Day: Amelia and the Rosen Vamp (Lima’s Words)_Days of Blood and Roses: A Magical Girl Thriller

> Golden head by golden head,

> Like two pigeons in one nest

> Folded in each other's wings,

> They lay down in their curtained bed: . . .

> Cheek to cheek and breast to breast

> Locked together in one nest.

> —Christina Georgina Rossetti,

> “Goblin Market”

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Even when twenty-four years made up almost a quarter of a century, Leslie still remembered the horror of it with a clarity that has never faded. It just grew with every visit to the reservoir of repressed memories that was (and still is) Leslie’s subconscious, wherein the words and actions of her younger self still shamble about like silent screams trying to speak out an ugly truth. Even so, she remembered her younger years with a tender aching in her chest like farewell kisses before departure, for she and Lima were sixteen and Ramona was seventeen, all three girls as young and clueless as their daughters are now.

Soon after Leslie and Ramona started looking after Lima’s mother, they began noticing other things besides the hung crosses and the garlic cloves. They noticed Lima averting her gaze whenever they made eye contact with her, and avoiding their proximity whenever they sat close to her on the couch to watch TV with her, and staying silent whenever they asked her what was bothering her. All of this came to a head one day when Lima finished tucking Amelia in bed for her afternoon nap. She herded Leslie and Ramona towards her room (which would become Celia’s twenty-four years later) and shut the door and looked at them for a long moment of silence, then turned away and faced the door.

Whatever was rolling through Lima’s mind, Leslie could only guess, but Ramona seemed to have an inkling of it in her thoughts, so Leslie whispered, “You know what’s going on?”

“I don’t know for sure,” Ramona said, pausing when Lima locked locked her door, “but if it’s what I think it is—”

“What is it?” Leslie said.

“I told you,” she said, “I don’t—”

“Just tell me what’s on your mind,” Leslie said.

Ramona was about to reply when both girls noticed Lima lingering at her door with her back still turned to them, and Leslie felt a tingling at the back of her neck and put her hand there to scratch it. It was an involuntary movement that wouldn’t have crossed her mind, till the sight of Lima’s long red locks began floating behind her in a wide spread. Within that spread of hair, Leslie noticed a faint trace of something at the base of her neck half-hidden beneath the collar of her blouse.

“Wait,” Leslie said, “is that a . . . hickey?”

Lima raised her hand to the very spot, but kept her face to the door and said nothing.

“What’s going on?” Ramona said.

Again, Lima stayed silent, so Leslie and Ramona approached her from behind and reached out and almost touched her shoulder—

“Don’t touch me,” Lima said, then more gently: “Please.”

So the two backed off, and after a time, Lima faced them but still averted her gaze from them, keeping her eyes to the floor as she approached her bed and sat on the edge. She had her fingers laced together over her lap, still keeping her eyes to the floor, and had her ankles crossed over it.

Lima stayed silent, so Leslie and Ramona waited. And waited. And waited some more.

When Amelia’s breathing became audible through the bedroom door down the hall in the master bedroom, Lima said, “It’s my fault.”

At her words, Leslie and Ramona traded looks.

“What is?” Ramona said.

Lima stayed silent.

“Is it okay if we sit with you?” Leslie said.

Lima nodded her head, so both girls sat with her on the bed, Leslie on her left and Ramona on her right and waited for her to say something. Anything. Neither girl reached for Lima’s clenched hands, but Leslie kept thinking about the garlic cloves at the corners of Lima’s room and the crosses hung on the walls and over the headboard of Lima’s bed. It was the same thing in Amelia’s bedroom and in every other room in the house.

Lima unclasped her hands and said, “Hold my hands.”

So Leslie took her left hand, and Ramona took her right hand, while Lima’s hair crept around the backs on the bed and began wrapping locks around their waists, catching their attention. Leslie looked up the creeping lock and messaged it in her hand, looking at Lima all the while as yet more of her locks kept wrapping around her waist.

“Try not to mind my hair too much,” Lima said.

“It’s okay,” Leslie said. “We’re used to it.”

“Tell us what’s wrong,” Ramona said.

“That’s the problem,” Lima said, and Lima squeezed her grip on both of their hands. “It’s hard for me to put it in words, as if someone or something was . . . taking them away.”

“What do you mean?” Leslie said.

“I don’t know how to say it any better than that,” she said. “When I told you what happened to my mom, it took a lot out of me just to let you know.”

“When she was in the hospital?” Ramona said.

“Yeah,” Lima said, pausing for a time and looking at the floor between her feet, her eyes clouded with images Leslie could only guess at from a sidelong view, “but I couldn’t say everything I needed to say.”

“Do you need us to help you?” Ramona said.

Lima nodded her head.

“Like, we tell you questions,” Leslie added, “and you answer?”

Again, she nodded her head.

So Leslie said, “When did this happen? When your mom got sick?”

“Before that,” Lima said.

“Where did this happen?” Ramona said.

“In my dreams,” she said. “In this house.”

At her words, Leslie glanced at the garlic cloves by the door jamb of Lima’s room and said, “Did anyone besides you and your mom enter this house?”

Again, Lima nodded, keeping her eyes to the floor between her feet, and said, “A little girl.”

Leslie and Ramona traded glances behind Lima’s back, and Leslie mouthed at Ramona, “It’s your turn.”

“Did she ask to be let in?” Ramona said.

“Yeah,” she said, and tears began trailing down her cheeks.

Again, Leslie and Ramona traded knowing glances behind Lima’s back, but Ramona shook her head, and Leslie got the message. They were not to broach the subject, unless Lima brought it up first, and even then, they had to approach it with care.

Now it was Leslie’s turn, so she paused, thinking of her question, and said, “Did she introduce herself?”

“No,” Lima said. “I asked her name.”

“And she told you?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s her name?” Ramona said.

“Alice,” she said.

“Did this ‘Alice’ ask for your name?” Leslie said.

“No,” Lima said. “She already knew my name.”

At that statement, Leslie and Ramona paused for a spell and traded knowing looks behind Lima’s back, but Ramona shook her head again, giving Leslie the same message. They were not to broach the subject, unless Lima brought it up first, but Leslie challenged her and mouthed, “Why not?”

Yet again, Ramona shook her head, so Leslie backed off and was about to ask Lima the second question on her mind, but Ramona beat her to it, saying, “How did she know your name?”

“She said she knew my mom,” Lima said.

At those words, Leslie gulped and looked at Ramona yet again behind Lima’s back and mouth, “Now?”

This time, though, Ramona paused for some moments, avoiding Leslie’s gaze, then let go of Lima’s hand and hugged her close to her body, and more of Lima’s locks snaked around her waist.

Lima looked up at her and said, “What is it?”

“It’s okay,” Ramona said, then leveled her gaze on Lima and nodded her head. Now was the time to broach the subject.

“Lima,” Leslie said, “do you believe in vampires?”

The girl nodded her head, and tears trailed her cheeks and dripped onto Ramona’s shirt. Lima then let go of Leslie’s hand and wrapped both of her arms around Ramona’s waist, leaning into her till they were both lying over the bed, with Raman’s back propped up on the stack pillows against the headboard and with Lima’s face buried in her bosom.

Ramona looked at Leslie and mouthed, “Go on.”

“Did the vampire try to bite you?” Leslie said.

Lima shook her head over Ramona’s bosom, making Ramona bite on her own lip.

Ramona said, “What did she do, then?”

What Lima couldn’t say in words, she said with her actions, raising herself up to Ramona’s face and kissing her lips, staying there for a moment longer, before Ramona bucked her hips and turned her over on the bed, breathing hard against the coils of Lima’s hair constricting around her body.

Leslie got off the bed and stared at the blank expression on Lima’s face, noting in particular the dull luster of her maroon eyes, and said, “Is she in a trance?”

“No,” Ramona said. “She’s dreaming.”

“Did you see anything?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Leslie, use your—ugh!” And Ramona winced against Lima's long coils of hair constricting her body, saying through gritted teeth, “Use your seals! Ugh, I can’t hold out much longer! Uuuuuuuuuugh!”

So Leslie manifested twelve omamori charms floating around her, four of them with the Greek word, ‘katapató,’ to ‘override’ the barrier between the waking world and the dream world, another four with the Greek word, ‘epikálymma,’ to ‘overlay’ Lima’s bedroom over Lima’s dream, and the last four with the Greek word, ‘apokalýpto,’ to ‘reveal’ what was going on in that dream. All four sets of charms, three in each set, Leslie placed on all four walls of Lima’s bedroom.

Imagining the room refracting and then merging together in her mind, Leslie said in quick succession, like a line of enchantments from a spell book, “Katapató! Epikálymma! Apokalýpto!” (Override! Overlay! Reveal!)

And the confines of Lima’s bedroom shook and rumbled, booming in succession like fireworks on the Fourth of July, like volleys of cannons exploding through the astral plane, shaking the bed and the side drawer and credenza and desk and rattling the lamp on the side drawer and the books in the low bookshelf. Her bedroom then doubled and tripled and quadrupled, blurring the lines with each new replication of her room, then synching back up into sharp lines like a camera lens coming into focus.

Ramona then got up from Lima’s bed and raised her arms and arched her back, allowing her body to stretch after Lima’s hair constricted around her diaphragm. Lima herself was asleep on her own bed in this dream, her once dull staring eyes now closed, so Leslie stretched out her hand to touch her forehead, but her hand passed through.

“This is only her dream,” Ramona said.

Leslie said, “Can’t we do anything to help her?”

“I’m afraid not,” Ramona said, placing her hand on Leslie’s shoulder. “All we can do is watch.”

“Only watch?”

“We can’t interfere in her dream without her consent,” Ramona said. “We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.”

So they both leaned against the wall opposite of Lima’s bed, Leslie one side of the door near the credenza on the other wall, and Ramona on the other side of the door next to the low bookshelf. Both girls waited in silence, waiting for Lima to stir from her bed, waiting for God knows what else to happen.

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While lagging behind Auna and Akami and the musketeers up the yellow-brick road, Shiromi continued her shenanigans with Nico, pestering her with her derrière, till Nico got fed up with it and said, “That’s it!” And she pinched Shiromi’s sides with merciless fingers.

“Ow!” Shiromi said, and looked back at Nico over her shoulder. “What was that for?”

“That’s to get you to stop,” she said, then pinched Shiromi’s butt cheeks, making her wince and shift herself up against the pommel of the saddle. “And that’s for being a cringe-freak!” And she pinched her butt again and again.

“Cut it out, I say!” Shiromi said, brushing away Nico’s hands and glaring at her over her shoulder. “It’s starting to hurt!”

“Only if you stop shoving your ass in my lap!” Nico said.

“All right, all right,” she said, humphing and pouting as she winced at the sore spots where Nico had pinched her. “You don’t have to be so forceful, Auna!”

Shiromi fell silent, while Nico paused at the Freudian slip and said, “Why’d you call me Auna?”

Shiromi remained silent.

“You’ve got anything to say?” Nico said, and waited for her reply, then: “What is it?”

It took a while for Shiromi to say anything, but when she did, it was the most un-Shiromi-like reply Nico heard her say: “Auna’s a vulnerable child. She’s been through more than you know, more than Akami and I could ever know.”

At her words, Nico’s thoughts drifted onto her secret relationship with Mara amid the storm of their parents’ yells and curses during their arguments. Nico thought of all the times she let Mara play with her bellybutton or fondle her breasts between her shirt, as she rubbed circles around Mara’s shoulder blades and said that everything would be okay. And before she knew it, Nico found herself leaning into Shiromi and rubbing circles around her shoulder blades.

“What are you doing?” Shiromi said, looking over her shoulder at a dreamy Nico. “What are you playing at?”

“This is how I comforted my sister,” Nico said, continuing the circles between her shoulder blades. “Whenever our parents fought, she’d get all scared and teary-eyed, so I’d rub circles on her back to calm her down.”

“What about you?” Shiromi said. “Were you scared?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “I’d be just as scared as her.”

“What would she do then?” Shiromi asked.

“I’d let her play with my belly button, or my breasts,” she said, and she stopped rubbing circles. “What about you and Akami and Auna? What would you all do when you were scared?”

“Well, for starters,” Shiromi said, “Akami would drink tea and serve Auna and me tea. She’s the tea-drinker of the three of us, and the tea cup would always jitter in her hand whenever she was scared. I would make fun of Akami for it and get our laughs out of it at her expense just to cheer up Auna.” Then she pulled up her right leg and bent her knee around the horn of the saddle and sat side-saddle, looking right along the road and then looking left at Nico, and said, “As for me, I’d pinch Auna in a playful manner, and she’d pinch me, sometimes a bit too hard, but that would keep her spirits up.”

“Did her parents fight?” Nico asked.

“It’s not that simple,” Shiromi said, shaking her head.

“What’s not simple?”

Again Shiromi stayed silent for a time, seeming to roll things through her head that Nico could only guess at, then said, “Auna never grew up with her mother, for her mother died after giving birth to her.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Nico said. “I didn’t—”

“It’s okay, really,” she said, and continued on with her story. “Auna’s father took care of her the best he could, never letting his true feelings manifest, till she started reading books. Auna was a voracious reader, reading many books by the time she was six, but she loved the Alice books of Lewis Carroll the best and read them over and over, till she all but memorized the chapters and the names of the characters and places.”

“That’s how she came up with you and Akami?” Nico said.

“Yep,” she said. “Auna imagined us into existence, because she had no real friends at school, and because life at home alone with her father was boring her. She gave us our names, and we played with her as young children do, till she got hurt. Akami and I comforted Auna the best we could, but she wouldn’t say how she got hurt. Auna would get hurt in other instances, as well, but she refused to answer our questions. I thought it was the bullies at school, but Akami suspected it was her father doing it.”

“Doing what?” Nico said.

“Pinching her,” she said, “in very intimate places.”

“Oh my god,” Nico said, raising a hand to her gaping mouth, thinking all kinds of horrendous thoughts. Even during Nico’s most risqué moments with Mara, she’d never do anything against her sister’s will, let alone do anything to hurt her or make her cry. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“I know what you mean,” Shiromi said. “When Akami told me her suspicions, I couldn’t believe it, either. It wasn’t until she posed the question at Auna, who broke down into tears, that our fears were confirmed.”

“What did you do after that?” Nico asked.

“We taught Auna how to defend herself,” Shiromi said, “using steak knives from the kitchen drawer and keeping them under her pillow at night just in case her father would do it again, but it backfired. When her father found the knives, he became angry and wanted to punish her, so he dragged her into his bedroom and berated her and called her all sorts of names behind closed doors, but Auna stood her ground. That’s when her father did it to her.”

Horrifying images flooded Nico’s thoughts, and her eyes welled with tears streaming down her face.

“Akami and I tried to intervene, but we couldn’t get past her father’s door, no matter how much we tried to get inside,” Shiromi said. “In the end, all Akami and I could do was wait till her father was finished with her. I’ve never heard Auna scream like that before or since, and I hope I never will again. Then it all stopped, and the door finally opened, and we found Auna underneath her father on the bed. We came in and pulled that beast of a father off of her and found Auna almost in a comatose state. We tried waking her up, but when our efforts failed, we carried her into her bedroom and waited for Auna to wake up. And when she did, she woke up without knowing who she was.”

Nico gulped. “What did you do?”

“We gave her a different name,” Shiromi said, “just as Auna had given us our own.”

“Alice?” Nico said.

Shiromi nodded.

That’s when it grew too much for Nico to bear, and she wiped her eyes of tears that still kept welling up like springs.

That’s when Shiromi pulled up the reins and leaned her legs out on the stirrups, stopping the horse in the middle of the road, and reached out her hand and wiped the tears from her riding companion’s face and said, “It pains me to say this, but Alice is Auna’s true self, while Akami and I are mere shades of it. Please don’t cry,” she added and cupped her hands on Nico’s cheeks and leaned and kissed her eyes and then her lips. “We’re all but shadows of who we really are.”

Nico just stared at her and said, “Why’d you—”

“Oh, just returning the favor,” Shiromi said and winked at her. “And there’s more where that came from.” Then, without warning, she slapped Nico in the face.

“Ow!” Nico cupped her palm against the sting of it on her cheek and yelled, “What the hell was that for?”

“That’s for pinching me,” Shiromi said and winked at her again, then pinched her legs against the horse’s sides, urging it into a brisk trot along a dust-covered stretch of yellow-brick road. “Wait, where are the others?”

Nico regained herself and looked over Shiromi’s shoulders along the road ahead of them and said, “Figures. With everything we’ve been doing, we must be far behind them now.”

So Shiromi kicked the sides of the horse, urging it into a full gallop along the road past fields of roses and irises and pansies and tulips and sweet peas and bluebonnets and violets, etc. Onward they rode, the air fluttering through their hair and the hems of their dresses, but the horse grew tired and began wheezing and huffing and puffing, slowing down to a canter along a dust-covered stretch of yellow-brick road that forked into two roads along both sides of a grove of zelkova trees.

“Which way did they go?” Nico asked.

“I have no idea,” Shiromi said.

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Lima’s first thoughts upon falling asleep were on her father, while nodding off into another dream.

When Lima opened her eyes upon this dream, she stirred to the silvery chime of distant bells just within earshot, turning onto her side and finding herself in her darkened room. She pulled herself over to the side drawer next to her bed and reached under the shade of a lamp and turned it on, casting a warm peach-colored light through the bedroom, and she looked about the room for some moments. She then threw off the sheets and sat up on the edge of her bed and looked down on the floor between her feet and raised her gaze, till it fell on the door ajar before her.

She couldn’t remember if she had opened it or not, though she figured she probably had. So she got off the bed and went to the door and pushed it, till the latch clicked fast through the slip plate. Lima turned back to the bed, but paused in mid-turn and looked back at the door she had just closed.

“Mom, is that you?” Lima said.

Silence reigned and nothing more.

Lima looked around the confines of her room again from right to left—the credenza along the first wall, the bed and side drawer with the lamp turned on along the second wall, the desk and chair overlooking the window with the curtain pulled over along the third wall, and the low bookshelf along the fourth wall right next to her bedroom door. She kept looking at these things till the silvery chime of distant bells drew her steps back towards the door, drew her hand towards the knob, opening it into the darkness, and drew her steps out into the upper hallway.

Her vision went blurry in the darkness, so she waited at the door, letting her eyes adjust. She then put her hand against the wall and felt her way as she passed the sewing room, her mother’s study, and the guest room, till she reached her mother’s bedroom at the end of the hall and knocked.

Nobody stirred.

“Mom?” she said and waited for her mother’s reply.

Nobody stirred.

Lima grabbed the knob and turned, but it stayed locked—something her mother never did before when she slept.

“Mom,” she said, “why did you—”

The sound of bells chiming in the distance drew Lima’s attention away from her mother’s room and down the stairs, so she descended into the entrance hall, where the source of the chiming grew stronger at the entrance door. Her steps then slowed to tiptoes, and she crept up to the door and placed her ear flat against it. The chiming was clear and strong, as if someone on the other side of it were jingling bells outside, so she peered out through the curtains but saw nothing there.

She reached for the knob, then paused there and looked back at the stair landing, thinking of her mother for some reason.

Lima ignored it and turned the knob and opened the door into the chill of an early spring night and found a little girl of around nine or ten standing on the veranda, wearing a sky-blue Sunday dress and skimmer hat atop her head. The little girl was looking down, so that the brim of her hat hid her face from view.

“May I come in?” the girl said.

“Eh, sure,” Lima said, then bent forward. “Are you lost?”

The girl looked up at her and nodded her head.

Lima reached out to her, but the girl backed away. “Don’t be scared,” Lima said. “It’s okay, sweetie. I won’t hurt you, I promise.”

“Are you sure?” the girl said.

“I’m sure,” she said. “Come on.” The girl put her hand in Lima’s, and Lima led her past the threshold of the entrance door and shut it and locked it, then switched on the ceiling lamp and got a good look at her face, wondering where this girl came from. “Where are your parents, sweetie?”

The girl remained silent.

“Do you know where your parents are?” she said.

The girl shook her head.

Lima paused for a spell, wondering if this girl knew her parents’ phone number (Lima could call them and let them know where they can pick up their daughter), but something in her silence disturbed her into looking at the girl’s face again—specifically at her eyes.

They were bloodshot, as if she’d been crying, so Lima kneeled till she was at the girl’s eye level and said, “Are you okay?”

The girl shook her head.

“Are you hurt anywhere?” Lima said.

The girl nodded.

“Where are you hurt, sweetie?”

The girl paused for a moment, as if deciding whether or not to let Lima know, but then she grabbed the hem of her Sunday dress and raised it almost past her thighs. Lima took her hand, keeping her from raising it any further, and gulped at what she saw.

A trickle of blood ran down the inside of the girl’s thigh.

“Who did this to you?” Lima said.

The girl stayed silent, but tears began to well up in her eyes and trail down her cheeks.

“Listen, you don’t have to be scared, okay?” Lima said, reaching out and wiping her cheeks with her fingers. “I’m right here with you, and I’ll protect you from whoever did it to you, but you need to tell me who did this to you. Can you do that for me?”

The girl nodded.

“Who did this to you?” Lima said.

The girl stayed silent for a time, then said, “Rubin.”

“Who is he?” she said, but the girl remained silent. “Is he someone you know?”

The girl nodded and said, “My father.”

At her reply, Lima gulped and then hugged the girl close to her, saying, “I’m so sorry you had to go through that. What’s your name, sweetie?”

“Alice,” she said.

Lima let go of her and said, “Alice, you don’t have to be scared anymore, okay? Come with me,” and she led Alice along the entrance hall past the staircase and into the guest restroom. “There’s toilet paper you can use. Wipe yourself after you’re done and flush it, understand?”

“I understand,” Alice said and shut the door.

Lima then sprinted into the kitchen and dialed ‘9-1-1’ on the phone beside the kitchen pantry and waited for someone to pick up, but she only heard static. She hung up and redialed the number and heard static, saying, “You’ve got to be kidding me,” and she picked it up and redialed but got the same result.

Meanwhile, in the restroom, there was the sound of the toilet paper roll rolling on the holder and tearing, then wiping, and then the flushing of the toilet.

Lima hung up the phone again and redialed, but again she got the same result and said, “God damn it! Why can’t I reach them?”

In the restroom, there was the sound of a faucet knob pulling up and the rush of water flowing past hands and draining into the sink. Then there was the wiping of hands against the towel on the towel rack.

When Alice opened the door, she said, “Where are you?”

“In the kitchen,” Lima said.

Alice appeared in the kitchen and said, “Is something wrong?”

“No, sweetie,” Lima said, and hung up the phone, “nothing’s wrong. Come with me,” and she reached out her hand, and Alice took it, and both girls went down the entrance hall and then up the stairs and into the upper hallway towards her room at the end of it. “I’ll let you sleep in my room for now.”

And she opened the door into the warm peach-colored light of the lamplit bedroom, and led Alice across the threshold, then led her towards her bed, whereon Alice sat and put her skimmer hat on top of Lima’s side drawer next to the lamp and looked at her as Lima headed for the door and opened it. Lima then turned and said, “If you need anything, just holler. I’ll be in the guest bedroom.”

“You’re not staying with me?” Alice said.

Lima paused for a moment, wondering if Alice needed company, and said, “You want me to stay with you?”

Alice nodded her head.

Again Lima paused, then said, “Are you sure?”

And again she nodded.

So Lima shut the door and approached Alice with something squirming around in her stomach, though she hadn’t a clue why it was there. She just sat beside Alice on the bed and wrapped her arm around Alice’s shoulders, hugging her close, and said, “Everything’s going to be okay, I promise.” And she got up off the bed and pulled the sheets over for Alice to climb into. “Nothing’s ever going to happen to you again,” she said and pulled the sheets over Alice and kissed her forehead.

Alice nodded her head and scooted over on the bed, so Lima could climb in with her.

“You really want me to stay with you?” Lima said.

Alice nodded her head.

So Lima reached under the lampshade and turned off the light, then climbed into bed and pulled the sheets over herself and Alice and said, “Go to sleep, okay?”

But then Alice turned on her side and wrapped her arms around Lima’s waist (“Alice, what are you—”) and said, “Please, hold me.”

Lima paused for a spell, then said, “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” she said and pulled herself closer to Lima’s body and put her face against her bosom. “I want you to hold me, Lima.”

Lima sucked in breath and looked down at her charge and said, “How did you—”

“Please, hold me,” Alice said.

So Lima relented and wrapped her arms around Alice’s shoulders, feeling Alice’s long hair tickling her forearms, and rolled onto her back and cradled Alice’s head on her shoulder. Lima combed her fingers along Alice’s hair and spread her bangs and kissed her forehead again and said, “Now go to sleep.”

Time passed, but Lima still felt Alice’s hold over her waist, still felt her shifting whenever Lima tried to move, so she said, “You still awake?”

Alice shifted her head over her shoulder, till she looked up at Lima’s eyes and said, “Can you sing me something?”

“I’m not much of a singer,” she said, “but I can try.” So she searched her mind for tunes she heard on the radio from Nat King Cole to Queen, but none of their lyrics came to mind. She didn’t feel like singing, either, but she had to do something to help this girl sleep. The only lines she remembered for sure were a section of lines she had memorized from Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” during spring break for a group recital the following week, so she began in whispers,

> “Golden head by golden head,

> Like two pigeons in one nest

> Folded in each other's wings,

> They lay down in their curtained bed:

> Like blossoms on one stem,

> Like two flakes of new-fall'n snow,

> Like two wands of ivory

> Tipped with gold for awful kings.

> Moon and stars gazed in at them,

> Wind sang to them lullaby,

> Lumbering owls forbore to fly,

> Not a bat flapped to and fro

> Round their rest:

> Cheek to cheek and breast to breast

> Locked together in one nest.”

When she finished, she found Alice fast asleep over her bosom, so Lima breathed in and exhaled and looked up towards the ceiling, thinking of her father and his rocky relationship with her mother before the divorce. After that, her mother had Lima’s last name changed back to ‘Hearn,’ probably to keep herself and Lima from remembering him, but names (like words) were double-edged. Names could cause pain as well as mask it, and with these thoughts fluttering like ghosts through her head, Lima drifted off back into the slow-wave anonymity of dreamless sleep.

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In the heady moments before it happened, before Alice came at her in a blur, before Auna turned around and faced her, before Auna even had a chance to gasp, Akami hoisted Auna over her shoulders into a fireman carry and rushed off the roof, leaping over the balustrade, and fell towards the street below amid Auna’s screams for her to stop. More screams erupted from the onlookers below them as they fell, but Akami regained her feet against the side of the building and ran down the brick facade like a roadrunner. Just before reaching the ground floor, she leaped and bounced against the sidewalk canopy like a trampoline, somersaulted through the air and landed like a gymnast on her feet with a hyperventilating Auna held snugly over her shoulders.

“Are you all right?” Akami said, putting her down.

“I’ll manage,” she said, then doubled over and clamped her hands onto her knees, wheezing.

The yokai and ghosts and dreamers alike stared at the two girls who had fallen from the sky and talked amongst themselves, but Akami ignored them and looked around her for two pairs of eyes peering at her and Auna from a street corner just around the edge of a nearby restaurant. She couldn’t get a direct line of sight of whoever loitered there around that corner, but she sensed yet another looming presence above her and peered up and saw Alice looking down from the balustrade of an adjacent building.

“Listen up, everyone,” Alice yelled down at the crowds below her. “I need your assistance, if you please,” and she raised her hand, causing the onlookers around them to stand at attention with blank faces and dull lifeless eyes. With a snap of Alice’s fingers, their bodies turned into the limber figures of Auna’s clones, cloaked in red tabards and wielding flintlock muskets and carbines and pistols.

They leveled their guns, but just before they fired off rounds, just before Auna had a chance to speak, Akami grabbed Auna’s hand and dashed down the street into the crowd of more unsuspecting onlookers, pulling Auna with her in a blur through the crowds and traffic—

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Just as a pair of Phantom Office operatives wearing black cloaks and masquerade masks fled from their position around that very corner that Akami had spied out. While one operative acted as lookout for any sign of Alice, the other one secreted himself into an old telephone booth a block away, where he dialed the number of his operatives in the Nura Club and waited for excruciating seconds for the other person to pick up. Just minutes ago, both men had received a text message asking all masqueraders to make haste to the Nura Club, the front name for an underground speakeasy that doubled as Phantom Office headquarters during this operation.

When the receiver picked up, he said, “Comrades, this is Adam Bailey. I just spotted Alice!”

“Where?” the person said on the other end of the line.

“On the rooftops of every building in this city,” he said. “She’s using the high ground and making clones of herself out of everyone she sees!”

“Ah, shit!” the person said on the other end of the line. “Where are you now?”

“I’m in a phone booth,” he said, then looked for his friend who was missing from his spot as his lookout. “Where the devil is he?” He turned around and saw his friend rounding the corner of the next block before losing sight of him.

“What’s going on?” the man said on the other end.

And before he could speak, the last sight he saw was that of a doppelgänger of Auna wearing a red tabard and aiming a flintlock pistol at his head through the pane of the telephone booth—

And his lights went out with a bang of gun smoke and shattering glass and the sleep of death.

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The blur of Akami and Auna zipped past several yokai and dreaming late-risers and ghosts along the streets, almost bowling them over with the turbulence of her wake like a passing dust devil running amok through the city streets and sidewalks. Tables at a curbside cafe toppled over, the hems of dresses and skirts rose up and flapped like flags, and several pedestrians threw curses at the girls in the midst of Akami’s wake.

She passed phantom rickshaws with their cursing yokai runners that said, “Hey, watch where you’re going, temee!” (jerks)

She passed Chinese passersby that scattered before her and Auna and said, “Get off the road, shabi!” (cunts)

She passed loiterers on street corners who turned their heads at them and said, “Nani ga . . . ?” (What the . . . ?)

She even passed several portly yokai sitting on stools and breakfasting on platefuls of rice omelettes and flapjacks with syrup at a curbside diner, chewing their meals as they saw Akami and Auna zooming by in a gust of wind, followed by a parade of curious doppelgänger dressed like red musketeers bearing their resemblances. These doppelgängers split into smaller groups and filtered through the crowds along the thoroughfares and side streets, disappearing from view.

Word began to spread amongst the inhabitants of this part of the Phantom Realms about the frolicking Akami and Auna and Alice’s red musketeers through the streets, perhaps as a rival cosplay parade to their masquerading counterparts. In addition to the masqueraders that came from those mysterious Oriental double doors earlier this morning, these red musketeer girls added yet another kink to the festivities of this part of the Phantom Realms.

As such, the spectral residents and tourists alike aimed their cameras and took pictures, but Akami managed to avoid any collisions with the thick throngs of ghosts and yokai and late-waking dreamers and phantom rickshaws along the winding streets of this unknown Chinatown or Koreatown or Japantown or whatever this place was. She had no time to look at specific street names, and even if she could, she couldn’t read Kanji or Hangul or Hiragana or Katakana, let alone stop for a better look. She just ran and ran and ran with her grip over Auna’s hand pulling the poor girl along with her like a flag fluttering in the wind.

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

Yet even as the dead traveled fast, Akami couldn’t escape Alice’s presence in the city. Doppelgängers of Alice as red musketeers kept flitting and capering through the throngs Akami passed, and the mere threat of their shadows kept following along the moving shadows of the crowds around her. So she kept on running like the human version of that roadrunner cartoon (beep beep!), juking through crowded street corners and sleepier thoroughfares, trying to shake Alice’s red musketeers off of her ass through street after street, but just as she thought she evaded her pursuers through yet another thoroughfare, she saw another group of cloaked figures wearing masks and brandishing revolvers and rifles blocking her exit on the other end of the thoroughfare.

“Masqueraders?” Akami said, skidding to a halt before she reached the end of the thoroughfare and pulling Auna back to her side. “What are they doing here?”

After regaining herself, Auna looked back and saw the other group of Alice’s doppelgängers brandishing flintlock muskets and pistols, now approaching the other end of the thoroughfare, before she looked back ahead of her up the street.

With Rancaster’s masked masqueraders before them and Alice’s red musketeers behind them, Auna and Akami stood back to back facing their foes, Auna facing the red musketeers and Akami facing the masqueraders. Auna manifested her guns in both hands, and Akami manifested her knives.

“We’re surrounded!” Auna said.

“I know!” Akami said.

Then both sides formed into ranks and aimed their guns at the opposing side, the masqueraders aiming their rifles and revolvers and the red musketeers aiming their muskets and carbines, both sides trapping the girls in no-man’s land—

When one of the masqueraders yelled, “Get down!”

So Akami and Auna dropped to the ground, flat on their stomachs, as a volley of thunderous shots filled the thoroughfare with clouds of gunsmoke and burnt cordite and the screams of those who were shot.

Then the smoke cleared, revealing a row of dead and dying red musketeers and masked masqueraders on both sides of the thoroughfare bleeding out pools of blood onto the street, and in between the carnage were Akami and Auna still flat on their stomachs yet unscathed. When the girls looked around, they bore witness to a transformation of the red musketeer girls back into the bystanders that Alice had transformed with the snap of her fingers just like Rancaster.

That’s when Akami sighted the entrance of an apartment residence before them, so she made her next move and scrambled to her feet and pulled Auna with her across the curb in a blur through the revolving glass doors of the entrance, spinning it like a top.

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Meanwhile, there stood the solitary figure of Alice Liddell on the roof of the Dragon Volant, looking over the balustrade at the carnage below her. She had witnessed Akami pulling Auna with her as she bolted for the entrance of the hotel, and she had heard one of the masqueraders shouting for the two girls to get down before the volleys. With her mind turning on these facts, Alice thought about Aaron Rancaster’s intelligence of infiltrators amidst the ranks of these masqueraders back at Katherine’s dream mansion, so she wondered if the dead and dying masqueraders below her were indeed those infiltrators or even just a cell of infiltrators taking orders from some unseen enemy in their midst.

Moments passed in these thoughts, till she said to herself, “What are you planning, Rancaster?”

That’s when a gray haze appeared behind her, followed by a voice that said, “It seems you’ve made a mess of things.”

Alice balled her fists over the balustrade railing and said, “I know what I’m doing!”

“Do you, really?” Rancaster said, materializing in the haze, and came over to her and put his hands over her shoulders, massaging them. “I’m beginning to wonder if you have what it takes to be a Queen of this realm.”

“I’m managing what I can despite the insolence of your retainers!” she said, shaking off his hands from her shoulders and turning to face him.

Rancaster fell silent for a spell, then said, “My retainers don’t seem to have much faith in you.”

“That’s your fault!” she said, manifesting her knife and pointing it at his face. “I can’t always keep track of your idiots in this city of yours!”

“Those ‘idiots’ below,” he said, “are not my retainers.”

“Then who are they?” she said.

“You’re the one directing this show,” Rancaster said.

“Then bugger off and let me handle it my way!”

“This isn’t Wonderland, Bambina,” he said. “Just because I’ve offered you this stage for your debut doesn’t mean I’ll let you spoil it. Acting in the same picture you’re directing is far more difficult than you think.”

“Then how do you expect me to keep track of all this?” Alice yelled. “I can’t be everywhere at once!”

“Not all actors can be controlled,” he said. “Not even God can do that. Was it not God himself who gave humanity free will?”

Alice looked at Rancaster’s mask-like face, mulling that question over in her mind, and sensed something in his tone, something that had irked her back in Katherine’s ballroom with his bumbling masqueraders retreating from the explosions of Kendra and Mara’s surprise assault. She now wracked her brain for the source of this nagging feeling, looking for any signs of it on Rancaster’s face, but it proved elusive.

“What do you know?” she said at last.

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t sidestep the question,” Alice said and stepped toward and placed the edge of her knife on Rancaster’s cheek. “What do you know about me?”

Rancaster just raised his hands, palms forwards, and said, “No more than what you know already, Bambina.”

“Are you sure?” she said, gripping the handle and fighting the urge to slice his cheek open. “Are you absolutely positive you’re not hiding anything from me?”

“You wound me, Bambina,” he said, casting his eyes to her feet, and turned around and began dissipating in a gray haze. Before he completely dissipated, he added, “Why should I hide anything from you? You were the love of my life while you lived, and you still are now, even when you doubt it.”

Alice lowered her blade, dissipating it in her hand, and lost herself in those very doubts. Oh, she wanted to believe every word Rancaster said, wanted to lose herself in the confidence he had in her, but she just couldn’t shake that nagging feeling of who she was and what she was really meant to be. In her mind, Alice was the heroine of her story playing her part to become Queen, but she wondered why it all felt . . . off somehow.

What part was she really playing?

The protagonist?

Or . . .

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Blustering past a beefy bellman and a French concierge at the front desk, fluttering loose papers off the front desk in her wake and kicking up clouds of dust as she went, Akami flew through lobby area and towards the elevators when something inexplicable happened to her feet. As Akami and Auna’s feet left the ground, both girls saw the carpet pattern of the floor blurring beneath their feet and found themselves floating back to the lobby area under someone else’s volition.

“Excusez-moi, mademoiselles,” (Excuse me, misses) the concierge said, waving them from the side hall back over to the front desk before placing them gently on the carpet. “Do you have a key-card with you?”

“No, we don’t,” Akami said, still holding onto Auna’s hand and casting quick glances towards the glass doors, where the bellman had witnessed the volleys and the resulting massacre between Alice’s red musketeer doppelgängers and Rancaster’s masquerading retainers in the street. “Can we purchase one?”

“Cash or credit?” the concierge asked, who looked over at the glass doors and began breaking into a sweat.

“Credit,” Akami said, and let go of Auna’s hand and grabbed a pen and a note card from the desk and wrote out an IOU note, stating,

> Send charges to Alice Liddell and Aaron Rancaster. They are the ones responsible for the tussle outside.

> —Akami

Akami slid the note towards the concierge, who picked it up and looked at it, then looked at the ’tussle outside,’ then looked at Akami and Auna, and then back at the IOU on the card.

“That ‘tussle outside,’” he said, looking from Akami to Auna. “Was that fireworks or gunshots?”

“Gunshots,” Akami said. “Listen, we’re in a hurry to get somewhere, as you can see, so can you—”

“Are you two all right? Do you need help?” he said and looked once again out through the glass doors into the street where now silence reigned between the red musketeers and the masqueraders still motionless in the street. “What in God’s name is going on out there?”

“They’re reenactors, Monsieur,” Akami said, writing the ‘Akami’ and ‘Auna Wenger’ in the guest book, “from the acting companies of Lady Alice and Lord Rancaster, respectively, but they’re currently outdoing each other on playing dead. It’s part of the festivities here.”

“Playing dead or not,” the concierge said, “they’re disturbing the peace! I nearly had a heart attack with all their commotion, and they’re all lying around in the street outside! That’ll deter the customers!”

“That’s what the IOU is for,” Akami said, “but whatever you do, keep them from entering this building, while we get prepared for later this evening.”

Akami held out a hand for a key to the door, but the concierge seemed to hesitate for an instant on looking over the names on the IOU, then looking at Akami and the ‘tussle outside’ again, before opening a drawer beneath the table and pulling out a key and saying, “It’s on the 10th floor, room no. 99. Just go straight from the elevator till you reach the end of the central hall and take a left and another left. The room is the last door to your left.”

Then Akami grabbed at the key, but the concierge held it away, saying, “Nah, ah, ah, Mademoiselle. I need to confirm your claim with Lord Rancaster himself, first, just to make sure everything is as you say.”

“Why?” Auna said.

“We’ve had a few rabble rousers claiming to be Rancaster for the last few weeks. This will only take a moment,” he said and put down the IOU note and picked up the rotary phone, then dialed a number and waited for someone to pick up, then said, “Sorry to bother you, Monsieur Rancaster, but I have a two girls at the Dragon Volant claiming that you’re— . . . Really, Monsieur? . . . And what of those red musketeer girls? What do you suppose— . . . I see. Well, then, I guess there’s no harm in letting them play out their antics if it’s for the festivities, and I do appreciate your charity, Monsieur, but I must insist— . . . I see what you mean, and I know what you’re talking about, but— . . . But, Monsieur, are you sure you don’t want me to call in the Phantom Office? The ruckus they’re causing outside could drive away customers! . . . Really? You’ve actually consulted the Phantom Office, and they sanctioned this? . . . I see. Well, then, I certainly hope the hubbub outside won’t drive the customers away, but I have two mademoiselles looking a little harried at the moment. . . . Ah, so they’re in character, are they? . . . Ah, I guess that explains things. So you and Alice just want me to play along? . . . I see. . . . All right, will do, Monsieur. Sorry for bothering you. . . . Ah, that’s quite all right. . . . Au revoir!” (Goodbye!)

“Are there any problems?” Akami said.

“None that I see now that everything’s been cleared up,” he said and put the key in the girl’s waiting palm. “Enjoy your stay at the Dragon Volant, mademoiselles.”

With key in hand, Akami grabbed Auna’s hand and dashed towards the three elevators and jabbed at the button, waiting out the excruciating seconds for one to come all the way down to the ground floor, then entered and jabbed at the Close button. Akami and Auna then turned back at the ringing of the rotary phone and saw the concierge jumping at it as if the ringing had been the roaring of a lion or a tiger or a bear. They saw him picking up the receiver just as the double doors slid closed.

“What’s with the phone ringing?” Auna said.

Akami said nothing.

So Auna said, “Akami, what’s going on?”

Yet Akami said nothing and just put her finger to Auna’s lips, saying, “Let’s wait here for a bit,” and she handed Auna her key to room no. 99. “Whatever you do, don’t lose this.”

Auna nodded her head and took the keys, lacing her fingers through the key ring.

All the while, Akami kept thinking of a way to use the elevator to gain access to the throne room, just as the last movement of Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique began its flourish on the radio speakers overhead. Auna looked at the Floor 10 button and then at the Floor 4 button, weighing the pros and cons of her next decision for a time, wondering if she should risk such a dangerous shortcut to the throne room. As Berlioz’s symphony began its final flourish, she made her decision.

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Alice Liddell looked back over the balustrade at the bodies of the dead incognito Phantom Office operatives and her red musketeer girls, before she chanced upon an idea. Just as she did before, she raised her hand the way Rancaster had shown her and smiled at her newfound talent of making the most out of the stuff of dead dreams and forgotten memories. She may have resented Rancaster for keeping certain details of his operation from her, but she appreciated him teaching her some of his own tricks.

She snapped her fingers and bore witness to the dead coming back to life in her image, saying, “Time for my entrance,” and disappeared from the rooftop.

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After going over the finer details of the subsequent investigations he and his brother Randal made over the last two weeks, Inspector Stephen Larking finished debriefing his team and stood up from his chair to stretch his legs a bit. He looked at the trio of men before him—first at Ronald Hamilton, then at Todd Curvan, then at Lt. Frank Shaefer—and said, “Any questions?”

No one had any for the inspector, at least none that he hadn’t already thought of himself.

Then his smartphone chimed inside his pocket, so he fished it out and said, “Stephen Larking here. What is it?”

“There’s a call for you,” the dispatcher said.

“From who?”

“A Monsieur Bertrand Dumont, the concierge of the Dragon Volant hotel,” she said. “Apparently, he wanted to inquire if you or anyone else had sanctioned the grounds of the Dragon Volant as a reenactment area, because he says there are red musketeer girls and masked masqueraders playing dead on the premises. Did you sanction this, sir?”

“There must be a mistake,” Stephen said. “Why is he asking?”

Ronald and Todd and Lt. Shaefer all looked at him.

“I’m not sure, but he said he called another man by the name of Monsieur Rancaster,” she said, “who told Dumont that the Phantom Office, your jurisdiction, had sanctioned it.”

Stephen tightened his grip on his smartphone and said, “Is Monsieur Dumont on the line right now?”

“No,” she said, “but I’ll connect you—”

“Did you tell him my name and credentials?” he said.

“No, I didn’t,” she said, then paused. “What’s going on, sir?”

“Can’t say over this line,” Stephen said. “Just connect me.” And he waited, while the despatch connected his line to the receptionist’s number at the Dragon Volant, creating static in his ear, then—

“This is Monsieur Bertrand Dumont speaking,” the concierge said in a French accent, then another distant voice of someone came over the line saying that the reenactors outside were getting up and . . . “Damn it, why here of all places? Monsieur, can you hold on a moment?”

“Sure,” Stephen said, then cupped his hand over the speaker. “Damn you, Lieutenant.”

“So I was right, then?” Lt. Shaefer said, standing up from his chair along with Ronald and Todd. “Shit’s gonna happen there?”

“Yeah,” Stephen said, “but don’t get cocky.”

“We won’t,” Lt. Shaefer said. “Is the drop ready?”

“Drop’s already there,” he said. “Just go and get prepared, and I’ll be there once this phone call ends.”

So the trio of men walked to the door of the Secret Room, and Lt. Shaefer opened it and walked out into a different part of the Phantom Realms, followed by Ronald and Todd in single file after him, while Stephen waited on hold over the line.

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After he asked the person on the other end of the line to “hold on a moment,” the concierge decided to get in character himself and said to the bellman, “Lock the doors, will you? I will not have a bunch of rabble rousing hooligans sullying the reputation of this hotel!”

“Yes, sir,” the bellman said, then positioned the door flush over the threshold and took out a key and inserted it into the security lock and twisted it, sliding the bolts into the floor and ceiling, but when he looked outside, he stared and gaped. “Wait a minute, sir! Outside! They’re—”

“Be quiet!” the concierge snapped. “Can’t you see I’m on the phone with someone else?”

“But, sir, I just—”

“I said, be quiet!” the concierge said, then shifted his attention to the other person on the line and said, “Bonjour, Monsieur. Sorry about the interruption. . . . I’m having something of an emergency here at the Dragon Volant, and I was . . . If you’re not the one who sanctioned this mess, then who did? . . . I see. That Rancaster did strike me as a bit of an odd one, but if that’s the case, then why are these hooligans outside the entrance doors? . . . Sit tight? You can’t be serious! They’re causing a major scene outside! . . . All right, all right, all right! Cross streets are Brazen Street and Grenville Street on the right side if you’re coming northbound. . . . That’s right, Monsieur, you can’t miss it. . . . Oh, and one more thing, Monsieur,” he added, looking at the elevator the two girls had entered.

“Sir! SIRRRRR!” the bellman screamed.

“I said, be quiet, damn you!” the concierge snapped, keeping his eyes on the elevators. “Sorry about that. . . . Anyway, I just met two mademoiselles who entered this hotel right after those hooligans caused a ruckus.” Then he checked the guestbook and said, “One is named Akami, spelled A-k-a-m-i, and the other is named Auna Wenger, spelled A-u-n-a and W-e-n-g-e-r. . . . Yes, that’s right. . . . What is it, Monsieur?” He then gripped the handset of the phone as he listened to the person on the other end of the line give his own name and occupation before giving him the names of two other girls and describing their appearance, so he flipped through the pages of the guest book and said, “I haven’t seen anyone of either description entering these premises, neither this ‘Mara,’ nor this ‘Nico’ person. What’s going on here, Monsieur?”

As he listened further to the detective on the other end, the concierge’s face grew pale, and his brows knitted at the facts of an on-going investigation of a family disappearance at the Cairns residence and the subsequent retrieval of both sisters from the old Rancaster district and Mara’s disappearance from the Nayland Hospital later on last night. The detective on the other side of the line then gave him the number of his smartphone and told him to contact him if anything else came up during his shift.

When the conversation ended, he put the handset back on its cradle and looked at what Akami had written on the IOU note and gulped. Indeed, the anomalous Akami and Auna seemed like twins going incognito, so he had entertained the idea of them using aliases to help them run away from home, but what the detective had said about that investigation contradicted his thoughts.

“Inspector Stephen Larking of the Larking baronetcy,” he said, taking up the IOU note in his hand and reading it over to remind himself of what’s going on. “My God, what’s going on here?”

“Oh, just your little part in the play,” someone said.

He looked up and saw Akami there at the reception when she should’ve been with Auna in the elevator, so he looked back at the elevator before turning back at the girl and gulping down a growing sense of uneasiness about this girl.

Even so, he played his part and said, “My part in the play? I don’t understand. What ‘play’ are you talking about? And how did you get down here so fast? Aren’t you supposed to be with your friend?”

“You ask too many questions for a throwaway character,” she said and manifested a knife in her hand—

Already stained with blood.

He then looked to the bellman at the door and found him lifeless on the floor, bleeding a spreading pool of blood from a slashed throat that seeped into the carpet of the entrance. Yet before he could run away from this girl, before he could scream, before he could even gasp in horror at the thought of his own demise, he saw a flash of her blade and felt the tearing of his throat and tasted iron on his breath and smelled his own blood as he bled out from his wound.

He doubled over the counter space of the reception desk, bleeding out over the countertop, and with his last glimmer of consciousness, he heard her whisper in his ear, “To answer your questions, your part in this play is your death at my hands, and the play in question is my own coronation, and I got down here with the snap of my fingers. Compliments go to Rancaster for teaching me that trick! As for my ‘friend,’ I’ll be meeting her shortly, but you won’t be around to see it, I’m afraid. But not to worry, Monsieur. I’ll make sure to send my regards in a card and mail it to ‘Nowhere’ for a nobody like you.”

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After killing the bellman and the concierge, Alice walked towards the fallen bellman and crouched and searched in the bellman’s trouser pockets and pulled out a key, then unlocked the security bolts on the revolving glass doors and invited her expanded troop of red musketeer girls into the hotel lobby. She ordered a third of their number to stand guard and watch the revolving doors for any unknown visitors, saying to shoot at anyone not resembling Lord Rancaster on sight, while the remaining two thirds followed Alice towards the three elevators.

She closed her eyes as she pressed the button and gleaned Akami’s thoughts and location, so she smiled and said, “Two can play at that game, love.”

When a pair of elevator doors slid open before them, she ordered the second third of her red musketeers to take one elevator to the tenth floor, while the remaining third would accompany her in the third elevator to the fifth floor.

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After the elevator doors closed, Auna noticed that Akami didn’t press the Floor 10 button, but merely waited for the last movement of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique to finish its final flourish on the radio speakers. So Auna waited for her to press it, but when she didn’t, she went to press it for her, but Akami snatched her by the wrist and said, “Don’t.”

“Why not?” Auna said, but Akami stayed silent for a time as if she were thinking of something. “Is something wrong?”

Akami put a finger to her lips, indicating that they speak in whispers, and said, “I need you to follow my instructions exactly as I say when I say it, because this is a dangerous ritual that will trap us if you make a single mistake. Do you understand?”

Auna nodded her head, then said, “What are we doing exactly?”

“It’s called the ‘Elevator Ritual,’” Akami said, and looked at her in a way that gave Auna gooseflesh, for she had heard of this infamous game. “If you succeed in completing it, you will get to your destination in a short time. Are you ready?”

At her question, Auna gulped down any qualms she had and nodded her head, so Akami pushed the Floor 4 button and said, “Whatever you do, don’t get out of this elevator, till you reach the 10th floor for the second time. Even when these elevator doors open, don’t go out until it reaches the 10th floor for the second time, got that?”

Again, Auna nodded that she understood as the elevator ascended three flights to the fourth floor.

When they reached the fourth floor and the doors opened, both girls remained inside, and Akami pushed the Floor 2 button. The elevator doors closed, and they descended two flights to the second floor. When the doors opened, both girls remained inside, and Akami pushed the Floor 6 button. The elevator doors closed, and they ascended four flights to the sixth floor. When the doors opened, both girls remained inside, and Akami pushed the Floor 2 button. The elevator doors closed, and they descended four flights to the second floor. When the doors opened, both girls remained inside, and Akami pushed the Floor 10 button. The elevator doors closed again, and they ascended eight flights to the tenth floor.

Yet just as they began their ascent, the radio speakers burst to life with a resounding click, like the click of a latch or the sliding of a bolt, through the interior of the elevator that raised goosebumps on Auna’s forearms.

“What was that?” Auna said.

“I don’t know,” Akami said, “but I think—”

“Now my tale has come to an end, my dears,” Rancaster said through the speakers, “and so draws the end of our stay here. How do you like it?”

Auna gasped, but Akami cupped her hand over Auna’s mouth and said through hoarse whispers, “Be quiet! He could be anywhere in this building, understand?”

Auna nodded her head, so Akami let her go and put a finger to her lips, indicating complete silence.

So both girls waited out the static of radio silence with the hint of something audible within the speakers, perhaps someone moving with hurried reflexes and tugging at something heavy and dislodging it from its place.

“I guess I’ll take that as a ‘No,’” the man said through the speakers, “but not to worry. I’ve got one more trick up my sleeve.”

Then a metallic double-click echoed through the static, like the action of a foreshock loading a cartridge shell into a loading port of a shotgun, catching both girls’ attention and riveting their gazes up at the speakers.

Then another voice, and girl’s voice, said through the speakers, “Ah, fuck, we’re screwed!”

“Was that Nico or Shiromi?” Auna said.

Akami shook her head, indicating that it wasn’t either.

And the tugging noises continued along with the heaving grunts of two girls, and the creaking of old nails and the squeaking of rusted hinges filled the static of the speakers, till all was silence for but a moment—

When the boom of a shotgun blast and splintering debris flared through the speakers, causing Auna and Akami to crouch and cover their ears. Another metallic double-click and another boom and more splintering debris flared through the speakers, followed by yet another double-click and a third boom, and a scream of agony roared through the speakers.

“Ramona,” another girl screamed, as this ‘Ramona’ girl dropped with a thud on the floor, followed by the bang of something heavy and flat falling onto the floor, so her friend kept saying, “Don’t move! It’s gonna be okay! It’s gonna be—”

Then yet another double-click and a fourth boom cut off the girl’s voice like the sickening crunch of a rib-breaking body shot. And in Auna’s mind, she saw the spattering of blood against the lid of a trapdoor and on the floor boards and on the lower part of the wall of some room she didn’t recognize. Then arose a moment later the image of a girl in her mind, perhaps one of the girls from the speakers, a girl Auna’s age that she thought she recognized, if only because she bore a passing resemblance to someone she knew from way back in the haze of her childhood memory, someone whose name was lisping on the tip of her tongue, lisping with the letter L . . .

“What did you say?” Akami said.

Her words brought Auna back to the present moment.

“Le . . . Le . . .” Auna said.

“Leslie?” Akami said. “I think that’s what you said.”

“Yeah. That’s it,” Auna said. “Leslie . . . Do you remember anyone by that name?”

Akami shook her head, then looked at the indicator lights with the number, ’10,’ when the elevator reached the tenth floor and opened its doors. Auna was about to move, but Akami grabbed a hold of her wrist and said, “Not yet. The second time, remember?”

Auna looked at her and blinked, wracking her brains over Akami’s instructions when they entered the elevator, then nodded and said, “What do we do when we go out?”

“Go straight all the way to the end of that hall and keep turning left till you reach room no. 99, the last door on your left,” Akami said, then pressed the Floor 5 button. “A young woman will enter this elevator on the 5th floor. When she enters, don’t look at her, and don’t speak to her, even when she talks to you. Even if you recognize her voice, don’t acknowledge her in any way, got that?”

Auna nodded that she understood.

“And when you get out on the 10th floor,” Akami added, “don’t look back. Whatever you do, don’t look back.”

Again, Auna nodded that she understood, so Akami kept pressing the Floor 5 button, but the elevator refused to shut. She then pressed the Closed button over and over. “Why won’t it shut?”

Auna looked out into the tenth floor and gasped at the sight of Rancaster himself dissipating a shotgun from his hand and then a side table next to him, before turning to her and saying, “Hold the elevator for me, bambina!”

Akami cursed and kept pressing the Close button, but the doors stayed open, so Auna attempted to walk out but bumped into an invisible barrier.

Both girls put their hands up against what felt like cold glass, and a stab of horror shuddered through Auna’s heart. Akami unsheathed the sword she had stolen from the Red Knight in one hand and manifested her knife in the other, while Auna manifested a revolver in one hand as she held onto the key ring in the other, but an invisible force flung both girls against the back wall of the elevator, jolting the whole compartment on impact and dislodging their weapons and sending them clattering to the floor, leaving them pinned against the elevator’s backwall with their hands over their heads and their palm facing forwards. Yet through it all, Auna still held onto the key to room no. 99.

Rancaster came strolling towards the elevators as if it was an ordinary day, saying, “Thank you for waiting,” passed through the invisible barrier and stepped inside.

All the while, Auna caught a glimpse of the third door to the left with a splintered door panel inside it just before the elevator doors closed.

As they started their descent, Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique began the first flourish of its first movement on the radio speakers.

“Ah, I haven’t heard this symphony in years,” Rancaster said, as if passing some small talk amongst casual acquaintances, “not since I shot Leslie and Ramona with a shotgun moments ago, though the first time was a bit different. They’re old news from years ago when your mother was still a snot-nosed elementary school brat, so don’t mind them too much. Just cheer up and look forward to your coronation! I know I am!”

Tears welled up in Auna’s eyes, and she said, “Why did you—”

“Oh, don’t cry yourself silly, bambina,” Rancaster said. “Leslie was just a woman you met in your dreams, that’s all. Nothing more, nothing less, just a figment of your imagination.”

“What’s the meaning of this?” Akami said, struggling against the man’s psychokinesis. “Why are you—”

Another invisible force clamped over her mouth, stopping her from speaking, so Rancaster said, “Oh, let’s just say that I’m tying up loose ends, which includes you, you traitor!” And he backhanded Akami across her face, before he turned back to Auna and looked at her eyes and ran his finger along her jaw and up to her chin, but she squeezed her eyes shut and squirmed at his touch. “I’m doing all of this for you, bambina, believe me,” he added, then leaned forward and kissed her lips, even when Auna turned away and blinked back more tears, before noticing the key in her hand. “Don’t lose that key, darling.”

When they reached the fifth floor and the doors opened, both girls remained in place on the back wall and saw Alice Liddell, who just stared at the trio outside of the threshold.

Rancaster smiled and turned around and said, “Right on time, Bambina! Did you miss me?”

----------------------------------------

With the options before them, Nico chose right, but Shiromi chose left. Shiromi asked why Nico wanted to go right, and Nico said that she wasn’t too keen on taking the left-hand path, because she wasn’t left-handed like her sister, Mara. Shiromi said her reasoning was a ridiculous one, based on needless superstition, to which Nico humphed and wouldn’t budge from her position, and neither would Shiromi.

To decide which path to take, they played paper rock scissors, with Shiromi saying, “Best two out of three wins decides it.”

Here were the results: Nico beat Shiromi’s scissors with rock in the first round, Shiromi beat Nico’s rock with paper in the second round, and Nico beat Shiromi’s paper with scissors in the deciding round.

“You cheated,” Shiromi said.

“Did not,” Nico said.

“Did, too!”

“Did not,” Nico said, “and you know it! I won fair and square. Now can we go, please? We don’t have all morning, you know.”

Shiromi pouted but relented and pressed her legs against the horse’s sides, urging it into a brisk trot along the right path. Then, just before Nico had a chance to savor her victory over her stalwart companion, Shiromi yanked the reins over to the left and pressed her foot against its left side, urging it into a sudden gallop along the left side path for a few yards.

“Hey, what are you doing?” Nico said, and shoved her riding companion forwards in the saddle, which pressed her butt once again into her lap. “We’re supposed to go right!”

“You should know one thing about horse riding,” Shiromi said, turning back over her shoulder and winking at the flustered Nico. “Unlike you, I’m the one who knows how to ride, and if you’re going to hitch a ride with me, I’m the one deciding where we go, got that?”

“Fine! Have it your way, geez,” Nico said, pouting, but letting it go after Shiromi had trotted the horse along the yellow-brick path for several yards in silence. In that silence, in which Shiromi didn’t pester her with her derrière for once, Nico thought of Akami’s words about free will and her own destiny that only she could decide, mulling it over in her mind for any indication of what that meant, and said, “Shiromi, I have a question.”

“What is it?” she said.

“Do you believe in free will?”

Shiromi looked back over her shoulder at Nico and cocked an eyebrow, then smiled and said, “Yes, I do. I’m free to stay up as long as I want, free to twirl my knife around like a toy, free to piss off Akami, free to push my ass into your lap, free to do anything I want, really. You know why?”

“Because of Auna?” Nico said.

“Yeah,” she said. “Akami told you about it, didn’t she?”

Nico nodded. “Yeah.”

Shiromi turned back and looked ahead of her past the bobbing horse’s head and said, “I know Akami and I have our differences, but one thing we both can agree on is that we would be nothing without Auna. She gave us more than free will; she gave us a choice, one that would decide both of our destinies, and with that choice came a responsibility to be there for her if she needed us. And by God, we were there for her, whether she was Auna Wenger or Alice Liddell. It didn’t matter which.”

“You mean,” Nico said, rolling her observation through her head, “Auna and Alice are one and the same?”

“Exactly,” she said and remained silent for a long spell as she trotted the horse along the road, then: “Promise me something.”

“What is it?” Nico said.

“When you meet Alice,” she said, “try not to kill her, if you can. Alice is as much a part of Auna as Auna is a part of Alice, like two sides of the same coin. For my sake and for Akami’s sake, try to talk to her first.”

“You still love her, don’t you?” Nico said.

Shiromi nodded her head but refrained from looking back behind her, but Nico heard her sniffling and saw her wiping her eyes, it seemed. So Nico scooted up against Shiromi in the saddle, spreading her thighs against hers, leaning over her and wrapping her arms around her waist, and hugging her close to her body the way she had done with Mara.

“What are you doing?” Shiromi said.

“Cuddling,” Nico said, and rested her head just above her shoulder blades, rocking with her body to the cantering motions of the horse along the road. “Wake me up when we get there—wherever ‘there’ is.”

----------------------------------------

After ditching his cloak in a public trash can, John Crane wandered about the streets of Chinatown, keeping to the less traveled byways and avoiding crowds meeting in shops, bars, restaurants, and delis for breakfast. The air was a-waft with many flavors in the morning, from steaming dumplings and ramen noodles to toasting subs and roasting poultries of many kinds, all of which watered his mouth and grumbled his stomach.

So he entered the first eatery that caught his eye, a curb-side diner serving rice omelets and flapjacks with syrup and tea, so he sat next to one of the portly yokai and ordered. After getting served, John dug in with his fork and listened to the breakfasters talking about something that piqued his interest.

He said to the yokai next to him, “Doushita?” (What happened?)

“It was a group of red musketeer girls,” the yokai said in Japanese in between shoveling more pancakes into his mouth. “They were chasing after two other girls that looked just like them. It’s a queer way to start the morning, eh?”

“Yeah,” John said and thought of his words. “Do you know what they look like, these red musketeer girls?”

“I do,” the yokai said, then looked at him and grinned a wide set of teeth across his face. “I saw them, actually, with my own eyes. They were rather charming maids in their own way, one in a school uniform and the other in a red Sunday dress with a sheathed sword hanging from a belt around her dainty waist. Aye, they both had their own charm about them, though they’re not like the original, as far as I’ve heard.”

He paused again, thinking of the anomalous girl in the sky-blue Sunday dress and red mask who had enacted the part of the doomed Prince Prospero by opening the double door of the grandfather clock in Katherine’s ballroom, and said, “Then who’s the original?”

The portly yokai looked at John with his beady eyes sunken into his chubby yokai face and said, “You’re not from around here, are you?”

“No, I’m not,” John said, “but who’s the original?”

“I’ve heard it’s Alice Liddell, the girl who came back from the dead last night,” he said.

“Have you heard what happened last night?” he said.

“I’m not too sure of the details, last I’ve heard,” the yokai said, “but I’ve heard that Alice had some serious heat put on Rancaster’s masqueraders.”

“What exactly happened?” John said.

The yokai said, “I’ve heard Alice said she’d hunt down these masqueraders for turning tail on her last night, these yellow-bellied scoundrels! Heard many of them were running around town and using up every phantom rickshaw in sight trying to escape Alice’s wrath in the form of these charming red musketeer girls.”

“I see,” John said and shifted the subject onto any tussles between the masqueraders and red musketeer girls just to pass the time and blend in, so that those red musketeer girls won’t single him out if they passed by the restaurant he was eating at. Through it all, John held his composure under a taut string of heartbeats thumping in his chest and kept eating and nodding to the yokai’s unsuspecting observations.

After he finished his meal, he thanked his new acquaintance for the information and left.

He had to find his comrades and warn them, so he took out his smartphone to dial the number of his closest friends but stopped when he saw the text message in his in-box. When he opened it, he read,

> Comrades,

> Emergency meeting at the Nura Club. Hurry!

----------------------------------------

In one of the narrow back alleys of a drowsy Chinatown, where the rays of the dawning sun have yet to pour into the street, a trio of men opened the door in the brick wall of a dead end and crept down the alley, unseen and unheard and unknown. The swaying red lanterns had dimmed, and the smell of dissipated fireworks still lingered in the air like soft undercurrents of last night’s festivities, and the three men slipped into the growing crowd of the teeming streets, just now beginning to stir like any other day in the Phantom Realms.

“You know where this ‘drop’ is?” Ronald said.

“Yeah,” Lt. Shaefer said, leading the way. “Todd and I already scoped it out.”

“And what’s a ‘drop,’ anyway?” Ronald said. “You moderns always use terms differently from the way I did.”

“In this case,” Todd Curvan said, dropping back and walking side by side with Ronald, “we call it a dead drop.”

“Why so?”

“Because Roy dropped supplies for us at a predetermined location last night during his own dream dive,” Lt. Shaefer said, “and we’ll pick them up. We call it a ‘dead drop,’ because we don’t have direct contact with Roy.”

“I see,” Ronald said and smiled at his own sheepishness. “I was about to say, ‘dead as a doornail,’ but I suspect we’re not going to pick up door nails, are we?”

Lt. Shaefer shook his head and looked back at Ronald, but he said nothing, so Todd said, “Are you always this talkative on operations?”

“Not always,” he said. “Just making small talk. You know, blending in? Acting casual? Not looking like overworked workaholics with grapefruits between our legs?”

Lt. Shaefer and Todd slowed to a halt and looked at Ronald in the midst of the teeming crowd, then looked at the passersby staring back at them like they were outsiders.

“Look around you,” Ronald said, then smiled a wry smile. “This is an ordinary day in the extraordinary realm of dreams, boys, where dreamers and ghosts and other manner of living and non-living entities can read you like a book if you slip up. You’ve got to live the part, not just act it.”

Both men looked at each other and said, “Small talk?”

“Exactly,” Ronald said, then leaned between Lt. Shaefer and Todd and added, “We’re being followed. Don’t look back, or they’ll know we’re on to them. Just keep walking to our destination as if nothing’s up, and we’ll see what we can do when we’re there.”

So to keep from attracting unwanted attention from the masqueraders, Ronald picked the first subject that came to mind, lovely women, and egged on his friends to follow suit. Soon all three of them began walking the walk and talking the talk of three party-drunk blokes, still steaming from a night of drinking and chasing cute girls and telling raunchy jokes. They kept up their ruse for the entire trip towards the drop zone in a clothing store without anyone taking a second glance at them except for the pair of masqueraders who had ditched their cloaks and masks in a public trash can outside the entrance before following the trio into the clothing store.

----------------------------------------

Yet Ronald and his friends weren’t the only ones getting tailed. Two other operatives from the Phantom Office had also ditched their cloaks and masks in the same trash can and were lingering outside the clothing store.

One of them was already on his smartphone dialing his lieutenant’s number and saying, “Comrades, this is Benson. . . . Yes, we’ve spotted Ronnie and his comrades at the first drop zone, but there are two masqueraders following them inside the store. Do you want us to tail those two?”

He listened to his lieutenant telling him to ignore the two masqueraders, but he said, “But, ma’am—“ He listened again to his lieutenant giving out instruction to get to Lt. Shaefer and his team, ASAP, while she’d inform their operatives at the Nura Club of their observations on Alice. “Okay, we’ll do that once they leave the premises. . . . We will, Anne, don’t worry. Just get to the Nura Club and let them know, and ditch your mask and cloak! Those red musketeers are killing anyone with cloaks and masks on, masqueraders and our guys alike. . . . Yes, we’ll keep you updated. Over and out.”

“What are we doing?” Cory said.

“We’ll lay low for a bit, till Lt. Shaefer and his team shake off their tails,” he said. “We’ll meet them once they do.”

“But why?” Cory said.

“Because Anne ordered us to,” he said. “That’s why!”

----------------------------------------

At first, John kept walking as usual amongst the crowds, but when the pedestrians dwindled towards the seedier parts of the neighborhood, he broke into a run past the near-empty streets and alleyways still in the shade of an early morning sunrise. When he reached a dead end, he bolted full tilt at the wall and leaped with arms outstretched and caught the top edge of the wall, then hoisted himself over and landed in a squatting position on the balls of his feet.

He then sprinted down the alley and cut into the side stairs from the sidewalk into the entrance of the hidden Nura Club and knocked three times at the door.

Then a younger man who hadn’t yet taken off his mask or cloak met up with John, huffing and puffing, so John said, “Ditch your mask and cloak, old boy! Quick now, before those red musketeers catch sight of you!” And when the man took off his mask and cloak, John said, “Ambrose, thank God you’re alive!”

“Just barely,” Ambrose said, still huffing and puffing and now bending over and clutching his knees.

So John took those incriminating articles and went over to the dead end of the alley and disposed of them in a trash can. “Where’s Adam?”

“Dead,” Ambrose said. “Those red musketeers got to him as he was warning the others. I sent out the text for the rest before running away as soon as I spotted them. I honestly thought he was behind me when I bolted, but he was still back at the phone booth. I saw one of them take him out while he was still inside the booth, so I just hightailed my ass out of there!”

They both knocked at the entrance door, and another operative of the Phantom Office admitted both men into the premises before shutting the door behind them.

“Are you all right, old boy?” John said as he walked with his winded comrade in arms along the long entrance hallway, then stopped when Ambrose halted and doubled over again. “What happened?”

“It’s Alice,” Ambrose said, catching his breath before continuing on with John. “We saw her with our own eyes, me and Adam Bailey, God bless his poor soul!”

“Saw what?”

“Saw her making doppelgängers of herself out of pedestrians,” he said, “all of them turned into red musketeers! And they gunned down old Bailey!”

Upon hearing the news, the worst news of any John has heard yet, John and Ambrose footed it through the indoor entrance hall and came up against another door, wherein the chatter of a heated argument assailed their ears, at which they grabbed a metal knocker and knocked three clanging knocks.

A shutter opened, and the doorman said, “Password?”

“What password?” Ambrose said. “We don’t have a password!”

“Things have changed, lads,” the man said behind the door. “This whole town’s been itching to get at our throats! No password, no entrance,” and he closed the shutter.

“What password is he talking about?” Ambrose said.

John thought for a moment, muttering, “Password, password, password,” till he remembered his text message. So he knocked three more times and said, “Comrades.” But the arguing of the group inside raised up a few decibels too many for the masked doorman to hear, so he yelled, “Comrades!”

Only then did the door open, and he bade them to enter and said, “Good. No masks or cloaks.”

“Did you receive Adam Bailey’s—”

“Yes, we did, lad,” the doorman said. “Sorry for your loss.”

“I know, God bless his soul,” Ambrose said.

And John added, “I have an important message that can’t be delayed, so let me through!”

With that, the man let both men through the antechamber into a storm of other operatives without their cloaks and masks arguing the points of needless details, some wanting to flee the city right this instant, and others wanting to wait out the day and flee incognito under new costumes during the hubbub of another festive night, and still other wanting to take up arms against Alice’s red musketeer girls and attack them head on.

John looked at this hideous display of a democracy on the verge of a mutiny and screamed out, “COMRADES, I HAVE A MESSAGE FOR EVERYONE HERE!”

“Be quiet, lad, for God’s sake, or I’ll rip that tongue out of your mouth!” a middle-aged sergeant said from the table full of other talking heads seated with him, all of them now glaring at the intruder amongst their midst.

“For God’s sake, listen to him!” Ambrose said. “I saw it with my own eyes, and I’ll vouch for him to the end of my life if I have to!”

Then followed several warnings from his peers, but a second operative in the back yelled, “Let him speak!”

Then followed a round of approvals from his peers.

“What is it, then?” the sergeant said, staring at him from the table. “Out with it, lads!”

“It’s Alice,” John said. “She’s gonna hunt us down if we—”

“We already know that,” a third operative said.

“You don’t understand,” John said.

“Of course, we do,” the third operative said. “Why do you think we’ve sent out that text? We already know.”

“No, no, no!” John said, approaching the table as his peers gave way before him. “Alice has already got a party of her own doppelgängers looking for us as I speak—”

Several curses filled the room.

“—but it’s way worse than that,” he added, then waited for his statement to sink in as they all became silent. “I don’t know how she spread the word so quickly amongst the inhabitants of this place, but Alice has already turned public opinion against the masqueraders and anyone else wearing masks and cloaks. If we so much as step out of these doors into their streets with these on, they’ll hound us just as Alice’s blasted red musketeers have!”

Silence filled the room, and several of his peers traded glances with each other as if they were already about to be shot under firing squad without any blindfolds.

“Then what do we do, lads?” the third operative said.

“I say we blend in with the festivities in town,” Ambrose said, “by becoming musketeers ourselves.”

“That’s madness!” the sergeant said. “We’re not cosplayers! We’re officers of the Phantom Office!”

“I know that,” Ambrose said, “but we need to blend in somehow! Otherwise, this whole town’s gonna skin us alive by sunset!”

“He’s right,” John added. “As long as we’re here in this place, we’re in enemy territory. Don’t let your own pride condemn us all to an untimely demise.”

“All right,” the third man said. “If it’s life and death, I’d rather choose life with a bit of embarrassment tacked on.”

“Then it’s decided,” Ambrose said. “We’ll become blue musketeers.”

“God, who’s bloody idea was it that we became musketeers in the first place?” the third man said.

“It was Roy’s idea,” John said. “The old boy always had a boyish imagination, I’ll give him that.”

Then a knock came at the door, jolting the doorman from his post, before he slid back the shutter and said, “Password?”

“Comrades, this is Anne,” Lt. Anne Granger said.

The doorman let her in and saluted her, saying, “Attention!”

Everyone in the room stood up straight and saluted, till Anne said, “At ease,” and came in huffing and puffing and sweating bullets without her mask or cloak on, as though she had sprinted a marathon to get here just like Ambrose.

The sergeant saluted her and said, “What’s happening out there?”

“It’s Ronnie,” she said, clamping her hands over her knees as she tried to regain her breath. “Benson and Cory have seen him entering a clothing store along with Lt. Shaefer and Officer Curvan, but they’ve spotted two masqueraders inside the store.”

“I see,” the sergeant said. “Did Roy prepare all of the drop zones, though?”

“He did,” Anne said, still catching her breath. “All three drop zones are ready. Lt. Shaefer and his team are already at the first drop zone, and he’s got our guys headed for the third drop zone as we speak, but Alice intercepted us before we got to the second drop zone.”

“Where?” Ambrose said.

“Atop the roof of the Dragon Volant,” Anne said, finally regaining her composure. “We footed it out of there before Alice turned the rest of us into clones of herself! We split up, Benson and Cory heading towards the first drop zone at the clothing store, while I footed it here. It’s exactly as Benson said: Alice is using the high ground of every roof in this town and making clones out of everyone she sees. So I need the most able-bodied among you, because we’ve got Alice making doppelgängers out there, and they’re vicious little vixens.”

“Dressed like red musketeers?” John said.

“Yep,” she said, “the whole lot of them.”

“Everywhere?” the sergeant said.

“Just about,” she said, “but I’m heading back out there as soon as I catch my breath.”

“No, you’re not,” John said.

“What did you just say?” she said.

“He’s right, Anne,” the sergeant said. “You’re winded, and we can’t afford to lose you out there.”

She breathed out a long sigh and said, “Then you’re in charge, sergeant. Pick your men and head over to the second drop zone, but be careful out there. Don’t let Alice see you!”

The man saluted her and said, “Will do, ma’am!”

And the man asked for about 50 volunteers out of the hundred-something operatives at the Nura Club.

----------------------------------------

The next dream Lima entered was again situated in her room and seemed to be a continuation of the previous one, but with a difference she noticed the moment she opened her eyes. The lamp was turned on, and in bed with her was an older version of Alice (maybe around Lima’s age) still wearing that sky-blue Sunday dress, but with shorter bobbed hair, her head now resting over the swell of her bosom. This new version of Alice had her forearms cradled snugly behind Lima’s shoulder blades, her legs entwined with Lima’s like those of a lover after a bout of making love, and the swell of Alice’s bosom was now pressing over her stomach.

“Alice,” Lima said, “is that you?”

Lima tried propping herself up on her elbows, struggling beneath the added weight, but for some reason the movement proved too much for her. She plopped back down on her bed, sinking back into the padding, which stirred Alice into motion.

“Can you get off of me?” she said.

As Alice stirred from her slumber and pushed herself up from her body, Lima noticed her blank eyes seeming to phase in and out of unconscious slow-wave sleep.

“Hey, what happened to you?” Lima asked. “Are you all right?”

Alice remained silent, unblinking, possibly unaware of her surroundings as far as Lima could tell, but something about this older version felt off. Propping herself up with her hands as Alice pushed herself into a kneeling position, Lima found herself in a compromising position she wouldn’t be caught dead in with any of her friends at school. Here was a stranger she’d just invited into her bedroom, now straddling Lima’s left thigh, her crotch uncomfortably warm and moist above her knee cap.

“What’s going on?” Lima said, reaching out and grasping her hand, feeling her palm slicked over and cold with sweat. “Alice, can you hear me? What’s wrong?”

Alice remained silent, her expression blank, her eyes unblinking, as if she were looking into a different scene with those eyes. And before Lima knew it, before she stopped herself from wondering at those unblinking eyes like a scryer looking into an obsidian mirror, she felt Alice rubbing herself against her thigh and fondling her breasts and kissing her lips, and moaned when she felt Alice biting down on her neck. Through it all, Lima let Alice do these things to her with a strange resignation that filled her with guilt, though she hadn’t a clue why this was so. All she knew was that she was making love to this strange woman, returning her insistent rubbing and fondling and kissing and biting and pinching with automatic movements that were not her own. In fact, she kept thinking that Alice was making love to another woman, one completely different from the prim and proper one Lima thought herself to be—

> . . . or not to be, that is the question:

> Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

> The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

> Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

> And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,

> No more; and by a sleep to say we end

> The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

> That flesh is heir to: 'tis a consummation

> Devoutly to be wish'd. . . .

And in her heart of hearts, Lima wished it to end, but her body refused to obey her will, as if someone else was controlling the physical movements of her other self, helping Alice strip off her dress and letting Alice take off her bed clothes. She wanted to scream herself hoarse, but she moaned to Alice’s caresses on the skin of her stomach, the kneading of bare breasts, and the rubbing of practiced fingers on her pussy lips. She moaned till it became too much to bear, and she bucked her hips and grabbed Alice’s forearms and turned her over on the bed.

No sooner had she done that when Lima collapsed over Alice’s body, her head cradled against Alice’s heaving bosom, her ear cupped against the thumping drumbeats of her rising and falling chest, their bodies heaving together in mutual exhaustion.

“Take me to your mother,” Alice said.

Or, at least, that’s what Lima thought she said, but she wasn’t sure if she heard her right. She just looked up at Alice’s face and peered into eyes that now seemed clear and lucid.

“Take me to your mother,” Alice repeated.

“Why?” Lima said, her words rolling out of her without her own conscious will, as if they were someone else’s words. “Don’t you want to make love to me?”

“We can do more of that later, if you want,” she said, “but take me to your mother, first. I want to see her well.” With that, Alice turned Lima over on the bed and kissed Lima once again (in which Lima distinctly felt the sharp points of her teeth against her lips) and said, “There’s more where that came from, my love,” then she pushed herself off and pulled Lima up onto shaky knees and draped her arm over her shoulder, supporting her. “Lead me to your mother, Lima, and I’ll make love to both of you like you won’t believe.”

Lima’s heart skipped a beat at those words, and icy knives dug through her stomach, but just as her physical movements kept striving with Alice in their love-making without her, so too did her words.

“She’s at the end of the hall,” Lima said, and led Alice past the threshold of her bedroom door and into the hallway. Together they passed the sewing room, her mother's study, and the guest room, till they reached her mother's bedroom at the end of the hall, where Lima raised her fist to the door and knocked and said, “Mom, let us in.”

Nobody stirred.

“Mom?” she said, and waited for her mother's reply.

Nobody stirred.

Lima grabbed the knob and turned it, but it stayed locked—something her mother never did before whenever she slept.

“Mom,” she said, “why did you—”

Alice put her hand over Lima’s on the knob and said, “Let’s open it together, shall we?”

With both of their hands, as if that did the trick, the knob of her mother’s door turned all the way, and the door to her bedroom opened into the next iteration of Lima’s nightmare.

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つづく

Day: Amelia and the Rosen Vamp (Lima’s Words)

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