Oblivion (41 page)

Frowning, Isobel leaned over and switched on her bedside lamp. She scanned her room again, searching for any evidence that might point to someone's having been there.

There was nothing, though, and eventually her gaze wandered back to the book, which had been left open at page 119—a title page of mostly white space.

When Isobel caught sight of the name stamped in the middle, though, her frown deepened. Palming the watch, she took the book and drew it into her lap.

THE NARRATIVE

OF

ARTHUR GORDON PYM

OF NANTUCKET

COMPRISING THE DETAILS OF A MUTINY AND ATROCIOUS BUTCHERY

ON BOARD THE AMERICAN BRIG
GRAMPUS
, ON HER WAY TO THE SOUTH SEAS,

IN THE MONTH OF JUNE, 1827.

“Gordon,”
Isobel whispered, tracing the middle name of the story's protagonist with her fingers.

Next, her fingertips trailed to the ship's name, which she'd also seen before.
Grampus.
Hadn't that been the name written across the storm-tossed ship in the animated painting that had hung in Varen's dreamworld house?

Hurriedly, Isobel flipped to the next page, to the place where the story began. She skimmed the first few lines.

My name is Arthur Gordon Pym. My father was a respectable trader in sea-stores at Nantucket, where I was born. My maternal grandfather was an attorney in good practice. He was fortunate in everything, and had speculated very successfully in stocks of the Edgarton New-Bank, as it was formerly called. By these and other means he had managed to lay by a tolerable sum of money. He was more attached to myself, I believe, than to any other person in the world, and I expected to inherit the most of his property at his death.

Baffled, Isobel narrowed her eyes on the tightly packed blocks of text while her mind went on autopilot, deep-sea diving for something Reynolds had once said to her. About his having had a family . . .

Like you, I had a mother and father. And a grandfather, with whom I was particularly close.

“Arthur Gordon Pym,” Isobel muttered, speaking into the book. “By . . . Edgar Allan Poe.”

She'd said the names aloud for a reason. Now that she had, it did not elude her that they carried such similar-sounding beats. Quickly another memory resurfaced—of a time when Reynolds had mentioned his friendship with Poe. Two sides of the same creepy coin, Reynolds had said.

Well, Isobel thought, flipping back to the title page and its lines about mutiny and the Southern seas—at least that explained the whole pirate sword thing.

Curious, she hooked a finger to catch the next segment of pages, preparing to flip straight to the end and read the last paragraph, when a low
click
from somewhere downstairs made her look up.

Her door frame stood empty. Dark. Quiet.

Then:
eeEEEEEeee
.

Isobel recognized the sound of the front door opening.

She grew still, listening for several more seconds. When she heard nothing else, she closed the book, set it aside, and, clenching her fist tight around the watch, reached with her free hand to pick up her bedside lamp.

Her fingers stopped just short of wrapping around the lamp's middle.

Deciding this time to forgo her usual impulse of grabbing the first useless, weapon-esque thing she saw, she rose and padded barefoot to the door.

Peering out into the hall and over the banister, Isobel saw that the front door hung halfway open.

Bits of snow fluttered in with a rolling fog of cold mist.

Sparing a quick glance to the cracked door of her brother's darkened room, Isobel slid out into the hall.

She stood overlooking the foyer, watching the gales of cold air waft in. Though she thought for a moment about calling for her dad, she decided against it.

Then she noticed that the outer storm door, which should have prevented the inflow of snow and air . . . was missing.

Tick tick tick tick tick tick,
came the sound of the mantel clock in the living room.

The noise prompted Isobel to check the pocket watch again, but it continued to tick normally.

She slipped to the stairs and then down, the middle step creaking as she passed the collage of family photos, most of which had been repaired and rehung.

Edging around the banister, she took the door and, opening it all the way, peered out into the familiar cemetery that had taken the place of her front yard.

To her right, perched atop its short cement stoop, its four faces aglow with floodlights, Poe's gravestone monument stood tall and sturdy. As if it and all the other tombs had always been there. Just another collection of quaint lawn ornaments.

Snow dusted the headstones and the narrow walkway, which ran between the house-shaped sepulchres.

Leading away from the threshold on which Isobel stood, a single set of boot prints dotted the trail. They ran past Poe's monument and between two rows of short, low-lying tombs. There the footprints disappeared, fading into the patch of darkness that waited beyond.

Even though her breath clouded in front of her, Isobel felt no coldness in the air.

She deliberated for a moment, but then, stepping outside, found that the fleecy snow held no frigid sting.

Isobel drifted forward through the silent cemetery. Following the trail of prints, she made her way down the path, glancing back only once to make sure her house was still there, that the door leading to her foyer remained open. It did.

Aware that despite what the pocket watch was telling her, she must be dreaming, Isobel bore onward. She paused when she reached the end of the narrow alley between tombs and, glancing right, saw that a quiet sidewalk waited beyond the tall Greene Street gates.

To her left, the footprints continued on, winding past the closed entrance to the catacombs and hooking around the corner of Westminster Hall.

Sure, now, of where the prints must lead—and to
whom
—Isobel let go of her need to stay within sight of her house. She rounded the bend, and from there made her way quickly up the narrow, uneven brick trail that would take her to Poe's original burial spot.

He stood just where she knew she would find him, hovering over the stone marker while bits of white gathered on the wide brim of his hat.

A low breeze brushed past Isobel and swept around Reynolds, stirring the bottom edge of his cloak and the tails of his white scarf.

Her bare feet leaving the trail, Isobel moved toward him over the hardened earth. Reynolds did not glance her way as she approached but kept his gaze squarely on the marker's chiseled raven. Even as Isobel joined him at his side, he didn't turn to her or speak.

“Let me guess,” Isobel said. She dropped her voice low, scrunching her face into her best Reynolds scowl.
“Do not be alarmed. This is a dream.”

To her utter shock, her impersonation actually got a smile out of him. Though she could not see his mouth for the scarf, the smirk was wide enough that it reached his eyes, causing them to crinkle at the corners.

And his eyes themselves—Isobel had to lean forward when she noticed their color. That they had a color. Wait. Were they . . .
blue
?

Unable to help herself, Isobel placed a hand on his arm. Finally, prompted by her touch, he turned his head her way.

Blue indeed, she saw. Blue, with rims of dark gray that encircled the bright starbursts of his irises.

“Yet your watch would advise you otherwise,” he replied, and, lifting a gloved hand, he pinched the scarf and drew it down from his face.

“
My
watch?” Isobel asked, her voice trailing off as she marveled at his complexion.

Though Reynolds wouldn't have walked away from a “best tan” contest with any sort of honorable mention, let alone an award, she thought his pallor had been greatly reduced. Less dead mushroom and more basement recluse.

“I am of the mind you would have more use for it now than I.”

That last bit hit her brain as mumbo jumbo. She shook her head, clearing their conversation to begin a new one that, hopefully, she would be able to follow.

“Hold up. I'm a little lost,” she said, folding her arms against the cold she didn't feel. She glanced behind her toward the Greene Street gates. “Are we in the dreamworld?”

“Tell me, what do your instincts suggest?”

Isobel glowered at him. “My instincts suggest that
you
, at least, are the real deal, given that only you would answer a straightforward question with a cryptic, open-ended one of your own.”

“Since I am, according to you, being predictable, you won't then mind my repeating old lines about not being long on time.”

Isobel's hands went to her hips. “Is that why you're all dressed up? Got a Monster's Ball to attend? Or a meeting for the Literal Literary Characters of America?”

“Something like that,” he said, another slight smile touching his lips—its appearance all but rattling Isobel's entire world. Because Reynolds smiled only
never
.

“I thought,” he went on, ignoring Isobel's dumbfounded stare, “that, given your undeniable knack for traversing untraversable barriers, not to mention your penchant for making your point clear through brute force, it would be wisest to arrange a meeting with you now. Save us both trouble in the long run, in the event you had any lingering queries or grievances you wished to voice. And, I suppose . . . because I thought it only proper that I tell you good-bye.”

Isobel refolded her arms, scrunching them in tighter than before as she shifted her weight to one foot.

“So I know you didn't just call
me
a bully,” she said, rattling off words before she even knew what they would be. “I mean, you're the one flipping around swords, stabbing people like you've got nothing better to do. And on that note, PS slash FYI, strolling out of tombs and getting nerds all excited and your dumb masked face printed up in national magazines is
not
the best way to make good on your whole ‘should you seek me again I will not be found' wannabe badass spiel.”

She was rambling and she knew it. And she was stalling, too. Despite all the crap between the two of them, Isobel wasn't ready yet to tell Reynolds good-bye.

“Do you suppose they will miss me this year?” Reynolds—Pym—Gordon—
whoever
asked after allowing a block of silence to pass.

Isobel trained her focus on her feet and the collecting blanket of snow beneath them.

“I'm going to pull a
you
, do the question-for-a-question thing and ask if that means you are, in fact, going somewhere other than the woodlands. Because I was kinda thinking I wasn't going to see you ever again. And now you're here, but you say that you're going for good this time.”

“Thanks to you, Isobel, the woodlands, as far as I know, are no more.”

Isobel's head jerked up. “She really is gone?”

“I can only assume that Lilith died when the boy did, and that her soul passed on from his body. Presumably, to wherever demons go.”

“The policeman's bullet . . . it only went through his shoulder,” Isobel said. “Right through him. But the paramedics said they thought the shock caused his heart to stop. They had no other explanation for it. They thought he was dead. Well, he
was
dead. Until . . . until they brought him back.”

“Varen's act was one of self-sacrifice. Of love,” Reynolds replied, and his words gave her pause. Not due so much to their meaning, but because she was certain she had never heard Reynolds refer to Varen directly by name. Never until now.

“Lilith would have found his heart an uninhabitable place,” Reynolds continued. “They were locked in battle even after they had become one, and it is quite possible that Lilith herself—unable to withstand such torture—was the one responsible for stopping his heartbeat, simultaneously bringing about her own demise. Whatever the case, his death—brief as it was—caused the last slip in her tenuous grip. On the boy. On her pitiful existence. On her reign and her very kingdom, as well. On me . . . Now you and the boy have both tasted death, it seems, and in so doing, you have delivered the demon's. And I believe you have granted me mine.”

Reynolds stopped there, and Isobel let his explanation settle over her along with the returning quiet. Glancing at the gravestone, her eyes traced its grooves and lettering—the raven carved there in profile.

Death, she reminded herself, was what Reynolds had wanted. His desire, even if he had given up hope of ever achieving it, had been to pass on. He'd been in limbo so long, halfway living and halfway dead—all the way lost. But though Isobel knew she should be happy for him, she found that particular emotion hard to summon just at this moment. So she pressed on to her next question instead.

“He . . . Varen . . . said that when the paramedics were working on him, he heard me calling. He said there was darkness everywhere and that he was alone. But then my voice appeared as a bright light. He followed it until he . . . woke up.”

Reynolds's gaze trailed after hers to Poe's old gravestone.

“For that,” he said after a beat, “I have no explanation. Except, perhaps, for this: that whatever force the demon could not survive is the same that has allowed my soul to return to you in this moment. The same that allowed the boy's soul to rejoin with his body—the same that returned him, whole, to you. The same that has empowered you along the way, guiding you better than
I
could have. For look at us now.”

He smiled at her again, only smaller and more bittersweet this time.

Isobel hadn't been able to prevent herself from touching his arm moments ago, or from tackling him in this same graveyard less than a month ago, or even from stabbing him through the foot on the terrace in the dreamworld. And now she could not prevent the tears that surged forth from her eyes, falling down her face in two unstoppable streams.