Nevermore

“Hm,” he said, eyes dropping, as though she’d just ratcheted herself down yet another slot on his respect scale. “Never mind.” She glared at him as he leaned over to pull something out of his satchel. “Here. You can borrow this for now.” Carefully he laid a large, black, gold-embossed book on the table in front of her. Its title read, The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, in shining gold letters. “But if anything happens to it, I own your soul.”

“Uh, thanks,” she said, handling it with care while under his scrutiny. “It’s so nice and portable.”

“We’ll have to meet again tomorrow,” he said. “After school.”

“Can’t. I’ve got practice.” Though she hadn’t even begun to figure out how she was going to deal with school yet, with facing Brad or Nikki, she still had to stand her ground where practice was concerned. She didn’t dare miss, not this close to Nationals.

“Whatever,” he said. “Tuesday, then.”

“Fine. What time?”

“Sometime after school. But I have to work, so you’ll have to come by the shop.”

Isobel bit her lip and thought about that. She hadn’t realized how tricky this was going to be. On top of being grounded, now that she and Brad were broken up, it was going to be tough to get around.

“Can I hitch a ride there with you?” she asked.

He shrugged. Okaaay, she’d just go ahead and take that as a yes. Now all she needed was a way to get home afterward. She probably could walk home, as long as she thought up a good excuse for being gone.

She turned her attention back to the Complete Works. On the bottom, she noticed a thin silk ribbon, sticking out like a beige tongue. Following her fingers along the top edge, Isobel pried the book open to the marked page. “Dream-Land,” the title read. Isobel skimmed over the first stanza: By a route obscure and lonely, Haunted by ill angels only, Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT, On a black throne reigns upright, I have reached these lands but newly From an ultimate dim ThuleFrom a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime, Out of SPACE—out of TIME.

Yeah, well, that made about as much sense as Cracker Jacks.

Isobel flipped forward until she recognized one of the titles that Varen had told her to write down at the library: “The Masque of the Red Death.” She thumbed through the story, counting six pages.

That didn’t seem so bad. She began the first paragraph: The “Red Death” had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal—the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour.

Isobel glanced up from the page with her eyes only. She stared at Varen from over the top edge of the book while he remained absorbed in his notes. Was he serious? The first paragraph alone was like reading the synopsis of a bad low-budget slasher flick remixed with nineteenth-century flair.

Either that or a physician’s death report. Reluctantly she let her eyes fall back to the story.

But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious.

Isobel’s head popped up. “What does ‘sagacious’ mean?”

“Sagacious,” he said, writing, “adjective describing someone in possession of acute mental faculties. Also describing one who might, in a bookstore, think to get up and locate an actual dictionary instead of asking a billion questions.”

Isobel made a face at him. When his pen paused, she ducked her head down and dove back into the page.

When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys. This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince’s own eccentric yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts.

They resolved to leave means neither of ingress or egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within.

She stopped, thinking that must mean that, no matter what side of the door you were on, there would be no checking in or out of the Prospero Hotel. She had to admit that was a little dooming right there, and it made her kind of want to know what happened. How was Poe going to write his peeps out of this if there was no exit? She skimmed to the bottom of the paragraph.

Buffoons . . . improvisatori . . . ballet-dancers . . . musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the “Red Death.”

Yadda yadda. She turned the page.

“Are you skipping?” he asked.

“Nope,” she lied without missing a beat, “I just read fast.”