alice, not that it wasn’t . . . unless it was trying to fool me. Playing a clever game before it moved in. Because, if it wasn’t Alice playing a joke and it wasn’t a doppelgänger, then what else could it be?
There was another possibility. Something I’d been trying to push out of my mind, but which kept pestering me like a gnat . . . and it wasn’t so much the strange girl that was making me think it. It was the cat. A talking cat . . . just the sort of magical creature that would come from Alice’s imagination. The fact that they had both appeared on the same day told me that somehow they must be connected.
A draught whistled round my ankles and my eyes went to the skylight. It was closed. I’d been the one to pull it shut when I came up here earlier, looking for Alice. At some point during the night, or this morning before I’d woken, Alice must have opened it.
Could she have seen something, or someone, that had made her leave the house in a rush? Someone she’d wanted to speak to . . . or hide from?
I climbed on to Alice’s bed and opened the window. A chilly breeze flew in as I peered out across the rooftops. There was a clear view of the street, all the way down to the corner shop.
Had Alice looked out and spotted the girl standing there?
I’d seen the girl well enough from the street. Enough to think it was Alice. Now Alice was gone without telling anyone where she was going, without her phone, or even her purse. I tried to imagine how I would feel if I saw someone who looked exactly like me. Excited? Confused? Afraid? Probably all three. I didn’t have to think about what I would do – I already knew that. I’d follow them.
The problem was that the girl was gone. She couldn’t be followed. But there was a chance she’d gone into the shop and, if she had, there might be a clue to where she was now. If I could find the girl, perhaps I might also find Alice.
I started to pull the window closed, my gaze drifting to the bushes at the front of the garden. A memory hovered at the edges of my mind. A figure skulking behind those bushes in the dead of the night . . . and Alice cowering in the corner of the attic. Wide-eyed, terrified, whispering, ‘You do see him, don’t you?’
I shuddered, pushing the memory away, and clambered down. My toes nudged something within the folds of the bedclothes. I fumbled through them, already guessing what it was. I found it hidden in the pillowcase: Alice’s notebook. The one she’d been writing in last night. I picked it up. It was heavier than I expected it to be, like there was a secret within its pages. I hesitated. Alice would be furious if I peeked.
But she doesn’t have to know, I told myself. If I just had a quick look, it might offer a clue as to where she could be. Sometimes Alice did things to research whatever she was writing about, or went to certain places. Once she’d made Mum shut her in the boot of the car when she was writing a story about someone being kidnapped and driven off, just to see if she’d fit. We’d had some odd looks from our neighbours after that.
Another thought was untwisting in my head like fraying rope. I wanted to get a look at the characters in case . . . just in case . . . I shook the thought away, then lifted the cover and looked inside.
My sister’s curly, black writing covered the first page from top to bottom in a numbered list. It went up to number seventeen and each number had something written after it, a word or short phrase. Could they be story titles?
On the next page, I found what I was searching for. I was looking at a character description. It was about a page long, with a chart of likes and dislikes and longer passages with more detail. As I read it, the skin on the back of my neck began to tingle.
Tabitha, an enchanted black cat that was once a human. Talks, fond of tea and riddles. Six of her nine lives remaining.
I turned the next page and found another one, and at this my hand froze.
I stared at it, then read it again.
Gypsy, a sixteen-year-old storyteller. Unable to speak, uses a notebook to communicate. Blonde hair, green eyes.
So I hadn’t imagined the girl’s eye colour.
The girl and the cat were characters from Alice’s story.
I collapsed on the bed, feeling squirmy and shaky. There was no holding it back now. The memory flooded into my head like an unwelcome guest turning up unannounced.
The memory of climbing up into the attic last year, the roof space stifling hot and airless as it always was in the summer. It was dimly lit, so dingy that I heard Alice before I saw her. The crackle of papers being shuffled, over in the corner of the room.
‘Alice?’ I whispered, snapping on the light.
A figure flew at me, teeth bared through tangled, damp hair, hissing.
‘Turn the light off! He’ll see!’
The sour smell of sweat filled my nose as she reached past me and snapped the light off, before scuttling back to the corner like a beetle hiding under a stone. I ducked down and crawled towards her, my heart drumming hard.
‘Who?’ I whispered. ‘Who’s out there? Should we call Dad?’
‘No!’ Alice’s fingers dug into my arm, bruising my skin. ‘Don’t call anyone! Just shut up, I need to think.’
I shrank into the corner next to her, stung. It wasn’t often Alice spoke to me that way. Most people that I knew with brothers and sisters fought all the time, but not us. We were a team.
I watched her in the faint glow of a single tea light on the desk. Her face was sickly white, and her forehead and upper lip were beaded with sweat. Her eyes were glazed and staring, and her hands shook as she fumbled through the pa
ges of a notebook.
‘Alice?’ I whispered, even more quietly than before. ‘I’m scared. Who’s out there?’
‘Someone who shouldn’t be. But you don’t need to be scared. It’s me he wants, not you.’ She paused, then her voice rose, becoming more panicked. Her breath was stale as it carried to my nostrils. ‘But then he could still use you to get to me . . . to force me to give him what he wants!’ She turned to me, grabbing my arm so hard it felt like her fingers were bruising me. ‘If anyone ever approaches you, Midge, anyone you don’t know that asks you about me, don’t trust them. Do you hear me? They’ll say anything . . . just get away from them . . .’
‘Stop, you’re hurting!’ I prised her fingers off my arm. ‘Alice, please . . . you’re frightening me!’
She bent her head over the notebook, her pen almost touching the paper, but unmoving. ‘I need to think, I need to think . . .’
My head was fuzzy with confusion. What was she doing with her notebook if she thought there was someone coming after her? My fears shifted, from the worry of a stranger outside in the night to the far more likely possibility of Alice having a fever.
‘Alice, you’re not making any sense. You don’t look well,’ I said. ‘I think you should lie down.’
‘I can’t. Don’t you see? I have to make him go away, I have to . . .’
‘When was the last time you slept?’
She shook her head, impatient. ‘I don’t have time to sleep, I—’
A whistled tune, like a short burst of birdsong, floated through the window. But there were no birds around at this hour.
‘It’s him,’ Alice whispered. ‘He’s still out there.’
Slowly, I crept out of the corner and climbed on to the bed. The window was wide open, but the night air was almost as still and sticky as it was in the attic.
‘Don’t,’ Alice moaned, wide-eyed with fear. ‘He’ll see you!’
I raised myself on to tiptoes and stared out through the darkness, across gardens and houses and parked cars that I saw every day. In daylight, all these things were familiar, but at night, and from so high up, it was like looking out on an unknown land. Everything was still, too warm even for foxes and cats to be on the prowl. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw something shift down by the lavender in the hedge. Such a slight movement in the deep shadows, but the spell was broken and I could see him now.