“Oh,” she said, taken aback. She wasn’t sure what to say. “I—uh, sorry,” she finally blurted.
“Don’t be,” he said. “It was a long time ago.” With that, he picked up the plastic bag of Chinese food and brushed past her to the hallway. “Grab the Cokes, would you?”
When he was out of the room, Isobel let herself breathe while silence descended anew.
She grabbed the Cokes from where he’d set them on the coffee table and left the room, looking back at the vacant piano seat. She found him waiting for her on the stairs, one hand poised on the banister. The Cokes cradled in one arm, the forks secure in her hand, Isobel mounted the stairs.
She climbed after him, the fingers of her free hand sliding along the mahogany banister. Her eyes focused on the upside-down bird on the back of his jacket, and she tried to resist the urge to say something else, to find words that would make up for the moment in the piano room. But there were none, and so Isobel kept her mouth closed.
It was odd, she thought, that this had been the first private thing he’d ever revealed to her. Watching the black wisps of his hair brush the jacket’s upturned collar, Isobel couldn’t help but wonder what had happened—what had caused his mother to leave? In one moment she thought it explained a lot about him, but then, in the next, she thought just the opposite.
“This place has a weird layout, I know,” he said, waiting for her on the landing above. “It’s gone through a lot of renovations. After the Victorian era, it got turned into a nursing home.
Then, in the seventies, it was converted into apartments.”
“It’s huge,” she breathed.
After another short, silent spurt of stairs, they reached the second-floor landing, which gave way to a cloister of rooms. When she saw him mount the stairs again, though, she knew this would not be their stop. They traipsed higher yet. Here the carpet ended, and they tromped on naked wood, the sound echoing through the house. They reached yet another tiny landing, a window stamped into the wall to her left. Isobel quirked an eyebrow at the view through this tiny portal, one that showed her little more than the details of the neighbor’s brickwork.
“How did you guys score a place like this?” she asked.
They rounded one final corner. With an internal groan, she saw that here, the next staircase, set slightly apart, seemed to slant more steeply and grow even more narrow, the individual steps themselves somehow thicker and taller. This staircase reached up toward a single narrow door. The burn in her thighs intensified as they climbed again. Even Quasimodo in his trek to the bell tower couldn’t have had this many steps to climb.
“My dad inherited it,” he said, then added, as an afterthought, “These were the original servants’ stairs.”
“Oh,” she puffed, “you don’t say.” No longer trailing her hand along the banister, Isobel gripped it with her free hand. “You do this every day?”
“Every day I come here,” he said, causing Isobel to pause. She looked up, squinting at his back again as he reached the door and twisted the knob. The door creaked as it opened, and without a backward glance, Varen slipped inside.
“As opposed to where?” she called after him.
Reaching the top of the stairs, Isobel stepped over the threshold into his room, an open space tinged with the scent of stale air and incense. Shadows gathered in pockets despite the room’s two windows, while above her, the ceiling pitched and slanted upward like the roof of a tent. A time-eaten mauve color wrapped the walls.
“As opposed to somewhere else,” he answered. He reached out to the wall beside her, flicking a switch. Light sprang forth from a small chandelier suspended over a narrow metal-framed bed, which had been shoved lengthwise against one wall.
“What, you mean you don’t come home?” she asked. She wanted to be sure she had it straight, that he’d meant the house itself and not just this summit peak of a bedroom.
“I said I don’t come here.”
Isobel shook her head, uncomprehending. “Then where?”
“Wherever,” he replied, adopting that biting tone that warned against any further inquiry.
Isobel pinched her lips together and swallowed her next question. She returned her gaze to his bed and the chandelier, reminding herself that he only ever said as much as he wanted, and never any more. He might have opened the door for her, but only a crack.
She distracted herself by studying his chandelier, thinking that he must have rigged it himself, because instead of normal lightbulbs, there were plastic candles topped with red-tinted flame-shaped bulbs. Also, the medieval-looking chain that suspended the fixture from a hook in the ceiling had been intertwined with black electric cords, which trailed down the wall before snaking out of sight behind the headboard.
There was a tiny gas fireplace in this room too, like the one in the living room downstairs, only this one was simpler, studded with plain white ceramic tiles. Isobel doubted if the fireplace was operational, though, because in the space where any fire might have gone, there were instead several small glass vials, each a different color and shape. They stood gathered together like bowling pins at the end of a lane or like potion bottles in a sorcerer’s forgotten cabinet. Instead of magical elixirs, though, each little vial held an assortment of dried flowers.
Isobel looked away from the fireplace, casting her gaze around at the walls, which were barren except for one black-and-white poster of Vincent Price. The floor beneath her was dull wood and creaky; a simple white throw rug had been laid out beside the bed. A TV-VCR-DVD unit sat on the floor in one corner, connected to what looked to her like two older-looking gaming consoles. The shelves behind the TV, she could see, were stocked with a handful of video games, some of which she thought she recognized from Danny’s endless collection.
There were also, she noticed, several DVDs tucked between the games, titles like
As Isobel drew farther into the room, she passed a folding-door closet and let her fingers brush against the painted white slats. She watched as Varen deposited the food on a simple writing desk tucked beneath a window, one with three vertical panels crosshatched by white
She stopped when she became aware of a pair of cool blue eyes following her. She turned her head to stare at the cat curled on top of his bed, a plump Siamese nestled on the gray comforter where she could have sworn it hadn’t been a moment before. The creature blinked at her slowly, squeezing its eyes shut, then opening them to piercing slivers.
“That’s Slipper,” she heard him say.
“Oh my gosh, he’s gorgeous,” Isobel murmured.
“She,” Varen corrected.
Isobel drew closer to the bed, then perched on the edge, setting the Cokes and forks aside. She offered a hand to be sniffed, per proper cat etiquette, which Slipper snubbed with a turn of her head.
“Don’t let the elegance act fool you,” Varen said, drawing out his notepad. “She farts.”
28
Ulalume
They’d spread out on the floor to work, sitting on the white throw rug beside the bed. The small red and white Chinese food containers had been opened and passed back and forth between them indiscriminately—neither of them, Isobel had noted, keeping track of which fork was whose.
At first Slipper had watched them from the bed, blinking cool, disinterested eyes. She had waited, it seemed, until they’d become fully engrossed in their work before slinking off the bed and, after making a big show of stretching and yawning, unfolding herself across their papers. From there, she purred loudly and flopped her tail against the floor.
They had decided to divide the presentation into three major categories: Poe’s most famous works, his
