When Isobel came to the final step, it was to find herself alone in the attic. The table and chairs that she had once sat at with Varen now hovered in the air. Several books, too, and the threadbare rug drifted about in lazy suspension.
She looked out the window at the top of the stairs, which she now stood in front of. It should have shown her the brick side and the windows of the next building over. Instead there were only the tempest-tossed woodlands below. It was the same story with the other window, the oval one above the table that in the real world would have overlooked the street. This was the place where she had first read Poe, and standing there, staring at it all, the distance of time felt like years.
Isobel’s gaze traveled to a slim, familiar book floating near the table. She recognized it at once as Varen’s black sketchbook and went to snatch it out of the air. She held it between her hands and let her fingertips trail over the book’s surface, then hook beneath its cover. She opened the book, flipping through the pages crammed tight with his beautiful handwriting. She stopped at a spread of drawings, suddenly realizing that she’d seen them before. Roughly sketched faces stared up at her, faces with whole pieces missing. In the middle, she saw Pinfeathers’s familiar countenance, though he was not labeled by name. She remembered these pages from the day in the library, the first time they’d met to study. Isobel turned the book sideways, noticing a poem that stretched vertically down, crammed in between the artwork and the page’s edge.
The Nocs
The Nocs
They live in the floor
The Nocs
The Nocs
They knock on your door
The Nocs
The Nocs
Where there’s one, there’s more.
Isobel felt a rush of ice creep its way through her veins. She turned to the next set of pages, then the next, each strewn with words that seemed to flow into one another. She flipped faster, the pages seeming to whisper their contents. Her. Dream. Sleep. Return. She. Real. Need. Run.
She stopped, reading from the top of a page somewhere in the middle of the book.
He stood in that place again, the middle realm, the forest between worlds, and waited for her. She came, her white skin illuminated to a ghostly pallor in the flashes of lightning. The sky swirled, her black hair loosened and tumbling around her ivory shoulders. Gray ash sifted from the sky.
“My prison,” she said, “it disintegrates. When, at last, will you write my ending? When, my love, shall you set me free?”
“Midnight,” he whispered. “On that night of all nights in the year.”
“You have done well.” She drifted toward him. For the first time, she kissed him. Her lips, pale and cold, sealed his and so bound them together.
Isobel flipped the page again, and here the handwriting morphed, changing from elegant script into unintelligible scribbles and scratched-out starts. At the bottom, she read the only bit of writing that she could make out.
This should make him happy. This should change him. But it doesn’t. It can’t. He’s been changed already. And I don’t know what to write anymore, because I’m afraid of what it will be. Because I can’t think, and she asks me to write, but I don’t know what to write and I can’t think because I don’t know what to write. I can’t think. I can’t think. Isobel.
Isobel. Isobel.
A warm coursing rush lit her skin and spread through her. She stood staring in disbelief at her name scrawled so desperately against the snow-white paper. She brought the sketchbook closer, trying to imagine him sitting there, writing this. When? There was no date. After her name, repeated three times, the page went blank, blank except for a small blot of red on one bottom corner. Blood?
A quick, sharp bang ripped into the silence. Isobel jumped, nearly dropping the sketchbook. The other books, the table, and the chairs all clattered to the floor with a resounding clunk.
The door.
Isobel turned to find she was no longer alone.
At the top of the stairs stood a woman. Layers of glowing white draped and clung to the curvatures of her slight though tall frame, and it was as though the fabric itself was made from moonlight. A gauzy veil of white covered her head, like a cerement of the grave. She was beautiful. Luminescent, like a sliver cut from a dying star. Trails of gently curling hair, thick and raven black, tumbled past the length of her fingertips, a stark contrast to the white. Behind the veil, two large onyx eyes stared fixedly at her.
It was a moment before Isobel could speak. “Are . . . are you Bess?”
“I have many names,” the specter answered. Her voice was deep and throaty yet wholly feminine. “I am Lila. I am Ita and Li-li. I am Ligeia. I am Lilith.”
Isobel swallowed, her mouth gone suddenly dry. Schizophrenic much? She thought the age-old and ever-popular “Are you a good witch or a bad witch?” might be the ideal follow-up question but then decided against it. Bess or Lady Lilith or whoever didn’t exactly strike her as the joking type. And despite all the white, she didn’t strike Isobel as the good-witch type either.
“Ligeia . . . ,” Isobel murmured. She hugged the black book close to her, and her mind went back to the lyrics of the song she’d heard in the ice cream shop, the one Varen had played over the sound system while they’d cleaned. “But she’s just a character in a story.”
The woman lifted her arm to hold out her hand. The motion was sudden and unnatural, and Isobel had to fight the urge to take a step back. “Are not we all?” she asked.
With every warning signal inside her blaring, Isobel watched a gauze sleeve slip away to reveal the woman’s hand. Her open palm was whiter than the draping fabric, her skin as flawless as marble. Hadn’t Reynolds warned her to “beware the white one”? Remembering these words, Isobel felt her jaw tighten. If she ever saw him again, she’d have to thank him for providing her with such useful, detailed advice.
Isobel’s gaze went from the figure to her outstretched hand. The silent gesture was one that suggested something be exchanged or handed over, and Isobel held all the tighter to the sketchbook. Why did she want it?
The woman took a step toward her, the train of her veil whispering against the floor. This time Isobel did not argue with her instincts. She backed away, bumping into the table behind her. She lowered one hand and, keeping the other clutched around Varen’s black book, steadied herself.
“You yourself, Isobel,” the woman continued, “could be nothing more than a shadow, someone else’s dream who is, themselves, someone else’s.”
“I don’t think that makes much sense,” said Isobel, only because it was the first thing that sprang to her mind. If she could keep the chatter going, maybe she could make it to the staircase, to the door. But then, she couldn’t leave yet. Where was the link between realms Reynolds had told her to find? Wasn’t that the whole reason she was here in the first place?
Why hadn’t she found it yet? Hadn’t Reynolds said she would know it when she saw it? And even if she did find it, how the heck was she supposed to destroy it?
“I have been watching you,” the woman said, “ever since that night you first entered his dreams.”
Her back pressed flat to the wall, Isobel inched her way toward the stairwell. The woman pivoted where she stood, and the white gauze swirled tighter around her form, like the garb of a mummy. Through the screen of the veil, the black pools of her eyes followed Isobel’s every movement.