Some light shone in the square. I only felt it as if someone prickled my forehead with a needle, swiftly but gently. I lifted my head. It was awfully cold. I had no idea how long I had been sitting motionless on the pavement.

I looked around, sleepily, just to check whether I had left something behind. There were a lot of crumpled tissues around the place where I had been sitting. Have I been crying? I couldn’t recall.

No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t even remember how I had got in the square in the first place. I had no idea where I spent the previous night or what could have happened then.

I put the tissues in my pocket, hoping that there would be a bin somewhere close, and I set off towards the light. The bright whiteness was not very inviting though, indeed, it was quite frightening. Empty. I felt as if I were to follow that light, turning at the corner, I would face the end of the world: a foggy emptiness under my feet.

Slowly, a scene came back to me: I was sitting in an empty pub, at an enormous table with someone, I was unable to recall his face. I had a steaming cup of tea in front of me. We held each other’s hands. I couldn’t say whether this had happened the night before, or years ago. I did remember though how distant we were, that man and I. Whether it was Edmund or not, I couldn’t tell.

I watched the steam coming from my cup. I leaned closer to smell the aroma better. I thought it was mint, in fact, I am pretty sure about that. The only reason I didn’t let the man’s hand go, was that I couldn’t think of an excuse to do that.

As I was approaching the corner, and I was completely absorbed in the light of dawn, another scene came back to me. Perhaps this did happen the previous night. I was sitting at the table. The cup was empty in front of me. I have no idea what was in it before. I didn’t even know whether I had chosen that drink or someone else ordered it for me. Anyway, the only traces left of it were a few transparent specs at the bottom of the cup. If it was sugar, I doubt I had chosen the drink myself. I wouldn’t think it was chosen by Edmund, either.

I, almost involuntarily, stopped at the corner. I peered down, afraid, but there was no emptiness under my feet. Instead, there was an incredibly bright and clear puddle. I leaned closer. The rising sun and the floating white clouds were reflected in it, it was beautiful. I squatted and looked. I hadn’t seen anything quite like this in a long while.

I extended my arm, I wanted to touch the clean water, but I stopped dead. I held both my hands above the puddle. Still nothing. No reflection of them whatsoever.

I clapped my hands. Nothing. No sound at all.

I knelt down on the pavement and leaned above the water. I couldn’t see anything else, only the sky.

I jumped up, I stomped, I cried, I shrieked. Nothing. All quiet.

I jumped into the puddle. My shoes sank noiselessly, my jeans lifted and began to float, while the surface of the water didn’t move at all.

As the hotness spread from my toes to my feet, to my legs, I started to understand. Suddenly, I knew who that man was, sitting with me at that table, and what he made me drink.

I stepped out of the puddle, warm and cosy now. My shoes and my jeans were just as dry and dirty as before. ‘Yeah!’ I cried, and spun around. I spun and spun and spun. To my great disappointment, I had to realise that I cannot even get dizzy in this state.

–

Mum keeps disappearing, that’s normal at ours. She wanders around for a while, then she comes back to us. When she comes back, she is better, for a while. And then, she disappears again. It goes like this, ever since I can remember.

But now, there is something really strange. She is here, in the flat. She is doing the dishes, making the beds, reads, types furiously. Still, she is somehow not here.

I don’t know whether Pete has noticed it. He seems to be interested exclusively in his knights.

I am sure Dad didn’t notice it. He went into his study this morning, holding one of his enormous lexicons and a bunch of papers, as usual. I cannot even imagine what my Dad does for a living. What can those lexicons contain, he is so absorbed in? What is he writing all day long with his elongated, spiky handwriting, on those yellowing papers he leaves everywhere around the flat? The other day, I read one of the papers that he had accidentally left in the bathroom. I couldn’t understand a word of it. Nothing. Could it be written in Latin, or what?

Anyway, at the moment, Mum has not disappeared – yet. She does her household chores silently, although I know how she hates them. Still, I can see that she is not here with us. For example, today, she had not quarrelled with anyone yet! She didn’t say a word when Pete put Leo right next to his plate on the dining table. The teddy bear actually stayed there until we got up from the table! And, the final conclusive proof: she hasn’t drank any of her coffee. Not one single sip!

I keep suspecting that the person who is sitting in front of me, it’s not actually my Mum at all. I am guessing, it is the Dark Figure himself. He could have transformed into Mum’s shape, and he could be waiting for the right moment to ruin our family. I have no definite proof yet, but this coffee business certainly indicates something like this.

I am sure Nanny would come up with a simple enough explanation, ‘Oh, your mum is exhausted because of the pregnancy’, or ‘she has some illness brewing in her system, even if she doesn’t want to show it.’ Nonsense.

–

I didn’t waste any time to enjoy my liberty. I thought that I would have plenty of time for that later. I ran straight home.

On the bus, people simply stepped through me, just like I stepped through the door between two stops when the bus slowed down by our street. A car sped through me, but I could only feel a bit of cool air, nothing else.

I stepped at the opposite side of the street and looked in our window. Edmund was absorbed in one of his lexicons, he sucked his pen absentmindedly. ‘He hasn’t noticed,’ I thought.

I slipped through the quite dirty window pane of our kitchen. I tried to pick up one of Pete’s plastic swords from the floor, but my fingers slid through it. I wasn’t sure whether that made me happy or sad.

As I lifted my head, I saw – myself. It was me, no question about that. It was nothing like looking into a mirror, since the other Alice didn’t do at all what I was doing. She leaned, she picked the sword up and she put in on the steps to take it upstairs to Peter’s room later.

I was wearing a blood red T-shirt from the day before. The other Alice was wearing a simple black one. My hair was freely floating around my face. She tied her hair in a neat ponytail, even if some locks escaped the clip.

The strangest thing was that I didn’t feel at all like the other Alice was me. It even crossed my mind that the other Alice was not me after all, but he himself who, for his own amusement, or for some other obscure reason, transformed into my shape. I was raking my brain how to find it out.

It was that moment when I noticed the cup on the table. The coffee wasn’t even steaming anymore!

‘I have to tell Dot,’ I thought, desperate, ‘right now!’ I ran upstairs. If I didn’t run through it, I would have tripped on Pete’s sword. ‘That’s lucky,’ I thought.

Dorothy was lying on her bed. She was holding a book, but I could see that she wasn’t reading. She was deep in her thoughts. ‘Dot, Dot!’ I shouted in her ear. Nothing. Of course, she couldn’t hear me.

I knew there was no way for me to reach her now. So I squatted in front of her and kept staring at her. I couldn’t remember the right spell.

‘Cacophony, commotion, drum, trumpet, emotion!’ I attempted.

There was a tremendous bang. One of the bookshelves collapsed to the floor. ‘Well, I didn’t mean this –‘

Peter and Edmund came running. ‘What just happened?’ they asked in unison.

‘I guess one of the bookshelves have collapsed,’ said Dot, rather unimpressed, ‘but that’s not the problem –‘

So she did notice!

That was when the other Alice entered the room. I just stared at her. She took a cardboard box and organised the books in it by size. She took the shelf out that had been stuck halfway. She found the missing holder thingy straight away. She was so effective, so well-organised. ‘Of course, this isn’t me,’ I thought.

It was really interesting. I have never had the opportunity to watch myself for such a long time before. I did see some videos in which I might appeared in for a few seconds; and I did see myself twice a week in the enormous mirrors of the gym. But this Alice was completely different. She was surprisingly tall and slender. Even her fingers were much longer than what I thought mine were. She had enormous eyes, bluish-greenish-grey ones, really sad ones.

To tell the truth, I felt sorry for myself.

On the other hand, I did like that Alice. I have never thought that my movements were so elegant and decisive. I didn’t know that my hair curled so nicely even if it was in a ponytail, as if I spent hours in front of the mirror to make it curl this perfectly.

‘Do you like it?’ I turned, horrified. He grinned, not cruelly, only merrily. He put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Do you like yourself?’ he teased me.

‘So, it’s not you after all,’ I managed to utter.

He laughed, ‘Me?? Don’t be silly, Al.’

As he watched me watching my family in horror, he laughed out loud. ‘Don’t worry, Al,’ he said, ‘they can’t hear us.’

I nodded. Of course, I knew that too. Still, it was such an absurd situation.

–

My mother acted so effectively about the collapsed bookshelf that I knew for sure now, this couldn’t be her.

At lunch, even my father noticed something strange. ‘Don’t you drink your coffee?’ he asked.

‘Sure,’ my mother, or whoever she was, said.

Unfortunately, the next minute, my father was already deeply buried in his lexicon, and he didn’t see that the impostor who took my mother’s shape to infiltrate our family, poured her coffee into the sink when she thought no one was watching. Well, I was.

At that point, I started to have some doubts. If it was the Dark Figure, he would surely know that I witnessed the whole coffee business. Either it was not him, I thought, or he wanted me to know that it was him.

In the afternoon, Pete nagged ‘mum’ so persistently that she finally gave in and went upstairs to play knights with him. I took this opportunity to empty the herbs shelf. I took some cardamom, lemongrass, cloves and cinnamon. There was no vanilla at home, so I added some grounded coffee instead, just in case. I put them in the old handkerchief that Mum kept precious (if I remember correctly, it was her grandmother’s), and I hid the bundle under the mattress of my parents’ bed. I whispered the spell, and I managed to complete the process right before I heard the stairs creaking. I jumped far from the bed.

Luckily, it was only Dad.

–

‘That’s enough. Let’s go now,’ he pulled me, and the next moment, we were stepping through the wall.

–

I kept an eye on ‘mum’ during the whole evening, but there seemed to be nothing strange about her. I got scared, what if it was really Mum? What effect would my spell have on her then?

Having had my shower, I closed my bedroom door, hid under the blanket, and I tried to breath as slowly and steadily as I could. I had no intention to let the creature who took my mother’s form, to slip into my bed and wish me goodnight.

When I heard the door knob turning, I froze.

‘The bottom of my cradle, the lid of my coffin, the rock of my castle, the peace of my soul,’ I chanted under my breath.

All in vain. The creature did stop for a moment at the foot of my bed, but she probably just waited for her eyes to get used to the dark, then she quietly slipped next to me. She stroked my hair, held my shoulder and buried her face into my neck.

I knew that she knew I wasn’t sleeping. Still, I focused exclusively on breathing slowly and steadily.

‘Are you asleep, Dot?’ she whispered into my neck.

I didn’t answer.

After like an eternity, she kissed my hair lightly and slipped out of the bed. When the door finally closed after her, I counted to one hundred before I dared to emerge from under the blanket. I sat up and looked out of the window, into the night. The dim light of the street lamps lit the rooftops around.

Suddenly, I saw her. She was creeping on the roof opposite. Her yellow eyes shone at me, then she jumped down somewhere, into the darkness.

It was probably just a stay cat. Still, I couldn’t stop shivering.

–

I woke up in the middle of the night. I had to stop breathing. I felt if I inhaled that strong spell even just once more, I would faint.

I found it quite easily. It was under the mattress, packed in my Nan’s handkerchief.

I ran into the bathroom, opened the window and shook the spell out on the street below. I could see how it sparkled on the pavement before the magic died out.

I put the handkerchief under the tap and I let icy cold water run on it for the longest time. I washed the fabric with some smelly French soap like a million times to get rid of even the faintest trace of that spell.

I didn’t even notice Dot coming into the bathroom, until she hugged me tight from behind.

‘Mum!’ she sighed.

‘OK, OK, I’m here now,’ I stroked her hair.

I hugged her tight, truly grateful.

We stood in the bathroom for a long time hugging each other. The cool wind kept whoosing in from the open window, the cold water kept running on the handkerchief.

‘Now, it is really time for you to go to sleep,’ I said quietly after a while.

‘Then come and wish me goodnight,’ she insisted.

‘All right,’ I said, and I turned the tap off.

–

Mum stayed with me in the bed for a long time that night. Only when I managed to convince her, with my superior technique of breathing slowly and steadily, that I was truly asleep, that is when she dared to whisper into my hair, ‘Thank you, Dot!’

‘You’re welcome,’ I whispered into the night when the door had closed behind her, ‘but I do wish you stopped this now!’