Quadrice (Scenes 4-6)
4
After the bathroom break, when they all got settled onto their chairs, Cooley asked the Cairns twins if they had that kind of relationship when they made out. At first, Mara and Nico were adamant about not making out, but when Cooley and Blaze challenged them with their observations (for they were themselves sisters in love), Nico admitted to kissing her sister, much to Mara’s chagrin. Cooley and Blaze traded knowing glances and smiled at their charges and reassured them that there was no harm done. Love was love, Cooley said, no matter what guise it wore or what orientation it followed.
Cooley’s observation eased the twins into a more trusting mood, so Nico whispered into her sister’s ear about the key they had found, saying these two might know what to make of it.
So Mara walked over to the bunk bed in the back of the underground vault, where she had placed it underneath the pillow for safekeeping, and came back with it.
Which Cooley saw and said, “What have you got there?”
“A key,” Mara said and handed it to her. “Nico and I checked for initials earlier, but we found nothing.”
Even so, Cooley looked at the key and felt an aura emanating off of it, like that of a guardian’s or a steward’s key. “Where did you find this?”
Nico pointed to the table, where they had been playing Strip Poker, and said, “We found it there.”
Cooley and Blaze looked towards the table, the exact copy of Katherine’s table in the underground vault of her own dream mansion. So Cooley thought of her conversation with Blaze there about Leslie Amame and sensed a synchronicity leading to some unknown link in a web of disparate circumstances.
Which wasn’t lost on Blaze, who asked, “You thinking what I’m thinking?”
Cooley nodded, then turned to the twins and said, “Were you two talking about Leslie Amame?”
“Yeah,” Nico said.
“When we were at Kathy’s place,” Blaze said, “were you listening in on us?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?” Cooley said.
“Because I felt something when I touched it,” Mara said, “but it’s kind of hard to explain. I didn’t just feel something; I saw something, too.”
“You mean like psychometry?” Cooley guessed. “Like channeling a reading or a thought from an object?”
“Is that what it’s called?” Mara said.
Cooley nodded her head and said, “Yep. I spend most of my time reading stuff like this. The word, ‘psychometry,’ is just a term used to describe an interconnection between living auras, in which objects like this,” and she held up the key, “embody that connection in physical form.”
Mara and Nico and Blaze deadpanned, none of them having any clue what the hell she was talking about.
So Nico said, “And that means what exactly?”
“We call these living auras memories,” Cooley went on, “and we call the objects that hold these memories together totems. We use totems like this one to ground our sense of place on what we think is reality, and that keeps us from losing our sense of who we are. Everybody living has them, but only lucid dreamers can use them to take control of their agency when they dream.”
At her words, Mara gulped and looked at the grim expression on Nico's face and grabbed a hold of her hand, feeling it clammy and cold in her palm.
She said, “And what happens if we lose that agency?”
Cooley said, “You mean if you die?”
Mara nodded and looked to her sister, who kept her eyes to the floor as if trying to keep it together, so Mara put her hand over Nico’s and squeezed it.
Cooley and Blaze followed suit, and all eyes were on Nico.
Cooley said, “There are many ways of keeping you grounded, whether it’s totems, or a flesh-and-blood body housing a soul, or memories of those we care about. In the absence of a totem or a living body, our memories are all we have.” At her words, Nico was about to cry, but Cooley added, “But in the case of siblings (and especially identical twins), there’s a stronger bond likened to a golden chain that lets you experience what the other experiences.”
On this, Mara and Nico traded a nervous look of recognition, for their visions were not just chance glimpses of their attraction to other girls. They were really a reflection of their halves of the same coin, two minds and two souls (one dead and one living) in opposition to each other, like Yin and Yang.
“But above all else,” she added, making one more observation, “the strongest connections are made with our intentions. We call them pacts and promises when we promise to keep our word, we call them vows and oaths when we swear to uphold our word with spoken words, we call them treaties and contracts when we uphold our word by writing our names on them, and we call them covenants when we uphold our word with God through our actions and our conduct.”
Mara and Nico blanched on Cooley’s observations, for her observations described two such promises: one, wherein Colbie vowed to be Mara’s sister, sealed with Colbie’s death and resurrection; and two, wherein Nico made Kendra and Celia promise to save Mara, sealed with Nico’s prayer and self-sacrifice. One promise sealed with actions, and one promise sealed with words. Mara and Nico: two sides of the same coin.
Cooley and Blazed sensed the wheels turning in their heads, so Blaze said, “Did anything happen between the two of you?”
The effect was immediate. Mara and Nico blushed and refused to look at each other, so as not to let either questioner pry any further into their love lives, but their hands stayed connected.
Cooley and Blaze must have had some inklings, because both of them smiled mischievous smiles.
“That’s it,” Mara said, standing up and glaring at her two nosy companions. “Get your filthy minds out of the gutter, you freaks!”
Nico stood up and placed her hand on her sister’s shoulder, saying, “Calm down. I don’t think that’s what they meant.” And to break the ice, she pointed to the key in Cooley’s hand and said, “Do you think that key belongs to Leslie Amame?”
“There’s only one way to find out,” Cooley said, “but I’ll need one of you to help me do it. Are either of you up for it?”
Mara and Nico gulped, but nodded their heads, anyway, while Blaze knew what was on Cooley’s mind and added, “You mean hacking into someone else’s dream, right?”
“God, Blaze, don’t scare them!” Cooley said, then turned towards a nervous Mara and Nico. “Don’t mind her, you two. It’s not as bad as that, trust me. We’re just looking to return this key to its rightful owner, and we’ll go from there, got it?”
Again Mara and Nico nodded.
“Good,” Cooley said, and she placed her hand on the surface of her mirror, where the reflection shimmered on contact. She then raised the key to eye-level between Mara and Nico and let it go, where it stayed floating in midair. “I can’t touch someone else’s totem when I’m scrying, so I need one of you to hold onto it.”
Mara grabbed the key.
“Okay,” Cooley continued, “I need you to press that key against the surface of my mirror and visualize the person you think it belongs to in your mind.”
So Mara did just that, pressing it flat on her palm against the mirror’s surface, and tried her best to think of Leslie Amame, but her thoughts fluttered onto Colbie Amame sleeping in her dorm room. Her thoughts manifested like a television show in Cooley’s mirror, in which Mara’s dream-self would enter her room and turn on the light and see her sleeping on the bed—
“Don’t change your mind,” Cooley said, keeping Mara from removing her hand and breaking the spell. “Just let it play out. Nico, press your hand on top of Mara’s, so she won’t break my spell.”
Mara panicked, though, and looked at a smirking Blaze enjoying the impromptu peepshow at her expense and a pensive Nico biting down on her lower lip. “But I’m not sure—”
“Don’t doubt yourself. Just let it play out,” she said. “Come on, Nico. Help her out.”
So Nico pressed her palm against Mara’s on the mirror, and Mara let her naughty thoughts go on, despite the embarrassment. There was a shift in perspective in Cooley’s mirror, revealing Mara’s dream-self in the nude, pulling off the bedsheets to reveal Colbie also sleeping in the nude and getting into bed with Colbie, who was unaware of her presence.
“Oh, you naughty girl,” Blaze said.
“Quit it, you sicko,” Cooley said, then turned to Mara. “Ignore her. She has her own sick tendencies, trust me.”
“Hey, I’m not that bad!”
Through it all, Nico kept her palm pressed against Mara’s as she bit down on her lower lip, as Mara’s vision played in her mind and her emotions pulsed through her heart.
“It’s okay,” Nico whispered in her ear, “I’m with you.”
So Mara closed her eyes, encouraged by her sister’s words, and let the thoughts play in her mind as she was pressing her head onto Colbie’s bare breasts, shedding her tears onto her skin, wrapping her arms around her waist, tangling her hands in her hair, and planting hungry kisses on her cheeks and lips, only to look into her eyes and see a different girl's face.
For it was not the face of Colbie Amame.
Nor was it the face of her sister, Nico.
It was the face of Alice Liddell.
And in that moment of recognition, Mara’s dream-self manifested a kodachi and stabbed her bare stomach, bursting the image of Alice into bloodstained petals of daisies and roses and purple carnations—
5
And plunging it through Alice’s stomach. And somewhere in the fog of Mara’s confusion and disbelief, somewhere between elation and horror, was the feeling that she had fucked up, that she had committed an unpardonable sin, that her soul was done for as visions of Mara’s own crazed self stabbing Colbie through the stomach flitted past her eyes.
She pulled out the dagger and Alice fell to her knees, her eyes entranced in a look of disbelief.
Then another wave of pain seared through her stomach, and Mara fell to her knees, letting her dagger clang to the floor in splatters of blood, like the knell of a funeral bell clanging through a silent night. She gritted her teeth hard against the spasms digging deeper and deeper into her, pressing her hand onto the wound and feeling the warmth of her blood running rivulets through her fingers.
She looked up and saw Alice still holding her knife, despite the blood flow seeping from her stomach. Yet the look on Alice’s face changed and contorted into a grimace, her smile stretching wide across her cheeks, her eyes burning red in a demonic glare. And Alice rose to her feet just as Mara’s vision blurred and doubled and tripled and quadrupled, her astral body finally giving out and collapsing to the floor in Cooley’s mirror . . .
6
The mirror flashed and faded to black, and Mara jerked her hand away, dropping Leslie’s key and bumping into Nico behind her. She thought Nico said, “Are you okay?” But Mara couldn’t decide whether she was okay or not.
She just stayed silent, entranced by the key that was now floating at eye-level before her and glowing in her face. She looked behind her at Nico, who seemed just as entranced, then looked back at Cooley and Blaze. They, too, seemed spellbound and awed into silence. Then she noticed the silence of the air around her, as though the dream itself had taken a deep breath and was now holding itself in suspension, and when she looked back on the faces of Nico and Cooley and Blaze, she saw what had happened.
This dream and everyone except for Mara was frozen inside it.
She then grabbed the key and looked into Cooley’s mirror. The aural connection through it had solidified into a door glowing in the reflection, and its astral counterpart had manifested behind everyone’s backs.
With the key in hand, she stalked off towards the door, inserted the key into the lock and turned it over, then grabbed the knob and twisted it, but it wouldn’t budge. She yanked on it, pulling her weight against the handle to make it turn the mechanism inside, but nothing moved on this side of the door.
Only then did she realize why: this key was someone else’s totem, and in the hands of another dreamer, she couldn’t use it.
She said, “Hello? Is anybody on the other side?”
That’s when she noticed something else: she could move and breathe just fine, but the suspended animation of the dream prevented her words from carrying beyond the door—or, for that matter, sounding out her voice.
So she did the next best thing, raising her hand to the door and knocking three times—
