Other Alice (6 page)

‘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 pages 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.

He was thin and tall, but stooped, with long hair that hung past his shoulders. He glared up at the attic window with one eye; the other was hidden beneath a ragged bandage wound round his
head. Even though it was dim outside, I could see it was stained with a dark mark. A streak of blood? Something was thrown over his shoulder. A long, thin rope. A noose.

Despite the suffocating heat, I shuddered and, at the jerking movement, he tilted his head sharply, bird-like. He whistled again, long and low, then slid further behind the hedge, out of
sight.

I dropped to the bed, heart thudding. There was something incredibly eerie about the man, like he had stepped right out of a horror movie. He didn’t belong on our nice, normal
street.

‘You saw him, didn’t you?’ Alice whispered. ‘You saw him, too.’

‘Who is he?’ I kept my voice low, even lower than Alice’s. The night was so still that I imagined each word carrying down to the stranger in the shadows.

Alice shrank back further into the corner. ‘The Hangman.’

The words sent a horrified shiver down my spine. ‘The
Hangman
?’

‘No one knows his real name,’ Alice said hoarsely. ‘But he knows your worst secret. The thing you’re most ashamed of . . . the thing you would die
before you let anyone find out. That’s how he does it. How he kills people.’

‘K-kills people?’ I stuttered. ‘Is that what the rope he’s carrying is for? He hangs you with it?’