Once (Scenes 10-12)
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 crowd 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.
