White Space (56 page)

Wait just a minute
. Her runaway thoughts suddenly bucked as if they’d been tethered to a galloping horse the rider had just wrestled to a halt.
His Majesty
. Had Battle just said there was a … a
king
?

She almost blurted,
Where’s Victoria?
but said instead, “Why am I in the hospital?” She looked to Kramer again. “I’m not sick. I’m
fine
. You said I got away, that I’m a witness? So why am I in an asylum? I’m not crazy. What the hell are you people talking—”

Then, everything—the words poised on her tongue,
her thoughts that would not stay still—turned to dust. That was the moment she finally realized what was wrong with Kramer’s face.

Half of it wasn’t his.

IF SHE’D BEEN
looking more carefully—if she hadn’t just popped out of the Dark Passages, lost her friends, nearly died—she might have thought he’d gotten too much Botox or plastic surgery, like Cher, who looked more like a wax mannequin or an alien than anyone real.

Kramer’s forehead was absolutely smooth. No worry lines. It didn’t wrinkle at all, and his nose didn’t move either. His left eyebrow was a thick black gash with no arch, and while Kramer’s wiry gray tangle of mustache looked normal on the right, the left half was perfectly smooth and much darker.

Not paralyzed. Not a stroke.

He’s wearing a kind of
mask,
like the Phantom, only painted to look like skin and hair
.

Her gaze shot to Graves. Instead of panops, a pair of steel-framed spectacles perched on her knife’s-edge of a nose. The nurse’s face seemed flesh and blood, but her left eye was fish-belly white, with no tracery of thin red capillaries. A muddy gray iris floated in its center like a dirty mote.

It’s artificial. It’s glass. Oh my God
. Now that she knew what she was looking for, Emma saw that one attendant held his right arm at a stiff, forty-five-degree angle. The fingers didn’t move, but they weren’t paralyzed. The arm and hand were prostheses. Another man wore an odd leather
headpiece to which a pair of tin ears, gray as an elephant’s, had been nailed. A nurse was minus a hand, the sleeve of her blouse neatly sewn shut at the wrist. Still another woman’s nose had been eaten clean away until there was nothing but two black pits set in a shriveled, weathered gargoyle face marred by strange, fleshy knobs that sprouted from her skin like mushrooms.

What happened here?
How could these people be so different from what House had shown her? Then she remembered what the shadow-man had said, right before he faded: that she mustn’t hang on too long or let the creeping black that was the whisper-man reach her.
He called it an infection. That must be what he meant: something of the whisper-man, a creature of the Dark Passages, remains bound to the blood
. She had been bleeding, her skin torn and slashed by the birds. Worse, the whisper-man had already used her before, many times over, whisking her away in
blinks
to other timelines, different
Nows
. So had this final exposure to the whisper-man’s energy, his blood, been enough to tip the balance?

Or could this be something different?
McDermott was always worried about the characters he didn’t finish infecting other book-worlds and
Nows. She’d assumed it meant breaking a
Now
in the same way that the snow had disintegrated around Eric and Casey and the others, but these people … Her eyes darted to Graves’s artificial one, that nurse’s prosthetic hand. Kramer’s mask. Was
this
what McDermott meant?

Am I to blame for this?

She had to get out of here. There must be something like the Dickens Mirror here; there
had
to be.
Maybe that’s why House showed me this before. The bell jar’s the key
. She threw a
glance at the dead-eyed, stuffed cockatoo under glass.
Got to get back to the domed chapel, get out onto the roof, and then …
Would a slit-mirror appear as it had before? Maybe not. This reality, this
Now
, was very different from what she’d been shown. Still, she had the cynosure; felt the weight of it between her breasts, on Eric’s beaded chain with his dog tags.
So not everything’s disappeared; but why don’t I have skull plates anymore?
Because
this
was where she belonged? This was her true and real
Now?

“Oh.” She inhaled. A different
Now
meant a different version,
another
Emma. Had she then slipped into
that
Emma’s body? She remembered that deflated, flat feeling before everything snapped into focus. Yes, that would explain what was happening here. But wasn’t there something wrong with that? If this body belonged to a different Emma … 
Then why don’t I have her memories? Where
is
she?

Here
. A wisp of sound drifted past her right ear, light as the decaying mist of a dying dream.
Here
.

“What?” She jerked her head around for a wild look. There was only the dead cockatoo, with its eternal stare, in a shell of glass.
“Where?
Where are you? Who’s there?”

“Elizabeth,” Kramer began.

The breathy voice, so small, came again:
Here
. Something stirred, like the creepy-crawly scuttle of spider’s legs, in the middle of her mind.
And who am I? No, the question is who—

“Are … you.” That spidery scuttle had worked its way onto her tongue, and now it clambered, a leg at a time, over the fence of her teeth to move her mouth, form words with this new strange voice: “Wh-who … are …”
Stop, stop!
Choking, she clapped a hand over her mouth.
Don’t let it win. Be quiet, be quiet!
Oh, but the urge to speak, let this thing
squatting in the center of her mind have its say, was ferocious, like a burn.
I am me
, she thought back to whatever this was, fiercely grinding this alien presence under the boot of her will, killing it,
killing
it.
I am Emma, and I don’t hear you, I don’t
know
who you—

“Are you in pain, Elizabeth?” Kramer oozed forward. “Maybe a tonic …”

“No!” She whipped the knife down, and Kramer stopped dead in his tracks. But she was grateful for the distraction—for anything that might muffle that spidery little voice. “Just back off and let me think. Don’t push me, don’t crowd me!”

“Of course.” Without turning, Kramer put up a hand, and Weber, who’d been sidling closer, stopped as well. “Let’s not get excited.”

Oh, easy for you to say
. This was a different London, but Jasper—whether he was a Dickens creation or not—might still be her guardian. Did he have a house with a cellar? If so, there might be a door, a way into the Dark Passages. She could push through, go somewhere else, get back to her own life where there must be versions of Rima and Bode and Tony.
But not Eric, and there won’t be a Casey
. God, could she bring them back somehow? Might they really exist as something more than words on a page?

Worry about that when I can. Nothing will happen if I don’t get out
.

“I want to go home,” she croaked. “I want to see my guardian. I want Jasper.”

“Guardian?” Despite the knife, Kramer sidled just a touch closer. “Elizabeth, we’ve spoken about this at great length. You have no guardian and no home to which you may return.”

“No …?” She felt that sudden flower of hope wilt. “Listen to me, please. I’m fine. All I need is to get out of here. I only want to go … to go …” She pulled in a short, hard breath at a sudden pop of memory.

“Go where?” Kramer said. “Where would you go, Elizabeth?”

Lizzie
. She would find Lizzie and her mother, Meredith. In one of her Lizzie
-blinks
, there had been talk of London and something bad happening that they couldn’t reverse. Was this it? Had to be. She and Lizzie were tangled, so the chances were good the McDermotts were here, in this London. Wait, hadn’t Lizzie and her mother left for several months? To go where?
But if I can find them, find
McDermott,
I’ve got a chance …

“Elizabeth?” Kramer prodded. “Tell us which home you mean.”

“My … house, of course.” If he asked where, she was screwed, but if she had a life in this
Now
, she must live
somewhere
. She hurried on. “Where I live.”

“And where is that?” When she didn’t reply, Kramer said, “Or don’t you remember that there is no longer a home to which you may return?”

Something about the way he said that made a cold knot form where her stomach ought to have been. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Then let
me
refresh your memory. Do you remember going down … what did you call it … such a curious phrase …” Battle pulled his brows together in a frown. “Down cellar?”

Oh Jesus.
Okay, be calm; you can talk your way out of this, if you just stay calm
. “Yes, of course I remember,” she said,
carefully. “I went down cellar to look for a book.”

“So you say.” Battle’s icy gaze stroked a shiver. “But do you recall what you found instead? You discovered a … what did you call it? Ah, yes, a
gateway
, correct? A secret
passage
to other realms filled with
beings
that exist between worlds?”

Oh crap
. She must have talked about the door, the click, the cold that ate the flame, and something living in the dark. How nutty would all that sound to these people? “I might … I might have made a mistake about that,” she said.

“Yes? And what mistake might that be?” When she was silent, Battle said, “Or mightn’t there have been something else you discovered below stairs, secreted down a hidden passage off the servants’ quarters? Something so horrible that your mind completely unhinged? That this is a hysterical fantasy of dual identities you’ve manufactured because it is preferable to the truth?”

“No,” she said, with a sudden, sickening dismay. “I … I know what I saw.” But did she? The doctors were always so pissed that she wouldn’t take her meds, and she
blinked
away so often.

Stop this. You know what you know
. Listen
to the way you think. It’s not like them at all. You know things they don’t. You’ve seen the future
.

Kramer said, “No one doubts your sincere belief in the fiction you’ve written or the characters; the duality of the brain and
variations de la personnalité
that allow you to people your world. Anything is better than remembering what was
really
there: not a door—”

“No.” She felt her fist tighten around the knife. This was
like
The Bell Jar
: Esther Greenwood going slowly nuts, déjà vu all over again. “No, there was a door, a
hand
, and it was cold, it was—”

“It was not a door, but a gap, a tomb, an abomination of a reliquary,” Battle said. “A pile of rubble, a heap of crumbling mortar and disintegrating brick. Not a phantasmagorical tale out of Poe or Wilkie Collins, but something
real
, with texture and color and a
stink
of decay—”

“Stop. I won’t listen to you.” This couldn’t be happening. She knew about 9/11 and movies, relativity and Hardy’s Paradox and Starbucks. “I don’t remember anything but my life, my life, my real—”

“And bones,” Battle interrupted. “
Bones
, Elizabeth.”

“B-bones?” She couldn’t pull in enough air. “No, no, I don’t know … I didn’t see—”

“But I did. I’ve seen the evidence myself in the blackened skeletal remains of the corpses you discovered below stairs. You found the murderer hard at work, a demon masquerading as a man; a monster that spirited you away and would’ve made you his next victim. There is no house to which you may return because he burned it to the ground in a futile attempt to obliterate any evidence of his crime. In that, at least, he has failed. But make no mistake: whatever feelings you may still have for him, this man is a lunatic. He is depravity and evil incarnate,” Battle said, in a voice so heavy with doom, with words so weighty with the inevitable, they felt as remorseless as hammer blows. “And he wears your father’s face.”

THE WORLD STOPPED
. It just. Paused. The time was short, only as long as the speed of thought, but it was as if she were falling again, swooning into a great darkness from which she would never escape.

Then the world began to spin once more, and a flood of horror washed through her veins at the same instant that a bright flash, like the death of a lightbulb, popped in the black of her mind, as if the private movie that was her life had decided to start up again.

The image, every sensation, was crisp and brutally clear: broken bits of mortar on chill, packed earth; the funk of mold and something gassy and much fouler, like meat going green with decay; an empty black square from which rotten bricks had tumbled; and a scurrying,
scritch-scratchy
sound of rats’ feet over stone. Of
whispers
from shadows, in the dark. And when she lifted her candle and reached in … When she reached
in
, she’d touched …

Fingers, limp and still. A hand as cold and smooth as glass with nothing beyond the wrist but hard bone stringy with dead flesh and leathery sinew …

And, farther back, gleaming in the candle’s uncertian light, a face with wide, black, staring sockets …

No
. Her mind shied away.
No, that can’t be right, not when I can remember the others and Eric, Eric, where are you, where—

“Listen to him, Elizabeth,” Kramer said. “Inspector Battle is telling the truth. Your father was a monster. He would’ve murdered you.”

No, no, that wasn’t true. Her father was a pathetic asshole
who strangled himself with the ratty laces of tattered All Stars. “No, I know what I saw, what I
felt
.” She was panting again as sobs swelled in her chest. “When I reached into the Dark Passages, something grabbed me and … and …” Her tongue stumbled.

“Yes?” Kramer prompted. Two attendants had sidled closer, but he put out a restraining hand. “What is it?”