Sister Uno (Scenes 5-9)
5
The moment Celia submerged herself bodily into the ever-shifting haze, she felt light-headed and tipsy as if she needed to sit down and settle her stomach before moving on. So 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 awake was completely nauseating.
How Katherine managed it without much effect on her physical body was almost beyond her, but then again, Katherine was the over-achieving eldest sister with the enviable specialty of using mirrors like portals. That meant that Celia and pretty much every other magic user she knew (including Madison) could only use a mirror’s reflection against a door to copy how Katherine could use a mirror. Only her grandmother, the Blood Rose Witch, could do what Katherine could, and Katherine was domineering at times for sharing an ability with her legendary forebear. Even the mother of the three Hearn sisters, Lima Hearn, could only replicate Katherine’s use of mirrors using talismans, yet her knowledge of talismans and sigils rivaled even that of her grandmother’s.
On the other hand, Madison was no pushover by any means as a second daughter of the three Hearn sisters. When she said she could roast Celia's ass, she meant every word of it, for Madison was the fire pixie of the Hearn family, which was 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 applied herself to it. Still, Celia mused, Madison was also a glutton and a slob at the dinner table and had bad taste in boyfriends, always falling for the handsome two-faced variety.
And dead last was Celia herself, the magical runt of the litter, who specialized in teleportation seals and could teleport almost anywhere, but her use of blood seals was limited compared to her grandmother's. And in her darker moods, Celia sometimes felt that she was a weaker version of her famous ancestor, and far from distinguishing herself from her sisters or even her friends Colbie and Kendra, she often found herself loitering in their shadows.
After her stomach settled, Celia picked herself up and wandered deeper into a dreamscape that wasn't her own, wondering what to do, till she remembered the events of last night. So she stopped again and 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, so Celia crouched and 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 subconscious of Mara's mind. And beyond the clusters of floating lilies hugging the base of the bridge, all Celia 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, 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 and 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 sukiya-zukuri 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 and just lay there motionless on her bed of roses. Although 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, because something was keeping her from waking, keeping her from breaking through the surface of conscious thought, keeping her mind pinned inside 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, so 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: they needed blood to work, so if it had not come from Mara herself, it had to come from someone else.
"Whose blood is this?" Celia said, till 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. Celia breathed out a sigh of relief and said, "At least you're not in immediate danger, but what's keeping you from waking up?" But 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 Lima 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, Lima 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 Celia's head: What happened to Grandma Hearn?
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 at the sight of the girl that had disappeared before her eyes. "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, and 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," she said.
"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, Celia stared at Mara's prone body in a pool of Nico's own blood, 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, and taking measured breaths in and out to quell the pulsing of her heartbeats. 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 as she said, "Do you know where she went?"
"She's at the house."
"How do you know?" Madison said.
"I saw her crying, but she wasn’t alone," Katherine said, driving off to the next intersection a block away and then making a wide right turn en route to the Hearn family mansion. "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, saying, "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 Percy Wenrich’s “Peaches and Cream Rag” through plumes of hot breath in the chilly air. As such, he was 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, the man 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 smelled of singed book pages on the shelves nearest the outburst from inside.
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. Once he was satisfied that they wouldn't spot him, he passed through the door 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 burnt 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, till 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!”
Flipping to the back of the front cover, he traced a blood seal imprinted with Nico’s blood on the inside of the cover with the idea of using it for his latest escapade against the Hearn family. 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, where 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.
