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Wham! The earsplitting crack of the door slamming shut behind her made Isobel swing around. She watched the lock’s brass thumb latch twist itself to one side, the deadbolt sliding into place once more.
Isobel backed away from the door, layers of stiff fabric rustling around her legs.
Like the pale pink dress she had worn to the Grim Facade, this dress had a strapless bodice and a set of full skirts that ended at her knees. But without the frills and lace fringe of the former, this one seemed to be its dark opposite.
She did not have to strain to remember where she had seen it before. It had been worn by the corpse lying on the lid of the sarcophagus in her vision of the blue crypt.
Her corpse.
Isobel’s hand sprang to her cheek, the silken satin ends of her ribbon, still tied to her wrist, brushing against her arm. She touched the scratch Pinfeathers had left, realizing that it, too, had appeared on the body.
A sudden clang of piano keys made her jump.
“No, no,” came a woman’s soft voice from somewhere behind her. “Not a C there. How about a D instead?”
The music began again, and Isobel turned to face the reversed interior of Varen’s house.
White sheets covered all the furniture. Black draperies hung from the windows.
Above, weak violet light flickered from a flame-lit chandelier with no chain. It hovered over her head, suspended by an invisible force, the crystal prisms and pendalogues jagged and broken.
To her right, the stairs that led up through the rest of the house looked loose and dilapidated. Glancing to her left, she saw that the sliding doors to the parlor were closed. Through the long slit that separated the wooden panels, however, she could just make out the edge of the piano as well as someone sitting at its bench.
The floor creaked beneath her as she drew nearer to the doors.
She heard the melody stutter, stop, and start again.
This time, a woman’s soft humming accompanied the haunting tune.
Isobel crept closer and closer, pausing only when she saw a flash of light from the corner of her eye. Her attention snapped to the painting on the wall. It hung above the sheeted hallway table that held the model of a schooner, now bedecked with black sails.
For a moment, the painting within the gilded frame appeared to be nothing more than a canvas of pure black. Another flash, however, revealed otherwise. A bolt of lightning contained within the square frame flickered to illuminate an old-fashioned ship as it tossed about on choppy nighttime waters. The fierce waves in the painting rolled and swelled, the whole tumultuous scene fluttering in and out of sight as the lightning continued to flare in the background. It lit the tar-colored underbellies of the clouds as well as the ship itself, which seemed as small as a toy amid the storm-tossed seas.
Isobel caught the name GRAMPUS across the ship’s stern during one long barrage of lightning strikes.
Then the humming from within the parlor changed to singing, and her attention returned once more to the pair of sliding pocket doors.
Quickly she slipped to stand just in front of the drawn panels, peeking through the slim space in between.
She saw a pair of elegant hands wandering over the white keys as the music rose and fell, every note melding with the woman’s wispy voice to create a liquid sound.
“Sleep now a little while
Till within our dreams we wake
Unfolding our Forever
If only for Never’s sake.”
Inside the ornate and orderly room, an eerily familiar scene unfolded before her. The old-fashioned decorations and the stately piano, the woman’s elegant violet evening gown, the glittering comb in her hair—it all matched what had played on the TV that night she’d found Pinfeathers in her living room. And the comb. It was identical to the one she’d found in the box beneath the stairs at Nobit’s Nook.
“And take me to your ever after
Let’s hide behind our eyes
Together pour through that door
Where autumn never dies.”
