The Dickens Mirror (52 page)

“Well, yes. It’s the same for everyone. Nothing is all
anyone
sees when they sleep.”

“Well, clearly not everyone, right? Meredith knows what a dream is. Where I come from,” Emma said, “everyone dreams. You see pictures. Stories, sort of. It’s a way of sifting through your day and storing memories.”

“Doesn’t sound very restful. Have you considered that’s something common to pieces because you’re imaginary? Of course you’d insert yourself into stories, because that’s all you know. Real people have no need for dreams.”

“Then how do you explain your mother?” Emma said. “She knows what nightmares are. It’s how she found the others.”

Elizabeth felt a twinge of disquiet. “I don’t know. Why is it important? Who cares?”

“You know,” the shadow-Casey said, the words wobbling and reverberating, “now that we’re talking about it, I’m not sure I remember
ever
having a dream. I know what they
are
, but …” (She noticed how close his shadowy pillar had sidled to Rima, and they
did
seem a pair, just as Eric and Emma did.) “Do
you
remember, Rima?” Casey asked. “From before?”

“No.” Rima sounded troubled. “And why would
our
Tony and Chad think something that happened was only a bad dream instead of the real thing?”

“They both died there,” Emma said. “Maybe that’s the only way they
can
think of what happened. When you wake up, you’re relieved it was only a nightmare.”

“But we get right back to the same problem: why has the nightmare bled into
this
London’s Tony and Rima and Bode?” Eric said. “Why them and no other?”

“For that matter, why hasn’t Meme had the dream? She’s your doppelgänger,” Elizabeth said, surprising herself.
Why am I helping them?
Perhaps
that
was her purpose? Was
this
the pivot upon
which her life might turn? “If she’s so close to you in every other way, shouldn’t she?”

“She’s right,” Eric thrummed.

It bothered her that she actually felt a flicker of accomplishment:
See, I’m not completely hopeless; I can hold my own
. “Why haven’t
I
had that nightmare? Except for Eric and Casey, you’re all pieces in me. Why doesn’t it bleed back into me?” Elizabeth said. “Because you’re right, Emma: how does my mother use a nightmare if
I
don’t know what a dream is? If
no one
here does? God,” she said, truly listening to herself, “what if people here don’t … because they
can’t
? What if dreaming isn’t a glitch or mistake? What if no one here dreams because …”
Say it, make it real; look at Meme and these doubles; look at my mother and that other Meredith. It’s the only logical conclusion
. “What if they don’t dream because it’s not in their nature … and it’s not in mine? God”—she exhaled a quavering gasp—“what if it’s because of the way we’re all
made
?”

“Hey, hey, take it easy.” Laying a hand at once solid and vapor, flesh and shadow, on her shoulder, Emma gave a gentle squeeze, and only then did Elizabeth feel the wet on her cheeks and the sting in her eyes. “We can’t be certain of anything,” Emma said.

But Elizabeth thought she was perilously close to understanding something. The words were taking shape on her tongue and then lives of their own. “If my mother is the only one in this London who dreams, doesn’t that make her closer to you? And then, because I can’t … doesn’t that make me like Meme? Like Kramer?”

“They don’t have us in them,” Eric said. “That might explain it. Maybe we keep you from dreaming.”

“Oh, how fortunate,” she said, but with no venom. Her voice was watery. Through her tears, she noticed that, like Emma, Eric
had moved closer. All the shadows had, and she recognized, with a start, that they
felt
something for her. Not pity so much as … understanding. Empathy.
We know how you feel; we are here to help you if we can
.

“What are we to do? What can we? How can we make this right? Look at this
Now
, my world. What a shambles it is. We’re all wrecks of one sort or another. Kramer may have learnt something from my father. In fact, I’m certain of it. There are those man-things, after all, and what he can do with the rock here. You’d think he’d use that ability to repair this place, but I doubt he truly can. He doesn’t know how, and maybe that’s because he can’t imagine properly. Can’t”—she could feel herself groping toward something now—“can’t
dream
a world in all its casts and colors, and so nothing will ever be right here, because he can’t do it, and never will.”

“Yesss.” The sound was startling, a ghostly sough, void of inflection, that drifted from somewhere behind. “Never.
Willlll
.”

God
. Shuddering, Elizabeth hugged herself. That voice stroked the tiny hairs on her neck and sent a frisson skipping the rungs of her spine. This particular shadow had spoken very little and was the least formed, quite probably because it was also the most contaminated of all, having bound itself to a whisper-man of the Dark Passages.

Odd, though, given how insubstantial and ghostly it seems now, that its voice was so strong, enough to get me to cut myself
. Cupping her arm, she kneaded her aching skin. She could swear the scars actually clenched.
Perhaps that is all of itself it recognizes, this urge to form these symbols?
Or its sole purpose?

The shadows’ indeterminate bodies flowed and eddied as they turned, and Emma dropped to a crouch. “Why not, Lizzie?”
Emma’s tone was very gentle, as if she feared frightening this piece back into incoherence and oblivion. Or perhaps she was only being cautious. After all, this small shadow had nearly killed Emma and her friends. “Is he doing something wrong?”

“Not. Make.
Riiight
.” The words were hollow and reverberative. If ever one wished to hear a proper ghoul, Elizabeth thought they need look no further.

“Make?” Eric repeated. “Don’t you mean
made
?”

“No, I think she means something else. Lizzie,” Emma said, “you made
Nows
. You
make
them. Can you …”

“Build.” Pause. “A.” Pause. “New.”

“A new,” Emma repeated after a moment. “A new … what, Lizzie?”

“Maybe she means
anew
,” Elizabeth said. “As in
over again
.”

“I don’t think that’s it. Lizzie, honey, tell me.” Emma reached a hand to where the shadow’s head ought to be, and when Emma’s fingers played through black mist, Elizabeth could swear she saw the slightest shimmer of corn-tassel curls.

The more Emma names it, the clearer it
—
Lizzie
—
becomes
, she thought.
Very canny, Emma. To name is to control
.

“Lizzie,” Emma said, “what did you mean?”

The curls roiled like golden pythons before evaporating in black steam.
“Nooow.”

“A new
Now
? Or a start-over
Now
? A redo?” Eric and Emma traded looks, and then Eric went on. “Which do you mean? How would you do that, Lizzie?”

The answer, when it finally came, sent a chill sweeping through Elizabeth’s body. Perhaps it was because the words also seemed so final.

“Not. Me.” The Lizzie-shadow trembled.
“Weee.”

Pot and the Kettle

YOU THINK
YOU’RE
the first, the original, the
only
Black Widow?
(No matter who she claimed to be, the name so suited.) Doyle’s eyes wandered back to the examination tables.
Pot and the kettle, that
.

“What? I …” Meredith warded off Black Widow’s words with an upraised hand. “That’s not true.” She repeated it, as if mortaring the words in place, then looked to her husband. “Is it?” As if hearing the question in her voice, she said, “No, of course not.” When McDermott didn’t respond, she turned to Black Widow. “I understand why you believe that. He creates you to think that way.”

“Creates us?” It was the little girl, Emma. She’d bunched a shawl under Tony’s head and now stood alongside Rima. “
All
of us? How?”

“Wait a minute,” Doyle said, breaking silence at the same instant Chad said, “Whoa, hold on a sec.” In his cell, the other Tony said, “What,
what
?”

“Yes. I know, it’s a lot to digest.” Meredith’s face softened a little. “All writers take bits and pieces of real life for their stories.
Some of you have more than others, that’s all. But that’s why this all feels so
real
. Why people who read his books fall into the page, get lost in the story.” A small laugh bubbled past her lips. “A little like us, I guess, although we only visit for short times, never …” Her eyes ticked over the iron bars of that cage, and then she slicked her lips. “We only visit,” she repeated.

“Visit?” Emma echoed, and Doyle saw that Elizabeth, too, had come to attention. “How do you get in and out?” the little girl asked.

Meredith went on as if she hadn’t heard. “The really good stories always
cling
to you afterward, too. It’s this little
click
in your head. You can’t shake the narrative, but walk around in a haze; the world doesn’t feel real. It’s as if, well …” Her shrug was almost apologetic. “You and your world jump off the page.”

“Jump off the bloody page?” Doyle went hot with anger. “What the
shite
you talking about?”

Careful, Doyle
. Black Dog’s tone held no mockery now.
Think hard before you go any further. Think of
me
and how I came to be
.

Doyle paid it no mind. “This is real because it
is
. What, you think we don’t feel nothing, suffer …”
Nothing
. He flicked his tongue over the no-taste blood on his lips. He thought back to the humbug, the nothing that was the hag, the ginger-haired sergeant and constables with no faces and brass smears where there ought to be numbers. Battle’s tasteless whiskey or brandy or whatever it had been. How nothing
smelled
like nothing, not even his sweat anymore. Kramer had said the serum would bring clarity and strip away artifice.
He said he’d wash my mind
. Doyle could feel himself going cold all over.
Turn my mind into a clean slate
.

And hadn’t he felt that happening? The layers peeling off?

My God, it could be, couldn’t it? Wasn’t
artifice
what a writer did? Gave a character or house or place a cursory description, a few choice bits of history to make it believable?
But then that’s all there is. Take that away and there’s nothing
. Give
him
a serum and then layer upon layer of life as he knew it sloughed to reveal the one moment—that little nugget—that was the nexus about which everything else that was Doyle had been crafted.
That damned hovel. My father. The moment I …

And then Black Dog had taken on true
substance
, as if it were his core.
No, that’s got to be wrong. Shite
. He was sweating rivers.
I’m letting them confuse me, that’s all. Hang on, hang on, Doyle. This is shite; it’s all bloody shite
.

Ohhhh, poppet
. Black Dog leaned into him, and maybe they were propping each other up after all, one feeding off the other.
Think of it this way: you’ll always have me
.

“What I don’t understand is, why, Frank?” Meredith looked up at her husband. “And don’t tell me I’m imagining things. I’m not insane or delusional.”

“Oh no,” Black Widow drawled. “You only slit your wrists as an amusement.”

“Shut up,” McDermott said, though without much force.

“That,” Meredith said to Black Widow, “has nothing to do with you. What you are and what this place is has no bearing on me or my life.”

“You can look me in the eye and say that? How do you know that he hasn’t
made
you to believe that you’re real and sane and a person, just as he has these others?” Black Widow said.

“Ohhh, no.” Meredith let out a weak laugh. “I’m not going to get into what-ifs with you. We can argue this all day, but facts are
facts. I’m real. No one made
me
out of words.”

“But I
am
real!” Little Emma shouted. “I’m bleeding. It
hurts
. Tony’s
dying
. Of course we’re real.”

“No, not quite.” Kramer put a hand on his chest. “Only some of us here are the genuine article: fully fleshed-out, real people. Ingenious, too, how Franklin’s managed to meld fact with fiction, reality with fantasy. As for the rest of you and all your many copies …” From a pocket, he pulled that glass bauble on a beaded chain. “All we need now is the Mirror. Once Franklin shows us how to reintegrate your energies, we’ll use the cynosure to guide us, track down any doppelgängers that remain. Rid of its fictions, this world will stabilize.”

“Cynosure?
That?
” Meredith’s laugh had more heart this time. “It’s a
fake
; it’s got no power.
I’ve
got the cynosure. Not on me, but back where …,” Meredith began, but then McDermott cut her off: “Kramer, you and I both know you’ve always had that.”

“What?” Meredith threw him a startled glance. “Why would you write them a copy?”

Write?
Doyle could feel the scream taking shape in his throat.
Bloody fucking
write?

Her husband ignored her. “What’s changed, Kramer?”

“Come now, Franklin. Don’t be willfully stupid. You know it’s her.” Tipping his head at Elizabeth, Kramer let the glass bead and chain dribble onto a nearby instrument stand. “Emma brought the power through the shadows. She’s always been strongest.”

“Me?”
Emma said.

“What you’ll become, child, not who you are at this moment,” Kramer said.

“You mean, like me but
older
?” Emma stared at Elizabeth. “Like
time
travel?”

“No.” When her mouth moved, Elizabeth’s entire visage trembled. “Tony’s right, Emma. I think this is an alternate reality.”