White Space (32 page)

“Patterns,” she said, her breath suddenly balling midway between her chest and mouth as her eye fell on something she recognized and knew she shouldn’t. This was a quilt that belonged to a strange little girl stuck in an even odder house at the bottom of a valley Emma had the feeling didn’t exist anywhere on earth.

Yet there was no mistaking that glass sphere sparkling in the center of an elaborately embroidered spiderweb.

There, stitched into Lizzie’s memories, was her galaxy pendant.

CASEY’S BREATH CLAWED
in and out of his throat as he staggered and lurched over the snow and away from the ruined church toward the waiting snowcat. His left hand was clamped to Tania’s right arm; in his right, he gripped the shotgun. God, he wished Eric was here. His brother knew weapons; Casey knew … well, the theory. Rack the pump, point, shoot. Pray you hit something. Hope to hell you don’t run out of cartridges before you do.

Rima didn’t recognize him. But how could that be? High above, the roiling sky was still black with crows. This new girl, Tania, someone Rima knew and had a history with, was moaning, nearly doubled over. Rima was murmuring encouragement, telling Tania,
Hang on, almost there
.

Rima knows
her
but not me
. He had the disorienting sense of walking into a movie already half over.
Rima knew what was happening
before
we even got here
. No, that was wrong: before this place made itself out of the fog. Could
Rima
be doing that? No, that was crazy.

Or was it? This was the nightmare of Tony on the snow, déjà vu all over again. Casey hadn’t told Rima—there’d been no time—but he’d
recognized
that thing, with its bulbous body of writhing tentacles, that bristly maw, those myriad mad eyes. He had glimpsed it only moments before, not as a living thing but a drawing: a creature that existed on the cover of a paperback. Something by Lovecraft, wasn’t it? Yes. Tony had tossed the well-thumbed novel onto the Camry’s backseat, where Casey had also found some very old vintage comic books.

The reality was this: what had torn Tony apart was something Tony knew well, because he’d read about it, over and over again if that dog-eared paperback was any indication. What killed Tony was a monster that leapt off the pages of a book.

And what about me?
What Rima had said about whispers, and his own transformation, a taking-on, taking
-in
, to become his father when he’d slipped into Big Earl’s shirt … No, that wasn’t exactly right either.
Dad wore me, instead of the other way around, like
I
was the shirt, and he had to fill me out in all the right places
. A grab of fear in his gut. So what did that mean? His memories of the last few hours were so hazy they felt as if they belonged to another boy’s dream. Did he even
remember
if something like this had happened before?
God, do I even know what it feels like to be myself?
So weird. He wasn’t … sure. But how could he
not
be?

Stop it. You’re Casey
. He was freaked, that was all. This
place
freaked him out, especially the fog. He lifted his eyes to the crows overhead; thought about the church behind and how Rima seemed to be … slotting herself in? As if the fog
was really a … a
thing
that could spin itself into the intricate web of your personal nightmare.

What are you?
He eyed the fog, thick and bunched and viscous, which had peeled back to hover above the distant trees, and he thought of the types of coverings used to protect furniture.
Do you read our thoughts? Can you
hear—

A loud, hard
bang
jolted him back.
Uh-oh
. That sounded like it had come from behind. The church?
But it was empty. There was just that body
.

“Casey,” Rima suddenly shouted. “Behind you! Look
out
!”

Something clamped onto his left shoulder, and then Casey let out a startled yelp as his feet left the ground. The world spun in a sudden, drunken whirl. He felt the whip and bite of cold air, heard the whir as he bulleted around, and then whatever held him let go, as if some little kid had gotten bored and flung this toy aside.

Casey went flying. As he hurtled through the air, he heard Rima scream again, a kind of decrescendo wail like the shrill of a passing ambulance siren. Flailing, he plummeted to this strange snow that had no give, no play at all, but was hard as packed earth. At the last second, he managed to twist, taking the brunt on his left shoulder, before turning in a somersault to slam onto his back. The impact jarred air in a great whoosh from his lungs. A streamer of hot pain scorched his spine, then licked down either leg, and he went instantly numb. For a trembling moment, he could only lie and stare at the crows oiling over the sky.

Breathe
. His lungs were on fire, no air in them at all. He couldn’t make his chest work.
Breathe, got to breathe, got
to
— With a giant effort, he sucked in a deep, gurgling gasp, felt a violent ripping in his chest, and then he was coughing out a scream of crimson mist. Something wrong with his chest, something
broken
 … His lips were wet; he tried to gulp air but choked on another gush of warm blood.

The thing heaved up from the snow. It seemed to grow, as if the snow had split to spit out a monster caught somewhere in the middle, no longer a man and only halfway into becoming. The thing’s face, studded with bony spikes, twisted in a grimace. Pale lips peeled back to reveal a bristling forest of very sharp, very pointed teeth.

What
is
this thing?
Casey’s stunned gaze tracked to a gory thumbnail of Roman collar around its throat. He thought back to the tumble of limbs and black cloth in the chancery and what Tania had said:
I shot Father Preston
.

Her aim had been spot-on. The thing’s chest was a wreck of mangled and splintered bone and moist, bloody tatters of flesh, but the body itself was rippling, the chest shimmering and boiling. Its skin seemed almost molten, sloughing in elongated runnels that somehow curled in and around pink fingers of revitalized muscle and glimmering silver ligaments of tendon and gristle.

It’s repairing itself
. A black fan of horror unfurled in Casey’s chest, crowding out what little breath he managed as the thing bellowed and reared over him. Where was the shotgun? He didn’t have it.
Must’ve lost it when it threw me
. He was going to die here. All that thing had to do was reach down and—

The air shattered with a sharp
CRACK
. Flinching, the thing bawled and then spun around, clawed hands splayed, slavering jaws open in a vicious snarl.

“Over here!” It was Tania, somehow upright, and leaning out of the snowcat’s passenger’s side door. Brandishing a long gun in one hand, she waved something else—a hammer?—in the other. “Come on, you son of a bitch,” the girl shouted. “Come and get me!”

Wheeling around with a roar, the thing that had been a priest sprinted away from Casey in a mad, ravening dash. At first, he thought it was heading for the snowcat, but then he saw it suddenly veer in a sharp dogleg left and away, toward a distant wall of dark trees. It was, Casey saw now, trying to get
away
.

And that was when the snowcat began to move.

“WHERE DID YOU
get this?” Emma’s tongue was thick and awkward. From its place on Lizzie’s memory quilt, the glass galaxy of lush cobalt and fumed silver gleamed. Beneath a transparent shell, tiny people and creatures floated in a writhing gorgon’s knot. “I haven’t made this. I don’t know how. I’m not good enough yet. It’s just an idea.”

“Our mom found it.” Lizzie stroked the pendant with a reverent finger. “Of all the glass, this is the one with the most magic. It’s the Sign of Sure.”

“Sign …” Mrs. Graves’s pinched, disapproving face suddenly swam up from memory, and she could hear Weber’s broad, almost comical cockney:
You sure she didn’t lay her hands on one of them marbles?
“My God, not
Sign of Sure
. You mean
cynosure
. A guide, a …” Oh, come on, what was the right word? “A
focus
.”

“Well, yeah.” Although the little girl might as well have said,
Duh
. “I just said that. It’s how you don’t get lost and end up in the wrong
Now
.”

She didn’t pretend to understand any of this. But any kid who’d suffered through PSAT prep knew what a cynosure was.
A focus. A lens
. Couldn’t it also be a beacon?

So, go with this: Lizzie used this to focus her mind? Or bring something distant
into
focus, like the lens of a telescope? What had the kid said?
I use it all the time to find you guys
. Emma thought back to the bright, unwavering, seemingly solid path of light that had sprung from the pendant as she vaulted off the roof toward that apparition of the Mirror.
Some kind of mental flashlight?
If that was true, the cynosure was a way of seeing through to, well, somewhere and, maybe, a somewhen.

But a flashlight worked both ways. Whatever lived in the dark might not see you exactly, but they sure had a pretty good idea of where you
were
.

So did it work that way when you were trying to find the words to your story? Would the words … well,
find
you if only they had some help figuring out where you were?

This is crazy
. “What do I think about?” Emma skimmed a hesitant thumb over the pendant in its brightly colored web of embroidery. “What am I supposed to see?”

“You. Read
you
like you want to find out more about your book, as if you want the words that are your story to make sense in your head, to bring them all closer from way down where you can’t see them.” Lizzie nibbled on her lower lip, then brightened. “Like an ocean, you know? White Space is like water that’s way deep. Just because you can’t see what’s way down there doesn’t mean things aren’t swimming around, right? So, pretend you’re fishing or the pen you’re using has no ink, and you want to hook the words.”

“I don’t have any bait,” Emma said flatly. “Without ink or
pencil or crayon or paint, you can’t write anything.”

“Emma,
you’re
the bait. That’s what the Sign of Sure’s about. You could write this if the pen
pulls
instead of
puts
,” Lizzie said. “Like when Dad reached into the Dickens Mirror, he was the bait. Pretend you’re
that
kind of pen.”

Oh well, that made things so much
clearer
. She wouldn’t have been surprised if Keanu Reeves popped by for a visit:
There is no spoon
.

And then she thought,
Wait, wasn’t that almost
exactly
what I thought when Jasper talked about White Space and Dark Passages?
An eerie ripple of déjà vu wavered through her—this feeling that everything in her life was the echo and twin to something else: Emma taking a right turn here, a left turn there, going up here, down there—and all simultaneously.

How could Jasper have known anything about this? The guy piloted chartered fishing boats and pickled himself until he stroked out. But this clearly couldn’t all be coincidence. That weird obsession Jasper had for Dickens’s novels and stories—had Jasper been looking for clues, trying to find the Mirror? To do what?

What she knew was this: Jasper had talked about White Space and Dark Passages. Jasper painted nightmare creatures and then—she wet her lips, tasting salt on her tongue—then he covered them over with thick white paint. She stared down at the parchment.
With his version of White Space
.

“What’s between the
Nows
?” She cleared the frog that had suddenly decided to squat in her throat. Graves had panops, and so did Kramer. Weber said something about
hangers-on
. “There’s something there, isn’t there? In the Dark Passages?”
Jesus, I’m starting to sound as crazy as Jasper
. “What was your
dad really doing? He wasn’t just pulling out words to a story.”

Again, she saw the little girl’s face darken and glimmer, her haunted cobalt eyes grow shadowy and somehow opaque as something ghosted through. It was as if, for just an instant, a mask slipped, and Emma got a fleeting peek at what she thought was the much older girl and woman, scarred by loss, that Lizzie would become, and felt a tug of sympathy.

“I’m just a kid,” Lizzie said. Her chin trembled. Blinking furiously, she looked away. “I don’t know everything. He was doing something … 
bad
, all right? Okay? Can we just not talk about that? This isn’t the same thing.”

“I’m sorry,” Emma said. “I just want to understand.”

“What’s to
understand
?” A huge tear rolled down the girl’s cheek. Another tear chased it, and then more. “I’ve told you what you need to know. House keeps showing you. Now just
do
it before it’s too late and the others get hurt! They’re in big trouble, and I can’t get them without your help.”

Eric
. Her stomach squeezed. “Big trouble? Get them from where?”

“Would you shut
up
already?” Lizzie dragged an arm over her streaming eyes. “Just do it, Emma! Look at the scroll and find your story!”

“Okay, okay.” The last thing she wanted was to deal with some little kid’s meltdown, and if Eric and the others were in trouble … 
Find my story? Use myself as bait?
She cupped the galaxy pendant in a palm.
Okay, so … I want the beginning of my story, how about that?
But what really was the beginning of her story? Jasper? She stared at that expanse of blank white parchment. Probably. She didn’t really know anything about her parents.

All of a sudden, she felt a familiar ache between her eyes, that same burn she always got before a
blink
. In her hand, the galaxy pendant warmed, and then, from the white of that blank scroll, a light pinkish blush began to waver into being, like the stubborn echo of a bloodstain on a collar that just won’t come out.