by Kelly Creagh
Varen pressed his thumb down on the hammer of the sleek handgun, cocking it. The weapon made a sharp cracking sound like the splintering of bone.
Isobel’s voice, her breath, her comprehension, everything jarred to a halt inside her, and her renewed terror gave way to a single thought. That the black hole of the gun’s barrel exactly matched the soulless centers of his eyes.
“That . . . that isn’t real,” Isobel whispered, lips scarcely moving.
He swiveled his arm toward the windows and fired. Isobel jolted as one deafening bang after another rang out, bullets shattering glass.
Varen returned the gun to point at her. “It’s at least as real as you are. ”
She clamped her mouth shut, setting her jaw.
He wanted a fight, she thought. He craved contention. His self-hatred had become a drug, an addiction he needed to feed. His lone source of perverse comfort in this forsaken realm.
Isobel’s soul ached for him with that notion. He had given up on himself as well as her. But knowing that also provided her with a scrap of strength—kept her from fracturing into a thousand pieces as she faced him—because at least it gave her somewhere to start.
Remind us of who we are, Pinfeathers had said.
“This . . . this isn’t you,” Isobel whispered, rolling the Noc’s words over and over in her head and choosing her own carefully. This time there could be no going back, no try again after the game over, if he pulled that trigger. “You aren’t like this. ”
Varen held himself as steady as he held the gun. Seconds ticked by, each one more unbearable than the last. Then, finally, relaxing his arm, he tilted the gun upward.
But the reprieve didn’t last.
“Maybe you’re right,” he said, nestling the muzzle of the gun under his chin. “Care to find out?”
“Varen, stop it,” Isobel snapped, her own anger spiking, mixing with the panic she could no longer restrain. She dared not make even a slight movement toward him, though. Not now that he held them both in the thrall of his black erraticism.
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“That’s just it. I can’t,” he said. “I can’t ever stop. Even if I wanted to. It’s always just too late when I’m ready. ”
“This isn’t who you really are,” Isobel insisted. “I know it isn’t. And so do y—”
“How?” he asked. “How do you know anything about me? You don’t. Not anymore. Because now I’ve become exactly what everyone expected. The only difference is that I’ve decided to stop fighting it. To fit the mold, so to speak. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do in life? We’ve all got a part to play. Someone’s gotta be the bad guy. ”
“I do know you,” Isobel said. “You are gentle. You’re kind. You care about what’s important, what’s right, even when no one else does. I’ve seen the real you, and that person—that beautiful soul—he wouldn’t hurt anyone. Please. If you let me, I can show you that I’m real. ”
“You don’t have to show me,” he said, his tone turning mocking. “All you have to do . . . is promise. ”
Once more, he switched the gun’s position, leveling its barrel at her. He squeezed one eye shut, taking aim at her head. Though he stared directly at her, his gaze would not meet hers.
“Do you promise?” he asked.
“Varen, I never meant to leave you—”
“I said!” he yelled, and her heart stalled. He lowered his voice again, his tone suddenly soft, rational. “Do you promise?”
Yes, Isobel wanted to tell him. Yes, I promise. But was that the right answer? Was there a right answer?
She didn’t know what to do, what to say. Even if she could shift their surroundings again, break through the constructs of his world, it wouldn’t change his mind—it hadn’t before in the courtyard of angels. He’d shut down completely this time. And if he could be counted as lost to this realm, then he was even more lost to himself.
Isobel didn’t know of any way to combat that. How could she reach him when he wasn’t even present?
Darkness there and nothing more . . .
Taking a step forward, moving before she even knew why, Isobel brought her forehead to the mouth of the gun. The sensation, cold and hard, reminded her of the last kiss Varen had given her, delivered to the very same spot just before he’d sent her over the cliff.
“I made you a promise once,” she said.
She saw the cuff of his sleeve move when she spoke, the fabric stirred by her breath, and she knew he’d felt it, because his hand, so steady before, suddenly began to quiver.
“I tried to keep it,” Isobel went on. “I tried, and I failed. So I came back. I know you didn’t think that I would. I know that’s why you did what you did. On the cliff. Because you didn’t think it was me. That I would find you again. I guess I failed you twice. But Varen, I never gave up. No matter what it looked like to you. I never did. ”
The anger in his expression began to siphon off as she spoke, transmuting into sorrow. His finger eased from the trigger.
“In your note,” Isobel continued, “you said we would see each other again, and I never stopped believing that. I never stopped believing in you. After you showed me what I should have known already—that there’s so much more to someone than can be seen on the surface—I couldn’t ever give up on you. But . . . what about me? I’m not everything you thought I was either, am I? You said so yourself. Just now. So what if I am really me and not just a figment of this place? If you thought there was a chance, even a small one, that I could be real, tell me, would you still pull that trigger?”
Varen cringed. Withdrawing the gun, he spun away. He tossed the weapon aside, and at once it burst into a flapping crow. The creature squawked loudly, its brash voice and frantic flittering breaking Isobel’s spellbound stare as Varen moved through the now-occupied classroom chairs.
Aside from her own chair and Varen’s, each desk now seated a skeleton.
Books and notepads littered the desktops in front of them. Bony fingers held pencils, while empty eye sockets stared down at papers filled with unfinished writing.
Isobel recognized the skeletons by their clothing. These were her classmates.
Even Mr. Swanson’s swivel chair held a skeleton, her teacher’s familiar spectacles askew on his nonexistent face.
Dumbstruck by her altered surroundings, Isobel felt her blood freeze.
She found Varen again and watched in horror as he threaded himself through one of the shattered windows. The bird, cawing, shot through another.
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A peal of warning bells sounded in Isobel’s head as Varen straightened into a standing position on the ledge, opening his arms wide as though he, too, could fly.
She spurred herself forward, running, knocking aside desks, causing the skeletons to slump and topple.
She caught herself on the windowsill just as Varen tilted forward.
“No!” She grabbed for him, but the hem of his long coat only grazed her fingertips, fluttering in the breeze as again, he slipped out of her reach.
29
Time Out of Time
Below, the brambly treetops resembled legions of bony hands, outstretched and waiting.
Varen had not fallen into their grips, though. He hadn’t fallen at all.
Boots firmly planted on the side of Trenton’s brick facade, he stood perpendicular to the building, staring toward the garden of black arms.
Strong winds lashed at him, whistling as they assailed his impervious form.
Afraid he might disappear again, Isobel hoisted herself into the window frame. Broken glass crunched under her feet as she ducked through to crouch on the sill.
Battling gales slammed into her from every direction, as if conspiring to shove her from her perch. She hung on, but when her hair fluttered in her face, she lost sight of both Varen and the drop.
Maybe that was for the best, she thought, as she straightened.
<
br /> Stiffening her body, locking her muscles, she thought back to all the calculated falls she’d taken in the past, the cheerleading aerials that had, more often than not, landed her squarely on her feet.
Isobel let go of the frame. She tipped into the open air.
The wind shrieked in her ears. The world blurred in her periphery. For an instant, she careened down, straight for those grabbing branches.
Then the school’s brick siding rushed up to accept the step she’d gambled, and Isobel staggered forward. Landing on one knee, she caught herself, palms splaying flat to the rough brick surface of the building’s exterior. She released the breath she’d held in reserve, along with her hope that this latest gravity-bending stunt wouldn’t be her last.
On either side of her, like still pools of water, the school’s windows gave off a mercury sheen. Detecting movement in the pane closest to her, Isobel turned her head and caught sight of Varen’s pale reflection.
She pushed to her feet, turning in time to see him stride past her, moving in the direction that, seconds before, had led up.
As though in a trance, he trained his gaze on Trenton’s four-spired bell tower, his gait even and graceful in that way that had always distinguished him in the hallways of Trenton.
Opening his arms out low at his sides, he ignored the winds that battered him, initiating with that single gesture the metamorphosis that came next.
The school’s red clay bricks faded to alabaster, widening into stone slabs beneath their feet.
The windows elongated, narrowing like the slit pupils of serpents’ eyes. Nets of black spread across glass panes that, as though lit by fire from within, burned with the same crimson glow as the horizon.
Varen walked on. A tremor shook the building, and with the low, rumbling groan of stone on stone, a pointed steeple emerged from between the bell tower’s spires. Shaped like the head of a spear, the spire’s spiked point telescoped far into the sky, piercing through the screen of clouds that rushed by.
Gargoyles, their grotesque faces fixed in toothy grimaces and open-jawed snarls, slithered out from every corner. Fastening lizardlike bodies to the wall, they swung their heads in Isobel’s direction, glowering at her with glowing red eyes.
At once awed and paralyzed by the quaking beneath her, the transformation happening all around them, Isobel could not bring herself to move. She only stared as Varen drew to a stop in the middle of the tower’s center window.
As he halted, the pane under him widened into an enormous circle. A round pedestal rose beneath Varen’s boots, elevating him by a foot, and two ebony vanes sprouted sideways from the base. While one vane remained short, the other grew long enough to reach the sets of roman numerals that emerged along the disk’s perimeter.
Like helicopter blades, the vanes wound around and around, passing one another in chaotic loops. A deep, steady grinding noise accompanied their race and joined with the rumbling just before it all died out, signaling the end of the tower’s transmogrification.
A clock, Isobel thought. Varen had converted Trenton’s bell tower into a clock tower. Simultaneously, he’d transported them to his Gothic palace—onto the exterior of this grand castle sanctuary he’d conjured into being.
The next time the colossal minute hand swung in front of Varen, he stepped forward to board it. With balanced, even steps, he made his way down the length of the appendage as it swept the circumference of the clock’s face.
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Varen stopped at the hand’s spade-shaped apex, and when its point swung past Isobel, their gazes again met.
His black stare both beckoned and dared, silently asking a single question: Are you coming?
Then the clock hand wheeled away, breaking their connection. Varen disembarked when the spade’s point reached the twelve. Continuing forward, he entered the foggy drifts of clouds that coasted by.
Isobel urged herself after him, and now her steps came more steadily. Because she thought she finally knew what it was he was doing. He was provoking her, challenging her to join him on another ledge—another cliff.
We’ll get our revenge, Pinfeathers had warned her. Don’t you forget that.
The Noc hadn’t been talking about Varen’s revenge on her, Isobel realized. He’d meant Varen’s escalating need to exact vengeance on himself.
And what better way to do that than to deny himself any chance of escape from the prison of his own mind?
Isobel arrived at the outer rim of the clock and waited. When the minute hand swung her way, she leaped aboard, throwing her arms out to her sides for balance. But she wavered anyway, managing the ride with far less grace than Varen.
Through the pane of the clock face beneath her, massive gears twitched and spun. The low clunking of the cogs vibrated through her entire body, reminding her how much of a dream this wasn’t.
She jumped when the numeral twelve entered her view and, stumbling, her momentum carried her forward into the clouds and onto the spire.
When she looked ahead, she saw that, like another grim fixture of the palace’s forbidding architecture, Varen now stood at the pinnacle of the horizontal steeple. Where one more step would have sent him plunging.
The Ultima Thule, Isobel thought grimly.
“I know what you’re doing,” she yelled out to him over the howling winds.
He glanced back at her. Though he said nothing, he lifted an arm, opening his palm toward her.
“You’re trying to prove to me—to yourself—that it can’t be done,” Isobel went on, stepping forward. “That you can’t be saved. That you don’t deserve to be. ”
Venturing farther out, she took care to place one foot directly in front of the other, treading the steeple’s tapering point as she would a balance beam.
Varen watched her without speaking.
Isobel kept her eyes fixed on him as well.
Though she refused to look down, spindly sideways spires spiked into her lower periphery. Somewhere past them, a swirl of movement and the distant roar of waves alerted her to the presence of the white sea.
But Isobel pushed the thought of raging waters aside and, through the strands of her whipping hair, did her best to maintain focus on Varen’s outstretched arm.
One inch at a time she shuffled nearer, and when she came close enough to place her palm in his, Varen’s hand clamped like a trap, fastening tight around hers.
Isobel winced, but she did not try to pull free.
“After everything,” she said, “I think I finally realize that . . . if you believe you can’t be saved, then of course you’re right. Because I can’t force you to listen. And no, as badly as I want to—and Varen, I want to, more than you’ll ever know—I can’t be the one who saves you. Only you can do that. ”
A flicker of confusion knitted his brow, and Isobel sensed it was because he was trying to banish her with his will, to cause her to disintegrate like he had done to her astral form in the mirrored hall.
“But there is one thing that I can do,” she whispered, twisting her hand in his fierce grip so that she could thread her fingers through his. She took his other hand too, and tilted her chin to find him scowling at her, his eyes stony but uncertain.
That uncertainty was the thing she’d been waiting for.
Because she needed only the merest of cracks in his fortitude, for his guard to lower for the smallest instant, in order to play her final card.
“I can prove to you that you’re worth saving. ”
Isobel clamped down on his hands. In the same instant, she envisioned the clock face and the rows of bloodred windows shattering in unison.
A hundred thousand shards burst upward with an earsplitting smash.
Transforming, the tinkling splinters became a throng of origami butterflies.
A hush of pink paper wings filled the air like the whispering of a million voices, loud enough to drown out the cry of the winds, th
e crash of the sea.
The butterflies swept toward them, funneling around the place where she and Varen stood, flittering to create a living curtain that sealed the two of them off—blotting out the tower, the steeple, the drop, the very sky.
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30
By Horror Haunted
Varen tried to wrench free, like Isobel knew he would. But she was ready.
Holding him steady, she willed her butterflies closer.
When the throng followed her silent command, swooping near enough for wings to rasp against Varen’s coat and snag loose wisps of her hair, she actually smiled.
Varen looked left and right, his confusion melting into disbelief.
Taking advantage of his disorientation—the distraction she’d created—Isobel concentrated fully on banishing Varen’s sideways tower. In its stead, she pictured the first place she could think of.
The butterflies dispersed to reveal an enormous room with a gallery walkway lining its upper level: the warehouse where the Grim Facade had taken place.
They stood together in the very spot she’d imagined, on that patch of dance floor where they had shared their first last kiss.
Gathering into clusters, the butterflies merged into people and things.
Caught in mid-sway, leather-clad boys and bodice-laced girls stood all around, frozen in tableau as though, for them, time had stopped. Leaning this way and that in the fog-machine haze, the goths held wrists aloft with bracelets and studded cuffs, their masked and painted faces half-lost in shadow, half-illuminated by the eerie blue-green glow spilling from the stage.
All eyes were closed, including those of the singer, who cradled her microphone between hands gloved in lace, her face lined with false stitching like a rag doll’s.
Though her lips were frozen, the girl’s siren voice, far away and muffled, rebounded through the hall. The unintelligible lyrics of her song joined with the low, echoing moan of a cello.
Isobel stood as motionless as the spectral goths.
She wanted to grant Varen enough time to acclimate to their altered surroundings. To check with himself to be sure he had not been the one to cause the shift.
Then, unable to hold back any longer, she released his hands and, touching his cheek, drew his gaze back to her.
Varen’s scowl had returned, but his anger seemed false now, just another mask meant to hide the doubt he was still too afraid to let go of.
