White Space (29 page)

Only one way to find out. Bracing the palm of her right hand on the dome’s wall, she turns her face away and whips Jasper’s walking stick around by the business end. There is a watery splash as the carved ivory head smashes a pane, breaking open a foot-wide maw bristling with glassy teeth.

Time for one more, and then it had better be enough
. Kramer is shouting again, and from the corner of her eye, she sees other men, who must’ve come in a different way, running for the spiral staircase. She swings. The remaining glass explodes, and this time the muntins surrounding this pane, as well as the ones immediately to the left and above, simply fall out.
They’re wood, not metal
. Through the huge gaping hole, she could hear the faint
hoosh
of the wind.

Far below, the chapel door finally grinds open, and she pauses just long enough to look down as Kramer and the others clamber over the felled cabinet and scattered hymnals. She sees Kramer raise a lantern, the light cutting deep shadows over his face as he cranes a look. She doesn’t even wait for him to ask her what she’s doing before she does it.

Unknotting the altar cloth, she snaps the heavy fabric like a sheet. The cloth snags on minute jags of glass but holds. Still clutching Jasper’s stick, she reaches with her left foot, plants it
on the sill, then shifts her weight to thrust her head and shoulders through the broken glass.
Easy, easy
. Stabbing down, she feels the moment that the tip of the walking stick hits and steadies against stone, and then she leans into it, trusting in the sturdy wood to hold her weight as she pulls her right leg through the window.

“Ahh!” she groans as her bare foot sinks into snow, then flinches away at a sharp bite of glass in her heel.
Go, go, muscle through this. Come on!
Gritting her teeth, she pulls her left leg after and clambers out of the bell jar and into the storm.

INSTANTLY, SHE SINKS
to her ankles in snow. She stands on the narrow ledge that surrounds the dome. Through a wavering curtain of whirling wet flakes, she spots the curved rails of an iron ladder bolted into the stone.
Must be the way down
. Below, the asylum’s roof is a wide, flat, white expanse edged with a decorative marble cornice.

So now what? Where is she supposed to go? For a stunned moment, she can only huddle against the icy dome. Snow blasts over her skin. The wind cuts, ripping the breath from her mouth, and she can feel her determination, the certainty that
this
was the right and only way, beginning to bleed away.

“So now what, House?” She watches the wind fling her words into the storm. “What was the
point?
Why are you showing me this?”

Only the wind answers, in a howl. A dullness settles in her chest. Either she stands here until Kramer or one of his men finds a ladder and comes through that broken window, or …

I
am
insane
. Floundering, her feet beginning to numb, she gropes her way to the iron ladder and carefully lowers herself a rung at a time. At the very bottom, she pauses, looking up at the massive bell jar of the dome hunched against a moonless night with no stars. Icy pellets of snow needle her cheeks and sting her eyes, which are starting to tear. She is here to find something; she has to believe that, because the alternative is just too awful.

So what is it, House? What do you want me to see, to do now?
Dropping into snow, sinking up to mid-calf, she grimly slogs toward the marble cornice at the front of the building. Walking against the wind is like shoving her way through pins. The dome rises off her right shoulder. Far below and across a long, very black expanse that must be the asylum’s front grounds, she can just make out the faint glow from gas lamps mounted on high iron posts to either side of a wide gate, and at ground level, the flicker of a lamp inside some kind of structure that reminds her a little bit of those ranger kiosks at park entrances. Raising a hand to shield her eyes, she squints against a pillow of wind-driven snow.
Gatehouse?
Beyond are other lamps, spaced at long intervals on tall posts along an empty street fronted by dark shops. Above those, lozenges of fuzzy light spill from apartment windows where anyone sane is riding out the storm. To the far right, through a distant tangle of bare tree limbs, she spots a glister of many colors, faint and fractured.
Stained glass
, she thinks.
That’s a church
. But where in England is she, exactly?

At that, the storm seems to pause a moment, or maybe it’s only the wind deciding to pull in a breath, because the snow shifts. Now, to her left and in the distance, she spots the dark
spear of a tower thrusting above the far trees—and its clock face, bright as a moon.

All right, that answers that question
. Other than Dickens and that crazy stunt where Queen Elizabeth parachuted into the Olympics with Daniel Craig, she might not know much about England, but she recognizes that clock tower. Everyone does.
Big Ben
.

That’s when she remembers something else, from a Lizzie-
blink
: a
different
London. Lizzie had thought that; her parents had mentioned it directly. But what did that mean
—another
London? Or would a little girl like Lizzie see the past as a different place, a separate
Now?

Or maybe it’s both
. Her eyes snag on a furred arc of green-white balls of light strung between the clock tower and the bank opposite.
What if we’re talking about not only travel between two points but also different
times?

Her thoughts suddenly fizzle and her vision seems to waver as the darkness ripples. For an instant, she thinks,
Shit, can’t pass out now
. But then, when she doesn’t and the darkness stops moving, her mind simply blanks.

Because there, hovering just beyond the decorative marble cornice at the roof’s edge, is a tall jet slit, narrow as a lizard’s eye and outlined by the glister of a blare-white glow.

No. You’re not real
. Squeezing her eyes shut, she flutters them open again to find that the view hasn’t changed. If anything, the glow is stronger.
Why did you make this, House? What do you want from me?

“Emma.”

At the sound of her name, her heart catapults into her
mouth.
I think about times and
Nows,
and House makes the Mirror appear
. Gulping against a sour surge of fear, she turns.
House makes
him.

Kramer is there, not far away, on the roof. His body is a well of shadow, the details indistinct. But like that slit-mirror that cannot
really
be there, Kramer is backlit by a faint, undulant luster, as sickly green as an old bruise. In a way, Kramer is the Mirror in human form: a blank daguerreotype, a cutout with no face and nothing she recognizes. But, oh, she knows that gargle of a voice that is one and many, because she has heard it before: in a Lizzie
-blink
, and on a Madison street conjured from memory.

“There’s nowhere in this
Now
left to run,” Kramer says, his voice burring and humming as if the words are being run through a faulty synthesizer. “Or rather … you have a choice of where and in which
Now
you choose to be.”

Where and in which
Now? Having rested long enough—allowing her to see what it is that House wants her to know—the greedy wind starts up again to grab her gown, snatch at her hair. Glancing back over her shoulder at the hovering slit-mirror, she feels that familiar burn in her forehead, which had ebbed as soon as she bashed out that window, beginning to brighten and sting, coring like a laser through her brain.

“I’m not going anywhere with you.” She eases back a slow step and then another, her bare soles digging troughs in the snow. “Just let me go. I want to go home. I want out of this valley and this creepy house with its weird doors and rooms. I only want to wake up.”

“Emma, this is your home and where you belong,” Kramer says. “
This
is your
Now
.”

“I don’t believe you.” Between her breasts, the galaxy pendant on its crimson silk ribbon smolders and heats.
I have plates that haven’t been invented; I carry the memory of the future
. “If I’m only crazy, how come
you
know about
Nows?
You’re a liar. I’m still in the valley. I’m in House.”

“Touché. But did I really say something just now?” Kramer cocks his head. “Are you sure you’re not imagining that I said something you’d like to hear? Even if I
did
speak, it is my word against your very intriguing delusion. Tell you what: if I’m not real, come to me.” Arms spread wide, Kramer starts toward her. Where she’s struggled and slipped on fresh-fallen snow, he seems to glide, and that is when she sees that his shoes aren’t sinking. She isn’t altogether sure his shoes even touch the snow at all. Something is also gathering … 
behind
him? No,
Kramer
is shifting, going fuzzy at the edges, his body beginning to steam. “Come,” he says, skimming over snow. “Come with me.”

Her voice locks in her throat. She is too frightened to scream. Her heart is thrashing in her chest, and the pendant is a scorching, calescent blaze.

Run. Run now. Go through the Mirror before he—

A blackness darker than night swarms over Kramer’s body, knitting itself into a tangle of scaly arms and spindle legs; into the thing that pulled itself from the book on the street she’s just left.
Peekaboo, I see you
. Its voice, whisper-man black, sweeps through her mind, working its fingers into the folds and crannies of her brain.
Stay, Breath of My Breath. Drink, Blood of My Blood. Stay and plaaay through tiiime—

“Get out of my head, get out of my head, get out of my
head!
” With a shriek, she whirls around and pelts across the roof, slip-sliding on ice and slick slate. She feels the whisper-man fling itself after, but she is running, running, running, and there is the black mirror, rushing for her face as the pain flares between her eyes and the galaxy pendant seems to explode against her chest, as hot and dazzling as a nova—and there is light, a wide blinding bolt that shoots from the pendant, unfurling itself in a path: light that is so strong and steady and sure, it’s as if she’s running on a bright, unerring seam.

Forget what Einstein said about light. It’s not solid; you can’t run
on
light. It isn’t there and neither is the Mirror
, a tiny panicked voice jabbers in her mind.
Follow this and you’re dead. You’ll go over the edge, because you’re crazy; the doctors were right, Kramer’s right, and this path is not there, it doesn’t exist, it isn’t—

Screaming, Emma plants both hands on icy marble, swings her legs, and then she is sailing for the mirror, following that ribbon of light, and crashing through in a hail of jagged black glass, and then she is falling, screaming,
falling …

ONTO A ROAD
.

London is gone. Her clothes are … regular clothes. Normal jeans, although she’s now wearing the turquoise turtleneck House let her find. Her head kills; that metal plate is gnawing a hole in her skull. She has brought nothing from the past except the galaxy pendant, which is, weirdly, still there and warm against her chest. Otherwise, she’s fine.

Well, considering all this fog.

Oh shit
. Her eyes lock on the wreck of a car, crumpled against a sturdy tree, and then she knows exactly where—and when—she is.
No, this is
Lizzie’s
life
, her
past, not mine; this has nothing to do with me
.

Suddenly, space wrinkles. The pendant fires and Emma rushes toward the wreck, though she hasn’t moved a muscle. It is as if she and Lizzie have occupied the opposite ends to a single sentence and someone has carved away everything in between. The degree of separation is now no more than
a sliver of White Space between two adjacent letters in the same word. Or is she still, somehow, caught in the Mirror, between worlds? Between
Nows?

Or is this like the bathroom in House
—she reaches out and feels her palms flatten on an icy, hard, impenetrable, invisible surface
—and I’m on my side of the glass?

Another thought, stranger still:
Is this one of those places where the barrier’s thinnest?

Beyond, on the other side, Emma can see Lizzie’s mother. Meredith’s head lolls; the air bag’s painted a slick red. The impact has displaced the engine block, the dashboard has ruptured, and the steering wheel has actually moved, jamming into Meredith’s body, tacking her to the seat like a bug to cardboard.

Lizzie’s mother lets out a long,
long
moan.

“M-m-mommmm?” Lizzie’s head is muzzy and thick.

Wait a second
, Emma thinks, on her side of the barrier.
I
feel
her, like I’m in her head, in two places at once. How can that be?

“Mom,” Lizzie whimpers. The car’s hood is an accordion, the dash only inches from Lizzie’s chest. Lizzie might be able to slither sideways, but there is nowhere to go. “M-Mom?”

“L-Liz …” The word is a hiss, but this is not the whisper-man. This is the voice of her mother, and she is dying; Lizzie knows that, and there is nothing Lizzie can do, no way to fix this.

Trapped on the other side of this nightmare, Emma thinks,
It’s like I’m bleeding into her life
. She remembers Frank cutting himself, the sound of his blood squelching over the Mirror.
I’m bleeding into
her.

“Mom?” Lizzie’s voice thins with grief and terror. Bright red blood jets from her mother’s chest and
splish-splish-splishes
onto vinyl. The steering wheel has done more than pin her mother against the seat. The wheel is broken, and the jagged column has punched through like the point of a lance. With every beat, Mom’s heart empties her veins just a little bit more.

Please, House, get me out
. Emma watches as the fog gushes into the car, swirling up in a whirlpool past Lizzie’s feet, her hips.
You showed me the way out of that asylum. So, show me
now.
Get me out of Lizzie’s head, please
.