I half-heartedly began a casual search around the furniture of the foyer, even peeping down the dining-hall corridor and the servant’s staircase. When this turned out to be fruitless, I went to check again upstairs, trying to keep my spirits up.
I will not slap Avery when I find him. I will not slap Avery when I find him. He doesn’t mean to be such a bother, I chided myself.
My stomach whined in protest as I passed the breakfast room, and I patted it sympathetically. We lived on a very strict schedule, so when timing was altered even slightly, we felt the effects.
“Avery!” I shouted, wandering up and down the second floor. “You win! I admit it!”
He didn’t answer. The bragging he was sure to do afterwards, didn’t bear thinking about.
“Aver—”
If I hadn’t been concentrating on every detail in the hope of finding Avery, then I probably would not have noticed the candle missing from its cove in the wall, a few yards down towards the north wing. Someone had moved the decorative ottoman from the common room so it now stood underneath it, no doubt put there to help a short person to reach higher.
My mouth suddenly felt very dry.
He wouldn’t…would he?
Praying to whatever powers existed, I tried to keep my head as I strode down into the darkening wing, growing closer to the medieval-style door and the distressing secrets held behind it.
I had no reason to get so anxious. Normally such unsavory feelings did not belong to me, and after all, he had no reason to believe I had myself breached the rules and gone upstairs. If he confronted me, I would simply deny it and ask for evidence.
This was all worst-case scenario; most likely Avery had just thought the shrouded north wing to be a clever hiding spot, although I couldn’t help but wonder how he has possibly reached there without me seeing him.
I approached the short door with my stomach butterflies going crazy.
Hardly daring to breath, I bent down to inspect the door. I let out a huge breath when I noticed the latch was still fixed over the bolt, untouched and still firmly blocking the staircase beyond.
Heaving a huge sigh of relief, I pivoted and nearly jumped out of my skin.
“What the…?!”
“I knew it!”
Avery and I both spoke at the same time, face to face with each other. He had been standing behind me the whole time, and now had his hands on hips with a triumphant smirk shaping his face into an infuriating leer.
“Knew what?” I asked, trying to look clueless.
“You went through that door.” Avery gleefully took in my struggling mask of innocence. “And before you try to slither out of trouble, I was following you the entire time instead of hiding, a few paces behind so you wouldn’t see. I saw you go up and come down looking as though you’d encountered a ghost. Care to elaborate?”
I desperately racked my brains for a decent excuse, but none came to mind.
“It’s none of your business.” I frowned, my attempted forceful tone rendered weak and scrambling. “I was bored with trying to find you, so I decided to have a quick peek down this wing, that’s all.”
“Penny.” Avery raised an eyebrow. “Don’t insult my intelligence. You came here first, before you even attempted to find anyone else.”
“All right. So what if I did go upstairs?”
“What made you so scared? Why the sudden rebellion? And most of all, what did you see that made you cry like a baby?”
I kept my mouth sealed, eyes shooting daggers at him and sincerely wishing a rather horrendous monster would materialize and devour him on the spot.
Avery waited for a few second for me to answer, but when I remained mute he suddenly darted past me with his candle in hand, unlatched the door, yanked it open and shot up the stairs.
I stood transfixed for a moment, not comprehending what was going on, and then felt the dawning shock bubble upwards.
“Avery no!” I screamed, tearing after him.
I stumbled up the staircase after him, blindly following the dim glow of his candle whilst hoarsely shrieking for him to stop.
My feet moved up the steps as fast as I’d ever seen them move, nerves threatening to implode with anxiety.
I banged into him as he stopped on the platform.
He stood, candle extinguished just as mine had been, fumbling around in the dark.
Avery turned to me. “A wall?”
“Congratulations,” I hissed sarcastically, panting. “What on earth are you up to? Get back downstairs this instant!”
“You’re turning into Tressa. Come on, show me what’s inside! Prove to me the fun Penny still exists.”
“No, you don’t understand, I can’t go in there until I’ve—”
“If you don’t help me, I’ll still find a way in. All the credit will go to me if we find anything inside, instead of you,” Avery taunted.
“As will the punishment if we get caught,” I added flatly.
“Punishment,” he scoffed, arrogance overriding any rational fears he should have had. “We’re all going to get annihilated eventually, and if that’s going to happen, I’d rather it be for something like this. Besides, I’m an exceptional liar, and it’s my word against yours. How favored are you feeling at the moment?”
I swayed, uncertain. Already my friends thought I was a fraud for failing them at seeking, and I didn’t want to lose my reputation of being outgoing as well in the same day…not that it mattered, I chided myself, but losing credit for what might be our ticket to freedom to Avery? We had come this far…
“If you tell anyone else, I will kill you,” I threatened, seriously meaning it at that moment.
I heard him tut to himself as I once again removed the key from my pocket and carefully edged it into the lock, pushing the loosened door open.
Excited, and pumped with adrenaline, Avery jumped into the darkness, dragging me along by the arm.
“What. Is. That?” he asked, his mouth dropping open.
I too found myself mesmerized by the intertwined rings and ornate lever, but was revolted to find bile rising in my throat from the mere memory of my artificial panic.
“Avery, let’s go,” I begged, feeling slightly sick.
In reply, he shook me away from him and approached the thing in a trance. Pulled against my better judgment towards it, I followed him.
I saw a hand inspecting the many engravings on the old lever and was mildly surprised to see that it was mine.
“Penny!”
Avery had suddenly gone very white, face contorted no doubt by the same feelings I had encountered the first time. Now, though, I felt nothing.
“Pull it!”
“Pardon?” I stared at Avery, who was shaking uncontrollably and seemed seconds away from a total breakdown.
“Pull the stupid lever,” he gasped urgently. “Then we can get out of here. Pull it!”
I hesitated. Then a determined frown set on my face and my fist tightened; I was going to get us out of here.
Not thinking too much, I closed my eyes and heaved a massive pull, with all my strength, anger, and frustration poured into that one movement. It bent easily.
For a minute, nothing happened. Then, in slow motion, something flashed on the screen and the rings began to move. Like dancers, they twisted hypnotically around each other whilst filling the room with the piercing buzz of a rip, and appearing to ripple as they moved faster and faster. A glow began to take shape in their center. Then the floor rushed up to greet the ceiling and I blanked out.
11
I came to, groggy, feeling as though I was being impaled to the ground by several spears and crushed under a ton of bricks. My limbs felt like lead, there was a crippling headache waging war with my skull, and my mouth was so dry I had to fight not to gag.
I just lay there, unaware of my surroundings and completely unsure of what had just happened.
“Urgh…” Avery groaned, retching on the floor beside me.
I tried to wi
ll myself into moving, but seemed to be glued to the floorboards and not capable of anything more than raising my pounding head a few inches from side to side.
A sliver of comprehension twisted into my subconscious as I realized the pressure holding me to the ground was slowly fading with the suffocating static. Somehow, when the rings had started moving, they had created a kind of rip so strong that Avery and I hadn’t been able to stay conscious through it. I wondered what it had done.
Feeling crawled back into my toes and spread upwards through my legs until I found the strength to stand.
“Any idea what just happened?” I slurred, head spinning.
I stumbled, trying to figure out a way to stop the room from moving around me and to keep my vision from swimming. It was rather distracting.
“Not in the slightest…” Avery sounded just as awful as I felt. “That machine…did you see what happened?”
I spun dizzily around and noted that the contraption was once again lifeless, the circles stationary and the dials on the screen frozen, without the artificial light which had animated them before.
“Maybe it ripped the Master away permanently!” I guessed with a crooked smile. “Or tore down the Boundary! Come, let’s go have a look and see!”
The possibilities welled up inside of me, shoving all the nasty sickness away with a beautifully refreshing tide of hope, something I had not experienced in a very long time.
“Blah…” Avery cringed. “I feel terrible. Give me a hand?”
I rolled my eyes and tried to ignore my own crippling symptoms. I took hold of a skinny arm and yanked his clammy body from the floor. Tucking it securely under the crook of my own arm, I haphazardly navigated us over to the doorway, taking care to lock the door behind me and collect the two discarded candles we had dropped on the landing.
One step at a time, we emerged into the corridor.
It had seemed disturbingly dark before, but now I had to pause to let my eyes adjust to the light.
“Now what?” Avery asked, taking a shuddering breath. “Do we tell everyone else or not? I know you weren’t planning on it, but this seems like something that they should know about it. Just in case you really have just killed the Master or whatever.”
“Ha, look who’s suddenly telling me what’s right and wrong!” I taunted, half-teasingly and trying to force our normal bickering back into the situation to make it seem less drastic. The serious expression on his face made my smile slide away, and I hung my head. “I don’t know if we should. Tressa will only get angry with me, also I wouldn’t want to get their hopes up if nothing has changed. And if the Master finds out, I don’t want them to be involved.”
“So be it,” Avery said tonelessly, and I couldn’t decipher whether he agreed with me or not.
An icy veil settled over us as we dragged ourselves over to the breakfast room for luncheon. Such a mundane activity seemed pointless and a complete waste of time compared to the monumental enterprise we had just been involved in, and I ached to bypass the entire thing to go find out what had been altered.
Still, the visions of thick cream custard sandwiched between delicate layers of sweet, sugary pastry beckoned me. I was surprised to see the breakfast-room door closed and no chatter coming from within.
“Hey, I found him!” I called.
Unwinding my arm from Avery’s, I rushed forwards to burst in on their luncheon, only to see with a jolt that the room was empty.
Six stools were pushed neatly under the table, the stitched tablecloth was clean of crumbs, and the room void of food and people.
“Where is everyone?” Avery asked in a small voice.
I refused to panic, throwing open the balcony doors and craning my neck out into the crisp…evening air. Sure enough, it was evening; the golden sun had disappeared over the tops of the trees and a blanket of twilight had settled over the grounds.
I relaxed a bit. Clearly, Avery and I had simply been upstairs longer than we thought and everyone was now getting ready for dinner.
“We’ve missed luncheon,” I stated, closing the balcony doors and turning back to Avery.
“My mind was just blown. Thank you for stating the obvious,” Avery said dryly, his cynical old self returning with the color in his pinched cheeks.
“Shut up. Now, you go to the boys’ chamber and I’ll go to the girls’, then we should not say anything about where we have been and try to have dinner as normal.” When he raised an eyebrow challengingly, I explained further. “Do you want to tell them right before we face Him? When they haven’t had a chance to absorb the information? You might as well commit us all to punishment and be done with it.”
“All right, fine,” Avery grumbled, shoving his hands into the belt loops of his trousers. “But tomorrow. I hate to deceive them.”
I had to admit, I was shocked by his attitude. Due to his irritating and often antagonistic character, I’d never have guessed that he would be the one telling me I was being thoughtless when it came to our friends’ feelings. Although I couldn’t help but be impressed by his decency, it would cause me grief in the future if I decided to hide what I’d done due to it being a failure.
“Yes. Tomorrow,” I agreed, somewhat grudgingly.
We bid farewell and headed to our separate wings once out of the breakfast room, with me still battling a massive headache. Perhaps I would trouble Beatrix for some medicine after dinner.
Fumbling with the handle, I massaged my temple as I entered the girls’ chamber.
“Hey,” I greeted them, trying to keep the dizziness at bay. “Sorry I took so long! I can’t believe I missed luncheon, I’m absolutely starving right now!”
“That’s okay. Things happen,” Tressa replied from a chair with its back to me.
A chill crept down my spine. I didn’t know why, but something about her voice was just…off. My headache began to worsen until I gasped out in pain and squeezed my eyes shut against the agonizing throbbing.
“Argh!” I winced. Still keeled over, I strained to see Tressa’s face. “Where’s Evelyn?”
“Over here!” Came a voice from around the L bend. Again, I felt the tingling sensation of extreme discomfort and my headache escalated again in ferocity.
“C-can you turn around?” I begged, vision starting to blur from the pain. “I can’t see you!”
In perfect synchrony, Tressa and Evelyn emerged from where they had been hiding away and a horrified, bloodcurdling scream ripped through my lips.
Two pairs of solid black eyes stared at me. Dark, demonic voids set above skeletal cheekbones protruding unhealthily from waxen, almost translucent skin.
“Can you see us now?” They inquired angelically, both tilting their heads jerkily to the side. Their voices sounded so wrong, like there were several people speaking over them! “Penny, Penny, Penny, what have you done, Penny, Penny, Penny? Who’s laughing now, Penny, Penny, Penny?”
As they sang, revealing pointy teeth leering vilely at me, a trickle of dark red leaked from the corner of their mouths. Blood!
I screamed and screamed until my lungs were bursting, and my throat so raw my voice was barely above a croak, and I could scream no longer. I tried to run but froze in terror – helpless as they advanced towards me, grinning, with blood now dripping from their lips…
“She’s waking up! Penny, dearest, open your eyes! Quick, get some more water!”
Someone splashed my face with something very cold and very wet, and my eyes flew open in shock.
Tressa bent over me with an expression of intense worry written all over her perfectly normal face, hazel eyes alight with concern. Evelyn hurried over to peel off a damp cloth from my forehead and replace it with another, her white and straight teeth biting her blush-colored lips nervously.
“How are you feeling?” they asked at the same time.
Merely hearing their voices together was enough to make me start, but I reminded myself that they sounded as they always did, without the creepy overlay.
“Awful,” I admitted, propping myself up on my elbows. They had set me down on my bed and loosened my bodice to help me breathe, which I took full advantage of. “I don’t understand what happened…”
“Neither do I,” Tressa said, handing me a dry towel. “You stumbled in with your head in your hands, mumbling something, and then you started screaming your lungs out! We rushed to see what the matter was, but you had collapsed before we got to you.”
“It was rather noisy,” Evelyn added, turning away to cough. “It startled me and I spilt water down the front of my chemise!”
“Oh dear,” I muttered in monotone, and Tressa smirked. “My heart goes out to you.”
“It was my best one!” Evelyn insisted indignantly. “You know, the one with the little daisies embroidered all over it?”
“Evelyn,” Tressa said seriously, though I could see the ghost of a laugh being subsided. “I love you dearly, but it is only water, and I think we’d be better off worrying about what happened to Penny now.”
She forced a smile. “Yes, I suppose you’re right. Sorry.”
“You best come and get ready for dinner.” Tressa stood up to finish pinning her hair. “Skipping two days isn’t a move I would pull if I were you. You probably just felt light-headed after missing luncheon, right?”
“Yes, that must be it!” I nodded wincing at the thudding. It was like my brain had become unattached from something and was now floating around inside my head, so that every move I made sent it slamming against my skull.
“I wonder what made you scream, though?” Evelyn said aloud as she began twisting my hair into an elaborate bun at the nape of my neck.
“I…erm.” I searched around for a way to explain the monstrosities I had seen without seeming insane or insulting the girls. “I have no clue.”
We didn’t speak of my episode again, but it was clearly on all of our minds, especially mine.
I knew what I saw. Why I saw it was another question entirely, and its connection to our pulling the lever upstairs was pretty much a given. The whole sinister experience had unnerved me, for it was not at all what I had been expecting.
Boundary Page 8
