Dangerous Games

Chapter 8 part 1

Charlotte looked round at the stark metal walls surrounding her. The polish was so fine that they reflected the strip lighting in the ceiling of the lift well, and she could see her own reflection to both left and right. Indeed, on first catching sight of herself in those mirrored panels, she jumped, startled by the prospect that there might be someone else in this metal box with her. However, after a minute or so – for she wasn't the brightest girl on the face of the earth – it dawned on her that the plain, tired and morose face staring back at her on all sides was her own. Indeed, being hemmed in by highly polished surfaces on all four sides gave the curious effect of showing an infinite number of copies of herself receding off into the distance. Every time she raised a hand, turned her head or made the slightest of movements, her army of clones duplicated her gesture exactly. Whilst others might have found this interesting or even entertaining, it just unnerved her and she wished it would stop.

Unable to find a direction to look in which she was not faced by a multitude of her identical siblings, she chose to sit in a corner with her elbows resting on her knees and her eyes tightly shut. Maybe that would make it go away. It had sometimes worked in the past. On opening her eyes, she'd often found that whatever it was that bothered her had simply gone away.

But not this time. She felt the mechanism quiver beneath her and the lift jerked almost painfully into motion, accompanied by the mournful whining of the electric motor. She had no idea whether she was going up or down. Indeed, the damn thing could have been moving sideways for all she knew.

Annoyed, she opened her eyes, to be faced by her own reflection scowling at her from the metal surface of the lift door not six feet away. She'd known for years that she was ugly, the terrible truth slowly dawning on her as the boys in her class had gradually deserted her for the more photogenic members of her sex. She'd had to accept that unlike them, she had no good looks to fall back on, and this, coupled with an innate turgid stupidity, may well have been the root cause of the don't-care attitude that she displayed to the world at large. It was an unpleasant fact that she had gradually learned to ignore as a coping mechanism for her sorry, disappointing life.

But here and now she was confronted by more copies of herself than she could count, and they were literally only a few feet away from her. Staring at her. Mocking her. Daring her to ignore them if she could. A thought occurred to her – a rare enough occurrence and an indication that this situation was far from normal. Was she the real Charlotte or was she just one of the reflections? Perhaps one of these girls was the real thing and she was just an image in a mirror. They did whatever she did, but did she control them or did they control her? No, that's stupid, she thought, and that faint flicker of a philosophical puzzle that had so briefly crossed her mind departed.

But something was amiss. She could feel it even though she lacked the intelligence to work out what it was. Her reflection straight in front of her on the lift door mirrored her gormless, dumbfounded expression, as her thought processes lumbered into action. She looked around at her army of colleagues in their neat, unsettling ranks, desperately trying to work out what was wrong with this picture.

Then it hit her. It was the lift door itself. Where the small crack should have been that marked the join between the door and the lift wall itself, there was nothing. Merely a seam identical to all the other seams in that rectangular canister. Laboriously her mind went through the implications. She was trapped in a metal box with no entrances and no exits. So how had she got in? How would she get out? Was she going to die here? Was this box going to be her coffin?

The lift movement changed, juddering from side to side slightly. At the same time she heard a faint voice from outside the lift calling her name.

"Charlie, Charlie." The juddering became more noticeable, as though the lift were about to jolt itself loose from its guide tracks. She felt herself being jolted from side to side, and from where she was sitting in the corner of the lift, that meant colliding with the two nearest walls in turn.