“The door, Alan!”
This time something got through to him. He shook his head and rose unsteadily to his feet to look around the room. After a moment, he swept his arm across the top of the worktable, knocking its contents to the floor. Then, using the long table as a makeshift battering ram, he aimed the point of one of its corners at the door and slid it across the floor. The point hit a wood panel with a satisfying crunch, but it didn’t break through.
Alan pulled the table back. He looked at the door, imagining that it was Rushkin standing there, and heaved the table forward again. This time the point of the corner went right through the thin wood of the door panel.
“One more shot,” he called back over his shoulder to Marisa.
She didn’t answer. She was too busy stanching Isabelle’s wound.
It was still Rushkin’s face that Alan saw in the wood panel as he drove the point of the table’s corner into it a third time. When he pulled the table back there was enough of a hole in the door for him to put a hand through and fumble for the key that was still in the lock on the other side.
XIV
The third time Isabelle called his name, John turned.
“Don’t,” she cried, floundering on through the snow toward him. “Please don’t go.”
But this time there was no coldness in John’s eyes. No rejection. When he saw her, he hurried forward, reaching out a hand to help her reach the comparatively easier passage created by a trough in the drifts that ran up to the corner of the house.
“I know I can do it right this time,” Isabelle said, once they reached the sheltering lee of the house. The wind wasn’t so strong here. The snow didn’t fall as thick. “I promise you, I won’t screw it up. I’ll save the numena and Kathy.”
In the light cast by the bulb hanging above the back porch, she studied John’s features, wanting to see that he believed in her, that he trusted her to do the right thing this time, but John was looking at her strangely.
“What … what is it?” she asked.
“You’re Izzy again,” he said.
Old nickname, given name, what was the difference? Isabelle thought. There were more important things to deal with at the moment than names.
“No,” he went on, understanding from the look on her face what she was thinking. “I mean, you’re young again.”
“Young …?”
Isabelle turned toward the nearest window. The image reflected back was hard to make out because of the streaks of frost that striped the pane, but she could still see what he meant. It was Izzy in the reflection – herself, almost twenty years younger. She lifted a wondering hand to her face. When the reflection followed suit, she shivered.
“Let’s get out of this cold,” John said.
“Where can we go?” she asked.
He pointed to the fire escape festooned with Paddyjack’s ribbons. Isabelle hesitated, not sure she could go. What if she found herself inside, crying into her pillow, brokenhearted? But when John took her arm and led her toward the metal steps, she went with him, up the fire escape, hand trailing along the cold metal banister, fingers tangling in the strips of colored cloth. At the top of the landing, John took a small penknife from his pocket and inserted it between the windows. It took him only a moment to pop the latch. Stowing away the knife, he pulled the window open and ushered her inside. As he closed the window behind them, keeping out the cold and snow, Isabelle gazed about at the familiar confines of her old bedroom. It looked exactly the way she remembered it, except it seemed smaller.
The warmth inside was comforting, but Isabelle still shivered, as much from the eeriness of being where – and when – she was, as from the chill she’d gotten outside. Her cheeks stung as the warm air settled on her skin. John made a slow circuit of the room, then sat down on the edge of the mattress.
After a moment, she followed suit.
“What were you saying earlier?” John asked. “About starting over?”
Isabelle turned to him, pulling her gaze away from its inventory of the room’s contents – all the remembered and forgotten objects that at this point in her life, almost twenty years later, seemed to be so much found art, gathered here together in her old bedroom by someone else, like a set for some kind of “This Is Your Life” television show.
“I feel like I’m being given a second chance,” she said, “Returning here like this, I mean. This time I can do everything right.”
“This isn’t the past.”
“But …. Isabelle gazed pointedly at the mirror on the far side of the room, where a reflection of her younger self looked back at her. “Then what is it? Just memory?”
John shook his head. “We’re in a maker’s dream – just as we were that other winter night all those years ago.”
“I don’t understand. – What maker?”
“You. We’re in your dream.”
Isabelle stared at him. “You’re telling me it isn’t real? That I’ve made this all up?”
“I don’t know if you actually made it up,” John said, “or if you simply brought us here. But what I do know is that what happens here reflects back into the world we’ve left behind us.”
Isabelle’s throat was suddenly dry. The exhilaration, the freedom she’d felt when she’d finally taken matters into her own hands and followed in Kathy’s footsteps, had utterly drained away. It had seemed as though there’d been no other choice at the time. Now all she could see was choices. Had it been this way for Kathy, as well? First the exhilaration of finally having done it, and then the regret when it was too late?
“I … killed myself,” she finished in a small voice.
“You cut yourself,” John corrected. “Badly. But you’re not dead yet. If you were, we wouldn’t be here.”
“I’m alive?”
Isabelle’s relief was immeasurable.
“For now. We don’t know how badly you’re hurt. And we can’t judge your survival by how long we spend here since time moves differently in a maker’s dream. It’s like fairyland. We could be here for hours while only a moment passes in the world we left.”
“I see.”
And she did. Nothing was free. She’d gained the knowledge of a new level of enchantment, but she’d only gained it when she might no longer be able to use it beyond this one last time.
“Have I always been able to do this?” she asked. “Could I have come here whenever I wanted to?”
“Ever since you became a maker.”
“But why didn’t I know?”
“I thought you did.”
Isabelle gave him a blank look. “But the only other time I’ve ever done it was almost twenty years ago.”
“Are you so sure about that?”
“Of course I’m sure. I’d know, don’t you think?”
John shrugged. “So you never dream?”
“Well, of course I dream. It’s just …”
Her voice trailed off. Yes, she dreamed. Very vivid dreams, often peopled with the numena she’d brought across from the before. Horrors courtesy of Rushkin for a while, but then later, other, mundane dreams in which she simply interacted with her numena. She just hadn’t been aware of a difference between what she now realized had been maker’s dreams and ordinary ones. And they’d all stopped, after the fire. After she shut herself off from the alchemy that Rushkin had taught her and refused to bring any more numena across.
“Why did I never dream of you again?” she asked. “Why did I never bring you back into one of those dreams?”
“I can’t answer that for you,” John said.
Isabelle nodded slowly. He couldn’t, but she could.
“It’s because I shut you out of my life,” she said. “I wanted you back, but I wanted you on my own terms and I guess some part of me realized that you can’t do that. I would have had to take you as you are, or not at all.”
“But you didn’t forget me entirely,” John said. “Sometimes a maker’s dreams are prescient, or at least the patterns in them
reflect on life and repeat toward certain meanings.” He held up the bracelet of woven cloth that was on his wrist. “Like colored cloth.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s one of the pattern that keeps repeating in your life: the bright clothes that Kathy always wore, Paddyjack’s ribbons from which you made these bracelets, the Maypole dance that was never consummated because of the fire. Even the abstract designs on your canvases that replaced your realistic paintings.”
“But what does the pattern mean?” Isabelle asked.
“I can’t answer that for you, either, but I do know that if you hadn’t made me this bracelet, you wouldn’t have been able to trust who I was after you’d met Bitterweed. We might never have come here, to this moment. We might never have had the chance to finally put an end to the shadow that’s hung over us for most of our lives.”
“You’re losing me again,” Isabelle said, but it wasn’t true. She knew exactly what he meant. She simply couldn’t face it.
“We have to go to his studio,” John said. “Now. Tonight. Here, in this dream. We might never get another chance.”
“But –”
“He’s not protected from me here, Isabelle. He told me as much himself.” He bowed his head, staring at the floor. “I carry as much guilt around with me as you do. I could have finished him that night in the snow, but I was too hurt and too full of pride. I chose to turn my back on you. It was your fight, I told myself, not mine, and because of that decision so many have died. I won’t let that happen again.”
Isabelle shook her head. “It wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t have known things would turn out the way they did.”
“But I did know. I had only to look at Rushkin to know the horrors he was capable of committing.”
“But to just kill a person in cold blood …”
John lifted his head to look at her. “He’s not a person. He’s a monster.”
“I still couldn’t do it,” Isabelle said.
“I’m not asking you to. I’m the warrior, the hunter. All I’m asking you to do is to accompany me to his studio. There, where his connection to you and this dreaming is strongest, you can call him across and he’ll have no choice but to come.”
“I …”
“Think of the dead,” John said. “Think of all those who might yet die at his hand. If you die, all he has to do is find another artist with the potential to be a maker. Your kind are rare, I’ll grant you that, but not so rare that he won’t be able to track down another – Barb, for one.”
Think of the dead, Isabelle thought. She turned to look at the door of her bedroom. Kathy was alive somewhere beyond it – either in the living room or in her own bedroom. Sleeping, probably, at this time of night. But maybe still awake, propped up in her bed with the inevitable book or notepad on her lap.
If she could only see her one last time …
“All right,” Isabelle said. “I’ll go with you to the studio and I’ll try to call him to us. But first I’ve got to do one thing.”
John put his hand on her arm as she started to rise. “This is dreamtime,” he said. “Not the past. Not the reality you remember of how things should be on this night, at this time. You might not find what you’re looking for.”
“I still have to try,” Isabelle said. “I have to see her. Even if she’s just sleeping. All I want to do is look at her and see her being alive again.”
John let his hand drop. “I’ll wait for you here,” he said.
Isabelle stood up. Crossing the bedroom, she paused with her hand on the doorknob.
“I won’t be long,” she said.
But in the end, John had to go looking for her.
XV
As she waited for Rolanda’s friends to arrive, Rosalind wandered aimlessly through the ground floor rooms of the Newford Children’s Foundation. On Rolanda’s desk she came upon a small oil painting that she recognized as Cosette’s work. It was crudely rendered – Cosette always seemed to be in such a hurry to get the image down – but powerful all the same. As powerful in its own way as any of Isabelle’s work.
Rosalind laid down her ever-present book to pick up the painting and study it more closely. She remembered what Cosette had told her about Isabelle. She said we’ve been real all along.
Just as John had always insisted.
That she made us real with the love she put into bringing us across.
Could it be true? Had they spent all these years yearning to be what they could never be instead of embracing what they were?
That we’ll never have red crows or dreams, because all we get is the real we have now.
And was that such a terrible thing? What were blood and dreams anyway but another way of describing aspirations and mortality? She and the others were certainly mortal and they were filled with hopes and ambitions. They had talent. Bajel’s poetry didn’t lack heart. Nor did the sculptures of found objects that Paddyjack constructed high in the trees and barn rafters back on Wren Island. Cosette’s art was rushed, but not without emotive potency.
And who could truly say that one of them couldn’t become a maker? When one considered how rare the potential for the gift was in human beings, perhaps it wasn’t so odd that none of them had the talent.
None of them so far. That, she realized, would not make Cosette particularly happy, but it was probably closer to the truth than Cosette’s belief that all it required were dreams and a red crow beating its wings in one’s chest.
Rosalind set the painting back where she’d found it and retrieved her book. Holding it against her chest, she walked toward the front of the building once more, more troubled than she’d care to let on, even to herself. When she reached the door, she looked out at the city street through the small leaded panes. She’d never liked the city the way that Cosette and John did, didn’t even care to be enclosed by the walls of a building. Give her the solace of the island any day, the wind in her hair and the open sky above.
Needing to breathe, if only in the noisy pollution of a city night, she stepped out onto the porch. Relief from the claustrophobia she’d been feeling was immediate. Relief from the troubling thoughts that had risen was not nearly so easy to achieve.
Have we really wasted so much of our lives? she couldn’t help but wonder. Could we not at least have tried to live for the moment, the way Paddyjack does?
Out of his company for no more than a few hours and already she missed the little treekin. She looked across the street, trying to imagine where he was, which building housed his gateway painting, how he was faring in his own guard duty. He’d be unhappy, too, but not for entirely the same reasons.
His needs were simpler. He’d miss the island and he’d be lonely. And frightened.
He had every right to be frightened. Her own fear was constant, for all that she’d hidden it so successfully from Cosette and her new friend Rolanda. What she wouldn’t give to have John here with her tonight. Nothing frightened him. Not the fact that they might not be real, not Rushkin or his creatures, nothing. Or was he merely an even better actor than she?
Rosalind sighed. She turned to go back inside, pausing when she heard a scuffle of footsteps on the sidewalk. Her heart leapt for one moment when the man first stepped into the light. She thought she’d called John to her, simply by thinking of him. But then she saw his companion, recognized her from Cosette’s description, and realized who it was that she faced. Rushkin’s creatures had come.
Panic reared up in her. She tried to keep her features expressionless, but she couldn’t hide the shock she felt when she looked at John’s doppelganger, this Bitterweed. Prepared though she’d been, it was too much of a jolt to see him in the flesh. The resemblance was beyond uncanny. It was perfect.
She managed to recover enough before they reached the porch to school her features to regain their impassivity.
“That’s far enough,” she said.
They paused there on the walk to look at her. The girl, Scara, regarded her with a
feral intensity, but Bitterweed only shook his head, as though regretting what must come.
“Don’t make this harder on yourself than it already is,” he told her.
“What?” she asked. “Dying? It doesn’t seem to me that there’s much to discuss when death is the only option you offer me.”
“You still have a choice,” Bitterweed told her. “You can die hard or easy.”
“That’s not worth a reply.”
“Christ,” his companion said. “Can we cut the crap?”
She started to move forward, but Bitterweed caught her arm and held her back.
“Now, Scara,” he said, reproachfully. “We can at least be polite about this.”
He looked to Rosalind and gave her a shrug as if to say, what can you do. He was trying to be charming, she realized, the way John might have, but he couldn’t pull it off the way John would have. The gesture only made him seem more pathetic to her.
“At least she’s honest,” she told the doppelganger.
“Who gives a shit what you think?” Scara said. She turned to Bitterweed. “What’re you screwing around for? Look at her. She’s all by herself and she’s not about to stop us.”
It was hard to be brave, Rosalind understood then. She’d often felt impatient with Isabelle for not standing up to Rushkin, but confronted now with the reality of her own terror, she saw how courage could so easily slip away, leaving you with nothing to hold but your fear.
“The only thing that really pisses me off,” Scara went on as though Rosalind weren’t even there, “is how that black bitch took off and left her on her own. I wanted a piece of her.”
“Why dontcha try taking a piece outta one of us, homegirl?” a new voice asked.
Neither Rosalind nor Rushkin’s creatures had heard the newcomers arrive. Rosalind felt a surge of hope that was quickly dashed as a half-dozen figures moved into the light. These were supposed to be her protectors? she thought. What had Rolanda been thinking of? The oldest couldn’t have been more than fifteen. But then she realized that while they might look like children, they were as feral in their own way as Bitterweed’s young companion.
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