Other Alice (2 page)

‘Did you read about me in the news?’ Dorothy asked. She lowered her voice. ‘All the naughty things I’ve done?’

Alice shook her head weakly. ‘Not exactly.’

‘Then how do you know me?’ Dorothy asked.

‘I know everything about you,’ Alice whispered.

Dorothy rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, not you as well. Do you know how many doctors I’ve had to listen to, spouting that sort of rubbish? We know all about you, Dorothy,’ she mimicked.
‘You must have experienced some kind of trauma, Dorothy. We want you to keep a dream diary, Dorothy, Dorothy,
Dorothy
.’ She was getting worked up now, getting that glaze over her
eyes. ‘Repeating my name over and over to make me think they’re my friends.’

‘I know,’ Alice said.

‘Oh, you
know
, do you?’ Dorothy said, her eyes gleaming.

‘I told you. I know everything about you.’ Alice sagged against the wall, her knees trembling. She wanted to run now, but felt like she was stuck in one of those dreams where, if she
tried to, she’d be going in slow motion. ‘How . . . how did you get here?’

Dorothy laughed. ‘Well, if you don’t know that, you don’t know everything about me, do you?’ she mocked. ‘I followed someone. Someone who took something of mine and
I want it back.’

‘Ramblebrook,’ Alice muttered.

The smile left Dorothy’s face. ‘How could you possibly know
that
?’ She leaned further in to Alice’s face. ‘You’d better start talking.’

So, in a few brief words, Alice told her.

Afterwards, Dorothy stared at her for a few seconds before erupting into giggles.

‘Oh, that’s good,’ she said finally, clapping her hands together. ‘Bravo! Even I couldn’t have come up with
that
and my plots are
pretty . . .
twisted
, shall we say?’ She shook her head, still chuckling. ‘You actually believe that, don’t you?’

‘No . . . I
know
it.’

Dorothy gave a low whistle. ‘And people say
I’m
dotty.’ She looked impressed, envious even. ‘Girl, you are
mad
. You are one
craaaaaazy
cuckoo!’ She clucked sympathetically. ‘I don’t have to worry about you talking to anyone about me. You sound far too bonkers for anyone to believe you.’

She pushed her face even closer to Alice’s and, with that, something inside Alice snapped like a spell being broken. She lashed out with her notebook, catching Dorothy on the side of the
face.

‘Get away from me – stay away! Just
. . .  just go back to where you came from
!’ Her voice erupted from her, shrill and desperate. She hit out again, missing
this time, for Dorothy ducked out of the way, and the notebook flew out of Alice’s fingers, landing with a whack on the pavement.

She threw herself towards it at the same time as a cackling Dorothy did. Panic gripped her as Dorothy reached it first, her eyes fixed on the open pages. With a gasp, Alice wrenched it away.

Without another word, she ran, swerving to avoid tripping over a black cat before fleeing into a side street. Her breath came in ragged sobs that burned her throat, but she didn’t stop.
She felt as though Dorothy Grimes’s eyes were still on her, but when she looked back she saw no one except a scattering of strangers staring at her.

Alice ran, and ran, and didn’t stop until she reached her house, slamming the front door behind her and locking it. She caught sight of herself in the hallway mirror and stared. Her hair
was a tangled mess, stuck to her cheeks with snot and tears. Her face was a deathly grey. But it was her eyes that were the worst. They were wild, haunted-looking.
Mad
-looking. And no wonder,
with what she had just seen.

‘It’s not possible, it’s
not
 . . .’ she wailed to the empty house. Her voice jarred in the silence, like a puzzle piece that wouldn’t
fit.

She sank to the floor and huddled with her back to the door. Dorothy Grimes was mad; Alice knew that better than anyone. But then what did that say about
her?

Could Dorothy have been right?

Was Alice even crazier than she was?

E
VERY DAY, HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE
sit down and begin to write a story. Some of these stories are published and translated, and
sold in bookshops all over the world. Others never make it past the first chapter – or even the first sentence – before they are given up on. And some stories are muddled, and
half-written, and struggled with until eventually the writer stuffs their creation under the bed or into a drawer. There it lies, forgotten for months or years . . . or perhaps for
ever. Even if it could have been the most magical adventure that anyone would ever read.

But what happens when a tale with
real
magic, that was supposed to be finished, never was?

This is a story about one of those stories. It begins a long time ago when I was just eleven years old, back when I was known as Midge. Back when my biggest worry was whether I’d be picked
for the football team and when one of my favourite things was to hear the latest story written by my older sister, Alice.

Alice had a thing about stories. Not just an amazing talent for making them up and writing them down, but also a strange and firm belief that every story started should be finished. She said an
unfinished story was a terrible thing: an unfulfilled dream and unlived lives for all the characters within it. So, every story she began, she finished, no matter how rubbish it might have been or
how silly the ending. They all had to have one – an ending.

Until the day one of them didn’t.

My sister disappeared on a Friday in February, the day school finished for half-term. It was ordinary in most ways, except that it happened to be the day before the Summoning. On the walk home
from school, I was on the lookout for Likenesses: little dolls fashioned from straw or cloth, each made to resemble someone. I’d already noticed a few in the morning, but during the day more
had appeared in windows and on doorsteps of the houses I passed.

I stopped to stare at a Likeness propped next to a flowerpot in a nearby garden. It always struck me how strange it was that, each year, everyone in the town made these dolls and put them on
display.

‘No weirder than dressing up as ghosts and vampires and everything for Hallowe’en on one night of the year,’ was Alice’s view.

‘But that happens in loads of places,’ I said. ‘The Summoning is just here in Fiddler’s Hollow.’

‘Lots of towns have strange old traditions,’ Alice had replied. ‘But they’re usually things like cheese festivals or maypole dancing, not something creepy like
ours.’

I had to admit the Summoning
was
a bit creepy. On this one night of every year, someone, either living or dead, could be ‘Summoned’ by the creation of their Likeness. It was said
that if the person who made it wanted it badly enough, and the Likeness was good enough, it would work and the maker could then ask the Summoned a question. Just one. After that, they could never
Summon that person again.

Of course, no one ever seemed to know anyone who had successfully Summoned another person, although there were plenty of tales of it happening to somebody’s uncle’s third
cousin’s son.

In the evening, there was always a huge bonfire in the market square when all the Likenesses were burned. Lots of people came just for this part, even if they hadn’t made a doll, because
there were stalls selling toasted marshmallows and roasted nuts, hot chocolate and warm, spiced apple juice.

It was a game of mine, every year, to try to recognise who the dolls were meant to be. Some, like the ones made by the lady who worked in the knitting shop, were excellent – but I still
couldn’t tell who they were. Others, like Tommy Parker’s from my class, looked barely human – but his was recognisable by the numbered shirt and football strip of his favourite
player. Then there were the mad: a grey felt dog called Fenchurch who’d been missing for more than a year; the bad: Jack the Ripper made by Mr Sherwood, the history teacher, who spent his
spare time working on theories to try and unmask the killer’s identity.

I reached the white painted gate of a cottage set back from the road. Next to the front door was a small figure of straw. This was one of the sad: the same little figure made every year by the
old man who lived in the cottage.

It was a boy, with fair hair and glasses. Every year it wore the same clothes, and the same little pair of old-fashioned spectacles, but every year its features were a little wonkier, as the old
man’s eyesight grew worse.

No one really talked to the man, so people didn’t know who the boy was. Some said that it was his son who had been taken away by the man’s wife and never seen again; others said that
the boy had died, and once I’d heard a horrid story that it was a little boy unknown to the man whom he had knocked down and killed in his car by accident. So many stories and none of them
happy . . . except one.

Alice said she thought the story went like this: the man was a time traveller and wanted to use the Likeness to speak to himself as a little boy, asking him questions about things that he had
long forgotten about. To Alice, everything was a story and hers was the one I wanted to believe.

I moved on past, pulling leaves from the hedge, trying to decide whether to make a Likeness or not. Alice usually did, but she was the creative one, not me.

By the time I reached Cuckoo Lane, the street where we lived, the sky was dark and a thin slice of moon dangled above the little shop on the corner. Our house was number 35, a short way down. It
was an old house, which looked tiny from the front, but was surprisingly large inside, stretching back much longer than it was wide. When I went in, the house was warm and the smell of something
delicious was wafting from the kitchen.

I hung my keys on the hook in the hallway and went through to the living room, where a fire had been lit in the grate. A basket of logs and a bucket of coal sat on the hearth, and our cat,
Twitch, was sprawled out asleep in front of it, her black coat gleaming in the firelight. I held my cold fingers up to the heat. I could hear a little tune being hummed in the kitchen. I followed
it and found Alice leaning over the cooker, stirring a large pot.

‘What’s for tea?’ I asked, my tummy rumbling as I sniffed deeply. The humming stopped and Alice turned to me with a smile.

‘It’s stew.’ She covered the pot and put plates in the oven to warm. ‘Stop sniffing it; you’ll steal all the flavour.’

I grinned. Alice was always saying silly things like that, mostly to amuse me – and herself – but also, I think, because she couldn’t help it. She saw magic in everything: a
trail of drips from a teacup were elf footprints; garden statues were people and animals that had been enchanted and turned to stone. Storytelling was in her blood; blood that we shared, though
Alice’s was a little different. She didn’t have the same father as me. Hers had left her and our mum when Alice was just three years old. She had seen him only a handful of times in the
thirteen years that had passed since then.

I watched as she set the table, noticing a plaster on Alice’s finger. ‘What happened?’ I asked, nodding to it.

‘Hmm? Oh. My finger decided it wanted to be a carrot and got in the way of the knife.’

‘You’re so daft,’ I said, giggling. Then I stopped as I saw that she had only laid the table for two.

‘I thought Mum was here for tea tonight?’ My voice came out all whiney.

Alice laid cutlery on the table and began to slice some bread.

‘She was supposed to be, but she called to say she had to work late.’

‘Again?’

‘Someone’s off sick and Mum has that book fair coming up. She’s snowed under.’

‘She’s always snowed under,’ I said sulkily.

I sank into my usual seat. I’d been looking forward to this evening. Mum had been working much later recently. She was the manager of a rights team for a big publisher, which meant that
she sold books to lots of different countries. It was over a week since we’d last eaten a meal with her. In fact, it had been more than a week since I’d had a chance to say much to her
at all, during mornings of uniforms being ironed and bowls of cereal being gulped down in the rush to get ready for school. We hardly saw my dad, either. He worked away on an oil rig and sometimes
he was gone for months. Since Alice had left school in May, she’d taken over a lot of the cooking and household chores. She wasn’t just my sister, she was like a second mother.

‘It won’t be for ever,’ Alice said. ‘Things will calm down after this book fair.’

She ladled stew and dumplings on to our plates and I wolfed mine down, but Alice only picked at hers. By the time the subject changed to the Summoning and the Likenesses I’d seen on the
way home, Alice had put her spoon down and abandoned her stew. She listened, her eyes clouding at the mention of the old man and his little-boy doll, and I wondered if she’d ever write down
the story of him using the Likeness to speak to himself as a child. She often based characters on people from real life, if there was something about them that interested her.