He looked down.
She shook her head. “Don’t you believe me?” Her eyes stung with the threat of tears. She could hardly stand to see him this way. It was as though the Varen she knew had been consumed, replaced by this husk of despair, his soul recessed so deeply within that no light could reach it. If there was only some way she could prove that it was the real her who stood before him, and not some phantom imposter. If she only had something to give him, some sort of proof. Or just something to leave with him. A token. A promise. Anything, as long as it was something as real and solid as her.
Isobel ran her hands over her dress, fingers fumbling, grasping for something to give him.
Then her hands stopped on the ribbon tied around her waist. She let her fingers follow the smooth satin fabric to the bow at her back. With nimble fingers, she unlaced the knot and it slipped free from her waist with a soft whisper.
“Here,” she said. Reaching through the jagged hole in the window, she offered him the ribbon. “Take this,” she said. “It’s mine, and I’m coming back for it, so don’t lose it. You have to hold onto it. You have to keep it safe. For me. Do you understand?”
At first he only stared at the ribbon, but then he lifted one of those elegant hands to touch the fabric. Then their fingers brushed as he slowly pulled the satin free, winding it around his own hand. As she drew back, she saw his fingers curl around it in a fist. Clutching it, something within him seemed to stir. His brow furrowed in confusion, as if there were something about the pink ribbon now encircling his hand that he couldn’t quite understand.
“Listen,” she said. Around them, Brad’s screams continued, building in volume, curdling into a crescendo of utter terror. Isobel struggled to concentrate on her words with the sound of Brad’s anguished shrieks echoing in her ears. “Try—try to open the doors. Reynolds—My friend says that if . . . that if you know you’re dreaming, then you can control things. So try to open the doors, okay? Try. If you can’t, then just wait here for me.”
She stood and began to edge backward, away from the window, hardly able to stand the thought of leaving him there, alone. But she had to do something for Brad. She couldn’t let him die or continue to be tortured like this. Whatever was happening to him, she had to make it stop.
“Isobel?” Varen called to her in a whisper.
“Hold on,” she said. “Hold on and wait. For me.” She turned away from him, toward the direction of the screaming, which came now between bursts of a pounding sound like someone beating their fists against a bolted door. She began to run.
“Isobel!”
“I’ll be right back, I promise!” These last words echoed through the passageway around her. I promise, she thought, repeating her vow over and over in her mind.
I promise.
43
The Oblong Box
The passageway ahead grew colder, narrower, and more maze-like. Her breath clouded in front of her, visible even in the fading light.
She listened again for the sound of screams but heard whispers instead. They seeped through the walls.
Isobel slowed her run and pressed closer to the damp stone, her fingers trailing as she strained to hear. The voices seemed to be moving along beside her, through whatever room lay on the other side.
She hurried along the passageway, struggling to keep up with the lingering sound of a long, low moan, one that had issued from the midst of the hissing snickers and low cackles. One she knew belonged to Brad.
She rounded the next bend, suddenly finding herself within a large circular room. Dark doorways lined the walls, each like the gaping mouth of a monster. Knowing there was no time to deliberate, she took one on her left, a tunnel-like entrance. This snaking pathway of stone, mortar, and dampness seemed to take her down and down. So far that the whispers and groaning faded. Along the walls and clinging to the stone overhangs, Isobel could make out the edges of a crystallized white substance. She hesitated, wondering if she should turn back, if she’d taken the right way. Was there a right way?
She pressed forward, lured through the blindfold of darkness by the promise of a glimmering, uneven light that danced against a portion of the stone wall far ahead. Shoulders hunched against the damp and cold, she passed one hand along the gritted wall to guide her. Something hard crunched under her feet, and Isobel willed herself not to look, not to even imagine what sort of matter covered the floor.
She stepped into the pocket of dim light, which illuminated a bridgelike portion of the passageway, one that overhung a vast and open vault of catacombs. Her eyes followed the orange-yellow flickering to its meager source—a torch. There, far below, a man worked in solitude. Divested of his cloak and coat, a trowel in one hand, he busied himself in laying a brick wall across a gaping black archway.
A clanking echoed from within the hole, as though from chains. A tingling of bells issued forth, and Isobel froze, her eyes widening with the realization that there was someone inside the recess. At once she recalled the pair of men she’d heard when she had first stepped through the doorway that had transformed into the ebony clock. There had been one with a mask and a cloak, and hadn’t the other worn a hat with bells?
The man working to wall up the hole paused, a brick in one hand. Slowly he turned his head until his eyes met with hers. She fell back with a gasp, then plunged headlong down the darkened path.
She ran, the floor snapping and popping underfoot.
Around the next corner, at the end of the long corridor, Isobel saw a shaft of soft blue light. It streamed through an open archway, and she sped toward it. Her footing slipped on the jagged edge of something hard, and she tripped forward, slamming onto the stone, sending up a rush of dust.
The light confirmed her worst fears. Bones and ash scattered the floor.
Her fingers curled in the grit as she pushed herself onto her knees.
No, wait, she thought. Not bones at all.
Hand shaking, Isobel slid her fingers beneath what had looked to her a moment before like the cap of an ancient skull. It was, instead, the broken sliver of a porcelain face, the curve of a cheek all too evident in the outline. All the pieces were similarly identifiable. Broken fingers, like tiny tombstones, lay scattered in the dust. Half of a hand here. Part of an arm there. A jaw. An ear.
Isobel flung the shard aside. She stood, wiping her hands on the folds of her grime-caked dress, then pressed them to either wall to steady herself. She continued through the passage, finally stepping past the shaft of blue light and through the narrow archway. She drifted over the threshold and down one step, finding herself suddenly within the confines of a large marble crypt.
Slats of blue-gray light funneled down from high square windows, each no larger than a letter-size envelope. Inside, the smell was dry and sharp, like burnt paper. Countless broken and misshapen faces stared sightlessly down at her from their perches along marble shelves lining the four tall walls. More hollow and intact appendages littered the outer edges of the space, strewn like the remnants of discarded marionettes.
At the front of the crypt, an iron door stood ajar. Backed by blue-tinted stained glass, the door was the source of the sapphire light, which fell like a translucent gauze over the crypt’s centerpiece—an elevated stone tomb. Atop the tomb, chiseled in polished marble, lay the carving of a beautiful woman, her eyes closed in death, her cold stone hands fastened around an equally frozen bouquet of roses. Isobel knew she had seen that face before, had watched it emerge from the unfolding blackness that had claimed Varen.