Music Box (The Dollhouse Books, #4) (11 page)

Pain entered her eyes. Trembling, I hugged her, holding her tightly. She collapsed into me, shivering.

“Why,” I cried, “why are you here?”

Rising from the floor, she stepped over to the window. Moonlight lit the angles of her face.

I walked to her, and gazed from the same window.

A tear was silver on her cheek as she turned to me. “Do you see me?”

“Of course. Of course I see you.” The words rushed from me.

She drew her hood back. “Do you really see me? Can’t you see who I am?” Her tone was anguished.

I searched her face, not understanding.

“I thought,” she said softly, “that if you ever saw me—the real me—you’d know me.”

I tried to answer her, but I had no words. I couldn’t begin to guess what she expected me to know. All I knew was the unease and terror that lay beneath everything as I stared at her—a sense of foreboding that I couldn’t explain to myself.

Her eyes were large in her narrow, heart-shaped face—haunting me. “I’ll tell you my story, of how I came to be here. Perhaps, in time, you’ll remember me.” Her eyelashes drifted down and her thin chest heaved. “But I don’t have long.”

Her head bowed. “I was at home, in my bedroom, asleep. I woke as Henry Batiste entered my room. He summoned a shadow and took me inside it. I was taken from my world to yours, taken to the dollhouse. Missouri was just thirteen then. She told me that Jessamine was a ghost, but I already knew. I knew the first time I looked at Jessamine. Another girl came down there—a girl Jessamine called Lilith. I pleaded with her to tell me how to get out of there. She said that it was my destiny to stay there forever. For days, I scrawled pictures and poetry, trying to purge my mind, trying to save my sanity. But I didn’t succeed. One night, in the bed chamber, I cut my wrists and waited to die. The shadow came, just before the moment of death. It told me it would harm my family if I didn’t do as it wanted, if I didn’t agree to serve it.” She paused for a moment. “I told it yes.”

Her gray-blue eyes stared into mine. “But you don’t die if you agree to go into the service of the serpent—you are spirited away and will remain between life and death. For eternity. You can never die.”

The weight of her words settled on me like a shroud. “In the tunnels of the dollhouse... I found your drawings and poems. And I found...
you
. You were.... dead.” The memory of seeing Prudence’s skeleton cut through me.

Her eyelashes grew wet. “The tunnels of the dollhouse belong to another realm—the world of the serpent. They are a portal. You could have been wandering any world in any universe—a world in which I died. I know that you know about the other worlds. You and I exist many times over. Please don’t grieve for one who has died—they’ve gone on to live again.”

I couldn’t speak. What she spoke of was the unimaginable.

“I tried to warn you and Missouri, about the shadow,” she said. “But from here in the tower, I am only able to send a pale shadow of myself, and only fleetingly. Before I am called back.”

A question burned in my mind. “What does the serpent want from you?” The words fell leaden from my lips.

Her gaze grew distant. “Sight.” She drew the symbol of infinity in the air and sketched two eyes in each of the loops. The image burned like cold fire in the air. “They use humans to see into other worlds.”

I drew back, not comprehending her words.

She closed her eyes. “They use us to see into other worlds, to find their prey. They roam from world to world through the universe.”

I eyed the crystalline object suspended in the air.

She followed my gaze. “That belongs to the serpent empress—the leader of the serpents. It’s a crystal with the highest vibration of any in the universe. It can transfer images from mind to mind. Each day, when I look into the crystal, I can see other worlds. My memories of those worlds are stored within the crystal. When the serpent looks into the images I have seen, she directs her species from planet to planet.”

“How does she see through it—the eye?”

“Francoeur—one of the servants of the castle—takes it to her each day.”

I stiffened. “She’s here? The serpent is here?”

“Yes.”

“I saw her... I saw her weeks ago, and I thought I was imagining her.”

“You weren’t imagining her. Her cave lies beneath the ocean, at the bottom of the cliff. The castle fountain—the one with the ugly gargoyles—is a deep well that draws water from her cave.”

I remembered the great spout of water that rose from the fountain on the day of the couplings, the day I was betrothed to Zach.

Her expression softened. “The serpent empress’s cave is the same one you entered when you escaped the dollhouse. When I sensed you moving towards the cave, I tried to go and help you—you and your double. One of you entered the water just before the other. And then the two of you became one.”

I exhaled steadily. “You saw me through the crystal eye—from here? And that time at the bay at Miami when I was drowning?”

“Yes, but I could only stay a few seconds. My energy is limited. And while you and Missouri have been at the castle, I couldn’t come to either of you at all. Everything here is under the castle’s control—they were able to block me from communicating with you.”

“Prudence... why were the girls taken to the dollhouse in the first place? And why them? It makes no sense. Any of it.”

She lifted stormy eyes to me. “Henry believes that all of us would either find our own way to the dollhouse or he would find the girls that were meant to be there. He believes that all of this is preordained. He wanted me because of a newspaper article he read, about my psychic ability. I’ve always had that ability, ever since I can remember. And he thought I would be of most use to the serpent, because I could see further than anyone. The shadow plagued me relentlessly, from the time I entered the dollhouse.”

She breathed out slowly. “The serpent wanted more of us in its service, so that it can see even further—but Missouri was too strong for it. And she made the others strong. She wouldn’t let any of them give in to the shadow. She beat herself up over what happened to me, but it wasn’t her fault.” Her eyes widened. “Because I could already see other worlds and ghosts, being in the dollhouse was too much for me. I could suddenly see evil that I’d never known before, and it broke me. I could sense Balthazar and the castle... and the tree that had existed on earth far before mankind ever did.”

“The tree that the castle was built upon?”

“Yes. And I could sense the hunger of the serpents. Exchanges between the serpent and humans goes back to the beginning of people on the earth. They were here long before us, in times when the earth was frozen. The serpent empress can inhabit the earth at any time she chooses, in her portal—the cave. The second book of the mirrored tree will show humanity how to use the serpents and their shadows at their will—to use them as servants to reach any part of the universes. But the serpents themselves cannot travel anywhere they wish. They are dependent upon us—they need our sight.”

I closed my eyes for a moment. “Please tell me, how do they use our sight? How does the serpent empress see through the crystal eye?”

“When Francoeur takes it, he puts it on the temple in an ocean cave at the bottom of the cliff. The serpent presses her third eye to it—which is a cavity in her forehead. Through the crystal eye, she sees everything I have seen. She communicates with the other serpents. She tells them what to do.” Prudence gazed downward. “Soon, it will be time for them to leave....”

I studied her pale face, holding my breath as I waited for her to continue.

“They’ll leave when every human is dead, except for those in the castle,” she whispered.

“Why must they kill every human before they leave?” My voice was dry and empty—a well without water.

“Because the castle wants it. Balthazar wants only his own kind to flourish on this earth. The castle wants the serpents to freeze the entire earth to a temperature that no one can survive. But the serpents are weary. Keeping the earth frozen is draining them. They’ll die if they remain much longer—they need to go somewhere where there are large deposits of the crystal that the eye is made from, as they need the vibrations of this crystal to heal. And the planet must be deathly cold. But they cannot leave until the person who summoned them—Henry—allows them to go, or until the second book of the Mirrored Tree is destroyed.”

“After they rest, where will they go?”

“To another planet that contains life. They prefer sea life to human, and those are the planets I direct them to.” She pointed to an array of charts and symbols pinned to the wall and lying on top of a heavy desk. “I’ve been taught how to chart and find planets in the universe.” Her gaze flickered over me. “I know that right now, you think I should kill myself, so that the serpent can never use me again. What is the death of one girl?”

“No!” I cried fiercely. “I don’t want you to die. Please, don’t say that.”

Her face hardened. “I would kill myself, a thousand times over, if I could. And I have tried, a thousand times over. I would ask you to run a sword through me—but a force that Henry keeps around me prevents me from being harmed. I am between life and death. I can’t die.” Tears streamed down her face. “I can’t die....”

Breath was thick in my lungs, like cement. I could never kill her, never cause her death, even if I was able to do so.

Frowning, I lifted my gaze to the distant trees being thrashed by the wind outside the window. I had known her death before—in the tunnels of the dollhouse. A darkness drew over me.

I had known her death
before
the dollhouse.

Before
.

But how? Where?

Images flashed through my mind.

I saw Prudence as a ghost—in the cave of the serpent and in the crypt, and in the dark water of the bay. I saw her bones in the crystal tunnels. I saw the Prudence of my dreams, tangled in sea grasses underwater. Always the ghost, the dead girl, the apparition, the unknowable....

The visions faded, and I saw her standing in front of me. Prudence in the flesh. Prudence with her pale, slightly-olive skin—not the ghost Prudence with all her blood drained away. Prudence with her pleading almond eyes and the high curve of her cheekbones that were so familiar.

I heard my father’s voice, telling me about the baby he and my mother lost when I was three. I saw my dream of my home in Miami, with the two young girls lying on the bed listening to music—I saw them turn at the same time... but this time, this time I saw their faces. The same dark hair and oval faces, only the younger one with blue eyes.

Tears slid across my cheeks and I nodded softly at her, my jaw quaking. “I know you....”

She waited silently, her blood-stained chest softly rising and falling.

“You are my sister,” I told her.

A sorrowful relief washed over Prudence’s face. “You know me,” she whispered.

We hugged, tears flowing freely.

My chest burned inside—an empty place. I felt myself pulled backward in time. Long-buried memories ripped free. I drew back, gazing into her face. “I remember. I remember myself when I was three, refusing to believe the baby would never be born. The baby was supposed to be my sister and I couldn’t understand how she could just leave like that.” My breath caught as the memories tumbled over each other. I gazed at Prudence through misted eyes. “I willed myself to follow you, to go where you had gone. I went to other worlds... worlds in which you had been already born. In those worlds, I was the ghost and no one could see me. I would stand at your crib and just stare. You were the only one who could see me. They were my secret worlds—the only times I was happy. My parents didn’t understand, and they made me forget. I still dreamed of you, for years afterwards. Until I didn’t. How did I forget you?”

“Cassie, you were supposed to let me go. In your world... I died. You never even knew me. I was never born.”

“I wanted you, so much. I couldn’t let you go.” I exhaled a long breath. “In the world you came from, were we all happy?”

A look of regret entered her eyes. “Cassie... there was an accident. When you were three. Mom and Dad had an argument one night, and Mom took you out in the car. She lost control of the car in the rain. Mom was pregnant with me at the time—she and I survived. But you died. I never knew the Cassie of my world.”

I had no reply. If one of us had to die that night on her earth, I was glad that it was me and that she had a chance to live.

She closed her eyes tightly. I wondered if she was thinking of the family she had left behind—the family that she had been missing from for seven years. In those seven years, she had only aged a month—the month she had spent in the dollhouse. She still looked fourteen. It was impossible to know how much time had passed in her world in all those years.

My view of her blurred through the wetness in my eyes, until she seemed as crystalline as the eye that turned in the air above us. Tears streamed down my face. Tears for the sister I’d never known, tears for her short life, tears for the wastelands of guilt and blame and regret that our family had lived in. I knew now, that people died—sometimes even before they had a chance to take their first breath. But death was just another birth—the person was never really gone. It wasn’t unnatural or ugly. It was nothing like the dark chains tying you to an existence between life and death—nothing like the horror Prudence lived each day here in the tower.

I understood now why I had been compelled to journey to the tower, why it held me in its grasp since the first day I’d seen it. My darkest nightmare had been the death of the sister I’d never known. It had been buried in the deepest parts of my mind, locked away from all points of light. This is what I had yearned for my whole life—the sister who stood before me. In other worlds, I’d grown up with her, known her—she’d been a part of my life and I’d been part of hers.

And I understood now the terror I had felt. It was the terror of the three-year-old me who had cowered in the rain-soaked woods the night my mother had crashed the car. It was the terror of watching my mother sitting unconscious at the wheel, blood dripping down her face. It was the terror of the words my father had said to me—that she had lost the baby. It was the blind terror of a small child who understood nothing. I didn’t understand lost. I had thought that if you lose something precious to you, then you should go and find it. You should go wherever you had to in order to get it back. I didn’t understand how they could just let her go.