Nevermore

46 Bedight in Veils

Isobel came to stand just in front of the door. Behind her the Nocs called and rasped wildly. Winds pulled and jerked at her hair, at the jacket and at the hem of her tattered dress. The paper signs taped to the door twitched and stirred in the bluster, threatening to blow away in a wind that was fast becoming violent. She reached for the doorknob, which was on the left side of the door this time, backward from what she remembered from the door in Bruce’s shop, just like the signs. There came a rustle at her side and she stopped, turning her head sharply to catch Pinfeathers’s jerky approach.

“Don’t,” she warned him.

He froze, leaving a distance of several feet between them. The other Nocs silenced and stilled themselves in the trees as Pinfeathers eyed her warily. She glared back coolly. It seemed that they now both understood what she was capable of.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he said, that static voice taking on a smooth, diplomatic tone. His gaze darted to the door, then back to her. “And so I’ll offer you that same warning.”

She narrowed her eyes on him. There was something very wrong about the way Pinfeathers worked. Hadn’t he tried to skewer her only a moment ago? So now why was he turning all Jiminy Cricket? And why, after fighting with her so fiercely in the graveyard, had he changed at that last second and offered her help?

That he’d wanted to toy with her had been evident right from the start. But it had become more than that. There was something else to him, a deeper secret lurking behind the hollow mask that was his face. Her thoughts went back to the purple chamber, to Pinfeathers and Varen’s strange conversation. What were they to each other?

Isobel knew it would be a dangerous question to ask the creature standing before her, and so she would keep it locked away, along with so many more, for Varen. She had other questions, though, for the apparent ringleader of the Nocs. “What will I find behind this door?” she asked.

“The other side of what you know,” he answered, with a laugh. “Just like me.” His smile faded.

A chill ran through her. “What do you mean?” She tried to make the question sound demanding, but even she couldn’t ignore the note of uncertainty and fear in her voice.

“Oh.” He sailed through the distance in quick, twitchlike motions until she became aware of him standing just behind her. His remaining arm wrapped around the front of her, across her chest, “I mean that you might not like what it is you find in there, that’s all.”

Stiffening, Isobel tolerated his closeness. At her side, her hands balled into ready fists. “You can touch me, but you can’t hurt me,” she guessed.

“Which works out,” he said admittedly. “Because, remember, I don’t want to hurt you. But you have to understand, Isobel, there is always that fine line.” As he spoke, his hand trailed up her collar, his touch featherlight. “Between doing what we want . . . and doing what we’re told.” Cold, his fingers wrapped around her throat.

Isobel gasped and grabbed for his hand. It dissipated at her touch, and her fingers clutched at her own skin. He swept around her, coils of violet and black mixed with the churning ash.

He reassembled to block the door, his form shimmering into solidity.

“Open this door, and no matter what, you’ll never close it,” he warned.

“Kind of like you and your mouth,” she snapped, and went to push past him. Fear flashed in his eyes and he loosened again, slithering aside. She grasped the handle, and at this, the Nocs in the trees renewed their frenzy. She could hear them flitting and rustling.

“You’re going to need a lot more in there than backflips and cute tricks, cheerleader,” Pinfeathers called. He slid away with a fearful whisper that sounded like “Tekeli-li!”

The cry was taken up immediately by the other Nocs. In hoarse, rasping croaks, they echoed the call. “Tekeli-li!” they shouted with their parched voices. She had heard it before, that first time she had found herself in the woodlands. But what did it mean? They took flight from the black branches and fought the turbulent air with their wings, carrying off the strange word with them until they vanished into spells of violet.

Left alone, Isobel turned her attention back to the door. She took in a quick breath, then twisted the knob. The door creaked as it opened inward. As she crossed the threshold, it felt as though she was moving through a screen of static. The electric sensation lingered over her skin like pins and needles as she passed into the small space of an enclosed staircase landing.

Immediately the wind at her back silenced. She glanced behind her to watch the world of ash and charcoal whip and toss. Traces of static blipped the scene, and it was like watching the whole thing on a muted television.

The air inside the stairwell was musty, like an old closet. Cold slats of gray-white light streamed down from the square window above the narrow wooden stairs. Dust particles filtered in and out of the stark light like tiny lost beings. The staircase itself, sandwiched between two wood-paneled walls, led up into what Isobel knew to be an attic.

Ash slipped from the sleeves and cuffs of Varen’s jacket as she moved forward to take the first step.

Isobel placed a hand on either wall. She took the second step, and it creaked low underfoot. In her chest her heart began to pound, rushing blood to her ears and adrenaline through her system. She could feel the presence in the room upstairs. It was like a tight vibration humming in the air or a tuning fork set off deep inside her. She glanced over her shoulder to see that the storm outside had intensified. The tangled boughs of the twig-trees scrambled back and forth, clawing wildly at one another. The ash swirled in wild cyclones and blustered in sandstorm clouds. Still, no sound of the chaos reached her.

When Isobel came to the final step, it was to find herself alone in the attic. The table and chairs that she had once sat at with Varen now hovered in the air. Several books, too, and the threadbare rug drifted about in lazy suspension.

She looked out the window at the top of the stairs, which she now stood in front of. It should have shown her the brick side and the windows of the next building over. Instead there were only the tempest-tossed woodlands below. It was the same story with the other window, the oval one above the table that in the real world would have overlooked the street. This was the place where she had first read Poe, and standing there, staring at it all, the distance of time felt like years.

Isobel’s gaze traveled to a slim, familiar book floating near the table. She recognized it at once as Varen’s black sketchbook and went to snatch it out of the air. She held it between her hands and let her fingertips trail over the book’s surface, then hook beneath its cover. She opened the book, flipping through the pages crammed tight with his beautiful handwriting. She stopped at a spread of drawings, suddenly realizing that she’d seen them before. Roughly sketched faces stared up at her, faces with whole pieces missing. In the middle, she saw Pinfeathers’s familiar countenance, though he was not labeled by name. She remembered these pages from the day in the library, the first time they’d met to study. Isobel turned the book sideways, noticing a poem that stretched vertically down, crammed in between the artwork and the page’s edge.

The Nocs

The Nocs

They live in the floor

The Nocs

The Nocs

They knock on your door

The Nocs

The Nocs

Where there’s one, there’s more.

Isobel felt a rush of ice creep its way through her veins. She turned to the next set of pages, then the next, each strewn with words that seemed to flow into one another. She flipped faster, the pages seeming to whisper their contents. Her. Dream. Sleep. Return. She. Real. Need. Run.

She stopped, reading from the top of a page somewhere in the middle of the book.

He stood in that place again, the middle realm, the forest between worlds, and waited for her. She came, her white skin illuminated to a ghostly pallor in the flashes of lightning. The sky swirled, her black hair loosened and tumbling around her ivory shoulders. Gray ash sifted from the sky.

“My prison,” she said, “it disintegrates. When, at last, will you write my ending? When, my love, shall you set me free?”

“Midnight,” he whispered. “On that night of all nights in the year.”

“You have done well.” She drifted toward him. For the first time, she kissed him. Her lips, pale and cold, sealed his and so bound them together.

Isobel flipped the page again, and here the handwriting morphed, changing from elegant script into unintelligible scribbles and scratched-out starts. At the bottom, she read the only bit of writing that she could make out.

This should make him happy. This should change him. But it doesn’t. It can’t. He’s been changed already. And I don’t know what to write anymore, because I’m afraid of what it will be. Because I can’t think, and she asks me to write, but I don’t know what to write and I can’t think because I don’t know what to write. I can’t think. I can’t think. Isobel.

Isobel. Isobel.

A warm coursing rush lit her skin and spread through her. She stood staring in disbelief at her name scrawled so desperately against the snow-white paper. She brought the sketchbook closer, trying to imagine him sitting there, writing this. When? There was no date. After her name, repeated three times, the page went blank, blank except for a small blot of red on one bottom corner. Blood?

A quick, sharp bang ripped into the silence. Isobel jumped, nearly dropping the sketchbook. The other books, the table, and the chairs all clattered to the floor with a resounding clunk.

The door.

Isobel turned to find she was no longer alone.

At the top of the stairs stood a woman. Layers of glowing white draped and clung to the curvatures of her slight though tall frame, and it was as though the fabric itself was made from moonlight. A gauzy veil of white covered her head, like a cerement of the grave. She was beautiful. Luminescent, like a sliver cut from a dying star. Trails of gently curling hair, thick and raven black, tumbled past the length of her fingertips, a stark contrast to the white. Behind the veil, two large onyx eyes stared fixedly at her.

It was a moment before Isobel could speak. “Are . . . are you Bess?”

“I have many names,” the specter answered. Her voice was deep and throaty yet wholly feminine. “I am Lila. I am Ita and Li-li. I am Ligeia. I am Lilith.”

Isobel swallowed, her mouth gone suddenly dry. Schizophrenic much? She thought the age-old and ever-popular “Are you a good witch or a bad witch?” might be the ideal follow-up question but then decided against it. Bess or Lady Lilith or whoever didn’t exactly strike her as the joking type. And despite all the white, she didn’t strike Isobel as the good-witch type either.

“Ligeia . . . ,” Isobel murmured. She hugged the black book close to her, and her mind went back to the lyrics of the song she’d heard in the ice cream shop, the one Varen had played over the sound system while they’d cleaned. “But she’s just a character in a story.”

The woman lifted her arm to hold out her hand. The motion was sudden and unnatural, and Isobel had to fight the urge to take a step back. “Are not we all?” she asked.

With every warning signal inside her blaring, Isobel watched a gauze sleeve slip away to reveal the woman’s hand. Her open palm was whiter than the draping fabric, her skin as flawless as marble. Hadn’t Reynolds warned her to “beware the white one”? Remembering these words, Isobel felt her jaw tighten. If she ever saw him again, she’d have to thank him for providing her with such useful, detailed advice.

Isobel’s gaze went from the figure to her outstretched hand. The silent gesture was one that suggested something be exchanged or handed over, and Isobel held all the tighter to the sketchbook. Why did she want it?

The woman took a step toward her, the train of her veil whispering against the floor. This time Isobel did not argue with her instincts. She backed away, bumping into the table behind her. She lowered one hand and, keeping the other clutched around Varen’s black book, steadied herself.

“You yourself, Isobel,” the woman continued, “could be nothing more than a shadow, someone else’s dream who is, themselves, someone else’s.”

“I don’t think that makes much sense,” said Isobel, only because it was the first thing that sprang to her mind. If she could keep the chatter going, maybe she could make it to the staircase, to the door. But then, she couldn’t leave yet. Where was the link between realms Reynolds had told her to find? Wasn’t that the whole reason she was here in the first place?

Why hadn’t she found it yet? Hadn’t Reynolds said she would know it when she saw it? And even if she did find it, how the heck was she supposed to destroy it?

“I have been watching you,” the woman said, “ever since that night you first entered his dreams.”

Her back pressed flat to the wall, Isobel inched her way toward the stairwell. The woman pivoted where she stood, and the white gauze swirled tighter around her form, like the garb of a mummy. Through the screen of the veil, the black pools of her eyes followed Isobel’s every movement.

“At first you were just another coal added to the fire. Fuel for his hatred, and I’d have had reason to thank you. Then his dreams changed.” Underneath the gauze, her head tilted to one side and her delicate brow knitted, as though she did not quite understand this observation. “Uninvited, you invaded the corners of his subconscious and intruded on our time. Your mere image became a nuisance, a distraction.” Her open palm snapped shut into a hard fist. “In this room, it was not I who was the ghost, but you. And so I sent them for you while they still could obey. You were, after all, yet an uncertainty in his thoughts. They would have had you that night too, if not for the aid and protection of your masked guardian.”

It took Isobel only a second to realize that she was talking about the night she left the bookstore, the night in the park. She recalled what the blue Noc from the crypt had said. Had he been there that night too? Only then she hadn’t been able to see the Nocs. And the voice that had whispered for her to run? Hadn’t the blue Noc also mentioned her “masked friend”? Of course. It only made sense now that it had been Reynolds trying to warn her.

“In the end, however, you shall have little to thank your secretive friend for,” Lilith said. “In time I shall discover him as well, and he will soon find that I have a special fate for those Lost Souls who betray me.”

“Why are you doing this?” Isobel demanded. “Why Varen?”

“He is not like others, is he?” she asked almost wistfully, and floated to the oval window. Through it, Isobel detected new light, warm and orange, like a streetlamp. “He is special, even in regard to those who have come before him,” Lilith continued. “Like them, he holds the ability to receive and interpret the shades and shadows of the dreamworld, to bring life and body to new ones, such as the Nocs. What is more, though, is that energy within him that drives him to destroy as much as he creates. The only thing he lacks is control. That in itself is what makes him so perfect. Tonight he is to finish my story. Tonight, when you are gone for good, he will set me free.”

Uh-oh, Isobel thought. Say what? Rewind. What was this “gone for good” business? Isobel flashed a forced smile as she fumbled backward, edging farther and farther toward the stairwell. Apparently, despite Isobel wearing his jacket, Lady-Lovely-Locks didn’t quite seem to get that Varen had left the proverbial building. It was about time for Isobel to make her exit too, link between worlds broken or not.

That was when the thought hit her. Instinctively she clung tighter to the sketchbook. The answer came to her in a flash, and suddenly it made all the sense in the world. It was all there.

Varen’s doorway into the dreamworld. Lilith’s story. The Nocs. This was the bridge between realms, his way in, on its way to being her way out. The link Reynolds had told her she would know—she held it in her very arms!

Lilith, too, seemed to see the light of realization in Isobel, because she turned and stared through her with those hole-black eyes. “It’s too late,” she said, “for you to do anything. He cursed you the night he wrote your name within those pages, for now you are part of the story. That is how you are able to see us fully in your world. Or did you not wonder?”

“If I destroy this book,” she said, “this will all go away. You and everything else will go back to where you came from.”

“And where will you go, Isobel? You who now has a foot grounded in both realms? You would rip yourself asunder? You would perish for the sake of one who is doomed already?”

“What—what are you talking about?”

“Did your masked guardian fail to mention your own fate? I am not surprised. I suspect he is selective in what he chooses to share with you. It would be an inconvenience for him, I think, if you were able to make too many decisions of your own. But it doesn’t have to end this way. It appears to me that we have been pitted against each other by men. Why? When we both have something the other wants.”

“I’m not giving you this book,” she said. Her footsteps took her backward until her heels found the edge of the top stair.

Lilith laughed, a soft and almost melodious sound, haunting and even beautiful. “Do you not see that you yourself are now something of far greater value?”

“What?” Isobel blurted, her mind unable to wrap around Lilith’s meaning.

“However unwittingly, you have become a link between realms. Your name in those pages has transformed you, has made you better than a poor lost boy’s sketchbook, for you are not a link to power, but power itself. Together we would have free rein over all, for I know all routes and you, dreamer, hold the ability to traverse them. I would no longer need an ending.

Why, when we would live forever? Bound as one with you, I would no longer have any hold over your Varen. He would be released, free to be with you, with us.”

The woman moved toward her, the veil falling away from her face as she drew closer. She was dark beauty perfected, her cheekbones high and regal. Her skin held the sheen of stardust and her hair, dark, massy waves of silk, seemed to float about her like a black halo. It was her eyes, though, almost alien in essence, that held Isobel so completely transfixed. Fringed with dark lashes, twin wells of bottomless ink, they trapped her, and she found herself no longer able to blink. “Take my hand,” she whispered, and raised her white palm once more. “Come with me.”

Isobel felt her hand lift.

The pull of those eyes was magnetic, a force that couldn’t be fought or resisted. She was so beautiful. Isobel paused, her fingers hovering just over the cold set of white ones.

This was how she must have lured Varen.

The thought came to her suddenly, buoying to the surface through a deep and cloudy sea of confusion, doubt, and longing. How easy it must have been for her, she thought. She’d made promises to him just like this. Only she had promised him more. So much more.

Like a serpent, this demon had coiled and nested into those empty and cavernous spaces of his heart. Like a harpy, she had preyed on his absolute aloneness—on his need for a

“Lenore.”

You could never be Lenore, Varen had once told her.

In her mind, Isobel imagined the future. A future void of herself. But also void of the creature before her. She pictured Varen safe at home. Sitting at his desk, he filled the pages of a new sketchbook by candlelight. His purple-inked poetry packed the crisp white sheaves of paper, her name printed more than once within those lines of elegant handwriting. In the company of soft, feathery drawings, those lines would be his last farewell to her.

Would he write about her? She liked to think that he would. About how, forevermore, the syllables that made up her name would continue to drift to him on the wings of his dreams—dreams now free of the ghouls and demons that had once haunted and stalked his mind. Finally, in this small way, she would be his Lenore.

She blinked at last. Her fingers twitched and retracted.

This witch had nothing to offer her. She had no spell to cast, not while Isobel knew Varen was safe, in her world. When the link was sealed, it would be that way forever.

Isobel’s gaze fixed directly with Lilith’s. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you three’s a crowd?”

Those black eyes widened in shock.

“It’s too late,” Isobel whispered, “for you to do anything.” She brought both arms tight around the sketchbook. It was still her dream, even if it meant she went with it when it ended.

She squeezed her eyes shut tight.

“What are you doing!” shrieked a voice like a screech owl’s.

At first Isobel focused the heat in her chest. Guided by her mind, it traveled into her arms and then burst into flames over the sketchbook.

Someone screamed. Was it her? She opened her eyes. White heat engulfed her, consumed her. She was grateful not to feel the pain. A gift perhaps from her subconscious to her conscious? Like a hallucination, the vision of the white, black-eyed figure dropped away. The lamplight through the windows grew brighter—or was that the reflection from the fire?

She looked down to see fire course the length of her arms. It danced over the sketchbook held close to her, and she watched the edges of the paper curl and turn from orange to brown to black—taking on all the hues of autumn.

Everything died in the fall.

The book in her arms collapsed, tumbling into ash. The fire snuffed into blackness and with it, the world.