“She’s not dead,” Marisa said, shouldering him aside. “But she will be if we don’t get her some help soon.”
“All this blood ...”
Marisa swallowed thickly. “I know.” She swabbed at Isabelle’s neck with one of the rags. The white cloth immediately turned crimson. “But look,” she added, pointing to the actual wound on the side of Isabelle’s throat. “You deflected her aim enough so that all she cut was the fleshy part of her throat. It’s not as bad as it looks.”
“It’s ... not?”
“The door.”
Still numbed by shock, Alan turned to look at it.
“It’s not that thick,” Marisa said. She didn’t look at him, concentrating her attention on Isabelle. “See if you can’t ram something through one of its panels. Or even the walls—Christ, they’re only plaster.”
Alan turned back to look at Isabelle. A shudder ran up his spine. “But she’s so still,” he said.
“I think you knocked her out when you banged her up against the wall.”
“Jesus. I never meant to—”
“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 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.”