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But what did Alice want? To haunt him? Laugh at him? Hunt and kill him? The scholarly literature on niffins was pretty thin. Their behavior was unpredictable at best. But whatever she wanted, he knew what she needed, and that was to be human again. He couldn’t have asked for a better chance.
And he needed her too: he needed to see her again, she was the only person he’d ever felt completely at home with. He knew he should wait and eat and sleep and talk it over with Plum, but—he told himself—it was hard to know how long he had. The whims of a niffin were pretty much the definition of perverse. If she left now he might never find her again. He was going to finish this.
And plus Plum would try to talk him out of it.
The house was quiet. He wasn’t even remotely tired. Staring at the red door he tried to summon up in his mind the Alice he knew. Did he really remember what she was like? Maybe he was pursuing a ghost, the ghost of a ghost, a figment of his own memory. It had been seven years: that was longer than he’d known her as a human. Maybe he was chasing some long-gone, never-was fantasy-Alice. If he could bring her back, who would she be?
Quentin was going to find out. He opened the red door but didn’t cross the threshold. The other room was still there, the mirror room, with its mirror windows. He sat down on the floor, cross-legged, and waited.
He’d been sitting there for ten minutes when Alice swam by, slowly, in profile, her legs trailing lightly behind her, as silent and malevolent as a shark in an aquarium. She was slightly smaller than she had been in life, like an expensive doll of herself. She didn’t see him; if she knew he was there she didn’t bother to turn her head.
Once she was out of view he stood up, waited five more minutes, then stepped through the door. Everything was just as it had been. There was the same deep muffled quiet. No wind from outside rattled the mirrored windows. Nothing moved. Or almost nothing: there was an unnerving flicker at the corner of his eye, like a television left on without the sound. It was the mirror in the bathroom, where flakes of snow were still drifting down.
He stood at the top of the stairs, swung his arms and bounced on his toes. He had not even a glimmer of a plan. How did you turn a monster back into a person? It took a long time for Alice to appear again, and he was starting to wonder if he should call her name when he heard a muffled, fumbling clatter in the room below, like somebody kicking something small and heavy across a rug. A minute later that thin blue radiance came filtering up the stairwell. Whatever he’d been about to do or say or cast exited his head, and he got up and walked stiff-legged back to the door. He couldn’t stop himself. It was like his legs were bionic and somebody else was controlling them.
That was what it was to fear for your life. He stopped himself in front of the door, breathing hard, not quite going through, not yet. What was he going to do? He wanted to shout at her: Wake up! Remember who you are! I need to talk to Alice! But the thing about monsters was, you couldn’t talk to them about it, because they wouldn’t admit they were monsters in the first place.
She came rising up right through the floor. Quentin bounded away from the door, out of the room and down the stairs like an athlete. He heard laughter, creepily familiar. It was hers, but cold, musical, mechanical, somebody tapping on a wineglass. She came floating down the stairs after him, and he backed away into the mirror-version of Plum’s bedroom. He caught a glimpse of her—she wasn’t quite Alice, not exactly. She blurred out for a second, a low-res hologram of herself. Her hair floated weightless around her head.
And she never stopped smiling. Never. Blue lips, blue teeth. Maybe it was fun being a niffin. Maybe everybody had the wrong idea about it.
She followed him down to the first floor, through the dining room and back up the stairs, back down, back up, then back up to the third floor. She didn’t hurry, though when he hurried up so did she, as if that were one of the rules of the game. It might have been comical if he weren’t being chased by a blue demon who could burn him to nothing just by touching him, and probably without touching him. Sometimes she paid attention to the walls and the floors and the ceilings, sometimes she passed through them with no resistance.
Maybe the weirdest thing about this surreal duel was that he was starting to enjoy it. However distorted or transmuted she was, she was still Alice. He was spending time with her. She was pure magic now, pure rage and power, but he had always loved her rage and her power. Those were two of the greatest things about her. She wasn’t Alice, but she wasn’t quite not-Alice either.
At this rate he could stay ahead of her forever as long as he avoided dead ends. It was like he was a ghost, he thought giddily, and she was Pac-Man, or the other way around. (Though no—Pac-Man could eat the ghosts when they were blue. Never mind. Focus.) He wondered how long till she lost patience and went for him. It was like swimming with sharks, except that he knew what sharks wanted. He couldn’t guess within a million miles what Alice wanted.
There were moments when he wanted to throw himself at her, right into her arms, and let her burn him up in an instant. What an incredibly stupid fucking idea.
After half an hour of this he doubled back through the red door, back home. This wasn’t getting them anywhere. He sat on the edge of the work table, gasping a little from all the stair climbing. He was still alive, but he wasn’t making progress. Someway or other he was doing this wrong.
He was still there when Plum came up around seven with coffee.
“Jesus,” she said. “Are you playing chicken with that thing?”
“With Alice.” He corrected her automatically. “I guess I am.”
“How’s it going?”
“Pretty well,” Quentin said. “I’m not dead.”
“And Alice—?”
“She’s still dead.”
Plum nodded.
“I don’t mean to sound at all critical,” she said, “but maybe you should just leave this alone? Stop tempting fate? I feel weird just being in the same house with it. Her.”
“I want to learn about her.”
“What’ve you got so far?”
“Not much. She likes to play. She could’ve killed me by now, but she hasn’t.”
“Christ! Quentin!”
They both watched the open doorway like it was a TV, or a hole through which they were ice fishing.
“It’s weird to think that she killed my great-great-uncle Martin,” Plum said. “But then it sounds like she had her reasons. Is she really alive in there?”
“I don’t know. It feels like she is.”
“OK. I’ll leave you to it.” Plum paused in the doorway. “Just—I know you’re going to get obsessed with this, so try not to forget the big picture. If there’s no hope, you have to promise me you’ll let her go.”
She was right, of course. Where did she get off, being wiser than him at twenty-one?
“I’ll let it go. I promise. Just not yet.”
“I’ll leave you alone.”
“I’m not alone,” Quentin said. “Alice is here.”
—
Later that day he tried fighting her. He’d watched Alice face down Martin Chatwin himself, with a whole arsenal of magic that he’d never seen before, but that was a long time ago. Now he knew his way around a ward-and-shield or two. He could chuck a magic missile with the best of them. He was a damn one-man magic-missile crisis.
And Alice was playing with him. This was a game to her. Quentin had this advantage at least: he wasn’t playing. It made him feel sick, fighting somebody he wanted to love, but right now Alice was in no condition to love, or be loved.
He looked up the thickest, baddest-ass shielding spell he knew about and crudely attached a couple of hardening enhancements to it. Taking a deep breath, he stepped through the closet door and as quickly as he could cast the shield six times in a row, one after the other, six magic shields hanging invisibly in the air in front of him, or all but invisibly. Looking through six of them at once turned the air a little rosy-pink.
Any more than six and they would have started to interfere with each other. Diminishing returns. Plus he didn’t think he could do another one right now anyway.
Then the missiles. He’d made them in advance, with all the trimmings: treble-weight, electrically charged, armor-piercing, viciously poisoned. He wouldn’t have dared to even prep the spell on Earth, let alone cast it, if the house hadn’t itself been so heavily shielded. If he missed they’d go through the wall like paper, plus they were a long way from street legal. Technically he was going to cast them in another dimension, so maybe he’d get off on jurisdictional grounds.
Alice rose to meet him: feeding time. She never quite touched the ground, he noticed, though when she saw him noticing she gave a little kick with her legs, balletic almost, a joke—as if to say, remember when I used to walk with these things? Sure you do. Remember when I used to spread them for you, my darling?
Quentin tried to kill her. He knew he couldn’t, but he thought she might feel it, and as long as she was a niffin this was virtually the only interaction they could have together. He cast the magic missiles, full strength and then some; they practically took his fingertips off. They were green, seething things that darted at Alice like hungry fish.
But about ten feet from her they slowed to a crawl. She looked at them, pleased, as if Quentin had made her cookies. You shouldn’t have! Under her gaze the missiles lost the courage of their convictions. They formed a line, single file, and obediently encircled her waist in a sparking, fizzing green ring.
Then the ring burst out in all directions. Two of the missiles whanged resonantly off Quentin’s sextuple shield. He flinched. He wouldn’t have survived even one of them.
Then Alice was across the room and hanging in the air right in front of him. He couldn’t tell if she’d teleported or just darted straight at him, she was that fast. For the first time she looked pissed off. She bared her sapphire teeth. Was it being a niffin that made her this angry? Or had she been this angry all along? Maybe the rage had been inside her already, and becoming a niffin had just revealed it—burned away the protective shielding.
Either way she was Alice to the life, he’d know her anywhere; she was more than alive, she was humming and crackling with energy. Her eyes were the brightest, angriest, most magnificently amused eyes he’d ever seen. She reached out and put a hand on the first of his six shields, pressed on it with two blue fingertips, then put them through it. The shield flared and died.
The second shield buzzed angrily when she touched it. That should have killed her too; he’d laced it with a magical charge he’d only read about, and in a book he shouldn’t have been reading. She wiggled her fingers with sensual pleasure. Delightful! With both hands she grasped the third shield and picked it up—set it aside as if it were a physical object, an old picture frame maybe, and leaned it against a wall. It was a joke, magic didn’t even work that way, but if you were a niffin it worked however you wanted it to. She did the same thing with the next one, and the next, stacking them neatly like folding chairs.
Quentin didn’t wait around for the ending. He could see where this was heading. Ceding the field of battle, he stepped back through the doorway. Let her follow him if she could, but she couldn’t. It was hard and smooth as glass to her. She mushed her face and her breasts against the barrier, like a kid squishing her face against a window, and looked at him with one antic eye, blue on blue.
She was daring him, baiting him. Come on! Quit moping around! Don’t you want to have some fun? When she opened her mouth it was bright inside, like in a photographic negative.
“Alice,” Quentin said. “Alice.”
He closed the red door. He’d seen enough.
—
She was the madwoman in the attic. It was weirdly intimate, this one-sided duel, just her and him, one on one. Not like sex, but intimate. He was like a free diver trying for greater and greater depths, forcing himself down, lungs bursting, then kicking frantically for the surface with his puny human flippers, the big blue nipping at his heels.
Quentin kept records of his trips in a spiral notebook: where he went, where she went, what he’d done, what she’d done. There wasn’t much point to it, because the performance went more or less the same way every time, but it helped him fight off sadness. And he did notice one thing: Alice liked to herd him toward the front door of the house, like she was daring him to open it. That seemed like a dare he’d be better off not taking.
But if there was nothing else on offer? Their little dance was like the endgame of a disastrously bloody chess match, just a queen chasing a beleaguered king around an empty board, sadistically refusing to checkmate him. It was difficult to know what if anything was going on in the queen’s mind, but one thing was clear: Alice was better at this game than he was. Apart from everything else she knew him better than he knew himself. She always had.
So that night, close to midnight, when Plum was safely in bed, he reversed tactics again. Alice wanted him to open the front door? He was going to head straight for it. Give her what she wants, see what she does with it. He still didn’t know what he was looking for, but maybe he’d find out what she was looking for.
He prepped a couple of spells in advance, and cast the first one as soon as he’d stepped through the door. It created a reasonably lifelike image of him in every room in the house.
It didn’t confuse her, but it might have pissed her off, because Quentin barely made it to the stairs before she banished the illusion so harshly that he felt like somebody had scrubbed his brain with steel wool. Go on or go back? In an undignified panic he feinted for the stairs, dodged past Alice at close quarters, arching his body like a bullfighter, and locked himself in the half bathroom off the landing.
