Nevermore

47 Surcease of Sorrow

She had smelled this smell before. It was that too sweet, deep scent of decay. Dead roses. The aroma of it was so much more potent than she remembered. It wasn’t a bad smell, but it was too strong in such a concentrated dose. Oppressive.

She tried to turn her head from it but for some reason found little room to move.

She wondered if she was dreaming. Or still dreaming . . .

Or was she dead, locked away forever in a flower-filled casket?

Did the dead dream?

She became aware of a pressure across her shoulders and behind her knees. Pain, too, invited itself into her brain like a bad memory, pervading her entire body.

The next sensation that occurred to her was that of movement. She was moving. Cold air prickled the tiny hairs on her arms. She wanted to open her eyes to see where she was, what it was that transported her, and where she was going, but at the same time, she didn’t. Why, when it would be so much easier to drift away again, to settle back into the cocoon of sleep, that blank place between dreams and reality, where the word “nothing” found its true definition?

She felt the press of something like fabric against her cheek and gathered beneath her curled fingers. Her hair tickled her brow in the wake of another breeze, and through her eyelids, she sensed light.

By now she had surfaced to consciousness enough that it was too late to fall back into the deathlike chasm of rest. Against her will, she became more and more aware of herself, of the seemingly limitless aches in her body, and finally of that steady one-two rhythm of movement beneath her. Her thoughts broke through the muck of oblivion, and she stirred.

She opened her eyes to the sight of a black cloth vest, so close she could count the stitches. A silver chain leading out of a small waistcoat pocket glinted in the light, and Isobel saw that she grasped the loose cloth of what she thought must be someone’s black cloak. That was when she realized that the pressure at her back and behind her knees was the pressure of arms, arms she currently occupied, arms that carried her.

His body felt neither cold nor warm next to hers, solid, but somehow not alive. She listened, but he never breathed. Her gaze trailed up to the chin and nose covered by a blood-marred scarf. She squinted, trying unsuccessfully to peer through the shadow cast over his face by a wide-brimmed hat.

Stars dotted the sky around the edges of him, visible through tangles of knotted limbs that could not have belonged to the same trees as the woodlands. Their leaf-dotted boughs were too peaceful, too normal.

Could it be possible she was back in her own world?

At first she didn’t say anything, because she was too afraid to hope. She wanted to suspend time and just be still for another moment, to let her tired mind and sore muscles rest. The stale, moldering odor that clung to him didn’t bother her as it had before, and against him, she felt almost comfortable. Safe.

Isobel released her grip on his cloak and, curious, let her fingers spider-crawl their way to the glinting chain that had caught her eye. She pulled at it, and a small ticking pocket watch came free in her hand. She turned it over, her eyes following the light as it chased across the polished surface. She opened the watch. It had a simple white face encircled by roman numerals and three black hands. There was a name engraved in cursive on the inside of the little circular cover. Isobel traced her thumb over the name. “Augustus,” she read aloud. Her voice came out small and hollow-sounding, as though it had been a long time since she’d last used it. “Is that your real name?” she asked. “Augustus?”

“I dare think,” Reynolds said as, over his shoulder, the pale slice of moon became visible between the knit of branches, “that not half so much trouble would find its way to you if you would only learn to leave things that are not yours alone.”

“Okay, Augustus.”

He sighed. “Augustus is dead, long since.”

“Oh . . .” She closed the watch and slipped it back into his pocket. “And you’re not?”

“Not quite.”

“Am—am I dead?”

“You, strange puzzle of a girl, are very lucky.”

“Where—where are we?”

“We are nearly through the park behind your home,” he said.

“And—and Varen?”

“He is . . . home now, as well.”

Home, she thought with a sudden pang of yearning. She pressed her lips together and felt her face pinch with sudden emotion. She fought the sting that threatened her eyes and instead forced herself to laugh. The sound that came out of her was more like a choking bark than anything else, and it rocked her body with a tight tremor. How? How had they managed to survive when their demise had been so certain?

Isobel shut her eyes again and released a long breath. Her sore muscles relaxed. Safe. He was safe.

“I had a home once. A family, too,” said Reynolds, interrupting her thoughts. Isobel looked up at him, surprised by this uncharacteristic sharing of information. “Never one of my own, mind you. I never married,” he said, as though reading the question in her silence.

“Like you, I had a mother and father,” he said, “and a grandfather, with whom I was particularly close. It has been so long, and yet I remember them just as they were.”

The light around them grew brighter, and Isobel became aware of the heads of streetlamps, their glow warm and promising, and she knew that they must have just entered the rear of her neighborhood.

“You must miss them,” she heard herself say.

He sighed. “Sometimes I fear I shall never forget them.”

“Why would you want to forget them?”

At first he didn’t answer. The moon drifted out of sight again behind the brim of his hat, and the glow of the stars lessened as the streetlights and houselights around them grew brighter.

Isobel turned her head enough to see the approaching outline of her house, the dark windows and drawn shades. Everyone inside must be asleep, she thought.

Candy wrappers littered the street along with scattered leaves. A white ghost’s mask lay far off in the grass, like the broken face of a Noc, left behind and forgotten. Reynolds’s footsteps made no sound on the gravel walkway that led to her back porch. He carried her to the door, but instead of setting her to her feet, he laid her gently on the cushion of her mother’s long wicker bench. As he stepped back from her, Isobel sat up, worried that he might leave her without another word.

He paused, though, and crouched down next to her. “Isobel,” he began, “it is naught but pain and regret when we think of the things and people we will never have, the opportunities we may never get. Would you not agree?”

She frowned, not sure where the question had come from and even more unsure of how to answer it.

“But to pine for those we have had and loved and once held but will never clasp again,” he continued, “it is a torture of an unbearable degree. It is the worst pain possible. Enough to drive you away from yourself . . . as it did with Edgar.”

“Why are you telling me this?” she asked. “Am I dead after all?”

He chuckled, and Isobel realized that it was the first time she’d ever heard his laugh. It was a soft and husky sound, like the opening of a rusted gate. Slowly he rose, sending her another waft of fermented roses. He drifted away to the edge of the porch, where he stood with his back to her. He raised an arm and curled one gloved hand around a wooden support beam. A breeze blew past, rustling his cloak.

“Edgar.” He looked down, speaking the name as though it were one he did not often allow himself to say. “You are right that I knew him well. Despite our list of differences, we were two sides of a single coin. Different, yet inherently one and the same. He was my friend.”

Isobel listened. It was strange to hear Reynolds talk this much. And he was always so vague. Usually you could turn around everything he said and it would make just as much sense.

“What really happened to him?” she asked.

“He died,” Reynolds said. “He perished partly by his own means and partly by the means of others. It is best left at that.”

“You mean Lilith killed him?”

“She was . . . responsible,” he said.

“I don’t understand,” Isobel said breathlessly. “I burned the book. Why am I still here? Why didn’t I die?” It was the question she had been waiting to ask, one that now fought its way through a crowd of others.

“Ah,” said Reynolds, “that is something I do not fully comprehend myself, though I suspect that it was somehow your friend’s doing.”

“Varen? But how could he—?”

He turned toward her. “Allow me to attempt to explain with an example I do understand. The Nocs. They are part of his imagination, part of Varen’s story, and so, part of him. If he would not hurt you, then it only makes sense that they would not be able to do so either. They are the deepest parts of his subconscious. Shrapnel of his inner self. As you might have learned, they have the same desires and conflicts as their maker. As separate pieces, freed from the soul and from the confines of a human conscious, however, they develop minds of their own. And, as demons created in the dreamworld, they are compelled by law to answer to its queen. That is why they attempted to harm you but in the end could not.”

“That doesn’t explain why the fire I made didn’t burn me.”

“You created the fire in a dreamworld that is subject to the rules of its queen, yet influenced by the imagination and desires set in motion by an outside force—your friend. Therefore, the same power that protects you from the Nocs perhaps also protected you from the fire. Furthermore, when you destroyed the link—the book, I should say—you also destroyed the page that held your name. Your sole connection to the dreamworld was broken, and you existed here fully, in your world, once more. And finally, because the fire was created by you in the dreamworld and was, in essence, a dream itself, it also ceased to exist the moment the link was severed, the moment the two worlds parted.”

“She asked me to join with her,” Isobel blurted.

“Then,” he said, sounding unsurprised, “I suspect that she knew of the power that protected you. Invulnerability in a physical form caught between two realms? There is no greater power she could wish for.”

“What about you?” she prompted. “Did you know about the protection?” She asked this, already knowing the answer. For a long moment, the question hung between them like a dead thing. A knot of discomfort deep in her stomach tightened to the point that she felt sick, and she wished that she hadn’t spoken the question aloud. After all, he wouldn’t have had to guess at why she was still alive if he had known all along that she’d been under Varen’s protection.

“A long time ago,” he said at last, “I made a vow to a friend that at all costs, I would not let the events that led to his death threaten his world or any other again.”

Isobel blinked long and slow. She glanced down at her hands in her lap and past them to the tattered and stained ruffles of her once pink dress.

“So . . . I was the cost,” she said finally. “You thought I’d be done for if I did what you said. That’s what Lilith meant when she said you hadn’t told me everything.” Her eyes flicked to him, and it was his silence that told her she’d hit the mark.

He watched her, and in return, Isobel studied the portion of his face she could see, just that strip of skin around the eyes. They were young eyes. Misleadingly young, she thought. Who knew how old this guy really was? Older than Christmas, probably, especially since he seemed to have the moral code of an Aztec priest on sacrifice duty. She looked down at her hands in her lap again. She shrugged, doing her best to pretend that it didn’t bother her. “You could have told me, you know,” she said. “I—I still would have . . . If—if that was the only way to—to save him.”

She waited for him to say something. To tell her that he hadn’t really believed she’d die. Instead he said, “I . . . am not sorry that you survived.”

She laughed, but the sound came out hollow. It was funny, because she could tell he’d meant it. And saying so was probably a lot coming from him. She swallowed with difficulty. In truth, the realization that he’d sent her off to become barbecue without so much as a heads-up was not something that sat well with her. Still, he’d come for her after it was all over. He’d helped Varen return. And he’d brought her home, too. He’d cared that much at least, right? “What are you, anyway?” she asked. She thought she might as well, as long as they were being blunt.

“It makes no difference.”

“Lilith said you were a Lost Soul.”

“I suppose that is one way to view my existence,” he replied.

“Is that what would have happened to Varen? If I hadn’t . . . ?”

“Possibly,” he said. Then he glanced away, amending his answer by adding softly, “Yes. At least . . . eventually.”

She tilted her head toward him. In that moment, he had sounded so terribly sad that she couldn’t help herself from asking her next question. “What does it mean to be a Lost Soul?”

Perhaps it had been the note of sympathy in her voice that he’d found so deplorable, or maybe it had simply been the underlying shift in focus from Varen to him. Whatever the case, she had apparently overstepped her bounds by asking. He turned toward her suddenly, his tone sharpening once more. “Isobel, after tonight, you will not see me again.”

Her mouth clamped shut. She knew that this was his way of snapping the shutters closed on that particular topic and all others. But she had too many questions left to stop now. She blinked up at him. “Where will you go?”

“I will return and continue my vigil, as promised.”

She smiled at him sadly. “The party never stops for you, does it?”

She’d meant it as a joke, but he didn’t laugh. Instead, he pivoted on his heel and took his first step down from her porch, the hem of his cloak brushing the weathered wood.

“Wait!” she called after him, rising. For a moment, she wobbled on her feet and her vision swam. She staggered forward and, not trusting her knees to support her, gripped the beam he’d held only a few moments before. “There’s one last thing, please. It’s about Varen.”

She had expected him to keep moving, maybe even to vanish into thin air before her very eyes. But he stopped. Maybe he had heard her stumble? Whatever the reason, he still did not look back at her, only turned his head ever so slightly in her direction, a gesture that seemed to say that even though he was willing to listen, willing to humor her one last time, he still, as always, retained that infuriating right to answer her with silence.

“Yesterday,” she began, speaking to his back, hurrying as though there was some element of him that was part hourglass. “Before this all started, I saw him. I hadn’t seen him all morning. I don’t think anyone had. But he came to Mr. Swanson’s class to do the project. Then, after class, he disappeared. Later, I found out he’d been at the bookstore the whole time, asleep. Then, when I saw him late last night, his face . . . He looked different, but . . . I don’t understand.” She shook her head. There were too many details to fit them all into a single coherent question. She tried anyway. “How . . . how could he have been in two places at once?”

To her great shock, Reynolds swiveled abruptly to regard her, something about her words having piqued his interest. “You say he’d been asleep?”

“Yeah. That’s . . . what Bruce said.” She looked at him curiously.

“You’re sure you saw him?”

“Yeah,” she said, confused by the question. “Everyone did.”

He drew rigid at this response, his black eyes actually widening. Until that moment, Isobel would not have thought “surprise” belonged to Reynolds’s limited gray-scale palate of conveyable emotions.

“What?” she said.

He stood and watched her very closely now, so closely that she would have given anything at that moment to have been able to read the thoughts streaming through his head.

“Perhaps this is a question better suited for its subject,” he answered.

Bam. She could almost hear the door of conversation slamming shut in her face.

“But . . .”

“I must leave you now,” he said.

Of course you must, she thought bitterly. She crossed her arms, her gaze dropping to her ragged shoes, the same ones she had flung at him earlier that night. In that moment, she was half tempted to find something else to throw at him. Preferably something heavier and more solid, like one of her mother’s garden gnomes. Fine, then, she thought. She would ask Varen when she saw him.

“Isobel?”

“What?” she snapped, not bothering to look at him. He could make her so mad sometimes. Even now, after everything, after he’d saved her, after he’d brought her home, after he’d rescued Varen.

“It is best for all if you remember what I’ve said tonight,” he told her. She just shrugged at this, glancing down at one hand, turning it over in the dim light to frown at the dirt caked beneath her fingernails. “And know that if for any reason it should occur to you to seek me again, I will not be found.”

At this, she scowled and kicked at the support beam with one foot. Eyes rolling, she said, “Like I would even think about calling you to hang out, Ren. You have the social grace of an undertaker.”

The porch light flipped on, and, squinting, she looked up.

Danny stuck his head out the back door. “Who are you talking to?”

Isobel glanced at the place where Reynolds had stood. He was gone. She looked toward the corner of the house, almost expecting to see the furl of his cloak disappear around the edge.

There was no sign of him, though, and it was hard to say how she felt about him being gone from her life for good. Annoyed mostly, she thought.

“What the hell happened to you?” Danny asked. “You lose a fight with a Weedwacker?” Her little brother stared at her with eyes round as manholes. “Mom and Dad are out looking for you, you know,” he said.

Her stomach dropped at these words, and she turned to gape at her brother as he said, “You’re in a crap load of trouble.”