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Isobel looked back to the doll.
Sift through his darkness, Reynolds had told her.
Was that what this place was?
Crouching in front of the doll, Isobel searched her fixed features for some answer.
Madeline, Isobel thought. Varen’s mother. Was this how she existed in his mind? As a cold and lifeless mannequin? A windup memory that could only repeat the same sad song over and over? Her image preserved but faded, distorted and worn down by the years of not knowing—not being able to comprehend—what had become of her?
“Why did you leave?” Isobel whispered.
As though in response, the doll’s eyelids rolled up to reveal emerald irises and a glassy stare that trained itself on Isobel. The pupils shrank to pinpricks. Then, with a quiet pop, the orbs cracked. Black oil seeped out from the inner crevices of the doll’s eyes, tracking dark streaks down her cheeks.
Splattering onto the floor, two blots of oil writhed and wriggled into a pair of tiny, dark brown beetles.
Isobel straightened quickly. She jumped back from the insects as they scurried toward her and then, one after the other, into a hollowed knot between floorboards.
She glanced back to the doll and saw that her cracked eyes had fallen shut.
Without a sound, the doll had lifted a porcelain finger to her ruby lips, as though calling for silence.
Somewhere in the room, something fell with a low clunk. A shadow skirted the ceiling, and with a splintering of glass, the light Isobel had lit winked out.
11
Noc Noc
Isobel grew still, holding her breath in the renewed darkness.
Shifting her weight slowly, to keep the floor from creaking again, she leaned toward the slim space between the wall and the screen. Peeking through, she saw that the bowl lay overturned, its contents strewn across the worn boards.
But Isobel did not see the largest of the porcelain shards, the fragment containing the etching of Virginia.
It was missing—just like the figure from beneath the collapsed white sheet.
“They call them deathwatches.”
The deep, static-corroded voice—almost incomprehensible in its distortion—had come from directly beside her.
Isobel’s eyes slid in the direction of the screen. Poison-tipped hooks of fear snagged her through the gut as she caught sight of a single pitch-black eye, watching her through the narrow slit between panels.
Grinning, the Noc flashed a double row of serrated teeth, an intricate network of cracks spreading into view on the visible slice of his porcelain cheek.
He inserted an indigo claw into the gap and pointed at her.
“If you listen closely,” he continued, a glossy bead of black liquid racing down his curved nail, “you can hear them in the walls.”
Isobel zeroed in on the droplet as it reached the very tip of the Noc’s claw. Before the drop could fall, however, it wriggled to life, forming into another of the rust-colored beetles.
Tumbling onto the floor, the insect scrambled to right itself, then scurried off into the same hole as the others.
“The sound, it goes something like this . . . ,” the Noc hissed, and retracting his claw, he tapped lightly against the screen.
The same noise answered from beneath, below the patch of floor right under her.
Tensing, Isobel readied herself to run. But she already knew it was too late. There was nowhere to go.
Nowhere the Noc wouldn’t be able to reach first.
