Phantom Heart

by Kelly Creagh

  A gauzy, floor-length veil shielded her mask, the features of which too closely matched my own.

  “I thought he didn’t have a heart,” I said, terrified by the change in this specter’s appearance.

  “We don’t,” she replied. “There is nothing this time to break. And yet . . . it does.”

  “Who are you?” I demanded of the mask. Then, thinking better of it, I rephrased. “What are you?”

  “I’m a dream,” said the mask as she took a descending step in my direction, her long train whispering after her. “I’m a falsehood. I am a beautiful lie that I can’t seem to help telling myself.”

  “Don’t talk to Desire,” rasped Envy, grasping my wrist. “She’s not supposed to speak to you. You’re not supposed to know about her.”

  Desire?

  My scowl deepening, my panic building, I glanced between the two of them—ultimately settling my attention on my ghostly twin. The bride whose name strangely did not scare me half so much as the chaos within which she’d made her appearance.

  “Erik,” I said to the veiled mask, ignoring Envy’s warning. “Where is he?”

  “That untasted kiss,” said the white-masked figure. “The one we almost stole. The one he claimed in our stead. That is what killed us then. But . . . seeing you with him again. That is what kills us now.”

  Pushing off from the stairs, I stood, my legs carrying me down the steps, away from the two masks and my abandoned lantern—toward the darkness of the foyer.

  “Erik!” I cried, remembering how I’d left him in the dream. Dying. Just as the mask had said.

  “Erik!” I shrieked again, hating this helplessness that I could never get away from here, no matter what I did.

  But then I spun to see his crimson-clad form standing in front of the mantel clock and the fireplace, his back to me. Uncaring that he wouldn’t have his mask, I rushed over to him. Rounding him, though, I stopped, arrested by what waited for me within the hood of his cloak.

  Nothingness. Wrath’s hood was empty.

  Still, the hooded figure turned his head toward me, and as I stood in terror beneath his invisible gaze, the fear inside of me suddenly morphed into something more like alarm.

  Wrath lifted a gloved hand. His fingers drifted toward me. Then his knuckles grazed my cheek with the softest of caresses.

  “Wh-where is he?” I demanded in a whisper.

  Somehow understanding, the cloaked figure shifted away from me to point to the dark smears of blood that marred the parquet floor, trailing past the piano, which glistened with wet handprints, as if he’d faltered against it.

  Immediately, I spun from the phantom cloak to follow the blood trail into the hall, toward the back door, which stood open to the cold and the crimson storm.

  Only scarcely visible through an upsurge of pinkish white, a long scarlet smear stained the snow, leading all the way to the conservatory.

  Not caring that I had neither cloak nor coat, I rushed out, bare feet crunching in the snow as I began to run, chasing the scarlet path to the glass house.

  SIXTY-SIX

  Zedok

  Never before had the world that encapsulated me so chaotically rebelled.

  Never had this body, which could hardly be referred to as such, so violently revolted against me.

  The hemorrhaging had started just as it had after the kiss that had rent my last heart.

  This time, however, the blood flowed from me in more copious amounts. Not only that, but it came with an unrivaled chaos that had arisen the moment I had ended the dream. Just after I had somehow managed not to kill her young man. I’d still had enough of Wrath coursing through me that I might have had she not reminded me of our bargain. The very same she had perhaps been in the midst of planning to break. I had not overheard enough of the conversation to tell. Only enough to ascertain that Mr. Cheney had joined forces with the medium.

  And the boy. Though he’d been foolish to challenge me, his words had hit their mark, dealing more damage than he could know.

  I had emerged from the dream to find my world and my masks in disarray. And now here I was. Running from her as well as them.

  But I had known better than to hope for respite from either. Or that she would not catch up to me nearly as swiftly as my masks.

  The metal-frame door of the conservatory shrieked on its hinges. Her sharp intake of breath alerted me to her presence.

  “Come no farther,” I commanded.

  Miraculously, she stayed put. Most likely not because I had told her to, though.

  The roses. Doubtless they had been what had stalled her.

  Myriam’s roses. They had returned from the grave. Going one step further than I had, they had returned to life as well.

  With blooms too numerous to count, they ambled over the frosted windows of the conservatory. Perhaps, though, these were not the ghosts of Myriam’s roses resurrected. For Myriam’s had varied in hue, ranging in color from the palest parchment to the deepest violet. These roses had instead taken the likeness of the dozen Stephanie had brought into Moldavia—the externally white and internally crimson variety from which I had plucked my last failed heart.

  Never again had I thought I would see them in bloom this way. At least, not outside of a dream. Defying the rules of the natural world as well as this unnatural one, they had simply appeared. Suddenly present where there had previously been nothing. Not unlike what I had come to feel for Stephanie. What I continued to feel despite having no heart with which to feel it.

  “Go,” I told her. “Return to your room and lock the door.”

  Though I disliked frightening her, I understood her fear would do a better job of keeping her safe than I could in my current state. Because I could not recall when and how I had come to be garbed in the long black frock coat and half-scarred iron mask of Tumult. Nor how, after the changing of masks, my hands had managed to keep Wrath’s rings. I remembered taking Stephanie to her room. Leaving Wrath’s mask in her unyielding grasp, I had walked backward out of her quarters, barefaced, watching her as I went.

  No sooner had I arrived in her doorframe, though, than did ten more hands seize me. I had abandoned myself to them, fleeing their melee mentally in order to take refuge within the latest dream I had spun for her, uncaring which mask assumed control next since none could be as bad as the one she had helped me to shed. Of course, I had forgotten all about Madness.

  His top hat now lay nearby on the floor, dropped by the figure who had followed me here, waiting for the moment when the confliction that made me Tumult swayed too far one way . . . or the other.

  Stephanie took a step toward me. In response, I made a retreating one, but I faltered, nearly slipping in the congealing pool of my own blood. She extended her hand to me.

  “Damn you, go.” I turned away, pressing a palm to my chest to stifle the blood as I moved toward the nearest glass wall. Once there, the pain slammed me again. And this time, it nearly sent me to my knees.

  I fell toward the glass, bracing myself against the wall with my free hand.

  Turning, I saw that she had ventured as far as the center of the room—just below him. The masked figure that floated above us, swirling in its own mire.

  Madness.

  His amorphous body of eddying clouds and silent violet lightning seemed to be having a difficult time ordering itself. Hatless, his three-faced mask sailed this way and that, eyeing me as a circling vulture does its dying prey.

  “He’ll have me soon enough,” I warned her. “You mustn’t be here when he does.”

  “What is he?” she asked.

  “Dangerous,” I hissed. “The chandelier. It was his doing.”

  I did not think Madness, or any part of me, could harm her physically. But it was his nature to be destructive. He could damage her mind with his words. Worse, he could show her our face. At the very
least, he would be incapable of keeping any pretty promises when her young man showed. Wrath might not have won the hate from her that he’d deserved, but Madness would. And if she stayed in this room with me for much longer when I knew she loved another, he would win me.

  “Your masks,” she said, “what’s happening to them?”

  I both did and did not know the answer to her query.

  Pandemonium had occurred here before, though never quite like this, and only after the shattering of a heart. But this time . . . This time . . .

  Wincing under the new mask, my body seizing with another wave of pain, I tilted my head back and shut my eyes.

  Your question. Is now a good time to

  remind you she never answered it?

  These words whisked through my mind, uttered by the highest pitched of Madness’s three voices. The lowest of his voices answered before I could.

  You said yourself the boy was right.

  On all counts.

  That’s why you should have killed him!

  “Quiet,” I said. “Both of you. All of you.”

  “Who are you—”

  “I thought I told you to go!” I roared at her.

  Bare feet padded against the floor, but not in retreat.

  Tenacious, obstinate—too bold for a woman—she came to where I stood, propped against the roses, still clutching at the pouring wound. I did not mark her progress toward me through my own still-closed eyes, though. Rather, I viewed her approach from above. From the vantage point and through the empty eyeholes of Madness.

  No. Not now. Not him.

  She came to within a foot of where I stood, and lifting her hand, she reached, unafraid, toward my bloody figure.

  Forcing my physical eyes open, I found myself back in my body. Back behind Tumult’s mask, which I covered with one bloodied hand, uncertain if I could truly keep her from seeing what she was determined to behold.

  Instead of reaching for my mask, her small, pale hand did what it had tried to in the dream and took mine—the one covering the wound.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, helpless to stop her as she began to tug my fingers away, prying them up with her own, which fast turned scarlet.

  No sooner had she taken my hand from the wound, though, than did she abandon it to the air. And it hung there, as stunned as I when the digits of both her hands curled into the fabric of Tumult’s waistcoat.

  “It cannot be helped,” I rasped as she began to undo the long row of buttons.

  Stop her, urged all three of the voices Madness possessed. The voices that would soon possess me.

  But, shocked into stillness by this—her newest and most astonishing act of bravery yet—I found I could not obey.

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  Stephanie

  Terror, I realized in the moment I reached for his collar, was something that could—in certain situations—be set aside.

  Later, I could open that parcel. Later, sometime after this moment ended, I could afford to scream and break down.

  That later would come. Even now I could see it winking at me from its dark corner in the future. But for now, so long as I just kept going, my unborn terror would stand aside long enough to let me do what I needed to. Even if I didn’t know yet what that was.

  Button after button, I undid his waistcoat, my hands shifting down after each unfastening, my bloodstained fingers moving on autopilot, repeating the same unhooking motion over and over. Next, I went to work on the buttons of his soaked dress shirt.

  I kept my eyes on the task, not daring even the smallest of glances up at the new mask he wore, a glowering, mouthless metal face, pristine and polished on one half, but scarred and corroded on the other.

  The obvious tumultuous nature of this mask combined with his silent stillness made me nervous. What was he thinking? Why had he stopped trying to stop me? And what would he do when the reality of what I was doing caught up to him? What would happen to us when my terror leapt from its corner to seize and devour me anyway?

  Madness. That was what.

  And that meant I had to keep it together. Already, though, my hands had begun to shake.

  Because the chest that waited behind the drenched fabric belonged to a corpse. Someone who had been dead for a long time. Someone who shouldn’t be standing or walking, let alone bleeding.

  Of course, I’d known what I would find. Conceptually.

  After catching that glimpse of his cheekbone, I hadn’t had difficulty picturing what he must look like under his regalia. And that image hadn’t been any worse than what now lay before me. But it had been in that hazy, uncertain space inside my head where horrors could lurk but not live.

  God. His ribs. I could have counted them. Together, they formed a cage shrink-wrapped by dark yellow and, in places, blackened skin.

  Still, my now dripping fingers worked at the buttons that seemed never to end until, abruptly, they did—leaving me to stare at a stomach that made my own churn.

  His entire torso resembled the shriveled core of a rotten apple, shrunken and withered and wasted.

  Taut, leathery flesh stretched unbroken over his abdomen. If there was nothing inside of him, though, if everything had been removed, then where was all this blood coming from?

  I swallowed, the memory of what Lucas had told me in the dream resurfacing in my mind. He’d said they’d found blood in Charlie’s room. Blood that had not been hers or my father’s. It was obvious now whose blood it had really been. But then, if the blood they had found was Erik’s . . . why had it matched mine?

  My gaze trailed down the left side of his sunken, concave stomach, to where there ran a black slit. An incision.

  Past it, one of the roses that had bloomed on the previously dead vines caught my attention, its petals snow white on the outside, blood red on the inside. Just like the ones I’d brought to the house that day.

  In the basement, when I’d asked about his heart, he’d said that he’d lost “all of them,” before referring to himself as “hollow.”

  Nausea crept over me as my fingers went to the bloom. I seized the flower—and pulled it free.

  Cradling the rose in my right hand, I made a loose fist around it to protect it. Then, without letting myself think, I passed my fist into the papery opening—where his organs must have been extracted.

  He made no move to stop me. And because he wasn’t breathing, because he couldn’t, I couldn’t either.

  The total hollowness he’d alluded to awaited my hand, and weirdly enough, that helped me not to stop dead in the midst of what I still wasn’t sure I was doing.

  He remained motionless as my wrist and then half my arm vanished inside him. As my bid to deliver a heart to him brought us closer, I caught, under the coppery tang of blood, the scent of lavender and honey. The same scents I’d smelled that night he’d brought me here in a dream.

  I smelled salt, too. And frankincense.

  Embalming scents.

  I hitched a gasp, my fingers releasing the rose that, amazingly, remained suspended.

  I waited several seconds. For what would happen. For something to happen.

  Mindful to keep my eyes from meeting his, I watched the blood recede as it had last night, moving toward the invisible wound in his chest before vanishing. The devastated, ruined state of his body, though. It did not change.

  Had I expected it to?

  But something more about him had to change. Didn’t it? Would it bring him back to me?

  The sound of my own shallow breathing sounded loud in my ears as, carefully, I began to withdraw my arm, which came away clean—no traces of blood.

  Before I could get very far, his hand caught the back of my elbow.

  With renewed strength, he stood from where he’d been leaning against the wall. He stepped into me, recovering the slim distance I
’d made. And keeping me close, he loomed tall over me once more.

  My own heart quickened inside my ribs.

  “Take it back,” he said.

  Even as he spoke, my fingers curled into a refusing fist.

  “It is sure to shatter,” he said. “And when it does, I cannot be expected to keep my bargain. I scarcely kept it this night.”

  “You won’t break your promise,” I whispered. “I know you won’t.”

  I withdrew my arm, and he let me.

  Once we were parted, he swung away, as though wanting to hide the horror that had already been revealed. But several panes of darkened glass not covered by roses reflected the sight back to us.

  I willed myself not to look away as he lifted those luminous twin light eyes to mine.

  “Do you want to know how I know?” I asked him.

  To this, he made no reply but, gripping his jacket with both hands, he clutched it closed.

  His eyes then went to the ceiling, and only when they left me did I give myself permission to follow their stare.

  But the masked figure he’d been so fearful of taking over had vanished. As had the blood. And the red glow from the moon. And the flying snow.

  Instead, raindrops now began to patter the glass, making it shine.

  “Because no,” I whispered. “I don’t believe him.”

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  Lucas

  The next day, for the first time in high school history, I arrived at lunch to find our table empty. Though I wasn’t surprised, I slammed my tray down all the same, not caring when half my fries spilled from their paper boat. I forbade myself from looking up and taking in any of the stares I’d attracted. I didn’t want to scan the crowd and find wherever my so-called friends had relocated to, either.

  For a moment, I just stood there, fighting the urge to pick my tray up again, dump everything at the station, and go to the library. Except the library was where Stephanie and I had first met. And there, her absence would ring even louder than it did at this table.