White Space (4 page)

Mom draws out a bit of all that thought-magic to seal in a Peculiar, because it’s already way too easy to slip into one of her dad’s books. It’s why Dad’s famous, a
bestseller
. People are always
dying
for him to hurry up and write the next book already. They love that feeling of being lost somewhere and somewhen else. Sometimes Lizzie doesn’t want to pull herself
out of a book-world at all, just like kids who pretend to be superheroes and run around in costumes.

As her eyes slide from the Peculiars to Dad’s desk, Lizzie’s throat suddenly squeezes down to a straw. She’d hoped that Dad would be there, looking at the night through a big picture window facing the high heifer pasture. Lots of times he’ll just sit there, and Lizzie swears he’s watching something play itself out, as if on a big television tuned to a secret channel. Mom says Dad
flashes back
, kind of like visiting a very special, private
Now
. Not for real; he doesn’t go anywhere or slip through any other Dark Passages than the black basement of his brain, where there are whispers from
waaay
back, when he was a boy and lived in this creepy old farmhouse at the very bottom of a deep, cold valley surrounded by high, snowy mountains in a very bad Wyoming.

But right this second, Dad’s not flashing back to that valley. He’s not at his desk, and Lizzie feels that awful, heavy blanket weigh her down just a little bit more. She thinks,
No, Dad, no. You
promised.
You crossed your heart
. But he must’ve been dying inside, the story in his blood hotter than the highest fever, burning him up.

Dad has been a busy, busy bee. A new skin-scroll is unfurled over his desk. What he’s already pulled onto the scroll’s White Space with special ink is a bright red spidery splash: letters and words and whole paragraphs. A heavy scent, one that is like a crushed tin can left out in a storm, fogs the air.

Dad stands at the Dickens Mirror, which is not an oval but a slit, like the pupil of a lizard’s or cat’s eye, with all sorts of squiggle-monsters and arguses and typhons and
spider-swoozels and winged cobcraas squirming through its wood frame. The glass isn’t normal either but smoky-black, like old char left from a great big bonfire.

And Dad … he’s not acting like Dad. What he’s doing doesn’t even seem human. Because Dad is
growling
, like something’s waking up in his chest, raking curved claws over his insides, trying to break his bones and bust from his skin, just like the mom’s cancer in
Now Done Darkness
, or the million creepy, furry spithres that tremble like spiky petals from that girl’s mouth in
Whispers
. Dad’s face is all twisted and crooked, as if his head got ruined in Mom’s Kugelrohr oven.

In his right hand is his wicked-sharp lunellum. Normally, Dad only uses the knife, which is decorated with special symbols, when he makes his White Space skin-paper. Not tonight, though, and Lizzie knows doom when she feels it. The person in front of that Mirror is in the middle of becoming a thing she’s never seen before.

So make a sound!
A tiny panic-mouse claws her brain.
Sing a song! Do something to save him! Do something, Lizzie, do
anything,
before it’s TOO LATE!

But then
too late
happens.

The blade kisses her dad’s left palm, quick as a snake, and Dad goes,
AARRGGHHH!
His head whips back as another roar boils and bubbles:
AAAHHHH!

On the ladder, Lizzie jumps.
Dad!
the panic-mouse in her brain squeaks.
Dad, Daddy!
All the hairs on her neck and arms go spiky as a porcupine’s quills. She watches in mute horror as a bloody rill oozes down her father’s wrist to weep ruby tears.

The knife flashes again. The skin of Dad’s right hand splits in a red shriek. The lunellum
thunks
to the floor as her
father slams his bleeding hands, really, really hard, against the Mirror. The stand wobbles; there is a squeaking, wet sound as her father’s blood squelches and smears the glass; and Lizzie hears a very distinct, metallic
click
like the snap of a light switch.

And then the lizard-eye of that Dickens Mirror … changes. It starts to shimmer. The surface wobbles and ripples in undulating black waves, like a river of oil spilling across ice. Her father’s blood pulses, hot and red and
alive
; his blood writhes over the Mirror, and where his blood touches, the smoky glass steams. Long, milky fingers of mist curl around her father’s wrists and begin to pulse and suck—and all of a sudden, they are not white as milk or heavy mist but first pink and then a deep, dark bloodred.

The Mirror is drinking her father. The Mirror’s greedy fingers spiral up and up and up in a tangle of rust-red vines to web his neck and face, as if her dad is a piece of blank parchment onto which something new is being written in blood.

“Blood of My Blood,” her father says, but what comes out of his mouth is a voice of one and many: overlapping echoes and whispers from down deep and very far away. “I feed you, Blood of My Blood, Breath of My Breath. I feed you and I invite you. I release you and I bind you and I draw you. Together, we are one, and there are the Dark Passages and all of space and time to bridge.”

The mist twines around her father in a shimmering vermillion spiderweb. The blood-web tightens and squeezes, hugging her father right up to the churning, rippling glass. The black glass gives, the inky mouth of that Mirror gapes, and then her father’s hands slip through,
sinking
into the glass,
as he reaches down its throat and into the Dark Passages.

Run!
the panic-mouse screeches.
Run, Lizzie, run! Get Mom!
But she doesn’t. Her heart
bumpity-bumpity-bumps
in her chest, and she has never been so scared. In all the Lizzie-worlds she’s made and the
Nows
she’s visited and the hours she’s spent here with her father, she has never seen anything quite as terrible as this—and she simply can’t move.

The glass fills with something white and sparkly and thick and formless as fog that swirls and ripples—and knits together to form a face. But not Dad’s face, oh no. Whatever lies beyond the glass is still becoming: oozy and indefinite, there and then not, as if the face is pulling together the way hot glass slumps and folds and becomes something else. Even as she watches, the face solidifies into a nightmare of raw meat, bristly teeth, a snaky black tongue—

And eyes.
Eyes
. Two are black. They are a crow’s eyes, a cobra’s eyes—dead eyes with no pupils and no eyelids either.

But the third is different. Instead of the blue-black cyclops eye that is her monster-doll’s, this third eye is a silver storm, both mirror and ocean—and her father is there, his reflection pulling together from the swirling, smoky whirlpool to eel like a serpent, and oh, his face, her dad’s
real
face!

Maybe she makes a sound. Or maybe, like a snake, the whisper-man tastes her with his tongue, because all three eyes cut sideways and then—

He sees me
. Her hand catches the ball of a shriek.
He sees me, he sees me, he sees me!

And then.

Her father.

Turns—

“EMMA. EMMA?”

“What?” Emma snapped back, awareness flooding her mind in an icy gush, an arrow of sudden bright pain stabbing right between her eyes. Blinking past tears, her gaze sharpened on a pair of windshield wipers thumping back and forth, pushing rills of thick snow.

Driving. I’m in a car
. Her hands fisted the steering wheel.
But where am I going? How did I get here?

“Emma, are you okay? You look kind of out of it.”

“I-I’m fine. Sorry, Li … Lily.” She stumbled over the name, but
Lily
felt right in her mouth and Emma
did
recognize her, sort of: leggy, blonde, a touch of the valley girl.

“Have you figured out where we are yet?” Lily asked.

Oh man. They were
lost?
Jesus, how long had she been gone this time? “Not yet, but I bet we’ll be up … up …”

“Emma?”

“Jasper’s,”
she blurted, the word catapulting from her
mouth like a rock from a slingshot. “I bet we’ll be up at Jasper’s in no time.”

“Are you—” Lily let out a shriek as a fork of lightning stuttered. “Is that
normal
?”

“For Wisconsin,” Emma said as thunder bellowed and the lumbering Dodge Caravan—
a rental; yes, I remember complaining about the bad shocks, the mushy steering
—jumped. “Happens all the time, Lily.” She tried to keep it light, but her voice didn’t feel as if it belonged to her at all. God, leave it to her to vacate at the worst possible time. The
blink
had been so different, too: not just a blackout or snapshot flash but a whole
sequence
, fading fast. What had she seen? A little girl and a … a cat? Yes, but what was its name? Something to eat … Jelly? No, no, that wasn’t right.

Come on, Emma, you can do this. Just relax and let it come
.

But she couldn’t relax. Her head killed. Her vision fuzzed and then blistered as her headache pillowed and swelled. The space before her eyes opened in a spiky, purple-black maw, violent as a bruise. The doctors had always dismissed it as a variant of a scintillating scotoma, a visual symptom of a migraine. But hers wasn’t anything like a normal person’s, which figured. No bright firefly flashes for her, no shimmering arc or fuzzy spiral. Hers began as a rip in thin air, like a hole being munched right out of the backside of this world. The doctors made reassuring noises about petit mal seizures and an Alice in Wonderland syndrome, but all their talk boiled down to the same thing:
Honey, so sucks to be you
.

Can’t afford to
blink
away again, not while I’m driving
. Although she’d clearly been away already, hadn’t she? But
why now?
Come on
. Emma put a finger to her forehead, right above her nose, pressing the hard circle of a lacy titanium skull plate beneath muscle and skin.
Think
. When had she taken her last dose? This morning? Last night? Two days before? She couldn’t remember. The docs were always on her about that, too:
Emma, you need to be more compliant
. Easy for them to say. It wasn’t like she was
trying
to be a pain in the ass, but let them choke back pills for a week or two, see how much they liked it. The anti-spaz meds completely messed with her mind. The headaches might evaporate, but reality also misted to a blur until she felt as flat and lifeless as fading words on a tattered page. She didn’t know what was worse: no headaches, seizures, and
blinks
, or wandering around all hollow and zombied-out, like an extra from
The Walking Dead
.

Well, just muscle through it
. Gripping the wheel harder, she squinted through tears. The world beyond the windshield was shimmery and nearly colorless, that relentless curtain of snow going to gray, about to fade to black as the day died. But what she saw around the edges of that purple maw was wrong: craggy mountains on the right, the drop-off of a valley on the left.

What?
Her eyebrows pulled into a frown. That wasn’t right. Sure, Wisconsin has plenty of valleys, but the mountains were pimples. They were zits.
Nice
zits but still zits.

God, where are we?
Her eyes slid to her driver’s side window, frosted with a rime of thin ice. And right then she had the strangest, weirdest impulse: to press her hand to the glass, feel the burn as the ice bled.
One push, where the barrier’s thinnest. That’s all it would take
. Push hard enough and the glass
would open to swallow her up and then she would fall …

Another crash of lightning broke the spell, made her heart flop in her chest. Beside her, Lily let out a yelp and clutched the dash. “How can it
do
that in snow? Come on, Emma, you’re the science brain. Is it supposed to do that?”

“Sure, if cold air passes over warm water,” she said, relieved her voice didn’t shake. Temples throbbing, she forced her eyes forward again. The metal plate above her nose seemed to be burning its way through the bony vault of her skull. What had
that
been about? Bleeding
ice?
Pushing through melting glass, a thinning barrier, to some other world?
You nut, who do you think you are—Neo? Stop this. Come on, get a grip
. “It just means we’ve got to be close to Lake Superior. That’s why the thunder’s so loud. If we were further away …” She bit off the rest. Lily probably didn’t need a lecture on acoustic suppression and the reflective properties of ice crystals—and she
did
know Lily, right? Sure, they were both juniors at Holten Prep; Lily was in her … her … What class was it? English? History? Basket-weaving for the mentally deranged?

What’s wrong with me?
Her tongue skimmed her lips, tasting fear and salt. Coming back from the
blink
this time was much worse than ever before, her mind pulling itself together like molten chewing gum pried from the underside of an old shoe. But why? Usually, it was
blink-blink
and, whoa, when had she decided to take up skydiving? All right, the fugues—pockets of time for which she had no memory—weren’t quite as bad as that, but if she ever needed a go- to for why eighteen pairs of shoes suddenly appeared in her closet, she was set.

Don’t freak. That just makes everything worse. Come on, you know who you are. You’re Emma Lindsay and she’s Lily … Lily
…
She swallowed around a sudden knot of panic.
Lily who?

“Maybe we should turn back,” Lily said.

No, I don’t think we can. I don’t think the storm will let us
. But those were crazy thoughts. A storm couldn’t think. Ice didn’t bleed. You couldn’t tumble through glass to fall into forever and all times like some kind of crazy Alice. Of course, a purple mouth shouldn’t make Swiss cheese of the world, but that didn’t stop her addled brain from conjuring one out of thin air. Understanding why didn’t make what she saw any less scary.