Oblivious to the shift, Virginia played on.
Individual notes, clunky at first, tinkled forth from the instrument, whose flat back met flush with one of the four unadorned walls. Against another, orange flames crackled in a tiny fireplace.
“Ever with thee I wish to roam—
Dearest, my life is thine.
Give me a cottage for my home
And a rich old cypress vine.”
As she sang, Virginia’s melody evened out. The notes became more certain, as light and airy as Virginia herself.
“Removed from the world with its sin and care
And the tattling of many tongues.
Love alone shall guide us when we are there—”
The last note, higher in register than the others, caused her voice to crack. Startled, Virginia paused.
She lifted a hand to her lips. Bringing fingers away, she frowned at the smear of crimson that blazed against her pale skin.
Blood, Isobel thought, suddenly realizing this moment was not a random dream or imagining as she’d first thought. Instead it was another memory. Like the one Pinfeathers had transported her into that morning she’d found him at the fountain.
Reynolds had testified that that memory, the one depicting Poe’s death at Reynolds’s own hands, had been “stolen.” But if that was true (and, at this point, considering the very little she knew for sure about Reynolds, there could be no telling), then had Scrimshaw been the owner of that stored memory—as well as this one? Had both memories originated from Poe himself?
At first glance, it would seem so.
On the night before their project was due, Varen had described this moment of Poe’s life to Isobel: Virginia playing the piano, singing for her husband and her mother. Then the appearance of blood—the heralding sign of consumption. Tuberculosis. Death.
“Eddie?” Virginia said, and she swiveled in her seat to look toward Scrimshaw, her face childlike in its expression of confusion and alarm.
Freeze-framing, the replay stopped there.
Isobel, startled from her reverie, channeled her focus once more to the image of the upside-down crow and steeled herself to charge the Noc.
But her feet stayed grounded, because she knew she’d waited too long.
He’d surfaced from his trance. That had to be why the scene before them had halted. Any second now, he’d turn on her and it would be over.
“Years later, she finished it,” the Noc said, pointing one blue claw at Virginia. “By then, however, she’d already been devoured from the inside out. From this day forth she lived—if indeed you could call it living—as though Death himself had taken residence within her very heart. A death as red as the blood that never ceased.”
Isobel’s clenched hands slackened. Maybe, she thought as she listened, she could still make her attack. Or rather, finish the assault she’d already unwittingly initiated.
If she aimed accurately, said just the right thing, was it possible her words could inflict more damage than her fists?
“You loved her,” Isobel said.
“Worshipped,” Scrimshaw corrected. “But more ludicrous than that, let us not forget, she loved me.” He gave a short ironic laugh. “Not just him—the poet. But me as well. I, the epitome of our own penchant for self-destruction. Do you know how difficult . . . how impossible such a feat must have been?”
“Yes,” Isobel said, pressing a hand to her own heart, certain she could feel echoes of the same pain that resonated within him. “I do.”
For a long time, the Noc remained quiet. He lowered his arm to his side, and when he spoke again, his words came soft, almost too low for her to decipher.
“There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion. Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made.”
Isobel thought she might have heard those phrases somewhere before—or read them. Maybe in one of Poe’s works, though she couldn’t recall which.
“You have conquered, and I yield,” the Noc went on to say, his words doubling midsentence when a second caustic voice rose to join the first. “But I’ll advise you not to allow my return. Because your final play, girl, effective as it was, stands with us as too grievous an onslaught not to seek vengeance for. I grant you a reprieve, but not forgiveness. One cannot give what he does not possess for himself.”
With these words, another vision shimmered into view before him, superimposing itself over the first. Similar in composition, though a hundred times more familiar, an alternate memory unfurled, causing the room to transmute yet again.