Eugene and Casper

Chapter One: A History of Victoria Place

Many, many years ago, when royal elk and rabbits roamed the earth at leisure, when the British were colonizing the various and sundry parts of the world, a few years before a trio of aboriginal explorers landed on the moon in their homemade weather balloon, a little girl named Victoria sat in a tent, drawing pictures in the sand with her index fingers.

Her father was a colonel in the British army or navy or something -- she could never keep them quite straight -- and they were stationed in Mozambique. Hot, dry, sandy Mozambique. Sometimes the sand got in her eyes, and it stung. Sometimes it didn't, though, and those were the times when Victoria would go exploring, scouting out the territory among the rocks and dried up riverbeds. Victoria was a brave little girl.

She also has nothing to do with this story.

The person who does have something to do with this story lived on the other side of the world. When he had reached a ripe old age of eight years old, Eugene (as we'll call him, for that was his name) was sent to a boarding school on Piper Lane, which eventually became 500 North as we now know it. The school was a maze inside, with rooms scattered here and there, left and right, even on the ceiling. There was only half a rhyme (the other half was lost in the laundry, the cleaning woman said) and no reason whatsoever to it all.

Sonny didn't care much for the schoolmasters, for they didn't care much for him. But he plodded along in his studies, scraping out sums with the chalk on his dusty slate, learning to spell words like "precipice." The part he actually enjoyed, though, was reading about people on the other side of the world -- people like Marco Polo and Genghis Khan. He would often dream of exploring the world, driving a team of camels across the Sahara, or sailing a Spanish galleon into the heart of the Atlantic in search for lost treasure. But his dreams were only dreams.

It was a Friday afternoon, with only half an hour of class left. Eugene was staring out the window next to his desk when he spotted something different. There, behind the school, was a large mirror. It was so big that it cut across the entire block, stretching up as far as he could see. It hadn't been there before; nothing had been there but an old field, which the teachers would never let anyone play in.

And reflected in the mirror, in the second window on the third floor, was Eugene. He lifted his hand ever so slightly, so as not to catch the attention of the schoolmaster, and bent his fingers in a timid wave.

His reflection didn't wave back.