A Tale of Two Proms (Bard Academy)

by Lockwood, Cara

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Because….” Sydney paused and decided against finishing his sentence. He began a new one instead. “You love him, don’t you?”

  “Why do you say that?” I felt flustered now and my face burned.

  “The way you talk about him. What I’ve heard the others say.” Sydney nodded off into the dark, where our friends were now many paces ahead of us.

  “Yes, I love him.” I still felt the same about Heathcliff, even though I wasn’t sure if he felt the same way about me. Even if he was now in love with someone else. The truth was still the truth. I felt the way I felt, and nothing had changed that.

  Sydney shook his head sadly. “Why do I always fall for women who are already in love with someone else?”

  The words echoed in my ears.

  “I don’t understand.” Fall for me? The words bounced around my head like a small rubber ball. But that explained the way he’d been looking at me. I guess part of me knew he was developing feelings for me. I just wanted to ignore that fact.

  He traced the outline of my neck with one finger.

  I stood very still.

  “Maybe you just like a girl who’s really hard to get,” I said at last.

  My words broke his brooding mood and a smile flashed across his face. “Maybe,” he said. “I always did like a challenge.”

  “We’re falling behind,” I told him, and he moved his body and freed me from the doorway. I didn’t know what to do about his sudden declaration, except ignore it. There wasn’t anything I could do about it, anyway.

  I jogged to catch up with the others and found myself moving in and out of dark alleyways, down main streets with people and horses, and even through a few narrow byways. The streets had grown very dark now. Candles flickered in windows as we darted past.

  “Where were you?” Lindsay whispered in my ear.

  “Tell you later,” I said, looking at Sydney’s back as he moved in front of me. Miss A glanced backward and saw Sydney. She moved alongside him and whispered something in his ear. He nodded.

  “Does anyone know where we’re going?” Lindsay hissed.

  “St. Stephen’s Church is near where Parliament will be,” Hana said. “Close to where Big Ben will be built in about a fifty years.”

  “Seriously?” Ryan asked Hana, impressed with her knowledge. An expression of admiration flickered across his face. Ryan appreciated smart girls, and Hana was the smartest one I knew. He was clearly into her geek chic. Hana sent him a shy smile. There was definitely something brewing between those two. And it wasn’t just because they were nearly married in Jane Eyre.

  Eventually, we turned the corner and Samir nearly ran straight into one of the life-sized stone lions statues of the Bard Academy Library. He yelped and jumped backward.

  “Easy, tiger,” Blade said, patting Samir on the shoulder.

  “Lion, you mean,” Samir said. “Look, it’s dark. Those things have sharp teeth. I could’ve lost an eye.”

  The lion’s mouth was open in a frozen roar. Behind him stood the steps leading up to the library, which was squeezed in between a church and another larger stone building. It looked surprisingly like it belonged here.

  Miss A slid close to me and Sydney. She whispered something else to Sydney and then he slunk off into the fog, maybe going around the building to the back. I looked at Miss A, but she put a hand to her lips.

  We took the steps cautiously. I began to hear strains of music. A violin, I thought. Or several. Bright lights beamed from the main floor windows, casting shadows down the steps.

  “Wait here,” hissed Headmaster B. She and Coach H and Miss A crept up to the nearest windows, each one taking a different angle. They peered inside.

  My heart sped up. I had a feeling Heathcliff was in there. And so was Catherine. I would finally see for myself, Were they a couple or was it all just some horrible mistake? Sweat broke out on my back. Miss A met my eyes and put her hand up, stopping me. She shook her head slowly from side to side. What did that mean? What was she seeing in there?

  Fog had rolled into the alley where we were standing, making it even harder to see. A cold wind blew in across the River Thames. I shivered.

  Suddenly, at the top of the stairs, I saw the faculty all turn at once. They each peered away from the library and into the dark shadows around us, as if sensing something approach.

  “Is it just me who is totally creeped out right now?” Samir whispered next to me. There was a tremor in his voice.

  Above our heads, the moon broke free of the clouds. It was a sliver of a moon, not very bright. I had to agree with Samir. The whole setting was a slice of a period-piece horror movie. It made me all the more antsy to get inside the library and figure out what was going on in there.

  Coach H studied a patch of fog somewhere behind us. I heard a rustle near the corner where I was standing and the sound made me jump. Thoughts of Heathcliff and Catherine fled my mind as I suddenly became aware that we were all pretty exposed in our current location.

  “Did you hear that?” Samir whined.

  “Hear what?” Ryan whispered. He and Hana were close to us now.

  “Shhhhh,” Blade commanded. We all stood silently. The only thing I could hear was my own breathing, and it felt too loud. Movement on the other side of the alley, about twenty feet away, made us turn in the direction the sound. Then, a small black thing darted out into the moonlight and charged Samir’s feet. He shrieked. A scream froze in my own throat. Adrenaline surged through every vein in my body.

  But then I saw what it was.

  “Rat,” Ryan said. “Just a rat.”

  The black rodent scurried off down the street and then disappeared under a heap of trash.

  My heart thudded loudly in my ears. I took a deep breath and released it.

  “Samir, you have to quit screaming at everything,” Hana said.

  “Sorry.” Samir looked sheepish. It was true that he did very little to calm an already decidedly creepy situation.

  I glanced up and saw the faculty members conversing with each other by the north-facing window. They were trying to come up with a plan of attack. I couldn’t see Sydney at all. I figured he’d gone inside or around the other side of the building.

  “Look, it’s not really my fault,” Samir whispered to us. “I mean, the fog. The cold wind. The dark alley. It’s creepy. Plus, we’re standing outside the Bard library where Heathcliff and Catherine are trying to take over the world, and you know, if I were them, I would sure put up some guards or something.”

  “Guards?” This was Ryan.

  “Yeah, I mean you wouldn’t think they’d just leave this place unguarded for anybody to…eep!”

  Samir’s sentence was cut short and suddenly he disappeared into the shadows, pulled backward by something I didn’t see.

  “Samir!” Blade shouted, but it was too late. He was gone.

  I ran blindly into the fog after him. “Samir!” I shouted. The teachers had turned and were looking at us. “Samir!” I called again. The fog had grown even thicker. Now, I couldn’t see a foot in front of me.

  All the library steps were swallowed up in fog, as were the lion statues. I couldn’t see anything at all, except the top floors of the library peeking out between thin patches of gray-white mist.

  Footsteps clomped all over the stones around me, and I couldn’t tell if they belonged to my friends or my enemies—or whatever it was that took Samir.

  “Samir! Hana! Guys!” I shouted.

  Distantly, I heard my own name. It sounded like Lindsay calling me. I went toward the sound. And then, to my left, I heard Ryan call. He was closer. I moved toward him but before I got there, a big strong hand snaked out of the fog and grabbed my arm. I was so surprised that I dropped my sack of vault books.

  “Ryan!” I shouted. “Don’t scare me like….”

  But then I got a good look at the face that belonged to the hand. Um, yeah. That definitely wasn’t Ryan. It was a bear of a man
who didn’t even look like a man. He was ugly, his forehead large and sloped, his eyes bleak and black. I couldn’t even tell what about him made him look like a monster, except I knew he was one.

  “Ahhhh!” I screamed, and then, reflexively, I stomped on the monster’s left foot. He let out a low grunt, released his grip and then someone else swung an arm toward the monster’s face. A fist connected to the deformed man’s chin and he staggered backward a step, enveloped by the fog.

  Sydney was by my side then. The fist had been his. I was insanely relieved to see him.

  “Thanks,” I said and meant it.

  He nodded. Then, his attention was drawn back to his left, where there were sounds of a scuffle. He put himself protectively in front of me. I wanted to search for my friends, but their voices were scattered and hard to find in the fog. I remembered my book bag then, I scrounged around on the ground until I found it and slung it over my shoulder.

  “Mr. Hyde!” I heard Hana shout somewhere.

  Mr. Hyde, as in the dark alter ego of Dr. Jekyll, I presumed.

  Samir had been right. Catherine had set up guards around the library. I wondered who else was out here hiding in the fog. The thought made my blood turn cold.

  “Stay close to me,” Sydney whispered. His hand tightened around mine as he pulled me closer.

  I heard a shout and a scream and Sydney pushed me against the wall of the alley, shielding me from the fog and from whatever fight was happening just out of our reach. I squirmed against Sydney, trying to get free. But he was a wall that wouldn’t move.

  Suddenly, he reminded me of Heathcliff. How many times had Heathcliff saved me from danger? How many times had he put his body between me and danger? He’d been my human shield more times than I could count.

  But, I had to remind myself this wasn’t Heathcliff. It was Sydney Carton. Heathcliff was inside the library—with Catherine.

  I tried not to dwell on that thought, imagining them together. Plotting to kill or destroy everything that mattered to me.

  A muffled grunt came and then a large body was thrown against the wall next to Sydney. He flinched and pulled me away. Mr. Hyde landed in a crumpled heap by my feet. Coach H emerged from the fog, as did Miss A. The two faculty members stood over Mr. Hyde, who lay curled into a fetal position with his eyes closed and jaw slack. The impact had clearly knocked him unconscious. As we all watched, he morphed before our eyes, turning from the monster-looking Neanderthal into a pale, thin man with modest features.

  “Dr. Jekyll,” Miss A said, shaking her head sadly. “Such a waste of a good scientist.”

  Samir appeared from the fog. He shook his head as he rubbed his neck. Blade threw her arms around him, happy he’d found his way back to us relatively unharmed. He had a bleeding cut above his left eye.

  “Why do scientists always experiment on themselves?” he asked us. “You know that never works out. It’s pretty much the only way to guarantee your experiment fails in a really hideous way.”

  “Not to mention you totally uglify yourself,” Lindsay agreed.

  “While I’d love to hear about your modern thesis on science in literature,” Miss A said. “I believe we should all get inside before another sentry finds us.”

  “There are others?”

  “Could be,” Coach H said.

  We all looked at the thickening fog. Suddenly, the other major monsters of literature flashed through my mind. Dracula. Frankenstein. Not the kind of dudes you want to run into in on a dark, fog-covered London street.

  “Inside,” Samir agreed, his voice giving way to fear once again.

  “This way,” Miss A said, leading us around to the back. “I found an unlocked door.”

  We all hurried after her. Miss A opened the door, and violin music drifted out over our heads and into the night behind us. The library was brightly lit on the inside and warm, compared to the dark damp of the outdoors. The books and shelves of the library had been removed, as had all the study desks and tables. In their place, were lit candle sconces illuminating the room with hundreds of small flickering flames. The violins were part of a quartet—two violins, a cello and a bass—being played by men wearing ruffled shirts and knickers. The dance floor in the middle of the library was filled with Bard students. Many of them looked dazed as if in a trance as they danced an elaborate waltz around the floor. My eyes wandered all around the library looking for them.

  I saw them almost immediately, of course.

  Heathcliff and Catherine.

  They were dancing close together, their noses nearly touching, their bodies pressed against one another in a slow dance. They weren’t dancing so much as hugging each other, spinning in a slow circle at the very center of the dance floor.

  The world tilted on its edge then, and everything I knew went sliding off into a void.

  There was no mistaking the look on Heathcliff’s face at all. It was adoration. He had found his true love.

  And it wasn’t me, after all.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even blink. All I could do was stare.

  While part of my brain knew I could find them together, my heart never really believed it could be true.

  But now that I was seeing it with my own eyes, the deftly built shield of denial I’d been holding up in front of me cracked. Reality poured in like a bucket of cold water.

  I don’t know how long I stood there staring at the couple on the dance floor. My lungs refused to work. They just wouldn’t draw in air. I just stood there, unable to move, unable to breathe, hoping that if I did nothing at all, maybe time wouldn’t move forward. Maybe I wouldn’t have to acknowledge the obvious truth of what my eyes were telling me.

  “Miranda.” I heard my name from Sydney’s lips. There was something he was trying to tell me, but I couldn’t hear it in the moment. The voice reached me as if calling from down a long empty subway tunnel, distant and thin.

  My eyes were on Heathcliff and Catherine. They were so close together you couldn’t tell where one began and the other ended. They were one body, moving together, their minds linked as if neither had to tell the other what to do. They instinctively knew one another. I realized then how stupid I had been all this time. How naïve. Heathcliff couldn’t love me and be able to dance with her like that. I knew this in my heart, and yet my mind still tried to tell me it was all some grand mistake.

  That he was faking it, maybe, or that she had him under some kind of spell. Or even that Emily Bronte had come back to put Heathcliff in a trance as she had once before. My brain grabbed at something, anything, that could explain what I was seeing. Everything except the obvious—Heathcliff loved Catherine.

  He looked toward me then, as if feeling my eyes on him. I took a step forward, raising my hand, as if hoping he could truly tell me none of this were true. Hoping he could explain it all away. If he smiled at me, or winked, or gave me some indication that we were still okay, then I would know what I was seeing wasn’t real at all. It was just an elaborate illusion, then everything would be all right, and I could breathe again and I could walk and I could live. But he didn’t smile at me. He saw me, and for the briefest of moments, I saw a flicker of surprise…and then, sadness, and even…pity? No, that was not what I was looking for.

  I didn’t think I could hurt more, but the pain sliced through me like a hot iron, and I nearly doubled over. I’d heard the term broken heart, but I never thought they meant it actually hurt—literally. That being betrayed by the person you loved most felt like a tiger ripping your heart to shreds with big, sharp claws.

  And then, they bent to kiss, and I realized it truly was all over. Dully, I remembered that the last time they kissed, Bard had been tossed into another dimension.

  “No,” Miss A shouted. “The kiss!”

  “We have to stop them,” hissed Coach H. Both he and Headmaster B tensed. But even as they sprung to move, they were too late.

  Heathcliff and Catherine’s lips met,
and suddenly the ground beneath our feet started to shake.

  “What’s going on?” Hana shouted.

  “It’s them,” Miss A shouted back. “Together, they are opening the portal.”

  Before her words were out, I could see the gleaming gold light opening beneath their feet. The shining splinter that would grow to a doorway to another dimension. Sydney had been right. Together, Heathcliff and Catherine had the power to make entire buildings disappear. Their intensity, their love, was such a great force that they were upsetting the balance of everything. It was as if together, they were as powerful as gravity.

  That just made it worse. Wasn’t it bad enough they’d crushed my heart? Now, they had to destroy the world, too?

  I found myself moving toward them.

  “Wait,” I said, my voice barely a croak, but it was enough. Heathcliff jerked away from Catherine. She glanced up at me, a look of surprise and then annoyance flitting across her face.

  I stopped when I was a few feet away from them.

  I could feel the eyes of every one of my friends on me. They hadn’t seen Catherine and me in the same room before. They didn’t know how much alike we were.

  “Miranda,” he began, his eyes desperately trying to tell me something. Was he trying to stop me? Warn me? I didn’t care. I didn’t want to hear what he had to say. Not now. My shock was melting away and in its place surged a hot and furious anger. I had no better place to put it, so I decided Catherine was a fair target. My sack full of books was heavy on my shoulder. I slipped it off, letting the vault books land with a clunk on the floor. No one spoke or moved, now that Catherine and I were standing facing one another.

  “This ends now,” I said. Overly dramatic? Maybe. But it was true. I’d had enough and I was going to stop this.

  Catherine just laughed. She threw back her head and cackled, as she curled her arm protectively around Heathcliff. He had the good sense not to meet my eye and instead looked down at his feet.

  “I’m not nearly through with this world or yours,” Catherine said. “There is much I’d like to see.”

  Another tremor shook the library, and small cracks in the stone appeared in the support beams holding the ceiling in place.