Alex Sees Things in Stereoview

Alex the Liar^* hadn’t been sleeping, either, Readers.

She struggled to keep her eyes open in The Orangerie’s oppressive heat. They felt like they’d been wrapped in starched wool.

She yawned. She blinked and blinked again. Then she brought the stereoscope to her face and looked through its lenses at the image she’d selected. She squinted and it grew blurrier, so she pulled back, repositioned, and relaxed her eyes until the photo shifted into its crispest three-dimensional form. She couldn’t be careless. She had to be certain.

She was certain. The image had changed. Even since yesterday.

She pulled the card from the viewer and placed it at the bottom of her stack. These were the very same stimulating stereo cards that (galling) Sara Dahlgren had brought over from Paris last summer. Had brought over from Paris for Libbie. They’d become infected, Alex had determined, after she’d stupidly used them as bookmarks in Clara Broward’s copy of The Story of Mary MacLane.

That was a mistake she’d not soon make again.

Although perhaps nothing at Brookhants happened by accident anymore. Perhaps it never had to begin with, not since Harold had lured them here.

(Not since Alex had encouraged him to.)

There were fourteen infected images in total, which meant Alex still had nine to go.

A fat drop of sweat rolled off the end of her nose and landed on top of her notepad. It briefly magnified the final o-n-e of the word anemone before absorbing into the paper. Another bead of sweat rolled into her right eye, leaving it stinging as she picked up her pen to add the following note, avoiding the sweat spot so as not to tear the paper: Woman standing has blue anemone tucked behind ear. Woman kneeling has blue anemone stem between teeth.

Alex had been checking the cards since February 6. Today was the seventeenth. In that time, the image had changed from showing one blue anemone in the bouquet at the base of the curtain to now containing only blue anemones.

She fanned herself with her notebook, though it did little good.

To Alex’s knowledge, no one had formally tended to The Orangerie’s plants since the start of the spring term some weeks before, but they seemed to prefer this. There was now something unquestionably depraved in their growth, something abhorrent. They smothered the windows, so that from the outside one could no longer see in, and the daylight that filtered through took on the eerie green of swamp gas. Vines had tangled into knots that could school sailors, and the citrus trees, though still producing enormous fruits, no longer had enough students to eat them. Instead, they fell to the ground and rotted there, leaving a cloying stench in the air and calling to the ubiquitous fruit flies, which sometimes swarmed so thickly that Alex could swipe through the air and come up with a palmful of them.

And all of this was to say nothing of the heat. It was, after all, winter at Brookhants. Even with The Orangerie’s cantankerous heating system operating at its fullest ability, it should have been drafty inside these walls of glass, even downright cold in places.

Instead, Alex now flicked more sweat from her eyelid.

She knew that soon enough she would have to stop this unnatural takeover. No one else could be counted on to see it for what it was and to take action. But for this moment, she was grateful for the privacy offered by The Orangerie.

Alex also felt that she owed it to Eleanor Faderman to spend time in the place where the girl died. It was important not to let herself forget that Eleanor had died. And how. Sometimes Alex thought she should be trying to spend time in the Tricky Thicket too, since that’s where Flo and Clara had met their ends. But it was harder to reach the thicket in winter. And the truth is, Readers, while Alex mourned their deaths—of course she did—she simply did not feel for them the same level of sorrow and regret that she did for Eleanor.

Lonely and alone Eleanor Faderman: Alex had failed her.

Whereas Flo and Clara had brought Mary MacLane’s book to Brookhants. And they’d started that club—and whatever wrong went with it out in the woods. Some of the blame for all of this surely wreathed their necks, too.

Alex believed that if Flo and Clara were somehow victims of the book, then Eleanor Faderman was most a victim of them—of their bad influence. They were dynamic older girls with campus stature. Eleanor Faderman had been only a wispy ghost mooning about in their shadows.

So what if Alex gave the bulk of her sympathy to poor Eleanor? Someone should.

Alex slid the next stereo card into place. This was the image of the woman in top hat and tails holding hands with the woman seated before her on a settee. The two of them grinning so garishly at each other that they seemed to have fish bones jammed cheek to cheek to stretch their mouths.

But something had changed: the wallpaper.

Where there had once been fuzzy fleurs-de-lis now were angel’s trumpet flowers, long and white with gape-mouthed ends, popping from between the stripes in mocking clarity.

Alex wiped more perspiration from the nape of her neck. She slid the card to the bottom of her stack, added another from the top. She needed to finish and get outside to meet the carriage before she was missed.

If Libbie would miss her. Rather hard to say, at the moment.

She forced herself to stay on task, noting new putrefaction in each image, all fourteen. Some cards revealed only small changes or additions, such as a cloud of black smoke on a window, or the creep of rot down a curtain, a few black specks hovering in the air that might be yellow jackets, but several of the images were now altered with monstrous significance.

Image #9: Scene painted on the three-paneled screen in background depicts an orchard of gnarled trees bearing black apples. Previously that screen bore a painting of healthy, fruitless trees.

Image #13: In the original, uncorrupted incarnation of this image, two women lounged together on the bed reading a magazine that the smaller woman held for them both to see. Now, that woman is holding a copy of The Story of Mary MacLane. Although the book’s title is too minuscule to read, its binding is clearly tinted red. This while the rest of the image remains in black-and-white.^*

When, some weeks before, Libbie had started her unnecessary tutoring of Adelaide, Alex had used those newly free hours to start, in earnest, her evidence-gathering. She would document the foul things afoot at Brookhants, maintaining a careful record, until she’d not only convinced herself, but had enough proof to convince Libbie as well.

She already had Flo and Clara’s copy of The Story of Mary MacLane, and it was surely the key item, but each day she found yet more corroboration that she could not rationally explain. Like these stereoscope cards, for instance. She’d slipped several inside the book to mark the entries she wanted to discuss with Libbie. Only Libbie had become so cross when Alex had broached the subject, so dismissive. (At the moment she was unwilling to talk about it at all.) So Alex was left to do the work herself, to scan its marginalia for clues and to guess about its missing page.^*

One night, doing this, she’d noticed a black growth in the corner of one of the cards she’d been using as a bookmark. She could see it even without the stereoscope, but with the viewer the problem became so much clearer to her.

Alex’s working hypothesis was assembled from bits of local lore, which held that Brookhants had been cursed since the days of the Rash brothers, owing to the brothers’ unnatural means of assuring their farm’s success. Alex thought that perhaps, over time, that curse’s efficacy had diminished. That is, until someone or something came along and allowed it to take root again. Someone like Harold Brookhants, for instance, with Madame Verrett stoking his belief.^* Wasn’t it at least possible that Harold had stirred up a wasp nest of trouble here by poking into things that he should have let be, and that even now, years after his death, that trouble still hadn’t subsided? And then a certain desperate book, written by an arrogant and wanton girl, made its landing on campus. A book that other desperate and misguided girls placed far too much stock in.

A book ripe to carry a curse.

Mary MacLane had written her portrayal with the purpose of escaping her dull domestic life as an unhappy daughter in Butte, Montana. She not only made no secret of this, she shouted it from the page. And what’s more, it had worked. She’d become famous and, at least for a time, financially independent, with a means to procure more money as soon as she was willing to write another book of the same sort. (Or worse, Alex guessed. Her next book would almost certainly be worse. It would have to be, wouldn’t it, to make anyone notice?)

Was it really more inconceivable to believe that Mary MacLane herself might have made some dark deal to ensure her astounding success than it was to believe that she hadn’t? That such unexpected, nearly overnight great-good fortune had fallen out of the sky and into her lap? Over and again in her book she called out to the Devil—her Kind Devil—to end her drab loneliness: It hurts—oh, it tortures me in the days and days! But when the Devil brings me my Happiness, I will forgive him all this.

Why should it be so impossible to believe that this Kind Devil would welcome the chance to trod his hooves around a school such as theirs, one filled with girls who thought themselves to be the same as their beloved Mary MacLane?

Mary MacLane really wasn’t so remarkable or talented or genius. Not really. It’s just that she put to paper the things that other girls had the good sense not to, the moral courage not to. Whereas Mary MacLane only had her Devil egging her along toward notoriety.

Alex saw very clearly how dangerous a book like Mary’s could become in the hands of such impressionable girls, such privileged girls: girls who kissed and fondled and laughed as they read each other passages out in the woods; girls whose parents’ social standing had taught them that there was nothing at all in the world they could not subjugate, purchase, or ignore; girls who set fires only to watch as others tried, and failed, to put them out.

What could be the harm in destroying this single, festering copy of such a book? For if there was even the slightest chance that it was the cause or conduit of their current troubles, wouldn’t it be better to do so? Even if some people might believe the action rash? Or benighted. (Even if Alex herself would have always thought the same. Before now, that is. Before now she would have . . .)

And anyway, hadn’t Alex lost all authority to argue such things when she’d come here to be with Libbie? When her Libbie had agreed to Harold Brookhants’s offer? (Or had agreed to enough of it, at any rate?) Here Alex was, after all, on Harold’s land in Harold’s Orangerie. She could hear Madame Verrett laughing all the way from France: I know what you’re thinking, Alex. And it’s not what you’re saying out loud.

What Alex the Liar had never confessed to Libbie, what she’d never been able to, was that after she had spent her remaining days in Chicago working to convince her that no matter how bleak her situation might seem, surely there were other, better, sounder options than Harold’s mad offer; and after they had sorted through these options together, discussed them and weighed them and tried to think of still more; and after Alex had watched from the window of her departing train as Libbie stood weeping on the platform watching her, watching her leave, Mr. Harold Brookhants had found her.

He’d found Alex, I mean.

Right away, Readers, he’d found her, there on the train, before it had even cleared the outskirts of Chicago. He and Madame Verrett had schemed it down to the minute. Alex hadn’t even been particularly surprised to see them coming up the aisle toward her. This trip had depleted her capacity for shock.

They had her trapped like a yellow jacket under a bowl. At least until the first station stop. (But even then, they could simply change their tickets, too. Harold Brookhants had the means to do whatever he liked. Except, it appeared, to convince Libbie to take his offer.)

For miles chugging across the country, Eastward Ho!, they worked to convince Alex that Harold’s option was the only option, and not just for Libbie but for her as well—if she wanted to be with Libbie, that is. Harold painted his imagined Brookhants School for Girls as a paradise awaiting its tenants. And owners. A place where she and Libbie could live as openly as the Ladies of Llangollen.^*

If Harold sold Alex the dream, Madame Verrett sold the nightmare, the one she said would be sure to come true for Libbie if she refused Harold’s offer. If she, for instance, told her parents of her pregnancy, or sought out Simon Everett III—or any other suitor—or attempted some horrible method of ending her pregnancy herself: all of which were options Libbie and Alex had discussed. Anything but Harold’s offer, the Madame said, would seal her fate.

And what a wretched fate it would be. That much was certain. Madame Verrett enumerated a host of dreadful futures for Libbie Packard, all of them avoidable, of course, if she’d only marry rich old Harold and partake in a ceremony or two, in France, before delivering her child there.

Alex did try to argue with them, to counter their assurances with her own ample doubts and misgivings, but together, over those miles and miles, they wore her down.

After all, she did want to braid her own life to that of her Libbie. Was she so wrong for wanting this, Readers? Libbie herself didn’t seem to know what she wanted. Couldn’t Alex want enough for them both?

And if Harold was going to die soon, anyway—and both he and Madame Verrett were so adamant that he would—then so what if he tried a few more of his nonsense rituals before he did?

Because of course they would be nonsense! What else would they be?

From the train, Alex wrote Libbie a letter. In it, she explained that she’d perhaps been a notch too rash when she’d so stridently condemned Harold Brookhants and his plan, too motivated by her own stupor over Libbie’s distressing news. Alex didn’t perform an about-face on the matter—that would have been suspicious—but she did begin the process, one furthered by many more measured letters between them, of allowing room for the idea of the future Harold Brookhants had conjured.

Alex let that idea of future in the door, spun it around, and told Libbie, gently—ever so gently—to take a good look, to consider it fully. It did have an appeal, didn’t it?

She, Alex the Liar, had done that. She’d done it so they’d end up here.

And now here they were.

And Alex the Liar had work to do.