by Kelly Creagh
Well, Isobel thought, flipping back to the title page and its lines about mutiny and the Southern seas—at least that explained the whole pirate sword thing.
Curious, she hooked a finger to catch the next segment of pages, preparing to flip straight to the end and read the last paragraph, when a low click from somewhere downstairs made her look up.
Her door frame stood empty. Dark. Quiet.
Then: eeEEEEEeee.
Isobel recognized the sound of the front door opening.
She grew still, listening for several more seconds. When she heard nothing else, she closed the book, set it aside, and, clenching her fist tight around the watch, reached with her free hand to pick up her bedside lamp.
Her fingers stopped just short of wrapping around the lamp’s middle.
Deciding this time to forgo her usual impulse of grabbing the first useless, weapon-esque thing she saw, she rose and padded barefoot to the door.
Peering out into the hall and over the banister, Isobel saw that the front door hung halfway open.
Bits of snow fluttered in with a rolling fog of cold mist.
Sparing a quick glance to the cracked door of her brother’s darkened room, Isobel slid out into the hall.
She stood overlooking the foyer, watching the gales of cold air waft in. Though she thought for a moment about calling for her dad, she decided against it.
Then she noticed that the outer storm door, which should have prevented the inflow of snow and air . . . was missing.
Tick tick tick tick tick tick, came the sound of the mantel clock in the living room.
The noise prompted Isobel to check the pocket watch again, but it continued to tick normally.
She slipped to the stairs and then down, the middle step creaking as she passed the collage of family photos, most of which had been repaired and rehung.
Edging around the banister, she took the door and, opening it all the way, peered out into the familiar cemetery that had taken the place of her front yard.
To her right, perched atop its short cement stoop, its four faces aglow with floodlights, Poe’s gravestone monument stood tall and sturdy. As if it and all the other tombs had always been there. Just another collection of quaint lawn ornaments.
Snow dusted the headstones and the narrow walkway, which ran between the house-shaped sepulchres.
Leading away from the threshold on which Isobel stood, a single set of boot prints dotted the trail. They ran past Poe’s monument and between two rows of short, low-lying tombs. There the footprints disappeared, fading into the patch of darkness that waited beyond.
Even though her breath clouded in front of her, Isobel felt no coldness in the air.
She deliberated for a moment, but then, stepping outside, found that the fleecy snow held no frigid sting.
Isobel drifted forward through the silent cemetery. Following the trail of prints, she made her way down the path, glancing back only once to make sure her house was still there, that the door leading to her foyer remained open. It did.
Aware that despite what the pocket watch was telling her, she must be dreaming, Isobel bore onward. She paused when she reached the end of the narrow alley between tombs and, glancing right, saw that a quiet sidewalk waited beyond the tall Greene Street gates.
To her left, the footprints continued on, winding past the closed entrance to the catacombs and hooking around the corner of Westminster Hall.
Sure, now, of where the prints must lead—and to whom—Isobel let go of her need to stay within sight of her house. She rounded the bend, and from there made her way quickly up the narrow, uneven brick trail that would take her to Poe’s original burial spot.
He stood just where she knew she would find him, hovering over the stone marker while bits of white gathered on the wide brim of his hat.
A low breeze brushed past Isobel and swept around Reynolds, stirring the bottom edge of his cloak and the tails of his white scarf.
Her bare feet leaving the trail, Isobel moved toward him over the hardened earth. Reynolds did not glance her way as she approached but kept his gaze squarely on the marker’s chiseled raven. Even as Isobel joined him at his side, he didn’t turn to her or speak.
“Let me guess,” Isobel said. She dropped her voice low, scrunching her face into her best Reynolds scowl. “Do not be alarmed. This is a dream. ”
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To her utter shock, her impersonation actually got a smile out of him. Though she could not see his mouth for the scarf, the smirk was wide enough that it reached his eyes, causing them to crinkle at the corners.
And his eyes themselves—Isobel had to lean forward when she noticed their color. That they had a color. Wait. Were they . . . blue?
Unable to help herself, Isobel placed a hand on his arm. Finally, prompted by her touch, he turned his head her way.
Blue indeed, she saw. Blue, with rims of dark gray that encircled the bright starbursts of his irises.
“Yet your watch would advise you otherwise,” he replied, and, lifting a gloved hand, he pinched the scarf and drew it down from his face.
“My watch?” Isobel asked, her voice trailing off as she marveled at his complexion.
Though Reynolds wouldn’t have walked away from a “best tan” contest with any sort of honorable mention, let alone an award, she thought his pallor had been greatly reduced. Less dead mushroom and more basement recluse.
“I am of the mind you would have more use for it now than I. ”
That last bit hit her brain as mumbo jumbo. She shook her head, clearing their conversation to begin a new one that, hopefully, she would be able to follow.
“Hold up. I’m a little lost,” she said, folding her arms against the cold she didn’t feel. She glanced behind her toward the Greene Street gates. “Are we in the dreamworld?”
“Tell me, what do your instincts suggest?”
Isobel glowered at him. “My instincts suggest that you, at least, are the real deal, given that only you would answer a straightforward question with a cryptic, open-ended one of your own. ”
“Since I am, according to you, being predictable, you won’t then mind my repeating old lines about not being long on time. ”
Isobel’s hands went to her hips. “Is that why you’re all dressed up? Got a Monster’s Ball to attend? Or a meeting for the Literal Literary Characters of America?”
“Something like that,” he said, another slight smile touching his lips—its appearance all but rattling Isobel’s entire world. Because Reynolds smiled only never.
“I thought,” he went on, ignoring Isobel’s dumbfounded stare, “that, given your undeniable knack for traversing untraversable barriers, not to mention your penchant for making your point clear through brute force, it would be wisest to arrange a meeting with you now. Save us both trouble in the long run, in the event you had any lingering queries or grievances you wished to voice. And, I suppose . . . because I thought it only proper that I tell you good-bye. ”
Isobel refolded her arms, scrunching them in tighter than before as she shifted her weight to one foot.
“So I know you didn’t just call me a bully,” she said, rattling off words before she even knew what they would be. “I mean, you’re the one flipping around swords, stabbing people like you’ve got nothing better to do. And on that note, PS slash FYI, strolling out of tombs and getting nerds all excited and your dumb masked face printed up in national magazines is not the best way to make good on your whole ‘should you seek me again I will not be found’ wannabe badass spiel. ”
She was rambling and she knew it. And she was stalling, too. Despite all the crap between the two of them, Isobel wasn’t ready yet to tell Reynolds good-bye.
“Do you suppose they will miss me this year?” Reynolds—Pym—Gordon—whoever asked after allowing a block of silence to pass.
Isobel trained her focus on her feet and the collecting blan
ket of snow beneath them.
“I’m going to pull a you, do the question-for-a-question thing and ask if that means you are, in fact, going somewhere other than the woodlands. Because I was kinda thinking I wasn’t going to see you ever again. And now you’re here, but you say that you’re going for good this time. ”
“Thanks to you, Isobel, the woodlands, as far as I know, are no more. ”
Isobel’s head jerked up. “She really is gone?”
“I can only assume that Lilith died when the boy did, and that her soul passed on from his body. Presumably, to wherever demons go. ”
“The policeman’s bullet . . . it only went through his shoulder,” Isobel said. “Right through him. But the paramedics said they thought the shock caused his heart to stop. They had no other explanation for it. They thought he was dead. Well, he was dead. Until . . . until they brought him back. ”
“Varen’s act was one of self-sacrifice. Of love,” Reynolds replied, and his words gave her pause. Not due so much to their meaning, but because she was certain she had never heard Reynolds refer to Varen directly by name. Never until now.
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“Lilith would have found his heart an uninhabitable place,” Reynolds continued. “They were locked in battle even after they had become one, and it is quite possible that Lilith herself—unable to withstand such torture—was the one responsible for stopping his heartbeat, simultaneously bringing about her own demise. Whatever the case, his death—brief as it was—caused the last slip in her tenuous grip. On the boy. On her pitiful existence. On her reign and her very kingdom, as well. On me . . . Now you and the boy have both tasted death, it seems, and in so doing, you have delivered the demon’s. And I believe you have granted me mine. ”
Reynolds stopped there, and Isobel let his explanation settle over her along with the returning quiet. Glancing at the gravestone, her eyes traced its grooves and lettering—the raven carved there in profile.
Death, she reminded herself, was what Reynolds had wanted. His desire, even if he had given up hope of ever achieving it, had been to pass on. He’d been in limbo so long, halfway living and halfway dead—all the way lost. But though Isobel knew she should be happy for him, she found that particular emotion hard to summon just at this moment. So she pressed on to her next question instead.
“He . . . Varen . . . said that when the paramedics were working on him, he heard me calling. He said there was darkness everywhere and that he was alone. But then my voice appeared as a bright light. He followed it until he . . . woke up. ”
Reynolds’s gaze trailed after hers to Poe’s old gravestone.
“For that,” he said after a beat, “I have no explanation. Except, perhaps, for this: that whatever force the demon could not survive is the same that has allowed my soul to return to you in this moment. The same that allowed the boy’s soul to rejoin with his body—the same that returned him, whole, to you. The same that has empowered you along the way, guiding you better than I could have. For look at us now. ”
He smiled at her again, only smaller and more bittersweet this time.
Isobel hadn’t been able to prevent herself from touching his arm moments ago, or from tackling him in this same graveyard less than a month ago, or even from stabbing him through the foot on the terrace in the dreamworld. And now she could not prevent the tears that surged forth from her eyes, falling down her face in two unstoppable streams.
Slamming into him hard, she actually sobbed out loud, straight into his waistcoat.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she wailed. “Why didn’t you tell me right from the start what was going on? That you had to pretend to be on Lilith’s side? That she knew I was alive? That she wanted me to try to show Varen I was real, so that he would re-enter reality and bring the dreamworld with him? You could have. You didn’t have to play her game. ”
“You remember when we fought?” Reynolds asked. “When the demon summoned me by name? I’d stepped out to kill you on her orders. ”
Isobel nodded, recalling how Reynolds had tried to coach her even then, guiding her through the sword fight on the terrace overlooking the cliffs where Varen had stood.
“It was not by accident that she called on me to dispatch you in that moment,” he said, his husky voice rumbling through her. “At that point, she suspected I was the Lost Soul who had been helping you all along, and the one who had ended Edgar’s life. Our fight and its outcome, I knew, would only confirm her suspicions. But I also understood that before exacting any revenge on me, she would take my ability to enter your world into consideration.
“After I returned you to that hospital, I knew that since you lived, she would try to use you again. But in order to do that, she would need me. And Isobel, if I was to be of any use at all—if I was to keep my promise to Edgar, to supply you or your world with any aid—I had to accept the demon’s offer to play the part of your guide. I had to deliver her lie to you—that she thought you dead, that you would be facing an unsuspecting enemy. And I had to let her believe I was aiding you only as a means to complete her goals.
“Even if I’d told you the truth, you would not have believed me—whether or not you would admit it now. It would only have made you more wary than you already were. You would have asked more questions. You would have waited to act. I also knew that, regardless of my commands, you would interact with the boy the moment you set eyes on him. Why do you suppose I was so adamant against it? I used your mistrust of me to both of our advantages, knowing that you would take your chance when you saw it. When you saw him. The sooner the better, was my feeling. You are welcome, by the way. ”
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“Oh, yes, thanks,” Isobel quipped. “Good to know I’m the predictable one here. ”
“I only predicted what I hoped would be true,” he replied. “My wager, as the demon called it—believing the best of you. Believing in you. ”
“Oh, you are so lucky this is a dream,” Isobel mumbled into him. “Because if I really was here, I’d totally barf on you right now. ”
“I am . . . touched,” he said.
But really, she was touched. Wrapping her arms around him, she squeezed him hard.
As un-Reynolds as his words had been, she thought that he must have meant them. And if he was getting mushy, if there really were no more ominous tidings for him to bring, no more secret suicide missions to send her on, then . . . then this really must be good-bye.
She still wasn’t ready for him to go, though. Not yet. But without the threat of worlds colliding or demons seeking to consume reality, all she had left to keep him there were questions.
“Your ability,” Isobel murmured. “Crossing between worlds. You can do that because of Poe?” Hitching a breath, she realized Reynolds’s scent, that essence of decaying roses, was gone now. Further evidence that he was slipping away. That he would depart forever, when the time came. And it was coming.
“Yes,” Reynolds replied, and Isobel shut her eyes when she felt his palm against her back. “I could cross between worlds because of the power granted to me by Edgar’s writing. ”
“Through that story,” Isobel sniffled, her voice muffled against him as she kept her face stupidly smashed to his chest, now if only to see how long he would tolerate it.
“My book, the only novel Edgar ever wrote, was meant as an experiment,” Reynolds explained. “Edgar’s idea was to take my story, which I told to him over the course of many dreams, and adapt it to fit a real location in your world. He would then publish the piece in increments, touting it as a nonfictional account. In so doing, he hoped to create a link that would allow me to cross physically into your reality and become a part of it. His plan worked, and might have saved me from my imprisonment in the dreamworld had he not been working on another piece at the same time. A story called ‘Ligeia,’ inspired by another dreamworld entity. The Nocs were unleashed from his soul, and I perished by the hand of Scrimshaw. Edgar, who wed s
hortly after, never knew of my demise; unbeknownst to him, his union with Virginia had severed his ties to the dreamworld. It was only after she died that Lilith again pursued him. ”
“She went after him again,” Isobel said, “and pulled him into the dreamworld. ”
“I found him there. When he discovered what had become of me, that I was now bound to the woodlands forever as a Lost Soul, his remorse was deep. We reconciled, and after exchanging clothing, I agreed to both play the part of his decoy, and to use the ability he’d granted me to help him return to his reality—your reality. ”
Isobel pulled back from Reynolds, and taking up the edge of his heavy cloak, she ran her fingers along the material. “That’s why they found him wearing someone else’s clothes,” Isobel said. “This . . . this is his cloak, isn’t it?”
Reynolds didn’t answer, but he didn’t have to.
“You knew what Varen would do, didn’t you?” Isobel asked. “You knew what he’d decided. That he needed to die in order for the worlds to separate again?”
Silence again.
“Typical,” Isobel said. “I should have known, but, whatever. As long as you’re not answering my questions like you said you would, can you at least tell me what happens now? Where you’ll go?”
“Presumably,” he replied, “wherever Lost Souls go when they are found. But you needn’t worry. I will not be alone. See for yourself. ”
He extended an arm toward Greene Street.
“Who said I was w—” Isobel’s words halted, evaporating out of her mouth at the sight of who stood beyond the gates.
No. Flipping. Way.
Stern-faced but not unkind, there stood a man in a top hat and a black comb moustache.
Touching the brim of the hat, Edgar Allan Poe bowed his head at her very slightly.
Isobel, unsure of what else to do, gave a small, shell-shocked wave.
She jumped when Reynolds brushed past her, making his way toward the gate.
Though she wanted to call after him, to dash forward and catch his hand, she let him go.
Reynolds opened the gate, and with a low groan, it swung in toward him. As he stepped through, he unclasped his cloak and unfurled it from around his shoulders, extending it to Poe, who, without pause, drew it around his own.
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