White Space (20 page)

“No!” Her heart smashed against her ribs. Wrapping her free hand around her forearm, she braced her feet and tried pulling her hand free, but her arm only kept going as first her fingers and then her hand
sank
into the glass …

And met the flesh of her reflection.

“God … House,
stop
!” she shouted. In the mirror, her reflection was still rigid and unmoving. The space on its side of the mirror was icy cold and felt … 
Dead. It feels dead, like a corpse, like Lily
. It was as if her hand didn’t belong to her anymore, or that the lines between her brain and her hand had been cut. Instead, she could only watch as her fingers spidered over her reflection: its cheeks, its nose, its jaw.
Dark—this is what
dark
feels like
.

“I don’t even know what that means,” she said, her voice breaking with terror. And
dark
 … in her
blinks
, Lizzie knew about the Dark Passages. Was
this
what she was talking about? Had this been what Jasper meant?

But this is just a bathroom. Jasper was a lush. It’s the wrong mirror. It’s not the mirror I saw in a
blink;
it’s not even close to the Dickens Mirror—

“Dickens Mirror?”
Where did
that
come from?
She watched her thumb skim her reflection’s lower lip. “House, what the hell is the Dickens Mi—” She shrieked as a phantom finger ghosted over her lower lip. What she was doing to that reflection,
she
felt:
her
touch over
her
skin, on
her
side of the glass.

“Ahhh … 
God
,” she moaned. She couldn’t even turn her head away. Her whole body crawled as if she’d thrust her arms up to the elbows in a vat of decaying flesh and slick, gooey pus. If she could’ve unzipped and shrugged out of her skin, she would’ve.
I
am
crazy
. “Please, House,” she gasped, “please,
God, let this be a dream! I promise, I’ll take my meds. I don’t care if I walk around in a fog for the rest of my life; I don’t want to see this or be here! I only want to wake—”

Quick as a snake, her reflection seized her hand, still buried on its side of the mirror, by the wrist.

“AH!” Emma tried shrinking back but couldn’t break her reflection’s grip. It pulled, yanking Emma in a stumbling lurch toward the glass. She was aware, but only vaguely, that there was now no sink in her way. There seemed, in fact—and for the briefest of moments—to be no bathroom at all: the walls, the floor, the ceiling wrinkling to nothing, evaporating in a glimmer.

“NOOO!”
Wailing, Emma fell into the glass, or maybe it was the mirror that rushed for her fast, and then faster.…

THE FOG—HER DAD
, the whisper-man, the energy of the Peculiars all tangled together—rushes for them, fast and then faster and faster, swallowing trees, gobbling up the sky. The fog is not a wall but a roiling mass like the relentless churn of a tornado, and very fast, much faster than they are. Lizzie knows they’ll lose this race. In fact, she’s counting on it.

But Mom doesn’t understand and would never agree if she did. So she tries. Her mother will not give up. She is brave, so brave, and screaming now, not at that fog but their car: “Come on, you piece of shit,
come on!
” Teeth bared, the cords standing in her neck, her mother is defiant, determined, enraged, and she has never been more beautiful. Through her terror, through whatever else is to come, Lizzie’s heart swells with pride and love, and she grabs hold of this one clear thought: she will always remember the moment when her mother tried to save them.

I have to be brave; be as brave as Mom, as the kids in Dad’s books. As brave as Dad
.

Their car leaps forward, and then they are vaulting, storming down the road, the woods whizzing to a blur. They are traveling much too quickly for this road, which twists and turns and climbs and drops—and still the fog is remorseless, a ravening white monster.

Come on
, Lizzie thinks, urging it on.
Hurry up, come on, come on, want me
, want
me!
Her whole body burns,
screams
with the need to finish the
Now
, finish the
Now
, finish it. Behind her, the symbols for her special forever
-Now
purple the air; they are so strong they snap and crackle as if the world were electric. Her hand is on fire. The best symbol, the most powerful and the one she must draw if the forever
-Now
is to work, begs to come into being. The Sign of Sure is so strong, the path it will blaze through the Dark Passages so brilliant, that Lizzie’s head is a hot bright ball, like a sun a second away from exploding into a supernova.

Wait
. She grits her teeth as tears of pain and grief squeeze from the corners of her eyes.
Wait, wait until it’s got us, wait until I feel it, until the very last—

They rocket over a rise. Her stomach drops away as the car leaves the road and then smashes to earth with a sudden, loud
bam
. The front tires explode. Something—the fender—catches. Sparks swarm past Lizzie’s window like fireflies. The car fishtails wildly, the rear skidding left …

And this is when Mom makes her mistake. Without slowing, Mom stiff-arms the wheel and wrenches it too far.

“No, no,
no
!” her mother shouts as the car fishtails. She
fights the wheel, but this time, the centrifugal force is too great and they spin out of control.

Lizzie’s forehead slams against her window. The pain is immense and erupts like a bomb. Her vision sheets first red and then glare-white. Something breaks in her head and tears, and then her hair is wet and warm. The car swerves left, and her head jerks right, snapping on the stalk of her neck. Another sharp
crack
as her head connects with glass again, and then the window has imploded in a shower of pebbly safety glass. They are spinning, whirling like a top, the world beyond dissolving into a crazy blur, going faster than any carousel. Even with her shoulder harness, Lizzie is pinned against the car door, momentum jamming her in place, crushing her like a bug. Through a red haze, she sees the trees racing for them, the trunks growing huge in the windshield.

Screaming, Lizzie throws up her arms and

BLINK
.

I’m still in the house
. Pulse thundering, Emma inched her head left, saw a procession of doors, and then looked to her right. Through a bright rectangle of yellow light, she made out the front door, the braided rug, gleaming hardwood. Blank white walls.
Downstairs again. I’m in that hall I saw from the foyer
.

The air in this hall was brain-freeze cold, bad enough to set her teeth and steam her breath, but her right hand was on fire. Steeling herself, she turned her hand palm up and inspected her skin in the gloom. No burns, no blisters, no marks, not even a scratch. She flexed her fingers, curled them into a fist. Everything seemed to work.

What had she just seen in that last
blink
? “A crash,” she said. “Lizzie was in a car with her mother, and she crashed.”

She dragged her eyes up to look straight ahead at a very strange door. It was not made of any kind of wood she recognized. It wasn’t even a proper door. This door was a long slit, just wide enough to allow a single person to pass through, and
as glare-white as the snow, as the sky around the sun at high noon on a hot summer’s day. As one of Jasper’s canvases, come to think of it.

She realized something else.
I’ve seen this before, too
. The color was dead wrong, but the shape was right. That smoky-black mirror that Lizzie’s father had in his barn was a slit, too.

“The Dickens Mirror,” she murmured, and frowned. What was
that
about? Dickens was … you know … überfamous. And so? They’d read
Great Expectations
in tenth grade—not a bad book; Havisham was a trip, like Dickens read Brontë and decided to bring the crazy lady out of the attic—and
A Tale of Two Cities
(total snooze). For a while there, before she was sent away to school, she had Dickens coming out of her eyeballs because of Jasper and all those tapes. They might have listened to a biography or two. No, make that a definite. Jasper had the old Dickens bio by Forster, and maybe another, more recent.
And hadn’t there been something about mirrors in that one?
That was right. Dickens had scads of mirrors, all through his house, in his study, everywhere. She even remembered why: when he was a kid and his dad had gone to debtor’s prison, Dickens had been forced to work in a gloomy, dank blacking factory. As an adult and even though he walked the nights away through the warren of London’s alleys and the sewers coursing through the city’s underbelly, Dickens hated darkness. He’d filled the rooms of his many homes with mirrors to bring in and magnify the light. So had there been a very special, very peculiar mirror? She just didn’t know, and she couldn’t remember a single Dickens story that revolved around a mirror.

So it’s probably not something Dickens made up
. Could he have
had a mirror made, or just found it somewhere? The guy went a gajillion places, climbed mountains, nearly killed himself getting to the top of Vesuvius, walked everywhere, wandered around the worst of London’s slums with some inspector. Ten to one, there were places Dickens visited where he’d have had tons of mirrors to choose from—or had he ever gone looking for one very
particular
mirror?
And then Lizzie’s dad ends up with it?
Her memory for
blinks
was always a little hazy, but what she did recall was an argument between Lizzie’s parents.
They stole it?
That felt right. They’d tracked down the mirror and stolen other things, too. But what, and why?

She gave it up. If it was important, the information would bubble up again, eventually. Maybe.
Or I’ll find it in my own time, when I’m ready
—and then she wondered where
that
had come from.
My own time, as in …
my
time, a place where I really belong?

“Don’t be a nut,” she said, but it was more of a tic, no force behind it. She eyed that slit-door. No knob. No hinges. No way in that she could see.
So are
you
part of the test, a way of seeing if I’m ready?
Ready for what?

All of a sudden, her ears pricked to a trickle of static.
Radio
. Much louder now, yammering to itself and coming from behind this slit-door. She actually made out a few words:
at large … murder … bodies
.

An eerie dark sweep of déjà vu gusted through her brain.
That’s what we heard in the van. Lily said the murders were all over the news
. So, if this was such a big story, why hadn’t
she
heard about some little girl who’d found bodies in some … “Cellar,” she said, and then wished she could call that back.
Some little girl found bodies down cellar
.

“But I didn’t find bodies,” she said out loud. “I don’t know
what
I found in Jasper’s cellar.” Yet that was a flat-out lie, or at least half of one. “Come on, Emma, you thought that thing down cellar was a door.” She studied not the slit itself but the color. That shade of white was right, maybe identical.
And I heard whispers seeping out of the dark, just like now. When I pushed, when I finally got my hand through, I felt …
She shoved away from the rest. God, for something she was determined to forget and hadn’t thought of for years, she could feel the memories piling up to bulge against some mental membrane—

(where the barrier’s thinnest)

as if what had happened down cellar was related to what was going on now.

“What do you want, House?” And then she answered her own question: “Of course, you nut, it wants you to open the door.” She thought back to earlier: her sense that if she found the correct door in her mind, she might walk into Lizzie’s life. “That’s right, isn’t it, House?”

The house didn’t answer. But the radio crackled on:
horrible … gruesome discovery of—

“I’m not listening to this, House.” Shuddering, she hugged herself tight. She felt sick. Her stomach coiled as if a snake had decided that her guts were a nice, dark, moist place to hang out. “I don’t hear it. I don’t care.” She let out a high, strained laugh through a throat that didn’t want to cooperate. “It’s not like I can go in, anyway. There’s no knob.”

Which hadn’t stopped her when she was twelve. Then, she’d had the same thought: no knob, no way in. A second later, she’d spotted that small, Emma-sized pull-ring, just right for a twelve-year-old. Had it been there all along? She’d
always had the queer sense that the door down cellar had
made
the pull-ring for—

In front of her eyes, the slit-door suddenly undulated, like thick white oil.

“Shit!” Staggering, she stumbled back on her heels and nearly set herself on her ass. Holding herself up against the far wall, she gaped, stunned, as the slit-door wavered and rippled. A moment later, a knob—brassy and impossibly bright—blistered into being like a weird mushroom pushing its way out of bone-white loam.

Just like down cellar
. Closing her eyes, she counted to ten, made it to five. The knob was still there, and now, something more, something that
hadn’t
happened all those years ago, down cellar.

In that milky slit, a tangle of creatures swarmed to the surface in a clutch of sinuous arms and legs and bodies. Some had what passed for a face: vertical gashes for mouths, a bristle of teeth, serpentine stalks where there should be eyes and ears. But the details were incomplete, running into one another, the features oozing and dripping together, as if all that white space was thick paint. The creatures were bizarre, a little like those Hindu gods and goddesses, the ones with animal heads and spidery frills for arms and legs and all-seeing eyes.

Whoa, I know these. I’ve seen these, and not in a
blink
either
. Despite her fear, she found that she was also as curious now as she’d been when she was twelve. Easing from the wall, she slid a few slow steps closer.
Jasper
painted
these, then covered them up
.