Oblivion

by Kelly Creagh

  This place—this house—it was Bruce’s.

  43

  The Heart Whose Woes Are Legion

  Dropping the pepper spray but keeping the ribbon, Isobel flew past Gwen. Then, swinging around the corner she’d seen Varen turn, she tore down the cramped hallway, a collage of hanging photos blurring by in her periphery.

  That must be where Gwen had snagged the portrait, Isobel thought as she skidded to a halt at the end of the hall. Glancing right, she peered into the adjoining corridor.

  A grim-faced grandfather clock seemed to watch her from the shadows. Behind its glass door, a tarnished silver pendulum swayed to and fro, its quiet ticking the only sound in an otherwise absolute silence.

  The clock’s stationary hour hand pointed to the roman numeral nine, the filigreed minute hand hovering over the six. Below the clock’s face, someone had stuck a yellow sticky note that read AUCTION in bold black marker.

  Aside from the clock, there were only doors. Two on either side, all of them open.

  Isobel crept down the hall with slow steps, the ancient floorboards creaking underfoot. As she passed each doorway, she peered into the room beyond.

  Her first right led to a study full of boxes and stacked furniture. More sticky notes labeled everything with one of three words: GOODWILL, AUCTION, and DUMPSTER.

  Next, on the left, came an empty bathroom with dingy tile flooring, its walls peeling floral paper. The following right opened into a cleaned-out closet, its metal rack cleared of everything except for a black garment bag marked with yet another sticky note—this one bearing Varen’s name.

  At the top of the partially unzipped bag, Isobel spied a gray suit jacket and a striped tie. She thought they might be the same clothes that Bruce’s son, Grey, had been wearing in the photograph.

  Isobel pressed on, and finally, glancing into the last room on the left, she found Varen.

  He stood with his back to her, staring down at the stripped and dismantled remains of a four-poster bed, its headboard propped against the wall.

  The white raven still emblazoned between the shoulders of Varen’s coat reminded Isobel, painfully, of how far the nightmare was from being over. How Varen’s ties to Lilith still existed.

  And though Reynolds had pointed the way, though he’d handed Isobel the ribbon and helped to bring them here, to this moment of all or nothing—how could she tell Varen that everything would be okay when his pain never ended? When the “nothing” part was all he knew?

  When in coming home, back to reality, he had found no home to come to.

  What good were her words and promises now?

  “You knew?” he asked, his voice quiet, disconcertingly calm.

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  “I—I didn’t get a chance to tell you,” Isobel stammered. “I wanted to, but . . . Varen, I’m so sorry. ”

  “How long?”

  Isobel fidgeted with the ribbon, uncertain of what, exactly, he was asking her.

  “How long has he been gone?” Varen snapped, louder this time.

  “The funeral was today,” Isobel said. “This morning. Gwen and I were both there. I went because I—”

  “Goddamn it,” he said, snatching a small lamp from a nearby nightstand and sending a cascade of empty orange medicine bottles to the floor. He slung the lamp at the far wall, where it smashed and fell.

  Isobel flinched. She watched the lamp’s fractured bulb sputter before dying out.

  Suddenly the objects in the room—books and boxes, a trash can, the medicine bottles—shifted. They rose together and hovered in place.

  Tensing, Isobel checked the grandfather clock, the hands of which had started to spin.

  “Varen,” she began, but she stopped, her words catching at the sound of a woman’s humming.

  It was the melody from Varen’s lullaby, the heartrending song Madeline had written for him when he was a child. When he’d still been her child.

  Then the humming dissolved, becoming laughter, low and insidious.

  An electric charge filled the air, causing the hairs on the nape of Isobel’s neck to stand at attention. And yet she couldn’t bring herself to look back in the direction she’d come from—toward the end of the hall where the building laughter rebounded.

  Instead she kept her gaze fixed on Varen as he slowly turned to face the door.

  Black once more, his eyes stared straight through her.

  44

  White-Robed Forms

  Radiating fury, Varen stalked toward Isobel.

  As he moved, the doorway that stood between them expanded, its rectangular arch rounding as it transformed to stone. Then Varen walked right past her, across the wide threshold and into the hall, where his continuing steps triggered more change.

  Like a crawling frost, cracked stone spread out from beneath his boots. Plaster and drywall faded into rough gray brick. While the emerging walls of Varen’s palace absorbed the doorways on Isobel’s right, the entries on her left morphed into more Gothic arches, and the passageway before her took the form of a cloister.

  Through the open arcade, Isobel saw that Varen had returned them to the courtyard of statues.

  Or was it that he’d brought the courtyard of statues to them?

  But then, this was not the same courtyard she’d encountered before. Not only were there no angels among the gathering of fog-enveloped white forms—no sets of wings, neither tucked nor unfurled—she saw no faces, either.

  None fully decipherable . . .

  Draping stone shrouds covered the statues’ heads, spilling long down their feminine bodies in clinging sculpted folds.

  Lilith’s laughter echoed all around, trailing off into the eerie garden.

  Another trap, Isobel thought. The demon’s final play.

  And Varen, with his mind now firmly set on revenge, was about to walk straight into it.

  “Varen, wait,” Isobel called after him.

  To her surprise—and perhaps to his as well—Varen halted at the corner of the cloister.

  “She’s right,” Isobel said.

  Varen turned his head slightly toward her. The gesture, though small, suggested that at least he was listening.

  Fixing her eyes on that white raven, Isobel held her ribbon—their ribbon—closer.

  “Darkness will win,” she said. “It has to. So long as you try to fight fire with fire. ”

  Half-shielded by his tousled, ashen hair, his eyes flicked in her direction.

  “Sometimes,” he said, speaking in that quiet and contained way that always frightened her, “fire is the only way to fight. But then . . . you knew that already. ”

  With that, Varen rounded the corner, passing out of her sight.

  Isobel’s chest contracted with fear.

  Fire. Isobel had been referring to Varen’s obvious plan to fight Lilith with anger, to pit his own capacity for darkness against the demon’s.

  But the fire he meant was Isobel’s chosen tool to banish him from the strip mall parking lot earlier that day. And to sever the original link—to destroy Varen’s sketchbook.

  Now that Varen knew he was the link, would he try something similar?

  Immediately Isobel’s thoughts circled back to Varen’s duel with the doppelgänger Noc. To what had been said between the two. They had reached some sort of agreement—or rather, Varen had come to an understanding with himself.

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  He’d devised a deadly contract.

  Then he had tried to soothe Isobel’s fears with a distracting explanation, with a kiss.

  Had that kiss been meant as a good-bye?

  Panic seized her at that thought, spurring Isobel to charge around the bend after him. But she halted suddenly when she found herself back in Bruce’s house, in that dimly lit hall sandwiched between the stairs and the wall.

  All the photos now hung askew, their glass panes cracked and splintered. r />
  Dead ahead, she saw Varen cross through the front door, which hung wide, exiting not into Bruce’s yard but to the courtyard and its shrouded, mist-wrapped forms.

  But before she could follow him through to the other side, Isobel spotted something—someone—lying on the stairs.

  “Gwen!” Grabbing the banister, Isobel swung down to kneel next to her.

  Unconscious but breathing, her chest rising with small, shallow intakes, Gwen lay on her side, head propped on one arm as if someone had positioned her that way. A red welt swelled near her temple, and in one hand, her fingers curled loosely around the canister of pepper spray.

  Isobel glanced behind her, to the top of the staircase and the hall, but she saw no sign of Reynolds.

  She pushed off from the steps and whirled for the open door. Barreling through it, she ran headlong into the drifts of fog and down a winding path after Varen, whose form she no longer saw.

  45

  Nameless Here for Evermore

  “Varen!” Isobel shouted.

  “Varen,” a hushed voice echoed back.

  Isobel turned in a circle, shoes scuffling stone.

  Marble faces peered down at her from every direction, their features half-lost behind carved veils that perfectly mimicked the sheerness of gossamer. Now, even through the stone shrouds, she could make out their solemn expressions—their lidded eyes that, though closed, still seemed to see.

  Looking behind her, Isobel also saw that along with the door to Bruce’s, the walkway had vanished, its curving path now populated with more enswathed figures.

  One of the statues moved, swiveling its head her way.

  With a jump, Isobel backpedaled and stumbled straight into another.

  Laughter, deep and throaty, filled the courtyard, growing louder and louder until the voice swept down on Isobel—and right into her.

  Isobel shrieked as the shrill cackling invaded her head. Her hands leaped to cover her ears, dropping the ribbon. She squeezed her eyes shut, but she couldn’t block out the laughter as it spiked into a skull-shattering scream.

  Legs giving out, Isobel collapsed. Her knees slammed hard onto cold stone, and, doubling over, she fought the urge to be sick.

  Then, departing as suddenly as it had descended, the demon’s voice ceased and fled her mind. Its reverberation clapped through the newly quieted courtyard.

  Trembling, gasping for air as well as for the return of her senses, Isobel lowered her quaking hands. She kept her head bowed, opening her eyes again only when she felt something warm trickle from her nose.

  Three blots of crimson fell to splatter the smooth rectangular slab on which she now knelt. There, letters formed, creating trenches for the blood droplets.

  Through the matted dreads of her hair, Isobel read the carved words.

  ISOBEL LANLEY

  BELOVED DAUGHTER, DEVOTED SISTER,

  CHERISHED FRIEND

  LIVED FOR LOVE, YET PERISHED BY ITS HAND

  “Carries a certain Poe-etic ring to it, does it not?” asked a low feminine voice.

  A soft shifting followed by a quiet drag of fabric sounded loud in Isobel’s ringing ears. Then pooling folds of white and violet-stained gossamer entered her view. Poking through the puddled hem, curved black talons clicked to a stop atop Isobel’s engraved name.

  “Pun intended,” Lilith said, “as our wayward Pinfeathers might have suggested were he here. Had you not incited him to self-annihilation, I mean. But then, you do possess a certain knack for impelling lovesick wretches to ruin, don’t you? I suppose you and I have that much in common. ”

  “I am nothing like you,” Isobel growled. Slamming her palms flat against the slab, she pushed to her feet and lunged at the figure in front of her. Instead of digging into soft veils and flesh, though, her fingers clashed with hard marble.

  Another statue.

  As though mocking her, the figure smiled serenely at Isobel from behind its pall.

  “You do like your epitaph, do you not?” Lilith asked, her voice now emanating from a separate corner of the courtyard.

  Isobel shoved away from the frozen effigy. Whirling, she scoured the endless multitude of veiled forms.

  “I’d rather hoped you would,” the same voice called, issuing from yet another direction. “Given that it is the prize you’ve been fighting so hard to obtain. A sorrowful ending to a mournful tale whose greatest tragedy is that it happened to conclude with your name instead of mine. ”

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  “Where are you?” Isobel yelled. She twirled in place, and in a kaleidoscope of muted faces, statues wheeled around her. “If you think you can end this, if you want to kill me, then come out! Stop hiding like a coward. ”

  “You seem upset,” Lilith said. “Don’t care much for having your own tricks turned against you, do you?”

  Isobel rotated again and again. She began to slow, though, when she noticed that none of the statues appeared to hold the same position as before. But when she stopped, the courtyard only spun faster, continuing its rotation without her.

  Isobel teetered. Her feet tangling in her ribbon, she fell onto the cold slab bearing her name.

  Her surroundings whizzed by in a blur—a merry-go-round of phantoms that halted only when a familiar mausoleum slid into view directly across from Isobel.

  Mist, thick and rolling, enshrouded the tomb she recognized as Lilith’s.

  Its decorative wrought-iron and blue stained-glass door hung wide open, revealing a rectangle of pure black.

  Above the void, etched over the archway, Isobel saw a name she knew but had not noticed there before. Not until now.

  LIGEIA

  “Enough with games, though,” Lilith said, her sultry voice resounding now from within the tomb. “You called. And now, here I am. ”

  For an instant, the cavity of pitch darkness remained undisturbed. Then, like a dead thing floating up from black waters, the demon’s hollowed white face and emaciated form emerged to stand in the door frame.

  Lilith’s sheer shroud, tattered and stained, hung from her in strips and shreds. Her tangled, dripping hair fell long over her shoulders, its ends still soaked in inky muck.

  A pit oozed in the center of the demon’s ivory chest, where Reynolds’s hamsa-strung blade had impaled her. Only lightly smeared now with the violet-black substance she’d nearly dissolved into, Lilith’s pale, papery lips entertained a renewed smile.

  “Lilith,” Isobel said, spitting the name from between her teeth as she scooped up her ribbon again. “Ligeia. Lenore. Emily. Lilo and Stitch. Which is it?”

  “‘Ulalume—Ulalume,’” Lilith replied, her voice going sweet and soft, making the syllables sound like a song. “’Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume. ’”

  As the demon crossed out of the barrier of darkness, her aura of cold ethereal light burned suddenly bright, its glow evaporating the stains from her figure.

  Black veins faded from hands that became delicate again as they took up the veils that still clung to her shoulders. Lilith drew the gauzy fabric over her face, and like a bride approaching the altar, she strode toward Isobel.

  Her heart rate speeding, Isobel flicked her eyes between the approaching creature and the shifting letters above the tomb.

  The name LIGEIA melted away, and bleeding through the stone, new letters emerged to spell ULALUME.

  “‘Then my heart it grew ashen and sober,’” hissed the demon, her thin lips blossoming to bloodred fullness, her face and figure regaining their former beauty. “‘As the leaves that were crisped and sere—as the leaves that were withering and sere. ’”

  Keeping hold of her ribbon, Isobel drew to her feet. She took several retreating steps until her spine collided with one of the statues, leaving her nowhere to go.

  The demon drifted nearer still, her radiance blazing to an ultraviolet shine and her skin to an eye-stinging white.

  “‘A
nd I cried—“It was surely October on this very night of last year, that I journeyed—I journeyed down here!—that I brought a dread burden down here—on this night of all nights in the year,”’” Lilith continued, reciting lines from one of Poe’s poems. The same poem, Isobel knew, whose title matched the name now written on the demon’s tomb. The poem Scrimshaw had recited to her the first time she’d found herself within the walls of the blue marble crypt.

  The same poem Varen had read to Isobel in his room.

  It was the one work of Poe’s that mentioned the woodlands by name.

  “That poem,” Isobel said. “Poe wrote it trying to seal you back up, didn’t he?”

  “And we see how well that worked,” Lilith replied, coming to a stop in front of Isobel. “But while we’re on the subject, and if you don’t mind my asking, would you do me the favor of refreshing my memory?”

  Isobel gasped when she felt the statue behind her snatch her wrist, immobilizing the hand that held her pink ribbon. A yelp of shock rose in her throat as bony fingers dug into her flesh, but her cry caught there, dying the moment the effigy swung her around to face it.

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  In place of another of Lilith’s stone idols, a skeleton leered down at her from within the shadows of a heavy hood.

  Behind a sculpted pall of its own, the skull grinned at Isobel and, looping an arm around her waist, jerked her snugly against its robed body. Then, as though they’d been caught in a fervid dance, the statue threw her low into a dip and, holding her there, refroze.

  Isobel whimpered in the skeleton’s solidified grip, recognizing all too well where she had seen it before.

  This was the Red Death. The same nightmare figure that had collapsed the grave over Isobel when she’d fallen there, trying to rescue Brad.

  “I seem to recall you mentioning something earlier about . . . putting me in my place?” Lilith said, her glowing figure sliding into Isobel’s periphery, her serene and lovely face half-obscured by the tails of the ribbon still hanging from Isobel’s clenched fist.

  At the rumbling sound of stone grating on stone, Isobel twisted in the skeleton’s hold to peer down over her shoulder.

  Beneath her, the long slab bearing her epitaph had slid free, unveiling a pit that reached far into the earth.

  Tightly packed walls of red dirt formed a deep grave that terminated in an open pine box.

  Isobel ceased her struggle in the skeleton statue’s crushing grip, aware that if it were to let go of her now, she would fall into the tomb’s waiting mouth—straight into that coffin.