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?
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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.
“At first you were just another coal added to the fire. Fuel for his hatred, and I’d have had reason to thank you. Then his dreams changed. ” Underneath the gauze, her head tilted to one side and her delicate brow knitted, as though she did not quite understand this observation. “Uninvited, you invaded the corners of his subconscious and intruded on our time. Your mere image became a nuisance, a distraction. ” Her open palm snapped shut into a hard fist. “In this room, it was not I who was the ghost, but you. And so I sent them for you while they still could obey. You were, after all, yet an uncertainty in his thoughts. They would have had you that night too, if not for the aid and protection of your masked guardian. ”
It took Isobel only a second to realize that she was talking about the night she left the bookstore, the night in the park. She recalled what the blue Noc from the crypt had said. Had he been there that night too? Only then she hadn’t been able to see the Nocs. And the voice that had whispered for her to run? Hadn’t the blue Noc also mentioned her “masked friend”? Of course. It only made sense now that it had been Reynolds trying to warn her.
“In the end, however, you shall have little to thank your secretive friend for,” Lilith said. “In time I shall discover him as well, and he will soon find that I have a special fate for those Lost Souls who betray me. ”
“Why are you doing this?” Isobel demanded. “Why Varen?”
“He is not like others, is he?” she asked almost wistfully, and floated to the oval window. Through it, Isobel detected new light, warm and orange, like a streetlamp. “He is special, even in regard to those who have come before him,” Lilith continued. “Like them, he holds the ability to receive and interpret the shades and shadows of the dreamworld, to bring life and body to new ones, such as the Nocs. What is more, though, is that energy within him that drives him to destroy as much as he creates. The only thing he lacks is control. That in itself is what makes him so perfect. Tonight
he is to finish my story. Tonight, when you are gone for good, he will set me free. ”
Uh-oh, Isobel thought. Say what? Rewind. What was this “gone for good” business? Isobel flashed a forced smile as she fumbled backward, edging farther and farther toward the stairwell. Apparently, despite Isobel wearing his jacket, Lady-Lovely-Locks didn’t quite seem to get that Varen had left the proverbial building. It was about time for Isobel to make her exit too, link between worlds broken or not.
That was when the thought hit her. Instinctively she clung tighter to the sketchbook. The answer came to her in a flash, and suddenly it made all the sense in the world. It was all there.
Varen’s doorway into the dreamworld. Lilith’s story. The Nocs. This was the bridge between realms, his way in, on its way to being her way out. The link Reynolds had told her she would know—she held it in her very arms!
Lilith, too, seemed to see the light of realization in Isobel, because she turned and stared through her with those hole-black eyes. “It’s too late,” she said, “for you to do anything. He cursed you the night he wrote your name within those pages, for now you are part of the story. That is how you are able to see us fully in your world. Or did you not wonder?”
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“If I destroy this book,” she said, “this will all go away. You and everything else will go back to where you came from. ”
“And where will you go, Isobel? You who now has a foot grounded in both realms? You would rip yourself asunder? You would perish for the sake of one who is doomed already?”
“What—what are you talking about?”
“Did your masked guardian fail to mention your own fate? I am not surprised. I suspect he is selective in what he chooses to share with you. It would be an inconvenience for him, I think, if you were able to make too many decisions of your own. But it doesn’t have to end this way. It appears to me that we have been pitted against each other by men. Why? When we both have something the other wants. ”
“I’m not giving you this book,” she said. Her footsteps took her backward until her heels found the edge of the top stair.
Lilith laughed, a soft and almost melodious sound, haunting and even beautiful. “Do you not see that you yourself are now something of far greater value?”
“What?” Isobel blurted, her mind unable to wrap around Lilith’s meaning.
“However unwittingly, you have become a link between realms. Your name in those pages has transformed you, has made you better than a poor lost boy’s sketchbook, for you are not a link to power, but power itself. Together we would have free rein over all, for I know all routes and you, dreamer, hold the ability to traverse them. I would no longer need an ending.
Why, when we would live forever? Bound as one with you, I would no longer have any hold over your Varen. He would be released, free to be with you, with us. ”
The woman moved toward her, the veil falling away from her face as she drew closer. She was dark beauty perfected, her cheekbones high and regal. Her skin held the sheen of stardust and her hair, dark, massy waves of silk, seemed to float about her like a black halo. It was her eyes, though, almost alien in essence, that held Isobel so completely transfixed. Fringed with dark lashes, twin wells of bottomless ink, they trapped her, and she found herself no longer able to blink. “Take my hand,” she whispered, and raised her white palm once more. “Come with me. ”
Isobel felt her hand lift.
The pull of those eyes was magnetic, a force that couldn’t be fought or resisted. She was so beautiful. Isobel paused, her fingers hovering just over the cold set of white ones.
This was how she must have lured Varen.
The thought came to her suddenly, buoying to the surface through a deep and cloudy sea of confusion, doubt, and longing. How easy it must have been for her, she thought. She’d made promises to him just like this. Only she had promised him more. So much more.
Like a serpent, this demon had coiled and nested into those empty and cavernous spaces of his heart. Like a harpy, she had preyed on his absolute aloneness—on his need for a
“Lenore. ”
You could never be Lenore, Varen had once told her.
In her mind, Isobel imagined the future. A future void of herself. But also void of the creature before her. She pictured Varen safe at home. Sitting at his desk, he filled the pages of a new sketchbook by candlelight. His purple-inked poetry packed the crisp white sheaves of paper, her name printed more than once within those lines of elegant handwriting. In the company of soft, feathery drawings, those lines would be his last farewell to her.
Would he write about her? She liked to think that he would. About how, forevermore, the syllables that made up her name would continue to drift to him on the wings of his dreams—dreams now free of the ghouls and demons that had once haunted and stalked his mind. Finally, in this small way, she would be his Lenore.
She blinked at last. Her fingers twitched and retracted.
This witch had nothing to offer her. She had no spell to cast, not while Isobel knew Varen was safe, in her world. When the link was sealed, it would be that way forever.
Isobel’s gaze fixed directly with Lilith’s. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you three’s a crowd?”
Those black eyes widened in shock.
“It’s too late,” Isobel whispered, “for you to do anything. ” She brought both arms tight around the sketchbook. It was still her dream, even if it meant she went with it when it ended.
She squeezed her eyes shut tight.
“What are you doing!” shrieked a voice like a screech owl’s.
At first Isobel focused the heat in her chest. Guided by her mind, it traveled into her arms and then burst into flames over the sketchbook.
Someone screamed. Was it her? She opened her eyes. White heat engulfed her, consumed her. She was grateful not to feel the pain. A gift perhaps from her subconscious to her conscious? Like a hallucination, the vision of the white, black-eyed figure dropped away. The lamplight through the windows grew brighter—or was that the reflection from the fire?
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She looked down to see fire course the length of her arms. It danced over the sketchbook held close to her, and she watched the edges of the paper curl and turn from orange to brown to black—taking on all the hues of autumn.
Everything died in the fall.
The book in her arms collapsed, tumbling into ash. The fire snuffed into blackness and with it, the world.
47
Surcease of Sorrow
She had smelled this smell before. It was that too sweet, deep scent of decay. Dead roses. The aroma of it was so much more potent than she remembered. It wasn’t a bad smell, but it was too strong in such a concentrated dose. Oppressive.
She tried to turn her head from it but for some reason found little room to move.
She wondered if she was dreaming. Or still dreaming . . .
Or was she dead, locked away forever in a flower-filled casket?
Did the dead dream?
She became aware of a pressure across her shoulders and behind her knees. Pain, too, invited itself into her brain like a bad memory, pervading her entire body.
The next sensation that occurred to her was that of movement. She was moving. Cold air prickled the tiny hairs on her arms. She wanted to open her eyes to see where she was, what it was that transported her, and where she was going, but at the same time, she didn’t. Why, when it would be so much easier to drift away again, to settle back into the cocoon of sleep, that blank place between dreams and reality, where the word “nothing” found its true definition?
She felt the press of something like fabric against her cheek and gathered beneath her curled fingers. Her hair tickled her brow in the wake of another breeze, and through her eyelids, she sensed light.
By now she had surfaced to consciousness enough that it was too late to fa
ll back into the deathlike chasm of rest. Against her will, she became more and more aware of herself, of the seemingly limitless aches in her body, and finally of that steady one-two rhythm of movement beneath her. Her thoughts broke through the muck of oblivion, and she stirred.
She opened her eyes to the sight of a black cloth vest, so close she could count the stitches. A silver chain leading out of a small waistcoat pocket glinted in the light, and Isobel saw that she grasped the loose cloth of what she thought must be someone’s black cloak. That was when she realized that the pressure at her back and behind her knees was the pressure of arms, arms she currently occupied, arms that carried her.
His body felt neither cold nor warm next to hers, solid, but somehow not alive. She listened, but he never breathed. Her gaze trailed up to the chin and nose covered by a blood-marred scarf. She squinted, trying unsuccessfully to peer through the shadow cast over his face by a wide-brimmed hat.
Stars dotted the sky around the edges of him, visible through tangles of knotted limbs that could not have belonged to the same trees as the woodlands. Their leaf-dotted boughs were too peaceful, too normal.
Could it be possible she was back in her own world?
At first she didn’t say anything, because she was too afraid to hope. She wanted to suspend time and just be still for another moment, to let her tired mind and sore muscles rest. The stale, moldering odor that clung to him didn’t bother her as it had before, and against him, she felt almost comfortable. Safe.
Isobel released her grip on his cloak and, curious, let her fingers spider-crawl their way to the glinting chain that had caught her eye. She pulled at it, and a small ticking pocket watch came free in her hand. She turned it over, her eyes following the light as it chased across the polished surface. She opened the watch. It had a simple white face encircled by roman numerals and three black hands. There was a name engraved in cursive on the inside of the little circular cover. Isobel traced her thumb over the name. “Augustus,” she read aloud. Her voice came out small and hollow-sounding, as though it had been a long time since she’d last used it. “Is that your real name?” she asked. “Augustus?”
“I dare think,” Reynolds said as, over his shoulder, the pale slice of moon became visible between the knit of branches, “that not half so much trouble would find its way to you if you would only learn to leave things that are not yours alone. ”