CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR #2
Silently, des-per-ately, I wished for a fourth op-tion to ma-te-ri-al-ize. A devil of some kind, who might be will-ing to bar-gain. Be-cause there was very lit-tle I would not give up in ex-change for both of our sur-vi-val. I would make us the ugli-est hags in all the world, I would make us poor be-yond mea-sure and tal-ent-less as earth-worms, if we could sim-ply be to-gether.
But this was no Faus-tian tale, and no devil ap-peared.
It felt pro-foundly lonely that even hell it-self had de-serted us.
“Even if I agreed to all of this,” I said, “none of it mat-ters un-til I find Catalina.” An-other hor-ri-ble sus-pi-cion smacked me around the face. “Mum … did you lure her here? To try and force me to fol-low?”
Mum’s eyes widened. “Of course not. Of course not, Penny. I have no idea what hap-pened to her. But from what I’ve seen of her, she seems like a smart girl. Maybe she fig-ured it all out, and de-cided to come down here and free you her-self.”
Could that be true? Did she re-ally care about me enough to be so reck-less with her own life?
“Or the swans just at-tacked her,” I rea-soned. “The way they did the girl from the ghost story. In any case, we need to find her. Can you help me?”
Mum wrapped her arms around me once more, thick and warm. “Of course. Any-thing for you, Penny. Any-thing. And while we’re at it, we have to find the other you too. We need her for this to work.”
I clam-bered to my feet like a foal who’d been born mere sec-onds ago. I was dizzy and faint, hun-gry and cold, and so deathly afraid that the sim-ple act of breath-ing and mov-ing like a hu-man be-ing seemed in-sur-mount-able.
It wasn’t just the im-mi-nent loss of my only liv-ing par-ent, or the re-al-iza-tion that I might be too late to save Catalina, or the idea of try-ing to claw through a tem-po-rary gap in the ether be-fore it sealed me in here for-ever. It was the will-ing pur-suit of the other me—the one I had sen-tenced to this ter-ri-ble ex-is-tence. The un-can-ni-ness of see-ing an-other you live and breathe and walk and think and feel … It was pro-foundly wrong.
“It’s ter-ri-fy-ing, look-ing at her,” I said as we started walk-ing un-evenly, side by side. “The other me.”
“Dop-pel-g?ngers are freaky enough, let alone ones who ac-tu-ally are you.”
“Do you know where your own por-trait is? Will we be able to find that when the time comes?”
“As long as the labyrinth doesn’t shift again, I think I should be able to trace the path to it. I make sure to mem-o-rize it ev-ery time it moves.”
Sure enough, she seemed to know where we were go-ing.
“But how do you mem-o-rize it?” Ev-ery-thing around me seemed to warp and eddy be-fore my eyes. “Even when they don’t en-tirely shift, the back-grounds never stay still.”
Mum nod-ded. “They do, but there are fun-da-men-tally two types of panes—mir-rors and paint-ings. They’re ar-ranged in dif-fer-ent or-ders in each cor-ri-dor. I’ve trained my brain to think of mir-rors as white and paint-ings as black—”
“Like a chess-board.” I couldn’t hold back the laugh.
“Ex-actly.” She gave a funny smile. “They’re just ranks and files. All I have to do is re-mem-ber the se-quences of each cor-ri-dor and I have a good idea of where I am.”
There was a hook-ing sen-sa-tion in my chest. “I was ab-so-lutely robbed of you.”
“To think that I gave it up to stay beau-ti-ful…” Her voice sounded like a phys-i-cal wound. “It de-stroys me. It ab-so-lutely, ex-is-ten-tially ru-ins me. I love you. I just love you, okay?” She slid her hand into mine and squeezed. The palm was warm, fleshy, wrin-kled. Per-fect.
Ev-ery time we rounded a cor-ner, I held my breath, un-sure what was more ter-ri-fy-ing: find-ing Catalina, or not find-ing her.
What state might she be in if we found her?
How long might we spend look-ing?
But the next cor-ner turned into an-other empty cor-ri-dor. I rec-og-nized a hideous brushed ma-roon vel-vet back-ground with a sil-hou-ette in the dis-tance. The hue and tex-ture re-minded me of the seats in the Basil Hall-ward The-ater. My fa-ther’s the-ater.
“Have you talked to her much?” I asked. “The other me.”
She shook her head. “She’s only been here a few weeks, and she’s ab-so-lutely ter-ri-fied. When-ever she sees me, she sprints in the op-po-site di-rec-tion.”
My stom-ach lurched as there was a crack of thun-der and a flash of light-ning in both the ceil-ing and the floor. The mir-rors seemed to rat-tle in re-sponse. I shiv-ered in my swim-ming cos-tume, still wet from the lake. “How have you not gone in-sane? Two decades here … it’s pur-ga-tory.”
“All this time, I fo-cused on you.” Mum let her fin-ger-tips run along the walls, al-most with fond-ness. “I sa-vored the snap-shots the mir-rors gave me, no mat-ter how painful they were to watch. The raves I took you to … my god.” Her teeth grit-ted. “But at least I was see-ing you, hear-ing you, de-spite be-ing un-able to touch you. It was sweet, per-fect tor-ture. And so when-ever I felt my-self los-ing it, con-tem-plat-ing tak-ing a mir-ror shard to my own wrists—I just thought of the next time I’d get to see you.”
Ev-ery-thing in me wept.
I had been enough all along.
I let the thought of this mar-i-nate. “So, in a way, when you were watch-ing those aw-ful mo-ments through these look-ing glasses … you were there, in a sense.”
“I was.”
If there was such a thing as ret-ro-spec-tive com-fort, this thought gave it to me.
Around what felt like the hun-dredth cor-ner, I heard the un-mis-tak-able sound of hy-per-ven-ti-la-tion. Raspy, un-even breaths, high-pitched and deeply afraid.
Hands graz-ing the cold sil-ver of a mir-ror pane, I steeled my-self and walked into the next cor-ri-dor.
There I was.
The real me—with enough mur-der-ous fear in her eyes to burn down the un-der-world.
Kneel-ing over Catalina’s life-less body.