Her Name is Alice

Chapter Two

Midnight arrived and the train came to a stop at a small, seemingly abandoned brick building beside the tracks. The windows on the building were boarded shut and the roof was one snowfall from collapsing. There seemed to be no other buildings in sight except for a few dozen scattered huts several miles in the distance gathered in an abandoned wheat field.

The sparrow woke Alice by gently tugging her yellow hair with its beak. It then tweeted sharply at her and flew out the now open train door. Alice rubbed the sleep from her eyes, made sure her tote was securely strapped to her shoulder and followed her little friend into the pouring rain.

Having nothing to protect herself from getting drenched, she hurried off the train and took shelter on the half-rotted porch of the rundown building. A young woman dressed from head to toe in black, as if she were in mourning, stood at the furthest corner of the porch with her headed tilted down so Alice could not see her face.

"Hello, ma'am?" Alice took a hesitant step towards the woman. "Do you happen to know how far Whitmore Academy is from here?"

The shadowed woman did not answer her, not even with a nod or shake of the head. Alice took another step towards her, trying to get a peek at her face. Before she could, a deep brown stagecoach pulled by a team of four black horses appeared in front of the building as if it had materialized from the soupy fog.

The coachman turned in his seat and spoke in a thick, Norwegian accent.

"I am here for Miss Alice White and Miss Eva Wyatt. Am I correct to assume those names belong to you two ladies?"

"Yes, sir, I am Alice White." Alice made to move towards the empty stagecoach when she spotted a little brown bird perched on one of the wooden wheels.

Her sparrow joined her in the carriage, shaking the water from its feathers. "I was wondering where you had flown off to."

The gloomy woman in black, Eva Wyatt, climbed in after Alice and sat in the corner farthest from her. Alice tried to make light conversation but every time she spoke, the girl folded herself more and more into the corner until she almost completely blended in with the shadows cast by the crescent moon's light.

Frustrated, Alice chewed on the inside of her bottom lip as she tried to figure out why Eva refused to make simple light conversation. Suddenly, she felt as if a dull gray mist was pulsing inches from her nose. Unsure what it meant, she tilted her head forward so that her ear was barely touching the strange fog.

Dozens of violent thoughts and emotions erupted in Alice's ear as if she had stepped into a completely different room where her own didn't exist. Listening closely to the estranged words, she realized that they all belonged to the same voice. The voice had an aggressive energy to it, as if it were angry at everything and everyone.

Impossible, she argued. How could one person have so much negative energy trapped inside their body like that? It must cause immense emotional pain.

The more she listened to the scrambled voice, the more her heart ached for Ava once she realized that was who's thoughts she was hearing. Alice's skin crawled at the agonizing sound of anger and depression ringing in her ears.

She pulled her knees to her chest and pressed her face into the skirt of her dress to stifle her whimpering. Images from Eva's complicated life forced tears from Alice's eyes. At some point, Ava must have noticed Alice's strange behavior.

"Why are you crying?" She raised her hand, inching out of the shadows to help in some way.
But something held her back, something stopped Ava from comforting Alice as she sobbed into her dress skirt.

"What happened to you, Evangeline?" Alice sobbed, pressing the heels of her palms into her eyes to stop the flow of tears.

Before Eva could open her mouth to ask what she meant, the coachman shouted something from outside the carriage.

"The storm only seems to be getting worse from here but not to worry, ladies, we'll be arriving shortly."

Eva shrank back into her corner of the carriage and Alice, pulling her ears from the horrible gray mist, dried her eyes. They sat in a grating silence until the stagecoach came to an abrupt halt.