Siblings: your only enemy you can't live without.

—Anonymous

1

After thanking Mrs. Amame for explaining the situation to her sisters, Celia waved Colibe and Kendra and their parents goodbye and left the Police Station at around 4:00 p.m. The sun loomed just over the horizon to the west in a golden blaze against the sky, and Celia had to shade her face when she looked for Katherine Hearn's car in the parking lot. Her car was a dark shade of gray and hard to spot in the blaze of the looming sunset, hidden in the shade of the Police Station holding area, where Katherine miraculously found a parking space.

Following close, Celia looked at her elder sisters. Her eldest sister, Katherine Hearn, wore a thick jacket over her university uniform, her long braided twin tails swinging behind her as she walked, so she must have cut class to pick her up. Her elder sister, Madison Hearn, had changed her university uniform for tall boots and tight black slacks and a turtleneck sweater under a thick jacket with her hair tied in a low ponytail down to the small of her back, so she must have stood someone up. But before they walked any further, both of her sisters halted and glared down at her.

Celia tensed. "Please don't tell Mom and Dad."

"And why the hell shouldn't we?" Katherine said, bending over Celia and glaring beneath a fringe of hair, her side bangs and braided twin tails shifting in a slight breeze. "I was about to start my presentation, but because of you, it got pushed to next Monday, the first day of finals, you ass! Do you have any idea how much that sucks?"

Celia thought differently, though; having an extra week to prepare seemed like a godsend, but she refrained from voicing her thoughts.

"And because of you," Madison Hearn added, folding her arms over her chest and glaring down at her in contempt, her hair shifting somewhat in the breeze, "I had to cancel my date, thank you very much," then sighed. "Seriously, why do you have to be such a brat all the time?"

Celia gulped, mentally cursing the accuracy of her intuition. "I'm really sorry, okay? I didn't mean to screw up your lives. It's just that—"

Then both sisters reached out and touched Celia's shoulders, and their expressions softened.

"We were really worried about you," Katherine said. "We thought something happened to you."

Celia looked down at her feet. "I'm really sorry, guys."

Katherine and Madison traded knowing glances. Both sisters were still angry at her, but now wasn't the right time for that.

Madison said, "Show me your hand."

Celia showed her uninjured hand.

"Your other hand."

So Celia showed her bandaged hand, and Madison took off the tape and unwound the bandage wrap and turned Celia's hand palm up. The small pin prick still showed blood, traces of it still spidering along the creases of her palm.

"It's not congealing," Madison said. "You used one of Grandma's blood spells again, didn't you?"

Celia said nothing, only nodded her head.

So Madison raised up Celia's hand and licked her palm clean of blood, leaving only the pinprick left. She then pressed her own palm flat against Celia's and said an incantation in her mind.

The spell took effect and glowed bright red between their palms, and Celia winced.

"Ow!" Celia shook her hand to alleviate the residual stinging, still wincing. "You could've warned me, geez!"

"You used a blood spell, Celia," Madison said, placing her hand atop her younger sister's head and ruffling her hair. "What did you expect, a flu shot?"

Celia pulled a face, but refrained from answering. It wasn't the sharp pain of initial contact she was complaining about, though; it was the residual stinging sensation of reconnecting nerve endings that got her pulling faces.

"Aw, did I cause a booboo?" Madison said. "Was it that bad?"

"Don't make me put a blood seal on you," she said.

"Guys," Katherine yelled from her car across the pavement, pointing to her watch, "I still have one more class, so can you continue your cat fight after I drop you off?"

"Coming!" Madison said.

"Wait, where are we going?" Celia said.

"To Dad's bookstore," she said, as her younger sister followed her heels. "I need to check something out for a paper I have to write. You have the keys?" she asked Katherine, as all three sisters opened the doors and climbed into her car, buckling up inside. "I'll give them back when I'm done."

"Don't you have the access card?"

"Yeah, but I need the keys to get into the private room, where the big books are."

"Is this for your paper?"

"Yeah," Madison said, deadpanning like it was the most obvious thing in the world. "The teacher decided to be a massive dick-hole and assigned us paper topics, and I just had to get one of the complicated ones. Wanna guess?"

"Nope. I wanna save my brain cells, thank you." Katherine reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a large ring full of keys, saying, "It's the black one with the crescent on it," then started up the car, and backed out of the parking space.

All the while, Celia simpered, thanking her lucky stars that she and her friends were already finished with finals and papers the week before.

2

After Katherine dropped off her sisters at the Arcana Bookstore, she sped off down the street and turned left towards Shad-Row University to hopefully sneak into her last class without getting marked tardy.

Celia and Madison waved her off from the curb, then went to the entrance of the bookstore that had a poster sign taped to the window pane of the door. It said:

CLOSED (

Dear patrons, Mr. Ian Easton Hearn and Mr. Collin Kent Faraone are away on business from Saturday (Dec. 16) to Sunday (Dec. 31). If you need help, contact us via phone number at (702) 349-0434 or e-mail at [email protected] or [email protected] Sorry for the inconvenience!

Both sister's rolled their eyes at their father's attempt to be hip with the times, and sighed in exasperation.

"Why does Dad keep trying so hard?" Madison said, taking out her card from her wallet and sliding it down the access slide, opening the door, and entering past the threshold. "It's kinda scary!"

"You think so?" Celia said, following her sister inside and turning on the lights. "Come on, Dad's actually trying, so cut him a break! At least he knows how to use an emoji, unlike someone I—"

"What are you talking about?" she said, glaring back at her sister, seemingly about to pop a blood vessel, and a pulse of contempt beat through the bookstore. "I dumped that bastard, so why do you keep harping on it, huh?"

"Oh, I don't know," Celia said, smiling, walking along one of the shelves full of books, running her fingers across the spines, and adding distance between herself and her sister. "You seem to keep going after those idiot types, you know? Or maybe they're just attracted to you, and you keep dumping them when they piss you off. Or maybe—"

"Maybe you should just mind your damn business!" Now Madison's cherry-blonde hair began to float on waves of anger.

"Or maybe you just need to raise your standards."

"Are you fucking calling me a slut?"

"You said it, Maddy, not me."

"That's it! I am so fire-bombing your ass," she said, sprinting at her miscreant little sister, but Celia teleported two shelves away from her. "You bitch, get over here!"

Celia giggled her head off behind the shelf, and her hair started floating in her excitement. She said, "And have you do naughty things to my ass? No way!"

"Celia, I don't have time for this!"

"But I have all the time in the world," she said, peaking past one of the shelves and spying her fuming sister near the central walkway, then hiding just before Madison caught sight of her. "You'll just have to deal with bratty little me, so deal!"

"Fucking little troll-whore, I swear," Madison muttered to herself, walking past Celia on the way to the door of the back room. She got out the keys, flipping through them for the black one with the crescent on it, found it, and was about to unlock the door when—

Celia teleported in front of her, snatched the keys, and teleported out of her reach.

For a moment, Madison just stood there, barely comprehending what had happened beyond the fact that she was seconds away from screaming her head off, and that Celia was now the absolute worst minx of a sister she was cursed to have.

Then she screamed for several moments.

At this, many passers-by paused and looked in through the windows of the Arcana Bookstore. What they saw scared them away, some of them screaming for their lives.

Moments later, a heat wave of light flashed through the windows, lighting up the corner of Faraway Street and Camden Street.

Inside the bookstore, the pages of most of the books on the shelves showed foxing on the edges, but near the epicenter of Madison's fit was the smell of searing paper and the melted glue of ruined book bindings. When she finally regained herself, her first words were these: "Celia, when I get my hands on you, I'm fucking ROASTING YOU ALIIIIIIIIIVE!"

3

A circle of pink roses appeared on the walkway entrance to the Hearn family mansion, a massive three-story Queen Anne-style house surrounded by a row of hedge bushes, and on it Celia appeared with the big ring of keys in hand. The sun had just set over the horizon to the west, leaving a civil twilight lingering on the sky in hues of ever-fading reds and blues. As such, the automatic lights in the house turned on, lighting the windows and the veranda, as she climbed the steps into the veranda, digging into one of her jacket pockets.

She took out her key to the house and unlocked the door, but she paused and looked back over her shoulder across the front lawn and across the lighted street and into the horizon of neighborhood houses against a westering sky. No doubt when Madison finds her, Celia knew she would be a whole heap of trouble, but she kept her nerve steady and her mind focused, and smiled.

She said to the air, her breath fogging in the chill, "Maddy, Kathy, please find it in your hearts to forgive me," and now her smile disappeared, and a stern look of determination lighted on her face. "I have to do this for Mara; if I was in the same position, you'd do the same for me."

She passed the threshold and shut the door with a thud, like the thud of a casket shutting over the dead. Mara's outburst at the wall of the old Rancaster district still rang through her mind like a hangover, making her clench onto the ring of keys she'd stolen from Madison.

She walked through the entrance way and turned up into a flight of stairs that led into an upper hallway connecting a set of rooms—her parents' shared master bedroom at one end of the hallway, then Katherine's room, then Madison's room, and lastly her own room at the other end.

She ran towards her room, opening the door wide open, and took off her jacket and flung it on her bed, then sprinted along the hallway to Katherine's room and tried the handle, but it was locked with a magic incantation on the other side.

So she placed her hand to the ground and formed another seal, and moved it with her mind underneath the door, blinking out of sight and into her sister's room. She opened her sister's door from the inside, then ran into her sister's bathroom and spied a full-body vanity mirror on caster wheels.

Rolling that mirror out into the hall and into her own bedroom, she locked her door and rolled the mirror into position, so that the mirror caught her bedroom door in its reflection. She then thumbed through the keys, skipping over the one with the crescent on it, and found the so-called 'dreamer's key,' shaped like an arrow, the key that opened the doors of other people's dreams.

She then proceeded to her bedroom door, and in the reflection of the mirror, she stood there thinking of her promise to Nico to save Mara Cairns, safe in body in the hospital, but not in soul. Using the key, she unlocked her door and opened it into the lurid and ever-shifting haze of the Phantom Realms.

She was about to enter with the keys, but she thought better of it and left the keys on top of her bed, then grabbed a few sticky notes from her desk and a marker and wrote these messages for her sisters:

If you need to find me, use the 'dreamer's key' with the mirror, and think of Nico Cairns before you enter.

—CELIA HEARN

P.S. Sorry, Kathy, for stealing your mirror. You can chew me out later when I get back!

—C. H.

P.P.S. Sorry, Maddy, for harping on your boyfriends. You can roast me later when I get back!

—C. H.

Once she had them written, she stuck them to the inside of her door, but then she thought of Madison, probably screaming on her smartphone for Katherine to get out of class and help find her little sister (a.k.a. Celia), and Katherine was probably up to her eyeballs in school work right now. And since Celia was feeling extra perky this evening, she wrote one more sticky note and put it on the door. It read:

P.P.P.S. And if I'm in trouble, SAVE MY BRATTY ASS! I'll return the favor and be your love slave for a week! ( -_^ )

—C. H.

With that done, Celia smiled once again and stepped past the threshold, letting the door close with a thud, like the thud of the casket over Nico Cairns' body.

4

"Come on, come on, come on, come on, come on! Stop fiddling with your school work and pick up the phone already!"

When Katherine finally picked up after fifteen minutes of prerecorded messages telling her that she couldn't be on today, Madison was hysterical. She was walking up and down the sidewalk next to her father's bookstore, scaring off passers-by with a maniacal glare, her hair floating in the air, and a tangible heat glowing visibly red from her body like steam.

She said, squeezing her hands into tight knuckle-white fists, "Get out of class and help me find her! Ugh, I'm gonna fucking roast her scrawny ass for this! Arrrrrgh!"

"Calm down!" Katherine said over the connection. "What did Celia do this time?"

"She fucking stole the keys you gave me," she said, halting her back-and-forth steps along the sidewalk and cracking the concrete with a stomp of her foot, "and she teleported right out of the bookstore! Maybe I should've called the cops on her ass, and that'll fucking teach her!"

"Maybe she just teleported into the private room," Katherine said, trying to reason her sister out of such action. "She did that the last time I was there with her."

"I already checked, and she's not there!"

"You can't teleport, so how do you know?"

"Look, if she was in there," Madison said, "I'd have strangled her by now!"

The voice on the other end of the connection sighed a long sigh, then said, "Look, I'll come over there and see for myself, okay?" Then came a pause, as if Katherine was running several worst-case scenarios through her head. "Did you have an outburst in the bookstore?"

For the first time since Celia left the premises, Madison calmed down long enough to take stock of her surroundings and pressed her face to the windows of the bookstore. Although the books stopped smoldering, the carpet in the middle of the walkway area was singed black where she had exploded into a fit over Celia's theft.

All at once, she gulped and said into her smartphone, "Um, just a little one, I swear! I didn't burn the whole bookstore down, okay? So—"

"Maddy."

Madison paused, unnerved at Katherine's tone of voice. "Y-yes, what is it, sis?"

"Please don't tell me you fried everything on the shelves," Katherine said, then paused for her sister's reply, then added, "Please don't make my day any worse than it already is, sis! I am so freaking out right now!"

"Listen, it's not as bad as you think," Madison said, looking inside through the window and willing the carpet stain to disappear before her sister arrived. "If we just explain that Celia was the cause of all this—"

"Oh my God, we are soooooo fucked when Dad and Mr. Faraone come back," she said, sulking through the connection's static.

"It's all Celia's fault, I'm telling you!" Madison now continued her maniacal pacing up and down the sidewalk again. "When Dad comes back, you and I are gonna show him what Celia did, and we're gonna have him disown her scrawny ass—"

"Maddy."

"And then we're gonna ship her off to Switzerland, and then we'll—"

"Maddy!"

She winced at her own nickname screaming into her ear, pulling the smartphone away, and then putting it close to her ear, saying, "Geez, what is it?"

The voice on the other end paused, then said, "I don't know, but I've got a bad feeling about this. I know Celia can be a handful sometimes, but she would never be this reckless without a reason. You and I both know how much she cares about her friends. We got a phone call from the Police Station to pick her up today, and we saw her friends there, too. That is not a coincidence. And on top of that, you and I both heard it from Mrs. Amame herself. Those girls saved Mara's life today, and Celia even used a blood spell to locate Mara and her sister! There has to be something more to this! You get me?"

It took some moments for all this information to sink into Madison's head, stopping on the sidewalk and looking into the bookstore in thought. "Yeah, I get you."

"Good," Katherine said, then added, "Oh, and one more thing."

"What's that?"

"Don't you ever say what you just said about Celia ever again. She's family! You saying that about her is like you saying that about me! Don't ever say that again, got it?"

"Yeah," Madison said. "Kathy, I'm sorry. I—"

Then the connection died. Katherine had hung up.

Madison closed her smartphone and stared out across the buildings to the westering sky, the last traces of blue now fading into astral twilight and the first bit of luminous crescent that was the new moon coming into view.

"Celia," Madison said to the evening air, "whatever's going on with you, you don't have to hide it from me or Kathy. You don't have to bear it alone."

5

The moment Celia submerged herself bodily into the ever-shifting haze, she felt light-headed and tipsy, like she needed to sit down and settle her stomach before moving on. She took a moment and sat down to dissipate the queasiness and thought of her situation. In her sleep, stepping into the Phantom Realms was like waking up into a new world from a dreamless sleep, but stepping into it while still conscious was completely nauseating. How Katherine managed it without much effect on her physical body was almost beyond her.

Then again, she mused, Katherine was the over-achieving eldest sister with the enviable specialty of using mirrors, while Celia and pretty much every other magic user she knew (including Madison) could only use their reflections. Only her grandmother, the Blood Rose Witch, could do what Katherine could, and Katherine was smug and domineering at times for sharing an ability with her legendary forebear.

But Madison was no pushover by any means, either. When she said she could roast Celia's ass, she meant every word of it. Madison was the fire pixie of the Hearn family, both a blessing and a curse. Celia couldn't remember all the times Madison burned things with her mood swings, but it also meant that she was an awesome cook when she wanted to be. Still, she was a glutton and a slob at the dinner table, and had bad taste in boyfriends.

And then there was Celia herself, the magical runt of the litter. She specialized in seals and could teleport almost anywhere, but her use of blood seals was limited compared to her grandmother's. In fact, she often felt that she was a weaker version of her famous ancestor, a ripoff of the genuine article.

After her stomach settled, Celia picked herself up and wandered deeper into the dream that wasn't her own. She closed her eyes and once again thought of the promise she made to Nico, to save her sister Mara and bring her back to her senses.

When she opened her eyes, a faint silver thread lay at her feet. Celia picked it up in her hands and followed it through the kaleidoscope of morphing shapes and colors, following it towards more static and solid imagery. It eventually led her to a garden bridge spanning endlessly across a vast reservoir of water lilies and lily pads, symbols of yearning for peace and joy in a tumultuous emotional journey.

Not the slightest breeze disturbed the black mirror sheen of the water, and barely a ripple stirred from her silent footfalls on the garden bridge, as she followed the thread into the unconscious of Mara's mind. And beyond the clusters of floating lilies hugging the base of the bridge, all she saw was the black mirror of the water blending seamlessly into the black color of the sky overhead and reflecting a full blood moon she couldn't see anywhere in the sky.

So she sped up to a sprint along the bridge, then started thinking of Nico again and the promise she made to her, and released her spell and blinked out of sight—

6

And ended up at the end of the garden bridge at the entrance of an enormous round Chinese pavilion, possibly over a hundred feet in diameter, seemingly floating on the water's edge, surrounded by yet more water lilies. And on the floor of the pavilion lay Mara Cairns on a makeshift bed of roses in the same bloody clothes she had seen her wearing when Colbie and Kendra carried her into their dream mansion.

She sprinted to her side and grabbed her by her shoulders, trying to shake her out of her dreamless sleep, saying, "Mara, wake up! Wake up, I'm here! I'm here!"

But no matter how much Celia shook her, Mara didn't wake up. She lay there motionless, and though her limbs were limber and her skin was supple to the touch, Mara felt like a corpse in Celia's hands, a shell of a shell that housed a void within.

"Mara, please, wake up," she said, continuing to shake her over and over. "Wake up, wake up, please wake up!"

But she couldn't walk up. Something was keeping her from waking, keeping her from breaking through the surface of conscious thought, keeping her mind pinned to a lingering comatose.

That's when Celia noticed blood seeping through the bed of roses, so she cleared away the roses and saw a pool of Mara's blood settling into the floor of the pavilion.

Celia removed Mara's bloodstained shirt from the waistband of her dress skirt and pulled it up to her bra and saw a blood seal on her stomach, and her mind began connecting disparate links of observations into a coherent chain of reasoning. Maybe the blood stains Kendra saw on the grounds of that Rancaster storefront came from this very blood seal. And maybe that was why neither Celia nor Colbie found any wounds on Mara, because there were no wounds to begin with.

But blood seals never appeared on their own.

"Whose blood is this?" Celia said to herself, and all at once, something clicked in her mind. Maybe it wasn't Mara's blood at all. Maybe Nico's blood had been used to place a blood seal over Mara's stomach.

"At least I know you're not in any immediate danger," Celia said, "but what's keeping you from waking up?" And at the back of her mind lingered a darker question, urging her onto a singular possibility that she whispered under her breath, saying, "Who did this to you?"

It was the one variable she didn't know, the one link in the chain of reasoning she had yet to find. Whoever this person was, Celia knew he or she had extensive knowledge of blood magic and blood seals in particular.

Celia's grandmother now flashed across her mind, but she had died years before Celia or her sisters were born. Her grandmother passed away under mysterious circumstances when Celia’s mother was just sixteen, just able to get by on her own as a newly orphaned young woman under the emancipation of the court. Yet through it all, Celia’s mother was able to regain her foothold on life, from paying the funeral bills and other expenses to holding down a job while paying for college to getting married and raising a family of her own.

Yet the question still remained in her head:

What happened to Grandma Hearn? Celia thought.

Celia hadn’t a clue, since her mother only mentioned her grandmother’s name in passing in front of Celia and her sisters, and always in an off-put manner as if their curiosity tread over unholy ground. Even when they asked, she kept saying that she’d tell them after one of her various archeological assignments in Eastern Europe if she thought they were ready for it. Till then, there was always an excuse or a well-meant delay or any number of other unavoidable circumstances that prevented her from divulging the truth about Amelia Hearn’s death.

Celia turned from these thoughts and looked out into the inky mirror that was the sea of Mara's unconscious mind, and spied the blood moon reflected in the water. But everywhere she looked, she couldn't see its double in the sky.

"He's watching you," a voice said.

Celia wheeled around and saw Mara standing in front of her. "Mara, you're—"

"Not Mara," the girl said, and nodded back towards Mara's prone astral body in the middle of the pavilion.

Celia sucked in breath, gaping, and for a moment speechless. "N-Nico, is that you? But Kendra and I saw you fade away! We thought you were—"

Nico placed a finger to Celia's lips, and said, "There's more than one way to live on, even after soul death."

"But how?"

Nico quoted, saying, "'. . . listen to the words your heart should know: / That we are twain, but one where love can grow.' Does that answer your question?"

"You're one of Mara's memories," Celia said.

At this, Nico smiled, saying, "I'm more than just a collection of fading memories. She and I are identical twins. We came from the same egg, we came from the same womb, and we were blessed with the same birthday. I came out first, and she came out second. I am the heads, and she is the tails. I am the beginning, and she is the end. She and I are two sides of the same coin, one mind in separate souls and separate bodies. I am as much a part of Mara as Mara is a part of me."

That's when Celia saw the meaning of her words and grasped onto Nico's hand, realizing that she was no longer a ghost. She said, "Do you mean that you and Mara are . . . split personalities?"

"It's called dissociative identity disorder, and Mara and I both have it. When we were children, she and I pretended to be one another as a form of charades, and we kept that up until the end of middle school. We could always say each other’s lines and imitate each other’s voices and actions. It became really creepy, so we stopped playing them, but we could still do it on occasion when we were bored. Come on."

Nico pulled Celia back into the center of the pavilion, where Mara's astral body lay.

"What's going on?" Celia said. "Why are you—"

"He's watching you."

"Who?"

Nico paused, cupping her hands on Celia's face and making her cheeks burn, and whispered in her ear, "I can't say his name without revealing my intentions to him. He has control over part of Mara's mind, so I'll have to show you directly, instead."

"But how? I don't—"

And before she said another word, Nico pressed her lips onto Celia's in a lingering kiss, showing her the memories she had with Mara, from their first kiss to their parents' separation on that fateful night, from Lord Rancaster's pronouncement of the rules of the game and the cheers of a sick audience and the screams of their parents over seeing their daughters take part in Russian roulette to the last moments of Nico's participation therein when her last ounce of strength failed her—

And the pull of the trigger ended her bodily life.

Celia caved in and fell to her knees on the spot, sobbing in an agony she had never experienced in her life, while Nico dropped to her knees and hugged her in a tight embrace, pressing Celia's face into her bosom with one hand and letting her cry into her shirt, and rubbing circles on her back with her other hand.

All the while, she stared at Mara's prone body in a pool of Nico's own blood. She then looked out into the sea towards the reflection of the blood moon and caught a glimpse of Lord Rancaster's shadow crossing the image.

7

The moment Celia began sobbing, Madison felt a stab pulsing through her heart, then tightness around her chest and a lurch through her stomach as if she was nauseous and about to throw up. She doubled over, clutching at her knees to keep her legs steady. Tears fell from her eyes and spattered on the sidewalk, and when she tried blinking back more tears and wiping her face on her jacket sleeve, Celia's face appeared in her mind's eye.

Something was wrong. Something had happened to Celia.

Madison dug into her pocket and pulled out her smartphone, dialing her sister's speed dial icon on her homepage screen, and waited for her sister to pick up. When she did, Madison said, "Something's just happened to Celia!"

"I know. I'm on my may; just hang on," she said, and the connection died.

Moments later, Katherine's car came barreling through Faraway Street and skidded to a halt at the curb next to the Arcana Bookstore. The passenger window was down, and she said, "Get in!"

But Madison was already opening the door and getting in, buckling up on pure instinct. "You know where she went?"

"She's at the house."

"How do you know?"

"I saw her crying," Katherine said, driving off and making a wide right turn en route to the Hearn family mansion, "but she wasn't alone. Someone else was with her . . . No, two people . . . Ugh, it's hard to explain!"

Her sister's words were troubling enough, but when Katherine couldn't think straight enough to form coherent sentences, Madison knew it was bad. "God damn it, Celia! What the hell did you get yourself into now?"

8

After the sordid events of last night, in which he had failed to make any progress with Mara Cairns off stage (thanks to her meddlesome sister), Rancaster belied his misgivings with a skip in his step and a twirl of his cane in hand, while whistling a ragtime tune through plumes of hot breath in the chilly air. In this way, he seemed the perfect specimen of a jolly good fellow, nodding his head at passing pedestrians, saying his salutations to the women that caught his eye, and even waving at the children of a few mothers out window-shopping during later business hours.

In this way, he continued along the sidewalk down Camden Street, till he reached the street corner of Faraway Street and noticed a crack in the sidewalk where Madison Hearn had stomped her foot over something Celia had done.

He then looked to his right at the Arcana Bookstore and approached one of the window panes and peered inside, where he saw the results of Madison’s outburst on the singed carpet in the middle of the walkway and in the still-smoldering books on the nearby shelves.

He then spied the door that was left ajar, inviting entry. So he dissipated his cane in hand, then looked one way and then the other for any nearby pedestrians, and once he was satisfied that they wouldn't spot him, he passed through it like a ghost and entered the premises.

Upon his entrance, the coffered ceiling lights blinked out for a moment or two, then came back on through intermittent blinking. While inside, the man avoided the still-smoldering books and turned left into the fiction section along a row of books on a low shelf along the window, tracing his fingers down the spines of various translated reprints he had read before: Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, François-René de Chateaubriand’s Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, etc.

He turned into the left side aisle and continued his walking perusal of various British and American titles that he was not familiar with: Sax Rohmer’s Brood of the Witch-Queen, Richard Marsh’s The Beetle, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, William Godwin’s The Adventures of Caleb Williams, and Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto; Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables, and even an omnibus of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories and poems.

He continued down to the end of the aisle, where he spotted the odd inclusion of a translation of a French author amidst the English and American titles: Marquis de Sade’s Juliette.

He took the book off the shelf and thumbed through its pages, scanning a few titillating paragraphs, and whistled and said, “Ah, good old Marquis de Sade! I miss that old boy.”

Flipping to the back of the front cover, he traced a blood seal imprinted with Nico’s blood on the inside of the cover. He then closed the book, dissipating it in his hands, and spotted the door to the private room, where the reference books and nonfiction books were stored. He put his hand on the knob and opened the door and entered the ever-shifting haze of the Phantom Realms.

9

Sixteen minutes later, the ‘bambina’ girl looked into the windows of the Arcana Bookstore, pressing her hand onto the pane and feeling the residual heat of Madison’s outburst emanating from it. Despite the frosty air of the fading twilight, she still wore her oversized hand-me-down jacket over the shoulders of her Shad-Row uniform. She didn’t seem to mind the cold, even as her breathing came out in misty clouds against the light of the overhead street lamps, because she was still upset over what Rancaster had made her see and do last night.

She then spied a crack in the middle of the sidewalk, as if someone had stomped it or dropped a heavy object onto it. She then spotted the door left slightly ajar, which Madison had overlooked during her craze over Celia’s theft, so the girl looked around her to make sure nobody would see her entering. The only pedestrians were either walking on the other side of the street or waiting at a nearby corner for the crosswalk signal to allow them to cross the road.

This done, she opened the door and stepped inside, wherein the coffered ceiling lights came on overhead and illuminated the interior, and noticed the acrid scent of singed carpeting and melted book bindings. After closing the door, she stalked through the left side aisle, avoiding the burned area of Madison’s outburst, and read the titles as she ran her fingers along the spines of books on the shelf that still had their bindings in tact, till the image of a bespectacled Gibson girl flashed through her mind before fading away.

She looked at the title her hand was on that time, which read,

Entering the Secret Room,

by Linda Kouri. She pulled it out and flipped the cover and turned the pages, one by one, first to the title page with an illustration page next to it showing an enchanted doorway left slightly agar, then to the copyright page showing 1923 with a dedication page next to it that read,

For Ronald Hamilton

(1888-1913),

then flipped to the table of contents where she noticed the first story in the list, a novella entitled,

“Alice and the Mad Tryst,”

and dropped the volume onto the floor, where it landed with its pages turned to the first page of that story.

Reaching down to pick it up, she was just about to touch it, when Rancaster’s presence flooded the bookshelves in gloom. She felt his power blacking everything out into a nameless and formless void, where all things are one and the same, where everything meets nothing, where the past meets the future, and where eternity meets the now. Here, there was no happiness, no hope, no love, no life, and even no soul, and the girl felt like she was losing herself as her senses dulled into sleep.

No stealing, bambina, even from the enemy, Rancaster said in the shapeless void around her.

“Why should I listen to you?” she said.

Oh, come, come, he said. I have no hard feelings for last night. I don’t blame you for being upset that time, but remember that I’m doing all of this for you, even if you don’t see it yet. Now come, bambina. I’ve found a suitable place for your debut.

“Where?” she said.

Come to the door, darling, and see for yourself, he said, and the door to the private room of the bookstore (where all the ‘big books’ were shelved) glowed a crimson color and opened just a crack before her. Your time has almost come, bambina.

So the girl approached the door and opened it and stepped past the threshold into the stage of her debut looming over her fate like the sword of Damocles.

つづく