White Space (38 page)

Shrieking, Chad fell, dropping into the embrace of a thousand stygian tentacles. One snaked over his eyes, and yet another probed at Chad’s mouth and slid inside—and then Chad was no longer screaming but choking as the tentacle worked and wormed into his throat. Chad’s skin was turning, going from white to a deep plum and shading to black, as if the tentacle were a hose, pumping ink—or dissolving Chad from the inside out.

The truck jolted, the engine died with a gurgling rattle, and now, groaning, the Dodge listed in an excruciating slow roll, like a boat beginning to founder. Crying out, Rima jammed her left foot into the back of the front seat and the other against the raised ridge running up the center of the floor. The truck was too old for shoulder harnesses or hand
loops, so she spread her arms and flattened her palms on the roof. The truck was now canted at a forty-five-degree angle, far enough that she was afraid to let up with her legs. As it was, if they tipped much more, she’d be practically standing straight up.

“Oh Jesus.” Both Bode’s fists, trembling with strain, were clenched in Casey’s parka. “Kid,” he grunted, “I’m slipping, can’t hold you! Eric, shut the door before I lose him, man! Shut it before those things get a taste of you, too! Come on!”

“Can’t!” Beyond, Eric had planted his boots to either side of the open door and was bracing Casey, trying to keep both his brother and himself from falling out. The waving, searching tentacles of that black anemone were probing the bottom right corner of the truck door, as if deciding whether they liked the taste, the sound a moist but hollow
splot-splot-splot-splot
. Chad was completely gone now. Either swallowed or dissolved … Rima thought it didn’t much matter. “We’ve rolled too far,” Eric said. “It’s too heavy, I can’t
do
it.”

“Man, we’re done, it’s over,” Bode said, and yet his body didn’t seem to believe that, because, if anything, he pulled even harder on Casey, eking out every last second of life. “Come on, kid, help me.
Pull
.”

“I’m
trying
.” Casey’s voice was as gray as his face. He flicked one quick look back at her. “Rima, if you can, pop your door or unroll your window and climb out, get on top of the truck.”

“He’s right.” Sweat coursed down Bode’s cheeks. “Get outta here, Rima. Maybe you can find your way out of this.” When she made no move to do so, he barked, “Rima,
damn it
, go!”

“Forget it,” she said, thinking she sounded braver than she felt. “I’m not leaving you guys. There’s no point.” Even if she could bully the heavy door or lever herself out the window, she could picture herself balancing on an ever-diminishing island of metal until the ooze finally took her, too. Worse, she would hear the others—hear Casey—as they died before her, and know she was powerless to help.

“Hey, we’re not sinking as fast,” Eric said. He sounded breathless, like he was churning through wind sprints. At his feet, the tarn kept on sampling the truck, the
splot-splot-splot-splot
of little black tongues flicking along the bottom edge of the door, working toward the hinge, as the truck slipped deeper by slow degrees. Eric managed another inch back. “You feel it? We’re still going down, but …”

“Good.” Bode’s teeth were bared. “Hope it’s got a stomachache. Hope it
chokes
.”

“But it was so fast before,” Casey said in as breathless a tone as his brother. “What’s it waiting for?”

“Maybe it’s playing around.” And then Eric grunted at the
splot-splot
of a tentacle over the door’s running board. “Maybe it likes it when we scream.”

And then, out of nowhere, Rima thought she heard something: slight, airy, the thinnest sliver of sound.
What?
That wasn’t a scream. Craning, she looked to her right and through the truck’s rear window. It was now very dark in the truck and outside, the coil of birds blotted out whatever sky remained. If anyone could look through all those birds—say, the way you could through the clear glass shell and into the intricate design at the heart of a paperweight—it would probably seem as if the truck were a small bubble of metal and glass, and they, the
creatures trapped inside.
Like one of those old-fashioned diving bells, the ones open at the bottom but filled with air
. Other than the birds, there was no one out there.

Then, she heard that sound that almost wasn’t again, and this time she recognized a word.

“Do you hear that?” she said.

“Hear what?” Casey asked.

“Someone just called my name.” She twisted a look over her left shoulder, craning up through the passenger’s side door. More birds. “I think it was
Emma
.”

“What?” Bode said.

Rima
. Still tentative and evanescent, but now somehow more intense to Rima than simply empty air, as if Emma was honing in on them. Then:
Eric
.

“What?” Eric said. His head jerked up. “Emma?”

“You heard that,” she said. “You heard her?”

“What are you guys talking about?” Casey asked. “Where?”

“I don’t know.” Rima threw a wild look around. “Emma?” she called. “Emma, where …” She listened again, and then heard Eric answer: “Bode and Casey.”

Another pause, and then Emma’s voice again, so insubstantial you might mistake it for the sough of a light breeze that held no meaning at all, saying something else.

“Jesus,” Bode breathed, at the same time that Casey said, “God, I heard that.”

“Yeah, but what’s White Space?” Eric said. “And what does she mean,
think my hand
?”

“MAYBE THINK
ABOUT
it?” Casey said.

“I don’t think that’s what she means,” Rima said. Was White Space something on the other side of this place? She looked at the way this world was shuttering: the birds, drawing down death, obliterating the horizon, as if an eyelid were closing. “Maybe what she means is we should
think
her hand; not what it
is
,” she said, “but what it
does
. Like it grabs, it …” She felt the rest wick away on a gasp. “Oh my God,
look
.”

Just outside her window, hovering against all that blackness as if suspended from an invisible string, was a luminous silver-white slit so bright it almost hurt to look.

“Is that the fog?” Bode said.

“No. I think it’s a
door
,” Eric said, still stiff-arming the frame to keep from falling out. The tentacles had swarmed past the running board, and were now licking at the interior edge of the foot well. The outer corner of the door was already under. “That’s what she means by White Space.”

“Okay, but so what? How do we get through? It’s not wide
enough; it’s a nothing,” Bode said. “We can’t even
get
there. It’s not a single step. So what would we hang on to?”

“We hang on to Emma. We let her pull us,” Rima said, and looked back down at them. “We’re inside something or on the other side of a mirror, in the glass, looking out like Alice in Wonderland. What we see through the slit is the … the wrapping paper, the
skin
, like on a baseball or a clean sheet of paper with no words on it yet. That’s where she pulls us, onto that page, where
she
is.”

“What?” Bode said. “How do you know this?”

“I
don’t
, okay? It’s just a guess. But Bode, do you want to stay
here
?”

“She’s right,” Casey said. “I almost see it, too. But Rima, I still don’t understand how we can use it.”

“Me neither,” she said, and then popped the lock of her door.

“What are you
doing
?” Bode said.

“What does it look like?” She shoved as hard as she could, felt the door open by six inches.
Heavy
. “
Help
me,” she said to Bode.

“What?” Bode turned a swift glance back at Casey. “Can you hold him?”

“I guess I’d better,” Casey said.

“Go, Bode,” Eric said, with a tense jerk of his head. “I don’t understand this, but I know we’re all dead if we don’t do something.”

“Go. I can hold him,” Casey said. “Just do it.”

“All right, I’m letting go,” Bode warned, and then took away his hands. At the end of the seat, Eric’s legs, spread in a wide V, suddenly quivered with the additional strain, and
at Casey’s hard, sudden gasp, Bode said, his voice rising with alarm, “Kid?”

“Got him.” Casey’s voice came out strangled. “But
hurry
. Do it, guys, do it
now
.”

Without another word, Bode turned in his seat, bunched his arms, and gave his own door a mighty shove.

“Wait,” Rima said, “what about—”

“Faster this way than the back door.” The words squeezed out on a grunt as Bode heaved. There was a loud, piercing, metallic yowl that Bode matched with a drawn-out jungle yell of his own, and then the door was open and he was swarming over his seat, turning around until the weight of the door rested on his back. “Come on,” he panted, and extended a hand. “Come on if you’re coming.”

Trusting in Bode’s strength took an act of will. If he slipped, she wouldn’t fall out, but she’d knock Casey. Then Eric would slip …

As if she sensed Rima’s fear, Emma came through:
Hurry, Rima
. And:
All of you at once
.

“She’s crazy. How are we supposed to do that?” Bode said, as he hauled Rima over his seat in a half slide, half fall. Turning her body around, Bode got her facing out. “Okay, you’re here. Now what?”

“Now we all think her hand,” she said, taking one of Bode’s in hers. She didn’t dare look away from that slit, which was either dimming or being covered over, she couldn’t tell. “Grab Casey.”

Emma:
Hurry
.

“I got him,” Bode said. “Do it,
do it
.”

“You have to help,” Rima said. “It’s a leap of faith.
Think
her hand,
think
of her pulling us, and don’t anyone let go.”

Come on, Emma, come on
. Rima fixed her eyes on the sliver of White Space.
Do you feel us? Pull us, pull us now
.

For a very long second, nothing happened except the slow but inexorable slide of the truck, and she thought the muck might win this tug-of-war after all.
Emma
. Panic boiled in her chest.
Emma, please, help us. Where are you?

“I’m right here, Emma,” she heard Eric say. “Concentrate on me, feel me; I’m here, I’m
here
. Pull, Emma,
pull
.”

At that, there was a sudden rush, a whirring. Rima felt herself moving, and she thought,
Go. Trust her. Go now
.

She stepped

OVER SPACE THAT
was truly a blank—not black, not gray or white, but
absence
—and into a flat, hard cold of nothing.

If Bode’s hand was still in hers, she did not feel it. Instead, her body compressed. She was passing
through
something, but didn’t know what. She could feel her heart struggling in her chest. She opened her mouth to scream, but nothing came. It was as if she was shifting not from a place but from one
thing
into another, the way water rearranged into ice or steamed away as vapor, and her one thought, as thin as a plank of wood shaved to the thickness of a single molecule, was …

“I BELIEVE YOU,”
Rima said. She studied Lizzie’s crazy quilt, with its intricate stitchery, oddly shaped blocks of fabric, colorful glass beads, and dangling pendants. Her fingers skimmed a large orange tabby cat embroidered onto a trapezoid of green felt. “I don’t understand it all, but I believe you.” She paused, then added, “I think.”

“Well,
I
don’t.” Bode was leaning against the mantelpiece of a hearth in which orange-yellow flames crackled and danced. They were gathered in a front family room that Bode didn’t recall seeing in the house, and that Emma was pretty sure hadn’t been here at all, and certainly not
this
way—strewn with comfortable furniture, a fire already lit—until she and the others trooped down from Lizzie’s room.

“
This
, I believe in,” Bode said, rattling open a box of matches. Selecting one, he struck it. “Something I can touch and feel,” he said, as the flame gobbled up the match nearly to his fingertips. Wincing, he flipped what was left into the
fireplace. “See,
that
hurt. That was real. So
I’m
real. I’ll believe in time travel before I believe this other extra-universe crap.”

“Multiverse.” From her perch on an ottoman near Lizzie, who was hunkered on the floor, Emma said, “So, forgetting what just happened to you guys, the
reason
you’re in Wisconsin instead of Wyoming—”

“You just said you don’t know
where
we are. Why can’t we be in Wyoming?”

“Whatever. How about the fact that you started the day in
1967
but ended it almost fifty years later? And this is because …?” When Bode didn’t reply, Emma said, “Feel free to jump in anytime.”

“Well, first off, I’m not saying I have all the answers. Second, I could say the same right back to you guys. Like, maybe
you’re
back in sixty-seven with me, see? It’s all in how you look at it.” Scowling, Bode scraped another match to life. “Real is real. This guy, Tony? Rima and Casey said he got chewed up and then blown to pieces. I
saw
Chad die. We all nearly got killed.”

“I didn’t
say
we weren’t real. I said that
we
—that is, the energy that’s us, our … 
essence?
Our souls? Whatever you want to call it, I think the core of who we are and how we think of ourselves, might be in a different timeline or alternative universe, or even outside of regular time the way we know it.”

“See?” Bode waved a dismissive hand. “It’s all voodoo. You’re just guessing, and I don’t even understand what you just said. Our
essence?
Outside of time? And what timeline? What other universe? I’m
here
, it’s
now
, I’m real.”