Nevermore

  Her voice sounded quiet and small in her own ears. She didn’t receive an answer, but she thought she could hear the shuffling of papers, so she mounted the stairs, leaving the door open behind her.

  There was no banister leading up, so she held her arms out at either side and braced her hands along the dark wood-paneled walls. The stairs groaned and creaked underfoot, as though murmuring secrets about her.

  She took one step after another, and as she drew closer to the top, an odd feeling began to creep over her. She felt it in her stomach first, a queasy sensation coupled with the slightest hint of vertigo. It made her skin prickle and the tiny hairs on her arms stand at attention. She drew to a halt on the steps and listened.

  Crack!

  Isobel yelped. Her knees buckled, and she dropped down to clutch the stairs.

  Whipping her head around, she saw that someone had slammed the door shut.

  10

  Spirits of the Dead

  “What are you doing?”

  She knew that voice, languid and calm, with that faint hint of irritation. Isobel slowly turned her head until she found herself focusing on a pair of dusty black boots positioned at the top of the stairs, less than a foot from her nose. Tilting her head back, her eyes met with the cool greens of one Varen Nethers, the great-and-jaded.

  He stared down at her, a Discman in one hand, spinning a CD, his other hand poised on the buzzing, squealing headphones draped around his neck.

  “That crazy old guy slammed the door on me!”

  He shot her an admonishing glare before turning away, moving into the room, which was small—tiny really, an attic, or so it had probably once been. His boots made hollow thumping sounds against the dried-out floorboards as he made his way toward a small, café-style table, which sat at the other end of the room, swamped with papers. In the center of the space, an ugly, threadbare, brown and orange throw rug lay stretched out on the floor, like the severed scalp of some balding monster. Aside from a few obligatory stacks of books in each corner of the room, there was nothing else.

  The table sat beneath a window, the only other besides the one above the stairs. This window was smaller and round, and it overlooked the street.

  “Bruce hates noise,” Varen said, “so I can’t picture him slamming any doors. ”

  Isobel pursed her lips. She watched him resume his seat at the table, setting the CD player aside before he began sifting through the mess of papers. She eyed the Discman, thinking that it was really old-school that he still carried one, that he didn’t have an iPod or some other MP3 player. She thought better about commenting on it, though.

  Instead she folded her arms and said, “So you’re calling me a liar. ”

  “Did I say that?” he asked without looking up, and she couldn’t help but recall how these same words had been the first he’d ever spoken to her.

  “Well, you insinuated it. ”

  “You’re jumping to conclusions. ”

  “Yeah, so then who slammed the door?”

  “Bess,” he said, as though this were the logical conclusion for anyone to make.

  “Who the heck is this Bess?” Isobel’s arms went up and landed at her sides in an exasperated flop. She hadn’t even met Bess, and already she was starting to despise her.

  “The poltergeist. ”

  “The what?”

  “Pol-ter-geist,” he said again, enunciating each syllable.

  “You mean, like what?” Isobel scoffed. “A ghost?”

  “Sort of. ”

  “You’re serious. ”

  His eyes lifted from the table to fix on her—seriously.

  “Whatever,” she said, brushing off a patch of gray grit she’d spotted on the front of her jeans, dust that she’d probably picked up from those grimy stairs. It was evident that he was just trying to weird her out again. Probably.

  Isobel ignored the goose bumps that prickled all the way up the back of her neck, like tiny spiders with electric legs. “So we’re working up here? I don’t get it. How do you know that guy?”

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  “Bruce owns the ice cream shop. ”

  “He’s your boss?”

  “More or less,” he said, and scribbled something onto his notepad.

  “I was kind of wondering why you were there all by yourself,” she said, using her dad’s probing trick, trying to make it sound more like a casual observation than prying.

  “Yeah, well, he’s short on help. And speaking of that, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention anything to him about . . . what happened. ” He didn’t look up at her, just kept writing, his pen moving in slow, careful strokes.

  “Why? Would you get fired?”

  “No. He’s just got enough to worry about. ”

  “Do you work here, too?” she asked, looking around. She shed her backpack and let it drop to the floor. Then she took a seat in the chair across from his.

  “Not really,” he said.

  “So what, you just hang out here? With Bruce? And Bess?” she added, trying not to smile.

  “Did you read?” he asked.

  She paused. Oh, yeah. The reading.

  For the first time since she’d written them down, Isobel thought back to the list of titles he’d given her. So much had gotten in the way between then and now. She grimaced. “Mm.

  About that . . . ”

  He sighed. A soft sound, like a dying breath.

  “Well, have you read them?” she asked.

  “Multiple times. ”

  “Of course,” she said, realizing she might as well have asked the pope if he’d read the Bible.

  “You know, you can find most, if not all, of Poe’s tales and poems on the Internet,” he said, in a very distinct and warning “you’ll have no excuse the next time” tone.

  “Oh, sure. Let me just ask my geek brother to stop slaying zombie ninjas for a few hours so I can borrow the PC and catch up on my Victorian horror lit. ”

  “Doomed Kingdom One or Two?”

  “Huh?”

  “Is he playing Doomed Kingdom One or Two? It’s the only series with zombie ninjas. ”

  Isobel stared at him, incredulous. “How should I know?”

  “Hm,” he said, eyes dropping, as though she’d just ratcheted herself down yet another slot on his respect scale. “Never mind. ” She glared at him as he leaned over to pull something out of his satchel. “Here. You can borrow this for now. ” Carefully he laid a large, black, gold-embossed book on the table in front of her. Its title read, The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, in shining gold letters. “But if anything happens to it, I own your soul. ”

  “Uh, thanks,” she said, handling it with care while under his scrutiny. “It’s so nice and portable. ”

  “We’ll have to meet again tomorrow,” he said. “After school. ”

  “Can’t. I’ve got practice. ” Though she hadn’t even begun to figure out how she was going to deal with school yet, with facing Brad or Nikki, she still had to stand her ground where practice was concerned. She didn’t dare miss, not this close to Nationals.

  “Whatever,” he said. “Tuesday, then. ”

  “Fine. What time?”

  “Sometime after school. But I have to work, so you’ll have to come by the shop. ”

  Isobel bit her lip and thought about that. She hadn’t realized how tricky this was going to be. On top of being grounded, now that she and Brad were broken up, it was going to be tough to get around. “Can I hitch a ride there with you?” she asked.

  He shrugged. Okaaay, she’d just go ahead and take that as a yes. Now all she needed was a way to get home afterward. She probably could walk home, as long as she thought up a good excuse for being gone.

  She turned her attention back to the Complete Works. On the bottom, she noticed a thin silk ribbon, sticking out like a beige tongue. Following her fingers along the top edge, Iso
bel pried the book open to the marked page. “Dream-Land,” the title read. Isobel skimmed over the first stanza: By a route obscure and lonely,

  Haunted by ill angels only,

  Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,

  On a black throne reigns upright,

  I have reached these lands but newly

  From an ultimate dim Thule—

  From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,

  Out of SPACE—out of TIME.

  Yeah, well, that made about as much sense as Cracker Jacks.

  Isobel flipped forward until she recognized one of the titles that Varen had told her to write down at the library: “The Masque of the Red Death. ” She thumbed through the story, counting six pages. That didn’t seem so bad. She began the first paragraph:

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  The “Red Death” had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal—the redness and the horror of blood.

  There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour.

  Isobel glanced up from the page with her eyes only. She stared at Varen from over the top edge of the book while he remained absorbed in his notes. Was he serious? The first paragraph alone was like reading the synopsis of a bad low-budget slasher flick remixed with nineteenth-century flair. Either that or a physician’s death report. Reluctantly she let her eyes fall back to the story.

  But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious.

  Isobel’s head popped up. “What does ‘sagacious’ mean?”

  “Sagacious,” he said, writing, “adjective describing someone in possession of acute mental faculties. Also describing one who might, in a bookstore, think to get up and locate an actual dictionary instead of asking a billion questions. ”

  Isobel made a face at him. When his pen paused, she ducked her head down and dove back into the page.

  When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys. This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince’s own eccentric yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts. They resolved to leave means neither of ingress or egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within.

  She stopped, thinking that must mean that, no matter what side of the door you were on, there would be no checking in or out of the Prospero Hotel. She had to admit that was a little dooming right there, and it made her kind of want to know what happened. How was Poe going to write his peeps out of this if there was no exit? She skimmed to the bottom of the paragraph.

  Buffoons . . . improvisatori . . . ballet-dancers . . . musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the “Red Death. ”

  Yadda yadda. She turned the page.

  “Are you skipping?” he asked.

  “Nope,” she lied without missing a beat, “I just read fast. ”

  It was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade. But first let me tell of the rooms in which it was held. There were seven—an imperial suite.

  It was here that Isobel first felt the twinge of an inward pull on her mind. Slowly the words started to get out of the way and let images of courtiers revolve, in slow motion, through her mind’s eye. It was as though she had somehow adapted to the density of the language. Soon the words smudged away from the page, and in their place, she was left with the sensation of gliding through the scene, like she’d become a movie camera, sweeping through the sets of rooms and over the heads of costumed actors.

  Each of the seven rooms, she read, had its own color, with tall, Gothic windows to match. First was the blue chamber, then the purple, then the green, the orange, the white, and then the violet. The last chamber, however, was black, with heavy draperies and bloodred windows.

  It was in this apartment, also, that there stood against the western wall, a gigantic clock of ebony. Its pendulum swung to and fro with a dull, heavy, monotonous clang; and when the minute-hand made the circuit of the face, and the hour was to be stricken, there came from the brazen lungs of the clock a sound which was clear and loud and deep and exceedingly musical, but of so peculiar a note and emphasis that, at each lapse of an hour, the musicians of the orchestra were constrained to pause, momentarily, in their performance, to hearken to the sound; and thus the waltzers perforce ceased their evolutions; and there was a brief disconcert of the whole gay company; and, while the chimes of the clock yet rang, it was observed that the giddiest grew pale, and the more aged and sedate passed their hands over their brows as if in confused reverie or meditation. But when the echoes had fully ceased, a light laughter at once pervaded the assembly; the musicians looked at each other and smiled as if at their own nervousness and folly, and made whispering vows, each to the other, that the next chiming of the clock should produce in them no similar emotion; and then, after the lapse of sixty minutes, (which embrace three thousand and six hundred seconds of the Time that flies), there came yet another chiming of the clock, and then were the same disconcert and tremulousness and meditation as before.

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  Isobel skimmed ahead until she reached midnight in the story. Having seen plenty of horror flicks, she knew enough to expect the major drama to start then. And Poe didn’t disappoint.

  When the black clock chimed twelve, so began the real freakiness. Left and right, everybody started to flip out over some stranger-danger creep who had come out of nowhere.

  The figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave. The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have had difficulty detecting the cheat. And yet all this might have been endured, if not approved, by the mad revelers around. But the mummer had gone so far as to assume the type of the Red Death. His vesture was dabbled in blood—and his broad brow, with all the features of the face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror.

  Gross, she thought, but also kind of cool. Isobel flipped the page and scanned to the very end, to where Prince Prospero, peeved to the max, started charging through all the chambers.

  He bore aloft a drawn dagger, and had approached, in rapid impetuosity, to within three or four feet of the retreating figure, when the latter, having attained the extremity of the velvet apartment, turned suddenly and confronted his pursuer. There was a sharp cry—and the dagger dropped gleaming upon the sable carpet, upon which, instantly afterwards, fell prostrate in death the Prince Prospero. Then, summoning the wild courage of despair, a throng of the revellers at once threw themselves into the black apartment, and, seizing the mummer, whose tall figure stood erect and motionless within the shadow of the ebony clock, gasped in unutterable horror at finding the grave-cerements and corpse-like mask which they handled with so violent a rudeness, untenanted by any tangible form.

  And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

  Hold up. Wait—what? That was it?

  Isobel traced over the last sentence again, even though she knew she hadn’t missed an
ything. Or maybe she had? She swallowed hard against the lump that had formed thick at the back of her throat.

  “Okay. ” She slammed the book shut, causing the table to rattle, which must have caused Varen’s writing to skip because he looked up, eyebrows raised. “So can we talk about how I just read this Masque with a q thing and how at the end the bad guy totally wins?”

  He drew his pen away from the page and sank back into his chair, regarding her with something like amusement. “I assume that when you say ‘bad guy’ you’re referring to the Red Death, implying that Prospero is the good guy?”

  Her jaw jutted to one side as she took this into consideration. She saw his point and, eyes rolling upward, lashes fluttering, she sighed. “So, whatever, he locked out all the sick people and threw a big party for his rich buddies. Not cool, I get it. But that aside, why would Poe write a story about some lavish palace and take so much time talking about all these different-colored rooms and build up all of this stuff about this chiming clock and some sagacious prince and his drinking pals if he’s just going to kill everybody at the end?”

  “Because,” Varen said, “in the end, Death always wins. ”

  At these words, Isobel recoiled. She took her hands from the table and put them into her lap, shoulders hunching. “You know,” she said, “no offense, but it’s when you say stuff like that that people start to worry about you. ”

  His expression fell.

  She cringed on the inside, admitting to herself that she hadn’t meant to sound so blunt. He stared at her, but she couldn’t meet that kohl-etched gaze, half-hidden behind his hair yet still able to pierce her straight through.

  “I mean . . . ,” she began, gesturing with her hands, as though they could help with the damage control.

  “So,” he said, “are you worried about me?”

  Her eyes lifted. He watched her steadily, all too serious and, again, she found herself floundering in that penetrating stare.

  Was he being for real? Or was he just mocking her again?

  He blinked once, clearly waiting for an answer.

  “Um . . . ”

  She was saved by the sound of a low creak. His focus broke away. She followed his gaze, realizing that it must have been the downstairs door reopening.

  “Is somebody coming?” she asked.

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  “Just Bess,” he murmured. “What time is it?”