White Space (24 page)

“Casey,” she gasped as they floundered, their legs digging post-holes through deep snow, “the sled, where’s the sled?”

“Blast blew her off the road!” Casey’s grip on her hand was iron. “Saw it from the tree, to the left, in a ditch!
No!
” He tugged her harder. “Don’t look back!”

But she did—and all the strength drained from her body to seep into the snow.

The fog was a gigantic thunderhead stretching so far overhead there was no limit to it. The fog was a pillar of nacreous, roiling white that built on itself, piling higher and higher. Unlike a cloud, the fog also spread from side to side, and everything it touched, it swallowed. Rima knew the night sky was still there, that above this deadening veil were true clouds and the stars beyond, but the fog was lowering itself, filling the bowl of the valley, obliterating the sky. The fog
surged, an avalanche of white steamrolling right for them.

“Come on,” Casey urged. “Come on!”

Something bullet-shaped gleamed a dull silver and black from a deep wallow to her left. “There!” Rima cried. As soon as she stepped off the road, Rima sank up to her thighs, but she bullied through, trenching out a path to Casey’s snowmobile. “What should I do?”

“Dig under the nose!” Casey was stamping snow, beating out a trail. “We got to pack down the snow, then roll it onto the runners and get it pointed downhill.”

No time
. Rima could barely move. With every step, the treacherous snow grabbed and pulled, and she was conscious of the fog boiling across the night, pressing against her back. They only had maybe a minute, if that, before the fog reached them. “Casey, there’s no time!”

Casey tossed a wild look over his shoulder. His face glistened with sweat. His teeth were bared in a grimace of fear and frustration. “Damn it. All right, leave it; come on, let’s flip it!”

They wallowed around to the downhill side, and then Casey backed into the sled, hooked his hands under the seat. Rima slid her left shoulder under the left handlebar, felt the snowmobile rock to the right and then try to tumble back, but she dug in and heaved. The snowmobile tilted, and she nearly slipped as the sled wobbled and then did a slow, heavy tumble onto its runners.

“Come on, get on, but don’t sit down!” Straddling the seat, Casey waited until she’d scrambled onboard before pulling up the kill switch, twisting the ignition key, yanking on the start cord—once, twice …

Hurry
. Rima shot a quick look over her shoulder. The fog was still coming.
Hurry, Casey, hurry, hurry, God, come on
, come on!

The sled’s engine sputtered, caught. The machine gave a sudden lurch, and Rima tumbled forward. With a cry, she made a wild grab, snagging Casey’s tattered parka just as they began to move.

“Okay,
down
!” Casey shouted. “Rima, sit down!”

Arms wrapped around Casey’s middle, Rima obeyed, dropping onto the seat. The sled roared out of the gully, a rooster tail of snow flying behind, and then they were streaking across a sparkling plain of silver-blue snow. With no faceplate for protection, Rima gritted her teeth against bitter air that cut like a bristle of knives.

“Hang on!” Casey shouted as they banked into a tight, fast turn. She felt the back of the sled swing, and for a heart-stopping moment, she thought they’d spin out. But Casey wrestled the handlebars back to true, and the sled spurted over the snow with a roar. He shot a quick glance over his shoulder, and she felt his body go rigid. “Shit,
shit!
”

“What?” But even before she looked back, she knew. The fog was there, a seamless curtain stretching from the sky to hug the snow, chasing after them in an inexorable tide: two hundred yards back and gaining. One-fifty, a hundred yards, eighty.
Fifty
 …

Casey, I’m sorry
. Squeezing her eyes shut, she buried her head into his back, hugged him tight.
If it hadn’t been for me, you would’ve gotten away
.

The fog slammed down.

ON A STREET
drawn from that terrible summer of
The Bell Jar
when Emma will become so lost in that book, she will think she really might be better off dead; as she stares at the jacket photo of a McDermott novel she’s never heard of—the hand in the photograph moves.

Horrified, Emma watches those bizarre fingers unfurl and stretch and sprout talons. Its talons lengthen like a cat’s claws. Oozing over the windowsill, the hand slithers down the apron, and now Emma can see that the skin is as scaly and cracked as that of a mummy. The hand bleeds onto the photograph in an inky stain, a black blight, and Frank McDermott …

McDermott—the McDermott captured in the picture—comes to life. As if suddenly aware that there is a world outside that photograph, Frank looks straight out to throw Emma a wink.

“Ah!” With a wild, incoherent cry, she stumbles back, her half-finished Frappuccino flying in a fan of whipped cream
and mocha-flavored coffee from her left hand.
The Dickens Mirror
, a book that shouldn’t exist from a series that was never written, flutters to the pavement like a wounded bird. Around her neck, the galaxy pendant suddenly smolders.

“Hey,” Lily says.

“Emma?” Eric—a boy she has yet to meet, who shouldn’t be here—reaches for her. “What’s wrong? Are you all right?”

“No! No, you’re not real! This isn’t right!” Emma flinches away. She turns, her treacherous feet trying to tangle, trip her up, spill her to the sidewalk. “Get away from me, get away, don—” Backpedaling, she blunders from the curb into oncoming traffic on East Washington. A horn blasts as a car churns past, its hot breath swirling around her bare legs, snatching at her sundress. She can hear the sputter of the car’s radio through an open window:
Investigators continue the grisly task of removing the remains of at least eight children believed to be the latest victims of—

“No, stop, I’m not listening, I don’t hear you,
I don’t hear you!
” She takes a lurching stutter-step and tumbles to rough asphalt. As she hits, the fingers of her right hand reflexively close around something hard and jagged.

She looks—and every molecule in her body stills. Everything stops.

The dagger of glass is absolutely flawless and wickedly sharp—and she knows this shape. It is nearly identical to the shard she will fish from that discards bucket and turn over and over on that afternoon when she feels Plath’s bell jar descending to engulf her mind in a dense, deathless fog. When she will think,
I didn’t see anything, there was nothing down in Jasper’s cellar; it was just a crawl space, there was nothing inside, I didn’t find …

But there is a difference. This dagger isn’t clear but smoky and black, polished to a mirror’s high gloss. Her reflection within this black dagger is so crisp she can make out the terror in her eyes, the curve of her jaw, every glister and sparkle of that galaxy pendant.

It’s a piece of the Mirror
. She is jittering so badly her breaths come in herky-jerky gasps, and she thinks she might be one second away from passing out.
It’s from the Dickens—

A sudden bite of pain sinks into her left wrist, bad enough to make her cry out. What
was
that?
God
, that hurt. Her eyes shift from the black dagger to her wrist—and then a scream blasts from her throat.

A thick, stingingly bright bracelet of blood has drawn—no, no,
is
drawing itself, inch by inch, across the skin of her left wrist.

“N-no,” she says. It’s like watching someone unzip her. She still clutches the black dagger in her right hand, and a single glance is enough to show her that the glass is pristine, not a splash of blood on it at all.
And anyway, I didn’t, I didn’t, I don’t do it! I only
thought
about cutting my …

“Aahhh!”
Another slash of pain, on her right wrist this time, the lips of yet another slice gaping open. She shrieks as the moist tissues pull apart to reveal a silvery glint of tendon and deeply red meat. Blood instantly surges into the belly of the wound, pumping and slopping from slit arteries,
splish-splish-splish-splish
, surging with her heart. A nail of panic spikes her throat. The warmth drains from her face, her lips, and her guts are ice. Her vision’s going muzzy, and in the black dagger, her reflection’s turned runny, the features shifting and melting as a new and different face knits together: same eyes,
same golden flaw in the right iris. Same jaw and chin. Only the hair, wavy and golden blonde, is different. Still, she knows who this is.

I’m Lizzie?
A violent shudder makes the reflection jitter.
We’re the
same
person?

“NO!” A shriek scrambles past her teeth. “No, I’m me, I’m
Emma
!” Still screaming, she hurls the black dagger away. It cuts the air, flashing end over end like a scimitar. Both her arms are spewing blood now, and as Emma scuttles back on her hands like a crab, vivid red smears paint the road, marking her path. There is blood everywhere, too much, a whole lake of it. Anyone who’s bled this much ought to have fainted—hell, ought to be
dead
. For that matter, she’s landed in the middle of a busy street. She should be squashed under a bus by now, or flattened by a car.

But there are, suddenly, no cars, no people. No taunts from a radio. When she glances back at the bookstore, she sees that Eric and Lily are gone, too.

It’s like House
. Terrified, her aqua sundress purpling with her blood, she clamps her torn arms to her heaving chest. Her eyes skip from store to store.
No people
. Except for
BETWEEN THE LINES
, the other stores are only blank fronts with blacked-out windows. Her gaze falls to the curb, the gutter, then drags up to the trees silhouetted against a milky sky that she knows was blue and bright only minutes before.
No trash, no dead leaves. No sun
. Yet not everything has vanished.
The Dickens Mirror
lies on the pavement, facedown, its covers in a wide splay.

There is movement out of the corner of her eye, on the grimy asphalt. Glancing down at the growing pool of her
blood, she sees a glimmer along the crimson surface, which quivers and gathers itself—into a long, rippling red worm.

Oh
. All the small hairs on her neck and arms rise. Her scalp prickles with horror, and she can feel her titanium plates, the lacy one on her forehead and its twin at the very base of her skull, heating beneath her skin as if a switch has been thrown and a connection forged in her brain.
Oh, this can’t be happening
.

But it is. Her blood is alive, slithering, eeling from side to side, snaking its way over gritty asphalt. Frozen in place, she watches the red slink as it seeps across the road, never spreading, never veering, but creeping up the curb and onto the sidewalk, heading straight for the book. As soon as her blood touches the cover, dragging itself like a moist crimson tongue along the edges, curls of steam rise—and the book … quickens.

It’s like my
blink,
when I saw Lizzie’s dad—Frank McDermott—at the Dickens Mirror
. Except it is a book, not a strange mirror, drinking her blood, greedily sucking and feeding, the pages pulsing and swelling, the covers bulging … And then she spies …

Oh God
.

THE SPIKE OF
a claw rises from the book, like a trapdoor has suddenly opened to let something deep underground find the surface. And then she sees another claw. And a third.

“No.” The word is no more than a deathless whisper. Trembling, she watches as the taloned fingers of whatever is
living in that book hook over the cover’s lip. It is as if
The Dickens Mirror
is not paper sandwiched by cardboard but a mouth, the rim of a deep well, a pit, a cave. A second stygian hand snakes free to clamp onto the edge. The razor-sharp claws clench; and now two spindly and skeletal arms appear. They bunch and strain, the elbows straightening like a gymnast’s working parallel bars, as the thing living inside strains to be born. It boils from
The Dickens Mirror
: first the head and now shoulders and a leathery scaled torso, which is now green, now silver, now black. The book-thing twists its long, sinuous body right and left, corkscrewing its way from the page. Then, it pauses as if gathering its strength—or maybe only deciding what it ought to do next.

Quiet, be quiet
. Clamping her lips together to corral the scream, Emma holds herself very still as the rounded knob of its head lifts, the thing seeming to taste the air, sniff out a scent.
Don’t see me, don’t taste me, don’t smell me
.

But then … it
turns
.

No. Please, House
. A dark swoon of terror sweeps her mind. Her skull plates are so hot her brain ought to be boiling.
Please, show me a door, House. Sweep me away in a
blink.
Do something, do anything, but please show me a way out of here!

House, if it is listening, does nothing. And this thing is … not
quite
formed, not yet. It has no face. Where there should be eyes, a nose, a forehead, a mouth, there is only an ebony swirl. A nothing. A blank. But Emma knows: somehow, it
sees
her.

There you are
. The voice ghosts over her brain in a whisper that is the sound of brittle ice; of glass frit spilling over a metal marver.
I’ve wanted to play with you for such a long time, Emma.
Come. Staaay. Stay and plaaay, Blood of My Blood—

She drags her voice up from where it’s fallen. “N-no. No, you’re not real. This isn’t happening. I saw this in a
blink
. It was just a—”

All at once, the thing’s eyes pop into being, but not on its face. Two eyes stare from its hands, one on each palm, and they are not black but blue as sapphires. They are
her
eyes. Even at this distance, she can see the golden flaw floating in the iris of the eye on the right.

Get up, Emma
. Somehow, she has pulled herself into a crouch. Her arms are no longer bloody; in fact, there are no wounds at all, not even a scratch.
Get up, Emma, get—