“ARE YOU FAIR?” asked Hamlet, and Florence, a fragile apparition in a plain gown, her brown locks tied up on top of her head with ribbons, asked him back, in confusion, “What means your lordship?”
“Isn’t that great? She’s the perfect Ophelia,” Lottie whispered, without taking her eyes off the stage, although she was right there sitting beside me. Not that Florence was as perfect as all that; to Hamlet’s annoyance, she went straight on with his own lines: “That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should admit no discourse to your beauty.”
“Er, yes, exactly, Ophelia,” said Hamlet. “Just as I was about to say myself.”
Florence gave him a nicely judged smile. “Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty?”
Hamlet frowned. “Now that you mention it…”
He got no farther, because Florence was stealing his lines again. “For the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd!”
“You take the very words out of my mouth,” said Hamlet. “I did love you once, but now you’re nothing but a stupid cow stealing all my best lines.”
“It’s a very … very modern production,” whispered Lottie enthusiastically. “And the setting is avant-garde too, such a lovely mixture of steampunk, folklore, and minimalism—incredibly extravagant.”
“You don’t mean it,” I whispered back. The stage setting was terrible. Nothing matched anything else, and it certainly didn’t suit Hamlet. He was now furious with Florence, because she was putting one hand to her breast and declaiming, with malicious glee, “To be, or not to be: that is the question.…”
“This is too much! I never should have stabbed poor old Polonius. I should have stabbed you!” shouted Hamlet, seizing Florence by the throat and forcing her back against a bright-green door in the backdrop onstage. “Who needs a dagger? I’ll throttle you with my bare hands.”
“Now he’s importing a touch of Othello,” said Lottie, impressed. “Hey, where are you going, Liv? And when did you learn to fly?”
“I can only do it in my dreams,” I assured her, making straight through the air for my green door without even beating my wings, because I didn’t really have any.
When I landed on the stage, Lottie applauded loudly, and Florence, her throat still in the clutches of the furious Hamlet, croaked, “I am not of ladies most deject and wretched, you bastard, woe to you, not me!” And she rammed her knee into Hamlet’s stomach.
I could have sworn that tonight I’d be dreaming of Damascus steel blades dripping blood or, alternatively, beings with horns rising from strange chalk diagrams to demand the most precious thing I had, but no, instead I found myself back in the endless loop of silly dreams about Hamlet that had plagued me all this week. I thought I’d rather not know what that said about my state of mind.
I had to get out of here. Pushing Florence and Hamlet aside, I turned the lizard doorknob to get out into the corridor. When I closed the door behind me, I found myself in welcome silence.
Cautiously, I looked all around. There was no one else here, at least so far as I could see. Henry’s black door was opposite mine again, and right next to Grayson’s door. Frightful Freddy majestically lowered his beak when I waved to him. I could have visited Grayson in his dreams anytime I liked, because I was now in possession of a personal item of his again. That afternoon I had fished a blue T-shirt of his out of the laundry basket in the bathroom, one of the dark-blue shirts that were part of the school uniform. He must have had a dozen of them, so he’d never notice that one was missing. However, I didn’t think Grayson’s dreams would get me any farther tonight.
I wandered undecidedly a few steps up and down without really knowing what or who I was waiting for. I had no idea how long I’d been asleep. Grayson and I had come home just before midnight and gone to bed at once. Home—that was a funny feeling. I hadn’t really accustomed myself to the idea yet. It still felt as if I were a guest visiting the Spencers.
There was nothing moving yet in the dream corridor. Next to the sky-blue door with carved owls that I thought was the way into Mia’s dreams, I saw a pine door adorned with Christmas decorations. A garland of spruce with red velvet bows surrounded the door frame, and even before I deciphered the wording on the door itself, I knew whose it was. LOTTIE’S LOVE BAKERY said the notice. DELIVERIES PLEASE USE THE BACK DOOR. I sighed, touched. Lottie was such a darling! I was just about to sit down on her doorstep, under a sprig of mistletoe—very useful in case Henry needed an excuse to kiss me again (I loved these Christmas customs!), when I heard footsteps approaching.
But they weren’t Henry’s footsteps, as I had secretly hoped. They were Anabel’s.
“I was looking for you,” she said in her attractive voice.
I’d have gone looking for her, too, if I’d only known where, because our last meeting had left me feeling very anxious to know more about her.
She looked stunning, the same as before. With her jeans and flat ballerina shoes, she was wearing a low-necked sweater the same color as her eyes, a deep turquoise green.
“I’m sorry I didn’t take things quite seriously enough last time we met,” I said. That wasn’t entirely true, but it was certainly a good idea for me to be on friendly terms with her. I just hoped fervently that she wouldn’t come out with the name Lulila again, or I couldn’t be guaranteed to keep a straight face.
“That’s all right.” Anabel sketched a smile, but she looked tense. “Listen, we don’t have much time. I know you took the oath this evening.” She glanced briefly around. “That’s why I wanted to see you. I think that’s … really brave of you.”
“Well…” Somehow or other so did I.
“Brave and unselfish! It can all end well now, because of you. So long as you don’t make the same mistake as I did. Come along. I want to show you something.”
I looked at Henry’s door on the other side of the corridor.
“Where are we going, then?” I asked suspiciously.
“It’s not far.” Anabel had already gone a little way ahead. I followed her along the corridor, around a corner, into another corridor, and over to a double door that, with its heavy gold fittings and Gothic arch, looked like a church porch. Outwardly it didn’t look quite right for Anabel. I’d have expected her to have something more delicate. But she pushed one wing of the door open as if it were to be taken for granted, then turned to me. “What are you waiting for?”
“Is this the door to your dreams? But I thought … I mean, I don’t own anything of yours.”
“You don’t need it if I invite you in myself and ask you through the doorway.”
“Oh. Same as with vampires?”
Anabel looked puzzled. She obviously wasn’t very familiar with the habits of vampires. Well, demons were her special subject. “Come on. This will interest you. And help you to understand a few of the things involved in all this.”
If so, there was nothing I’d rather do than understand them. I went through the doorway and into a sunny garden: trees, bushes, and colorful flower beds surrounded a large lawn, emerald green, not a weed in sight, and perfectly mown, a typically English expanse of turf. I could see a house farther away.
A little white dog came running out of the bushes and raced toward us. He had a ball in his mouth and dropped it expectantly at Anabel’s feet before jumping up at her, wagging his tail.
“Stop it, Lancelot, you little rascal!” Anabel ruffled up his coat and laughed. Only now did I realize that so far I’d seen her only when she was tense and anxious. Laughter suited her. She picked up the ball that the dog had dropped and threw it into a flower bed. The little dog almost turned head over heels in his haste to catch up with his toy, a whirling bundle of fur on the green lawn.
I looked around the garden. “What did you want to show me?”
The radiance drained out of Anabel’s face. “Him.” She pointed to Lancelot, who had picked up the ball and was chasing back to us full speed ahead. “He was my very best friend. But now—see for yourself!”
At that moment Lancelot uttered a howl and collapsed as he ran. He lay on the lawn, twitching.
“Oh God, what’s the matter with him?” I was going to help the dog, but Anabel caught my arm and held it.
“He’s dying.”
“What?” I asked, horrified.
“It’s my fault. He took him away from me, do you understand? Because I broke the rules of the game. I’m showing you this so that you don’t make the same mistake.”
By he she must mean the demon. At that moment I wouldn’t have laughed even if she’d called him by that comical name. “But what … How can he … Why?” I stammered helplessly as the little dog lay on the ground in convulsions. He twitched once or twice more, then stretched out his legs and did not move again.
“In real life it took much longer,” said Anabel in a hollow voice. “He was lying outside my door trembling when I woke. He was in terrible pain, and he lay in my arms all the time looking at me, as if he wanted…” Her voice faltered. “The veterinarian says it was internal bleeding—he bled to death.”
“That’s … Oh, I’m so sorry,” I whispered. “But I don’t understand. You think the demon killed your dog?”
“Lancelot was my forfeit.” Anabel wiped a tear away from her cheek. “He was what I exchanged for my heart’s desire. So when I broke the rules, he took Lancelot away from me.”
I couldn’t take my eyes off the limp little body on the grass. The dog was the dearest, most precious thing that Anabel had? I mean, I loved Buttercup so much, I really did, but I loved Mia, Mom, and Lottie even more (if not necessarily in that order). And Papa, too, when I came to think of it. But even if Anabel didn’t have such a great relationship with her family, how about Arthur? When we first met, hadn’t she called him her one great love?
I tried to concentrate. “What exactly happened?” I asked, secretly promising myself to scream, loud and long, if she went on with her usual hints and half explanations that she never ended properly.
But Anabel surprised me. “I had sex,” she said, looking me in the eyes. “I’d sworn to keep my virginity until the end of the game, but … I didn’t think it was so important. And also I was convinced that no one would ever know. But you can’t keep any secrets from him. He was so angry, he threw me out of the circle.…”
“And murdered your dog,” I said, finishing the sentence for her. All just because she wasn’t a virgin anymore? That seemed to me a really stern reaction. Since when were demons so puritanical? It was unfair, too. I mean, it takes two to have sex, right? “Why wasn’t the de—er, he angry with Arthur, then?”
“Arthur,” breathed Anabel, and again tears came into her eyes. “That was the worst of it. To think that I hurt Arthur. I’ll never forget the way he looked at me.”
“The way Arthur…?” Confused, I stared at her. Then, suddenly, I understood. “It wasn’t with Arthur at all!” I said. “You slept with someone else!” Now all her evasions made sense at last, and it was so simple: Anabel had secretly had sex, and the demon had found out and told on her. The only question was who she had slept with. And why, if Arthur had been—how had she put it?—the tsunami of her life?
So there probably had been something in the rumors, as reported by the Tittle-Tattle blog, about the sparks still flying between her and her dead ex-boyfriend.
Anabel was looking hard at me. “Like I said, I wanted you to know. I owe you that. Because after all, I’m the one who got the boys into all this, and now you as well.”
Well, yes. I certainly understood that by now. And in any case, this is all my fault seemed to be one of Anabel’s favorite sayings.
But it obviously did her good to talk about it. She seemed strangely refreshed. With a gesture, she made the dead dog disappear from the lawn, conjured up a picnic rug out of nowhere, and spread it on the grass. A picnic basket and a few cushions completed the ensemble.
“What…?” I murmured.
“Believe me, if I could somehow make it not have happened, I would,” said Anabel, placing a little vase of flowers on the picnic rug. “I regret it every day. Arthur and I are like those pairs of lovers in great literature, destined for each other even beyond death. Romeo and Juliet. Tristan and Isolde…”
She’d certainly have made a good Ophelia; she had exactly the right amount of drama in her voice. Since her mind was on other things just now, it seemed to me that the right time for a catch question had come. I asked the first to occur to me.
“The book found in the cellar of your house—where does it actually come from?”
Anabel raised her head. “Oh, the book! Arthur knew at once that we’d found a real treasure. That the book would change our lives.”
Okay. I’d have to come back to that later. But first there was another detail that I wanted to clear up.
“Your ex-boyfriend Tom…,” I began.
“Oh, Tom?” Anabel looked surprised. Then she nodded. “I see. You must have been reading the Tittle-Tattle blog, and now you think…” She paused for a moment. “Everyone thinks so, of course. Even Arthur.”
What now? Did that mean she hadn’t slept with Tom at all? Who was it, then? And in addition …
“Arthur was always terribly jealous of Tom. He hated him,” said Anabel. “Because he was the first boy who kissed me.”
“And now Tom is dead?” As I said that, goose bumps crept over my arms.
“Yes,” Anabel confirmed quietly. “He died in a car accident in June. It wasn’t his fault. A drunk truck driver knocked him down.”
The goose bumps spread all over my body. Leaving aside all the other incidents, this seemed to me one remarkable coincidence too many.
Anabel straightened the picnic cushions. “As I said, I’m so sorry for what I did,” she said. “And ever since, I’ve done all I can to make sure things are the same between Arthur and me as before. He does say he’s forgiven me, but sometimes when I look into his eyes…” She wound her arms around herself. “I can still see the pain I gave him in them. And a chill that’s like a knife going into my heart.” Obviously she and Arthur shared a liking for emotional figures of speech. I was sorry for her, all the same. She really did seem deeply unhappy. “And then I’m afraid he will never see me the same way he did before,” she whispered. “I—oh, look, here he comes!”
I turned around. Yes, it was Arthur just coming through the door and onto the lawn, carrying a bottle of wine. The sunlight made his hair shine like pure gold. And somehow I suddenly felt an urge to run away.
“Please don’t tell him what we were talking about.” With a nervous laugh, Anabel brushed a lock of hair back from her face.
“Is that the real Arthur, or are you just dreaming of him?”
She laughed. “The real Arthur is lying in bed in Hampstead, I hope.”
“On his own, at that!” Arthur assured her.
Anabel went three steps toward him and flung her arms around his neck. Then she said, “Look who’s here,” and pointed to me. “I wanted to thank her.”
“Hi, Liv.” Was I imagining it, or was there a flash of something like triumph in his eyes? “How does it feel to be the heroine of the hour?” Arthur had put the wine bottle down and was embracing Anabel from behind, both hands around her waist. He tenderly pushed her heavy hair away from the nape of her neck and began covering it with kisses. “I’ve missed you so much, sweetie.”
I looked away, feeling moved and embarrassed.
“Excuse us, Liv,” said Anabel. “It’s just that … I’ve been living in Switzerland for the last three weeks, over a thousand kilometers away. We can meet only in our dreams.”
“Yes, but that’s so much better than Skyping.” With a laugh, Arthur drew Anabel even closer to him. “Would you like to share our picnic?”
“Er, no, I really don’t want to be in the way.” I did still have any number of open questions, but I also had plenty to think about for now.
Arthur drew Anabel down on the picnic rug. “A very sensible attitude,” he said, and Anabel added, “See you soon, Liv.” Neither of them watched as I opened the door and went out through Anabel’s porch and into the corridor again.