AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Positioned in the center of the room, the coffin-shaped crypt sat atop a set of stairs stationed directly below a blue stained-glass skylight embedded in the stone ceiling.
Moonlight, sheer and diaphanous, poured through the sapphire panes. It bathed the slender body that lay concealed beneath a snow-white sheet in dappled patterns.
The melody drew Isobel farther, beckoning her like a siren’s song into the room.
Something crunched under her foot, but she ignored it, too distracted by the array of broken and empty-eyed Noc faces that seemed to watch her from their perches on the rows of shelves lining the narrow chamber’s four walls.
Suddenly realizing where she stood, Isobel froze.
She was back. Back in the dreamworld. Back in the blue marble crypt that held the sarcophagus with the stone woman lying on top.
But unlike before, the lid of the tomb was no longer ominously shifted open.
While the shrouded figure kept on humming, Isobel glanced to the far corner of the room, to the place where she had first encountered the blue-haired Noc who had called himself Scrimshaw—the same Noc she had seen in the vision of Poe’s death.
The space he had once occupied was empty, cleared away to reveal the stone floor. Like Pinfeathers, Scrimshaw must have managed to piece himself back together. And now he was out somewhere, roaming the woodlands.
Lifting a hand to her collar, grasping the hamsa, Isobel drew nearer to the tomb. She mounted the steps, and as she edged closer to the shrouded form, the woman’s humming began to slow.
She reached out a quivering hand and grabbed a portion of the stiff fabric close to the woman’s face. Keeping her other hand firmly clamped around the hamsa, she began to draw the sheet slowly away.
The figure beneath stopped humming.
Inch by inch, the sheet slipped free to reveal a girl dressed in a pink party dress, the same one Isobel had worn to the Grim Facade.
She uttered a clipped cry.
Blond hair lay in a halo of loose ringlets around the girl’s head. Soft curls framed an all-too-familiar face—her face.
Isobel let go of the sheet. The covering continued to slide off the sarcophagus, the cloth pooling onto the stairs and tumbling over Isobel’s shoes.
Inky splotches began to seep through the material of the pink dress, the layers of skirts and bodice transforming to pure ebony.
Isobel watched with mounting horror, unable to look away.
The girl lay prone on the slab, her still lips painted a false pink, her eyes closed. A slanted needle-thin scratch marred her right cheek, the cut a deep purple against her ashen skin.
Bound to her stiff and pale hands by a pink ribbon, the same pink ribbon Isobel had given Varen, the corpse held a bouquet of pristine white lilies. Their stifling perfume, now unleashed, filled the tomb, lacing the stagnant air with their choking fragrance.
A twin version of Isobel’s hamsa circled her double’s sallow neck. It gleamed in the frosted moonlight until a blanket of cloud cover passed over the skylight, turning the opal in the center of the charm dim and milky.
Isobel took a step backward and stumbled down the stairs, nearly falling.
She whirled for the door but it was gone now, replaced by flat stone.
“No!” she shouted, the word reverberating around her.
Rushing to the wall, she beat her palms against the place where the door had stood wide open only moments before.
Trapped, she spun to face the interior of the tomb again, but the sudden motion caused the room to reel and tilt. Tossed off her feet, Isobel slammed onto cold stone that pressed into her back and shoulder blades like a slab of ice.
Reaching out, kicking her legs and thrashing, she found herself boxed in by close narrow walls of smooth marble.
Isobel screamed. Contained within the narrow coffin-shape space, the sound of her cries, she knew, would pierce only her own ears.
The sarcophagus—Somehow, she’d become sealed within.
28
