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“We should go,” Isobel said, and pulling up the lock tab, she climbed out.
Wordlessly Gwen shed her own coat, tucked a notebook under her arm, and exited her side. Huddling against the cold, they hurried to the doors.
Inside, the warm stairwell had already cleared of students. A faint odor of mildew hung in the air, commingling with the quiet to give the enclosed space, Isobel thought, a tomblike feel.
“So,” Gwen said, “what happens now?”
Isobel shrugged. “Maybe nothing.”
“Except you don’t really believe that.”
Isobel could hear Gwen’s keys clinking in her fidgeting hands. “No,” she admitted, “I don’t.”
Gwen started to speak again, but for both of their sakes, Isobel interjected.
“If we get caught cutting together—”
“—your dad will have me extradited to Canada,” Gwen finished for her. “I know.”
“And that’s if he’s in a good mood,” Isobel said, and she forced a small smile, figuring she owed Gwen that much at least.
“Lunch in an hour?” Gwen asked, tucking her keys in her purse, clearly trying to reestablish some sense of normalcy. Nodding slowly, Isobel took a retreating step, hoping now that she’d done what she could to stitch her wounds closed—to move on—normal was within their grasp.
Gwen mirrored her movement, backing in the direction of the hall.
Then they pivoted to go their separate ways, and Isobel started up the stairs. Alone now, she let her smile fall away as she swung herself up one flight to the next, feet slamming hard and fast, heading to the last place she wanted to go. Mr. Swanson’s class.
Despite her conviction to release Varen, to release herself, the pounding beat of her sneakers could not drown out the lines of the note she’d surrendered at the cemetery. Lines that, after an infinite number of readings, she would never be able to expunge from her memory.
In the shadows of the dreamland, he waits. He watches the gaping window to the world he had so longed to open. Now flown wide, bleak and empty, ravaged—like him—it grants his wish. He belongs.
It cannot compare to the memory of her eyes. Blue azure, warm as a summer sky.
If he could but fall into their world.
Would that he had.
Now he writes the end to the story that past its Midnight Dreary—that too late an hour—has its own without him. It was always, he knows now, meant to end this way.
Like that circle that “ever returneth into the selfsame spot.”
My beautiful, my Isobel, My Love. You Ask me to wait. And so I wait.
Isobel imagined Varen speaking the words to her in her head, his voice low and even. But as she rounded the final stretch of steps to the third floor, his tone grew icy in her inner ear, mocking, and then—with the final line—threatening.
For all of this, I know, is but a dream.
And when, in sleep, at last we wake,
I will see you agai—
Isobel halted with a gasp, arrested by the two ash-caked boots positioned at the top of the landing.
Her hand tightened around the banister and she looked up, eyes meeting with the black gaze of the dark figure blocking her path.
8
Approaching Darkness
