Let none of earth inherit

That vision on my spirit;

Those thoughts I would controul,

As a spell upon his soul: . . .

—Edgar Allan Poe,

“Imitation”

1

After Colbie’s mother finished talking with Kendra’s stepfather, Detective Dolan, Colbie and her mother waved Kendra and her stepfather goodbye and left the Police Station at around 5:00 p.m. just after sunset, which left a civil twilight lingering in a sky of fading reds and blues. The songs on the radio occupied the drive back home, but in Colbie’s thoughts were replays of Mara in last night’s dream dive and of Colbie’s misadventure with her friends at the Rancaster district, while everything else in between was just filler.

She glanced every so often at her mother’s face as she drove, and her stern expression spiked her heart with a momentary blip. So she said, “Are you angry?”

At this, her mother turned the volume down on the radio and said, “Not as much as earlier, but you scared me. When I got that phone call from Mr. Dolan, I nearly had a panic attack, and I had to drop everything I was doing. And I’m gonna have to call your father and let him know, and he might have to cancel part of his book tour. Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

“Sorry about that,” she said.

“‘Sorry’ won’t cut it, and you know it!” her mother said, squeezing the steering wheel before relaxing her grip again, and sighed. “I’m just glad nothing else happened to you or your friends, but . . .”

"But what?"

Her mother looked over at her with eyes softened with worry, saying, “Why did you do it?”

Colbie stayed silent.

“Why didn’t you let the police handle it?”

Colbie paused, then said, “Because we had to.”

Her mother glanced at her, saying, “You just barged in there and endangered your lives for a total stranger?”

Colbie couldn't just say the truth, that they were honoring a promise to a ghost to save her sister, that they got Connie Davis involved just to get medical records, that they had just barely escaped the Rancaster district with their lives intact along with God knows how much in property damage, maybe a heavy fine or even probation.

So she opted for the short version, saying, "We had to, Mom. We just had to."

After that, neither of them spoke for the rest of the drive.

So for the rest of the drive, Colbie looked through the passenger window at the blur of passing residential scenery, at the walls enclosing individual homes and backyards, then at occasional loners on the dimly lighted sidewalk, at gated entrances to gated communities, and at the houses near her own residence when her mother took a left turn into Grimwald Cove. She spied her house at the corner of the cul-de-sac, over which loomed the darkening hues of nautical twilight blurring the skyline of rooftops into a street-lit night.

2

Upon arrival at the house, Mrs. Amame called her husband on her smartphone and informed him of what happened. He wanted to speak to Colbie over the phone, so she called Colbie to get out of her room and come over. When Colbie did, she gave her the phone, saying, “It’s your father.”

Colbie pressed the phone to her ear and said, "Dad?"

"Honey, are you okay?" her father said amidst the hum of a crowd in the speaker, possibly before or after an event. "Your mother told me everything. No scrapes, scratches, or anything like that?"

"I'm fine, Dad. Don't worry," she said, looking over her shoulder to find her mother looking intently on her face. "How's your book tour going?"

"No, no, don't change the subject on me," he said. "This is pretty serious, you know that, right?"

"Yeah," she said.

"Tell me what happened."

"Dad, come on," she said, seemingly for the umpteenth time, "I've been answering questions all afternoon, and I'm tired. Can this wait?"

"Nope. Not for something like this," he said, and the noise of the crowd over the line grew quieter as if he had walked into a room or hallway out of the ruckus. "Tell me now, or I'll cancel my tour and catch a plane back there, and you'll tell me then."

"Okay, okay, geez!"

And so, for the next fifteen minutes, Colbie retold the events of her misadventure with her friends at the Rancaster district, answering his questions and expanding on details, while keeping the masons why she and her friends did what they did. In this way, Colbie became the unwitting storyteller, and her father and her mother became the listeners and readers of her story.

All the while, Colbie felt something fluttering in her stomach and gripping at her chest, and she gleaned the cause. She had this weird connection with her mother, in which she could sense her mother's intentions. Sometimes this connection proved useful to her when she pretended to be studying or doing something productive instead of texting her friends on her own smartphone, or watching online videos of conspiracy theories and creepypastas and true scary stories, or writing her own stuff that she wouldn't dare let her parents read. But now this connection stifled her and made her anxious, even paranoid.

By the end of her storytelling, Colbie was sweating and a bit hoarse, but she managed, saying, "Geez, Dad. Are you gonna use that for one of your stories?"

And for the first time in fifteen minutes, her father chuckled and said, “No, thank you. I don’t want to make my life any more complicated than it has to be. Okay, is that all?”

"Yes, that's all."

"Are you sure?"

"Dad, really? Come on," she said, exasperated to the last extremity of her plight, "we went over this already!"

"All right, all right. I'll get out of your hair," he said, and the crowded noise became louder over the line. "It's almost time. Love you, Honey. Bye."

"Love you, too, Dad," she said, then added, "Oh, and good luck on your talk."

"Ha! Thanks." Her father hung up.

She handed the phone back to her mother, who took it and said, "Now you're officially grounded for a month."

"Mom!"

“Don’t ‘Mom’ me,” Mrs. Amame said, her arms akimbo. “I talked to Mr. Dolan, okay? You’re lucky you didn’t get charged with destruction of property, let alone get probation.”

”Really?”

“Yep,” her mother said. “Mr. Roy Dolan really stuck his neck out for you and your friends, so you should count yourself lucky. Be grateful, got that?”

Colbie sighed. "Got it."

3

Dinner was uneventful. Just mother and daughter sitting at the dining table and eating microwaved leftovers, because Mrs. Amame was too stressed out over the day’s events to cook dinner. Right across from where they were eating was the television, turned on and playing a movie about Sleeping Beauty (not the animated kid-friendly Disney version, but a dark fantasy version), in which a painter sees and awakens the title character with dark consequences for himself, his friends, and his family.

In between bites, Colbie’s mother viewed the movie without much interest, letting the images and sounds slip through her mind like a tonic cleansing her worries away. To her mother, television was just a means to an end, and that end was to ease her mind of built-up tensions over the pressures of her work and the events of today, in particular.

Colbie was different, though. She followed the protagonist of the movie with open eyes, from his first dream of Sleeping Beauty to subsequent encounters with other characters who have encountered her, most of whom exhibited symptoms of mania or depression, sometimes accompanied with other symptoms like PTSD or schizophrenia or suicidal thoughts.

She looked at her mother, who had finished her plate and was now taking long swallows of juice, spiked with vodka. Even with juice mixed in, Colbie could still smell the scent of vodka on her breath, and a stab of guilt spiked through her heart.

When did you start drinking again? Colbie thought. Is it because of me? The more she thought about it, though, the more she wondered if it was something or someone else. Maybe it was her father. Or maybe it was something else entirely. Whatever it was, it's got its hooks in her mother again, and it seemed to fester inside her like a cancer of the emotional kind, where all the good feelings have faded away and only the bad feelings stayed.

When her mother got up from the table, Colbie said, "Leave it there. I'll clean the dishes."

Her mother smiled and slurred out, “Thank you,” and made her way on unsteady feet towards the sofa facing the television and plopped herself on the sofa and yawned. “Colbie.”

"Yeah?"

"Don't turn the TV off. Just keep it on for me."

"Will do," Colbie said and continued eating. When she finished, she downed her juice in one gulp, collected both cups and plates and forks, put them in the sink, and turned on the faucet. Rinsing, scrubbing, rinsing again, then placing the plates in the plate rack, cups right next to the plates, forks in the utensil rack inside the drawer beneath the kitchen counter.

After washing her hands and drying off, she came over to her mother fast asleep on the sofa. She lingered over her for a time and noticed slight wrinkles under her eyes and worry-lines between her brows. Her mother still held on to her beauty, but time was beginning to show her true age. If the face really can reflect one's inner strength, her mother's showed cracks as if she was losing her will to keep going.

"I'm really sorry, Mom," she said and bent down and kissed her mother's forehead.

4

5:35 p.m. was way too early for Colbie to go to bed, so she had time to spend but hadn't the slightest clue how to spend it. So she just plopped herself onto her bed, stretching herself, relieving any residual aches and sprains from her latest misadventure, then just lay there looking up at the ceiling fan, thinking of nothing in particular, just letting her thoughts drift and make connections on their own.

On impulse, Colbie turned over and reached for her smartphone that was recharging on the side drawer next to her bed, snatched it up and flipped it open before punching in her access code and checking for messages. All the messages from Kendra and Celia were from last night, so she forwarded them her message:

What's up? Hope you're doing well.

—C. A.

Not the most inspiring thing to send, but she sent it, anyway, not really expecting an answer any time soon. For all she knew, Kendra was already grounded, and Celia . . . Well, she’d have her hands full dealing with her sisters, especially Madison. As for herself, Colbie put her smartphone back on the drawer and went to her laptop atop a low bookshelf that was also charging.

She sat, cross-legged, on her bed and opened her laptop and accessed the internet browser full of recommendations from conspiracy theory podcasts, power metal playlists, and podcast readings of various weird and scary encounters. Tonight, though, none of these carried her interest, and after clicking through a handful of videos and listening to theories and stories, she opened another tab and accessed her online dream journal, opened a fresh entry and typed out the contents of her collective dream dive with her friends on the previous night, then added her friends’ account about what happened after she had ‘DIED in their dreams’ (Celia’s words and Kendra’s emphasis). She then saved and uploaded it to her dream journal, closed the browser tab and set her laptop aside, and flopped back onto her bed in thought, thinking . . . and thinking . . .

Wondering at something she couldn’t pinpoint, since she had no memory of it happening, yet the feeling persisted even now after she had cleared her thoughts with meditation and writing. She felt it—whatever it was—fluttering through her stomach where Mara had stabbed her, yet she felt no pain or discomfort. And she felt something else tingling from the touch of human warmth upon her lips, although she had no recollection of it during her dream dive that night.

Colbie turned over and reached for her smartphone atop the side drawer, snatched it up and flipped it open, and typed out another message to send to Kendra and Celia, but she stopped herself from sending it. She was close enough to her friends for her to ask without either of them writing her off as creepy, but it might not be appropriate at this time.

She put her smartphone back on the side drawer, put her laptop back on the low bookshelf, and plopped herself on her bed in thought, thinking . . . and thinking . . .

She kept thinking till her eyes swam with sexy possibilities, lewd thoughts connecting with even racier thoughts about Kendra or Celia or both sharing that kind of intimacy with her, wondering if they really did swing that way or if it only seemed that way through Colbie’s own fantasies about them. And amidst that heady cocktail of curiosity and embarrassment and excitement, she fell—

5

Into her dorm bedroom where all things were possible, where love between friends could flourish without boundaries or limits on how to love or why. Here in Colbie's little corner of the Phantom Realms, all was permitted, all of it at her beck and call once she awoke from the stupor of slow-wave sleep.

Here Colbie lay inert on her mattress, looking at the colored lights on the ceiling and walls around her and watching for the red glow of the lamplight on her dresser drawer to throw a purple light up on the ceiling. Her dream cue never changed or varied in the slightest.

That is, until tonight.

When she broke through the trance, she reached for the lamp and turned it on, throwing a spectral light throughout the room. Yet when she reached for her watch right next to the lamp, she found it missing atop the dresser drawer.

She got off the bed and knelt to the floor and looked for the watch underneath the bed, and then underneath the dress drawer, but came up empty and cursed, saying, "You're kidding. Of all the times it has to be missing, it has to be now? Damn, this sucks!"

So she pulled out the top drawer to look inside and, lo and behold, she saw an object there—not her watch, though.

A key.

She picked it up and looked at it under the lamplight. It was a small and unassuming key, probably a house key or even a trunk key, if they still made traveler's trunks like that anymore.

"What are you doing here?" Colbie said, as though the key could talk to her, but she knew better. Keys never talked, even in her weirdest dreams, but she also knew that keys never appeared in dreams at random. Keys opened things, so when she finds a key in her dream, she was meant to find something like her missing watch, or find out something like an answer to a nagging question.

She walked towards her door, holding onto the key in one hand and placing her other hand on the door knob, thinking of the key and her watch, connecting both objects in her mind, letting her subconscious guide her to the destination.

And spectral waves billowed through her room, fluttering her hair in long wavy peals and wrinkling her pajamas. And when she opened the door into the wine-dark night of her subconscious, she stepped across the threshold—

6

And found herself passing into a crowded entrance hall, where a doorman wearing a white mask gave her a program at the threshold of the double doors. She entered dressed in a sky-blue Sunday dress with a square neckline and a mask of her own tied over her face and her hair hanging over the small of her back. Other guests in formal dress were there, many of them in couples of men and women congregating in their own private groups, talking and laughing. Other groups, comprising men or women only, hung around their own little groups, talking about things Colbie couldn’t quite hear out of earshot. And there were a few loners hanging around the corners of the entrance hall or sitting on benches and observing the crowds around them, looking for groups to mingle and converse with.

She hung around the outskirts, a loner herself, and observed these other loners and the groups they were looking for and noted their masks. They all wore either black or white masks that covered only their eyes, leaving their mouths open to express their salutations to other fellow mask-wearers.

“It’s a masquerade ball,” she said and looked at the program, but there were no lines of printing on any of the pages. So she went back to the doorman who had given her the program and said, “Um, excuse me.”

The doorman flinched at her voice, but ignored her.

“Excuse me, sir,” she said.

The doorman kept ignoring her, but eventually relented. “Y-yes, ma’am. What is it?”

”I think there’s been a mistake,” she said, handing him the program he gave her. ”All the pages are blank on this one. Can you hand me another one?”

The masked doorman paused, then handed her another one, saying, “Sorry, ma’am. I must’ve given you the wrong one.”

Colbie opened the program, but like before, the pages were blank. She said, “It’s blank in this one, too.”

The doorman paused for a while longer and gulped as the other masqueraders started avoiding both of them, then said, ”There must be a mistake, then. I’m very sorry, ma’am, for the inconvenience.” He paused again, as though thinking of her words, then added, ”By the way, do you know what color your mask is?”

“Oh, um . . .” She paused, looking down at her dress, and said, “Black, I think.”

“No, I’m afraid not,” he said.

“Then it’s white,” she said.

“It’s not that, either,” he said.

“Can you tell me?”

And all at once, the doorman began to sweat under his collar, as the other masqueraders began pointing the two out in hushed whispers, and said, “Ma’am, will you excuse me?”

“Sorry,” she said and stalked off towards the restroom and looked at the bathroom mirror. Unlike the black and white masks the others wore, her mask had a dark red hue and a glossy finish that reminded her of fresh blood, and so she took it off and inspected it.

The restroom door then opened to reveal another masked woman entering, but on seeing Colbie without her mask, the woman gasped and stormed out and left the door ajar.

After that, Colbie came out and caught a glimpse of the woman hiding amongst her girlfriends, talking about her encounter with the Red-something. Colbie had no idea what this Red-something was, so she tried to find another person wearing a red mask but had no such luck. To be sure, she saw masks of different styles and designs in the entrance hall, but everywhere she looked, all the groups of masqueraders had masks of black or white and no other color. She was the only one with a red mask, the only one belonging to neither group of masqueraders. And everywhere she looked, she saw the momentary glances of the other masqueraders, who turned away from her whenever she looked in their direction. And even when she walked towards them, they avoided facing her directly, or if they were facing her, they pretended to look past Colbie at someone else. And even when she wasn’t facing them, she felt their hushed whispers surrounding her with half-heard phrases about the Red-something.

She glanced back at the doorman, once again greeting the other masqueraders and then whispering in their ears and pointing her out amidst the crowd.

“They’re avoiding me,” Colbie said under her breath, “but why?”

She thought about it for a time, thinking about the Red-something or whatever they’re talking about. And so her thoughts lingered onto an Edgar Allan Poe story she had read in American Lit., though the title of it escaped her. The story was about a cloaked figure called the Red . . . She couldn’t think of the next word, even as she could almost grasp its form in her mind, reaching out and pulling off its mask and peering up at its face. That’s when she remembered something else and noticed her empty hands, then cursed when she couldn’t find her key.

A few heads turned in her direction, but they turned away when Colbie looked at them. She checked her pockets but found that her dress had no pockets for her to put her key in, so she went back to the doorman, while the crowd of masqueraders parted before her and avoided looking at her.

The doorman looked away from her, as well.

Colbie said, “Excuse me.”

Again, the doorman ignored her.

“Excuse me, sir, but I must’ve misplaced something,” she said and reached out to him and—

He flinched and stepped away, then regained himself and said, “What did you misplace, ma’am?”

“It’s a key,” she said.

“What kind of key?” he said.

“I don’t know what kind,” she said, “but I know I had it when I came here. I was just wondering if you could—”

“Excuse me, ma’am,” the doorman said and slipped past the double doors into the hallway beyond.

Colbie just stood there, speechless, wondering why he would just up and leave like that, till she felt the other masqueraders looking at her, yet when she looked back at them, they all ignored her.

She sighed, saying, “Ugh, this sucks!”

Then she spotted the program the doorman had dropped on the threshold and picked it up and went out into the hallway to give it back to him but stopped just outside the double doors, thinking better of it. She opened the program and saw the pages were blank, but on closer inspection, holding it against the light of a wall sconce, she noticed a name fluorescing in invisible ink.

“Edward Foster?” she said and looked down the hallway along the rows of mirrors and paneling on the walls. “Who are you?”

“Excuse me,” a woman said, and Colbie jumped before turning around and looking at the same woman who had walked in on her in the restroom. “Sorry about that! I didn’t mean to startle you, but you may want to keep this,” and she handed Colbie another program.

“I already have one,” she said, holding hers up, “but thanks, anyway.”

“You misunderstand,” the woman said, pressing the program she had into Colbie’s hand and taking the one Colbie picked up off the ground. “Kathy wanted you to have that one.”

“Why?” Colbie said.

“Open it, and you’ll find out,” the woman said, “but not yet and not here. There are too many wandering eyes and whispering lips around here, so be on your guard.” She then opened Colbie’s program and perused the pages beneath the light of the wall sconce, till she saw Colbie staring. “Don’t mind me.”

“Have you been spying on me?” Colbie said.

“Just to make sure you’re you,” the woman said, snapping the program closed. “Do you know who this Edward Foster is?”

“How should I know?” Colbie said.

“Just checking.”

“Do you know him?” Colbie said.

“I have an idea who he is.”

“What about Kathy?”

The woman smiled and said, “I have my secrets, but yes. I know her,” and she was about to walk down the hallway where the masked doorman had gone when Colbie caught her arm. “What?”

“Have you seen my key anywhere?” she said, letting go.

“No, I haven’t,” the woman said. “What does it look like?”

“It’s small,” she said, “like a house key or a trunk key.”

“That’s too generic to help much,” the woman said. “Where did you find it?”

“In my dream just before I came here,” Colbie said, “and then I lost it somewhere a few minutes ago.”

“I see,” the woman said. “Keys don’t just appear and disappear at random in dreams, but try not to concern yourself with what you’ve lost. Try to see it from a different angle, instead.”

Colbie considered this woman’s advice and said, “What angle are you talking about?”

So the woman raised her finger to her temple, saying, “The real key lies in you, in your knowledge and your creativity, which you have in spades. I’m glad to have met you in person, Colbie,” and she placed a finger to Colbie’s lips before she said anything else. “I know we haven’t met before, but I need your help,” and she took her finger off her lips.

“What kind of help?” Colbie said.

“Kathy will be placed under a sleeper curse soon,” the woman said, “and you’re the one to wake her out of it.”

“Seriously?” she said.

The woman nodded her head.

“How do you know that’ll happen?” she said. “And why me?”

“Because it’s fated to happen,” the woman said, “and I’m just here to give you a heads up before it does.”

“But why me?”

“I already told you,” the woman said.

“Yeah, but why?”

“I don’t know why,” the woman said. “Kathy’s already been placed under a sleeper curse on my watch, because I was too distracted to notice before I could do anything to stop it. It hasn’t happened yet, but when it does (and it will), her spirit will lie somewhere on these premises.”

“Where?” Colbie said.

“I have no idea where,” the woman said. “All I know is that if she doesn’t wake up by tomorrow morning, she’ll stay asleep for God knows how long. That’s why I’m here,” she added and pointed to the program in Colbie’s hand, “and that’s why you need to hold onto that. So don’t lose it!”

“I won’t,” Colbie said, “but can’t you do anything else?”

“Not without endangering your life and the lives of your friends,” the woman said. “As it is, this is all I can do for Kathy. The rest is up to you.”

Colbie just stared, saying, “What do you expect me to do?”

“I’ll give you a hint,” the woman said and planted a kiss on her lips. “Think of Sleeping Beauty, and you’ll know what to do. I’ll be off now. It was nice talking to you,” and she passed by Colbie and walked down the hallway and turned the corner—

7

And found the doorman leaning against the wall paneling between two mirrors and checking his watch, catching his attention the moment she appeared. And when she approached him, she did so under the unfavorable impressions Blaze had said of him, that he was a shady man who dealt with other shady characters, yet his overall demeanor dispelled that notion.

He stood up and straightened the collar of his dinner jacket and said, “Can I help you, ma’am?”

“Yes, you can,” Cooley said, looking at his eyes through the eye slits of his mask. “Is your name Ronald Hamilton?”

The man just stared at her through his mask, silent for a time, seeming to analyze Cooley’s reactions as much as she was analyzing his. He said, “I don’t know who that is, ma’am. You must’ve mistaken me for someone else.”

“Oh, really?” she said. “Do you go by an alias?”

“Ma’am, I don’t know what you’re saying,” he said and scuffed the soles of his shoes on the carpet before passing her by on his way back to the ballroom. “Good evening, ma’am.”

“Edward Foster, is it?” she said.

The man stopped and looked back at her, saying, “Do I know you?”

“Not yet,” she said.

The man paused for a moment, then came back to her and said, “What business do you have with me?”

“A plea for help,” she said.

“What kind of help?”

“The kind only you can give,” Cooley said. “In a few hours’ time, Kathy will succumb to a sleeper curse.”

“Kathy?” the doorman said. “Do you mean Katherine Hearn?”

Cooley nodded her head.

The doorman backed away from her and said, “How do you know the mistress of this house?”

“I’m her avatar and spirit guide,” she said and took off her mask, revealing an exact copy of Katherine’s face. “You have no reason to be afraid of me, sir. I’m just looking out for Kathy by making sure the right people know what’s going to happen, and I know her spirit will lie somewhere on these premises when she succumbs to the curse. Will you help me?”

The masked doorman paused again, seeming to roll Cooley’s information through his head, and said, “Who else did you tell?”

“The girl I saw talking to you,” she said. “Her name is Colbie.”

“Colbie?” he said. “Do you mean the girl in the blue dress with the red mask?”

“That’s the one,” she said.

“Anyone else?” he said.

“Nobody else,” Cooley said and handed him back the program he had dropped on the threshold when he ran from Colbie. “You dropped this, Mr. Foster, so be more careful next time. I don’t want you to blow your cover,” she added and noticed her hand beginning to fade. “I don’t have much time left, so I implore you to help Colbie out however you . . .” And she faded away before she could say anything more.

8

The ball had started, and masqueraders were already congregating in the ballroom, many of them dancing with their incognito partners, others conversing on various topics, and here she was sitting alone on a solan sofa in a corner of the ballroom with the program lying next to her, looking at the herringbone parquet design on the floor, so that she wouldn’t see the masqueraders throwing wary glances her way.

And last but not least, she was thinking of her lost key and watch and the strange woman’s warning of future events. If keys never appeared and disappeared at random in dreams, as the woman had said, then the same was true for watches, as well. Losing both, she thought for a moment, meant a loss of control and a loss of time. In addition, when she considered the woman’s brief appearance in the restroom as she was inspecting her mask, as well as her conversation with her just outside the double doors, she cursed herself for not getting her name. Still, the woman’s intelligence on Kathy’s fate weighed on her, pushing her to think beyond the confines of a lost key and whatever it opened.

She wished she knew what it was.

Pushing those thoughts away, she looked up at the masqueraders in their reveries and listened to their hubbub blending into a continuous hum up to the coffered ceiling, from which hung a succession of six chandeliers designating six major sections of ballroom. In fact, the ballroom was more of a humongous hallway separated into six rooms of a specific color in each, from blue and purple and green to orange and white and violet. And from where she sat in the blue section of the ballroom, she saw two grandfather clocks on both sides of the room, both ticking closer and closer to 6:00 p.m.

It was currently 5:54 p.m.

Two clocks, just like the two dials on her missing dream watch.

One clock told the time, and the other counted down the time remaining till the next hour.

Just like her missing dream watch.

She stood up, forgetting her program, and walked towards the central aisle, ignoring the masqueraders that parted from her approach, looking at the clocks on either side, one telling time, the other counting down.

And like Moses parting the Sea of Reeds, Colbie parted the crowds as she left the blue room and entered the purple room, looking on either side of her.

And behold! Another pair of grandfather clocks stood on both sides of the purple room, ticking one minute closer to 8:00 p.m. as the crowds stirred around her.

It was now 7:55 p.m.

She proceeded, the crowds parting before her, into the green room, where she saw another pair of clocks ticking one minute closer to 10:00 p.m., and a hum of whispers arose from the crowd around her.

It was now 9:56 p.m.

She proceeded, the crowds parting before her, into the orange room, where she saw another pair of clocks ticking one minute closer to 12:00 a.m., and the hum of whispers grew into a rumble of speculations and prophecies.

It was now 11:57 p.m.

And even as the reports of two gunshots going off resounded through the ballroom and shook the crowds around her, she proceeded, the crowds parting before her, into the white room, where she saw another pair of clocks ticking one minute closer to 2:00 a.m., and the rumbling of the crowd grew into a stir of spoken revelations and dreadful confirmations.

It was now 1:58 a.m.

She proceeded, the crowds parting before her, into the white room, where she saw another pair of clocks ticking one minute closer to 4:00 p.m., and the stir of words grew into yells begging for her to stop.

It was now 3:59 p.m.

Yet she proceeded, the crowds parting before her and getting restless, where she only saw one massive grandfather clock before her with no hands on an empty dial-face, as though time had lost all meaning. And before her stood a set of double doors built into the body of the clock itself, looming larger in view as she approached it. Only then did she remove her mask and let it fall to the ground, rousing another stir of yelling voices from the crowd as she reached out to grasp the handles and pull the door open into God knows what.

Now the yells grew into screams, as she yanked and pulled at the door handles and sent ear-splitting creaks of rusty hinges cracking down the six sections of the ballroom. Then a stampede of masqueraders rushed from the place in a flurry of screams and jostles and shoves and groans.

Yet she yanked and pulled the doors open, opening them into an endless void within, wherein she tread on tenuous steps—

9

And listened for any sign of a living soul within the depths, tuning out the fading hum of panicked masqueraders behind her. So she walked and she walked, listening through the growing silence of the darkness, listening till she could only hear the steady drumming of her heartbeats inside her heaving chest, listening to her own breathing, listening to her footfalls echoing through an empty unseen space around her.

And for a time (God only knew how long), Colbie heard nothing else but her own heartbeats and breathing and footfalls.

After a time, a reverie of thoughts flooded Colbie’s mind with flashes of her mother’s tired face, sleeping on that sofa in the family room with the movie on the television playing itself into her mother’s dreams, and now playing itself into her own dream in snatches of waking reality.

Her thoughts boomed with the shatter of a percussive shock through her mind, a cloud of debris clouding her mind’s eye and wafting at her nose, then it hummed and screeched with the sound of dueling voices, the voices of Kendra and Celia arguing.

"Calm down, you two!" Colbie said, and her words echoed through the chamber of her thoughts, now echoing through the empty space around her as she walked on.

Then her mind flashed upon Mara's angry face, her eyes glaring like the fires of Hell and tears falling down her cheeks, when Mara's scream echoed through Colbie like a thunderclap, saying, "You made a promise! You made a promise to my sister, and YOU LIIIIIIIIIIIIIED!"

And all at once, huge waves of psychic energy flowed through the air around Colbie, and sonic booms detonated through her mind and turned everything around her into blinding light and buzzing through her ears with percussive static.

And through that buzzing fury, through the anguish of her tears, and through the pulsing chaos of her heartbeats, Colbie ran and ran and ran deeper through the void, into a darkness more than night, into a crisis of the soul. Colbie ran and ran and ran, till her legs ached and her breath came out raspy and ragged, slowing her steps and doubling herself over and grabbing at her knees, catching her breath in huffs and puffs.

10

Around the corner in the hallway, Ronald Hamilton fished out his own key from around his neck to make sure Cooley (or whoever she really was) hadn’t stolen or tampered with it. When he was satisfied, he decided to come back to the ballroom when he heard a tumult of screams and peered past the corner at the commotion. A sea of masqueraders spewed out of the double doors of the entrance hall and into the hallway and jostled with each other down the inclined plane towards the double grand staircase. He ventured towards the crush of panicked masqueraders, just out of reach of getting pulled in and carried down the inclined plane towards the top landing of the stairs.

He said, “What in God’s name is going on?” As more masqueraders squeezed their way down the inclined hallway towards the staircase, filling the space with a menagerie of panicked voices, he called out to his friends among them, yelling, “Anne! Ambrose! John!”

Soon enough, one of those masked friends said, “Over here, old boy!” And his friend waved at him over the sea of yells and screams and groans, as his fellow masqueraders pushed him down the inclined hallway.

Recognizing the man’s voice, Ronald pressed himself against the side wall and shoved his way through the moving sea of humanity towards his friend, then grabbed a hold of his hand and yelled, “This place is a riot! We need to get to the end of this hall! Do you hear me?”

“Loud and clear,” his friend yelled, gripping Ronald’s hand and pressing himself against the wall.

With his hand linked with his friend’s, Ronald doubled back along the side of the hallway, pushing and shoving his way past the sea of humanity, struggling to keep his place along the adjacent wall facing the ballroom, till both men made it through to the end of the hallway and rounded the corner.

“Jesus! If that wasn’t Dante’s second level of hell, I don’t know what is,” Ronald said, doubling over and grasping his knees and trying to catch his breath. “What happened?”

“Some girl with a red mask,” his friend said, still huffing and puffing and clutching at his knees himself. “That chick’s crazy, tried to get into the black room. Can you believe that?” More huffing and puffing.

“Did you see her enter?” Ronald said.

“I didn’t stick around,” his friend said and took in one full breath and breathed it out. “I can’t find Anne or Ambrose in all that ruckus. Have you seen where they went?”

“I haven’t,” Ronald said, still huffing and puffing but standing back up, then added, “God, I hope they didn’t get mixed up in that crowd,” and jerked his thumb over his shoulder towards the on-going exodus.

“Anyway,” his friend said, standing up and meeting the doorman’s gaze, “that girl you were talking to. I thought she was Alice.”

“She wasn’t,” Ronald said.

“Then who were you talking to?” his friend said.

“I’m not sure, John, but she seemed out of place,” Ronald said, thinking back on Cooley’s plea to help out this Colbie, till his thoughts drifted onto murkier waters. Colbie and Cooley weren’t the only out-of-place visitors he met. In fact, he thought his way back through a century of time on a hazy memory of two other out-of-place girls questioning various people, including himself, at a local inn on the eve of the most momentous decision of his life, a decision that would cost him his life at the hands of—

“What’s on your mind, old boy?” John said.

That’s when Ronald came back to the present and said, “When she talked to me, she couldn’t read what was on our program, so I can safely assume she’s not one of us,” and he dug into his inner jacket pocket and handed his friend the program Cooley had given him, which read:

Debut Ball of

Alice Pleasance Liddell

December 3, 2018

5:00 p.m.

Overseer: Aaron Rancaster (White Knight)

Officiant: Alice Pleasance Liddell (Queen of Hearts)

Officer: Akami (Red Queen)

Officer: Shiromi (White Queen)

“A party crasher?” John said.

“Maybe,” Ronald said, “but she was asking about a key, as well, so she might be an agent.”

John paused for a moment, then said, “Of Rancaster’s?”

“Maybe,” Ronald said. “I’ve already pointed her out to some of our friends, but keep a lookout for her as you inform the rest of us, and if you spot her, keep it on the sly. Understand?”

“Understood.”

“Good,” Ronald said. “Now go. I’ll stay and keep watch.”

John nodded his head, saying, “Be careful, old boy,” and headed down the hallway and pulled out his smartphone and called his contacts.

“These moderns and their quaint devices,” Ronald said, then rounded the corner and headed back through the empty hallway towards the ballroom, then looked behind him before peering inside. Seeing nobody else there, he entered and traversed the long ballroom from the blue and purple and green sections to the orange and white and violet sections and halted at the double doors of the giant grandfather clock at the end of the hall and looked up at its empty dial face. He placed his hand on the door handles and closed his eyes, and a flash came to his mind of the doors opening and a girl in a blue Sunday dress passing through. Yet when he tried turning the handles himself, he couldn’t and said, “So your name’s Colbie, is it? Who are you really, party crasher?”

11

When she caught her breath, Colbie found herself underneath a recessed light above her, so she shielded her eyes with her hand on looking up at a coffered ceiling with a light in each coffer. Then she noticed bookshelves reaching down from the ceiling, the shelves full of books on either side and stretching out ahead of her into the gloom. She then turned around and looked back at another row of shelves heading into a side hallway of another row of shelves filled with yet more books.

Maybe she was in a library during closing hours, or a private library in someone's residence. Or maybe she was in a different library altogether. Wherever she was, she looked and spied a small booklet sticking out of a row of books on a shelf at eye-level, so she took it off the shelf and sucked in breath.

It was the program she had left on the solan sofa at the masquerade ball. Then she noticed words on the cover that read,

"The Masque of the Red Death"

by Edgar Allan Poe, and her mind then flashed upon the meaning of her first dream sequence in that masquerade ballroom. Goosebumps formed on her forearms, and the program trembled in her hand at such a revelation washing over her senses, almost like a cloak or shawl fluttering over her. Then she opened the program at a random page, and out of it fell a library card, tumbling to the floor and jolting the entire library, rattling the floorboards and shaking the bookshelves, toppling Colbie over and tumbling a few volumes onto the floor and knocking out the lights overhead.

All was darkness for a time.

Then the lights from a backup generator turned on, winking overhead on a faulty power line.

She got up, picking up the program and the library card from the floor, and looked at the name on the card:

Katherine Hearn.

A chill ran up Colbie’s spine at the thought of what lay in store for Katherine, but she focused on her own impressions of her. Celia always called her Kathy, a term of endearment and intimacy that Colbie felt was out of reach whenever she met Katherine. Colbie always felt that way towards her, even when Celia had invited her and Kendra over to the Hearn house to attend Celia’s sixteenth birthday party during Halloween. While there, every mirror in that house gave Colbie goosebumps, for Katherine’s presence crept on her through the other side of those mirrors. Yet if the Hearn house felt claustrophobic back then, then this library squeezed at Colbie’s psyche and flooded her senses in a dizzy spell, so she breathed in and out to calm herself and think.

Was this place part of Katherine’s dream realm?

And if it was, where was she now?

Colbie turned from these thoughts and opened the program beneath the backup lights and found a letter addressed to her in the pages. It read:

Dear Colbie,

I'll try to keep this short, because I don't have much time before the sleeper spell takes effect. And if I ramble, try to bear with me, okay? Anyway, I hereby grant you, Colbie Amame, temporary access to and control over this library, that you will act as stewardess of my knowledge in my absence under the sleeper spell. Once this sleeper spell wears off, which I hope won't take too long, you will have probationary access to my library. For now, though, you'll have complete access till I wake up.

Colbie, I know you hold some misgivings about me, so I wish to amend those by granting this to you, but I'm telling you now that I'm not making this grant on a whim. I'm doing this, because my sisters and I are in danger from a man named Rancaster and a girl named Alice. They've already seized my dream mansion, and this library's the last place out of their reach, and I want to keep it that way. By the time you can read the contents of this letter, I'll be under their sleeper spell, and it looks like I won't be getting out of it for a while. So I implore you to look after this library, and look after my sisters during my sleep. They’ll need you by then as much as I need you now.

As such, I've given you a key in your dream realm just to get you into the library, but that's a one-time thing. The real key lies in you, in your knowledge and creativity. Your father's a great storyteller (I have some of his books in my library, in fact), and Celia always tells me about your scary stories. When this is over, I want to hear some of those stories from the authoress herself.

Your friend,

KATHERINE HEARN

P.S.: Call me Kathy, okay?

—K. H.

Colbie was speechless, to say the least, her cheeks coloring with warmth and her heart overflowing with something she felt once before when she wrote her first story. It was a ghost story, which she read to her father when she was eight years old. She remembered seeing her father’s smile and his eyes twinkling as she read it, and she felt her heart thumping against her chest, as though her reading was casting a spell over herself even as she was casting it over her father, just as Katherine’s letter had cast its own spell on her. Storytelling was the most intrinsic of spells, a universal spell that crossed all boundaries and brought people together like Colbie and Katherine. Beyond her mother’s wind affinity or her father’s teleportation, Colbie’s storytelling was a power of her own making that she wanted to share with her friends, including Katherine.

"Kathy," Colbie said, "I'm not sure if you can hear me, but I want you to know this: I didn't mean to make you feel unwelcome. So trust me, I'll do everything I can, okay? Everything."

She then walked off towards the side hallway of the library, thinking about the title of the program, “The Masque of the Red Death,” referring to a story by Edgar Allan Poe. She had read the story, and somehow her own presence had changed some of its setting elements, adding twelve more clocks and arranging them into pairs in six sections of the ballroom, with the original clock from that story reimagined as the thirteenth one with double doors added to it, which led into a hidden seventh room.

What did all of this mean?

Whatever it meant, the answer was in this very room.

So Colbie found the library carts at the end of one of the side aisles next to a row of private study coves, then went around Katherine's library scoping out all the aisles between the bookshelves for fallen books, starting from the central aisle that bisected the library shelves into two distinct areas. From there, aisle after aisle after aisle, she gathered all the fallen books from the floor, pushing the cart like a shopping cart loaded with groceries, working her way to the perimeter aisles of the library.

When she finished, she went back to the aisle where she found the carts and entered one of the study coves, where she sorted the books in alphabetical order on a table. It totaled to eighty-four books in all, ranging from novels and nonfiction books to art books, a short story collection, a diary, a dictionary, some encyclopedias, guides and how-to books, and even two occult books. But of these books, as Colbie scanned their titles, one caught her attention. It was titled

Entering the Secret Room

by Linda Kouri. On seeing the title, Colbie thought back to the dream motifs she noticed in her observations of the ballroom and compared them to the depictions she remembered in Poe's "Masque of the Red Death." In both, the number of clocks varied, and the last big clock acting as a doorway into the seventh room changed Poe's original interpretation of a single large clock inside the seventh room where Prince Prospero died when he confronted the eponymous Red Death of the story.

Maybe that's the secret room, Colbie thought.

Then she thought about the similarities between her initial dream interpretation of the ballroom and Poe’s original. In both, she noted the fear of the other masqueraders on seeing Colbie in her ball gown wearing a red mask and the Red Death, but such a comparison was too straight-forward for her taste. Despite the similarities, she couldn’t have been playing the part of the Red Death, not even when that doorman got scared off when she met him that third time. Then her mind flashed on the woman who had walked in on her while Colbie had her mask off, running out and telling people about the Red-something.

"The Red Death?" she said under her breath.

No. It had to be another role, another persona playing a complementary part of the climax in both stories, in Poe’s story and in Colbie’s. For any plague like that of the Red Death to spread, he would need the agency of another character confronting it. In Poe’s story, it was Prince Prospero, and in Colbie’s dream, it was another identity playing a similar part.

But whose identity was it?

Whose part was she playing?

Colbie braced herself for another drop into her dream bedroom, breathing in and out, in and out, to steady her heartbeats, till everything around her was nirvana and peace. She then said an incantation in her mind, and closed eyes, and fell backwards into the slow-wave sleep of oblivion through the rabbit hole of another dream dive—

12

To her dream bedroom, where she awoke with a gasp, staring up at the ceiling and walls with the nightlight throwing a harsh blue diagonal of light across them. The lamp on her dresser drawer glowed red and threw a purple circle cut into thirds up on the ceiling, but her trance felt heavier than before, lingering over her mind longer than usual. So Colbie waited and waited and waited in her pajamas, and feeling the moments stretch on into an infinity of anticipation. It was one of those dreams again, wherein she had to push herself past the threshold of her trance.

So Colbie gritted her teeth and moved her head to the side, where the lamp stood over her dresser drawer, and saw the watch right next to it.

“Finally,” she said, struggling to prop herself on her forearms, and reached a hand over and grabbed the watch and looked at the dual dials: 4:24 a.m. on one dial, and 12 minutes and counting down on the other dial. “You’re kidding. Just twelve minutes?”

Then the lamplight flickered, and a voice said, “More like twelve seconds.”

Colbie turned and saw a girl with bobbed dark hair and glowing red eyes and wearing a blood-stained sky-blue dress and a skimmer hat, and she was straddling her stomach.

"Get off!" Colbie yelled, wrenching and torquing her hips, trying to throw this stranger off of her bed, but the girl pressed her hand over her chest, pressing her back onto the cushions, all but pinning her to the bed despite her struggles. "Damn you, how'd you get in here? Fuck, get offfff!"

A slasher’s smile stretched across her face, and her eyes blazed as she said, “It only happens when you’re not looking,” and the girl manifested a large kitchen knife in her other hand and gripped it overhand above Colbie’s chest and plunged it home—

Only to stab through the padding of the bed, for Colbie had teleported out of the room.

In a rage, the girl slashed the padding and the pillows and the sheets, scattering bed feathers and tufts of foam throughout the room and ruining the sheets. Amidst the fluttering feathers still afloat in the air, she smiled her slasher’s smile and said, “Hide and seek, is it? Or maybe tag’s your game? Either way, don’t let me find you, and don’t let me catch you, because when I do—”

And the lamplight flickered again, and she was gone before she completed her threat.

つづく