White Space (6 page)

Originally a quantum physics star—lotsa theories about multiverses and timelines and blah, blah—Meredith McDermott was fruitier than a nutcake. Years in institutions, suicide attempts—the whole nine yards. Maybe she turned to glass art the way a patient might take up painting, but what she made was unreal; museums and collectors fell all over themselves snapping up pieces.

Turned out the lady was also a complete pyro. She would’ve had plenty on hand in her studio, too: propane tanks, cylinders of oxygen, acetylene, MAPP. To that she’d thrown in gasoline and kerosene and, as a kind of exclamation point, a bag of fertilizer.

The fireball was immense. The explosion chunked a blast crater seventy feet long and fifteen feet deep. Emma bet Old Frank was tip-typing away in writer heaven before he knew he was dead.

Even so, there ought to have been plenty of Frank McDermott shrapnel: bits and pieces zipping hither and thither at high speeds to get hung up on branches or blast divots into tree trunks. Science was science. No matter what the movies said, for a person to completely vaporize, you needed either an atomic bomb or about a ton of dynamite. So why couldn’t the police find a single, solitary bone? A watch?
Something?
All that was recovered at the scene were the barn’s iron bolts, sliders, and hinges—and a coagulated lake of slumped, amorphous glass.

And only the barn burned. The house hadn’t. Neither had Meredith’s workshop or the woods or even the fields, despite the fact that the local fire department was twenty miles away and no response team arrived until hours after the explosion. Just plain weird.

And where was Meredith? What happened to the McDermotts’ little kid? All the police ever found was the family car, miles away after it lost an argument with a very big oak. No bodies, though. Just a dead car.

And a whole lotta blood.

THE UNFINISHED MANUSCRIPTS
were also weird.

Three—and there might be more—were quietly decomposing under house arrest in some vault in England. No one was allowed to see or handle them, period. All scholars like Kramer got were a few choice bits copied from the originals: not enough to make much sense of the stories but just enough to whet their appetites.

This tallied, though. McDermott was a squirrel. Not even his editors were allowed to hang on to his original manuscripts, which were penned on homemade parchment scrolls—no one was quite sure whether these were vellum or the hide of some more exotic animal—with a special ink McDermott also formulated himself. Since the guy made more money than God, the editors put up with it. They also mentioned how the
longer they handled those scrolls, the more the ink changed color
to a shade as vibrant as freshly clotted blood
, as one editor put it. Even this wasn’t necessarily news. From the description, Emma thought McDermott’s brew must be chemically related to iron gall ink, which oxidized with exposure to air. In other words, the ink rusted, and the stuff literally ate through parchment. All the academics made this sound so
spooky
, but honestly, it was just chemistry. Mozart and Rembrandt and Bach used the same ink. So did Dickens. BFD. All McDermott had done was tweak the original recipe so his work had a built-in termination date: a nice way of sticking it to people like Kramer. Give McDermott an
A
for effort; Emma almost admired the guy.

Probably would have, if she hadn’t been so freaked about her story.

WHAT KRAMER HANDED
her was a fragment—a note, really—from a book she’d never read, because McDermott never got around to writing it. All that scholars like Kramer knew about this novel,
Satan’s Skin
, came from this and a few other jotted entries. The plot involved a demon-grimoire stitching itself back together, only the pages had been reused in other books and so the characters kept jumping off the page while debating the nature of quantum realities. Some loopy
Matrix
meets
Inkheart
-with-a-vengeance crap like that.

Her
story was about these eight kids stranded in a spooky house during a snowstorm who begin to disappear one by
one. Okay, it wasn’t
all
original; she’d taken a cue from this awesome John Cusack movie. (Sure, the film was completely freaky. All the characters turn out to be alters: different personalities hallucinated by this completely insane, wacko killer. But the idea that people who
thought
they were real
weren’t—
well, it was just so cool.) Her first draft had written itself, pretty much. Considering how writing creeped her out, this should’ve tripped some alarms.

As it happened, her story was a subplot of
Satan’s Skin
. There were differences. In McDermott’s version, the kids—and yeah, there were eight—were nameless. The oldest, a complete psychopath, murdered his nasty drunk of a dad, who deserved it, the abusive SOB. (All McDermott’s dads and quite a few moms were the same, too. Guy had some serious parental unit issues.) In her version, the characters had names, but her hero—this sweet, sensitive, gorgeous, hunky, completely
yes-please
guy—had killed his nasty dad in self-defense and was haunted by what he’d done.

Both her draft and McDermott’s fragment shared something else: neither ended. Kramer said McDermott’s note stopped in midsentence, a little like
Edwin Drood
, although Dickens had the decency to put in a period before up and dying. Hers was like McDermott’s. Not only had she written herself into a corner; she couldn’t figure a way to tie up all those loose ends. The last sentence just sort of floated all by its lonesome. Since her assignment was only a first draft, she had the go-to of needing feedback from the Great Bloviator … er, Kramer.

But, to be honest? Imagining a final period or
the end
set
up a sick fluttering in her stomach. She just couldn’t do it. She’d never admit this to a soul, but … well … her hero was the perfect guy and she … she really
liked
him. In
that
way. Okay, okay, fine, she even
daydreamed
about him, and how lame was that? Mariane had this stalker thing for Taylor Lautner—seriously, the girl was obsessed with those pecs and that six-pack—but at least she drooled over a real guy. Emma’s perfect boyfriend was an idea that lived in her head, but he was also so
real
, the most well-rounded of her characters. The others were just one-dimensional placeholders. This guy she actually thought of as a complete person. Wrapping up his story would be so
final
, a lowering of that damn bell jar. Once done, her guy was finished, no way out of the box—not unless she decided to chuck science and write herself into
The Continuing Adventures of Emma Lindsay, Loser and Social Misfit
. Maybe that was why writers did sequels; they just couldn’t let the story really die.

Anyway. Her draft and McDermott’s fragment were virtually identical.

“Other than the madwoman in the attic, which is so utterly Brontë but perhaps understandable considering Meredith McDermott’s long history of mental illness, that subplot is baffling,” Kramer said. “It’s as if these teens in
Satan’s Skin
are … stand-ins? Alters? Different possible versions and aspects of McDermott himself? Because, clearly, the man’s reworking his abusive past. That miserable childhood in Wyoming always haunted him, and of course, the snow and deadening cold are symbolic of slow soul murder. Very Joycean, wouldn’t you agree? He does much the same with the mother in
Whispers
—absolutely brilliant; we’ll be
reading that after break … and of course, madness as a slow cancer, a rot eating away at the very fabric of reality, is rendered with stunning effect in this very bizarre little Victorian pastiche that exists only in fragments itself and yet is thoroughly
blahdiddy-blahdiddy-blah-blah
.”

Numb, Emma grayed out. Who gave a wet fart what McDermott had in mind? How had she copied a manuscript she hadn’t known existed?

Hating Kramer would’ve been easy; he was
such
an asshole. But she couldn’t, not really. From his perspective, she was a cheater, a plagiarist, the academic scum of the earth. But he just didn’t know the whole sordid story.

No one did.

EVERYTHING SHE KNEW
about her bio parents fit the back of a stamp, with room to spare. Dear Old Drug-Addled Dad tried a two-point set to see if Baby really bounced against a backboard. (Uh, that would be no.) Mommy Dearest boogied before Dad tested whether
she
might be less sucky on a layup. Later, Daddy hung himself in lockup because
—oops
—someone forgot to confiscate the shoelaces of his All Stars. Big whoopsie-daisy there.

Cue ten years of Child Protective Services and a parade of foster parents, group homes, doctors, staring shrinks, clucking social workers. Her headaches got worse, thanks to Dear Old Dad. All that head trauma started off a chain reaction of growing fractures. She got older and uglier as her skull grew lumpier and bumpier.

Then Jasper, a crusty old sea dog with a fondness for bourbon, Big Band, and paint, showed up. Why he wanted to foster a kid, especially one with her history and looks, she never could figure. (Before her surgeries, she could have been a stunt double for those bubble-heads playing the Mos Eisley Cantina.) Jasper got her surgerized so her brain wouldn’t go
ker-splat
all over the floor. Fixed up her face, too. Then he whisked her away from all the do-gooders to an ancient stone cottage
waaay
up north overlooking Devil’s Cauldron, a dark blue inlet of rust-red sandstone layered over ancient volcanic rock on the northern tip of Madeline Island in Lake Superior.

By day, Jasper piloted charters and wandered around in a ratty cardigan and muttered to himself. Nights, he tossed back a couple belts, cranked up a wheezy old cassette recorder, and slathered canvasses with eerie, surreal landscapes choked with bizarre creatures, as Frank Sinatra or Dean Martin burbled, or
Bleak House
or
The Old Curiosity Shop
or a dozen other Dickens novels and stories spun themselves out on the air. Some of the creatures Jasper painted, she recognized: woolly mammoths, dinosaurs, prehistoric benthic creatures, weird insects with three-foot wingspans. Others—the ones with stalk-eyes and tentacles and screaming needle-toothed navels—were so Lovecraft, they looked like they’d slithered from the deep wells of inky nightmares.

What Emma never did understand was that when he finished, Jasper pulled a Jackson Pollock, slopping thick white paint onto each and every canvas. When she complained there was nothing left to see—and what was the
point
?—Jasper would toss back another shot and explain that the creatures, which existed in the Dark Passages between all the
Nows
, were
too powerful to let out:
Every time you pull them onto White Space, you risk breaking that
Now. (And oh well, when he put it
that
way, it all became so
clear
. So much for a straight answer.)

With a story as Harry Potter as this, Jasper ought to have been a wizard. She should have had strange powers. But no, Jasper was just odd; a small army of surgeons stenciled a road map of skillfully hidden scars onto her scalp and gave her a normal, if titanium-enriched, skull; and she loved Jasper so much that seeing him as he was now hurt like nails hammered into her heart.

AND NOTHING BAD
happened once she was with Jasper. Summers, she biked around Madeline or kayaked over to Devils Island with Jasper, slipping in and out of sandstone sea caves or wandering the forested sandstone while her guardian sketched. Jasper said the island got its name from the old Ojibwe legend that Matchi-Manitou, some honking huge evil spirit, was imprisoned in a giant underground cave at the entrance to the spirit worlds, and only the bravest warriors could pass through the black well at the center of the island to fight the thing,
blah, blah
. Some vision quest crap like that. The only well she knew on that island was near an old lighthouse and keeper’s cottage. Still, whenever there was a really big blow, the roar and boom of the sea caves—of big, bad Matchi-Manitou—carried clear to Jasper’s cottage.

Still, nothing horrible happened. Okay, she was lonely. No friends. Maybe it was crusty, tipsy, bizarre Jasper, who would scare a sane kid, but no matter how hard she tried … she was
a dweeb. Smart, but still inept and weird.

Whatever. Really, everything was good.

Well … until the year she turned twelve and went downstairs into the cellar to look for a book and where … where …

Well, where something happened down cellar that she’d really decided not to think about, or remember.

Really.

THE BLACKOUTS—THE
BLINKS
—STARTED
a week after the incident down cellar. Each began the same way: a swarming tingle like the scurry of ants over her skin; the boil of an inky dread in her chest. The world thinned; her brain superheated. Then that purple-edged maw opened before her eyes and she would swoon into an airless darkness, tripping into the space between one breath and the next.

And then
—blink-blink
—she was back.

Often, she retained glimpses: the ooze of fog over slick cobblestones; a string of gaslights marching over a faraway bridge and a huge clock face that she
almost
recognized. A long hallway and rough carpet against her feet. A white nightgown that whispered around her legs. A huge red barn. A deep valley ringed by craggy, snow-covered mountains.

Sometimes—the worst times—she remembered
things
: bulbous monsters with tentacles and a patchwork of eyes; creatures that lived someplace dark, far away, and very, very cold. Or, come to think of it, that lurked behind the white paint of Jasper’s canvases.

Mostly, though, there was nothing. She would simply
blink
awake with a sizzling headache arcing from the plate between her eyes to another at the very base of her skull, as if a switch had been thrown and a circuit completed:
zzzttt!
The
blinks
lasted anywhere from a few seconds or minutes to a good long while, but she apparently functioned: got to class, turned in papers, took tests, worked glass, drank Starbucks. Clearly, even in a blackout, she was a girl with priorities.