The Dickens Mirror (17 page)

Ignoring Elizabeth took energy; it was like trying to hold back a wide stream with two hands.
Focus, come on
. Kramer took the pendant but only
after
she’d awakened in Elizabeth, which meant that the other girl had obviously been wearing a cynosure, or a close facsimile.
And Kramer has panops
. Which meant he’d spotted some
change
in Elizabeth’s pendant after
she
showed up. Did that mean he was worried she could get out with it again? But wouldn’t she need the Mirror for that?

No. That’s not how you do it. It’s the symbols that matter
.

No, little Lizzie had used symbols.

Don’t contradict me!
The voice
kicked
.
What do you know? You’re nothing but an intruder, a PIECE!

“Jesus!” Emma pushed back with her will.
“Stop!”
A second later, the nattering voice and the feel of elbows and knees trying to punch out real estate in her brain receded. Felt good, a relief. Her head still ached, but at least she could actually think.
Yes, but for how long?
Shivering, she crouched on all fours and listened to … okay, this was so weird … to the inside of her own head.
Her brain felt as if it trembled like a pot of water just shy of a boil. Was there something else
beneath
this voice?
Other
voices?

Don’t go looking for trouble
. She smoothed moist palms over rough canvas. Considering she was trapped in a different
Now
and in a padded cell with a nasty bitch in her head, she was in deep shit already.

I’m
nasty?
Elizabeth faded back.
Try living with so many pieces you can’t keep track
.

That stinging red venom was absent from Elizabeth’s tone. In fact, Emma thought she sounded a little … cautious.
Worried that I was able to shut her up?
Could she do that, permanently? Lock Elizabeth away somewhere?
But she knows this
Now.
If I can get her to cooperate and help me …

“What do you mean,
pieces
, Elizabeth? Are you talking about hallu …” She caught herself;
hallucinations
sounded somehow worse. More clinical, like the girl was really sick.
But she is
. There was a pang just under her right ribs, and she dug in the point of an elbow to brace herself.
Something physically wrong with her
. “Are you talking about voices, Elizabeth?”

No, more than that. I hear my mother, sometimes, but I know that’s memory. Odd how I never hear my father
. A pause, as if Elizabeth were giving herself a shake.
These others are … facets, like the different faces of a diamond
.

Aspects of herself, that’s what she was talking about, and this actually made a loopy kind of sense to Emma. In the valley, Lizzie said that Emma and Rima and Tony and everyone else were book-people based on
her
. (Well, except if you believed the whisper-man, Emma had written Eric to life, and then Eric had given himself Casey: a creation of a creation of yet another creation. Emma wasn’t entirely sold on the whole book-people
thing either. She sure as hell felt real.) But if Lizzie/the whisper-man was right, then some book-people, like Emma, had more of Lizzie, and yet they were each their own person, designed to fit and function as distinct characters in separate worlds.

But what would happen if you reversed that? If you tried to put back, say, Rima without erasing everything that made her Rima, and not Lizzie? What would happen to your mind? Wouldn’t you feel like you were in pieces? Crazy? Nothing would fit together. She thought back to what she’d read in abnormal psych. Elizabeth would be … what … a multiple,

dédoublement de la personnalité

a dissociative, in this
Now
?

Oh boy
. Emma felt her insides ice. That made
her
just an alter?
In psych, the teacher said a strong personality can take control
. And
she
supposedly had more of Lizzie than all the others.

I asked the cynosure to take me where I’d find Eric again, and the others
. The device had done exactly what she’d asked, too, slotting her into a different Lizzie, tortured by the voices of characters McDermott created based on his daughter.
I know that at least Bode is here, because I saw him, on the ward
. So Bode was a real person in this
Now
. What about the others? Did this mean that Rima and Tony and everyone else had their doubles in this
Now
?

Did
she
?

Wow. That thought hadn’t occurred to her. What would happen if she came face-to-face with herself? Could multiples of the same person exist in the same
Now
? In the valley, Lizzie said that too many
finished
book-people, ones whose stories were set, could destroy a
Now
. But if she believed the whisper-man,
she
was unique: a creation that had either escaped or been set free.

Except Elizabeth’s heard me, as a voice
. Why was that?
She called
us pieces
. Which meant they—Bode, her, Rima, and all the rest—were also
in
Elizabeth, and she experienced them all as voices. So where
was
everyone else? Why could she hear only Elizabeth?
Is it because I
am
strongest and shut them down?
Could she find them?
Talk
to them? Yes, but how would that help?

“Look, Elizabeth,” she said, pushing unsteadily to her feet. Her head swirled a woozy second, and her lips tingled. What was wrong with this girl? Coughing again, she brought up something gluey that she gagged back. Phlegm, she hoped, but her mouth went brackish again. Panting, she put a hand to the ache in her right ribs. “Help me out here. Where am I?”

You’re in me
.

“I understand that, okay? You know what I mean.” She aimed her words into this weird, shimmying darkness.
What
is
that?
It hit her then that she had no idea how big this cell was, or … 
Jesus, are there other people in here with me?
She’d assumed there were none because all the cries and bellows were so distant.
But what if there’s someone else, tucked in a corner, just
breathing,
waiting for me to stumble into it?
She felt her lids peel back as her eyes bugged. How would she know?
Only if it talks out loud or touches me
.

At that, she felt a faint whisk over the back of her neck.
What?
Spinning around, she stumbled and almost fell. “Wh-who?” Her breath came ragged. “I-is somebody …” She clamped her lips together. It was just air, the wind, a draft. Shrugging her shoulders around her ears, she shivered.
Imagining things
.

Or you’re only mad
.

“You shut up.” She swallowed around a snarl of fear. “Instead of fighting me, let’s work together so I can get out of here.”

No
. Elizabeth’s response was viper-quick.
I won’t. Every second you’re in control is one more I’m not
.

Damn it
. “Elizabeth, I only want to go home.”

Home. You say that as if it’s real, but it’s only make-believe, the energy of thought fixed to White Space, and nothing more. As soon as I find a way to put you back where you came from, energy’s
all
you’ll be
.

Put her back? Emma felt a sinking in her gut. The other girl was talking about putting
her
back into the Dark Passages. Could she do that, without the Mirror? Obviously, Kramer thought
she
could, or he wouldn’t have taken Elizabeth’s pendant. “How would that work, though?”

How would what work?

“The necklace.”
Okay, that’s really interesting
. They occupied the same body, but Elizabeth couldn’t read every thought. Maybe she could use that. “Kramer took it. But that makes no sense.”

Why not?
Elizabeth sounded curious despite herself.
Of course it does
.

“No, not really. Think about it. Let’s say my
essence
came out of the Dark Passages because it was attracted to you, okay? Like a moth heads for a candle?”

Yes, that’s obvious. I’m the original
.

Okay, she wasn’t going there. There was also a serious flaw in Elizabeth’s logic; she saw that right away. Honestly, with so many pieces of Elizabeth and the possibility of an infinite number of
Nows
, who knew who came first? What would that make little Lizzie? Just another piece?
That
little girl thought
she
was the original.

“Kramer took the necklace
only
after he saw it through the panops. I think that means that he believes it’ll work now, which means that it didn’t or couldn’t have before. Why else would he take it?”

You don’t know that
. Uncertainty, now.
Perhaps
he
didn’t want you using it
.

“But there’s no Mirror. So what does it matter if I have it or not?” Silently praying,
Please don’t freak out
. Because wasn’t she pretty much saying that Elizabeth wasn’t as special as she thought? “Don’t you see how it doesn’t make sense?”

No. It’s only that I don’t understand which symbols I need to make the right
Now
.
I might not even require the Mirror
.

All right, that could be. Little Lizzie used symbols to create new realities, and hadn’t used the Mirror at all.

Whoa, wait a second …
Until this instant, Emma had thought Lizzie was a
real
kid. Yet Elizabeth was obsessed with symbols as the way out of this
Now
, carving them into her arms—and so far as she knew, only Lizzie could use symbols that way.

So does that mean a piece of Lizzie’s in Elizabeth?
And if that was true … 
Lizzie was a creation, too?
Everything—the explosion, McDermott’s death, Meredith crashing the car—hadn’t happened in the real world, but in a book? As part of … what … 
her
story?

Jesus, that can’t be right
. Because what could it mean? That
this
, a London where people fell apart … 
this
was the only
real
place?

Wait, wait, slow down
. Lizzie had died still trapped in her forever-
Now
, the Peculiar in which she’d imprisoned the whisper-man. But did that mean that what happened to little Lizzie then was the same as when Tony had died, or Chad?
Back in the valley, Lizzie said that Tony wasn’t really dead and neither was Chad; that if you died in a
Now
that wasn’t yours, you went back to the one in which you belonged
. Or maybe the whisper-man, who’d inhabited Lizzie all along, had been lying. Honestly, keeping all this straight was giving her a headache.

Headache
. A ping. She gasped.
Jesus
. “That would
prove
it.”

What? What proves what?

She’d forgotten all about them.
But they were there
. She’d felt them.
Graves asked if I had a headache
. Trembling, she walked careful fingers to the ache at the center of her forehead. She felt stitches, regular as a train track, but … 
No
. Panicked, she pressed harder, ignoring the protests from her freshly stitched flesh. But there was nothing.

Of course not. What else should there be?

Nothing. No metal, no lacy filigree. Maybe she was wrong about this, the whole direction her thoughts were tending to here. But if that was true, she was really screwed, because then she had no idea what Kramer could possibly want from her.

“They were
there
,” she said fiercely. “
Damn
it, they were!”

All at once, under her probing fingers, she felt a firm and familiar edge surfacing from beneath those fresh stitches. It was just suddenly there, like one of those stop-action films where a tulip

How are you doing that?

goes from a tiny green nubbin to full flower in the blink of an eye.

“Ohhh.” The word came in a dribbling little moan that was equal parts relief and awe.
Oh, thank you, God
. She moved her quaking hand to explore Elizabeth’s scalp, which was smooth.
But
I
have plates and screws and scars
. She’d let Eric feel them, and she never let anyone do that, but Eric, she trusted.

Who is
Eric?
Is that another monster my father created, another piece? I don’t recognize the name
.

She paid Elizabeth no mind. Beneath her hand, her scalp wriggled. “Oh, holy shit!” All the tiny hairs on her neck went
stiff as spikes. “Please, make this be real, please.” Yes, beneath her fingers, her scalp was squirming, actually writhing and clenching and
heaving

How are you doing that?

as her many scars wormed to life,

Stop
.

tunneling from deep burrows to the surface,

STOP STOP THIS STOP!

where, an instant later, they knit into a familiar quilt of healed skin.

HOW DID YOU DO THAT?

Because of who I am; because I
am
stronger
. Her scars were like her skull plates.
They can’t
really
be there
. But she felt them.
And this is proof
. She traced an index finger over a fibrous filament on the crown of her head, then walked her fingers to the base of her skull. The mate to the titanium plate screwed to the bone between her eyes was there, too.
I was right about why Kramer took the cynosure
.