Ensnared (Splintered, #3)(22)
His fingertips take over where mine left off, stroking the metal panels. “Uncle William was teaching me how to open it, just the two of us, when he fell to his knees. He was struggling to breathe. I was too small to drag him to a wind funnel, and I knew if I took one for help, he’d be dead before I got back with someone.” Dad purses his lips, as if the confession has a distinctive flavor—sour and biting. “He started turning blue. I panicked. I’d heard stories about Wonderland. That the creatures had healing powers. I let myself through the gate . . . thought I could get help faster that way. I knew they could be evil, but I’d also heard some were kind. Unfortunately, I met with evil first.” He presses his forehead to the machine, lights flashing along his skin as he squeezes his eyes shut.
I put my hand on his shoulder, haunted by the image of him trapped inside Sister Two’s lair, wrapped in web with glowing roots attached to his head and chest. His dreams were being siphoned away to feed the restless dead. He’d been Sister Two’s prized dream-boy for ten years before Mom rescued him. This isn’t the time to tell Dad that he might be facing that same evil again once we get to Wonderland. That Sister Two might have Mom in her webby clutches, unless she was able to escape somehow.
“Dad, you were just a kid. You made the only decision you could. You were right, too. If your uncle’s skin was blue, he wouldn’t have lasted until you got back with someone.”
Dad sighs and lifts his head. “He’d had a stroke. Bernie told me they found him dead by the gate, and me missing.” Squinting, he eases his thumb into a space between two panels and pushes. He steps back before a door flings open and a set of motorized metal stairs drops down.
Uncle Bernie pokes his head out of the ride’s entrance. He’s wearing a fresh White knight’s uniform. “So, you do remember how to get inside. There’s a good sign.”
Just like that, Dad’s sadness melts away. He smirks and hands up the duffel bag.
I stare at him in disbelief. First, I saw him fence like an expert. Now, he’s the master of secret doorways. How can this be the same man who raised me? The man who read picture books in funny voices, who packed my lunches and never forgot that I liked graham crackers with my applesauce?
I thought he was so normal. Yet he’d had an extraordinary life ahead of him, before he was lost in Wonderland.
Dad helps me up the stairs behind him. Inside, we face innumerable images of ourselves amid black-and-white checks reflected off the floor. Mirrors upon mirrors slant along the round interior, covering the walls and domed ceiling and forming reflections that cast other reflections until there’s no end and no beginning. The illusion of infinity.
Carousel horses—in vivid colors and wild poses—appear to rise from the checked floor, captured in the reflections, yet none exist where we stand.
“The carousel . . . is it painted on the mirrors?” No sooner do I ask then I realize it’s similar to the moth spirits in the mirrored hall at Morpheus’s manor in Wonderland, except the horses aren’t trapped inside the reflection. They’re behind it somehow.
“You see the carousel?” Dad asks. He and Uncle Bernie exchange surprised glances.
“It would seem your girl is more Skeffington than merely her sense of humor,” Uncle Bernie teases, patting the top of my head as he scoots around us in the tight corridor.
Dad takes my hand and leads me through the circular surroundings. “What you’re seeing is the other side of the portal, Allie. None of the females in our family have ever had that ability.”
Uncle Bernie nods. “Could also be Alison’s lineage.”
As if sensing my quiver at the mention of Mom, Dad squeezes my hand. “The reflected reflections . . .” He motions around us. “The unending loop of images . . . they’re like an optical code. Only those with the gene can make out the two-way mirror effect. The carousel is outside the entrance to the looking-glass world. The Knighthood put it in place decades ago, piece by piece, because the area surrounding the gate is barren. We needed something to aim for on the other side. Now, once we discern which horses are real and not just reflections, we jump astride them through the portal.”
“Okay,” I say cautiously. “But why can’t you use a room of mirrors for the starting point? Why a Gravitron?”
“Well, this isn’t how we’ve always done things,” Uncle Bernie answers as he opens a metal breaker box and flips a few switches. “In the earlier years, before such motorized amusements were perfected, our ancestors used to go to carnivals in search of mirrored funhouses. It was risky. They chanced being seen by other thrill seekers. So they began to build their own infinity-mirror rooms. But it’s hard to get enough thrust to leap through the portal. Sometime in the 1950s, we started seeing the Rotor rides. They gave us a way to use centripetal force to our advantage.”
“I thought it was centrifugal.” I’m feeling woozy, and the ride hasn’t even started.
“Centrifugal force is reactionary,” my uncle says. “It only exists because of centripetal. If you spin around and stretch your arm while holding a hammer, you’re exerting centripetal force to make the object follow a curved path. But you’ll feel the hammer pulling your hand from your body. That is centrifugal—a coercion in the opposite direction. Our ride has been adjusted to use both forces against one another so that when the floor drops, your body will lurch forward, like what would happen to the hammer were you to let it go while spinning. It makes entry simpler.”