Chapter 18 Alyssa Burgess
Alyssa Burgess
Alyssa.
I whipped around at the voice and gasped. There was nobody there, and there was also no door, a smooth, blank wall where the entrance had been only moments ago.
Not sealed, not hidden, just entirely gone. A flat expanse of emptiness where a door should have been. I took a sharp breath, shallow and quick, as my palms slicked with nervous sweat. My fingers tightened around the staff I’d gratefully been able to keep.
“Tarran?” I called. Logically, I knew it was just me here, but this was a book, and anything could happen. Maybe it was she who had called me.
“Carl? Carls?” I tried again.
Nothing.
The silence pressed in like the fog outside, dense and heady and far too aware of my existence.
I was completely alone.
Alyssa. Come to me.
My pulse picked up, thrumming an erratic beat worthy of an elite athlete.
With no other choice, I moved forward, slowly, each step echoing louder than it should have.
The hallways seemed to stretch forever, all arched ceilings, black stone shot with veins of crimson and silver.
Candles flickered with colored flames that did nothing to warm the frigid air.
A slow chill crept into my bones. I didn’t like this. None of it. The sudden isolation, the silence, the way the walls seemed to lean just slightly in as I passed, as if I was going to tell them a secret. The house felt…alive, and it was watching me. Assessing me.
Is this the trial? Why else would the house separate me from my friends, make me walk through this creepy ass house?
I glanced behind me again, irrationally hoping maybe the door would reappear and I’d see Tarran with her sly half-smile, the Carls skipping along behind her—hoping I wouldn’t be so alone.
But the hall behind me was just as long, just as empty.
Just me and the castle.
Fine.
If it wanted to play this way, I could play. I wasn’t going to let one haunted house stop me from getting back to where I belonged.
I kept walking, the sound of my boots muffled by a rug so dark, it might have been black once, now faded and worn. Doors lined the corridor on all sides, pulsing faintly as I passed, and I didn’t dare open them.
Eventually, I came to a stop in front of a door at the end of the hallway that stood slightly ajar. Its handle was wrought iron, twisting into a shape like a withering tree. I hesitated, my hand over the knob, palms clammy.
“Don’t be a little bitch, Liss,” I ordered myself. “It’s just a book. Just. A. Book.”
I pushed the door open.
The room beyond was circular, every inch of wall covered with large, ornate mirrors. I blinked, taking a step inside, and what I saw reflected back at me made me gasp.
Each mirror held a different version of me, staring back at me.
One showed me laughing, wild and loud, my hair long and flowing, cheeks pink and sunkissed with a gleeful expression that looked alien to me.
Another, I was crouched in shadow, clutching something tight to my chest, face pale and mouth twisted in terror.
The more I looked at them, the more I realized each one was reflecting a different emotion to its most extreme intensity.
Anger, sorrow, lust. They were all there, staring back at me, almost mocking.
But it was the one directly in front of me that drew my attention the most. She was exactly as I was now, her brow furrowed, and I stepped closer. At least in here, there was a reflection that was normal.
Another step closer, and I froze.
She was staring at me. I was staring at me. Up this close, her eyes looked darker, her face more angular. I turned my head to the left, and she didn’t.
I took a step back. She didn’t follow, didn’t move at all.
“Oh, fuck that,” I whispered, backing out of the room, pushing the door shut quickly.
My palms left sweaty marks where I had touched.
I had to keep moving. To where, I didn’t know, but this place wanted something from me.
To terrify me into failing the trial, most likely.
This didn’t seem like a trial that would kill me, but what was the alternative? Stay in this doomed house forever?
There had to be another way out, and I was determined to find it.
I kept going, rounding a corner that hadn’t been there a moment ago.
My breath hitched as my brain struggled to keep up, to make sense of the chaos happening around me, but I couldn’t dwell on it, couldn’t stop and ask myself why every room was different and hallways appeared out of nowhere. I’d go crazy if I did.
Another hallway. Different tapestries littered the walls. I squinted closer, realizing the tapestries were depicting scenes—scenes of my life I’d already lived.
A kiss with my first and last boyfriend, Adam, whom I hadn’t spoken to since the sixth grade.
Serena and I at the beach, laughing and splashing each other back and forth in the waves.
Myself, curled up on my favorite chair in my room, reading some book I couldn’t make out.
But it was the last one that startled me the most.
Me in a bookstore, staring down at Journey to Foreverland, about to make the biggest mistake I ever had and touch it.
My chest tightened, my stomach hardening like a stone, threatening to fall through my body and end it all right now. This castle was in my head, alive, testing me. Shifting around me. Reading me.
I was a rat in an experiment, and someone was watching.
Almost there, Alyssa.
The whisper was louder this time, a velvety, genderless voice that reeked of sinister trouble I wanted to be nowhere near.
The hair on the back of my neck prickled, the warmth of the key I already held radiating from the pouch slung around my hip, like it could sense the evil in the air and wanted to be nowhere near.
Emotions waged a war inside me, trying to stay contained under my skin. Fear, confusion, panic. But I shoved it down roughly, locking it inside a cage I built from the memories of my life. My home. This place wanted me unsteady and broken.
I wasn’t going to give it the satisfaction. I squared my shoulders.
“Bring it on!” I said into the silence. “Stop hiding like a fucking coward.”
The next door looked harmless enough.
Simple wood, plain brass handle. No carvings, no twisted trees, no ominous glows. Just a door quietly waiting at the end of the newest corridor like it had been there all along.
Still, it was better than wandering in circles until I lost my mind. There was nowhere to go but in. I reached for the handle. It was warm.
The door opened into a room lit by candlelight. Soft, flickering. It might’ve even been calming if not for the creeping sensations skittering up my spine. My eyes widened as I looked around.
This was a library.
Books of every shape and form lined the curved walls from floor to ceiling, packed tight like they were afraid of being forgotten.
Ladders were leaned against shelves, the kind you saw in a fairytale where the heroine gets her first kiss from the surly man who owns the castle.
A fireplace crackled softly at the far end.
Spacious velvet chairs sat empty beneath a towering stained-glass window, though the image in the glass was warped and unreadable, fraying more out of focus the longer I looked at it.
I stepped further inside, half-expecting the books to launch themselves from their spots and attack me. But everything stayed still. Silent.
No mirrors or monsters to battle. Just a cozy room in a crazy house, and that almost put me on edge more than anything else had so far.
I walked between the shelves. Dust clung to the air, thick and dry, the smell of old paper tugging at my memories. It was familiar, as if I had been here before, but I would have remembered being in a place as magnificent as this.
What was the catch?
I reached for the nearest book, a small shout escaping me as I read the title. Panic surged as I checked the next one and the next one, going down the line until I accepted what I saw.
All the books had my name on the spine.
Alyssa Burgess. Over and over and over, printed in the same looping script, etched in silver and gold.
My hands shook as I pulled one out.
The cover read: Alyssa Burgess and the Day Dad Left.
My stomach dropped, my cheeks stinging like I’d been slapped in the face.
I didn’t want to, I knew I shouldn’t, but I opened it, flipping to the first page.
The first sentence stung like a knife to the heart: “Her heart splintered into little pieces when he ignored her pleas to stay, slamming the door shut in her face.”
My fingers tightened on the leather-bound edges. I shoved it back onto the shelf angrily, but like some form of sick punishment, I reached for another.
Alyssa Burgess and Her Mother’s Disappointment.
Another.
The books were my memories.
Not all were big ones. Not all were dramatic. Some were small, razor-sharp slices of shame and loneliness I thought I’d buried so deep, no one could ever dig them up again.
But they were here. Catalogued. Itemized.
I backed away from the shelves. My heart pounded, my limbs feeling heavier than ever. I stood frozen for a second until a soft rustle echoed behind me and I whirled.
A girl sat in one of the velvet chairs, watching my meltdown.
It was me.