She had moved away five months ago. No one should have been addressing letters to her here.
But there it was, a single golden envelope with “Rosalind Albertson” embossed on the front. (You would think people this fancy could afford to hire a forwarding service, she thought to herself.) It glistened as she took it from the mailbox and into the midday sun. She flipped it over, noting the expensive feel of the paper — no return address.
Envelope in hand, she sat down on the stairs in front of her old home. Nobody lived here now; the developers that bought the lot, intending to turn it into some condominium plaza thing that Rosalind didn’t quite comprehend, were having trouble securing new funding. Old green paint was beginning to curl and peel from the front door. She glanced around, half-expecting to see someone watching her — but there was no one around her.
She slid a nail under the envelope flap, and opened it to reveal — nothing. There was no paper inside, despite the weight of the thing, which was definitely not normal for an empty envelope. Or — a tiny, flat piece of shiny black metal fell to the ground with a clink.
Before she could pick it up from between her feet, a tinny voice issued from the featureless medallion.
“Sector 291 reporting to Unit 48B.”
Then, a twist of radio interference, and “… you’re listening to The Groove 105.5!” — more static — “Delta five niner two, you are clear for takeoff” — a sound of loud feedback — and then the noise disappeared.
It was only after a long silence that Rosalind heard a tentative “hello?”
The voice sounded as if it were coming from far away, and there was some noise in the background that she couldn’t identify.
“Hello…?”
Somehow it was… familiar to Rosalind, the voice, but she couldn’t place it, like recognizing an actor but being unable to say what other roles she’d seen him in before. The idea distracted her for a moment before another, more desperate, question came:
“Is anyone there?”
“Yes… yes, I’m here. Who are you — do you need help?”
“No, I’m — no. I take it you’re Rosalind Albertson?”
“Yes — and you are…?”
“Hold this coin up to the sun, and you’ll find out.”
She picked up the coin — with a bit of difficulty; it felt as if it were as thin as a sheet of paper — and held it up to the sun as the voice instructed. She only had a moment to notice that the coin was translucent, more of a deep purple than true black, before she felt as if her head were being pulled open, as if images were literally worming through her eyes into her mind. Rosalind lost her footing. No, it was more accurate to say that her footing lost her — the ground was pulling away from her, as was the sky, seemingly pulled into a vacuum behind her. The colors around her swirled in spirals of violently neon colors, and the sound of something like a deep jet engine roar surrounded her. She barely had time to scream before she landed on the ground with a deep, resounding thud.
Her ears rang as she staggered and fell over to one side, the side of her face meeting a cold gray floor, though she didn’t feel any pain. Her senses were too overloaded to care.
A woman dressed in black stood before her, a similar-looking coin in her left hand.
“Miss Albertson? Actually,” the woman said, pulling Rosalind’s limp body up off the ground with her right arm, “I should call you Rose, shouldn’t I?”
Rosalind’s stomach churned. “No. No. Don’t call me Rose.”
“I’m sorry. I see I was misinformed. Much can change in four years….”
Rosalind sat back and rubbed her head. The room was dim, and the floor — it felt smooth, like stone or tile, but it was seamless — and she couldn’t see walls on either side, but the way the woman’s voice echoed slightly informed her that they must have been there.
“My real name isn’t important, but for the sake of convenience you can call me Alice. Fits, doesn’t it, in this little rabbit warren?”
Rosalind tried to get a good view of Alice’s face, but it seemed like a censor blur had been put over the top. She rubbed at her temples. “I… what… what do you want?”
“To escape from this place, is all. And to do that, I had to bring you here.”
“So you have the power to teleport people over who knows how long of a distance, but you can’t get out?” She glanced around again, trying to find some kind of landmark. “Where are we?”
“You… seem to be under the impression that I know more than I do. I can’t really say where this is, or whether ‘where’ is even the right question to be asking. It doesn’t look like anything from my time or era.”
“It doesn’t look like anything at all, really.” She looked Alice up and down, noting her skin-tight clothing and the turquoise mark on her shoulder — an intricate-looking tattoo. “‘Your’ time or era… would that be different from mine? 1998?”
Alice glanced at Rosalind briefly, with sharp blue eyes that seemed to have an unnatural glint behind them. “That’s not important.”
Rosalind narrowed her eyes. “And how am I supposed to know whether or not I should help you? Is this a prison? You’re not telling me anything about yourself. Why should I trust you?”
“Either you trust me, or you figure a way out of here alone.” Alice’s airy voice suddenly took on a much sharper tone. “I brought you here because I trusted you, and I would appreciate if you could at least try to do the same.”
Rosalind sighed. She had moved to get away from all this — but always managed to get sucked back in, quite literally.
“Fine.”
“I’m glad. Now, a question for you. What can you see in this room?”
Rosalind squinted. “A single lightbulb. A simple wooden chair. Either no walls, or black walls. And you.”
“You’re different from the last two. They both said they were in a house. Small, one story, completely unfurnished, green front door….”
Rosalind’s heart skipped a beat. “That… I moved away from that house five months ago. I… well, the nightmares stopped once I settled in to my new apartment.”
Alice paced in a circle in front of Rosalind. “You’re the first one to see the dark room I’m seeing right now. I don’t understand.”
“Who were the other two? Did they also live in that house?”
“I imagine they didn’t. Neither of them mentioned anything to me about it seeming familiar. They couldn’t help me, so I sent them away.”
Rosalind frowned. “Is there anything else here? Other than this room?”
“No, not to my knowledge.”
Rosalind stood and arbitrarily picked a direction to walk — left. Alice said nothing; Rosalind walked, briskly, her steps echoing throughout the room, which was rapidly plunging further into darkness. She could see a pinpoint of light up ahead — she dashed toward it, only to see that same lightbulb with Alice standing patiently underneath it. She turned around, to see that the Alice she had just left was still behind her. As she looked left, right, in every direction, she realized that the floating lights in the distance weren’t a consequence of her rough arrival — they were an infinite grid of light bulbs, each with the chair and Alice underneath.
“I had a dream like this, once,” she said, trying her best to keep her voice steady.
“Is that so?” Alice said, though Rosalind couldn’t tell which one. It sounded like all of them had spoken at the same time. She realized with a jolt of horror that that “echo” that she thought she had heard was all of them speaking in unison.
In a panic, Rosalind ran out of the darkness between lights, back to the place where she had started. Out of the corner of her eye, before the glare made it impossible to see anything in the distance, she saw another girl of her height, her stride, her hair length, making her own run to safety. She felt as if she were trapped in a so-called “funhouse” at a carnival — trapped in a nightmare — but when she squeezed her eyes shut and willed herself to wake up, she found herself still in the same room when she opened her eyes again.
Rosalind clutched her head, which she thought was beginning to make an odd whistling sound. “Why? Wh — why? Why, why, why, whywhywhywhywhy?!” She flung her hands onto Alice’s shoulders, her face somewhere between crying and screaming in anger.
Then her breath caught in her throat, and she withdrew her fingers as if burned.
Alice’s skin was ice-cold.
Alice looked away in shame, saying nothing.
“I…” Rosalind reached out a hand before withdrawing it again. “Are… are you dead?”
“Not strictly so. That implies that I was alive at some point.”
You’re a robot. You’re a manifestation of my subconscious. You’re divine. “Why are you even here in the first place?”
“This is a strange place, isn’t it?” Alice was either taking an odd tangent, or ignoring Rosalind’s question entirely; Rosalind decided it was the latter. “It appears infinite, yet it possesses a clear finiteness. We see a million copies of ourselves, but we recognize that they are merely reflections in a mirror. It’s oddly contradictory, don’t you think?”
“I suppose. And who knows what it’s made out of — how have you tried to get out so far?”
“If I know of a key to this realm, it is this… coin.” Alice held up the almost-black circle of metal between her straightened fingers. “I used it to bring three people here, and I used it to send two of them away. As far as I can tell, the light and chair were just set pieces to draw attention to the coin. A very minimal universe.”
Rosalind frowned. “But you can’t send yourself away?”
Alice gave a bitter laugh as she took a seat in the chair. “If only it were that easy, then I would have rushed out of here long ago. It’s like a push. You cannot push yourself, Rose. Someone else must do it for you.”
“So you’re telling me that this’ll basically boil down to a battle of wills to see who gives in first and is left behind as the other is transported out.”
“I hope the situation is not so dire as that. It would be cruel of me indeed to ask you to trust me, only for me to betray that trust and leave you stranded with no return.”
“And how are we supposed to both escape? We can’t simultaneously use the coin, can we?”
“Which is why I want to find another way. And I believe that other way starts with Rosalind Albertson. It starts with you, Rose.”
Rosalind grit her teeth, memories flashing behind her eyes. “Didn’t I tell you not to call me that?”
“I apologize. It’s….” Alice’s voice trailed off. “Habit.”
Rosalind stared at Alice’s expressionless face. Four years… habit? That image in her mind: a slim back receding into darkness, walking away from her, her face tear-stained….
I love you, but enough is enough…. The words formed themselves in her head.
Alice… Alicia? Her hands were clenched into fists, and she found her whole body trembling.
A cold hand grabbed Rosalind’s left arm, arresting her motion.
“If you are who you — are — don’t touch me.”
“I’ll overlook the tautological nature of that condition for now, but what right do you have to tell me that?” Alice’s distant facade began to crack with visible anger. “Why shouldn’t I touch you, Rosalind Lauren Albertson?”
Rosalind slapped her hand off. “Do I have to give a reason? Just don’t touch me. At this rate I won’t want to help you anymore.”
“That you can even say that so easily… even if you’re trying to forget everything that happened, even if you can pretend it’s all different now, I won’t. I can’t! Tell me, Rose, when did you start having these nightmares of yours? You said you’d stopped having them recently, but when. did. they. start?”
Rosalind clamped her mouth shut. After a few moments, she unclenched her jaw and said, “Four and a half years ago. Not too long before that day.”
“That day when she and I were separated, Rose. She, the Alicia Waterston currently lying in that bed in room 2613, and I, the thing that she needs to get out of there.”
“So that’s why….” Rosalind took the coin from Alicia and examined it as memories flashed through her head — a bright, cheerful laugh; beautiful smiles; sparkling eyes…. “How did you send the others back?”
“I didn’t. They went back themselves. You’ve moved a lot, haven’t you?”
“Huh? I — you can’t move?”
“No, I mean homes. Moved from place to place. The other people were just the ones who happen to be living where you used to. I have no thrall over them; after all, I’m just an ex-girlfriend of a former resident. They left as they pleased. Thought it was a dream.”