Slowly she made her way down the rack of costumes, pausing after every half dozen or so to separate and look behind them for the lady. At worst, she expected Grandma's helper to lean forward, make a face, and whisper Boo. But when she pulled the costumes apart at the exact middle of the rack to reveal who was standing behind them, no one said Boo. No one said a thing. And what Whitney had expected to be the worst would have been merely playful in comparison to the reality.
It was not a young, redheaded woman with kind green eyes and glasses who now stood a yard away from Whitney. Instead it was a creature out of a worse nightmare than any little girl could imagine. Everything was bad, but the eyes were the worst of all, or rather the absence of eyes. Where they should have been were two black pits, their utter darkness in vicious contrast to the icy whiteness of the skin and the long hair that, shroud-like, framed the face. Yet deep within the sockets Whitney saw red specks burning brightly, like coals when you blow on them.
The mouth opened slowly, as if cranked, and the exhalation that rippled over Whitney was more foul than anything she had ever confronted in her eight years of life. She felt a sudden warm dampness, knew that she had wet her pajamas, and for an instant shame swept over her before the fear bludgeoned its way back.
Now something moved at the bottom of her field of vision, and she saw that the hands, sharp talons from which gray flesh was flaking, were coming up toward her across the surface of the thing's blood-red dress, and the monstrous head was growing closer as well, the nightmare face nearing her own.
Whitney's hands fell to her side, and the costumes closed together, blocking the woman from her sight, breaking the spell the lich had laid upon her, giving her just enough time to back away a few steps before the gray, rotting claws darted from between the costumes, pushed them violently to either side, and the woman came toward her again, quickly now, her legs unseen beneath the long red dress she wore, the red coals of the eyes blazing as though buffeted by a tornado.
" Grandma! " Whitney screamed, still backing away, unable to turn her gaze from the thing bearing down on her. Then her head hit the railing of the loft, and she was through, falling backward, toward the floor of the costume shop far below, falling, the ceiling receding, and all she could do was hope that the woman didn't come over the edge, didn't fly down after her where she was falling, falling, hearing the air rush past her, hearing Grandma's cry, and falling.. .
~* ~
It was Whitney's scream that alerted Marvella, then the sharp crack of her head hitting the rail that brought her to her feet and turned her around just in time to see the girl fall. Too far away. There was nothing she could do, only stand frozen and watch the girl falling, falling in an eternity of time during which Marvella could not move a muscle, in that split second knowing the futility of it, praying for angels to bear the child up, ease her to the floor.
But the prayers were unanswered. The girl did not slow in her descent, but fell down, down, directly onto the heap of clothing that Marvella had been throwing over the edge of the loft for hours, and disappeared into them.
"Oh Jesus," Marvella breathed, a prayer, not a curse, and ran to the heap of costumes, where weak, thrashing movements told her that her granddaughter was alive. "Lie still!" Marvella barked, fearing that if harm had been done the girl's movements would only worsen it. "You lie still, Whitney!"
But the girl did not obey. Soon she was out of the soft pile, and if the strength of the embrace with which she held her grandmother was any indication of her general health, Marvella had nothing to worry about. Still, she grasped the girl's shoulders to disengage her as gently as possible and hold her at arm's length. "Are you all right?" she said firmly.
The girl, tears in her eyes and trembling, nodded. "Oh Grandma," she said, lowering her head and pointing upward, as though she feared what she might see. "That lady up there, she turned into something.. . into a witch…"
"What?" Marvella frowned. "What are you talking about. What lady?"
"The lady! The lady you said was helping you, the lady with the red hair and the glasses, she was here."
"Who? Terri?"
"I guess, I guess, and I followed her up the stairs, only when I got up there it wasn't her, it was somebody else, like a witch, or like a… a dead person…” The girl broke into a fit of crying then, and it was a moment before Marvella could get anything else out of her. "She scared me, Grandma, and that's why I fell over!"
"You let me look," said Marvella grimly, knowing that no one could have gotten into the costume room without her seeing them.
"Don't leave me, Grandma!" The girl grabbed at her sleeve.
"Well, you wanta come with me then?"
"No! No, I don't wanta go up there!"
"Well then, you just have to wait here, don't you? I won't be a minute," and she started toward the stairway.
"I gotta see you, I gotta see you, Grandma!"
"Well, you're not gonna see me when I'm up there."
The girl's face puckered in thought, and she wiped her cheeks with balled fists. "Sing then," she said. "You sing, I know you're there."
"All right, all right, I'll sing." And she climbed the stairs, singing one of the ballads from A Private Empire that she sang Whitney to sleep with when she was younger:
"'I catch a glimpse of you as in elusive dreams,
A girl who could be true, but isn't who she seems…”
Marvella hummed the rest, loudly enough so that Whitney could hear her as she went through a cursory search of the loft. She expected to find nothing. She knew Whitney, and knew how the girl tended to dramatize events, blaming her own rash acts on invisible playmates, or people who were there "just a minute ago," but who conveniently disappeared when time came for blame. The woman turning into a witch was just one more, Marvella reasoned, in a long line of Whitney's fictitious scapegoats. Her fear and crying could easily have been caused by her terrifying fall. God knew it had shaken up Marvella as well.
There was no one in the costume loft. The only thing she found out of place from when she had left it just a short time before was one of Dennis Hamilton's costumes from A Private Empire. It was the Emperor Frederick's formal dress uniform. The costume was turned on its wooden hanger so that it lay adjacent to the other costumes, neatly lined up in their row.
"Now what's that doing here?" Marvella whispered to herself, forgetting to continue humming. It should have been downstairs in the locker that held all of Dennis's costumes. She picked it up just as Whitney shouted up to her.
"I'm here, I'm here," Marvella replied. "Don't worry." She began to hum again as she crossed the loft and came down the stairs, the uniform held carefully so that it would not wrinkle.
"Did you find her?" Whitney asked. "Where is she? Was she there?"
"There's nobody there, Whitney," Marvella said gruffly. She opened the locker, carefully hung the costume inside, closed the door, then turned back to her granddaughter. "And there wasn't to begin with. You made that all up, didn't you?"
The child's face went gray. "No, Grandma, no!"
"You got careless and you fell outta that loft and thank the Lord those costumes were beneath you, and you made up that story to get the blame off yourself. But now you got a whupping coming, girl. You come here."
Whitney went to Marvella, but not at all reluctantly. She went, her arms outstretched, tears streaming down her face, sobbing as if she were going to die. Marvella hugged the girl, but her trembling would not stop. She decided then not to punish her, that the terror of the fall had been punishment enough. When Whitney sat in her lap, and she felt where the girl had wet herself, she was sure of it. No, Marvella thought, patting her granddaughter's head as she carried her back to their suite, this little one has had quite enough for one night.