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After all, how could she trust what she’d seen when she had been tricked by false images before?
Gwen had said that demons could twist minds.
But it was hard to tell whose mind Lilith was trying to turn with lies. Isobel’s or Varen’s?
Though both the car and the hanging sign matched up with her dream, it all brought to mind something Mr. Swanson had once said back at the beginning of the year when they’d been studying Othello. He’d explained to the class that what made the villain, Iago, such a convincing liar was his ability to make things appear a certain way to his enemy.
Perception had been his weapon.
With that thought, Isobel gained the courage to move. She hurried up the short flight of stairs, twisted the knob, and pulled open the door. As she slipped inside, the stiff scent of aged paper, dust, and stale air greeted her. She turned to face the door as it closed, careful not to allow its hanging belt of Christmas bells to jangle too harshly.
She kept her back to the shop interior, listening and waiting to see if anyone had noticed her come in. With her head down, her face partially hidden by the hood of her parka, she risked a glance over one shoulder. Seeing no one, she took a quick inventory of her surroundings.
Tall wooden bookcases stood in close proximity to one another. Their shelves, once stuffed to the point of bowing, now seemed to hold a much lighter burden. There were even a few barren spots in between clusters of worn-looking volumes and stacked tomes.
The high-reaching shelves stretched long across the floor, halfway blocking the copper-colored light that struggled to illuminate the tight aisles in between.
Isobel heard rustling and, glancing the other way, spotted a round middle-aged woman in a navy-blue raincoat. She stood over a bin of old magazines with a handwritten sign on the side indicating that they’d been marked down to twenty-five cents an issue. The woman looked up, offering Isobel a distracted smile before going back to leafing through the magazines.
Other than the woman, the store appeared to be empty of customers.
Careful to keep her steps as quiet as possible, Isobel slunk between two of the tallest shelves. She placed one foot directly in front of the other as though walking a tightrope and trailed close to the shelf at her right.
Her ears strained for the sound of Bruce’s haggard cough, though she heard nothing.
A few more steps took her to the end of the bookcase, and peeking around its edge, she found him.
The bookstore owner sat behind the glass display case that served as the front counter, half his face obscured by the ancient push-button register.
His single visible eye, its center dark as black coffee, stared directly at her.
Isobel gasped. She darted behind the bookcase again. Whipping her head around to peer back toward the front of the shop, she had to fight the urge to make a run for the door. Instead she held her breath, squeezed her eyes shut, and waited, but the yelling she had anticipated never came. When she didn’t hear coughing, either, she suddenly remembered what had happened the first time she’d ever walked into the store. The old man had stared at her then, too, but she’d discovered a moment later that apparently that was the way he slept—with one of his eyes (the one that just so happened to be glass) wide open.
Isobel leaned out to peek around the bookcase again.
The shop owner sat in the exact same position.
He looked frailer than she remembered, his once round body having shrunken enough so the sleeves of his thick brown sweater hung from his arms in loose folds, like the skin of a bloodhound. His hair had thinned as well since the last time she’d seen him, the shock of Einstein-white gone, leaving mere wisps on his otherwise bald head.
His breathing, slow and rhythmic, came with a wet, rattling sound. He didn’t blink. But when he didn’t cough, either, Isobel took that as the most telling sign of all.
She released the breath she’d been holding and took a cautious step out from behind the shelf. Watching him closely as she crept past the counter, Isobel paused again when his other eye came into view. As she’d suspected, it was pinched shut.
At the far end of the counter, opposite where Bruce sat, a gramophone, identical to the one in her dream, caught her eye.
The seed of dread within her dropped out of her heart and into her gut. There it grew, transforming into quiet panic.
She hurried to the rear of the shop, taking the short step up and through the archway, into the section that housed the nonfiction books and encyclopedias. She ignored the stacks of boxes and the emptied shelves, heading straight for the door that would take her to the attic.
Below the DO NOT ENTER sign, she saw the yellowing and far more ominous handwritten note that bore the familiar words BEWARE OF BESS.
Before she knew what she was doing, Isobel ripped the handwritten sign free, crumpled it, then let it drop to the floor. She pulled the door open.
The enclosed stairway stretched up before her. Above, the attic room appeared to be intact, no longer exposed to the sky as it had been in the dream. Solid walls met with the wood-and-rafter ceiling, and cold light poured in from the window above the staircase, dust particles drifting through the sharply slanted shafts like flotsam.
Isobel moved beyond the threshold, pulling the door shut behind her. She mounted the stairs, and as she moved through the patchwork of light and dimness, she thought she could smell the bitter scent of seared wood.
She opened her arms and placed her hands to the wood paneling on either side of her. Her fingers trailed the coarse surface, bumping over the grooves as she used the walls to guide herself up, every step taking its turn to groan beneath her.
