Illyria Read Online Free PDF Page A

murmurs echoed my own. The space around us was another, warmer skin, its reek of sex and sweat cut with the chalky scent of plaster and that intense, oddly evanescent balsam smell. We kept our jeans on, striving together until first Rogan came and then I did, straddling his thigh.
    Afterward we lay entwined. Small moons quivered all around us, blue and gold and silver, as the candle guttered in its glass.
    "Shhh," I said, though neither of us had spoken. "Listen." I pressed my hand on Rogan's mouth and whispered, "Do you hear?"
    "Mice," said Rogan. "They're everywhere."
    "That's not mice."
    From behind the wall came a faint tapping. Not scrabbling or scratching; more rhythmic. I sat up, my sweat cooling, and cocked my head.
    "It's there." I touched the wall with the flat of my hand--warily, as though it might burn me. "Can't you hear it?"
    It sounded like drumming fingernails. Or sleet, if sleet could fall inside a house.
    Yet the sky had been cloudless.
    Rogan yawned. "It's mice, Maddy."
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    The thought of mice made my bare flesh prickle. I snatched up my flannel shirt and started to pull it on.
    "Hey!" Rogan tugged my sleeve. "Don't do that! I was looking."
    "I'm cold. Well, not cold, but I don't want mice crawling on me."
    "How about this?
    He pulled me toward him. I smacked him, not hard, and pretended to struggle. He pinned me to the floor, I kicked at the blankets as he laughed and tickled me.
    "Rogan! Don't--"
    I kicked again. My aim went wild and my foot connected with the wall. I felt the wood buckle.
    Then, alarmingly, the wall pushed back.
    "Shit." With all my strength I pushed Rogan away. "Damn it, look. I broke something."
    One of the wood panels had come loose and fallen onto the blankets, leaving a gap as wide as my hand. I nudged the board with my foot, then froze.
    From inside the wall, light glimmered. Neither cold blue candle-flame nor an electric bulb; more like starlight, fractured and wavering yet also warm, as though embers had rained from the rafters. For an instant the rhythmic tapping fell silent. Then it started up again, louder now that the wall had been breached.
    And I could hear something else besides that soft strange pattering--a susurrus, sweet and high-pitched, like the sound that hunting swallows made in the twilight above Fairview's lawns. I leaned, breathless, toward the opening. Rogan did the same. His arm circled me as our faces drew within inches of the gap.
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    "Oh, Maddy," he breathed. "Oh, Maddy, look."
    Inside the wall was a toy theater, made of folded paper and gilt cardboard and scraps of brocade and lace. Curtains of scarlet tissue shrouded the proscenium. The stage floor was mottled yellow and green, as though to suggest a field starred with flowers. Thumbnail-sized masks of Comedy and Tragedy hung from the proscenium arch, beneath a frieze of Muses that looked as though it had been painted with a single hair. Columns no bigger than a pencil rose to either side, and a dizzyingly intricate arrangement of trompe l'oeil cutouts and folded paper walls and arches made it seem as though the stage receded endlessly, into topiary gardens and ruined statuary, a fallen tower and snow-peaked mountains and, most distant of all, a beach of golden sand with a ruined ship silhouetted against a wintry sun. A row of tiny footlights burned at the edge of the apron, each light the size of a glowing match-head, and there were loops of colored string that hung from the flies, so the curtains could be raised and flats or scrims lowered.
    There was even an orchestra pit.
    But no orchestra. No actors or stage manager or director. And no audience, save for Rogan and me. We craned our necks, trying to see it all.
    We couldn't. The opening was too small.
    And the toy theater, tiny as it was, was too big. Rogan shook his head and gazed at me questioningly. "Mice," I said.
    We both started laughing, our voices edging into hysteria. Rogan finally drew a shuddering breath and wiped his eyes. "How the hell