The woman’s hair, like that of a sorceress, lay spread around her head. It draped over the sides of the sarcophagus in long, coiling tendrils. Her marble dress, heavy and flowing, like the inaugural gown of a queen, spilled from either side of the elevated tomb while the embellished train fell in gentle folds along the stairs leading down from the base. The pleats and endless ripples in the marble garment gave the illusion of softness, her face the illusion of life. It was as if at any moment Isobel could expect to see her chest rise and fall with the intake and release of breath. Perhaps the most disturbing element about the tomb, however, was that the impossibly heavy lid had been shifted open.
Isobel didn’t dare climb the steps and peer inside, knowing that the only thing worse than finding a withered body within would be not finding one. She waded instead through the carpet of broken faces and parts until she reached the crypt door.
“Mistress?”
At the sound of the voice, low and grating, she halted.
“Mistress, is that you? Have you returned?” the voice asked, curious.
Isobel’s hand stopped short of the iron-and-glass door. She pulled back and, with careful steps, drew to peer around the other side of the sarcophagus.
He sat slumped against the far wall, half of him lost in shadow. A Noc. He looked up, his dark gaze focusing on her. “Ah,” he said, grinning, “now there’s a surprise. Tell me, what demon has tempted you here?”
He was different from the other Nocs. This Isobel noticed right away. Instead of a dark red to black, his hair was deep black to blue-violet. As he lifted his head from the wall, his hair spiked up from his skull like the feathered crest of a bird. His teeth, pointed like the tips of countless sharpened pencils, gleamed an unsettling indigo. Though his face was whole, he was missing nearly half of himself on one side, including an arm from the shoulder down, part of his abdomen, and his leg from the knee. A thin layer of dust coated his dark pants, evidence that he’d not moved for some time.
He wore no shirt or jacket, which was what revealed the most unusual thing about him.
Scrolling designs covered much of his exposed skin. His chest, sculpted and smooth like a Greek statue’s, depicted minutely detailed tattoos of sailing ships, tossing waves, and foam. A long-haired mermaid graced his existing shoulder, her scaly tail sweeping the length of his arm. An entire portion of the sea epic vanished into the pit of his missing side, and though the pictures themselves might have been beautiful, Isobel was too distracted by the fact that they had been chiseled into his skin like carvings. That thought, combined with his demonic grin, the garish white of him, and the jagged gaps in his body, made them somehow vulgar.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Not who”—he wagged a blue-clawed finger at her— “what.”
“Fine,” Isobel obliged, “what?”
“Baffled,” he replied, “at how you, fetching though you are, could have cost me an arm and a leg.”
Isobel stepped out fully from behind the tomb, eyeing him warily.
“If I had known about your masked friend,” he continued, “and his way with a sword, I’d have let Pin go first in the chase.”
“Chase?” she asked, her voice echoing through the crypt.
He grinned and pointed at something behind her with a detail-swirled finger of his existing hand. “Be a doll,” he said. “Show your worth and hand old Scrimshaw that empty limb over there.”
Isobel glanced over her shoulder, where against the side of the open tomb lay a hollow arm, complete from shoulder to wrist, though missing its hand.
Her head whipped back to him and she stared in disbelief, all other questions forgotten. She watched as, with his remaining hand, he rooted through the pile of dust beside him and pulled free a large shard. He held it against his gaping body, like someone trying to determine where a puzzle piece might best fit. With horror, Isobel realized what he was doing. He was piecing himself back together. Was that possible? She took a step back, her footstep crunching.
He looked up. “No?” he said.
She took another step back from him.
“There’s gratitude,” he muttered, the shadows overtaking his form once again as she receded. “Ah,” he said, and began to sing softly to himself in a lilting tune.
“Can it have been the woodlandish ghouls—
The pitiful, the merciful ghouls—
To bar up your way and to ban it
From the secret that lies in these wolds—
From the thing that lies hidden in these wolds—?”
Isobel turned and ran for the iron door. Behind her, he laughed, the lyrics of his dreadful song rising in volume.
“Well you know, now, this dim lake of Auber—
This misty mid region of Weir!”
She grasped the side of the iron and tugged inward. With a screech for each pull, the door gave inch by inch until it yielded a space big enough to slide through. She eased out, a panel of lace ripping free from the skirt of her dress.
“Well you know, now this dank tarn of Auber,
This ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir!”
Isobel pushed the door shut behind her, blocking out his voice with one last shriek of iron and rust.
Outside, gray ash coated the ground of a silent cemetery. Flecks of white sifted from the purple sky, falling through the arid atmosphere to gather like snow atop the countless crooked tombstones that pockmarked the grounds in crowded patches. They leaned into and away from one another like scattered, broken teeth. Stone angels and grim, robed figures wept and grieved at the sides of aboveground tombs, while in between it all stood several of the same thin black trees as from the woodlands. Beyond the cemetery, the jagged edge of a cliff split the sky from the ground, stretching in a serrated rift spread as far as she could see.
Behind her, attached to the crypt, loomed the cathedral-like castle, the abbey from Poe’s story within which raged the masquerade. Its spires pointed toward the ashen sky, jagged and wicked, like the spine of a slumbering dragon.
The view was all stillness and quiet, like some creepy charcoal etching brought to life.
Until the sound of loud knocking shattered the sanctuary quiet.
Isobel kept close to the side of the crypt, pressing one hand to the cold marble wall as she moved away from the stained-glass door. Soon the Nocs drifted into view. She counted six of them altogether as they exited from the iron doors of another vault.
They bore aloft on their shoulders what she recognized at once as a long wooden coffin. Her heart jarred at the sight of it, fear tightening her chest.
A shout arose from within, followed by the clatter of more knocking.
On top of the coffin, like a king, perched a great black bird. In between dry croaks, it pecked at the lid, as though in answer to the knocks coming from within.
Pinfeathers. He made seven.
Another anguished cry for help came from inside the oblong box, and now she was certain. It was Brad inside that coffin. But how had they brought him here?
Isobel remembered how, on the playing field, Brad’s eyes had turned black. Just like Varen’s, they’d lost the vibrancy of color within the beat of an instant. But when Brad’s eyes had changed, his body had remained on the field, unconscious. How, then, had he been transported here?
Isobel slipped away from the crypt. She followed them, venturing through the tangle of trees, ducking behind monuments and tombstones. She stopped at the side of a tall winged seraph weeping into her stone hands, and watched them from a distance.
Like bizarre pallbearers, they carried the coffin along toward a misty clearing encircled by more black trees.