Point Blank

was leaning on a stone dragon, identical to the one on the ground floor. He looked at the fireplace. That too was identical. In fact …
    Alex wondered if he hadn’t somehow made a terrible mistake. He was standing in a hall that was the same in every detail as the hall on the ground floor. There were the same corridors, the same staircase, the same fireplace … even the same animal heads staring miserably from the walls. It was as if he had climbed in a circle, arriving back where he had begun. He turned around. No. Here was one difference. There was no main door. He could look down on the front courtyard from the window. There was a guard leaning against a wall, smoking a cigarette. This was the third floor. But it had been constructed as a perfect replica of the first.
    Alex tiptoed forward, worried that somebody might have heard him climb out of the fireplace. But there was no one around. He followed the corridor as far as the first door. On the first floor, this would lead into the library. Gently, an inch at a time, he opened the door, It led into a second library—again, the spitting image of the first. It had the same tables and chairs, the same suit of armor guarding the same alcove. He ran an eye along one of the shelves. It even had the same books.
    But there was one difference—at least, one difference that Alex could see. He felt as if he had strayed into one of those puzzles they sometimes printed in comics or magazines: two identical pictures, but ten deliberate mistakes. Can you spot them? The mistake here was that there was a large television set built into a shelf on a wall. The television was on. Alex found himself looking at an image of yet another library. He was beginning to feel dizzy. What was the library on the television screen? It couldn’t be this one because Alex himself was not being shown. So it had to be the library on the first floor.
    Two identical libraries. You could sit in one and watch the other. But why? What was the point?
    It took Alex about ten minutes to discover that the entire third floor was a carbon copy of the first floor with the same dining room, living rooms, and games room. Alex went over to the snooker table and placed a ball in the middle. It tolled into the corner pocket. The room was on the same slant. A television screen showed the games room downstairs. It was the same as in the library: one room spying on another.
    He retraced his steps and climbed the stairs to the fourth floor. He wanted to find his own room, but first he went into James’s. It was another perfect copy: the same sci-fi posters, the same mobile hanging over the bed, the same lava lamp on the same table. There were even the same clothes strewn over the floor. So these rooms weren’t just built to be the same—they were carefully maintained. Whatever happened downstairs, happened upstairs. But did that mean there had been somebody living here, watching every movement that James Sprintz made, doing everything he did? And if so, had somebody else been doing the same for him?
    Alex went next door. It was like stepping into his own room. Again there was the same bed, the same furnishings, the same television. He turned it on. The picture showed his room on the first floor. There was the CD player, lying on the bed. There were his wet clothes from the night before. Had somebody been watching when he cut through the window and climbed out into the night? Alex felt a jolt of alarm, then forced himself to relax. This room—the copy of his room—was different. Nobody had moved in here yet. He could tell, just by looking around him.
    The bed hadn’t been slept in. And the smaller details hadn’t yet been copied. There was no CD
    player in the duplicate room. No wet clothes. He had left the closet door open downstairs. In here it was closed.
    The whole thing was like some sort of mind-bending puzzle. Alex forced himself to think it through. Every single boy who arrived at the academy was watched. All his actions were duplicated. If he hung a poster on the wall of his room, an identical poster was hung in an identical room. There would be someone living in this room, doing everything that Alex did.
    He remembered the figure he had glimpsed the day before … someone wearing what looked like a white mask. Perhaps that person had been about to move in. But all the evidence suggested that, for whatever reason, he wasn’t here yet.
    And that still left the biggest question of all. What was the