Unless she retreated all the way back up the stairs, there was no way to escape going by that door, and she must find Tilly. After waiting a few moments to gather courage, Emily took a deep breath, locked it in her chest, and started out again. She intended to skitter past the doorway like a small insect, not looking through it. But when she reached it, an unbearable curiosity drew her eyes in. She let out her breath with a gasp. There was no one in the room, but what a room it was!
A fire crackled invitingly in a red brick fireplace. Pictures of laughing children danced across wallpaper as sprigged with violets and rosebuds as an old English garden. Crocheted doilies lay on plump chairs and gleaming walnut tables like patches of spring snow. On a tiny mahogany chest of drawers, red-breasted berries nested in a brown china bowl beside a basket spilling over with tangled skeins of yellow wool as soft looking as eiderdown. The room was as cozy as Mrs. Plumly herself. Emily wondered how the thought of it could have made her shiver with fright. Now she could stand and gaze at it for hours. But the gloomy clock in the dining room was already tolling the hour of eleven, and Tilly must be found at once. Quickly, Emily crept past the enticing room.
But as she rounded the balcony, she glanced at the giant mirror that rose up from the first landing, reflecting the whole grim parlor below as clearly as a stereopticon slide. And what she saw brought her to a dead stop. Her heart seemed to jump into her throat and lay there frozen.
Standing before the great oak door of Sugar Hill Hall, just as when Emily had first walked through it, were Mrs. Meeching and Mrs. Plumly. Aunt Twice was in the reflected picture, too, opening the door to four people, two women, a man, and a boy. All four of them were enormously fat. The man had a round, pink face, tremendous jowls as smooth as silk, and tiny, slanted eyes. He was dressed in an expensive black suit with a rich gold chain resting on his stomach. The boy, except for being shorter, seemed to be his exact copy. One of the two women, very much older than the other, though no less fat, was sobbing violently into an impossibly tiny lace handkerchief.
Something in the back of Emily’s mind warned her, “If you can see in the mirror, you can also be seen!” Swiftly, she crouched down behind the balcony railing. Then held by a kind of dreadful fascination, she watched the scene being enacted in the room below, revealed in deadly clarity by the mirror.
“So, Mr. and Mrs. Porcus, you have brought us Mrs. Loops,” said Mrs. Meeching.
“Yes, Mrs. Meeching, you see we have brought her, just as we said we would,” Mr. Porcus said nervously. “Er, just as we said we would,” he repeated, looking quite miserable. His arms waved about in a distracted manner as if he were trying to find something to hang on to.
The older woman, who Emily suspected was Mrs. Loops, began to sob again into her small handkerchief.
Mrs. Porcus dropped her first chin consolingly into her second, which in turn dropped into her third. “There, there, dear Aunty,” she said, “look at this grand parlor. I’m certain you will be quite comfortable here.”
Mr. Porcus looked distinctly uncomfortable. “Perhaps, Lucine, we should reconsider—”
“Your wife is quite right, Mr. Porcus. Your aunt will indeed be completely comfortable.” Emily had trouble recognizing this soothing voice as belonging to Mrs. Meeching, though it did.
Mr. Porcus, who now looked as if he had just floated through a warm oil bath, beamed expansively at Mrs. Meeching. “Well, in that case …”
Another heartrending sob from Aunty Porcus (otherwise Mrs. Loops) seemed to have no effect on anybody.
All the while this was going on, the boy was staring at the bowl of peppermints across the parlor, his jaws moving mysteriously inside his fat cheeks as if he were actually chewing one. At last, he began pulling rudely on his mother’s coat sleeve and pointing.
“If Albert might be spared one of your delicious peppermints?” inquired Mrs. Porcus of Mrs. Meeching.
“Indeed,” said Mrs. Meeching with a shade less soothing oil in her reply. Then the whole joyous party processed across the parlor to the peppermint bowl.
What astonished Emily was that no one in the Porcus family seemed to pay any attention, much less even see, the other old people lined up on either side of the parlor. No one, that is, except Aunty, who looked fearfully from left to right, and then threw a fresh wave of useless sobs into her sodden handkerchief.
“We have these for the pleasure of our boarders, although we don’t encourage the habit,” said Mrs. Meeching as they all stood worshipfully around the glistening bowl. “Bad for the teeth!” she hissed at Albert. Then her lips stretched out like two thin rubber bands in what must have been intended for a smile.
Albert paid no attention to her. The little eyes in his round face stared greedily at the peppermints. All at once his pudgy hand darted out to snatch three of them and stuff them into his mouth. Then, as Mr. and Mrs. Porcus gazed at him fondly, he grabbed a whole handful and stuffed them into his pocket, his face turning scarlet with greed and excitement.
Mrs. Meeching’s mouth continued to smile, though the rest of her
