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More than anything, it felt as if she’d been delivering a final speech. Her last words to herself. For herself. For the girl she’d once been but could never again resurrect, the girl her father had been so afraid of losing and had lost anyway.
But, Isobel thought with a bleak and sad smile, what better place to bury what was dead than in a cemetery?
27
The Most Lovely Dead
A soft scraping noise made Isobel open her eyes.
She scanned the outline of tombs but saw no movement within their ranks. Listening, she heard only the high, keening whistle of the wind as it whipped along the sides of the church.
Isobel rubbed one eye with the back of her hand. She turned her head to see if Gwen was still asleep, only to find her gone.
“Gwen?” she called into the darkness, which seemed to eat the syllable right out of her mouth.
There was no answer.
Hands fumbling, Isobel groped in the dirt for the knot of Gwen’s keys. She found the flashlight amid the tangle of metal and plastic and, squeezing it, aimed the glowing bulb toward her backpack. The key-chain watch, still clipped to the front zipper, gave off a sharp glint. Isobel pulled the bag into her lap and flipped open the butterfly’s silver wings.
The tiny clock’s three thin black hands did not show the time, but spun chaotically, chasing one another in fast loops.
A dream? Impossible. She couldn’t have fallen asleep. She’d only shut her eyes for a moment.
The sudden sound of soft humming caused Isobel to drop both the watch and the flashlight. She scrambled to her feet and squinted through the gloom toward where the door leading to the rear of the cemetery now stood ajar.
A dim blue glow emanated from the slight gap, lighting a path through the obstacle course of broken stones, low-lying crypts, and uneven ground.
“G-Gwen?” Isobel called, louder than before. Again, she received no response.
The melody, as though drifting up from the depths of some fathomless well, continued to echo through the catacombs.
It was the same song that had filtered through the stereo in Varen’s car in the dream where he’d taken her to the rose garden. The same collection of notes that had squeezed past the static of her bedroom radio the evening she’d found his jacket. It was the lullaby she’d heard playing through the living room TV that night with Pinfeathers, and over the crackling hush of the gramophone in the dreamworld bookshop. The very same one she’d heard only minutes before in this very cemetery.
Isobel began to move in the direction of the humming. She stopped as soon as the toes of her boots met with the edge of the slanted porcelain-blue shaft of light that spilled from the door. Hesitating, held in place by her own indecision, she wondered if she dared look inside.
Did she even have a choice?
Maybe, she thought, she should do something to try and wake herself. If she cried out, would Gwen hear her and be able to rouse her?
While Isobel deliberated, the humming beyond the door grew stronger, the melody rising and falling in its familiarly haunting and melancholy pattern.
Curiosity overriding her trepidation, Isobel took her first step into the blue light, where the coldness of the catacombs seemed to intensify. A draft rose up around her, sending a chill through to her bones, as though every spirit trapped within had decided to come out and watch her approach.
But toward what? Or whom?
One tenuous step after another brought Isobel closer and closer to the door until she stood just beside it.
The door swung inward at her slightest touch, making no sound as it moved.
Where she knew she should have found the cold night and the back of the cemetery, Isobel instead discovered another chamber in the catacombs.
Immediately her focus settled on the source of the humming, a shrouded figure who lay faceup on the lid of a horizontal tomb.
Positioned in the center of the room, the coffin-shaped crypt sat atop a set of stairs stationed directly below a blue stained-glass skylight embedded in the stone ceiling.
Moonlight, sheer and diaphanous, poured through the sapphire panes. It bathed the slender body that lay concealed beneath a snow-white sheet in dappled patterns.
The melody drew Isobel farther, beckoning her like a siren’s song into the room.
