Paper. Cervantes. Don Quixote? Had she ever finished that one?
“I think she’s almost done. Didn’t I help you with that one? Isobel?”
Overhead, the bell rang shrill and loud. She looked up in search of its source.
“Okay, okay, I believe you. ” Swanson sighed. He gestured for them to go inside. “Go. Sit. Learn. ”
For a moment Isobel stayed. She glanced down the hall behind her, wondering where it was they’d just come from. Why could she not remember sitting through the class before this one? And where did she get these dark-rinse jeans and fitted pink V-neck tee, anyway? Varen tugged her, and like a soap bubble, the thought broke. She followed him in and he led her to their usual spot. Automatically, she took the desk beside his. Why did it feel so different to sit on this side of the room? Hadn’t she been sitting here all year?
“Are we still on for dinner at your parents’ house tonight?” Varen asked.
Her head whipped toward him. Dinner with her parents?
“I want to ask your dad some more questions about the University of Kentucky. I know he went there for football, but I think he mentioned they had a good English program, too, right?”
“Yeah,” she said, thinking she remembered. That’s right. They were supposed to have lasagna, she thought. And hadn’t Danny been pestering her all week about getting Varen over to help with the game he’d gotten stuck on?
“Okay, kids,” Mr. Swanson said, “today is a very exciting day, because we’re covering Robert Frost and Ezra Pound. Two of my favorites. You can be sure that means these poems will be ground into the very marrow of your malleable little brains. Don’t worry, though. Someday you’ll thank me. Now turn to page two-twenty-six, and let’s take a look at ‘The Road Not Taken. ’ Can I get a volunteer to read? Emma?”
Emma Jordan’s voice broke through from the back of the classroom. “‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both . . . ’”
Isobel glanced toward Varen again. She watched as he stared down at the open pages of the book in front of him. Sunlight caught on his light hair. This had been how they’d first met, she thought. The first day of school, when he’d sat down next to her and had asked her to write her number on his hand so that he wouldn’t lose it.
Isobel smiled to herself, remembering.
He’d taken her out to eat for their first date. A fancy Chinese restaurant. And just last week, hadn’t he given her his class ring? Isobel glanced down at her right hand. The thick gold band was held tight on her finger by the soft felt strip he’d wrapped it with so it would fit her. The Trenton blue stone inside glinted in the light, bringing back the memory of the moment he’d asked her to wear it. It had been that day sitting in his car outside her house, the day he’d asked her to go with him to junior prom.
Outside, autumn sunlight winked at her through a fluffy, cotton white haze of cloud cover. She looked forward and watched Mr. Swanson. He leaned against his desk, holding a copy of the textbook open in his hands. His eyes closed, and she watched him mouth key words along with Emma while she read. That was the way you could always tell which parts were his favorites.
When Emma finished the poem, Mr. Swanson opened his eyes and straightened his glasses. “Okay,” he said, “now let’s talk about what Mr. Frost is saying here. Does anyone have any thoughts on what the metaphor is? Yes, Miss Andrews. ”
“He’s talking about taking different paths in life. Making different choices. ”
“Yes, good. That’s definitely one way to look at it. He’s talking about making not just the literal choice of walking down a physical pathway in the forest, but coming to a fork in the road of life and making a decision. We’re a product of our choices, wouldn’t you say? If the narrator of the poem had taken another path, things would have been different for him, right?
Perhaps drastically so. That’s the ‘difference’ he’s talking about here. Very good. Anyone else?”
Isobel looked down at her desk, realizing she hadn’t taken out her book yet. She leaned over and opened her backpack, pulling out her copy of Seventh Edition Junior English. She glanced at Varen’s copy to get the right page number, then flipped to a black-and-white portrait of Robert Frost. Next she reached down to get a pencil and her notebook. She stopped, though, noticing the time on her pink locket watch clipped to her bag. The hands read 11:20. But that couldn’t be right. Class started at eleven. Was her watch running fast? Or had Danny set it forward as a joke? She unclipped the watch from her bag and held it between her fingers, twisting the tiny dial on one side. The minute hand refused to budge. She shook the small watch, sending the pink liquid glitter within rushing around.
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Isobel paused, staring at the watch face as the glitter settled. She focused on the reflection of her eyes in the clear glass.
But . . .
Hadn’t she smashed this watch?
Maybe she’d dreamt that.
No. The park. Running. That had been real. The book had smashed the watch. The book. The Poe book. No again, she thought. She’d thrown that book away because it had come back.
Or did that happen later? But then that really must have been a dream, because books don’t come back on their own. Isobel scowled, none of it making sense.
She looked once again at the open pages of her book, at the picture of Robert Frost sitting in his chair, holding out a sheet of paper and reading from a distance.
Suddenly that didn’t seem right either. They weren’t on Frost yet.
Slowly, carefully, Isobel set her watch on the desktop. She grabbed her book and flipped to the index, scanning. Pasternak, Plath, Pope. What? Where was . . . ?
“Poe,” Isobel whispered aloud. Keeping her head low, she glanced toward Varen.
He looked at her, eyebrows raised.
She flipped through the pages of her book. “Where’s Poe?”
“Page two-twenty-six,” he said, and reached a hand over to help her.
She jerked the book from his grasp. “But we’re not studying Frost yet,” she hissed. “We’re studying Poe and the Romantics. ”
Mr. Swanson stopped talking. “Miss Lanley, is there something you’d like to add?” he asked.
She straightened in her chair to find twenty sets of eyes trained on her. Everyone stared at her, and suddenly a creepy feeling stole over her. There was something not right about them.
Any of them.
In unison, they all blinked.
“Uh—Poe,” she said, and then had to clear her throat. “He—he’s not in here,” she clarified. She held up the book in one hand. “I thought we were supposed to be studying Edgar Allan Poe. ” She glanced up—and froze in Mr. Swanson’s gaze.
Mr. Swanson lowered his glasses, his eyes black. “Who?”
Isobel whipped her head back to stare at Varen. He watched her with a strange fierceness, frustration in the eyes that had since turned black as ink. His face, now wan and sunken, contorted with anger, scarcely resembled Varen’s at all.
That’s when she realized that it wasn’t Varen.
Isobel launched out of her seat. She made a break for the open door. Screams arose from her phantom classmates. Their faces twisted, their expressions demonic. Hands grabbed at her from all sides, but she yanked free and cleared the tangle of desks.
The room stretched and elongated before her like a tunnel. The door in front of her fell farther away. She ran faster, and the door slid back farther. It started to close. The faster she ran, the faster it moved. It boomed shut as she reached it. She groped for the handle but there wasn’t one.
“You’re always running away. You ruin everything” came a static voice from behind.
Isobel whirled to find herself alone in the classroom with Pinfeathers. His scarecrow figure sat occupying the desk the false Varen had. Slowly he rose, and Isobel pushed herself flat against the door, felt the coldness
of it against her bare shoulders. She looked down, finding herself in her party dress again. Outside the door, she could hear music and people.
With quiet steps, he moved toward her, tucking a pencil behind one ear.
“You could have it all, you know. If you’d only let go,” he said, danger lacing his tone.
“I don’t want a lie. ”
“Why not think of it as just another version? A better version. Really, no less truthful than the last. Perhaps even more truthful. Think of it as another chance to go back to that road not taken. To see what it would be like. To live what it would be like. ”
“You’re not him. ”
“Aren’t I?”
Isobel eyed him, skittish as she marked his approach, even though there was nowhere to run. His words seeped into her, burrowing deep into the recesses of her mind, raising flags of doubt. He stopped at a distance, letting her eyes scour him, his hands folded at his back and his chin turned down, as though posing for a snapshot. Isobel stared in disbelief, unable to deny an underlying shadow-resemblance to Varen that she had never noticed before. Where it could not be found in his face or his demeanor, it pervaded his stature, his height—his very form.
She shook her head, refusing to believe that his words held even the merest fraction of truth. She could not accept that this thing, this hollow zombie nightmare version, could hold any direct link to Varen. “It’s not just stalling this time, is it?” she said. “Tell me why you’re doing this. ”
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He sighed, eyes rolling. “Blondes, always needing things explained. ”
Isobel glared, hands curling into fists.
He smiled wistfully. “See, this is why I like you. You never give up, even when you should. We need a little bit of your resolve, useless as it is. I think that’s why, cheerleader. Because the truth is that I don’t want to kill you. Not if I can avoid it. ”
He took another step forward. She hitched in a breath, her back smashing flat against the door. Her hand groped for the knob she knew she would not find.
“And that’s up to you,” he said, his tone softening. “If you’ll only play the game, stay in the dance with me a little longer?” His head tilted to one side. He blinked those black eyes at her, the question in them, she was shocked to see, sincere—if that was a word that could be applied to Pinfeathers. That look frightened her more than his words could have. What was it, she wondered, that lurked beneath that monstrous porcelain shell? If it wasn’t a soul that animated him, then what? More important, what did it want with her?
He took one step closer, then another. “Only long enough to forget. ” His face grew serious. “Quaff,” he said, his voice hushed, “oh, quaff this kind nepenthe. ”
He closed the remaining distance between them in a series of movements too fast to see and pinned her to the door. He grabbed her chin, forcing her eyes to his. His nails pressed into her cheek, threatening to break the skin.
She twisted her head away, but he looped an arm around her and yanked her to him. His body felt rigid and hollow next to hers. Empty. His grip on her tightened until she could no longer breathe. He pressed his lips to hers.
Isobel’s eyes flew wide. His mouth, smooth, cold, and hard, felt almost sharp against hers, like glass. He tasted of clay and ink, of blood and death.
Bile rose at the back of her throat, and along with it a scream.
He broke away from her, laughing, and released her with a shove before dispersing, unraveling into coils of smoke. Isobel fell, tumbling in a sprawl. Suddenly insubstantial, the floor shattered beneath her. She fell through, and the scream within her broke loose at last. She crossed her arms over her face, shielding her eyes from the jagged shards of emerald glass that winked around her in the blackness, threatening to shred her. She toppled until she jarred to a halt, caught by several sets of arms that dipped her into a low cradle. Glass rained like lethal confetti, a shard embedding itself in her shoulder, another slicing her ankle. She opened her eyes to find a circle of masked faces surrounding her. Above them a shattered stained-glass skylight opened to reveal the swirl of a storm-ridden sky. Ash floated through the opening left by her fall.
The group shouted jovially at catching her, and quickly they set her to her feet. Then the figures disbanded, laughing among themselves.
One look around told her that she was back at the masquerade and that she now stood within the center of a deep green chamber.
Enormous tapestries hung over the walls. A heavy black granite Egyptian sarcophagus stood at each corner of the wide, rectangular room as though on guard. Embroidered pillows and carpets lined the floor, while thick clouds of sweet smoke hazed the air. Lethargic courtiers sat, stooped, and stood around hookah pipes and bowls of smoking incense. A heavy perfume pervaded the space, making her dizzy.
Like a mirage, a dark figure emerged in her blurred vision. It surfaced through the crowd and moved toward her like death itself, face blurred and half hidden from view. She shuddered.
It couldn’t be twelve yet—could it? Had she missed the last chiming of the clock?
She had no time to pull away or even move before the figure seized her. A gloved hand clamped over her mouth, stopping a shout before it could emerge. He dragged her to one side of the room despite her struggling, and reaching the wall, he pulled back one corner of a heavy tapestry, one that depicted a horse trampling its rider. Revealing a small secret doorway, he thrust her inside.
Isobel rolled across the cold and damp stone floor.
She looked up to find herself inside a hidden passageway, the kind in old murder mysteries where the killer hides to spy on his victims through the eyeholes of hanging portraits. Inside this narrow passageway, a tripod torch burned yellow-orange. Its flame threw jagged shapes across the masonry and against the emerald stained-glass windows, the courtiers on the other side moving across in a shadow play of silhouettes.
Her masked abductor ducked inside and emerged above her, all towering height and grimness. She scampered backward until she met with the damp wall.
“Do you have any idea how much danger you are in?” asked a muffled voice.
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Husky and ever sharp with admonishments, it was a voice she recognized immediately.
Reynolds.
And it was about time.
41
Alone
“What is wrong with you?” she exclaimed, removing one of her flats. She threw it at him with enough force to jar her shoulder in its socket. The shoe hit the wall behind him with a sharp smack. Even with the mask and hat, the surprise in his eyes could not have been missed.
“Where the hell have you been?” she raved. Wasting no time, she wrestled her other shoe free and hurled it at his chest. He blocked the slipper with a raised forearm, and it tapped harmlessly onto the floor. She was sorry she didn’t have anything else to throw.
Blood oozed from the embedded glass in her shoulder, and she reached up to yank the splintered shard out. She hardly felt the pain, only the blood as it trickled warm down her shoulder to stain the neckline of her dress. She was angry enough to throttle him. Yet at the same time, she could have just as easily rushed him, thrown her arms around him, and buried her face in his cloak. Somehow, though, she figured Reynolds probably wasn’t the touchy-feely type, and if you’d asked him beforehand to fill in an option bubble on the questionnaire, she thought he’d probably have opted for the shoes anyway.
“Don’t you look at me like that!” she snarled, her teeth chattering. The quaver in her voice betrayed her emotion.
He continued to stare as Isobel struggled unsteadily to her feet. Her knees wobbled.
“This is all your fault!” she shouted. “None of this started happening until you showed up! I don’t even know who you are! I don’t even know what you are!”
“Lower your voice. ”
“No! I’m not goin
g to lower my voice!” Isobel yelled, incensed. What gave him the right to talk to her like she was a child? “You say you’re helping me, but then you just disappear.
You show up just to freak me out, and then, when I need you the most, you aren’t anywhere, while those other things are everywhere!”
“Isobel—”
“So far I’ve been jerked around, thrown through a window, molested by a monster, and now practically abducted! What do you want from me? Why won’t you or anybody else tell me what’s happening? Why can’t I tell what’s real and what’s not anymore? Why am I inside this nightmare story?”
“There is no time for this. You should not even be here. ”
“That’s it! The next person who tells me I shouldn’t be where I am gets decked! I know I shouldn’t be here, but I am, and as far as I can tell it’s because you—”
“It is because of the boy and his utter carelessness,” Reynolds corrected, and with such sudden ferocity that it made her swallow against the anger boiling inside her.
“Where is he?” she asked, quieter now.
“With her,” he whispered, as though pronouncing a death sentence.
“Who?” She remembered Varen’s earlier mention of a “she. ” And then those hands that had dragged him into the darkness. She thought about the white light from the woodlands and the figure reflected in the clock pendulum with those black-socket eyes.
“I have no time. You must return to your world immediately. You must seal the link that has been made, because I cannot. Otherwise, your entire world will be forfeited to this one.
Come. We must make our way to the woodlands. Hurry. ”
He held a gloved hand out to her, just as he had done that first night he’d brought her to the Woodlands of Weir.
“I’m not going anywhere with you. ”
He studied her with those dark eyes, as though trying to gauge the level of her seriousness.
“You refuse?”
“Do you think I would leave him here?”
He stepped toward her, and she had to resist the urge to shrink back. “Isobel, there are countless realities at stake. There are entire existences. You have no idea of the scope. And believe me when I say that whatever in your world does not die from such a merge will surely wish it had. You would sacrifice everything for the sake of one who is already lost? Think of your home. Your family. ”