A Cathedral of Myth and Bone by Kat Howard

Author:Kat Howard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Saga Press

Murdered Sleep

Kora had heard the rumors. They were everywhere that fall, blown on the wind along with the golden fans of fallen ginkgo leaves. Everyone claimed to know someone who had been invited, though Kora spoke to no one who had attended. People told stories of masks and decadence, of a play that might have been a bacchanalia, of something that wasn’t a play at all, but rather an enfleshed dream masquerading as a drama. Of impossibility made concrete and stone in the condemned hallways of an abandoned building.

The invitation arrived with the rest of Tuesday’s post, unstamped and unmarked. Heavy black stock, printed in silver gilt, and sealed with bordeaux wax. Impressed upon the surface of the wax was a pomegranate, split, seeds spilling like blood.

Kora’s hand trembled only slightly as she broke the seal.

There were three lines written on the inside of the card. An address. There was no need to print a time: midnight was ever the hour of the impossible.

• • •

Sleep is dying, and has been for a long time now, through uncounted ticks of clocks and the flickers of thousands of too-brief candles. Sleep is dying, a slow exsanguination of dreams, a storm-tossed suffocation of nightmares. Sleep is dying, and she is not alone in her throes.

• • •

The building looked like nothing from the outside. Or rather, it looked like the kind of place where the latest victim in some murder-of-the-week show would be found, the building’s state of destroyed decay a metaphor for her own. Kora picked her way over trails of broken glass, amber-brown and snake-green, and climbed stairs that canted out from the rusting iron doors at an Escheresque angle.

The doors groaned open as she reached their threshold. Kora glanced around, looking for CCTV units, and decided that whoever had installed the system had done an excellent job hiding them.

The designer also had a fondness for Cocteau, Kora thought as she stepped into the entryway. It was mostly dark, lit only by torches in fixtures made to resemble white-gloved hands. The doors echoed shut behind her.

As one, the torches shifted, lighting Kora into a hallway. She followed them, nerves making her blood fizz and her steps come fast and short. At the end of the hallway was an outstretched pair of white-gloved hands. The one on the right curled and beckoned, then opened flat.

Kora stood, puzzled. The hand repeated the gesture. Kora removed the invitation from her beaded purse and placed it on the hand. The hand snapped shut, then flung open, empty. On the previously empty palm of the left hand was a deck of cards. They looked like plain Bicycle playing cards, but when Kora picked the top card from the deck, it was the Lovers, reversed. The card was from the Marseille deck, the young man pinned by the gazes of the two women he was to choose between as much as by Love’s arrow in his chest.

The left hand snapped shut, disappearing the deck. Kora tucked the tarot card into her purse, a replacement weight for the surrendered invitation.

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