It’s Saturday. At least I think it is. If I were home, Dad would be grilling steaks. I’d fix a fruit salad, because it’s my job to see that he eats well-balanced meals.
What if I can’t pull this off and get back home? Alison will blame herself forever and plunge into the deep end for real. Shock treatments will make her worse. Then Dad will be sitting alone in the kitchen eating cold cereal with nothing but his grief to keep him company. And then there’s Jeb’s mom and Jenara. His job at Underland helps pay the monthly bills. They rely on him. What will they do without him?
If I screw this up, I screw it up for everybody.
Jeb—still behind me—offers a napkin. I wipe my face and mumble, “Why didn’t you land at the other end of the table?”
“It was occupied.” Jeb turns me around.
I nearly choke at the sight of the tea party guests—Herman Hattington, March Hairless, and Door Mouse—all seated at the far corner and frozen solid beneath thick, glittering sheets of bluish gray ice.
“Mothra has a twisted definition of asleep,” Jeb says.
Morpheus has a twisted definition of everything. Shaking my head, I start toward them. As I step over the teapot’s spout, steam licks my calf, dampening my leggings. Hattington and his crew are suspended like glaciers, but the food looks fresh and the tea’s still hot.
“Where’s that pepper?” I hold out my hand. It’s awkward playing at teamwork. My family’s been in upheaval mode since I can remember, but at least over the last few years, I’ve had Jeb’s friendship to count on. Now it’s hanging by some weird emotional thread; I don’t know whether to believe him or Morpheus. It was easier to be mad up in the real world, when I knew for sure that he’d chosen Taelor.
Jeb digs the bag from his pocket. I loosen the ribbon while breathing through my mouth. I won’t chance inhaling any of it. Just the faded scent of the pepper on the fans and gloves was enough to make me almost sneeze.
Sneeze …
That must be what Morpheus intended with this little bag of spice.
“You’re not going to waste it on trying to make the hat guy sneeze, are you?” Jeb asks. “He’s an ice sculpture. There’s not even an opening where his nostrils should be. And there’s only enough pepper for one dose. We have to be sure.”
It’s uncanny how well he reads me at times, yet is so oblivious at others.
Tying the bag shut, I hand it back. He’s right. We’ll never be able to wake Hattington with pepper. He doesn’t even have a nose. I edge closer. He’s holding up a cup of steaming tea, as if he was in the middle of punctuating a point with it.
“Jeb, something’s not right with his face. It’s just a blank space of nothing.” The glittery, bluish gray void reflects my likeness, more unsettling than a stranger’s frozen snarl would be.
“Maybe the ice is so thick, it covers his features,” Jeb says.
“I don’t know. But check out that hat.” It could be a medieval torture device—part top hat/part cage—made of metal pins with a hinged flap at the crown that’s open like a lid. On second glance, the metal’s actually growing out of his head like bones. The cage pokes through holes in his flesh, just like the chess piece in Morpheus’s room.
“A conformateur,” Jeb says, his voice tense. “He’s got a conformateur sprouting out of his head.”
Most people wouldn’t know about a nineteenth-century tool used for customizing hats to fit specific head shapes, but Jenara has one in her room. Persephone ran across it at an estate sale once and, knowing Jen’s love for anything fashion related, bid low on it and just happened to win because no one there knew the value of the artifact.
The ribbed metal frame molds around a customer’s head where a hat brim would sit, and the pins conform to the ridges and bumps of the skull. An oval of cardboard is inserted into the hinged lid and pressed into place at the crown, causing the pins to punch holes in the shape of the head. It forms a pattern the hatmaker can use to custom-fit a hat to that individual.
Why this one is physically attached to Herman’s skull is beyond me, and I don’t even want to imagine how he uses it in his craft.
I force my attention from his reflective face and turn to the “hare,” who is twelve kinds of hideous. Mostly because he seems to be turned inside out—no fur, only gaunt flesh. It’s like looking at a skinned rabbit. But at least he has a face. His expression is demented, with a wild glint in his white eyes. A teacup balances atop a pastry on his plate. His paw is tucked into the cup from his wrist down, as if he’s dunking something.
Of the three guests, the mouse is the only one that looks normal. If a mouse wearing a doorman’s jacket could be considered normal.