Nevermore

49 Obscure and Lonely

Isobel returned to school on Monday, walking the halls with her body, but not with her mind. It was like her whole awareness of the universe had somehow become inverted. Words became indecipherable. People morphed into objects, moving automatons that floated through the space around her as meaningless, formless shadows. Hours elapsed without her being aware of their passage. All the while, her thoughts never changed, never deviated from that place where she had last seen Varen, locked in the purple chamber where she had asked him to wait for her. Where she had promised to come back for him.

The image of his despair consumed her.

In Mr. Swanson’s class, his vacant chair haunted her. Even though she knew it was empty, she kept stealing glances toward it, as though he might somehow materialize.

She did not return to the cafeteria to sit with Gwen, Stevie, or Nikki at their hodgepodge table. Instead she spent lunch in the gym. There she turned flip after flip. She drilled herself on her layout, on her back handspring and round-off. She went through the motions over and over until the repetitive action and the necessity of focus caused the world to condense. Until she didn’t have to think, until it was just her and the floor.

Still, there was no reprieve from the ghost of his memory. He followed her everywhere. She felt him on her skin, sensed him in everything, in the books she carried, in the paper she was forced to write on.

She skipped practice that week so she wouldn’t have to face Nikki or Stevie, and she did her best to evade Gwen at every turn, going to her locker at odd times and taking longer routes to class, not caring if she was late. While Stevie and Nikki seemed to take the hint, Isobel’s allusive behavior only goaded Gwen into taking more extreme measures. She called Isobel’s house every night, even though her father had repeatedly made it clear to her that Isobel wasn’t allowed to take calls. After that, Gwen resorted to disguising her voice, though she knew Isobel’s parents had caller ID. Almost every one of these calls had ended with a direct hang-up from her dad, who had since taken to calling Gwen “that Northern girl.”

For once in her life, Isobel was grateful for the excuse of being grounded. She couldn’t stand the thought of being barraged by questions she didn’t have answers for. Or to be reminded again of how she had failed Varen. Of how she had left him there, waiting in vain for her to return because she had promised to come back for him. She had promised.

At Trenton, rumors connected to Varen’s disappearance began to build and circulate through the hallways in hisses and whispers. While most people thought that he had simply run away, others buzzed about how he’d been murdered by his weird one-eyed boss, his body boarded up beneath the floor of Nobit’s Nook or buried somewhere in the park. There had, after all, been neighborhood reports of strange lights and sounds coming from the attic of the bookstore the night he disappeared, as well as one account of a cloaked figure seen exiting through the rear entrance, a limp body held in his arms.

At the end of the week, Swanson handed back their project papers. He went through the aisles, dropping them off at every other desk. When he placed her and Varen’s paper in front of her, Isobel thought that he might have lingered for an extra moment or two before moving on. She stared through the clear glossy report cover at the B- they had managed to pull off.

“Good job,” he’d written on the title page in red. “Next time, though, ask about parent participation instead of stereos, okay? Also, I’ve attached an Internet article from the Baltimore Sun that the two of you might find interesting. By the way, nice bird.”

Below that, Swanson had added something else. This note appeared in blue ink, and in a tighter, more compact version of his loopy cursive. “P.S.” it read, “if you need to talk, I’m here.”

This tiny gesture, so very unobtrusive and kind, struck a chord deep within her, inducing a surprise moment of lucidity. It brought a sad smile to her lips, because it didn’t matter that she could never accept the invitation. She just liked knowing that Swanson had added it because he liked Varen. And that, in turn, made Isobel like her English teacher more than he would ever know.

She slid the paper off of her desk and shoved it into her backpack, putting Varen’s name out of sight so that the world could go mute again. Mute and void, colorless except for that one empty chair in the corner.

That afternoon Isobel made the mistake of going to her locker.

She had just finished shoving her binder, notepad, and English book inside when Gwen sprang up behind her, sending the door to her locker slamming shut.

“You,” she said, jabbing Isobel right in the shoulder, “are a terrible friend.”

Isobel scowled and kicked the corner of the metal door so that it popped open again. Her notebook slipped out and fell to the floor, loose papers scattering. “Thanks,” she muttered. “I needed that.”

She stooped to gather the spilled papers, but stopped when Gwen stepped forward, pinning them to the floor with one foot. “No,” she barked. She sent Isobel’s locker slamming shut again, this time with a decided bang. “What you need is a reality check. You’ve been wandering around in this little bubble of solitude and sulk long enough. Now, I don’t know what happened that night, but I know that you do. I know it was weird. I was there, remember? I saw that fight with my own eyes, but unlike everybody else, I knew it was real. I also know that you disappeared on one side of town only to reappear on another. You might be fooling everyone else, but you’re not fooling me, Isobel Lanley. If he’s dead—”

“He’s not dead!” Isobel shouted suddenly, her voice piping with panic. She grabbed Gwen tightly by the arm, shaking her. “Don’t say that.”

Gwen pulled her arm roughly away. She took a step back, and, for a long moment, the two of them stood there and stared at each other.

“I’m tired of chasing after you,” Gwen said at last. “And if you’re not going to do something, then I’m not going to cover for you. Those two detectives came to school yesterday. If they come back, if they ask me what happened, I’m telling them what I saw.”

Isobel gaped at her friend. “Do something?” she repeated. She shook her head, uncomprehending. “Do—do you have any idea—”

“No!” Gwen snapped. “No! I don’t. I have no idea! In fact, the only thing I do know is that it looks like you’re giving up.”

Isobel blinked, suddenly speechless, stung to the core by the accusation of those words.

Gwen glared at her, unrelenting, her eyes lit with intensity. “Don’t look at me like that. I saw you there with him that night. And I know you know where he is.”

Isobel’s lips parted with a tremble. She started to speak, to deny it. But the truth was that she did know where he was. There was just no way to reach him. How could she tell Gwen that it was impossible to save him because the link between worlds had been destroyed? How could she expect anyone else to understand any of it when she’d scarcely been able to grasp what had happened herself?

A glower hardening the normally soft angles of her face, Gwen turned away to dial the combination to her own locker. She opened the metal door and, reaching inside, grabbed something from the top shelf, shoving it into Isobel’s hand. Her pink cell phone.

“There. Now it’s your turn.” With that, Gwen looped her purse strap over her head, her movements fast and jerky. “When you figure out how to use one of those again, well . . . I logged my number in at the top of your address book. And here,” she added, yanking out Isobel’s gym bag. She let it drop onto the floor between them, right on top of the smattering of papers. “My locker’s not a storage unit.”

With a flip of her long hair, Gwen stalked off, leaving Isobel to stand there, staring at her rumpled gym bag, wondering how it was possible that she could feel any emptier.

Mechanically, she sank to one knee in front of her locker and with slow, deliberate movements, began to gather her things.

Then something about one of the papers made her pause. Her cell phone slid from her grasp. It cracked against the floor, but Isobel hardly seemed to notice, too distracted by the black-and-white photo mixed within the spread of loose white sheets.

She grabbed one corner of the printout, tugging it free from the others. Isobel’s eyes scoured the page, certain that she had to be imagining what she saw there.

At the top of the paper, the header read Baltimore Sun in bold block letters, and she knew it was the article Mr. Swanson had wanted her and Varen to see, the one he had handed back with their paper. There, in the middle of the page, Isobel focused on the dim and misty black-and-white image that had first drawn her attention. Head bowed, a man knelt before a large gravestone. On the headstone itself, she could scarcely make out the outline of a carved raven. The man, however, she could see more clearly.

He wore a dark coat, and a black fedora covered his bowed head. In his hand, he offered flowers to the grave. Roses? Around the lower part of his face, a white scarf concealed his features.

Isobel read the caption:

The only known photo of the “Poe Toaster,” taken in 1990 for Life magazine. This mysterious figure visits Poe’s Baltimore grave during the early morning hours of January 19, marking the poet’s birthday each year with roses and a toast of cognac. First observed in 1949, the ritual has continued over the years, though the Toaster’s identity, along with the details of how he enters the locked cemetery, remain a secret to this day.

“Reynolds,” she hissed, gripping the page until it crumpled in her fist.

Isobel stared with sheer disbelief. She gawked at the image of Reynolds, kneeling in front of the headstone, paying homage before Poe’s grave, blatant and visible to all who dared to watch, imprinted forever on film.

She looked up and, at the far end of the hall, caught sight of Gwen’s swaying broom skirt. Something inside of her clicked on, and for the first time since she had found out that Varen had never returned, her mind switched to life. Her awareness spread out. Suddenly, the external world reentered her sphere of existence. She heard the lockers slamming around her, and people laughing and talking. Sneakers squeaked by on either side of her, everyone heading for the buses. Clutching the article in one hand, Isobel fumbled for her phone. She flipped it open and turned it on, thankful that she still had some battery life left. She thumbed through her address book, highlighting the first entry before pressing the send button.

Even from a distance and with the clamor in the hallway, she still heard the trill of Gwen’s cell phone. Through the net of interweaving students, she saw Gwen stop, and watched as she reached one hand into the patchwork purse slung at her side. Isobel studied her friend as she fished out her ringing phone and eyed her view screen, as though trying to decide whether or not to pick up.

Isobel stood.

Please, she pleaded in her mind. Please. I need you.

Slowly, Gwen lifted the phone to her ear. Then Isobel heard her voice just as she saw her lips move. “So, you let me get through that whole spiel, my entire tirade, but you weren’t going to let me have the dramatic walkaway, were you?”

“Baltimore,” Isobel blurted. “January nineteenth. I have to be there.”

Gwen turned to face Isobel. Phones pressed to their ears, they stared at each other from across the expanse of the clearing hallway.

“What?” Gwen asked, already starting back toward her again, shouldering her way through clusters of stragglers.

Isobel lowered her own phone. She held the article out at arm’s length.

Closing in, Gwen snatched it from her. “Hey!” she said, “It’s that guy! From the Grim Facade . . .”

Gwen suddenly grew quiet, and Isobel watched her eyes grow wide behind her glasses as she scanned the brief paragraph. Meanwhile, Isobel allowed her thoughts to spiral backward to the moment when Reynolds had laid her on her mother’s wicker bench. With that memory, a new thought occurred to her, one very important detail that, until that very instant, she had managed to overlook entirely. Despite what he had said about the separation of worlds and the destruction of the link, he had still stood there, in her world, fully real and tangible.

And hadn’t Varen created the link in the first place? Wouldn’t that mean that Poe had done the same?

Isobel’s eyes narrowed. Her gaze slid back to the article in Gwen’s hand, just as she was lowering the paper. Gwen’s eyes met with Isobel’s, and her face held a wondering expression, one that went through several quick changes as the wheels of her brain spun to catch up, to draw the same conclusion that Isobel had already decided on.

Isobel was going to Baltimore. One way or another.

And contrary to what Reynolds thought, she would see him again.

Of that she was now certain.