The Dickens Mirror (56 page)

But why make Elizabeth a little kid again?
She couldn’t tell what the older version was thinking, but somehow Emma thought Elizabeth—the other Emma inside—had a hunch.
Maybe he thinks that if he starts from when she’s younger, he’ll get more time. That he can change other things, too, and then nothing bad will happen to either his kid or her mom
.

“What is this, Frank?” For a lady who had only just met an earlier version of herself (because that was who this London’s Meredith had to be) and now gotten a peek of the copy that was supposed to take her place—
God, when she finally cuts in just the right way and deep enough?
—Emma thought Meredith sounded pretty calm. A little deadly even. “What have you done, Frank?” Meredith said. “What are you planning?”

“Isn’t it
obvious
?” But the London Meredith’s voice was a little breathless now, like someone had gotten her good, right in the stomach. “He’s preparing to discard you as he did me. You’ve become obsolete, a drudge.”

“No.” McDermott reminded Emma of those pictures they showed of disaster victims when a monster twister’s made match-sticks of their houses, or a guy who went out for a jug of milk and came back to find fire trucks and his family still inside, burned to a crisp. “Never. That’s not … not what this is about. It’s never been that.”

“Then what
has
it been?” Meredith asked, still in that deadly, even voice that was starting to sound an awful lot like the crazy lady in black’s. Emma kinda wished Meredith would go ballistic and get it over with. But maybe there was a limit to how much screaming a person could do, the same way you could be afraid for only so long before you had to deal. “Why have you done this? Why have you made them?”

McDermott gave her a long look with his disaster-victim eyes. When he did speak, he kept it short and sweet.

“Because she always gets sick. Elizabeth always dies,” he said. “And then, my love … so do you.”

Escaping Destiny

HOLY SHIT
.
FROM
her place behind Elizabeth’s eyes, Emma watched McDermott, how calm he was now. Meredith too. He’d said it to Meredith in a Lizzie-
blink
when Meredith couldn’t quite remember how much in love she and her husband once had been:
There’s some spark, an essence I can’t quite wrap my hands around and put where it belongs
. That essence was like Bode and tunnels, or Tony and his tentacled nightmares out of Lovecraft.
Just like me and my skull plates, the scars, this is the fundamental that holds constant in every version and cuts across
Nows:
Meredith
always
kills herself because Lizzie
always
dies. No matter what he tries, McDermott can’t write any of that out
.

I’ve always been ill
. In her head, at the mind’s eye, Elizabeth sounded as worn out and defeated as McDermott looked.
Ever since I can remember
. The other girl paused, and Emma could almost hear the rustle of a hem on poured concrete as Elizabeth shifted.
Mother was always so melancholy, too
. Elizabeth gave a laugh with no humor in it at all.
That’s why I’ve heard Mother, with you other pieces. He placed part of her here
for safekeeping, too. Why else craft a new Meredith here?

That would make sense. But Emma bet McDermott wasn’t the type of guy to put all his eggs in one basket either. Guy wrote a lot of books; there must be tons of notes, and she knew there were other unfinished manuscripts. Her Kramer had said so. She bet he visited other places. She’d just happened to land here.

“Well, now we know what he’s been doing here,” she said. It was internal, a thought directed at them all, but it felt better to imagine it as speech. “It’s the free energy, here for the taking, and he doesn’t have to worry about binding anything from the Dark Passages. He must know that if he reaches into the Dark Passages and binds those things too many times …”

She let that go, but she could supply the rest: do that too many times—or do it even once with something very powerful and hold on a second too long because every ounce of your being screams not to let go—and you ended up like her: stained. Nowhere to go.

I’m sorry
. She felt Eric as a sigh along Elizabeth’s neck.
I didn’t mean to stain you. I thought I’d let go in time
.

“Don’t, Eric. I don’t feel sorry for myself. I’d do it again.”
I would try to save you, no matter what
. Maybe she could understand McDermott after all. Eric felt so real, as if the longer they all spent time together, the more solid they became. Not that Eric would spring back to life or anything; that would never happen here. Maybe, in some other
Now
, an Eric would find an Emma, but it wouldn’t be her.

Rima:
Wonder who’s in the third sack
.

A new McDermott?
Casey, a flicker.

A good guess, but she didn’t think so. Size was all wrong.

Emma
. Eric, again.
If we’re going to do this, now’s the time. While they’re all focused on the bodies
.

He was right. She might never get a second chance. But God, she was scared. She didn’t want to do this, not really, but she didn’t see another way out. She couldn’t go back to her old life. So it was either do nothing or this one last thing and hope for the best.
But I don’t want to be
nothing;
I’m not ready to die
.

We don’t know if that will happen
. Eric felt so close.
But at least it’ll be our choice. Better than waiting around for something else to make that decision for us
.

So you are really going through with this?
She couldn’t tell if Elizabeth was scared or skeptical.
And you’d do it voluntarily?
Elizabeth said.

“We can’t stay here, inside you, forever,” Emma said. Just the image of Kramer looming over her with a syringe made her flesh creep. “It’s your best chance, too.”

Perhaps
. Elizabeth sounded thoughtful.
But I was made for
this
place. Perhaps there’s no escaping destiny
.

“I don’t believe that. I got out.” So she might again, just in a different way. Sweeping her eyes around the room, Emma mapped out positions, mentally choreographing her moves. Bode and Meme were behind and off her left shoulder. Weber was slumped even further back, and the blanks had retreated to slots along the far wall. Frank and his Meredith of the moment were to her left; Rima, the Tonys, Chad, and Emma were the furthest away, in the last cell to her right. Between her and them were Kramer, London’s Meredith, the examination tables, and Doyle.

And the cynosure’s where Kramer left it
. She snuck her eyes to the instrument on her right, within arm’s reach.
Quick snatch and grab, nothing fancy
. After that—she slid a hand into her right skirt pocket and felt the keen steel scalpel, the one that Weber had stolen and which she’d swept up from her cell’s mattress what seemed ages
ago now—she had to hope the others were fast enough. If she was really lucky, she’d pass on a suggestion, too. She hoped it would stick. But she’d settle for getting little Emma out of here and letting the chips fall where they would. She couldn’t control everything.

Do the best we can
, Eric said.
Besides, you heard McDermott: you’re
in
it. It should work
.

“Yeah.” But
should
wasn’t the same as
would
. There was little Emma, another wild card in all this.
Have to trust the cynosure knows what to do
.

There’s no guarantee you’ll be able to stay where you’re going, if you even manage it. You might only make things worse, although
—Elizabeth’s tone took on a wry note—
difficult to imagine how that could be
.

“But maybe not. This place is in pieces. McDermott never finished. There’s no coherent organizing principle, nothing that pulls it together or directs all this potential energy. But our Lizzie knows how to build
Nows
. So if
we
pull together …”

To write a nice story, make this world over?

“What other alternative is there? If we’re right … Hey, look.” Their interior exchange had lasted only a few seconds, and now Emma saw the constable, hands up as if warding something off, blunder back from the examination tables. “You see Doyle?”

Yeah. I don’t think you’re going to get a better shot
. She felt Eric and the others gather themselves.
Get ready
, Eric said.
And Emma: I will hold you to my heart, across times …

It was not and never had been her thought, but his, from that moment before they’d charged the whisper-man to try and rescue Casey and Rima. But Eric was in her, and she in him, and she knew the rest.

“To my heart, across times, Eric,” she said. “To the death.”

Creature

DEAR
GOD
,
WHAT
had he done?
I’m not a monster. I’ve never been cruel when it wasn’t called for in kind
. Gasping, Doyle threw up his arms but couldn’t blot out what lay on those tables. Core his eyes from their sockets with his black blade, and he’d still see them: fresh, unmarred flesh and yet that awful emptiness.
Like dolls
. His gaze flitted to the third bag, which he’d not torn open. Best to leave that.

No,
better
: get Meme out of here. He jerked his head around. With that bandage round his head, the boy, Bode, looked like a battlefield survivor, but it was Meme who tottered and Bode who slid an arm round the girl’s waist. The sight was acid and ate at his eyes. No,
he
would save her, back slang it from here. They would start fresh, just him and Meme, and to hell with …

“So they’re for you,” Meredith was saying. Her voice was queer, a little dead already. “For when you start over. How many times, Frank? How many other copies of me are out there? Or do you only bop over to a nicer, less crazy Meredith in some other
Now
?”

“No,” McDermott said. “It’s not like that.”

“Then what’s it like?” Meredith asked in her dead-voice. “Tell me. I really—”

“Constable, what is in the third bag?” Everyone turned, though Doyle couldn’t, not right away. “Constable?” Meme called again. “What’s in it?”

Face her. Don’t be the coward we all know you are, darling
.

He did what Black Dog asked. Meme had taken a step away from Bode and now stood, uncertain, one hand outstretched toward Doyle but the other still lingering after as if tethered to the other boy by an invisible thread. “What … who is it? You must know, because you brought these here,” Meme said. “Show us.”

“Yes, Doyle.” Kramer was still as a sphinx. “Do.”

Black Widow stood, regal yet ashen, by the doctor’s side, and for the first time, Doyle thought how much a pair they were. How they looked so like the McDermotts, come to think of it. Why, sculpt Kramer a new jaw and he might be a double at that. And why not? McDermott had peopled this fiction with other bits of his life. Why not a bizarre, broken, half-lunatic version of himself with the same obsessions and mad desires? It hit Doyle that if a man lost his wife, that
might
just feel as if a good half of him had been carved away, his innards gutted … and now here was Kramer, face eaten and in ruins, the loss plain as day: half man, half monster. Considering his own Black Dog, that did seem to be quite the theme, didn’t it?

“Hasn’t Doyle done enough?” A blank had more life in its voice than McDermott. “What’s the point?”

“Because I want to know,” Meredith, his wife of the moment
in whatever
Now
they inhabited, said. “I need to see this.”

No, trust me. None of you needs this
. But he’d no choice, did he? He felt Black Dog shuffle softly alongside as Doyle worked his blade into the slit he’d already started. This time, he worked the blade with care. He felt the supple glide of skin under his fingertips, the shudder of a heartbeat, the throb of a pulse along the neck. The head was swathed in light cotton, but loosely: a trick he’d learned when watching the undertaker do his pap. Then, too soon, he was done. Sack cut, wrappings laid aside.

It was at that last second, too, that it came together for Doyle. McDermott had returned, oh, who knew how many times to fashion these, over and over again. So Kramer must’ve seized a chance and stolen one, but without understanding exactly what came next. It also made so much more sense now why Kramer always said it in that most peculiar way of his:
my creature
.

It was also clear that Meredith was right. McDermott was obsessed.

But not only with his wife and daughter.

FIVE SECONDS AFTER
Doyle flayed that sack, Meme began to scream.

But it was another ten before she snatched the knife.

The Third Body

THEIR VIEW WAS
blocked, so she couldn’t see what
—who
—was in that third bag right away. But boy, she had a hunch, and before that policeman stepped back, Emma shot a glance at Elizabeth. Their eyes locked and Emma just
knew
the other girl was thinking the same thing. Emma turned to Rima. “You were right,” she said.

“What?” Rima’s brows folded. Her arms tightened around Tony, who was more awake now, so maybe Rima had drawn enough from him after all. “What do you mean?”

“When you looked through the glasses at Meme,” Emma said, “and saw noth—”

That was when Meme started screaming, the sound like a spike. It was
that
loud. Beyond the cell, everyone was focused on that third body, and Meme. Bode kept trying to pull her back, but she fought, biting and kicking until he backed off.