by Келли Криг
As though alerted through some extra sense, the glow in the phantasm’s eyes brightened like hell-fire, and Death turned to greet him.
Isobel watched on as, for a single moment, the two figures from the dreamworld stood opposite each other, like knights on a chessboard. One robed in black. One in red.
When the tension between them broke into movement, it was like watching a battle for light between moths. Cloaks whispered and curled. A blade flashed. Like jagged leaves stirred by a storm, they swept round each other, neither landing a blow, yet each of them whirling in a perpetual fury of motion.
One of Reynolds’s blades caught the cloak of the Red Death. The crimson-soaked fabric fell partially back, revealing a head and torso that might as well have belonged to a skeleton.
Ribs strained to break the tight yellow skin that clung to the creature’s body like wet cloth. Blood dripped from its sunken eyes, from its shriveled mouth, and from the tips of its outstretched fingers.
The space cleared for them by the crowd once more widened with a collective retreat. The goths lowered their masks to watch, their stark faces appalled, afraid, confused, and then, finally—excited.
Then someone actually cheered.
Typical, was the only thing Isobel could think. Even given the circumstances, she couldn’t help but roll her eyes. The goths—they thought it wasn’t real. They thought it was all a show.
And why not, when this sort of twisted crap was just their thing?
Above, along the gallery, an audience of Nocs crowed and rasped frenziedly in their bird forms. They hopped the length of the banister and followed the fight with their beady, bloodthirsty eyes, as though anxious to join in yet too afraid to swoop down and add their own blows.
A wboosh sound, a great rushing of air, came from the center of the open space. Like a house of cards, the Red Death collapsed in on itself, swallowed whole by the floor. It left in its wake a dark and ominous stain. In the next instant it emerged from behind Reynolds, rearing over him like an all-consuming shadow.
As though by magnetic force, Reynolds’s blades were swept out from his grip. In midair they turned on him, and Reynolds whirled just in time to accept the thrust of both into his chest.
A collective scream arose from the mass of onlookers, Isobel’s shrill cry among theirs.
She broke forward in a run as the Red Death drove Reynolds forcefully back. He plowed hard into the floorboards and slid, unconscious, to a halt at Isobel’s feet.
“Omigod!” she screeched, landing on her knees at his side.
What should she do? Her hands fluttered uselessly over him, like stupefied butterflies. She reached for the blades but then snatched her hands back. Her gaze fell to the white scarf covering his nose and mouth. Was CPR even an option at this point?
His eyes popped open, and she yelped. He glared up at her past the brim of his hat and, with each hand, grabbed both blades by the hilt. He yanked them from his chest in one clean motion. Gray ash poured out from the would-be wounds like sand. Then the openings closed over, and all traces of damage vanished into the blackness of his clothes.
Isobel gaped.
“Why are you still here?” he growled, then launched himself up from the floor. Blades crossed, he charged, then drove them into the Red Death’s back, stopping its approach toward a group of retreating girls dressed as fallen angels. The demon arched and howled—a sound like a hundred baying hounds. In a wrenching motion, Reynolds uncrossed the blades in a clean swipe. They sliced neatly through, and the bloodied figure dispersed with a shriek, transformed into a syrupy red-black liquid that slapped the floor and sent a slash of bright crimson to mar the clean white of Reynolds’s scarf.
There was no moment of reprieve.
The liquid on the floor pooled and writhed. It gathered itself, and like a phantom emerging from its grave, the robed form rose, whole once again. Its ruby eyes flashed rage.
Like everyone else, Isobel stood rooted to the spot, mesmerized by the otherworldly battle taking place before her. At least until one of Reynolds’s blades sailed in her direction. It pierced the floor right next to her foot. She jumped, staggering back.
“Go!” he boomed.
Thinking she shouldn’t wait to see if he’d send the other one after her, she turned and sped pell-mell through the throng of hapless spectators. She shoved and nudged her way past countless empty stares from innumerable masks.
But where was she going?
The answer came when something caught her foot, and she tripped. She met the floor palms-first with a smack.
“Whoops. Need a hand?”
That voice. Isobel twisted around to find him hovering over her, the hollow, jagged portion of his lost arm held out to her. “Oh, wait,” Pinfeathers said, withdrawing the lacking appendage. “Already gave you one of those today, didn’t I?”
Isobel pushed up from the floor, ready to run. He shoved her down again with one foot. She fell with a sharp gasp of pain, and he flipped her to sprawl flat onto her back. A squall of fluttering appeared behind him, and one by one, the other Nocs took their true forms until, like a flock of ravenous vultures, they encircled her.
With one black boot, Pinfeathers trapped her outstretched arm against the floor. With his remaining hand, and to the delight of the other Nocs, he lifted something curved, sharp, and gleaming to rest on his shoulder. Isobel’s eyes widened at the sight of Reynolds’s cutlass, the one he’d thrown at her. Only now did she realize that he must have meant for her to take it, only now did she see how stupid she’d been for leaving it there, open for grabs.
“Well.” Pinfeathers sighed, twisting the blade, letting it catch the light. “You know what they say—eye for an eye and all that.”
The Nocs barked with raucous laughter.
“No!” She twisted at the waist, sending a fierce kick into Pinfeathers’s side. To her surprise, her aim landed true, and under the snug fabric of his jacket, she felt part of his torso cave in with an audible crunch. He roared at her, though more out of fury, it seemed, than from pain.
The other Nocs, their laughter transforming into sympathetic hisses, writhed and withered away from her, cringing and clutching into themselves like snakes.
“Hold her!” Pinfeathers ordered with a stern point of the cutlass. As one, the other Nocs obeyed. Cold clay hands fastened to her free arm, claws dug into her legs as they pinned her.
Isobel wrenched and thrashed beneath their grip, her gaze darting. But there was nothing she could grab, nothing to use as a weapon, no one who could help her.
She held her breath and shut her eyes, braced for the pain. In her mind, she groped through her thoughts and formed the image of a door. She thought of one that would take her to the woodlands. Make a way, Reynolds had said. She pictured the door behind her, right at her back, pressed against her the way the floor was now. With the hand held closest at her side, she felt with her fingertips for the doorknob in her imagination . . . and touched something solid.
She gasped, her eyes springing open.
In a split second, the cutlass came down, whistling as it divided the air in its path. Isobel clenched every muscle, ready to feel the severing of her arm from her body. She gripped the doorknob that it was now too late to turn. The blade rained down, and with a clank, she felt it—break?
Low whispers erupted from the Nocs, the sound of suspicion and fear. They released her and shrank back at once, unanimous in their recoil.
Isobel had to raise her head from the floor to look, to make sure that her mind hadn’t simply blocked the pain. It was the cutlass that lay broken and detached, though, and not any part of her. Her widened gaze shot immediately to Pinfeathers, who, still looming over her, raised the fractured hilt to his scrutiny.
“Hmm,” he said, “I was afraid that might be the case.”
Isobel took her chance. She grabbed the doorknob she’d made in the floor and twisted it. The ground beneath her swung free, and they toppled through.
Taken by
surprise, Pinfeathers tumbled past her, while Isobel held tightly to the knob. She opened her mouth in a silent scream as her body jerked to a halt and she dangled above a world of ash, of withered leaves and black charcoal trees. She looked down between her feet in time to see Pinfeathers dispel into thick spirals of ink before he could shatter against the ground that lay no more than ten feet below.
It had worked, she realized, casting a quick glance around her. She was back! She’d made it to the woodlands.
The heads of the other Nocs appeared in a circle around the open door above her. Their whispers continued, and they turned their heads to look at one another, though not a one of them made even the slightest move to grab her.
Isobel’s grip on the doorknob began to slip. She let go and, prepared for the drop, landed squarely on her feet. Pinfeathers gathered himself once more into his humanoid form. He stood at a distance from her while other Nocs, morphing into birds, poured themselves through the open doorway. They lighted on the barren, swaying branches of the skeletal trees, watching, waiting.
Ash rained around them, heavy and thick enough to collect on the shoulders of Varen’s jacket. By now, Isobel’s hair had become completely unraveled, and it whipped about her face in a flurry of cold winds.
The purple sky overhead swirled and roiled like the eye of a hurricane. The door that hung open and suspended in the sky swung shut with the next gust of air. She peered through the trees, and there she saw another door. This one was narrower, familiar to her, and she knew it at once as the one she sought. It was almost, she dared to think, as if the door had been seeking her.
Or lying in wait.
As she approached, her eyes went to the two signs taped to the door’s surface. The words on the signs were written backward, but she didn’t need to read them to know what they said.
She knew that the top one read DO NOT ENTER, while the one below it warned the reader to BEWARE OF BESS.
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 bri
ck 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.
