Switchback Ch16 pt1

Their room reminded Alex of a bedroom in a period TV drama written by Agatha Christie. No flash and spangle, just everything you’d need and nothing you wouldn’t. There was a bed on either side of the only window, and below that an oak cabinet which held a telephone, a bedside lamp reachable from either of the beds, and a wind-up alarm clock. A double wardrobe of polished walnut was behind the door. Alex opened it to find half a dozen hangers either side of a central mirror with a small flat surface below and three drawers below that.

          The beds were made up with pastel-coloured blankets over white cotton sheets and smelled of Lily of the Valley, or Heather on the Moor, or some other fake outdoor fragrance the fabric softener’s manufacturer managed think up.

          On the other side of the door was a vent you could open or close to allow or stop cool air coming into the room from an air conditioner somewhere else in the building. Sammi put her suitcase on the right-hand bed and flicked the grey metal lever up to close the vent.

          ‘Are you that cold?’ said Alex.

          She shrugged. ‘Little bit.’

          ‘I haven’t seen you take your meds since we had breakfast.’

          Sammi looked at the clock. ‘It’s only ten-past-four; I’ve got two hours, yet.’

          Between Alex’s choice of bed and the wardrobe was a low table that held an electric kettle and two bone china cups turned up-side-down on their saucers. There was a small rack beside the kettle filled with half a dozen different teas and coffees, sachets of white and brown sugar, and those small cartons of milk no one likes the taste of.

          Alex zipped open a side pocket of her suitcase and took out a clear plastic bag of light-brown powder. ‘What’ll it be, Earl Grey, Darjeeling, mint and herb, or good-old-fashioned cocoa?’

          Sammi picked up the kettle and the room keys. ‘You sort the cups, I’ll get the water.’

          Before Alex sorted the cups she looked out the window to see just how the lodge came by its name. The garden was as wide as the building and probably twice as deep, most of which was lawn with shrubbery of various sorts scattered around its outer edge. In the centre was a large wooden gazeebo painted red and green with a white gravel path that led to a rear door somewhere right below their window. On the right was another path that ended where a rotary-style barbecue was stood beside the six-foot fence that ran around the perimeter. A dozen wooden tables with chairs were between the gazeebo and the barbecue, and outside the fence, on every side of the garden, were pine trees, a whole forest of them.

          She was about to upturn the cups when Sammi screamed and ran back into the room.

          ‘What’s wrong?’

          ‘In the mirror, I, I saw−’

          Alex didn’t wait for what she saw. ‘Stay here, don’t move.’

          She pushed open the bathroom door to see a cabinet attached to the wall that separated the two rooms, its own door a mirror, below it a sink with the kettle on its side and the cold tap running.

          At the end of her interview with Foley, he’d screamed as they removed him from the room, he’d warned her that any reflective surface was a window from their domain into ours. The world inside as physical as the world it reflected, but he’d said it was a darker place, an evil place. The image she saw in the news van’s window when she watched the recording Sammi had made, was it Evans? Could Evans know she was there? Had he followed her progress since then, seen her eyes every time she used her rear-view?

          She stepped into the bathroom and turned to the mirror, looked into it, waited for any slight change in its finish, a ripple of movement, a flicker of some sort. Nothing. She turned off the tap and opened the cabinet to see two clean drinking glasses and one unopened bar of soap. She closed it and looked again, waited. Was Evans hiding in there somewhere, watching her right now? If he was, could he reach out and take her by the throat?

          ‘Has it gone?’

          ‘Jee-Zuss, Sammi, you scared the holy crap out of me.’

          ‘Did you kill it?’

          ‘What?’

          ‘The spider, it was on the wall behind me, huge it was, big as my hand.’

          Alex turned to see the spider was actually no bigger than her thumb nail as it made its way across the top of the bathtub. ‘Is that all you saw in the mirror?’

          ‘Uh-huh, it was running down the wall behind me.’

          Alex relaxed, nodded. ‘Samantha’s spider scare,’ she said. ‘Don’t go in the closet dear or hide beneath the stair. Don’t go down the basement dark you’ll find a spider there.’

          ‘So you remember chasing me out the house dangling one of them by its leg while you said that?’

          She shrugged. ‘We were kids.’

          ‘No, I was a kid, you were fourteen, I was only five.’

          ‘Yeah, kids, like I said. Go on, sort the cups, I’ll get the water.

          Alex filled the kettle and heard the clink of cups as she plucked a sheet of tissue from a roll; she covered the spider and picked it up to shake it out the open window. After that she opened the bathroom cabinet’s door until its mirror faced the wall behind.