White Space (41 page)

“It kind of fits, doesn’t it? Whatever was down cellar let you … well, log on.”

“What?” Bode asked. “What a log got to do with anything? A log’s just wood.”

“It’s just another word for a special kind of key,” Casey said. “Only this key unlocks a machine.”

Key
. Emma felt the word hook her attention.
Lizzie said … or was it her dad … one of them mentioned a key
. But hadn’t Frank McDermott also said that this key was something they’d read?
Yes, he said manuscript, and they found it in London
.

“But log on to a machine that can do what?” Rima asked. “Draw out energy that you can use to make a book? Or glass?”

“Or anything.” Eric ran a hand over the hard edge of the coffee table. “Even something as simple as this. In the real world, the one we all think of as real, the only reason this wood table
stays
a table is because the energy required for wood and iron to hold their shapes is exactly right
—for that reality
. Add more energy—say, touch a match, start a fire—you destroy the wood’s ability to hold that shape. You’ve added too much energy to the system and initiated a different reaction.”

“Like the phase transition of ice to water, or water to steam,” Emma said. “To
fog
.”

Eric nodded. “So I guess this … this Dark Passages energy stays put in our reality only if you use a certain amount and no more.”

“You
know
 … what happened out on the snow—those creatures just appearing, the church, Tania?” Sliding a copy of
Whispers
from the pile of books, Rima studied the cover art: the portrait of a girl with wild, staring eyes as black as oil and a frill of spider’s legs blooming from her mouth. “If I let myself just accept the idea for a second that my story’s already been written and the fog
is
energy waiting to be used and molded and fixed … it kind of explains a lot.”

Bode barked a laugh. “How?”

“Look, outside this house, there’s fog. Call it thought-magic, call it energy … whatever. Casey and I started out caught in a whole lot of
nothing
. Just … just fog,” she said, although from the look she shot Casey, Emma almost thought she had been about to say something else. “But then
I
made things out of the fog because of who I am,” Rima continued, skimming a light finger over the portrait’s forehead as if trying to smooth back the girl’s bangs. “I
made
Tania, and I did it because Lizzie’s dad had already written it all out for me. I made …” She offered up the book with a slight shrug. “I made the
story
that I came from, or it built itself around me.”

“But then why did it get so crazy?” Bode asked. “The way everything fell apart on the snow like that? Is
that
in the book?”

Lizzie sighed. “I
told
you. The book-world
Now
that she made broke. I think there were too many of you guys all together for too long on the White Space of the wrong story. Dad said that whenever a lot of book-people end up on the same White Space, they break it, because the stories can only go in certain directions. It would be like everyone all piling into a car and wanting to go his own way. But you’ve only got
the one car,” Lizzie said, like a kid regurgitating a lesson she’s gone over so many times she could recite it in her sleep. “He said the wrong characters are like, you know, the things that give you a cold.”

“You mean viruses? An infection?” Eric asked.

“It actually makes sense,” Rima said. “That world was going pretty strong until you and Bode and Chad showed up and brought the … the
energy
of your stories. Like what you just said about adding energy to ice or wood? Only it was the
world
I was building from my story that broke.”

“So where’d Chad go?” Bode said. “He’s dead, right?”

“No. Well, sort of,” Lizzie said. “He’s just gone from
here
, this whole
Now
. He’s back where he belongs, in his book-world.”

“But Tony …” Casey nudged out
Now Done Darkness
, a book whose cover art—a bulbous, slimy-looking monster, with more tentacles than an anemone and what seemed a million eye stalks, chewing its way out of a woman’s stomach—made Emma actually ill. “We saw him die. So, is he really dead? Does he die in his book?”

“No,” Lizzie said. “I’ve visited that book-world a bunch of times.”

“But he’s
dead
,” Casey repeated.

“Yeah, kind of,” Lizzie said. “He got killed here, so he’s
gone
from here. But he’s not
dead
dead. Just who he was
here
is gone.”

“What?” Casey said, but Rima interrupted, “I think there’s a difference between dead and gone. I know what we saw, but …” Rima’s fingers crept to a crocheted scarf wound in a loose cowl around her neck. “His whisper, in the scarf?
And his mother’s? They just disappeared, as if they’d been erased, and that never happens. Taylor, for example.” Rima stroked an arm of her ratty parka. “She’s still here. Even when her whisper finally fades, there’ll still be the tiniest trace, like a watermark. That makes sense because she’s written into my story already. But there’s
nothing
in this scarf. Tony isn’t tangled up in my book, and if he was never a
person
but just the
idea
of one—the energy it takes to make a person come to life on a page—maybe that’s why. It’s like his chapter closed. Tony was never supposed to be here permanently.” Rima nodded at
Now Done Darkness
. “
That’s
the version of Tony we met, and he belongs
there
.”

Lizzie’s mouth worked. “I just
said
that.”

“But then how come he showed up to give Rima a ride?” Bode said. “That was still her … what? Book-world or something? And she and I met at the rest stop.”

“That’s because I was starting to pull you guys all together,” Lizzie said. “It’s hard, and I sometimes drop you where I don’t mean to. Things would’ve fallen apart if I hadn’t separated you all again. Right after that, all of you … you know, you think you drove here, but really, I dropped you into this
Now
.”

“How do you
do
that?” Casey asked, as Eric said, “So can you get Tony again?”

“No, I can’t,” Lizzie said, choosing Eric’s question. “Once you die in this
Now
, you can’t come back here. You can be in other
Nows
, just not this one, or any
Now
where you get killed.”

“Wait a minute.” Bode frowned. “So let me get this straight. Tony’s alive. So are Chad and Emma’s friend?”

“Yes, Chad is in his book-world and”—the little girl waved
a hand through the air—“other
Nows
, but only one Chad is allowed in a
Now
, no matter if it’s a book-world or, like, you know,” Lizzie said, “a regular
Now
.”

So this wasn’t like
The Matrix
. Frowning, Emma worried the inside of her lip. Which would make sense, because the film was about a simulation: a Neo-avatar slotting into a computer program. In a regular
Now
—call it an alternative timeline—if she died, she was gone from that timeline, period. That didn’t mean there weren’t a lot of other Emmas and Bodes and Erics and on and on, like an infinite number of Xeroxed copies. But which was the original?

“Why do you call them that?” Bode frowned down at Lizzie. “
Nows
. I don’t get that.”

“Gosh, you
guys
 … You’re thinking in straight lines too much. Look. Here’s the difference.” Sweeping up
Echo Rats
, she cracked open the covers and jabbed a page. “
That’s
a book-world
Now
.” She flipped two-thirds of the way through. “Here’s another
Now
.” She turned the page. “This is another book-world
Now
,” she said, stabbing the left-hand page and then the facing page, “and that’s another.” She riffled the pages in a fan. “All of these, the pages, they’re all book-world
Nows
. There’s no
yesterday
in a book-world. There’s no
tomorrow
. There is only the page where you start reading, and you can skip around back and forth and start wherever you want. Do you get it? You can read a book from what you
think
is the beginning to the end—go on, follow all the stupid numbers—and then start all over again, or in the middle; it doesn’t matter. You can
decide
where the beginning is, because the book-world is the book-world. It
never
changes. That’s not the same as a
Now
where there’s Christmas and stuff and people
get older and things like that, but there are lots and lots of different
Nows
and you can visit them by going through the Dark Passages.”

“To visit different timelines,” Eric said, “or alternative universes.”

“Fine,
whatever
.” Sudden tears pooled in Lizzie’s eyes as her lower lip quivered. “What’s so
hard
about this?” Lizzie hurled
Now Done Darkness
across the room, the book doing an awkward cartwheel to crash against a wall. “For book-people who are all me, you’re so
stupid
!”

After a moment, Bode said, “All
me
? Say what?”

THE CRAZY QUILT
was a rainbow riot: scraps from every bit of clothing Lizzie had ever worn, decorated not only with the Sign of Sure in its web but very special glass figures and alphabet beads Meredith McDermott had used to spell out Lizzie’s full name:

These same beads had been rearranged to form other names, too, and in various combinations:

There were more names, too:
EARL
and
ANITA, LILY
, even
MARIANE
. Emma picked out
SAL
waaaay
off in one corner of a sliver of black velvet. There were still many others she didn’t know:
BETTE. ZANE. DOYLE. BATTLE
. All characters who existed in other book-worlds but had no part in her story.

But if I’m writing my own, and part of me is tangled up with Lizzie …
Emma’s eyes crept back to the glass beads that spelled out
ERIC
.
I can only imagine so far, and no further?
No, no, wait a second, wait just a minute … that couldn’t be true. Her gaze swept across the quilt, and then she felt the air ease from her throat. Okay, no
KRAMER
. No
JASPER
either, not that she could see right away. The quilt was about half the size and length of a twin bed, and it would take time to pick over and parse out everything. But she knew on a deep, gut level: Jasper just wouldn’t be there.

There’s no
J
in Lizzie’s name, and she said I made Kramer myself. So, did I also make Jasper?
That thought promoted another, something that had bothered her but which, at the time, she couldn’t afford to dwell on because she’d been running for her life:
In that insane asylum, Kramer called him John, like that was Jasper’s first …
She felt her heart kick start in her throat.
No, no, that can’t be right
.

At her sudden intake of breath, Eric threw her a small frown, but she only shook her head, not trusting in her voice.
And I don’t even want to know what this means
. Because she had finally put something together, a puzzle over which her mind must’ve been working, like a computer laboring, quietly, toward a solution at once inescapable and irrefutable.

IT WENT LIKE
this.

Jasper was obsessed with a lot of things: the Dark Passages and horrific nightmarish creatures and
Nows
—and Dickens. So Emma knew a fair amount about the writer, including this: sometime in the mid-1860s, Dickens, along with his mistress and her mother, was in a catastrophic train accident that should’ve killed him. Of the train’s seven first-class carriages, Dickens’ car was the only one
not
to plunge from a viaduct and into a river at Staplehurst in Kent. For hours after the accident, Dickens tended the injured. Some died before his eyes.

The accident was something academics like Kramer loved to point to as the metaphor for Dickens himself: imperious, selfish, bombastic, a bit of the egomaniac whose life was going off the rails. At the time of the crash, the writer had been in the middle of
Our Mutual Friend
, which might have been lost if Dickens hadn’t remembered to retrieve the manuscript from his overcoat, which he’d left in the railway carriage, before boarding an emergency train to London.

Badly shaken and already in poor health, Dickens actually lost his voice for several weeks. His kids and friends said he never fully recovered, would get the shakes on any but the slowest of trains. Worse, Dickens struggled to finish
Our Mutual Friend
. Never at a loss, his next installment was several pages short. Either he was used up or traumatized—probably a bit of both; the guy was pretty manic to begin with—but his best writing days were behind him, the crash the beginning of the end.
Our Mutual Friend
bombed, and Dickens didn’t attempt another book for five long years. But when he did, he
decided to try something that, for him, was pretty radical: a murder mystery. He decided on
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
.