Isobel didn’t know. But she didn’t want to find out, either.
If Scrimshaw awoke to see . . . if he discovered that she wasn’t just a dream . . .
Fighting her rising panic, Isobel searched for an exit. She spotted the narrow door, its surface marred with ominous scratches, and began to wind her way toward it, navigating in backward steps in order to keep the Noc in her sights—the tips of those indigo claws that were still poking out from the corner of cloth she’d dared to lift.
Then, at the sound of humming, she froze.
Someone else was in the room with her—a woman.
The song, slow and soft, was one Isobel knew. Varen’s lullaby.
Isobel stalled her breathing to listen, but just as quickly as the melody had begun, it halted.
She scanned the cluttered room, her sight settling finally on an old dressing screen unfolded in front of the window that, in the real world, led out onto the fire escape.
Squinting, Isobel focused on one of the narrow gaps between the hinged panels.
She could see someone there, sitting on the other side.
As she inched forward, she reluctantly let Scrimshaw’s draped form slide out of her view. Peeking around the screen, she found a woman seated in a cloth-covered chair.
Except, Isobel realized with grim fascination, the figure wasn’t a woman at all.
With seeming disinterest, the life-size doll stared out through the slats of the shuttered window, her eyes lazy and half-lidded, curled lashes throwing long spidery shadows over her rouged cheeks.
Cobwebs swathed her narrow frame, clinging to the moth-eaten frills of her lavender gown. Frizzed wisps of ash-blond hair framed her somber, crackled-paint features, while a familiar purple rhinestone comb secured a loose bun at the base of her neck.
Isobel slipped behind the screen, floorboards whining as she drew nearer for a better look. Triggered by her motions, the brass windup key protruding from the figurine’s back twitched into motion. The key unwound, twisting the cobwebs with it as it rotated, and the humming started again.
Isobel grasped the brass key and held it steady, halting the woman’s voice.
She checked over her shoulder again and could just make out the edge of the boot still sticking out from the sheet. The blue claws, too.
Isobel looked back to the doll.
Sift through his darkness, Reynolds had told her.
Was that what this place was?
Crouching in front of the doll, Isobel searched her fixed features for some answer.
Madeline, Isobel thought. Varen’s mother. Was this how she existed in his mind? As a cold and lifeless mannequin? A windup memory that could only repeat the same sad song over and over? Her image preserved but faded, distorted and worn down by the years of not knowing—not being able to comprehend—what had become of her?
“Why did you leave?” Isobel whispered.
As though in response, the doll’s eyelids rolled up to reveal emerald irises and a glassy stare that trained itself on Isobel. The pupils shrank to pinpricks. Then, with a quiet pop, the orbs cracked. Black oil seeped out from the inner crevices of the doll’s eyes, tracking dark streaks down her cheeks.
Splattering onto the floor, two blots of oil writhed and wriggled into a pair of tiny, dark brown beetles.
Isobel straightened quickly. She jumped back from the insects as they scurried toward her and then, one after the other, into a hollowed knot between floorboards.
She glanced back to the doll and saw that her cracked eyes had fallen shut.
Without a sound, the doll had lifted a porcelain finger to her ruby lips, as though calling for silence.
Somewhere in the room, something fell with a low clunk. A shadow skirted the ceiling, and with a splintering of glass, the light Isobel had lit winked out.
11
Noc Noc
Isobel grew still, holding her breath in the renewed darkness.
Shifting her weight slowly, to keep the floor from creaking again, she leaned toward the slim space between the wall and the screen. Peeking through, she saw that the bowl lay overturned, its contents strewn across the worn boards.
But Isobel did not see the largest of the porcelain shards, the fragment containing the etching of Virginia.
It was missing—just like the figure from beneath the collapsed white sheet.
“They call them deathwatches.”
The deep, static-corroded voice—almost incomprehensible in its distortion—had come from directly beside her.
Isobel’s eyes slid in the direction of the screen. Poison-tipped hooks of fear snagged her through the gut as she caught sight of a single pitch-black eye, watching her through the narrow slit between panels.
Grinning, the Noc flashed a double row of serrated teeth, an intricate network of cracks spreading into view on the visible slice of his porcelain cheek.