Oblivion (5 page)

Then the bell rang, shrill as a scream, and still more students poured out of classroom doors. Kids carrying books and holding hands bumped into her from every angle, knocking her from side to side.

Isobel squeezed between one of the kissing couples, forcing them apart.

The boy rounded on her with a glare. “What are you staring at?” he asked. But neither he nor the girl had any eyes. Just peeling, burned-out holes, as if their faces were made of paper.

Isobel shrank from the couple and collided with one of the teachers, who thrust a stack of blank pages at her.

“You forgot to sign our name,” said a girl's voice.

Looking up, Isobel found herself staring into her twin's expectant gaze, the likeness between them complete, right down to the slanted scar on her cheek.

Again, Isobel scrambled backward, bumping into yet another version of herself, this one almost doll-like in her pink party dress from the Grim Facade.

“I found you,” the double whispered, words she'd once uttered to Varen.

A hush fell over the hallway.

Isobel spun—and saw that her classmates had all disappeared. In their stead, a dozen of her own faces watched her with unblinking stares.

She saw herself dressed in the ebony version of the party dress, her features shell-shocked. A stream of crimson ran down the duplicate's arm to soak the satin ribbon tied to her wrist.

Another replica had on her blue-and-gold cheer uniform. Yet another wore a pink robe and pajama pants—the same haphazard outfit she'd worn the night she'd climbed onto the ledge outside her window to meet with . . .

The truth, more disquieting than the clones themselves, struck her with stomach-twisting alarm. The versions of herself before her represented each different way Varen had seen her. Each way he remembered her.

“Go away,” she ordered. “All of you.
Now
.”

The face of the Isobel who held the stack of papers crumpled first, collapsing inward. The double's arm fell as it disintegrated, and the white leaflets slipped free, spilling across the floor. Then the edges of the duplicate's body curled in, collapsing like the remains of a burnt offering.

Pink Party Dress Isobel went next, bursting to cinders. One at a time, the others followed suit, and her legion of look-alikes dissipated to dust. Ash floated to the floor, coating the spotless linoleum and powdering the lockers in the leftover gray-white grime of whatever essence had allowed them to exist in the first place.

Freed from their stares, Isobel turned in a circle—wondering, as the sun-filled windows dimmed, if being alone wasn't a thousand times worse.

Glancing down at her feet, she caught sight of her name scrawled across the scattered papers, written in an unmistakable hand.

She wrapped her arms around herself, gripping her sides when she saw that the ink wasn't violet but red.

Bloodred.

Close by, one of the fluorescent lights popped, going dark. Then the intercom system cut on with a shriek of feedback.

“-ode red,” a man's voice echoed through a blast of static. “I repeat. Th-s is a -ode r-d.”

In unison, the classroom doors slammed shut with a resounding bang.

Another light popped, echoed by the tinkle of glass. Then another, and another—getting closer.

She shut her eyes just before the final light, the one right above her, snapped off with a smash.

“Wake up,” she told herself out loud, wanting to open her eyes and be in the real world—her world. Someplace where she could hide from this person she didn't know anymore. Who had forgotten who she was. And who he was too.

Lost. Lost. Lost.
The word echoed in her head.

Then the far-off sound of door hinges creaking long and low startled her, and Isobel's eyes flew wide again. She wasn't at home, though, and she wasn't back in her bed. She was still in that awful hall, facing windows filled with black tree trunks back-lit by a violet glow.

“Cheerleader.”

She felt his breath stir the hair by her ear and, whirling, suppressed the urge to scream, covering her mouth with a quaking hand.

Varen's black eyes bored into her.

He took a step toward her, forcing her back. Her heels crunched over the shriveling papers bearing her name, and they crushed to powder.

As he advanced on her, Isobel continued to retreat, hypnotized by that all-consuming stare, yet still aware that the walls surrounding them had begun to transform, drawing in tighter, shooting taller.

The floor beneath their feet became carpet and the ceiling smoke.

One after the other, clinking chandeliers dropped through the murk, falling to hover just overhead. Their dim violet flames cast Varen's wan face in an alien glow, rendering him unrecognizable.

On either side of them, a thousand golden frames bled through purple-papered walls that might have belonged to a Gothic palace, each filling with the liquescent surfaces of shining mirrors.

Isobel's gaze darted from left to right, to that angry face the glass multiplied to infinity.

But
she
wasn't in any frame. Not a single one.

Snick. Pop. Crack.

The mirrors began to fracture, each sprouting its own spiderweb pattern, splintering Varen's repeated image into countless more.

“Paper girl,” he whispered, and she flinched when he touched her cheek, “in a paper play.”

She placed her trembling hand on his sleeve, but no sooner did she touch him than her fingers disintegrated, flaking away to nothing in the same way the false versions of herself had.

Isobel tried to speak, but she felt her throat cave in.

His lips came close to hers, almost touching.

“I thought I wrote you out,” he whispered.

Then, like a reel of old film eaten through by heat, his face, the mirrors, the smoke, and everything else dissolved into the bright white glare of her bedroom's ceiling light.

Sitting up, Isobel clamped her hands around her throat. She gasped while her fingers climbed the contours of her face. Even though she could see the walls around her and the shadowy tips of her searching fingers, she still half expected to find her eye sockets empty, hollow as broken eggshells.

Releasing the breath she'd sucked in, she pushed off from her bed, retreating from the warmth of her covers as if that would help her escape the images that clung to her like cobwebs.

She snatched her alarm clock, hands fumbling as she read the blue numbers. The time twitched to read 6:30, and the sudden drone of her alarm sliced through her escalating panic.

She was awake now. She knew for sure because the digital numbers weren't scrolling. The interior of her room wasn't in reverse, and she didn't see her own body lying in her bed.

Isobel clicked the off button, silencing the alarm—but the rhythm of her heart still echoed its urgent bleating.

She glanced over her shoulder at her dresser and the dark-blue sheet she'd thrown over the mirror to hide it from view. And to shield herself from anything—
anyone
—who might be watching from the other side.

Setting her alarm down again, she kept her fingers on its casing, allowing the coolness of the hard plastic to ground her while the voltage of the dream ran its course through her system.

Pins and needles prickled her cheek in the place where he'd touched her—the scar.

She brushed her fingers over her lips where the sensation of his breath lingered.

Slowly, Isobel twisted to survey her room, her focus trailing upward to the light she
knew
she hadn't left on.

*  *  *

She got to school early that morning.

Once inside, Isobel didn't bother waiting to watch her mother drive off.

They hadn't spoken during the ride, and Isobel hadn't been able to bring herself to ask about the light—to see if one of her parents had come into her room during the night to check on her, turned it on, and then forgot to switch it off again. She decided she preferred to think that it
had
been her mother's or father's doing. Or even Danny making sure she was still there, still breathing, after another nightmare of his own.

Hurrying through the empty central foyer, she passed the velvet ropes sectioning off the school crest and then the trophy cases. She veered left, moving past the main office's wide windows, wanting to get to the next hall over—to the scene of last night's dream.

She didn't know what she hoped that would accomplish, or how being there could clarify or change anything. Varen hadn't left something in the dream for her to find in reality, as he'd done with the pink ribbon in the bookshop.

Even if he had, did she really need proof the vision had been true?

Dreams aren't real,
she'd told her brother the previous night, delivering the worst of lies moments after she'd resolved not to tell him any more.

Isobel stopped when something in the main office caught her attention: There was a man standing at the front desk. A man she knew.

He leaned against the counter, one hand propped at his hip, curtaining back his duster-style coat to reveal a holster and gun. He drummed the fingers of his other hand on the countertop, waiting, it seemed, for Mrs. Tanager, the secretary, to finish her phone call.

Too late, Isobel realized she shouldn't have stopped. Catching sight of her, the man did a double take; she could tell he recognized her, too.

Detective Scott,
she thought, plucking his name from the recesses of her brain, remembering him as one of the two officers who had knocked on her door the night after the Grim Facade. The night after Varen disappeared.

Isobel's cheeks flamed as he continued to stare, and snapping her head forward, she started power walking to where the hall split in two directions. She hooked a right at the corner and stayed close to the lockers, her heart galloping in her chest. Her ears perked for the sound of pursuing footsteps while her own feet sped faster, the cogs in her head beginning to whir.

After yesterday's session, Dr. Robinson must have called the police. There was no other explanation. After what Isobel had said, all that she'd alluded to knowing, she should have expected as much to happen.

There was probably some mandate somewhere that obligated doctors to contact the authorities in certain circumstances—like when a patient divulges information pertaining to a missing person.

Isobel gritted her teeth and wondered if
this
was what her father's cell phone call had been about last night. She thought back to the shoulder squeeze he'd given her and wished he was there with her now.

Ducking into the alcove of a darkened classroom doorway, she pulled her phone from her coat pocket. She flipped it open and dialed her father's cell, then hesitated, her thumb hovering over the send button.

A gnawing dread scraped at her spine. That same sickening sense of being followed.

Lowering the phone, she leaned out, peered down the hall . . . and felt her stomach bottom out.

She didn't see any adults. Detective Scott had not come after her.

Worse.

Strips of yellow caution tape roped off the opposite end of the hall, halting the group of freshmen who trickled in from the side entrance, their chatter ceasing the moment they took in the ominous scene.

Beyond the tape barrier, ash dusted the floor and lockers.

Isobel folded her fingers around her phone and clamped it shut again.

Because the darkened light fixtures and the trail of boot prints cutting a path through the grime told her that calling for help couldn't stop what was coming for her now.

And neither could the police.

“So I guess you heard about Lesley Groveston,” Gwen said, breaking the long silence that had stretched between them since leaving school.

Isobel offered no answer. She continued, instead, to stare out her window at the passing storefronts, their displays filled with kitschy hipster dresses, used guitars, and artfully arranged antiques.

Peace and calmness reigned in the cold and cloudless morning sky. Like there was nothing the matter. Like this world was the only one there was.

“She got dumped by Alex Trimble right after first bell,” Gwen continued, but Isobel tuned her out, turning her thoughts to their destination: Bruce's funeral. Her last and only chance to confront Varen on neutral ground. On ground she
hoped
would be neutral.

After discovering that last night's dream had leaked into reality, that Varen could not only re-enter the real world, but could affect it physically—and that he apparently still sought to finish what he'd begun in shoving her from the cliff—Isobel had finally come to understand that there could be no peaceful parting of ways. No escaping the dark world he'd embraced. No escaping him.

Not as long as he continued to buy into the twisted version of the truth Lilith had shown him.

By astral projecting from the dreamworld into reality, Varen had overheard Isobel say horrible things on more than one occasion. That she wished she'd never met him, that she'd never had feelings for him, that she was the last person who would know anything about what had happened to him. That she was the last person who would care.

All lies. Part of the front Isobel had donned to convince everyone that she'd moved on.

But Lilith had been one step ahead of her, using Isobel's own words against her in order to distort Varen's perception—just as she had his heart and mind. And now the demon would use him to gain access to this world, to carry out her plans to destroy reality.

Unless Isobel could convince Varen to listen, to hear her.

“Of course, Alex Trimble has another girlfriend anyway.” Gwen laughed. “One of the St. Bernadette girls. So I want to tell Lesley good riddance, but then again, the truth usually never cheers anyone up. Does it?”