White Space (33 page)

“Oh my God.” She was so startled she nearly dropped the parchment. On the skin, that weakly scarlet blush shimmered and began to dissolve as if she’d somehow lost her grip on whatever was shuddering its way to the surface. Against her palm, the galaxy pendant began to cool.

“Don’t worry, it’ll come back,” Lizzie said, her voice still a little watery and oddly indefinite. “Remember, you’re the bait. Everything you need lives in you. Just find your words, Emma. Let them come. You’re not like Mom. You don’t need the purple panops to see that far down or between.”

Panops. All-seeing
. Her chest tightened.
Kramer had purple glasses. So did Graves
. But to see what? She opened her mouth to ask but then felt her questions fizzle as a familiar tingle she always felt before a
blink
swept through: a sense of falling and space opening up. In her hand, the cynosure burned but not as hot or bright as in the London
blink
. Nothing solid, no path of light leapt to show her the way.

Maybe that’s because it’s functioning as a lens now, bringing something into focus
.

Something was definitely happening. On the parchment, that pink smudge was deepening and becoming more distinct. It was, she thought, like watching Jasper prep a design onto a primed canvas, except there was no hand other than the one in her mind, drawing and pulling out meaning. In the
next instant, a snarl of brilliant red bloomed over the page, spreading over the surface in the complex tangle of an intricate calligraphy, spinning into letters and words, and she read:

NO
.
SHE COULD
feel a fist of dread close around her throat.
No, this isn’t happening
. This was Kramer’s office all over again, just a different story this time. Her eyes flicked to the header:
Satan’s Skin
. That was the book where
her
story came from, the one she’d written for Kramer’s class. So what was
she
doing in the same manuscript?

It can’t be
. All the air whistled from her lungs. She hadn’t written herself into her story. All she’d done was dream up the characters.
McDermott’s novel fragment
, Satan’s Skin,
is a about a demon-book written on demon-skin. Kramer said the gist of the plot is that characters don’t stay put in their own stories. They keep jumping out
. Then:
That’s what worried McDermott. He said that if the characters’ stories didn’t resolve—

“I remember when Dad said he’d give you my eyes.” Lizzie’s voice reached her from what seemed like another planet. “If you know where to look, you’ll find my whole life in Daddy’s books.”

But not
my
life
. She smoothed the scroll to bring the words into greater clarity, her clumsy fingers fumbling as the White Space resolved into crimson blocks of text:

She felt her knees trying to buckle.
This is like that John Cusak movie where the characters are nothing but alters, hallucinations. But my life is mine, I’m
me,
I’m real
.

And then her gaze snagged on this line, floating on its own like a crimson banner dragged by an airplane:

AND
.
SHE WAS
panting now, chest heaving. She stared so intently at that parchment, the scroll should’ve burst into flames.
And?
“And
what
?” she said, and shook the parchment as if she could dislodge the words stuck between the lines.
“And WHAT?”

“Emma?” Lizzie’s voice filtered through a high burr. “Are you okay?”

No, I’m nuts. I’m insane, and this is about down cellar
. Her hands shook.
This is about when I was twelve and found that door. No one knows about that
. But there it was, in screaming red calligraphy spidering over white parchment.

“Where’s the rest?” Her voice grated like an engine that just wouldn’t turn over. “The sentence just
stops
. Why is that? What happens next?”

“Don’t you know?”

“Yes. I mean … I don’t like thinking about it, but …” She clamped her lips together, willed herself to get out a complete sentence. “Why isn’t it here? How can it just stop like that?”

“Because that’s where our dad stopped. It’s as far as he got before Mom …” Lizzie’s eyes pooled again. “Before she did what she did.”

“Where he …” The memory quilt slipped in a muted tinkle of glass from her trembling hand, followed a moment later by the flutter of the parchment scroll filled with that bloody scrawl. She put a trembling hand to her mouth. “I thought your dad’s notes and unfinished novels were locked up somewhere.”

Lizzie nodded. “But he couldn’t help himself from starting
again, even though he promised. He said books were like really bad colds you just never got over until you wrote them down and got them out of your blood. Maybe he put so much of me in you, it was harder for him to stop himself, but I don’t know. Anyway, he just never finished you, and that’s why you got out. But that’s also what makes you really special. You’re not like the others, especially the guys whose stories are over.”

He never
finished
me? She means, there’s no period to the end of that sentence; there’s no
The End.
But
I
know what happened after I went down cellar. I’m not twelve anymore; I’m seventeen, and I have memories and a life and I go to school
. Then she thought,
Oh my God. Eric
.

“Special.” Her voice came out in a croak. “Not over yet? What is this?” She grabbed her middle with both arms, trying to hold it together. She was going to be sick; she was going to lose it; she was losing it; she could feel the burn flickering up her throat. In another second, she would break a window and go shrieking out into the snow. No wonder it was called Alice in Wonderland syndrome:
This is just like London, because we’re all mad here
. “What do you mean, I’m closest to you? That I got out? Out of
where
? What are you saying?”

“Emma, you’ve got the most of me in you … you know, like our eyes and stuff. You pull words from White Space. The Sign of Sure recognizes you just like it knows who I am. So I figured you were special enough to help me hold all the others in place.”

“The most of y-you. The guys whose stories are o-over.”

“Uh-huh.” Lizzie nodded. “You know, like Rima and Bode and Tony. They’re harder to do because they’re over and can’t change much.”

Oh shit, oh shit
. She was gulping now, her breath coming in jerky, shuddery gasps.
God, please, please
, please
let me wake up
. “Different books. You’re talking about characters from different books, from your dad’s
books
.”

“Well, sure,” said Lizzie. “I just had to show you how to do it by opening the right books and dropping you into different book-worlds until you figured out how to pull me into your White Space, your story. Oh boy, it took you long enough.”

“Opening the right … dropping me into book-worlds …” Emma choked. All her blackouts. She looked down at the parchment scroll, with its unfinished story of her life. All those
blinks
when she lost time; when she saw things … “Are you s-saying … are you t-telling me that all I am is s-some
character
from a goddamned
book
?”

“Well, yeah.” Lizzie’s lips wobbled. “Kind of.”

“GO!” TANIA DROPPED
into the passenger’s seat. Whiter than salt, her face glistened with sweat. Another spasm of pain grabbed the girl’s middle, and she grunted through gritted teeth, the knuckles of her right hand tightening around the rifle, as she clicked her shoulder harness home. “G-go, Rima, g-get us moving!”

“Hang on!” Mashing the accelerator, Rima felt the hard knock of the snowcat’s engine throttling up to a full-throated roar. The vehicle surged forward in a squalling grind of grating treads and screaming metal. Through the windshield, she could see the thing that had been Father Preston sprinting away, his cassock unspooling like a cape, flowing around his ruined body like black oil. Preston was moving fast, faster than should be possible for a man, almost skimming over the snow.

“Get him, Rima!” Tania straight-armed the dash against another wave of pain. “G-get that son of a b-bitch,” she panted, sweeping a hank of sweat-dampened hair from her forehead. “Go, Rima, g-go!”

Go
. Rima rammed the joystick. Dropping on its hydraulic slave, the snowblower came alive with a mechanical scream, the massive orange auger chewing and biting snow that, finally, had decided to
behave
a bit like real snow. The discharge chute belched glittering arcs of pulverized ice. Rima gunned the engine, and the machine lunged forward like a ravening insect, steel mandible ripping, tearing.
Go, go, go, go!

The thing was now past the cemetery, almost to the woods, but
they
were gaining. Sixty yards … fifty … 
thirty
. They were so close now that she could see the thin puffs of ice crystals kicked up by the thing’s mad passage. The edge of the snowblower’s casing was ruler-straight, and as they neared and the thing that was once a man—a gentle priest who believed that touching whispers was a gift, and not a curse—dropped below this new horizon, Rima shouted, “We’ve got him, we’ve got him,
hang on
!”

They hit: a sudden, jarring blow. Both girls slammed forward. Tania managed to hang on to the shotgun but lost her grip on the hammer, which clanked off the windshield and went spinning to the floor somewhere behind them, in the passenger cab. With a gasp, Rima threw up her arms as she catapulted forward and saw the wheel rushing for her face. At the last second, her shoulder harness caught and held, jerking her back like a hooked fish. Above the cat’s stuttering clank and roar, she heard a long, bubbling, unearthly wail. Beneath them, the snowblower seemed to stagger and mutter a stuttering, muted gargle, like a person simultaneously trying to breathe and talk with his mouth full.

“No no no no no.” Rima stiff-armed the cat’s balky controls. “Don’t you quit, don’t you
quit
!”

With a choked bellow, the cat coughed a mucky jet of macerated flesh and bone from its discharge chute. Blowback splatted against the windscreen, but instead of the moist red and purple and pink of a man’s blood and tissues, what hit that glass was viscous and black as oil and no longer human.

Choking again, the cat lurched and clanked to a shuddering halt. In the cab, the sudden stop catapulted the girls forward once more, and this time, Rima’s shoulder harness failed. Pain exploded in her right cheek as she slammed into the steering wheel, and her vision sheeted red.

“Rima?” Tania’s voice was tight and breathless. “R-Rima?”

“I’m … I’m okay. I’m fine,” she lied. Her cheek felt like a bomb had detonated and blown a hole through the roof of her mouth. She felt the warm spurt of blood on her cheek and down her neck, and there was more blood on the steering wheel.

“N-no,” Tania said in that same cramped voice. “That’s n-not what I meant. Look, Rima.” She pointed. “L-look at the windshield.”

Rima did—and then wished she hadn’t.

The windscreen was a nightmare of steaming flesh and ropy streamers of black blood.

And all of it was moving.

“KIND OF?” EMMA’S
chest imploded. This was insane; she might be nuts, but she was real, she did things, she could
feel
. “Is that kind of
no
, I’m
not
a character in a book, or is that kind of
yes?
”

“I mean,
kind
of.” Lizzie’s face was a tiny white oval. Her cobalt eyes were dark as India ink, the shadows that ghosted through before somehow even more pronounced than before. That birthmark glittered as brightly as a finely cut yellow diamond. “It’s sort of like that—”

“
Sort
of?
Kind
of? What are you talking about? I have a
life
!” Her hands flashed out to grab the little girl’s shoulders. Crying out, Lizzie tried backing away, but Emma wouldn’t let go and shook the kid, hard, like a floppy rag doll she was suddenly very tired of playing with. “Stop this shit! I have a
past
! I go to school! I watch
X-Files
and
Lost
and write stupid papers about crazy dead writers! I drink goddamned mocha Frappuccinos!”

“I kn-know! I’ve v-v-visited!” Mouth sagging open, Lizzie
was bawling her head off, sobbing the way only little kids do. “The words are al-all th-there!”

“Stop
saying
that! I’m not just words on a page!” Her chest was going like a bellows, the air scouring her throat. She felt the prick of furious tears. Of all the things her mind could light on, this is what she thought:
Kramer would just love this. This is so Philip K. Dickilicious; I write this up, and I’ll get a damned A for sure
.