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Perhaps they were characters from one of Poe’s stories. More residue left by the poet’s time here.
Then again, maybe not, if they had the cognizance to assume she was a dream.
As the altar with its angelic sentries loomed nearer, Isobel wondered if, like Reynolds, the cloaked duo could be Lost Souls. Lilith had mentioned that there were others. . . .
“Where is she going?” one of the men whispered.
“Where she always goes,” the other hissed. “To him.”
Though Isobel softened her steps to better hear them, she didn’t dare slow down and risk revealing that she wasn’t the mirage they believed her to be. Instead she walked on, straining to make sense of the susurrant sibilants that, like the smoke rising from the altar, dissipated into the cavernous ceiling.
Then the voices stopped. Pausing when she reached the steps that led to the altar, Isobel waited for the conversation to restart. When she heard nothing, though, she had to fight the urge to turn and make sure the two men were still where she’d left them, tucked in the recess of shadows—and not standing in the aisle just behind her. Or worse, gone altogether. Off to report what they had seen.
She cast a flickering glance between the two stone angels to see if they might open their eyes, raise their swords against her. As she stared into their serene faces, though, something about their appearance struck her as strange. How each held an uncanny resemblance . . . to her.
Disquietude swept over Isobel, causing her skin to buzz, and she wondered if the statues’ echoing features might support Reynolds’s claim that Varen saw her everywhere—in everything.
She mounted the steps, and as she passed between the stone guardians, the sensation of being watched intensified. As if the number of eyes upon her had grown by two more pairs.
Though she could no longer see the angels, Isobel could sense them awakening—feel them turning their heads in unison to chisel stony glares into her back. If she dared to turn and look, then the two dreamworld figures would know instantly that she wasn’t like them. Their mouths would fall open, they’d start screaming, and their siren cries would shatter the windows. The Nocs would come pouring through from the woodlands. Then they’d have her. They’d have her. They’d never let her go and—
Stumbling up the last step, Isobel stopped herself from slamming into the altar by grasping its cold edge. She clamped down hard and forbade her imagination to progress any further toward chaos.
As real as the stone felt beneath her fingers, as detailed as the world around her appeared, she had to remember that it was all still malleable, changeable. She could take control if she needed. Whisk herself to some other place or even wake up back in the gym, back in her body. But if she started to alter things now, to interfere with this palace facade that had to have come from Varen’s own imagination, she would also give herself away.
Forgetting the angels, Isobel swept her thoughts clean, replacing her fears with her original purpose. Her only purpose. Find Varen.
She peered down into a rectangular pit in the center of the altar from which the white wisps of smoke arose. Several feet below, at the bottom of a narrow brick channel, a collection of glass bottles sat around a dish of burning incense cones. A slant of dim, smoke-diluted light shone into the recess through a squat archway at the very bottom.
A fireplace, Isobel thought with a scowl, realizing she was looking down the flue of a truncated chimney. And the assortment of the dried flowers in those familiar colored bottles told her whose.
Climbing onto the altar, Isobel lowered herself feetfirst into the tight space. Her sneakers knocked into the incense dish as she landed, spilling its embers and sending several bottles toppling.
Isobel slumped to squeeze out of the casket-size space and, dropping onto her hands and knees, she crawled after the largest bottle as it barreled out onto the wooden floor with a thunderlike roll.
The bottle clinked as it collided with a pair of polished men’s dress shoes, dumping its sprig of flowers. With a jolt of sudden terror, Isobel looked up.
Dark-gray and neatly creased slacks accompanied the matching jacket of an empty, immobile business suit. Where there should have been a man’s head, there was only the hollow circle of a starched white collar. A red tie laced an invisible throat, while silver links gleamed from stiff, white, hand-free cuffs.
Moving only when she was certain the suit would not, Isobel pushed to her feet.
As she’d suspected, she was in a reversed version of Varen’s bedroom. But the jam-packed interior no longer resembled the open and orderly space as she knew it.
Varen’s posters, books, DVDs, and bed were all gone.
Dusty boxes and cloth-draped furniture cluttered the room instead, while drab and milky light struggled to filter through the shuttered windows. Piled high, stacks of books wrapped in cobwebs obscured the legs of a plush velvet violet armchair that Isobel was sure she’d seen somewhere before. Not here in Varen’s attic bedroom, but . . . where? She couldn’t recall.
On a table nearby was an empty birdcage, its white wires eaten by rust, its door held closed by a red, heart-shaped padlock. Lining the circular bed of the cage, yellowing scraps of sheet music peeked through a mixture of mismatched skeleton keys.
An old-fashioned oil lamp, its glass casing cracked and sooty, sat next to the birdcage.
Isobel went to the table and, touching the base of the lamp, imagined it lit. In response, a tall flame sprang forth from the dried wick, sending a flush of warm amber light dancing up the peeling walls. Along with several flittering moths, the shadows fled to the four corners of the room, the farthest of which held another sheeted form—this one human in shape—its white covering untouched by the dust, as if the secret concealed beneath was the attic’s most recent.
Forgetting the ghostly suit, Isobel hurried to the form, winding her way between towers of boxes, past a covered desk and a toppled chandelier.
She fell to her knees beside the figure, which lay slumped against the wall, its covered head lolled to one side, the sole of a single black boot poking out from beneath the sheet.
Isobel took one edge of the pristine fabric, but before she could tear the cover free, she caught sight of line-crackled fingers tipped by blue claws, long and curved.
