White Space (30 page)

“L-Lizzieee.” Mom’s voice is weak, no more than a halting whisper. “G-get … a-awaaay …”

The phone is still beeping. The fog has crept to Lizzie’s chest and continues to rise, snaking higher and higher, coiling around her shoulders in a white rope to hold her fast.

Got to finish the special forever
-Now, Lizzie thinks. The symbols she’s already formed are starting to fade, the purpling mad bleeding away like her mother’s blood.
Got to make the last symbol
.

Symbol?
Emma no longer wonders how she knows what Lizzie feels or thinks. She only wants this to end.
What symbol?

“R-run.” Mom coughs, and crimson gushes from her mouth. “L-Lizzie … h-h-h-hide …”

“Momma, I … I
can’t
.” The lick of the fog, bright and cruel, is cold enough to burn, and very strong, stronger than Lizzie, and the phone is still ringing, ringing, ringing. The fog’s tongue tastes Lizzie’s chin. Its ice-fingers tickle her nose. She twists and turns, she holds her breath, but the fog doesn’t care. It slips in; it slithers up her nose. Its fingers crawl over
her brain and dig into the meat and worm behind her eyes. Lizzie has one last symbol to make, only one, but whatever it was, she can no longer see it in her mind. No, no, it’s not fair, she is so
close
; she was almost done! If only she hadn’t waited! The fog plucks at the cords of her nerves and muscles. Her legs flop; her arms jitter and twitch—

I’ve got to do something
, Emma thinks, frantically.
I’m so close, just a sliver of White Space. There’s got to be
something
I can do
.

Through Lizzie’s eyes, Emma watches the day gray as the darkness that is the fog flows over and through Lizzie’s vision like black oil, like something out of
X-Files
, when the aliens slip inside and hijack a ride.

And then the light is gone, and Lizzie is blind. She opens her mouth to scream—and can’t. Her mouth is stitched shut. No, no, that’s not right. Lizzie’s mouth is no longer
there
.

Oh my God
. If Emma’s heart still beats, she no longer feels it.
Lizzie’s face, her
face!

Lizzie’s face is going blank and whisper-man black, the way the words on a page are erased and scrubbed away, one by one, letter by letter, word by word, line by line.

Then, the cell phone ceases its relentless beeping.

Time’s up.

A moment’s silence. A pause.

Then, a
click
.

And then,

a soft …

And the phone says …

“NO!”
EMMA SHRIEKS
. Her palms flatten against the edge of White Space. “House, stop this! Don’t listen, Lizzie, don’t
listen
!”

House does nothing, and Emma knows there’s no more time for words. The galaxy pendant around her neck is a bright beacon, like a searchlight telling her mind where to go and what to do.

Bridge the gap. Cross the space. This is like the mirror in the bathroom; this has to be why House showed me how to do this in the first place: to get me ready, prime my brain to believe I can. Just reach out and pull her across and do it now, do it
now!

So Emma thrusts her hand, hard; feels the White Space resist and deform and rip and then—

Then there is pain.

Oh God
. She opens her mouth to scream, but her lungs won’t work.
What
is
this?
This isn’t like the bathroom mirror, where it was only cold and then burning. She isn’t prepared
for how much this hurts, as if the glassy teeth of the broken window from that domed chapel for the mad have snagged her after all. This is altogether different than what she’s just done: crashing from the past through a phantom black slit-mirror to this
Now
. That didn’t hurt at all. One minute, she was in the snow, on the roof, sprinting from the spidery thing erupting from Kramer’s body—and then she was on a road.

And this is not even close to what happened years ago: when she was twelve and found something down cellar in Jasper’s cottage that she’s determined not to think about. Because that might prove that, really, she’s only crazy.

Now, the White Space rips. It gapes in a fleshy wound, and Emma is suddenly teetering on the lip between two worlds, two times, two stories. The Space tears, and she tears with it, her skin ripping, flayed from her bones the way paper splits along a seam. She can feel her heart struggling in her chest in great shuddering heaves, and then there is no thought at all, only a blaze of white-hot agony.

Too late to go back, even if she wanted to: there is the car and Lizzie, right in front of her. She stretches, gropes for a handhold, as the gelid fog burns and scores her flesh. Her fingers slide over something solid: a small wrist, slick and tacky with blood. Her hand closes around Lizzie, and then she is pulling with all her might, dragging the girl from the car and away from the greedy fingers of that murderous fog, reeling her across shuddering time and shimmering White Space, bridging the gap between two letters, two words, two
Nows
. The White Space flexes, folds …

AND THEY TUMBLED
back in a heap.

Emma was knocked flat, smacking what little air she had left from her lungs. For a moment, all she could do was lie there, gulping like a hooked fish flipped onto a dock. Her heart hammered against her ribs. Blood bounded in her neck and head, her pulse beating time in her throbbing temples.

The downstairs hallway, where she’d come back to find herself at that slit-door, was gone. She now lay on plush white carpet in a room with blush-pink walls edged in white trim. To the left, a pine loft bed hovered five feet off the floor. A dollhouse huddled just beneath, and a wine-red tongue of quilt, speckled with colorful glass, dangled over the lip of the bed.

“Oh boy.” Sprawled on the carpet to Emma’s right, Lizzie lifted her head and said, weakly, “Wow, Emma, I thought you were
never
going to figure it out.”

DUCKING AROUND THE
cold red brick of the church, Rima scuttled through the open door and fetched up against the last row of pews. The church was a ruin. The altar had been junked; a huge wooden crucifix lay in two jagged splinters as if snapped over a knee. Beyond the altar rail, an over-large Bible with gilt covers flopped facedown in a colorful halo of shattered, bloodred stained glass. A body, all in black, lay beyond the chancery railing where it had fallen back against a lectern, which was splashed with gore and liverish chunks of flesh. But there was something off about the body, too. The hands didn’t seem … quite right.

There was the slight grate and pop of glass on stone as Casey came to crouch alongside. “Why did you run? Wha—” He sucked in a small gasp. “You hear that?”

She did: a small mewling, hitching sound.
Somebody crying
. “Tania?” she whispered.

“Who?” Casey asked.

“Tania,” she said, as if that should be explanation enough. At his frown: “A
friend
.”

“A friend from
where
?”

“Here.”
They were wasting time. Leaning out a little further, she called again, “Tania? Tania, it’s me.”

A pause. The scuff of a boot over stone. “R-Rima?”

“Yeah. I-I told you I’d come back.” The words just flew into her mouth, as if she was an actor dropped into a scene from a well-rehearsed play. But now she began to remember bits and pieces. She and Tania had been working in the school cafeteria when … when … She skimmed her lips with her tongue.
When what?

“Is it safe to come out?” Tania asked. “Did you bring the snowcat?”

“The what?” The boy shot her a bewildered look. “What is she talking about?”

“The snowcat,” she said, relieved.
That’s right; I snuck out and found the snowcat. I drove it over
. Her hand strayed to the front pocket of her parka, and her fingers slid over the jagged teeth of a key.
I grabbed a gun and I left it in the snowcat
.

“
What
snowcat?” the boy asked.

Instead of answering him, she called to her friend, “Yeah, Tania, the cat’s outside.” The words still felt strange in her mouth, but somehow she knew that these were the
right
words, filling in the blanks of a story still taking shape in her mind. “I found a rifle in the equipment shed, too. It’s in the snowcat. Come on, before they find us.”

“Rima,” the boy said, urgently. “Rima, what rifle? Who are they? What are you talking about?”

She fired off an impatient glance—and then felt a sudden jolt of panic. The boy’s face seemed familiar, especially his eyes, so stormy and gray. But she didn’t know him, couldn’t
remember his name.
Who is he? Do I know—

“Rima?” The boy reached a hand to her shoulder. “Are you all right?”

Casey
. The name flooded into her as if flowing from his fingers. “Yes, I-I’m … Casey, I’m fine.”

“Then what is this?” Casey asked. “Who’s Tania? Who are
they
?”

Dangerous, that’s what they are
. “Casey, I don’t
know
, I’m not sure.”
But this is right; this is the right story
. “All I know is, this is what’s supposed to hap—” She caught movement near the chancel rail, a flicker of shadow, and then a girl’s face, white and drawn beneath a thatch of wild black hair, slid above the edge of a pew. “Tania,” Rima said, relieved. “Are you all right?”

“Yes.” Tania’s eyes, little-girl wide, flitted from her to Casey. “Who’s he?”

“Casey. He’s a friend.”

“From where?” Tania was standing now, a shotgun clearly visible, the barrel pointing at Casey’s chest. “I don’t remember him from class.”

Neither did she, exactly. She improvised. “I found him wandering around when I got the snowcat.” From the corner of her eye, she saw Casey turn another look, but she pushed on. “I couldn’t just leave him there.”

“How do you know he won’t change?”

Change?
The word chilled her blood.
Change into what?
Then she remembered the broken body in the chancery, and those hands that weren’t quite right. “Who is that? Who did you shoot?”

“Father Preston.” Tania’s chin quivered. “I couldn’t stay in
the gym, so I ran to the church and Father Preston was here, only he … he … I didn’t want to, but I
had
to!”

“Stay calm, Tania. It’s okay,” Rima said, and then she was up, breaking out from cover and going to her friend. Casey said something, but she barely heard, couldn’t really understand the words. “Come here,” she said, gathering the weeping girl in her arms. “It’s okay. It’s going to be all right.”

“Nice that you think so.” Tania smelled of charred gunpowder, the oil the groundskeeper
—Fred
, Rima thought,
his name is Fred
—used to clean the shotgun, and sweat. Turning her head into Rima’s shoulder, Tania slumped into her. “I’m so
scared
.”

“It’ll be okay.” Rima slid the gun from Tania’s slack fingers and handed the weapon to Casey. Casey’s face was a mask of confusion, but she could tell from the firm set of his mouth that he would follow her lead.

“Rima, I … I don’t feel so good,” Tania moaned against her shoulder. “I think I’m going to be … I think I might be s-sick.”

“We just have to get you out of—” Then Rima felt Taylor’s death-whisper flexing and bunching with alarm along Rima’s arms and around her middle, and that was when Rima’s mind registered what her hands—so sensitive to the whispers within—were telling her, what
Taylor
sensed.

There was something else here, under her hands. Not in Tania’s soot-stained parka or whispering in her clothes, no. Rima saw Tania’s face twist as another pain grabbed her middle.

There was something inside Tania.

“COME ON!” LIZZIE
sprang to a sit. “We got to get the others, quick!”

“No, wait, wait a second,” Emma said. Her head ached, and a slow ooze of something wet wormed from her right ear. When she put a hand to her neck, the fingers came away painted bright red. From the pain she’d felt as she reached through White Space, she thought her skin would be torn in a dozen places, but other than the gash on her forehead she’d gotten when the van crashed, there wasn’t a scratch on her. The pendant wasn’t around her neck anymore either. Just another part of her
blink
, she guessed, like the flannel nightgown and Jasper’s ivory-handled walking stick—and good riddance.

Now that they were in the same space, in the same room, Emma could see that, really, they didn’t look all that much alike. Lizzie’s face was oval, the blond pigtails giving her the look of a pixie. Falling to the middle of her back, Emma’s hair was very dark, lush, and coppery, and her face was square.

What
are
you?
Emma’s gaze fixed on the golden flaw in the little girl’s right eye, embedded in an iris that was a rich, lustrous, unearthly cobalt.
Same flaw, same eye, identical color
.

“I’m not going anywhere with you,” she said, and thought, with an unpleasant little ping in her chest, that this was the same thing she’d said only minutes ago to Kramer or the whisper-man or whatever the hell that had been. All these repetitions and echoes were starting to drive her crazy. It was as if she existed in multiple places at once, the lines slotting into her mouth depending on which choice she happened to make at that instant.

And then she thought,
Whoa. Wait a second … multiple
places?

“You have to,” Lizzie said. “I can’t do this alone. The others are lost; they’ve fallen between the lines. I couldn’t hold on to them all.”

Okay, so the kid was as crazy as she suspected
she
was. Not too comforting, that. “I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what’s happening.”

“I’ll explain everything, I promise,” Lizzie said, scrambling to her feet. “But we have to get them now.” When Emma still made no move to follow, the little girl said, impatiently, “Why did you reach through White Space if you didn’t want to help?”