White Space

LIZZIE Wear Me

AS HER MOTHER muscles the stick and they race away from what’s left of their home, the fog—all that remains of her father tangled with the Peculiars’ energy and that of the whisper-man—is both a fist, closing down over Lizzie’s past, and a ravening monster with a mouth, gobbling up the road and this world, and still coming on strong. Seeping from the cell’s speaker, the whisper-man’s voice is a faint, mournful sough: Come down, Blood of My Blood; come plaaay, come down, come …

Lizzie fishes up her mother’s phone. Crackling with the energy of Lizzie’s thought-magic, the magic-glass of her memory quilt is a shimmering dazzle. The special Sign of Sure, the tool her dad has used to get himself back and forth from Nows through the Dark Passages, is as iridescent as the Milky Way. But she thinks the fog has to be much closer. Maybe she has to let it inside, allow it to slip into and wear her the way she does the book-people and her dolls. The way her father has invited whatever’s in the Dark Passages.

But he’s done it with blood, by cutting himself, so will this work? Can I grab it hard enough?

She just doesn’t know. Yet this she does understand: everyone wants what they can’t have, same as when Lizzie whines for a second scoop of chocolate ice cream. They especially want what’s hard to get.

So make the whisper-man mad. Make it really work hard, get so greedy-pissed it flies for her like a moth to the hottest flame, so it doesn’t get what Lizzie’s doing until way too late.

I’ll show you. Come on, you big show-off. Let’s play my game. She thumbs the phone to silence. The cell rings again at once. This time, she turns off the power, which she already knows won’t make a dent, and it doesn’t. When the phone begins to chirp again, she pitches the machine into the black mouth of the foot well because there is no way, no way she’s answering again. Let that whisper-man stew. That’ll show him.

“Good girl,” Mom says, misunderstanding. As Lizzie scrambles to buckle in, her mother chokes back another sob. “I’m so sorry, Lizzie.”

“It’s okay, Mom.” She knuckles away tears. “It’s going to catch us, isn’t it?”

“If it really wants us, yes. I don’t think there’s much I can do about that, but it’ll have to work to do it.” Her mother’s foot drops and the car surges with a roar. “Listen to me, Lizzie, this is important. If it wants something … if it needs to bind someone, it can take me. I won’t let it hurt you, honey, but you have to promise me to run, run as far away as you can, and don’t look back, all right? I’ll be …” Her voice wavers, then firms. “I’ll be able to hold it. But you run, promise?”

“I promise,” Lizzie says, already knowing that this is a pinky-swear she will break. Run, and as bad as this is, she thinks things could get to be a hundred million zillion times worse, because there is so much power here, enough to break this Now wide open. So what happens next won’t be up to her mother.

Come on, come and get me. As the woods spin by beyond the car, Lizzie hunkers down into her memory quilt. Behind her, hanging in the air, the symbols for Lizzie’s new Now hum and purple with a weird, mad energy drawn from ideas deep down cellar and from the dark where the strongest—the worst—imaginings live. Just a few more seconds and one more symbol …

Come on, come get me, Lizzie thinks. Get mad and want me, wear me, want me.

EMMA A Choice Between Red and Blue

1

FROM HER PLACE on the snow-covered farmhouse porch, Emma watched the red wink of taillights disappear into a mouth of darkness that finally closed, swallowing up that creaky old Dodge. God, she didn’t want to let Eric out of her sight. What would happen to him if she weren’t around?

Well, I’m sure to find out. She pressed a finger to an aching temple. Her head killed, probably a combination of concussion and all those blinks, a lot of them. Too many. Ever since waking up in this valley, she’d been zoning out, losing chunks of time. She didn’t think the others had noticed, although Casey—that nasty kid, someone she’d never have imagined related to Eric—kept throwing her speculative looks.

I see the same girl, too, over and over again, in every blink. Kid even has a name, and that’s a first. “Lizzie,” she said, trying it out in her mouth. Saying the little girl’s name made all those blinks feel much more real, not like dreams at all but as if she was a stunt double slotting into a film of Lizzie’s life. Not completely in the kid’s head but close. And everything I see is happening to her right now, at this moment. This last time, the kid had been … running from something? Afraid of her dad; something happened to her father. She thought that was right. Emma just couldn’t quite grab hold of what it was about Lizzie’s dad that was freaking the kid out, although she retained a wisp of an image: Dad doing something really, really scary in front of a very odd mirror.

Coming back from these blinks was so different, too, like surfacing with the tangles of nightmares clinging to her like sticky seaweed. They feel like memories, something I’ve always known. She had this odd notion that if her brain was a hallway lined with doors, all she had to do was open the right one to walk into Lizzie’s life.

Or pull her into mine. A weird thought. And this last blink … “Want me, wear me,” she whispered, hugging herself against the cold. Tony’s space blanket let out a tired crinkle like soggy cellophane. “What does that mean, Lizzie?” Made about as much sense as Jasper going on about … “Dark Passages,” she said, slowly, to the still, cold night. “Lizzie knows about them—and different Nows? Like Jasper? But Jasper was drunk half the time.”

Was Jasper talking about something that exists? The fingers of another shiver skipped up the rungs of her spine. No matter how many times she’d asked, her guardian never had explained. In the end, she’d chalked it up to the fact that he was pretty permanently pickled. But what if the Dark Passages and the Nows are why he drank? Not just to forget or because he was so freaked. What if Jasper drank so it—they?—couldn’t find him? This idea had an itchy, tip-of-the-tongue feeling, something that felt true. As if I once knew this but … forgot?

Another, more bizarre thought: Or is this something I was made to forget?

“Oh, don’t be stupid, you nut.” A flare of impatience. “Jasper was soaked, and the blinks are seizures. They’re hallucinations, like dreams. Of course, you’re going to slot in stuff you know about. That’s the way dreams and hallucinations are.” Yeah, but she didn’t know a Lizzie.

“Emma, stop, you’re not going to solve this right now.” She really ought to go inside. Yet the idea made a twist of fear coil in her gut. Why? It was stupid. There was light inside the house, and it was warm. There was food. She could still smell the faint, rich aroma of cheddar from a mac and cheese casserole. Bode and Chad seemed fine, if a little odd.

But this farmhouse … I have seen you before, over and over again. In the blinks? Yes, and no: she thought she’d actually seen a picture of the house somewhere. She ran her eyes over the porch railing, the bay window, that snow-covered swing on its chains. Come spring, she’d bet money a froth of red geraniums would replace the mounds of white humped in those hanging planters.

If spring ever comes to a place like this. Swaddled in the space blanket and her parka, still damp with gasoline, she shivered as much from cold as a sudden premonition that, maybe, it was always night here, and cold. And that’s got something to do with Wyoming. Those license plates are important. But I’ve never been to Wyoming.

“Oh, don’t be a nut just because you can,” she said, watching her breath bunch in a gelid knot. Her eye drifted from the porch and past Eric’s snowmobile to that huge, outsize barn soaring up from the snow. Wisconsin was lousy with red gable-roofed barns with stone foundations and sliders and haymows and cupolas to draw in air and dry out the hay. But this thing was ginormous, much too big—and wrong, too. Why? Her gaze brushed over the exterior walls, then roamed over the gabled roof.

“No cupola,” she said after a moment. “No sliders, not even a ramp.” There was a door but no windows of any kind. The walls were blank. It was as she’d said to Eric: the skeleton of a movie set, someone’s idea of what a farm—a barn—should be.

“Or maybe it’s all the barn you need.” Then she thought, What? Enough barn for whom?

“Hey, Emma, you nut … what if this is a blink? You ever think about that? Or maybe you’re dreaming.” Hadn’t there been some movie about this? “Inception,” she said, and then more loudly: “So, okay, go ahead, kick me. I’d like to wake up now.”

Of course, nothing happened. “Right,” she snorted, watching how her breath smoked in the icy air. “It’s not like Morpheus is going to show up and give you a choice between red and blue. Get a grip.”

Scooping snow from the porch railing, she cupped it in her bare hands, grimacing at the burn. “So that’s real.” She held the snow to her nose and sniffed. Frowned. “But funky.” Snow had an odor, something that she associated with frigid, frosty, old-fashioned trays of ice cubes. This particular scent was thicker and metallic, but not aluminum. Copper? The image of Jasper’s heap of a pickup flashed in the middle of her mind. Yeah, same smell: wet, cold rust. Still, this was real snow.

And my head hurts. Brushing powder from her hands, she gingerly probed her bandaged forehead with a forefinger. Beneath the gauze and her skin, she could feel the circle of her titanium skull plate. So that, or rather she, was—

2

BLINK.

“Oh boy.” She was inside, with no memory of having opened the door. She threw a glance at the braided mat upon which she stood. Her shoes were bone-dry: no melting snow, no puddles. To her surprise, the house was a little chilly; she pressed the back of one hand to the tip of her nose. Cold as a brass button. Bet it’s red as Rudolph’s, too.

“Okay,” she breathed, and felt the house fold down a bit, crouch closer—which was … pretty crazy. Exactly like when I read The Bell Jar this past summer; felt that damn thing coming down, trapping me like a lightning bug under a jelly glass. Yet she heard nothing in the house. Not a creak. Not a crack or pop, none of the tiny settling sounds any normal house made. No hoosh of a furnace either. She threw a glance at the ceiling and then down at the floor. Whoa, no vents. No registers or radiators. So how are they heating this thing?

Except for the gleaming hardwood floor, which held this single colorful braided rug, the foyer was a white-walled cube. No pictures. No paintings. Ahead and to the left, she saw a circular flight of stairs that twisted around and around, seemingly forever. Like the barn, the too-large stairs belonged in a little kid’s fairy-tale version of a mansion or castle, and was all wrong. Another hall—black as a tomb and lined with closed doors—ran to the left of the stairs and went on a long way.

Just walls and a front door with sidelights. A hall with a lot of doors. Outside, there’s a porch, a swing, hanging planters, but no storm door. No doorbell or peephole. She threw a look back at the door. Not even a lock. Her eyes zeroed in on the smooth brass knob.

“No keyhole,” she said. “It’s just a knob. Everything’s been stripped down to the bare minimum, like the barn. Because this is all the house you need?” All the house who needs? “Maybe I’m not thinking about this the right way. Maybe”—she cocked her head at the ceiling—“maybe this is all the house needs.”

To her left, something cleared its throat with a faint sputter.

“Huh!” Clapping a hand to her mouth, she held back a scream. She could feel her eyes trying to bug out of their sockets. What was that? Coming from that gloomy corridor … Her breath was coming too hard and fast to hear over, and she raked her upper lip with her teeth, focusing on the pain. Calm down, you nut. Just … music? No. Concentrating, she worked to reel in the sound and caught a static crackle, a gabble of nonsense syllables, a sizzle and hiss.

“Radio.” The word floated on a sigh of relief. Freak yourself out, why don’t you? Or maybe a TV Bode and Chad had left on. Had there been a satellite dish on the roof? She didn’t remember one, and this house was way the hell and gone. No way it got cable. So this was more than likely a radio.

I should look for it. Eventually, they’ll give the call sign, or if I really luck out and there’s a weather band … She pushed away a sudden woozy sense of déjà vu. Hadn’t this been exactly what she’d said to Lily only a few hours ago? Well, so what if this is a weather band? This was a farm, duh; farmers cared about weather just like ships’ pilots and fishermen. If I can find the radio, I’ll know where we are.

“Hah,” she muttered, “easy for you to say.” Carefully inching from the mat, she let herself ease a foot away but still close enough to the door to bolt if she needed to. If the house lets me out. “Stop it, Emma,” she said. Shutting her eyes, she cocked her head like a dog trying to decipher a command, and listened. Where was this coming from?

Well, you could go look, you coward. But she couldn’t make herself move any further than she already had. A spider of new fear scurried up her neck and stroked another deep shudder. “What are you waiting for, Emma?” she murmured. “An engraved invitation?”

And was she talking only to herself?

No. She ran her eyes over the blank walls, the improbable staircase, the smooth ceiling. I’m talking to you, House—and then she sucked in a quick breath as she realized something that neither she nor Eric had seen before, that just hadn’t clicked.

There was light in this house, glaring and bright. But there were no fixtures. No bulbs, no lamps, nothing—only that single pole lamp in front of the barn.

Because you wanted to make sure we saw that barn, didn’t you, House? Just in case we happened to miss the fact that it’s as big as a mountain?

“You,” she said to herself, “are creeping yourself out.” With good reason, though: this valley, the house, the stillness, this sudden radio gibberish, if that’s what it even was … none of this belonged.

“You don’t belong either, House.” Her voice came out flat. “It’s like you’re alive. I feel you watching me, waiting for me to make a move …”

3

SHE BLINKED BACK.

She stood at a bathroom sink, over which a wall-mounted, mirrored medicine chest hung. The glass was fogged with condensation. Her hair was damp, and the air was steamy and smelled of floral shampoo. A fluffy white towel was hung neatly over a steel shower curtain rod. The curtain itself was gauzy white and decorated with the black silhouette of a cat at the lower left staring up at a tiny mouse at the right.

Cat-and-mouse is right. Looking down at herself, she saw that she now wore fresh jeans and a turquoise turtleneck that brought out the deep sapphire of her eyes. Must’ve raided a closet or something. Even blinked out, she always could color-coordinate.

And now I’m in front of a mirror, and there was a mirror in that blink about Lizzie’s dad. “But this is a bathroom.” Plucking a white washcloth from a towel bar next to the sink, she scrubbed the mirror free of steam. Her face swam to the surface of the glass and firmed. She saw that she’d removed her bandage. Her forehead was a mess. “Just a plain-old vanilla bathroom in a creepy little house, not some huge, weird mirror in a big ba—”

Oh, shit. “In a big barn.” Her mouth was so dry she had no spit. Be calm. She carefully smoothed the washcloth, then folded it in half and draped it over the towel bar. Think this through.

“Right. Okay, so there’s a barn,” she said to her reflection. “So what? What does this prove? That you’re still in that weird Lizzie-blink? Or only dreaming?”

Yet Lily was dead. That was no dream. And her forehead hurt. Squinting at her reflection, she gingerly finger-walked the wound. The ragged edges were raw, and a purplish lump bulged like a unicorn’s horn. Touching it sent off a sparkle of pain.

“So this is real.” At the wave of relief, she gave a tremulous laugh. “Of course it is. I’ve been scared in dreams, but I’ve never gotten all banged up or cut, and if I have, I don’t remember, and I’ve never felt pain.” Lucky I didn’t crack my skull either. Can that happen if you’ve already got plates—

She never finished that thought. She felt the words curl in on themselves as tightly as snails withdrawing into their shells.

Because that was when her brain finally caught up to what was going on with that mirror—and, more to the point, what was happening in it.

“Oh, holy shit,” she said.

4

LOOK IN A mirror, any mirror, even the goofy ones at the county fair. Raise your right hand. From your reflection’s perspective, you’re raising your left hand, so your reflection raises its left. Equal but opposite. Put your right hand on the glass and your reflection’s left hand floats to meet you.

But when Emma raised her right hand, her reflection lifted its right. Equal … but not opposite.

“What?” Startled, she took a step back—

And watched her reflection take a step forward.

“Oh God.” A sudden cold sweat started on her upper lip. That can’t be happening. I hit my head. That’s what this is. I’ve been blinking a lot. I’m seeing things. “It’s all head trauma,” she said, and let her right hand drift up again. “This is nothing but—”

The rest wouldn’t come, because, this time, her reflection did nothing. Not a thing. Didn’t move its hand. Didn’t step back either.

“Stop that,” she said to her reflection. “What’s—” Ohhh, God. She heard her breath gush from her mouth. She was talking. Her mouth had moved.

But her reflection’s hadn’t. That thing with her face hadn’t matched her words at all but only stared, mute and waxen as a doll, as soulless as a mannequin.

Get out. Her knees were beginning to shake. In another second, if she didn’t get moving, her legs would give out and she’d fall, maybe faint. Get out of this house while you still can. Run, ru—

Her reflection moved toward her.

“Oh shit.” Emma breathed. Rooted to the spot, she watched as her reflection took a step and then another and another until it was plastered against the glass, its features flattening like those of a kid peering into the darkened front of a candy store. Run, you nut, run. But she couldn’t make herself move. It was as if she’d turned to stone.

Something tugged her wrist.

“What?” She stared at her right hand, which was starting to jitter. Her fingers twitched. “Stop that,” she said to her hand. “Cut that out. Stop!”

Her hand … moved. On its own. Without her telling it to.

No. Stop, she thought to her hand. Stop what you’re doing. “Don’t, Emma,” she said, hoarsely, as her fingers floated for the mirror. “Don’t, don’t!”

Her hand didn’t care. She watched herself reach for the glass and thought back to earlier that day: that strange compulsion to push through her driver’s side window—where the barrier’s thinnest—and bleed to some other time and place.

“Bleed,” she said, and felt her heart give a tremendous lurch. In my blink, Lizzie’s dad cut himself. When his blood touched that weird mirror, the glass began to change.

“Don’t touch it,” she quavered. All the tiny hairs on her neck and arms bristled. This wasn’t the same mirror; she hadn’t cut herself. But then why wasn’t her hand obeying? Whoever heard of a reflection that acted more like a double trapped on the other side of the glass? Alice in Wonderland syndrome is right. “Emma, don’t do this.”

But her hand just wouldn’t listen. As her fingers met the bathroom mirror’s silvered glass, a startled cry tore from her lips. The icy mirror burned; her fingers instantly numbed, and yet she was still reaching, pressing, pushing …

This is like when I was twelve and wandered down into Jasper’s cellar to find a book, she thought with stupefied horror. I couldn’t stop myself back then either. This was a nightmare, like Neo at the mirror, after he’d swallowed the red pill. Stop, I want the blue pill, she thought, crazily, as she kept pushing. “Help,” she panted, “somebody, help, he—”

Now, the glass dimpled. It rippled and swam. It opened itself like a mouth.

“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.…

LIZZIE Mom Makes Her Mistake

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

EMMA Between the Lines

1

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.

“With white paint.” Like the door down cellar. She put a trembling hand to her lips. “White slit, white door, white space.” That means something, too. What had Jasper said? Every time you pull them onto White Space, you risk breaking that Now.

“Okay, House, time-out,” she said. “I get it, I do. I’m supposed to walk through this door and into that room. I’ll bet that even if I leave—go outside and wait by the snowmobile—eventually, I’ll end up here again after another blink, because this is what you want.” This is a … test? Part of a process? What I’ve been brought here to learn and do? That all felt right. So, really, the only choice was whether she turned the knob this time around, or on the hundredth repetition.

Just do it already, you coward.

The brass knob was icy. Heart thumping, she tried giving it a twist, but it wouldn’t turn and nothing happened when she pulled.

Push, the way Lizzie’s dad did with the Mirror.

That did something. She felt the shift under her hand, almost a … a mechanical click? Same thing when I touched that … that membrane down cellar, when I was twelve. As if I’ve activated something. She instinctively backed up a step as the slit-door glimmered, not opening so much as dissolving. Melting, like a phase shift, the way ice changes to water. And then she thought, What the hell?

The slit-door vanished. A faint coppery aroma, like the rust-scent of that snow, seeped on a breath of frigid air. Inside, there was no light at all. From deep within, however, she could hear the buzz and sputter of that radio. Otherwise, it was pitch-black.

No, that’s not quite right. She realized the reason the door opened out. My God—she stared at the smooth, glassy, jet-black barrier—it’s solid.

It was, she thought, like the mirror in her blinks. And what I found in Jasper’s cellar. A week after she had, the blinks had begun. And I’ve got the feeling there’s something else I’m not remembering; was made to forget. But what? And why would anyone make me forget anything? Who could even do something like that? How?

At her touch, the black shuddered. Her hand instantly iced, then fired to a shriek, but she could stand this; and although her heart was still hammering, she wasn’t as frightened. It’s like what happened upstairs, in the bathroom. As if that had been a demonstration designed to show her what to do.

Beneath her fingers, the darkness gave and rippled, that weird sense of something transitioning from one state of matter to another, and then she was moving, pushing, feeling the suck of that oily black, stepping through

2

INTO SUMMER.

She is on East Washington in Madison. She knows this because the capitol’s white dome is just up the hill. To her left is the bus stop on Blair that will take her back to Holten Prep. The air is warm, a little humid from Lake Mendota, where sailboats scud like clouds over lapis-blue water. Her left hand is cold. She looks, expecting to see that her hand isn’t there but still wrist-deep in blackness. Instead, she holds a mocha Frappuccino topped with a pillow of whipped cream, fresh from the Starbucks down the block. In her right hand is a book.

This is a memory. She cranes a look over her shoulder. There is no room, no slit-door. The street presses at her back. A steady stream of cars hums past. Distant tunes and radio voices tangle and swell, then fade, trailing after the vehicles like pennants. Light splashes her shoulders because it’s summer. A light-aqua sundress that brings out the indigo of her eyes floats around her thighs. This is from six months ago. “That’s really cool.”

“What?” Disoriented, she turns back to discover that she stands before a table heavy with boxes of half-priced books. Her eyes crawl to the storefront window. There is a sign advertising the sale, and the bookstore’s name emblazoned in black-edged gold: BETWEEN THE LINES.

I remember this. I was here in June, after exams, a week before my birthday.

“I said your necklace is so cool.” The voice belongs to a guy about her age. In one hand, he cups a perfect glass sphere on a dark ribbon the color of a blood clot that she’s wearing around her neck. The pendant is elegantly crafted: a miniature universe, sugared with stars, that swims with a tangle of twisting bodies and strange creatures. She knows this necklace, too. It’s her galaxy pendant, the one she hasn’t flameworked yet and which exists only as an idea.

“Did you make it?” the boy asks.

“Uh …” Well, the answer is she didn’t, and hasn’t the skill. She might still try—assuming, of course, that she doesn’t crash, get her friend killed, and wind up going slowly insane. “Yeah.”

“I really like how it changes depending on how you look at it,” the boy says. “It could be this dark planet with a ton of lights, like Earth from outer space. Or it could be an explosion, like the black’s about to break apart and what you’re seeing is white light through the cracks, and that lights up all the things that live in outer space that we wouldn’t normally see, you know? Like dark matter? Or what space would look like if you could somehow get outside our universe and then look back.”

It’s as if he’s read her mind. All of that’s exactly what she’s after but doesn’t quite know how to do just yet.

“Well, I—” Then she gets a really good look at this boy, and whatever she was about to say fizzles on her tongue.

Because the boy is Eric.

EMMA As He Will Be

ERIC IS ALMOST exactly as he will be, right down to those smoldering, impossibly blue eyes fringed with long black lashes. His face is strong and lean, and his lips are full, his mouth perfectly shaped. The only difference is that he’s not as muscular, and his dark hair curls over the tips of his ears. He wears denim shorts and a black tee. His hands are slender, the fingers long. He is insanely handsome, something manufactured by a dream, and that queer sighing flutter in her chest that she feels now she will recognize as longing then.

“You’re—” she begins and stops. She has almost said, You’re not real. You don’t belong here. You weren’t here. “You’re not the regular girl. Who works here, I mean.”

“Oh. Well, no. Just subbing for the extra cash.” His eyebrows knit in concern. Releasing the galaxy pendant, he straightens. “Are you okay? Do you want to sit down or something?”

“No, I’m good.” Her throat is so dry she hears the click as she swallows. “You’re Eric,” she says, then remembers to make it a question. “Right?”

“Yeah.” His frown deepens. “Have we met?”

Not yet. “No. I, uh, I guess I must’ve seen you around.”

“I don’t think so,” he says, and then his expression changes: as if she’s glass and his gaze pierces to her hidden heart. “I would’ve remembered meeting you.”

Her pulse throbs in her neck. It’s as if he’s pulled her into a private, breathless space, somewhere warm and safe to which he has the only key. If he wants to hold her there forever …

“Emma!” The voice comes from behind. “Where’ve you been?”

No. Her stomach drops, and she turns to watch the girl striding toward her. No, no, you’re—

“I should’ve known. As if we don’t have enough reading to do. Only you would buy more books. I mean, making us read The Bell Jar? Seriously? That thing is so depressing.” Lily executes an exaggerated eye-roll, then plucks the book from Emma’s nerveless fingers. “So what else did you find?”

“Wh-what are you doing here?” Emma croaks.

“Hello, done with finals, not ready to face Sylvia Plath? Into some serious retail therapy?” Lily’s sculpted eyebrows crinkle in a frown. “Emma, are you okay? You don’t look so hot.”

Oh no, I lose my mind on a regular basis. “I’m fine,” Emma says, but she is definitely not. This is all wrong. She had not come with Lily; she didn’t know Lily back then, did she? Where had they met? On this street? In a class? She can’t remember, but she does recall that she went shopping with her roommate, Mariane, and they had lost one another when Emma wandered off toward the bookstore down East Washington, thinking now would be a great time to get a jump on all that summer reading.

Wait a second. What if this time is the first time? A strange relief floods her veins. Maybe that’s it. This is reality. All the rest—the snow, the crash, Lily’s death—is the dream, or blink, or hallucination. The street is what’s real. The taste of too-sweet coffee and chocolate still sits on her tongue. Chilly beads of condensation wet her fingers. In a few days, she will be seventeen. Lily is alive and Eric is here; he’s real.

But he shouldn’t be. He’s like the pendant I haven’t made yet: something I’ve only—

“Ugh, how can you read this stuff?” With an exaggerated shudder, Lily hands back the book Emma’s chosen. “You and your horror novels … I’d have nightmares for a year.”

Me and my … She doesn’t like horror; with her past, her life has been gruesome enough, thanks. “Well, I—” Emma begins, and then her eyes click to the book’s cover and Emma feels the blood drain from her face as her ears begin to buzz.

The jacket is smoky. In the center, there is a long dark slit edged in a fiery corona of red and yellow and orange. The slit could be a cat’s eye, or a lizard’s, or a split in the earth—or the mouth she sees whenever she gets a migraine, because there are shadowy figures and a writhing tangle of weird monsters struggling to climb out. Look at it a certain way, and you could almost believe they were about to leap off the cover and out of the book.

And the cover reads:

Franklin J. McDermott

THE DICKENS MIRROR

Book II of THE DARK PASSAGES

EMMA What the Cat Already Sees

IN THIS JUNE of memory, Emma’s blood turns to slush.

Another book by McDermott, in a series she’s never heard of. One that she’s pretty sure doesn’t really exist. Was this in the bibliography Kramer gave us? She doesn’t think so. But McDermott knew the Dickens Mirror; he wrote about it.

Wait a second. Just because he knew doesn’t mean it’s a real thing. Writers make stuff up all the time. The Mirror could be imaginary and something that only exists in a book.

But if that was true, and even if it wasn’t, then what—who—was the first book about?

Oh, holy shit. An icy flood sweeps through her chest. I am so stupid. The jigsaw bits and pieces of her Lizzie-blinks suddenly begin snapping into place. There are still a lot of gaps; these are blinks after all, and her memory of them, the fine print and little details, isn’t perfect, but she recalls enough: that barn, an explosion, a car crash, a dad who’s a writer, and Lizzie’s mom makes glass. Emma, you nut, Kramer said that—or he will say … Oh, what the hell difference does it make? She is shaking so badly, it’s as if she’s back in the snow, in that awful valley. What she remembered was what Kramer said about Meredith McDermott: a physicist turned glass artist, who blew her husband to smithereens.

Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, all this—the crash, the valley, House—all this is about Frank McDermott? First I write a story that’s straight out of notes for a book he never finished, and now I’m channeling his kid? This is like the moment to come, one she hasn’t lived yet, when Kramer accuses her of plagiarism, and all she can and will think is, Don’t be crazy. The guy’s dead.

But no, it’s even worse than that; she’s dropping into the last reel because she knows what comes next. Lizzie’s already in the car; that kid’s about five seconds away from dying.

“Emma?” Lily touches her arm, but the feel is muted, as if reaching her through a layer of cotton. “Are you all right?”

“I’m … I’m fine.” She flips the book over to study the jacket photo. The image is black and white, and the caption reads in tiny white block letters: THE WRITER AND HIS FAMILY AT THEIR HOME IN RURAL WISCONSIN.

They’re all there, ranged on the porch steps: McDermott, his head cocked as if something’s caught his eye, stands on the right. His wife—so you’re Mom; you’re Meredith, Emma thinks—is on the left.

Her eyes zero in on a little girl with blonde pigtails and an armful of cat, between Frank and Meredith. Bet that’s an orange tabby, too. The cat’s gaze is focused on something that must be in a tree off-camera.

Lizzie and Marmalade and … oh my God. Despite the day’s warmth, her skin prickles with gooseflesh as she picks out the porch railing, a bay window on the left, a door with a wrought-iron knocker and pebbled sidelights, the glider on chains, hanging flower baskets spilling over with geraniums that she’d lay money on are red. That’s House.

That is also when she realizes: McDermott is not looking around. The photographer captured McDermott as he was looking up. From the angle, she understands that McDermott is about to spot—or knows exactly—what the cat already sees. Her eyes inch up the picture, and then her breath hitches in a small gasp.

“Emma?” Eric says. “Are you okay? What is it?”

“I … It’s …” But her mouth won’t work, and she can’t get the words off her tongue.

In that photograph, draped over the sill of a second-story window, is a hand.

But the fingers are not fingers. They are claws.

And then … they move.

RIMA That’s No Cloud

THE CAMRY WAS gone. Tony was dead, and maybe Casey, too. Rima had scrubbed as much of a pocket out of the snow as she could manage, but she was jammed in tight, headfirst and up to her thighs. Her air was going fast, the snow melting from the warmth of her breath and body heat—and now, just when she thought things couldn’t get any worse, she heard something.

Coming right for me. A deep trembling seized her. She could feel Taylor’s death-whisper, still clinging to her parka, cringe. It’s going to get me … She felt something move and then close around her right ankle. No! Her heart bolted up her throat to lodge behind her teeth. No, no!

“Rima?” Casey, snow-muffled and distant. “Rima, are you okay?”

Oh, thank you, God. Nearly limp with relief, she wiggled her foot. Get me out of here.

“Good.” He sounded relieved. “Okay, hang on. It’ll only take a couple minutes to get you out.”

Actually, it took more like ten, and she felt every single second crawl by as her air pocket got stuffier and her chest started to hurt. Hurry, Casey, hurry. Her head ached, the pain like nails behind her eyeballs. Then, all of a sudden, cold licked her hips and waist, and she could move her legs. Pawing through snow, Casey grabbed fistfuls of her parka and yanked. Popping free like a cork from the tight neck of a narrow bottle, she tumbled out, and they collapsed together into the snow.

“Oh!” she gasped. They’d gotten turned around somehow so she was on top. They were nose to nose, her palms flat on his chest, his hands clamped around her biceps. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” he said. Deep, bloody scratches scored his forehead and cheeks. The fist-sized bruises on his jaw were purple and puffy. His parka was ripped, the arms nearly in shreds. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah. Thanks.” Her voice suddenly broke, and she knew she would start to cry if she wasn’t careful. She drew in a shuddery breath. “Thanks for getting me out, for not leaving me, Casey.”

“I wouldn’t do something like that.” Casey gave her arms a squeeze. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

She nodded. “What about you? What happened to your face?”

“Landed in a tree across the road. Got blown right out of my fath—” He stopped, licked his lips. “Out of some of my clothes. I guess the wind or something got under and tore my shirt off. My parka was all tangled up, like a noose. Took forever to work the zipper from the inside and then climb down. That’s why it took me so long to find you. I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s fine.” Her eyes traced the course of a red welt beneath his battered jaw and over the hump of his throat. She thought it was pretty lucky he hadn’t strangled. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

“Me too.” In the dwindling orange glow of the fire, his expression was unreadable. “I mean, I’m glad you’re okay.”

She was suddenly conscious of the feel of his body beneath hers, how close they were. How she could tolerate his touch. Taylor’s whisper didn’t seem to mind either. This was a very different Casey, not the mean kid from before. Even his voice was different: not rough or sneering, but normal and kind of nice.

Of course. She pulled in a small, quick breath. His father’s shirt was gone, and with it, all that poison. There was no whisper of Big Earl now, anywhere on—or in—Casey. Did he know? Somehow she didn’t think Casey had a clue—and what was it, exactly, that he could do, anyway?

Maybe he’s like me, able to sense death-whispers, but my opposite. I take away the whispers; I free them. But maybe he draws them in, gives them a place to live. Or they take him. Can whispers even do that? She didn’t know. In her experience, death-whispers like Taylor’s were helpless; they needed her to soothe and then free them. But Big Earl was gone, so whatever was going on with Casey was either reversible, or a whisper needed more time to weave itself into Casey’s skin. How long would Casey have to be exposed before that became permanent? All interesting thoughts, and something she’d never considered before. Too much to think about right now, though. Later, if there was time, they really ought to talk.

“We need to get out of here,” she said. “There might be more of those things.”

“Or something worse.” He slid her to one side and pushed up on his elbows. “We sh—”

When he didn’t go on, she looked over. “Casey?” She searched his face, saw something like amazement quickly shading to alarm—and then she realized: Wait a second, I can really see him. There was orange light from the dying car fire, but Casey’s face was bathed in a silver-blue glow, the kind of light thrown by a full moon. “What is it?”

“Rima, turn around,” he said, thickly, and lifted his chin. “Look at the sky.”

She did, and her stomach bottomed out.

They lay together on the snow, staring into the black night above and at something new: very dense, milky, and shimmering as if studded with silver glitter—or stars. It boiled out of the darkness in a great pillowing mass, gathering and gobbling the night.

“Oh my God.” She couldn’t seem to get enough air. “Is that … is that a cloud?”

“That’s no cloud,” he said.

BODE A Real Long Way from Jasper

1

“WHAT IS THAT?” Chad peered through the Dodge’s windscreen. “Is that smoke? Like, from the explosions?”

“It wouldn’t be white, unless they were using phosphorus,” Eric said. He was in the backseat but leaned forward now, draping his hands over the front, his walkie-talkie dangling by its wrist strap. “That’s more like fog.”

“Or just real thick clouds,” Bode said. Fog or clouds, he didn’t like the look of all that open sky. Drop him into a tunnel—what he and his fellow rats called a black echo—any day. Not that a tunnel was a cakewalk. There was the enemy hunkering down there, waiting for a quiet kill, and booby traps: snakes, wicked-sharp punji stakes smeared with God knows what kind of poison or human shit. But scorpions were the worst. Those suckers nested everywhere: on the walls, the ceiling. Get stung, and you were gone.

Other guys called him lucky. Maybe he was. If he’d popped out of that tunnel ten seconds earlier, that mortar would’ve taken his head off. Instead, Sergeant Battle took the hit: one minute there, his hand reaching for Bode’s, and the next—

Which is why you need to think, be careful, watch your step. The voice in Bode’s mind was more hiss than whisper. Not like I can take one for you this time around, son.

Bode’s eyes flicked to the rearview. Battle’s head floated next to Eric, who was back to fiddling with his walkie-talkie. Eric wouldn’t have seen Battle anyway, probably a good thing. Battle’s head was a ruin. Most of the meat on the sergeant’s face had flash-fried, leaving blackened bone and shriveled tendon. Battle’s right eye was a crater, no white at all. His left hung on his cheek, tethered to its socket by a leathery stalk of cooked nerve. A fist-sized chunk of Battle’s skull was gone, leaving behind daylight and a charred curl that had been his left ear. A goopy pink sludge of Battle’s brains slopped over his neck.

“I know that, Sarge,” Bode said, thinking it was lucky no one could hear him talking to the ghost of a dead guy no one else could see. “But you know we had to help. I couldn’t send the devil dog off on his own, no backup. Wouldn’t be right.”

Right’s got nothing to do with it. Battle’s mouth was a tight rictus grin of fat maggots squirming over shattered teeth. After all, it isn’t like you don’t already got enough problems.

2

CHAD HAD NOT wanted to go.

“Man, this is a really bad idea,” Chad said. They’d retreated to the kitchen to retrieve their weapons: a Remington pump, which was already minus two shells, and a four-shot bolt-action Winchester .270, as well as Chad’s Colt. Bode’s own service weapon was lying in scrub somewhere way back in Jasper. The desert was good for swallowing all kinds of stuff a guy didn’t want found. Guns. Money. Drugs.

Bodies.

“I mean it.” Chad gnawed at his sore. “Don’t we got enough problems?”

“You’re gonna give yourself a scar, man.” Bode hip-butted a drawer of silverware shut. The cupboards above the sink weren’t exactly bare, but whoever lived here had a thing for Kraft macaroni and cheese; the cupboards next to the fridge were stacked full, top to bottom. Man, they must have a lot of little kids. Who else plowed through that many Blue Boxes? Not that he minded: he’d choked down so many beans and franks in the bush, he hoped he never saw another hot dog.

Bode squatted, opened the cupboard beneath the kitchen sink, and pawed past cleaning supplies, lighter fluid, trash bags. No real weapons, though, not even a butcher knife. He felt under the sink to be sure—maybe something taped there—but there was nothing.

Weird. Farmers were always shooting shit: groundhogs, sick horses, crap like that. He stood, thought about that, staring at the black rectangle of window over the sink. So where would they stash a weapon? The barn? Maybe down cellar?

Framed in the window, Battle peered back. There aren’t going to be any other weapons here, son. This isn’t any kind of here you’ve ever been.

“A scar.” Chad let out a giddy bray. “Like that’s the worst thing I got to worry about.”

“You don’t have to worry about anything,” Bode said, flatly. To Battle: “What do you mean, this isn’t a here? I’m standing here.”

Yes. Battle’s ruined face glimmered from the window’s murky well. But where are you?

“I’m in a kitchen, Sarge.”

And where is this kitchen?

“Look, Sarge, you got something to say, say it.”

Think, son. Use your head. Does this house look like any farmhouse you’ve ever seen? Does it feel right?

“Sure,” Bode said. “I mean, you know, it’s a house.”

It’s got the right shape. It’s got furniture and there are rooms. There’s food and light. But there are no pictures on the walls, no photographs. Who lives here?

“I don’t know. I haven’t really looked, Sarge, but there have to be bills or something lying around. There’s probably a name on the mailbox.”

Are there? Was there?

“I didn’t notice. It was, you know, snowing.”

“Man, we got to get out of here.” Chad hugged himself. “This place just don’t feel right.”

“You need to calm down,” Bode said. Chad was not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Good on patrol; definitely watched your back, and the guy could de-ass a chopper like greased lightning. But he wasn’t any kind of rocket scientist. On the other hand, Chad wasn’t as crazy as Bode, who knew he was nuts. Given Bode’s day job, though, crazy is as crazy does. Battle’s ghost hitching a ride in his head was just so much icing on that proverbial cake. “Let’s just focus on one thing at a time, okay? First light tomorrow, we figure a way out of the valley.”

“A way out?” Chad said. “We don’t even know how we made our way in. Do you remember how we got down here? I sure don’t.”

Bode didn’t either. On the other hand, he’d gotten into some serious smack, so maybe that was understandable. The high had tailed off, though, and while Bode knew from experience that his memory never quite recovered a hundred percent, he really didn’t recall more than jagged fragments and sensations: the stink of piss from the men’s room, a thick sweat-fog hanging over the dance floor.

The moment he squeezed the trigger.

“Bode, I’m telling you, man: the cops catch us, they turn us over to the MPs and it’s Leavenworth. They give you the firing squad for stuff like this.” Chad hugged himself a little tighter. “I told you to let it roll, but no. You had to go and follow the LT out of the bar.”

Bode was tempted to point out that the military’s preferred method for execution these days was hanging, but no use making Chad more anxious than he was already. “Relax. No one saw us.”

“Bode, anyone finds your gun, the cops or the MPs’ll trace it right back to you.”

“Yeah, but we ship out in a week. No way they’ll pull us out of that.”

“How you figure?”

“Man, they’re hurting for guys to fight. No one’ll come looking. Come morning, we get our bearings and drive on out of here. Until then, don’t sweat it. Everything’ll be copacetic.”

“What if the owners here show up?”

Battle: They won’t.

“They won’t,” Bode echoed. “Not tonight anyway.”

“Man, I hope not.” Chad shivered. “House gives me the creeps. Know what bothers me? The food.”

Bode laughed. “Macaroni and cheese makes you nervous?”

Don’t laugh, Battle said. He’s right.

“Bode, that food was ready and waiting,” said Chad. “That’s just wrong. No one goes off during a blizzard and leaves his oven on.”

It was a good point. “If there was an emergency, they might,” Bode said, but he couldn’t convince even himself.

“If there was an emergency,” Chad said, “then it was a long time ago. There were no tracks and the road wasn’t plowed. That casserole ought’ve burnt. But it didn’t. I’m telling you: that’s not right.”

“Well, we’re not going to solve that little mystery now.” Turning away from the window and Battle, Bode scooped up the Winchester and the Remington pump. “Come on.”

Chad’s mouth set in an unhappy line, but he followed because that’s what Chad did best. Yet he—or maybe Battle—had planted a seed, because Bode realized something as they drove away and the house and barn dwindled to bright islands.

There was light. The house had electricity. But there were no power lines. This far out in the country, there would have to be.

So where was the light—the power—coming from?

3

“MAYBE IT’S LIKE gas,” Chad said now. He dug at his sore with a dirty thumbnail. “You know, like some kind of nerve gas or that Agent Orange.”

“Agent Orange?” Eric said. There was another sharp blat of static as he switched channels on his handset. “They don’t use that stuff anymore.”

“Yeah, man, there’s laws,” Bode said. “Besides, you need a bird for that. No way anyone’s flying a chopper tonight.”

Chad’s left foot jiggled as he pick-pick-picked. “Hey, Eric, you know how far it is to the nearest town?”

Sighing, Eric clicked off his walkie-talkie and shoved it into his parka. “No. I’ve never been down here before.”

“You know where we are?”

In the mirror, Bode saw Eric’s reflection hesitate. “No,” Eric said. “I don’t. Where were you coming from?”

“Outside Jasper,” Bode said. He ignored Chad’s sharp, reproving look. “Stopped off at this little cowboy honky-tonk around eight, nine o’clock.”

“Jasper? Never heard of it. What’s it near?”

“Uh …” For a moment, Bode’s mind simply blanked to a white dazzle. Then a word slid onto his tongue. “Casper.”

There was a small silence. Then Eric said, “Where?”

“You know … Casper.” For a weird moment, Bode thought that this was like when you tried to explain to the hootchgirl that you didn’t want any starch for your shirts, only she didn’t speak but two words of English and you kept shouting, No starchee, no starchee! Like that would get her to understand what you wanted, which she never did. “Casper.”

“Where’s that? Is that near Poplar or something?”

“No, it’s …” Bode licked his lips, then blurted, “Cheyenne!” He felt like he’d just passed a really tough exam he’d forgotten to study for. “Yeah, north of Cheyenne.”

“Cheyenne,” Eric repeated.

“Yeah, Cheyenne.” Chad cranked his head around. “You got some kind of hearing problem? The man said Cheyenne.”

“No, no. It’s just … where do you guys think you are?

What state?”

“What state?” Chad repeated. “Wyoming, man. Where else?”

4

ERIC WAS QUIET for so long Bode’s jaw locked. He had to really dig deep to push the word out. “What?”

“Wyoming plates,” Eric said, but he might as well have said aha. “That’s why you have Wyoming plates.”

“Well, yeah,” Chad said. “So?”

“You guys,” Eric said, slowly, “you guys are a real long way from Jasper, Wyoming.”

“Oh hell. Are we in Kansas? We’re in Kansas, aren’t we?” Chad turned to Bode. “I told you we took a wrong turn outside Laramie.”

“You guys aren’t in Kansas,” Eric said.

“Then where the hell are we?” asked Chad.

“You’re … Oh man.” Eric blew out. “You’re in Wisconsin.”

A beat. Then two. Chad broke the silence with a laugh. “That’s crazy.”

“No.”

“What are you talking about, no?” Chad sniggered again and shook his head. “No, he says. How many spiffs you smoke tonight?”

“What?” Eric waved that away. “Never mind. Look, I started out in Wisconsin this afternoon. I know I didn’t take a snowmobile into the storm and end up blown clear to Wyoming. So we’re either still in Wisconsin, or somehow we’ve all ended up in Wyoming.”

“Mountains are right,” Bode said. “Valley’s right for Wyoming.”

“That’s true. But I honestly don’t think that’s where we are.”

“So we’re in Wisconsin?” Chad asked. “Like where in Wisconsin?”

“I’m not sure of that either, but if we are … then we’re north,” Eric said. “I … I don’t know exactly where.”

“No, of course you don’t,” Chad said.

Battle’s head still floated in the mirror, but Bode focused on Eric’s reflection. “What if …” His tongue gnarled. Bode licked his lips and tried again. “What if we’re not anywhere?”

“What?” Chad said.

Eric returned Bode’s look. “I don’t know where we’d be, then.”

“What are you guys talking about?” Chad asked. “We’re right here.”

“Yeah, but where is that, exactly?” Eric said.

Or when. The thought was suddenly there in Bode’s mind, like the rip of a fart you just couldn’t ignore. “Maybe we’re in between, like limbo.”

Eric’s dark brows drew together. “Wouldn’t we be dead then?”

“Dead? You guys are nuts.” Chad bounced an anxious glance from Eric to Bode, then out the passenger’s side window. “Nuts,” he repeated, jiggling his leg, picking furiously at his sore. “I’m not no Catholic, man.”

Bode said to Eric, “Where you shipping out to, again?”

“Marja, I think,” Eric said. “Probably.”

“Well, I never heard of that.” Chad’s voice was tight with fear and anger. “Is that, like, north or south?”

“South … actually, southwest.”

“So, like, close to Phuoc Vinh? Or Dau Tieng?”

“Dau …?” Eric paused, and Bode saw that the other boy couldn’t ignore that awful stink either. “You guys,” Eric said, evenly, carefully, “what war are you fighting?”

Bode’s mouth was dry as dust. He couldn’t speak. A fist of dread had his throat.

“What war?” said Chad, and gave a sour laugh. “Why … ’Nam, of course.”

ERIC One Step Away From Dead

OH, OF COURSE. A balloon of sudden fear swelled in his chest. Vietnam, of course.

Yet it made a certain loopy sense. Factor in the vintage uniforms, the old Dodge, the way these guys talked—not only their slang but what they didn’t know. Bode and Chad were from the past. Or Eric was in it. Or, maybe, Bode was right and the valley was some crazy kind of limbo.

But it’s also real. How could that be? His right hand closed around Tony’s handset. That’s real. The others are real, and so is Emma. This has to be real. Or he was going crazy. The fear was an acid burn, eating its way up his throat, and Eric thought he might actually scream if he wasn’t careful. Oily sweat lathered his back and neck and face, and he pressed the back of one shaking hand to his forehead, the way he used to do when Casey had been little and got sick. Don’t, don’t do it. His lungs were working like a bellows. Come on, calm down. Sipping air, he breathed in, held it, let go … in with the good, out with the bad … Just hold it together.

What if … what if this was limbo? Maybe he was being punished. Could that be it? God sent him here because of Big Earl? What kind of justice was that? Big Earl was the adult; he hurt people. Big Earl shot at him; he would’ve killed Eric if he had the chance. The beatings had gone on for as long as Eric could remember. Yes, but how long was that, exactly? A day, a minute, five years, ten?

He. Did not. Remember.

No. Eric’s heart knocked in his throat. No, no, no, how can I not know? He remembered how careful he’d been in high school changing for gym, always slipping into a stall or coming in with just enough time to spare so that the locker room had already emptied out. I have scars on my back, my stomach. Every beating’s written in my skin. Why don’t I remember? How could his memory be scrubbed clean like that, as white as all that snow?

Because … because … because it never happened?

Before he could talk himself out of it, he bit the inside of his left cheek, very hard, wincing as his teeth sank into his flesh. There, that hurt. A moment later, there was the warm, salty taste of blood on his tongue, and that was good, and so was the pain. Swallowing a ball of blood, he savored the ache, grabbed the feeling, held it close. See, Ma, I’m real. I feel pain, so I must be real.

Unless the pain was just for show. Or—and this was a truly strange thought—he was real … but only here and nowhere else.

That’s crazy. What are you, nuts? His shirt, sticky with sweat, clung like a second skin. There’s got to be an explanation that makes sense. This has to be a dream, or I’m sick and I’ve got a really high fever and I’m delirious or something.

Or maybe … oh Jesus, oh God … maybe Big Earl hadn’t missed. Maybe that bullet blasted into Eric’s skull and drilled into his brain, and now he was lying in a hospital somewhere, his ruined head in bandages, a tube down his throat, IVs in his veins: hooked up to machines that were breathing for him, keeping him alive—and it was only a matter of time before someone pulled the plug.

Maybe I’m only one step away from dead.

“Oh man.” Chad’s sharp gasp cut through the maelstrom of his thoughts. “Man, you see that?” Chad said. “Off to the right?”

“What is it?” Eric asked, hoarsely. Really, he was grateful to have something else to worry about.

To his right, the night wasn’t exactly there anymore. Instead, an anvil of thick white fog extended from the ground and rose all the way up and across the dome of the sky.

“Oh my God,” Eric said, and felt the sudden kick of his heart in his teeth. “It’s getting closer. Jesus, it … it’s moving.”

“Bode? Bode?” Chad said, his voice rising. “Bode, we got to turn around, man. We got to turn around right now!”

“I hear that.” There was a sudden lurch as Bode jammed the brake, then muscled the stick into reverse. “Hang on.”

“What? No, wait, Bode. Stop!” Eric clamped a hand on the other boy’s shoulder. As frightened as he was of this thing gathering itself in the sky—and freaked out by what might be wrong with him—he loved his brother more. “We can’t turn back now. What about the others?”

“Devil Dog, I’m sorry, but we are bugging out PDQ.”

“But my brother’s still out there!” If this isn’t a fever, a hallucination, a last gasp … But even if it was. Because Casey is here, with me, in this, and that’s on me. “We can’t just leave him.”

“Yeah? You wanna watch us? We get ourselves killed, won’t do him no good anyway,” Chad said, as Bode swung the truck around. “Go, man, go!”

“I’m going.” Bode mashed the accelerator. The truck’s wheels spun in the snow, caught, and then they were churning back the way they’d come, the Dodge’s snow chains chattering over packed snow: chucka-chucka-chucka-chucka-chuck!

“Bode, wait, think,” Eric said. “You’re a soldier. You don’t leave your people behind. Please, don’t do this.”

“Screw that. Just go!” Chad shouted, his voice riding a crescendo of panic: “It’s getting closer! Go, Bode, go, go!”

“I’m going, I’m going!” Bode hammered the accelerator, and the Dodge surged, the engine chugging like an eggbeater. They flew over the snow, going so fast the outside world blurred into a silvery smear. “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, you hunk of junk! Move, move move move!”

Not going to make it. Eric knew that. They would never outrun that white cloud or fog or whatever it was. They would spin out, or Bode would lose control and they would die out here, because, despite everything, Eric was convinced that death, like pain, was real here … wherever that was.

“Bode, you’re not going to make it,” Eric said. “Slow down, slow—”

“Shut up.” Bode pushed their speed. “Shut up, shut up!”

“But Bode—”

“Shut up!” Bode stomped the accelerator so hard Eric heard the hollow thud of Bode’s boot. The Dodge rocketed over the snow, slewing right and then left, the wheels spinning, seeking traction, any kind of traction at all. “Marine, get it through your head: we are leaving!”

Chad was still chanting: “Go, Bode, go. Go, Bode, go, go go go!”

“Bode, slow down, you can’t outrun it! You’re going to lose it, dude, you’re going to lose it!” Eric hooked his fingers into the front seat as Bode jinked the wheel, doglegging to the right. The Dodge’s rear swayed. “Bode, you lose it out here, we’re dead.”

“I’m not going to lose it!” Bode shouted.

“You’re going to get us kill—”

“Man, you don’t shut up, Marine or no Marine, I’m tossing you out of this truck, right now!” Bode roared. “You got that? Now shut up!”

“I only—”

“Did you not hear the man? Ain’t you listening?” In the next instant, there was a pistol in Chad’s hand. He jammed the muzzle into Eric’s cheek. “You want me to end this right now?”

“Hey, hey,” Eric said, raising his hands in surrender. “Easy, Chad, easy, it’s cool, we’re cool.”

“We are not … COOL!” Spit foamed at the corners of Chad’s mouth, and he rammed the gun into Eric’s flesh so hard the front sight clawed his skin. “We will be cool if you shut up, if you shut up, if you just shut up!”

So Eric shut up. There was nothing else he could do. This was out of his control. He shut up, and after a long second, Chad jerked the gun away.

This is a nightmare, but I’m living it. Eric felt blood welling from the fresh wound on his cheek. I’m real; I’m bleeding; you can’t bleed if you’re not real. He watched that fog, all that brilliant empty white, storming after them, filling the world. You can’t be scared to death if you’re already dead.

The truck swayed, slewing into a turn, the world beyond tilting, and Eric’s blood iced, every hair on his neck prickling with a kind of stupid shock, because he suddenly understood.

The snowstorm had been a warm-up. The storm had only been a way of bringing them all together. It was the fog that mattered, the fog that would run them down and swallow them whole.

What then? Where—and when—will we be then?

“Oh JESUS!” Chad screamed. “It’s right on top of us, Bode, it’s right on top—”

RIMA No Time

“RUN!” CASEY SCREAMED, and then he was dragging her over the snow. Rima staggered, nearly fell, but Casey gave her a mighty jerk, hard enough that a shout of pain balled in her shoulder.

“Casey,” she gasped as they floundered, their legs digging post-holes through deep snow, “the sled, where’s the sled?”

“Blast blew her off the road!” Casey’s grip on her hand was iron. “Saw it from the tree, to the left, in a ditch! No!” He tugged her harder. “Don’t look back!”

But she did—and all the strength drained from her body to seep into the snow.

The fog was a gigantic thunderhead stretching so far overhead there was no limit to it. The fog was a pillar of nacreous, roiling white that built on itself, piling higher and higher. Unlike a cloud, the fog also spread from side to side, and everything it touched, it swallowed. Rima knew the night sky was still there, that above this deadening veil were true clouds and the stars beyond, but the fog was lowering itself, filling the bowl of the valley, obliterating the sky. The fog surged, an avalanche of white steamrolling right for them.

“Come on,” Casey urged. “Come on!”

Something bullet-shaped gleamed a dull silver and black from a deep wallow to her left. “There!” Rima cried. As soon as she stepped off the road, Rima sank up to her thighs, but she bullied through, trenching out a path to Casey’s snowmobile. “What should I do?”

“Dig under the nose!” Casey was stamping snow, beating out a trail. “We got to pack down the snow, then roll it onto the runners and get it pointed downhill.”

No time. Rima could barely move. With every step, the treacherous snow grabbed and pulled, and she was conscious of the fog boiling across the night, pressing against her back. They only had maybe a minute, if that, before the fog reached them. “Casey, there’s no time!”

Casey tossed a wild look over his shoulder. His face glistened with sweat. His teeth were bared in a grimace of fear and frustration. “Damn it. All right, leave it; come on, let’s flip it!”

They wallowed around to the downhill side, and then Casey backed into the sled, hooked his hands under the seat. Rima slid her left shoulder under the left handlebar, felt the snowmobile rock to the right and then try to tumble back, but she dug in and heaved. The snowmobile tilted, and she nearly slipped as the sled wobbled and then did a slow, heavy tumble onto its runners.

“Come on, get on, but don’t sit down!” Straddling the seat, Casey waited until she’d scrambled onboard before pulling up the kill switch, twisting the ignition key, yanking on the start cord—once, twice …

Hurry. Rima shot a quick look over her shoulder. The fog was still coming. Hurry, Casey, hurry, hurry, God, come on, come on!

The sled’s engine sputtered, caught. The machine gave a sudden lurch, and Rima tumbled forward. With a cry, she made a wild grab, snagging Casey’s tattered parka just as they began to move.

“Okay, down!” Casey shouted. “Rima, sit down!”

Arms wrapped around Casey’s middle, Rima obeyed, dropping onto the seat. The sled roared out of the gully, a rooster tail of snow flying behind, and then they were streaking across a sparkling plain of silver-blue snow. With no faceplate for protection, Rima gritted her teeth against bitter air that cut like a bristle of knives.

“Hang on!” Casey shouted as they banked into a tight, fast turn. She felt the back of the sled swing, and for a heart-stopping moment, she thought they’d spin out. But Casey wrestled the handlebars back to true, and the sled spurted over the snow with a roar. He shot a quick glance over his shoulder, and she felt his body go rigid. “Shit, shit!”

“What?” But even before she looked back, she knew. The fog was there, a seamless curtain stretching from the sky to hug the snow, chasing after them in an inexorable tide: two hundred yards back and gaining. One-fifty, a hundred yards, eighty. Fifty …

Casey, I’m sorry. Squeezing her eyes shut, she buried her head into his back, hugged him tight. If it hadn’t been for me, you would’ve gotten away.

The fog slammed down.

EMMA Black Dagger

1

ON A STREET drawn from that terrible summer of The Bell Jar when Emma will become so lost in that book, she will think she really might be better off dead; as she stares at the jacket photo of a McDermott novel she’s never heard of—the hand in the photograph moves.

Horrified, Emma watches those bizarre fingers unfurl and stretch and sprout talons. Its talons lengthen like a cat’s claws. Oozing over the windowsill, the hand slithers down the apron, and now Emma can see that the skin is as scaly and cracked as that of a mummy. The hand bleeds onto the photograph in an inky stain, a black blight, and Frank McDermott …

McDermott—the McDermott captured in the picture—comes to life. As if suddenly aware that there is a world outside that photograph, Frank looks straight out to throw Emma a wink.

“Ah!” With a wild, incoherent cry, she stumbles back, her half-finished Frappuccino flying in a fan of whipped cream and mocha-flavored coffee from her left hand. The Dickens Mirror, a book that shouldn’t exist from a series that was never written, flutters to the pavement like a wounded bird. Around her neck, the galaxy pendant suddenly smolders.

“Hey,” Lily says.

“Emma?” Eric—a boy she has yet to meet, who shouldn’t be here—reaches for her. “What’s wrong? Are you all right?”

“No! No, you’re not real! This isn’t right!” Emma flinches away. She turns, her treacherous feet trying to tangle, trip her up, spill her to the sidewalk. “Get away from me, get away, don—” Backpedaling, she blunders from the curb into oncoming traffic on East Washington. A horn blasts as a car churns past, its hot breath swirling around her bare legs, snatching at her sundress. She can hear the sputter of the car’s radio through an open window: Investigators continue the grisly task of removing the remains of at least eight children believed to be the latest victims of—

“No, stop, I’m not listening, I don’t hear you, I don’t hear you!” She takes a lurching stutter-step and tumbles to rough asphalt. As she hits, the fingers of her right hand reflexively close around something hard and jagged.

She looks—and every molecule in her body stills. Everything stops.

The dagger of glass is absolutely flawless and wickedly sharp—and she knows this shape. It is nearly identical to the shard she will fish from that discards bucket and turn over and over on that afternoon when she feels Plath’s bell jar descending to engulf her mind in a dense, deathless fog. When she will think, I didn’t see anything, there was nothing down in Jasper’s cellar; it was just a crawl space, there was nothing inside, I didn’t find …

But there is a difference. This dagger isn’t clear but smoky and black, polished to a mirror’s high gloss. Her reflection within this black dagger is so crisp she can make out the terror in her eyes, the curve of her jaw, every glister and sparkle of that galaxy pendant.

It’s a piece of the Mirror. She is jittering so badly her breaths come in herky-jerky gasps, and she thinks she might be one second away from passing out. It’s from the Dickens—

A sudden bite of pain sinks into her left wrist, bad enough to make her cry out. What was that? God, that hurt. Her eyes shift from the black dagger to her wrist—and then a scream blasts from her throat.

A thick, stingingly bright bracelet of blood has drawn—no, no, is drawing itself, inch by inch, across the skin of her left wrist.

“N-no,” she says. It’s like watching someone unzip her. She still clutches the black dagger in her right hand, and a single glance is enough to show her that the glass is pristine, not a splash of blood on it at all. And anyway, I didn’t, I didn’t, I don’t do it! I only thought about cutting my …

“Aahhh!” Another slash of pain, on her right wrist this time, the lips of yet another slice gaping open. She shrieks as the moist tissues pull apart to reveal a silvery glint of tendon and deeply red meat. Blood instantly surges into the belly of the wound, pumping and slopping from slit arteries, splish-splish-splish-splish, surging with her heart. A nail of panic spikes her throat. The warmth drains from her face, her lips, and her guts are ice. Her vision’s going muzzy, and in the black dagger, her reflection’s turned runny, the features shifting and melting as a new and different face knits together: same eyes, same golden flaw in the right iris. Same jaw and chin. Only the hair, wavy and golden blonde, is different. Still, she knows who this is.

I’m Lizzie? A violent shudder makes the reflection jitter. We’re the same person?

“NO!” A shriek scrambles past her teeth. “No, I’m me, I’m Emma!” Still screaming, she hurls the black dagger away. It cuts the air, flashing end over end like a scimitar. Both her arms are spewing blood now, and as Emma scuttles back on her hands like a crab, vivid red smears paint the road, marking her path. There is blood everywhere, too much, a whole lake of it. Anyone who’s bled this much ought to have fainted—hell, ought to be dead. For that matter, she’s landed in the middle of a busy street. She should be squashed under a bus by now, or flattened by a car.

But there are, suddenly, no cars, no people. No taunts from a radio. When she glances back at the bookstore, she sees that Eric and Lily are gone, too.

It’s like House. Terrified, her aqua sundress purpling with her blood, she clamps her torn arms to her heaving chest. Her eyes skip from store to store. No people. Except for BETWEEN THE LINES, the other stores are only blank fronts with blacked-out windows. Her gaze falls to the curb, the gutter, then drags up to the trees silhouetted against a milky sky that she knows was blue and bright only minutes before. No trash, no dead leaves. No sun. Yet not everything has vanished. The Dickens Mirror lies on the pavement, facedown, its covers in a wide splay.

There is movement out of the corner of her eye, on the grimy asphalt. Glancing down at the growing pool of her blood, she sees a glimmer along the crimson surface, which quivers and gathers itself—into a long, rippling red worm.

Oh. All the small hairs on her neck and arms rise. Her scalp prickles with horror, and she can feel her titanium plates, the lacy one on her forehead and its twin at the very base of her skull, heating beneath her skin as if a switch has been thrown and a connection forged in her brain. Oh, this can’t be happening.

But it is. Her blood is alive, slithering, eeling from side to side, snaking its way over gritty asphalt. Frozen in place, she watches the red slink as it seeps across the road, never spreading, never veering, but creeping up the curb and onto the sidewalk, heading straight for the book. As soon as her blood touches the cover, dragging itself like a moist crimson tongue along the edges, curls of steam rise—and the book … quickens.

It’s like my blink, when I saw Lizzie’s dad—Frank McDermott—at the Dickens Mirror. Except it is a book, not a strange mirror, drinking her blood, greedily sucking and feeding, the pages pulsing and swelling, the covers bulging … And then she spies …

Oh God.

2

THE SPIKE OF a claw rises from the book, like a trapdoor has suddenly opened to let something deep underground find the surface. And then she sees another claw. And a third.

“No.” The word is no more than a deathless whisper. Trembling, she watches as the taloned fingers of whatever is living in that book hook over the cover’s lip. It is as if The Dickens Mirror is not paper sandwiched by cardboard but a mouth, the rim of a deep well, a pit, a cave. A second stygian hand snakes free to clamp onto the edge. The razor-sharp claws clench; and now two spindly and skeletal arms appear. They bunch and strain, the elbows straightening like a gymnast’s working parallel bars, as the thing living inside strains to be born. It boils from The Dickens Mirror: first the head and now shoulders and a leathery scaled torso, which is now green, now silver, now black. The book-thing twists its long, sinuous body right and left, corkscrewing its way from the page. Then, it pauses as if gathering its strength—or maybe only deciding what it ought to do next.

Quiet, be quiet. Clamping her lips together to corral the scream, Emma holds herself very still as the rounded knob of its head lifts, the thing seeming to taste the air, sniff out a scent. Don’t see me, don’t taste me, don’t smell me.

But then … it turns.

No. Please, House. A dark swoon of terror sweeps her mind. Her skull plates are so hot her brain ought to be boiling. Please, show me a door, House. Sweep me away in a blink. Do something, do anything, but please show me a way out of here!

House, if it is listening, does nothing. And this thing is … not quite formed, not yet. It has no face. Where there should be eyes, a nose, a forehead, a mouth, there is only an ebony swirl. A nothing. A blank. But Emma knows: somehow, it sees her.

There you are. The voice ghosts over her brain in a whisper that is the sound of brittle ice; of glass frit spilling over a metal marver. I’ve wanted to play with you for such a long time, Emma. Come. Staaay. Stay and plaaay, Blood of My Blood—

She drags her voice up from where it’s fallen. “N-no. No, you’re not real. This isn’t happening. I saw this in a blink. It was just a—”

All at once, the thing’s eyes pop into being, but not on its face. Two eyes stare from its hands, one on each palm, and they are not black but blue as sapphires. They are her eyes. Even at this distance, she can see the golden flaw floating in the iris of the eye on the right.

Get up, Emma. Somehow, she has pulled herself into a crouch. Her arms are no longer bloody; in fact, there are no wounds at all, not even a scratch. Get up, Emma, get—

Too late: in that churning, rippling blank of a face, a third cyclopean eye—as dark as black smoke—peels open.

Blood of My Blood. The thing plants a webbed foot on the sidewalk. Something is happening in that third eye, too; the black blank is eddying and bunching, pulling together, molding itself. Breath of My Breath.

That is when she remembers what she’s already been shown.

Get up, get up before it really sees you, the way it did McDermott! Her brain screams the words, but she’s frozen in place. Where could she possibly go in a nightmare, anyway? But she has to move. There is no one to save her. She must get out of here before she ends up in the eye.

Come and play a game, Emma. The thing spiders, legs and elbows bent, body crouched low on the sidewalk, its position a mirror image to her own. Boring into her, looking deep, its third eye churns as, within, the glassy oval of a face begins to waver and shimmer up, the way a drowned body floats for the surface—and she knows she only has seconds left.

Come play, the whisper-man sighs. In the third black-mirror eye, lank tendrils of dark hair swirl about a face that now shows the faintest impressions of eye sockets and the swell of lips, like molten glass being worked and molded by a jack—and now there is the ridge of a nose, the slope of a forehead. Come with me through the Dark Passages to the Many Worlds, into Nows and times …

“No!” The paralysis that has gripped her breaks. Emma surges to her feet. “No, I won’t let you!” Whirling on her heel, Emma bullets across the street and

EMMA Them Dark Ones Is Cagey

AND NOW, EVERYTHING has changed.

Madison is gone, yet a clot of heat—the galaxy pendant from the blink or hallucination or whatever the hell that illusion of Madison was—rests between her breasts. But that day or vision or room into which House has let her wander … all that is over.

Now, instead of an aqua sundress, she wears a thick white nightgown. Barefoot, she stands on a scratchy rough carpet covering a long hallway with a dark wood floor. Above, the ceiling is slightly ridged like the planked hull of an old boat, and that’s when she realizes that what she’s looking at are whitewashed iron plates. Ceiling-mounted lights hang from rigid metal rods, and give the space a sterile, institutional look, although the air is close and stuffy with a sewage reek, as if all the toilets have overflowed and no one’s slopped up the mess of old urine and runny feces.

As if to counter the stink, the hallway is also lined with cheery, flower-filled vases, hanging baskets, and porcelain figurines. Framed pictures of flowers, done in intricate needlework, hang on the walls. Exotic stuffed birds—colorful parrots, a snowy cockatoo, a white dove—perch on artfully arranged branches beneath glass bell jars. The walls are sea-foam green, and there are many shuttered windows and dark wooden arched doors with tarnished brass knobs, set slightly back in cubbies like the openings to catacombs but bolted tight with queer rectangular iron locks. The gallery is ghostly, lit by hissing lamps that spill wavering gouts of light and shadow at regular intervals. The whole setup could be from a museum, like one of those exhibits where you stand behind Plexiglas and peer into places where people lived and died long ago.

This hallway. She tips a look to a table just a few feet off to the right where a staring stuffed toucan perches on a fake branch of wire and silk leaves beneath a clear glass dome. I’ve been here before, in a blink.

“You see her, Mrs. Graves?” The voice is male and rough, the accent like something from Monty Python. Startled, she looks up. Perhaps thirty feet away, in what had been an empty hall only seconds before, stands a trio of burly, mustached men in rumpled white trousers and shirts. One clutches a smudgy, sacklike dress of strong, heavy, flannel-lined wool. The dress has no buttons but long ties that run up the back and around each wrist. A pair of padded leather gloves bulge from the pockets of a second attendant a step behind the first.

Strong dress. They’ll tie me up in that thing. And then she thinks, What? How do I know that?

The attendant with the strong dress says, “You got her in your sights?”

“Indeed I do, Mr. Weber.” An older woman, with a grim set and clipped tone, steps toward her in a swirl of floor-length navy blue crinoline beneath a tightly cinched white over-apron that reaches to her knees. She would look like a fancy cook if not for the stiff, crisp nurse’s cap tacked to her head like a cardinal’s biretta. A large ring of bright brass keys jingles from a chatelaine at her waist, and the outlines of a small watch are visible, tucked in her blouse’s watch pocket and secured by the delicate links of a brass buttonhole chain, from which hangs a tiny, smoky agate fob. Threaded beneath a high, starched white collar, a strange pendant dangles on a red silk ribbon over the shelf of her breasts: some kind of polished black disk set in brass.

But it is her glasses that grab Emma’s attention. Rimmed in bright brass, the spectacles are not round or oval but D-shaped lenses. Each lens is hinged at the temple to allow for a second to open and shield the sides of either eye. The four lenses are not clear glass either. They are, instead, a storming magenta swirl.

Purple glasses. Emma hears herself hiss a breath. Panops?

“She got a hanger-on?” Weber, the attendant, says. “Anyone else fall out?”

“Thanks heavens, no, not that I see. Come now, Emma. Time to return to your room.” The woman—Mrs. Graves—extends a weathered hand, its knuckles swollen with arthritis and age, but her voice is as starched as her collar. “Let’s not make this more difficult than it need be.”

Nurse’s cap. Locked doors. A hospital? No. Her gaze clicks to the strong dress Weber holds, those bulbous, too-large gloves. Jesus, this is a psych ward, an asylum. But Weber’s accent and Mrs. Graves’s brusque tones …

Wait a second … I’m in England?

Emma’s stunned gaze jerks to those hissing lights of glass globes and brass pipes. Now that she knows how to look, Emma spots inky smudges on the sea-foam wallpaper: soot from brass wall-sconces. Gas lamps. Oh my God. Her chest squeezes with panic. I’m in the past, like something straight out of Dickens.

“How’d she fall out is what I wants to know,” Weber says. “You sure she didn’t lay her hands on one of them marbles?”

Marble. She nearly reaches for the galaxy charm but catches herself. He’s talking about the pendant?

“Yes, I’m sure, Mr. Weber.” Graves’s own jet pendant winks a weird, smoky green in the gaslight. With her spectacles in place, her eyes are bruised sockets. “I fear she’s stronger. If this keeps up, she might not require a cynosure at all to make the leap.”

Cynosure? Emma’s pulse skips. What is that, some kind of tool? Is that what Weber meant by a marble?

“What’d I tell you? Them dark ones is cagey. Why we’re bothering altogether, seeing as how them and their kind bring the plague …” Weber’s face screws with suspicion. “We ain’t never going to understand how to use them tools right, which of them dark ones is safe, so best to do away with the lot, I say.”

“Might we have this discussion later, Mr. Weber?” Graves’s eyes shift back, her mouth thinning to a crack above a sharp chin. “Emma, please, you’re working yourself into a state. Come along. You’re safe with us, dear.”

“N-no,” Emma says, and yes, this is her voice: no accent, nothing different about that at all. “Please, I just want out.”

“Now, now.” Graves moves closer, accompanied by the jingle and chime of brass keys. Her jet pendant gleams. “Let us take care of you, and in turn, you can help us.”

“Help?” The thought that she is insane—that she really must belong here—sparkles through her mind, because she does have a dim understanding of what will happen next. If the nurse gets a hand on her, if the orderlies get close enough, they’ll manhandle her into that sack of a dress, jam her hands into gloves, and truss her up before marching her down to a windowless cell deep underground where only the sickest, noisiest, most violent patients live. Someone will force open her mouth, then pour something thick and rust-red and too sweet down her choking throat. They’ll pinch her nose if she won’t drink; they’ll suffocate her until she does. Swallow that tonic, and a thick, cloying fog will descend over her mind, and she’ll float away on the breath of dreamless sleep. This, she knows—and if that’s so, she must belong here. She’s crazy. What other explanation is there?

It’s how I felt reading The Bell Jar. But that must not be a real book. She stares at the stuffed birds trapped under domes of clear glass. Those jars … I’ve slipped in real details from this place, the way you do in dreams. Everything she thinks she knows: Jasper and Madeline Island; bookstores and Holten Prep and icy, sweet Frappuccinos. I’ve hallucinated the future of a girl who doesn’t exist?

At that instant, the blister of a bright pain erupts between her eyes as a headache thumps to life, and she raises a tentative hand. The deep gash she got when her van jumped the guardrail and tumbled into that lost valley is gone. But of course it would be, because that never happened. Yet there is something there. Slowly, she traces the hard, unyielding, perfect circlet of lacy metal, and suddenly, she thinks, Wait. She can feel her heart ramp up a notch as she reaches around to sweep through her hair. Matching plate, at the base of my skull. This one is harder to feel because of all the muscle, but she knows exactly what that edge is—and there is hash-marked scalp, the network of scars thin and minute. Wait a second. That’s not right.

“Oh dear.” Graves glides a little closer. “Another of your headaches? Come, let me give you your medicine, dear. A nice tonic, a little cordial for what ails you. How does that sound?”

The titanium skull plates and screws don’t belong. They haven’t been invented yet, but … “Jesus,” she breathes. She has no accent, she thinks with different words, and these skull plates shouldn’t exist. Which means that I’m still me. What I remember is real. But she is awake now and aware in a way she’s never been in a blink before. Maybe this is like Madison. House is showing me something for a reason. She doesn’t know why she thinks that, but she senses she’s on the right track—but to where and why? The Lizzie-blinks and everything that’s happened in House feel like building blocks, one brick being added at a time.

“Mrs. Graves?” A new voice: another man, his tone peremptory, authoritative. “Do you have her? Did anyone else get out?”

Her thoughts scatter like a clutch of startled chicks. A knife of pure panic slices her chest. Stunned, she gapes as two men angle through the orderlies. Both sport old-fashioned suits with high collars and silk waistcoats, although one is bearded, darkly handsome, and decked out in an expensive-looking tailcoat and black gloves. With his gold fob watch and walking stick, he looks like he’s been pulled away from a fancy party or the opera.

“No, sir,” Graves says, without looking away. “Our Emma has managed it all on her own, it seems.”

“Oh dear.” The bearded man tut-tuts. “Emma, why do you insist on making such a scene? They’re trying to help you.”

“Best let me.” The doctor’s head swivels as he searches her out. He is older, and his eyes are deep purple sockets, his glasses identical to Mrs. Graves’s. “Now, Miss Lindsay, are we having a bad night? What do you say we go to my office for a chat and have ourselves a nice hot cup of tea?”

No. A thin scream is slithering up her throat, worming onto her tongue. No, no, no, it can’t be.

The bearded man in evening clothes is Jasper.

And the doctor is Kramer.

RIMA Where the Dead Live

“WHERE ARE WE?” Rima asked. Casey’s snowmobile was still running, the engine chugging between her legs. Yet everything else had changed. The fog was everywhere. The whiteout was so complete, Rima felt as if they were marooned in a small pocket of air, trapped beneath a bell jar at the bottom of a viscous white sea. The night was gone. The sky—well, up—was the milky hue of curdled egg white and bright as a cloudy day with the sun at its height. The fog was brutally cold and smelled odd. Metal, she thought. Rust? “Are we still in the valley? How did we even get here?”

“I don’t know.” Casey’s voice sounded odd: curiously flattened, paper-thin. His face was mottled from windburn, his many scratches and scrapes rust-red, his right cheek and jaw as purple as a ripe plum. “It sure feels different, too. Like the fog grabbed us, and we got beamed to some other planet or something. You know?”

Or maybe we’re only a different place inside the fog. She wasn’t even sure why she would think that, or what it meant. “What do we do?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think we should stay here.” Casey threw an uncertain look over both shoulders. “The problem is, without knowing where we are, I have no idea where we’d be headed. There are no landmarks, just … white. We could drive around in circles until I run out of gas, and then we’re screwed.”

“If we run out of gas.” When he turned to stare, she said, “I don’t know if regular rules still apply.”

“Like the gas from the van,” he said.

She nodded. “There was too much, and the way the snow turned to ice and that monster … None of that belongs in—”

“The real world.” He paused, then said, slowly, as if testing it out, “It’s like this valley is the fog’s world, and it wanted to make sure we left the piece we were in.” He shook his head. “That sounds pretty crazy.”

“Not to me. But assuming we could go somewhere, can you even drive in this?”

“Oh sure. How fast we go depends on how far ahead I can actually see.” Her arms were still wrapped around his middle, and now Casey put a hand over hers and squeezed. “I’m going to get off the sled and walk a little ways, take a look, see what I can see.”

“No,” she said, alarmed. She felt Taylor’s death-whisper squirm against her chest. Easy, honey, she thought to the girl. I know; we’re in trouble. To Casey: “I don’t think we should let ourselves get separated, even for something like that.”

“Don’t worry; I won’t go far. If it helps, I’ll walk backward, okay? That way, you keep me in sight, I can’t disappear, right?”

Well, unless something snakes out from the fog and grabs you. But she said, “How long?”

“The second I start to fade out, you give a shout, and I’ll stop. But I got to know how far we can actually see in this mess.”

He was right, but she didn’t have to like it. Perched on the sled’s runners, she held her breath as he backed up a step at a time. He never looked away, and she didn’t dare. The fog seemed sticky somehow, like a cloud of cobwebs, dragging over Casey in fibrous runnels and cloying tendrils.

“Burns,” he said, backhanding a clog of fog from his face. “Really cold.” His nose wrinkled. “Does it smell funny to you?”

“Yes.” She watched as more fog wreathed his chest and twined like ivy around his legs. The fog wasn’t grabbing hold so much as—okay, weird thought here—tasting Casey, the way a rattlesnake gathered information through its tongue. “Like rust.”

“No.” Working his mouth, Casey spat and made another face. “Like blood.”

She thought he might be right about that. “Okay, stop. You’re starting to gray out.”

“Yeah, you’re getting kind of fuzzy, too. So”—he cast a critical eye to the snow and then back to her—“thirty feet maybe and …”

“What?”

“This is snow, right?” He gave her a strange look. “So why am I not sinking?”

She didn’t understand at first, and then, staring down at the sled’s runners and his feet, she did. If this was snow, there should be clumps humped over the runners; Casey’s feet should break through the surface, but they hadn’t. There was no snow on his boots either. “Is it ice?”

“Nope.” Squatting, he scooped a handful and studied the white mound, tipping his glove this way and that. “Looks like snow.” He gave a cautious sniff. “Doesn’t have a smell the way the fog does. This only smells … cold. Like it’s someone’s idea of snow, know what I mean? Like a movie set.”

“Really?” She took a careful step off the sled’s runners. “Then why would the fog—”

The shock as her boot touched the snow was like the detonation of a land mine, an explosion that ripped from the snow to scorch its way up her legs and rupture her chest. Digging in, Taylor’s death-whisper shrieked against her skin, the pain like knives, and Rima let out a sudden, sharp shout.

“What?” Casey said, instantly alarmed. Five long strides and his hands were on her shoulders. “Rima, what’s wrong?”

“The snow.” Gasping, groping for the sled, she stumbled back onto the runners. Taylor’s whisper relaxed, but now that she knew what lived in this weird snow that wasn’t, Rima imagined all those death-whispers shivering up the sled to seep through the soles of her boots and into her bones. “I …” Bowing her head, she swallowed around a sudden lump of fear. “I f-feel something.”

“Feel something? In the snow?” He threw a quick glance at his feet as if expecting something to swim out and crawl up his legs. “Rima, what are you talking about?”

Now that she’d begun, she couldn’t simply brush it off. Just say it. “People.”

“People.” He waited a beat. “In the snow?”

“Yeah.” She wet her lips. “The snow’s full of dead people. I feel them.”

“You what? You feel—”

“Yes, Casey, I know it sounds crazy, but the dead live in the snow. I feel their …” She broke off, remembering how Casey had been Big Earl, shedding his father’s death-whisper as easily as shucking the man’s shirt. He must not know; can’t sense the change much at all and only half-remembers. He just becomes. She gasped. And if the snow’s where the dead live … “Casey.” She snatched his jacket and yanked. “Casey, get off the snow, get off now!”

“Wuh—” Off-balance, Casey reeled and lurched forward, his hands shooting out to grab the sled’s handlebars. “Okay, okay, I’m coming, relax.” She wouldn’t let go until he was straddling the seat so they faced one another. “All right, I’m on,” he said. “What’s the matter with you? What do you mean, you feel people?” Then his brows wrinkled, and he glanced away, his mouth working the way it had when he tasted the fog on his tongue. “You know, I … I remember something you said. It’s … foggy.” He let out a breathy laugh. “Which fits, I guess. But I do remember a little. In the car … I wouldn’t let you in … and I started hurting …” He raised a hand to that livid, swollen splash of purple-black bruise. “You said I needed to fight—”

“I remember what I said.” She took his gloved hand in both of hers. “It’s something I’m … I’m able to do. I know you’ll think I’m crazy, but just listen.” As she talked, she saw the growing doubt and disbelief. Well, she knew how to fix that. “So,” she said, “that’s how I know about Big Earl: that he’s dead. That’s why I told you to fight him.”

Yup, that did it. An expression first of blank surprise and then a swell of shock, hot and scarlet, flooded his face. “What?”

“You heard me.” She paused, then added, softly, “I know what Big Earl did to you. I know Eric didn’t mean for it to happen, but he had no choice. He was protecting you. If he hadn’t swung that bottle and put Big Earl down, I think you’d both be dead.”

“How?” The question came as a harsh, hoarse whisper. “How can you know all that?”

“Your shirt. It was your dad’s. That’s why I didn’t want you to touch me, Casey. Because whenever you did, I felt it, him, Big Earl’s death-whisper … and you, when you were wearing the shirt, you were different. You were mean. Didn’t you feel it? You feel the difference now, right?”

His eyes faltered, his gaze sliding from her face to the snow. Some part of his mind must register the change. Perhaps he even knew but tucked that knowledge away in some dim corner where he would have little excuse to look.

“Yes,” he said, finally. When his eyes again met hers, they were much too bright and pooled. “Before, when I looked at you and the others? I heard him talking to me, telling me what to think. But now I … I see you, like there’s no fog, nothing of Big Earl between us. It’s like I’m meeting you for the very first time.”

She opened her mouth to say … something, she didn’t remember what. The words slipped right off her tongue, because that was when she got her first good look at Casey’s eyes as they were now. They weren’t just bright with tears. They were different. When he had worn Big Earl’s shirt, Casey’s eyes were a muddy brown. Now they were stormy. Not gray, exactly, or blue or brown or green. His eyes were all colors, and no color, nothing fixed. His were the kind of eyes that, depending on the light, were green one moment and hazel the next. Even blue.

What does that mean? Another thought: My God, maybe he could get to the point where the change would be permanent and he’d never find himself again.

“How did you feel then?” she asked. “When you had that shirt? Do you remember?”

“Angry,” he whispered. “Mad at everybody, everything, even Eric. I didn’t like the feeling, and I heard Big Earl in my head and it … he was bad. Evil. Remembering him crawling around like this black spider, it makes me feel dirty. That’s never happened before either. I’d never had him in my head. Hell, I used to think someone had made a mistake. How could Eric and I have a father like that? It never felt like my dad belonged in our lives; he was a mistake, an outsider. Like … like this virus you just couldn’t shake and …” Casey let out a trembling breath. “Ohhh-kay, that sounds pretty crazy.”

She shook her head. “You’ve never met my mother. She and I don’t look at all like we belong to each other. Sometimes I think I popped out of nowhere or someone switched me at birth and my real mom’s got this awful kid. I don’t even like touching my mom. She feels”—she hugged herself—“like there’s something rotting inside. All the drugs she does, that’s probably pretty close.”

“So if you feel dead people, their … whispers, like the little girl in your parka, Taylor? Is that what I’m doing?”

“I don’t know.” She bent her head to study the snow. “Whatever it is, you seem okay now, but I think you should stay off this stuff until we can—”

When she didn’t continue, Casey said, “Rima, what … oh, Jesus.”

“Uh-huh.” She tried to say more, but all the words balled in her throat. In her parka, Taylor’s whisper tightened in alarm. I don’t know, honey; I have no idea.

But she thought they better figure this out, and fast.

RIMA Tell Me You See That

AT THEIR FEET and all around the snowmobile, the snow suddenly bloomed with oily splotches. Like something’s leaking up from deep underground—or we’re on top of something and the snow’s melting, giving way. Her eyes ticked from the snow immediately around their runners to as far as she could see. It’s everywhere.

“Rima.” Casey’s voice was library-quiet. “Tell me you see that.”

“I see it.” The splotches stretched, seeming to sprout legs to creep over the snow. Like what happens when ink drips onto white paper, Rima thought. It seeps along the fibers. The spiderstains stretched and lengthened and merged. The fog was no longer gelid and still but swirling now, the turgid scent of blood-rust growing stronger. The snow began to shift and hump as black waves rippled all around the snowmobile.

Then, with a monstrous scream, the ebony snow broke, splintering in a shuddering convulsion—

“Ah!” Shrieking, she threw her arms around Casey as hundreds and hundreds, thousands, of crows bulleted from the snow: pulling together out of that weird oil, spinning in a screeching black funnel cloud, hurtling into that blister of a glare-white sky.

“Where did they come from?” Casey shouted over the screams. His storm-gray eyes were jammed wide with shock. “What do they mean?”

Death. Stunned, she followed the scrolling tangle of birds as they drew their black calligraphy onto the sky: arabesques and whorls and swoops and slashes and arcs. Crows are death, and there is so much here, more than we can imagine. Tightening her arms around Casey, she felt his slip about her waist, and wasn’t sure if the shudder working its way through her arms and into her chest was only hers. Yet, as frightened as she was, she was suddenly more afraid for him. It was crazy, stupid, something you did if you were major crushing on someone. But this is so dangerous for you, Casey; there is something here that wants you, will take you, if it can. I feel it.

She had to get him out of here. Now that the birds had cracked out of their icy shell in their mad flight, the snow—if that’s really what it was—was pristine and white once more. All right; that’s a start. Maybe slide onto the snow, see if she felt anything now. If not, they needed to move, get out from under these birds if they could, put some distance between them. But what if the birds followed?

One step at a time. She tipped her head back to that roiling sky. “I can still see them,” she said. The birds’ ebb and flow was almost as hypnotic as the sea, or like staring into the swirl of an ebony whirlpool that endlessly circled round and round and round. Like a black hole, the kind that ought to exist in outer space: you could trip over the edge and fall forever. “So maybe the fog’s burning off. Casey, you think you can drive the sled—”

“Rima.” At his tone, she pulled her gaze from the sky. Casey was staring over her shoulder. “Behind you,” he said.

She craned a look. A slit had appeared in the thick mist, as if someone had drawn a very sharp knife through taut white fabric. The lips of the cut drew back, and then this rent widened as the fog retreated. When she stopped to think about it later, the effect was like the parting of a curtain on some bizarre stage. Beyond the mist lay a thick forest, dark and very dense, that hemmed the snowfield on three sides.

“Like walls,” Casey said. “Like we’re looking into a room.”

That was exactly right. She watched as the fog wavered and glimmered—and then another shape pulled together, the fog sewing itself into something solid and blocky: red brick capped with a spire. A rosette window blossomed above a set of thick wooden double doors.

“It’s a church,” Casey breathed. “And look, there, to the left.”

“Cemetery.” The tombstones were a jostle of rectangles and squares, listing like broken teeth. Beyond, she spotted … was that a snowplow? No, that wasn’t right. The blocky vehicle was outfitted with treads, like a tank, and the discharge chute of a snowblower reared like an orange smokestack to the left of the cab. Instead of a blade, the huge, sharp corkscrew of an auger was mounted at the front of the vehicle.

I know this. The certainty was so bright, it was like a searchlight had flared to life in the center of her brain. The church, the cemetery, and that thing with the auger is a snowcat, and it’s all important. But why? Why do I recognize thi—

A scream, short and sharp, ripped through the air, followed by a loud, rolling BOOOMMM.

Rima knew, instantly: not thunder, or an explosion.

A shotgun.

Coming from the church.

EMMA A Bug Under a Bell Jar

1

“NO. JUST STAY away from me.” Cringing from Kramer’s outstretched hand, Emma slides a slow step back and then another, the rough carpet scratching her bare feet. She is suddenly very cold, and from the heavy overcoat Jasper wears, that faint sparkle of snowmelt on his shoulders, she thinks it’s probably winter.

Of course it’s winter, you nut. Clad only in a coarse flannel nightgown, Emma shivers. It was snowing in the valley. Lily and I crashed in a blizzard. This hallway, this asylum, these people, all belong in a nightmare, a blink, a dream, a hallucination—or it’s House that is peopling this illusion, pilfering her memories for details: the embroidered pictures of flowers, the bowed ridged ceiling with its gas lamps, the low pedestal table to her immediate right with that stuffed toucan trapped under a glass dome.

How could House build this from my mind? She doesn’t know or recognize this as a real place, or from any book. Now, that day in Madison, the one she just left, she almost understands. The bookstore exists; she had bought The Bell Jar that day. The broader details, even her mocha Frappuccino, were correct.

Yet, unless she was taking a cue from all those Dickens novels and stories they listened to when she was young, she has never imagined Jasper as a bearded, middle-aged man in expensive evening clothes, complete with a walking stick. And Kramer, so different: no longer the Great Bloviator in prissy Lennon specs but a Victorian-era shrink decked out in purple panops. It’s as if she’s exchanged one monster for another.

And I’ve never been here before, except in a blink I barely remember. I don’t know anything about asylums except what’s in The Bell Jar, do I? Did Dickens ever—

“Come with me, Emma.” Kramer’s tone carries a note of command. “You and I will go to my office and sort this out”

What, and then you’ll accuse me of stealing a dead guy’s story? She fights for control, her eyes stinging with frightened tears. Stop it; this is a dream, a blink; that’s why it echoes. House is building this from your memories. This isn’t real. But she’s hip-deep in it; this is like being chased by a monster in a nightmare—and, yes, isn’t that exactly what’s happening? You have to run in a nightmare; you don’t know you’re in one until you wake up. She can’t chance that House will rescue her.

“No. I don’t want to sort it out. I’m not going anywhere with you.” Call it a hunch, but if she lets him take control in this hallucination or blink or whatever it is that House is doing, it’s the end. She’ll be trapped here. Behind her—and don’t ask her how; she just knows—this very long corridor is nothing but a blind alley, a dead end.

Which means the only exit from this floor is the way that Jasper and Kramer came in. How am I going to get past them? Kramer is the point of the spear; Jasper hovers just behind Kramer’s left shoulder. Another foot or so back, Graves stands to Jasper’s right. But Weber, the thickset attendant with the strong dress to Jasper’s left, is the one she has to worry about. Her eyes fall to Jasper’s walking stick with its carved ivory handle, and she thinks, Right-handed.

“I will go only if Jasper comes, too, and only him,” she says to Kramer. “But the rest of you back off, okay?”

Kramer hesitates, and Graves, the nurse, says, “Doctor, I don’t think—” at the same moment that Weber grunts, “Them girls know how to make trouble.”

“Those girls? I’ll thank you to remember that you’re speaking about my ward. Of course, Emma.” Arms open, Jasper’s already stepping past Kramer. “You’ll come to me, won’t you? No more fuss, eh?”

Oh, just watch me. “No more fuss,” Emma says, and then she darts forward, her left hand reaching for the walking stick. Startled, Jasper flinches, but he’s too slow.

“No!” Reaching for Jasper’s shoulder, Kramer tries to pull the other man back. “Emma, stop!”

But she won’t; they can’t make her. Wrenching the stick from Jasper’s fingers, she whips it around like a club in a fast, high, whirring backhand. She feels a jolt in her wrist as the heavy ivory head connects, and then Kramer’s head snaps back, a spurt of blood jumping from a gash on his jaw. Stumbling, Kramer falls into Jasper, who tries an awkward catch and misses. The two of them go down in a tangle. Behind them, she sees Weber start with a rough exclamation, “Oi!” and then recover, gathering himself to charge.

“Restrain her!” Kramer shouts, a hand clamped to his jaw. He is struggling to find his feet. “The door! Don’t let her off this ward!”

Thank you. He’s just told her: the door is open. Still clutching the walking stick, she sprints to her right, sweeping porcelain bowls and the stuffed toucan from its low table in a clash of glass and metal. Weber makes a lunging grab, but she is smaller and faster, and dodges. She feels the drag of his fingers, and her scalp gives a yelp of pain, but then she’s dancing past, with the fleeting thought that whoever said girls with long hair would never survive the zombie apocalypse probably had something there.

“Miss Lindsay!” Flanked by the other two attendants, Graves is stepping to block her way. “Stop this at on—” Graves lets out a breathless grunt as Emma rams the cane’s ivory head into the woman’s belly. Staggering, Graves takes an attendant down with her as she falls, and then Emma is sprinting for the exit in a swirl of white flannel. The hall is enormous, infinitely long, and alive with the muffled cries and catcalls of patients, the slap of hands on stout wood. Like feeding time at the zoo. Behind her, she hears heavy footfalls coming closer and Kramer’s shouts: “Miss Lindsay … No, Jasper, stay here … John, no, please remain on the ward and let me attend to this … Miss Emma! Emma, wait, wait!”

Dead ahead, she spots an arched entryway, but … is that a curtain, or …? Oh shit. Her heart sputters as she realizes what she sees is a floor-to-ceiling iron grate, like the bars of an ancient jail. Which is exactly what this is: a prison for nuts, lunatics, the mad. I’m trapped.

Then she remembers: Kramer didn’t want me to get to the door. Her eyes fall to a heavy wooden door set in the grate on iron hinges. Of course. You wouldn’t swing open the entire grate; there had to be a separate door that would allow doctors and nurses and patients to get in and out.

Without pausing, she stiff-arms the door at a dead run—and screams as a lightning bolt of pain shoots up her arm. Gasping, she reels, her right hand singing, and nearly falls. The door is very heavy, nothing she can easily smack open. Hit that thing at the wrong angle or any faster, she might have broken her wrist. Blinking away tears, she staggers back and shoulders her way through. The door gives by grudging degrees, groaning open six inches, a foot. Wide enough. Plunging through onto a large stone landing, she turns, plants both hands, and muscles the door shut. It claps to with a loud bang.

Through the open grate, she can see the others coming, Kramer in the lead. There is blotch of bright red blood on his white linen shirt. Got to stop them, slow them down … Across the landing stand identical iron grates and doors at nine and twelve o’clock, closing off yet more patient galleries, and the same to her immediate left. In all the corridors now, there is movement: the flow of long skirts and clump of heavy boots as the night nurses and attendants hurry to see just who has gotten loose.

Got to get out of here. She should block the door behind her, if she can. Throwing a frantic glance at the large cast-iron square lock, with a keyhole directly beneath a brass knob at the upper right, she feels a sudden kick in her chest. Whoa—her eye fixes on that bright brass knob—wait a second.

Attendants are shouting at her from the other galleries; there is the muted tinkle and shake of keys, but she barely hears. Staring at the knob, what she feels is recognition, a sense of something clearing in her mind, as if all the pieces to a tough physics problem are beginning to click.

That’s the knob House showed me on the slit-door. “Oh Jesus,” she whispers, and another fit of trembling sweeps through her as her mind jumps back to her first thought when she found herself here. What if this is the real-world detail House plucked from her mind? Skull plates or not, what if I really belong here?

“Emma!”

Kramer’s shout breaks the spell. Her head jerks up, and she sees the men only twenty feet away. There are more crowded at every single grate. Figure this out later, you nut; move, move! She spots a small latch-bolt protruding from the bottom edge of the lock-plate and thinks, Push it. Jamming the small bolt to the left with the ball of her thumb, she hears the lock catch with a crisp snap.

“Emma, stop!” Kramer says as he and the others crowd against the iron grate. Shaking out keys, Kramer reaches through the grate. There is a scrape of metal on metal as his key stutters on iron, and she realizes that she must have hit some kind of dead bolt that can only be opened from her side.

“Emma.” Jasper wraps his hands around the iron bars. “Please, let them help you.”

“If you refuse to listen to me, pay heed to John, your guardian,” Kramer says, still struggling with fitting the key. “You’re only making this more difficult for yourself, Emma.”

Oh, I don’t think so. Wondering, though: John? Why had Kramer called Jasper by that name? Something important there …

But she has no time to think anymore about it. Turning, she scuttles to the grate to her immediate left and jams the privacy bolt to. That will have to do; no time for the others. From all the wards now come muffled hoots and shouts and bangs as patients hammer their locked doors. Behind her, Kramer is shouting, “Porter! Porter!” and Emma thinks: Uh-oh. Scurrying to the head of the central staircase, she makes out denser shadows hustling over marble: the night guards coming to get her.

And there is yet one more sound, distant but so familiar, that snags her: a kind of mad, booming, howling chorus rising from the depths of this building to seep through brick and open-worked iron grills: Matchi-Manitou, in his cave under Devils Island. And then she thinks, What?

Out of the shadows below, a phalanx of seven men swarms for the stairs like an army of black spiders, and she backs away. Can’t get out that way. She won’t let them take her either. She won’t go down there. Down may be the way out, but down is also bad. Deep underground, in the dank basement of this asylum, there is …

Matchi-Manitou, in his deep dark cave …

A room, a sundry room, the words suddenly popping in her brain with the clarity of a flashbulb. The sundry room is padded with cork and India rubber for violent people like her. There is the rotary chair and thick, sickly sweet rust-red medicine and cold-water baths and more that is much, much worse.

But how do you know this, Emma? And why is she thinking of Devils Island? That’s in Wisconsin, and she’s … She doesn’t know where she is, but she can feel the scream rising from her chest. How do you know what happens here?

“Here now!” From far below, a very large man, round as a billiard ball, leads the charge, lumbering up the stairs and using a heavy stick for balance. “Stay there, Miss!”

No way in hell. To her left are arched windows, and because there is so little light behind her, she makes out the open space of a very large courtyard or garden. Protruding immediately below is the snow-covered roof of some other building she can barely see. Flanking the garden on either side are extremely long wings, which must be more wards.

I’m on the second floor. Her hand tightens on Jasper’s sturdy walking stick. Break a window. Climb down. And then she thinks: Seriously? She was no monkey in gym, and even if she manages it, she has no way of knowing how far the grounds extend and she can’t go fumbling around in the dark. It’s winter; she’ll freeze. Barefoot, she won’t get far anyway, and snow means tracks. But I have to get out, find a road and people. Figure out exactly where I am.

Sprinting right, she pelts along a side landing toward the next flight of stairs, trailed by Kramer’s bellows, nurses and attendants trapped behind gated iron grilles, and the porter’s shouts. Wheeling around a marble newel post, she catches a glow of streetlamps through high windows and, closer, the wide columns of this building’s massive portico—and she falters. That’s the front of the building. So why is she heading up and not down? Okay, down is bad, and yeah, the front doors might be locked, and there’s the little problem of getting past all those men. But what are you doing, Emma? Why are you running up? This is a blink, a nightmare, and forget the stupid brass knob on the lock, how detailed this is, how real, and all that shit. She’s got to believe she’s still inside that creepy little house, the near twin to Frank McDermott’s home, and House has created this.

I could do nothing. Eventually I’ll wake up or blink back. I always do. Yet even as she thinks this, she has the queasy sense that this would be the wrong move.

Must go up. It isn’t just the steady throb of her headache, the burn of her titanium skull plates impelling her to go, go, move. It’s as if she’s being guided by an internal compass, an invisible hand that prods the nape of her neck to urge her on, force her up, up, up.

God, Emma, you nut, I hope you know what you’re doing. She vaults up another flight. The hard stone is cold on her feet. Dead ahead, she can see that the layout above is identical to that below: four gated wards, two on the right and two on the left. There’s movement as the shouts trail and attendants hustle out of wardrooms, where they’ve been dozing, to see what’s going on.

How many floors are there? From her brief glimpse of the flanking galleries, she thinks not many, maybe only four. As she pivots around another newel post for the next flight of steps, she can hear Kramer and the others now: the clap of boots on marble and men’s shouts.

“Shit,” she breathes. They’re out. No more time. She is committed now. “Emma, you better be right.” Scrambling up this flight, she sees the same layout of wards on either side. Third floor. If it’s like this on the fourth, she’s screwed. As she bounds up the next stone staircase, however, she sees an immediate difference. Despite the gloom, it seems a little brighter up here, and then she spots the arched door at the very top of the steps. As she hits the landing, she pauses to throw looks right and left. No galleries. No wards. End of the line.

Please, please … Leaping for the door, she slots her hand through a curved iron latch and gasps. The iron’s so frigid it burns. Good. It means this must open to the outside. But is it locked? Below, she hears distant bangs, and then Kramer’s voice, louder than before but also … stranger, more of a gargled, strangled choke, as if he’s shouting from a deep, dark well: “Emma! Emma, there’s no way out! Come back!”

Shit. Come on. Mashing the thumb plate, she puts her weight into it, shoving, pushing with all her strength. Please, please, please, don’t be locked … A little cry jumps from her mouth as the wooden door, so warped and weighty it groans on its hinges, squawwws over stone. A gush of wintery air splashes her face, and she thinks, Roof. I’m out! She bullies through a narrow wedge between the door and wall …

2

AND INTO A huge, soaring space that is utterly and completely without light, as dark as a cave.

Oh shit, where am I? In the hush, she hears her heart thud. What is this? Turning a complete circle, she strains to make out details. The darkness is close and cold, but she detects that faint silvery glimmer again: light, spilling down from somewhere high above. Tipping her head, she spots a parade of tall arched windows marching all the way around a …

A dome?

“Oh God.” Now other details are materializing in the dim light. On this main floor, there are rows of wooden benches. They look familiar, not because she’s necessarily seen them before here. But I know what you are. She brushes a hand over the hard back of one bench; in the well, near the floor, she spots a folded wooden bar. A kneeler, which means … Dead ahead, there is a dais on which rests a carved pulpit. Turning, she faces the door through which she’s come—through which the others will be on her in a heartbeat, because she can hear them getting closer and louder—and sees high up and just below one of those arched windows, a large, long, rectangular plaque: probably stone, and the kind of marker you’d inscribe with the names of benefactors or Bible verses.

Pews. A pulpit. Next to the door, she now sees a low cabinet filled with books. They must be hymnals. Turning back, she lifts her eyes to a spot immediately above the pulpit on its gated dais—no, not gates; they’re communion rails—and spots the hulking saw-toothed pattern of an organ’s pipes. Of course: if you’re going to sing something from a hymnal, you’ll need something to keep the mad in tune and the lunatics on track.

She knows now, exactly, where she is.

She’s in a domed chapel for the insane—and trapped, like a bug under a bell jar.

RIMA What She Was Made For

THE ECHOES OF the first blast hadn’t quite died when there was another thunderous boom. Still perched on the snowmobile, Rima felt her heart give a quick, convulsive flutter, like the wings of a startled bird. From the church, another scream tore through the fog.

I’ve got to go into the church. But why should she do that? Rima didn’t know, yet she could feel her body obeying some call she couldn’t quite hear and didn’t understand. Got to get inside.

“Rima!” Casey said, as she swung off the sled and onto the snow. Scrambling after, he grabbed her arm. “What are you doing?” Then he seemed to realize what he’d done, because he threw a fast, nervous look at the snow. “We need to get off this stuff.”

“No.” She stared down at the white beneath her feet. No death-whispers now. The birds are psychopomps; they must be carrying the whispers with them. Or maybe the birds were the whispers. She didn’t know. “They’re all gone. But I think …” Tugging free, she took a halting, tentative step. “I have to …”

“Have to what? Where are you going?” Casey said. He reached for her, but she angled away and left him grabbing air. His gloved hand balled in frustration. “Rima, talk to me. We have to stay together. What are you doing?”

“I don’t know.” She looked back at him over her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Casey, but I think”—she could feel her legs tense, and realized, with a touch of wonder, that she was getting ready for something—“I think I’m supposed to …”

“No. Rima, no, wait!” As if sensing the danger, Casey started for her.

He was a second too late. “I … I can’t!” And then she was suddenly darting across the snow, heading for the church, even as a small voice of sanity screamed, What are you doing, what are you doing, what are you doing?

“Rima!” Casey cried. “Rima, stop!”

She couldn’t. A crazy compulsion had grabbed hold, dug in its talons, and wouldn’t let go. This was her destiny, what she was made for, what she had always done. She churned over the snow. The church rushed toward her out of the fog, the distance between them collapsing, the fog folding to bring her closer as if they were points at either end of a single line now drawn together. One of the church’s heavy wooden doors was ajar; the spicy scent of incense and spent gunpowder bit her nose.

She flattened herself against an outer wall. The brick was cold as metal. Across the snow, she could see Casey coming, and knew she was almost out of time. Casey would fight to keep her out of the church, and probably win.

Go, before he stops you. She gathered herself. Go now, go go go!

She vaulted for the door.

EMMA This Is Your Now

1

SHE MIGHT HAVE stood there, dumbfounded, until they caught her, if not for the bangs and shouts. Heart leaping, Emma shoots a glance at the chapel’s door. Got to block it. Then find a way out. Not much time either, but she has to. All these windows, and she’s in a dome.

“So outside those windows is the roof.” Saying the words out loud centers her. She can break her way out and then climb down from the roof, unless there’s a very long drop to the roof or a ledge, but she pushes that away. Her fist tightens around Jasper’s walking stick. Break a window. Climb out. But do something, anything, and do it now.

Dropping Jasper’s walking stick on the last pew, she rushes to the door and strong-arms it shut. Eyeing the freestanding cabinet, chock-full of books and immediately to the right of the door, she thinks, Yeah. Hurrying to the far side, she wedges her shoulder against it and pushes. Jumping over stone with a loud screee, the cabinet wobbles, and for a heart-stopping instant, she thinks it’s going to fall back on her. No, no. She butts against it, digging in with her toes to stop it rocking the wrong way. Come on, come on …

“Emma!” From where she stands, she can’t see the door, but there is a dull yellow glow now, and she hears both the swell of Kramer’s voice and a rougher mutter of other men bunched on the opposite side of the chapel’s door, which is only just swinging in with that grating squawww. “Emma, there’s no place left to …” Whatever Kramer’s about to say ends with a yelp as the cabinet suddenly topples with a huge reverberating crash that bounces back, the echoes caught and doubling on themselves in the cup of the dome.

Just in time. Through the three-inch gap, she can see Kramer’s face, the glistening wound where she hit him, the glint of lantern light off his panops’ brass frames—but not, she sees, mirrored in the purple lenses at all.

“You think this is the way?” This close, she can hear the gurgle. Kramer’s voice is so thick, it sounds like he’s got terminal pneumonia. There is an enormous bang as he slams a fist against the door. “This is where you belong, Emma, whether you know it or not.”

How about not? Hooking her hands on a pew, she drags it back with a grunt, leaning on her bare heels. If possible, the pew’s even heavier than the cabinet. Thank God they didn’t bolt these things to the floor. When she’s lined it up, she races to the opposite side, then strains on the balls of her feet. Her calf muscles cramp as she pushes and hammers the pew over stone, until the end of the pew jams against the fallen cabinet to form the long axis of a T. There.

Another bap as Kramer thumps the door. “Emma, this is futile,” he says in his harsh, gargly croak. “You can’t get out. You don’t think we have such things as axes or even a stout log? Or manpower? Or another way in? It’s only a matter of time—”

Yeah, yeah, resistance is futile—she tunes him out—blahdiddy-blahdiddy-blah-blah. Man, if she ever comes out of this blink, she is so dropping this class. Then, as a butterfly of a laugh flutters in her throat, she thinks, Emma, come on, don’t lose it.

She’s only bought herself a few minutes, if that. Swallowing back that bright burn of hysteria, she turns aside from the still-fuming Kramer and tries to remember why she thought this was such a good idea. Okay, this is a chapel; it’s got an organ. Which means there has to be a way up to the organ’s console. And in the next second, she spots it: a narrow curlicue of a whitewashed spiral staircase to the right. Behind her, she hears bangs and grunts, that fingernail-over-chalkboard grate of wood against stone, and knows that despite her barricade, time’s on Kramer’s side.

But that organ … Retrieving Jasper’s walking stick, she scuttles down the center aisle, dodges around the communion rails, and bounds onto the dais. Sweeping a hand over the low altar, she feels her fingers close around heavy velvet. Yes. Gathering the altar cloth, she jumps off the dais and heads for the spiral staircase. She takes the steps two at a time, her feet cringing away from cold iron. Ducking through a narrow trap, she pushes onto the second-floor loft, which is only long enough to accommodate the organ and, to its immediate right, another cabinet for books and music. Left of the organ are several ranks of folding chairs with cane seats and backs for the choir. If she thought it would help, she might toss chairs down the iron staircase or try barricading the trap with the cabinet, but she doesn’t have that kind of time. Besides, she wants that cabinet for something else entirely.

Centered beneath one of the dome’s many windows, the organ’s pipes form several clusters. The thickest, largest pipes in the center are all much too tall for her to get a step up. To her right, however, a series of smaller, thinner pipes start low at the center and end higher next to that cabinet. Right there. Her eyes click to the pipes and the cabinet, and then she’s moving before she can think of all the reasons this won’t work. So long as I don’t pull it down on top of myself. But she can’t climb holding on to Jasper’s walking stick, and for this to work, she needs it. Clamping the wooden stick between her teeth, she knots the altar cloth around her waist. Then, sucking in a breath around Jasper’s stick, she climbs onto the organist’s seat and plants her left foot on the highest of the organ’s three keyboards. She expects a breathy run of notes, but nothing happens. Straddling the gap between the organ and bookshelf, she hangs on to the pipes with both hands as she reaches with her right foot, groping with her toes.

“Emma.” Kramer’s voice is very loud now, and echoes, and she thinks they’ve nearly got that door open. “Stop. What do you think you’re doing?”

What does it look like, asshole? With the stick wedged in her mouth, she can’t answer anyway. Instead, she spiders up, bracing herself on the pipes to her left as she scoots up the cabinet on her right. Even though she’s careful not to let her full weight drop on the shelves, there is a subtle shift under her feet, the soft rickety squeal of stressed wood. But the cabinet’s as heavy and solidly made as the one on the main floor. Lucky they didn’t have Ikea back then, or I’d be sunk. With a grunt, she hauls herself the last few inches to crouch on top of the cabinet. She can feel the outside air spilling in a frigid waterfall over the windowsill, which is less than six inches to her left. With a small flare of alarm, she realizes that she never stopped to wonder if the window’s muntins are wide enough. Jesus, if I knock out a pane, will there be enough room for me to climb through?

Only one way to find out. Bracing the palm of her right hand on the dome’s wall, she turns her face away and whips Jasper’s walking stick around by the business end. There is a watery splash as the carved ivory head smashes a pane, breaking open a foot-wide maw bristling with glassy teeth.

Time for one more, and then it had better be enough. Kramer is shouting again, and from the corner of her eye, she sees other men, who must’ve come in a different way, running for the spiral staircase. She swings. The remaining glass explodes, and this time the muntins surrounding this pane, as well as the ones immediately to the left and above, simply fall out. They’re wood, not metal. Through the huge gaping hole, she could hear the faint hoosh of the wind.

Far below, the chapel door finally grinds open, and she pauses just long enough to look down as Kramer and the others clamber over the felled cabinet and scattered hymnals. She sees Kramer raise a lantern, the light cutting deep shadows over his face as he cranes a look. She doesn’t even wait for him to ask her what she’s doing before she does it.

Unknotting the altar cloth, she snaps the heavy fabric like a sheet. The cloth snags on minute jags of glass but holds. Still clutching Jasper’s stick, she reaches with her left foot, plants it on the sill, then shifts her weight to thrust her head and shoulders through the broken glass. Easy, easy. Stabbing down, she feels the moment that the tip of the walking stick hits and steadies against stone, and then she leans into it, trusting in the sturdy wood to hold her weight as she pulls her right leg through the window.

“Ahh!” she groans as her bare foot sinks into snow, then flinches away at a sharp bite of glass in her heel. Go, go, muscle through this. Come on! Gritting her teeth, she pulls her left leg after and clambers out of the bell jar and into the storm.

2

INSTANTLY, SHE SINKS to her ankles in snow. She stands on the narrow ledge that surrounds the dome. Through a wavering curtain of whirling wet flakes, she spots the curved rails of an iron ladder bolted into the stone. Must be the way down. Below, the asylum’s roof is a wide, flat, white expanse edged with a decorative marble cornice.

So now what? Where is she supposed to go? For a stunned moment, she can only huddle against the icy dome. Snow blasts over her skin. The wind cuts, ripping the breath from her mouth, and she can feel her determination, the certainty that this was the right and only way, beginning to bleed away.

“So now what, House?” She watches the wind fling her words into the storm. “What was the point? Why are you showing me this?”

Only the wind answers, in a howl. A dullness settles in her chest. Either she stands here until Kramer or one of his men finds a ladder and comes through that broken window, or …

I am insane. Floundering, her feet beginning to numb, she gropes her way to the iron ladder and carefully lowers herself a rung at a time. At the very bottom, she pauses, looking up at the massive bell jar of the dome hunched against a moonless night with no stars. Icy pellets of snow needle her cheeks and sting her eyes, which are starting to tear. She is here to find something; she has to believe that, because the alternative is just too awful.

So what is it, House? What do you want me to see, to do now? Dropping into snow, sinking up to mid-calf, she grimly slogs toward the marble cornice at the front of the building. Walking against the wind is like shoving her way through pins. The dome rises off her right shoulder. Far below and across a long, very black expanse that must be the asylum’s front grounds, she can just make out the faint glow from gas lamps mounted on high iron posts to either side of a wide gate, and at ground level, the flicker of a lamp inside some kind of structure that reminds her a little bit of those ranger kiosks at park entrances. Raising a hand to shield her eyes, she squints against a pillow of wind-driven snow. Gatehouse? Beyond are other lamps, spaced at long intervals on tall posts along an empty street fronted by dark shops. Above those, lozenges of fuzzy light spill from apartment windows where anyone sane is riding out the storm. To the far right, through a distant tangle of bare tree limbs, she spots a glister of many colors, faint and fractured. Stained glass, she thinks. That’s a church. But where in England is she, exactly?

At that, the storm seems to pause a moment, or maybe it’s only the wind deciding to pull in a breath, because the snow shifts. Now, to her left and in the distance, she spots the dark spear of a tower thrusting above the far trees—and its clock face, bright as a moon.

All right, that answers that question. Other than Dickens and that crazy stunt where Queen Elizabeth parachuted into the Olympics with Daniel Craig, she might not know much about England, but she recognizes that clock tower. Everyone does. Big Ben.

That’s when she remembers something else, from a Lizzie-blink: a different London. Lizzie had thought that; her parents had mentioned it directly. But what did that mean—another London? Or would a little girl like Lizzie see the past as a different place, a separate Now?

Or maybe it’s both. Her eyes snag on a furred arc of green-white balls of light strung between the clock tower and the bank opposite. What if we’re talking about not only travel between two points but also different times?

Her thoughts suddenly fizzle and her vision seems to waver as the darkness ripples. For an instant, she thinks, Shit, can’t pass out now. But then, when she doesn’t and the darkness stops moving, her mind simply blanks.

Because there, hovering just beyond the decorative marble cornice at the roof’s edge, is a tall jet slit, narrow as a lizard’s eye and outlined by the glister of a blare-white glow.

No. You’re not real. Squeezing her eyes shut, she flutters them open again to find that the view hasn’t changed. If anything, the glow is stronger. Why did you make this, House? What do you want from me?

“Emma.”

At the sound of her name, her heart catapults into her mouth. I think about times and Nows, and House makes the Mirror appear. Gulping against a sour surge of fear, she turns. House makes him.

Kramer is there, not far away, on the roof. His body is a well of shadow, the details indistinct. But like that slit-mirror that cannot really be there, Kramer is backlit by a faint, undulant luster, as sickly green as an old bruise. In a way, Kramer is the Mirror in human form: a blank daguerreotype, a cutout with no face and nothing she recognizes. But, oh, she knows that gargle of a voice that is one and many, because she has heard it before: in a Lizzie-blink, and on a Madison street conjured from memory.

“There’s nowhere in this Now left to run,” Kramer says, his voice burring and humming as if the words are being run through a faulty synthesizer. “Or rather … you have a choice of where and in which Now you choose to be.”

Where and in which Now? Having rested long enough—allowing her to see what it is that House wants her to know—the greedy wind starts up again to grab her gown, snatch at her hair. Glancing back over her shoulder at the hovering slit-mirror, she feels that familiar burn in her forehead, which had ebbed as soon as she bashed out that window, beginning to brighten and sting, coring like a laser through her brain.

“I’m not going anywhere with you.” She eases back a slow step and then another, her bare soles digging troughs in the snow. “Just let me go. I want to go home. I want out of this valley and this creepy house with its weird doors and rooms. I only want to wake up.”

“Emma, this is your home and where you belong,” Kramer says. “This is your Now.”

“I don’t believe you.” Between her breasts, the galaxy pendant on its crimson silk ribbon smolders and heats. I have plates that haven’t been invented; I carry the memory of the future. “If I’m only crazy, how come you know about Nows? You’re a liar. I’m still in the valley. I’m in House.”

“Touché. But did I really say something just now?” Kramer cocks his head. “Are you sure you’re not imagining that I said something you’d like to hear? Even if I did speak, it is my word against your very intriguing delusion. Tell you what: if I’m not real, come to me.” Arms spread wide, Kramer starts toward her. Where she’s struggled and slipped on fresh-fallen snow, he seems to glide, and that is when she sees that his shoes aren’t sinking. She isn’t altogether sure his shoes even touch the snow at all. Something is also gathering … behind him? No, Kramer is shifting, going fuzzy at the edges, his body beginning to steam. “Come,” he says, skimming over snow. “Come with me.”

Her voice locks in her throat. She is too frightened to scream. Her heart is thrashing in her chest, and the pendant is a scorching, calescent blaze.

Run. Run now. Go through the Mirror before he—

A blackness darker than night swarms over Kramer’s body, knitting itself into a tangle of scaly arms and spindle legs; into the thing that pulled itself from the book on the street she’s just left. Peekaboo, I see you. Its voice, whisper-man black, sweeps through her mind, working its fingers into the folds and crannies of her brain. Stay, Breath of My Breath. Drink, Blood of My Blood. Stay and plaaay through tiiime—

“Get out of my head, get out of my head, get out of my head!” With a shriek, she whirls around and pelts across the roof, slip-sliding on ice and slick slate. She feels the whisper-man fling itself after, but she is running, running, running, and there is the black mirror, rushing for her face as the pain flares between her eyes and the galaxy pendant seems to explode against her chest, as hot and dazzling as a nova—and there is light, a wide blinding bolt that shoots from the pendant, unfurling itself in a path: light that is so strong and steady and sure, it’s as if she’s running on a bright, unerring seam.

Forget what Einstein said about light. It’s not solid; you can’t run on light. It isn’t there and neither is the Mirror, a tiny panicked voice jabbers in her mind. Follow this and you’re dead. You’ll go over the edge, because you’re crazy; the doctors were right, Kramer’s right, and this path is not there, it doesn’t exist, it isn’t—

Screaming, Emma plants both hands on icy marble, swings her legs, and then she is sailing for the mirror, following that ribbon of light, and crashing through in a hail of jagged black glass, and then she is falling, screaming, falling …

EMMA The Opposite Ends to a Single Sentence

ONTO A ROAD.

London is gone. Her clothes are … regular clothes. Normal jeans, although she’s now wearing the turquoise turtleneck House let her find. Her head kills; that metal plate is gnawing a hole in her skull. She has brought nothing from the past except the galaxy pendant, which is, weirdly, still there and warm against her chest. Otherwise, she’s fine.

Well, considering all this fog.

Oh shit. Her eyes lock on the wreck of a car, crumpled against a sturdy tree, and then she knows exactly where—and when—she is. No, this is Lizzie’s life, her past, not mine; this has nothing to do with me.

Suddenly, space wrinkles. The pendant fires and Emma rushes toward the wreck, though she hasn’t moved a muscle. It is as if she and Lizzie have occupied the opposite ends to a single sentence and someone has carved away everything in between. The degree of separation is now no more than a sliver of White Space between two adjacent letters in the same word. Or is she still, somehow, caught in the Mirror, between worlds? Between Nows?

Or is this like the bathroom in House—she reaches out and feels her palms flatten on an icy, hard, impenetrable, invisible surface—and I’m on my side of the glass?

Another thought, stranger still: Is this one of those places where the barrier’s thinnest?

Beyond, on the other side, Emma can see Lizzie’s mother. Meredith’s head lolls; the air bag’s painted a slick red. The impact has displaced the engine block, the dashboard has ruptured, and the steering wheel has actually moved, jamming into Meredith’s body, tacking her to the seat like a bug to cardboard.

Lizzie’s mother lets out a long, long moan.

“M-m-mommmm?” Lizzie’s head is muzzy and thick.

Wait a second, Emma thinks, on her side of the barrier. I feel her, like I’m in her head, in two places at once. How can that be?

“Mom,” Lizzie whimpers. The car’s hood is an accordion, the dash only inches from Lizzie’s chest. Lizzie might be able to slither sideways, but there is nowhere to go. “M-Mom?”

“L-Liz …” The word is a hiss, but this is not the whisper-man. This is the voice of her mother, and she is dying; Lizzie knows that, and there is nothing Lizzie can do, no way to fix this.

Trapped on the other side of this nightmare, Emma thinks, It’s like I’m bleeding into her life. She remembers Frank cutting himself, the sound of his blood squelching over the Mirror. I’m bleeding into her.

“Mom?” Lizzie’s voice thins with grief and terror. Bright red blood jets from her mother’s chest and splish-splish-splishes onto vinyl. The steering wheel has done more than pin her mother against the seat. The wheel is broken, and the jagged column has punched through like the point of a lance. With every beat, Mom’s heart empties her veins just a little bit more.

Please, House, get me out. Emma watches as the fog gushes into the car, swirling up in a whirlpool past Lizzie’s feet, her hips. You showed me the way out of that asylum. So, show me now. Get me out of Lizzie’s head, please.

“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 …

tiny …

eep.

And the phone says …

EMMA Space Tears

1

“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 …

2

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.”

RIMA Something Inside

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.

EMMA Just One Piece

“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?”

“I didn’t know what I was doing.” That was almost true. The impulse had been instinctive, no more mysterious than rescuing a baby bird fallen from its nest. “You were in trouble and …” And I was in your head, which was just too freaky-weird. “I just knew I could.”

“But why?” Lizzie pressed. “Why did you really do it?”

“Because …” She bit off the rest. Oh, come on, what do you care if she thinks you’re nuts? Just say it. “I saw your dad, at the Dickens Mirror, in my blinks, and I did the same thing because House showed me: in the bathroom, at the slit-door to the … well, I think it’s a library. And I … I was in your head just now. It felt like we were the same somehow, like echoes or twins or …” She made an impatient gesture. “Only we’re not. I was wrong. I don’t look anything like you. You’re a little kid. I’m seventeen.” And I’m nuts and you’re … okay, maybe you’re nuts, too. “Whatever,” she said, and huffed out in annoyance. She was so taking her meds from now on. “I’m not you.”

“No, you’re not,” Lizzie said. “You’re just one piece. You all are.”

RIMA I Don’t Know Who You Are

NO, GOD. NOT Tania, too. Cold sweat slicked Rima’s skin. The whisper of something unspeakable moved in a darkling roil deep within Tania to shiver and squirm beneath Rima’s hands. It can’t be happening to Tania, not when we’ve come this far.

Tania sensed something, because she drew back, her frightened eyes shimmering with tears. “What’s wrong?”

“N-nothing,” Rima managed. She was aware of … of that boy. Her mind blanked, as if all the words she’d been thinking were suddenly erased. The name that had been on the tip of her tongue only seconds ago vanished like smoke. The boy, that kid with her: What’s his name? She couldn’t remember. He didn’t even look all that familiar.

What’s happening to me? A bolt of panic shuddered through her chest. I remember Tania. I recognize the church. I know where I am. So why can’t I remember him?

“Rima,” the boy said, “I don’t think we should stay in here.”

He knows me. Anything she might have said knotted in her throat and wouldn’t come out. She felt as if her mind was being swallowed a bite at a time. How can he know me if I don’t recognize him?

“Rima?” The boy reached to touch her, then seemed to think better of that. “You’ve … you brought the snowcat, remember?”

Right. She almost let out a giddy laugh. The cat, I remember that. She was freaked out, that was all. Who wouldn’t be? After the carnage in the cafeteria, where the pimply guy with the dweeb hairnet in the serving line, Victor, suddenly howled and sprouted claws … who wouldn’t be spooked? Worry about this later. Just move, get out!

“Yes,” she said. “Right outside. We better get going.”

“Wait.” The boy was clutching Tania’s shotgun in one hand and now shucked in a shell, the pump making a loud, echoing, ratcheting, insectile sound. “Tania … Tania?” When the girl dragged up her head to look at him, the boy said, “How many shells are in the shotgun? Do you know? How many shots did you take?”

“T-two,” Tania said, then shook her head and moistened her lips. “N-no. Three, I … I th-think. I d-don’t know.”

“All right. It’s okay.” To Rima: “Let me go first, all right? Just in case. You take care of your friend.” Without waiting for her to agree, the boy turned and hurried up the center aisle.

“Come on, Tania. We’re almost out. Just hang on.” Threading an arm around the moaning girl, Rima staggered after the boy. Leaning so heavily against her that Rima was practically carrying her, Tania stumbled along, nearly doubled over with pain. Ahead, at the front entrance, Rima saw the boy put up a hand and then slide to the open front door. “Anything?” she whispered.

“No. Here, she’s too heavy for you. Let me help.” Darting back, the boy grabbed Tania’s other arm and took most of the girl’s weight. “She’ll fall otherwise.”

“Thanks.” And then Rima blurted, “I’m sorry. I don’t know who you are. I don’t remember your name. Isn’t that weird? I think I knew, but now …”

“I’m Casey.” The boy’s voice was calm, which surprised her, because his eyes, their color, were so strange: stormy and indefinite, as if they hadn’t quite settled in his face just yet. “It’s okay, Rima. We’ve had a really rough night so far.”

“Yeah?” Rima tried a shaky smile. “Feels like it’s been pretty bad.”

“And then some.” A brief smile flickered over the boy’s lips. “Come on.”

With Tania lurching between them, they wobbled outside and over the snow in an ungainly jog. At the sight of the blocky orange snowcat only a short distance away, Rima felt the cobwebs of uncertainty in her mind being swept away by relief. I know this. I recognize this. She also knew that there were two distinct parts to the vehicle: a glassed-in, two-seater forward cabin for the driver and a larger passenger cabin just behind that, like a smaller version of a semi-tractor trailer.

Turning to the boy—no, Casey; he’s Casey—she said, “Let’s take Tania around back. There’s a door there and more room for her to lie …”

There came a sudden hard bang, not the blast of a shotgun but the slam of stout wood against brick. With a jump of alarm, Rima turned and saw a dark blur—something with a head and arms, a swirling black torso—storming, insanely fast, from the church. In the blink of an eye and before she even had a chance to pull in a breath, the thing was there, right on top of them, looming over Casey, who was only just now beginning to turn, and there was no time to get to the snowcat, no time!

“Casey!” Rima shouted. “Casey, look out!”

EMMA Find Your Story

“A PIECE.” EMMA stared. “A piece of what?”

“A piece of me,” Lizzie said. “I’ve been trying to pull you closer … gosh, forever. It’s way harder to grab someone who’s popped right off the page than you think.”

“What?” She felt the burn of a scream trapped somewhere in her chest. “You,” she said to the little girl, “are nuts. What are you talking about? That’s just an expression. All I want is to wake up and fall out of this blink into my life. I want you to get House to let me go.” As soon as she said that, she thought, Okay, that sounds pretty crazy, too.

“This isn’t a dream, or even a blink. I wish it were. It would be easier, maybe.” Lizzie looked suddenly … tired? No. For a brief second, her outlines seemed to glimmer, her eyes to actually … smoke, and Emma thought, Oh holy shit. But then the moment passed, and Lizzie was only a little girl with shock-trauma eyes: a kid who’d seen and been through too much. Like Emma, come to think of it. She didn’t like looking at the few pictures of herself before Jasper had the doctors surgerize her brain and repair her head and face. It always felt as if that little girl was a freak, a clay doll badly in need of molding, caught halfway between a formless nothing and something only vaguely human.

“I don’t know any other way to explain it,” Lizzie said, her cobalt eyes so dark and shadowy and haunted, they’d have been at home in an X-Files episode. “You’re a piece. Part of me is in you, like your eyes.”

“My eyes are just blue,” Emma said. “Eric’s eyes are blue. So are Rima’s.” Weren’t Bode’s eyes blue, too? Tony’s and Chad’s, she couldn’t recall, and Casey … maybe green? Brown? Hazel? She wasn’t sure.

“Yeah, but the others’ eyes aren’t exactly the same, not like ours. We’ve both got that birthmark, that little speck of gold? We’ve got our dad’s eyes,” Lizzie said.

“Our dad? That’s crazy. I don’t know who my dad is, and I’m not you.” Emma clambered to her feet, a move she regretted a split second later when her head swirled. Wow, it was like she was waking up from a bad fever. Or like I still got one. She put a hand to her forehead, but her skin was cool and dry. “I’m me.”

“Yes, yes, you are you, but …” Lizzie darted to her bookshelf. “Let me show you.”

“Ohhh no, no,” Emma said, as Lizzie tugged down not a book or a folder but a scroll tied with purple ribbon. “No more books, no more monsters slithering out of pictures and people morphing.”

“You’re in my room,” Lizzie said. “It can’t hurt you.”

“What are you talking about?” she said, but she almost understood. House was an island, the only place where light shone in this darkness. House had the power to whisk her places, or keep her in a single room. Jesus, what if Lizzie wasn’t here either? What if this was all House’s doing and just one more thing she was being shown for whatever reason?

I could go round and round this thing until my brain ties itself into a knot. Just got to accept something as a given, and I know I’m real. Yeah, but she’d interacted with Kramer; the snow had been freezing cold against her bare feet; the windowpanes smashed with the right sound in the right way. So had that been real, too? No, I know that was a blink because I’m pretty much back where I started: not out of the valley but back in House. Whatever House thought I needed to see and experience, I have.

“Did you make this place?” she asked. “This is the special forever-Now you were thinking about, isn’t it? That’s what those weird symbols were about. Is this what you were trying to make right before the crash?”

“Yeah, it is. It’s worked … okay, I guess. Here.” Lizzie unrolled the scroll. “Read that.”

“Wait a minute.” She didn’t make a move for the proffered roll of white parchment. “What does that mean, it’s worked okay? How is it supposed to work?”

“Too much to explain now, Emma, and you’re wasting time.” Lizzie thrust out the parchment. “Take it.”

It was on the tip of her tongue to say something snarky, like time was relative, but she thought, Oh, cut it out; she’s just a little girl.

The scroll was very strange, not yellowed with age or crackly but smooth and velvety soft. She’d never felt anything like it. The parchment was also completely blank, front and back. “Read what?” she asked, turning the scroll over and then back. “There’s nothing there.”

“Sure there is. There’s White Space.”

“Yeah, I see that it’s white, but that’s because it’s blank, Lizzie. I can’t read nothing.”

“You still don’t get it, do you? The words are there, in White Space. Haven’t you been paying attention? House showed you over and over again. You don’t put words on White Space; you pull them out. It’s like what our dad did with the Dickens Mirror.”

“No, it’s not,” she said, and wondered why she was bothering to argue this. “I remember what you saw, at least a little bit of it. He pulled out a thing … or the thing got into him.” She stopped, frustrated, wishing the memory of that blink was clearer. “Look, I’m sorry, but this is only blank parchment, and don’t give me that gobbledygook about how special your dad’s parchment was.”

“Well,” Lizzie said, “it was. It is. Wait, here, I know what you need.” Reaching on tiptoe, the girl yanked the coverlet from her loft bed. “Hold on to this. Honest, it’ll help a lot. I use it all the time to find you guys.”

The memory quilt: Emma recognized the swirl of colors, the rattle and chink of glass. She backed up a step. “Are you crazy? After what happened? I’m not touching that thing.”

“But Mom sewed on the Sign of Sure, and that will help.” The little girl thrust the quilt out to Emma. “Everything that’s important to a story is on the page. It’s already in White Space. All you have to do is follow the path, the same way you do when you go between Nows.”

“Path?” But she remembered: on the roof, her galaxy pendant suddenly growing hot and then the leap of a bright beam. Light that was solid, like a path. I even thought about it that way.

“Yes. Use that to find the story and pull out the words.”

“Lizzie, you write on paper. There’s nothing magical about that, and no matter how special your dad’s parchment or ink, there are no words in this thing.”

“Yes, there are. You’ve just never thought of building a story this way before, that’s all.”

“But—”

“Emma, will you stop thinking so much?” Lizzie rapped, with an air of angry impatience that was, eerily, a bit like Kramer’s: I didn’t say steal. “The others are in trouble, and you’re wasting time! Now shut up and find your story.”

She gave up. The kid was nuttier than she was. No, no, the kid wasn’t real. This was a dream, a blink, or just another illusion conjured up by House. Eventually, she’d pop back into her life, and this would all be nothing more than a hazy memory, a vague uneasiness. She could live with that. Swear to God, she’d take the damn meds, too.

For something that wasn’t real, the scroll freaked her out. That velvety white was the color of the snow and the fog. It was the same color of white that hid Jasper-nightmares. Wait, was white a color? Yes and no: visible light was all wavelengths, all colors, combined. To see them, you had to use a prism, a specially fabricated piece of glass, to separate them into their component parts. Otherwise, white light was … white. It was nothing.

But still full of color, just waiting for you to use a special tool to pull them out. Then: Stop it. White light is white. Jasper slathered his paintings with white paint. This is only a blank parchment scroll. She studied the quilt. And this thing is only bits of cloth and glass sewn into pretty pat—

“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 What Killed Tony

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.

EMMA All I Am

1

“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.

“Oh my God.” She was so startled she nearly dropped the parchment. On the skin, that weakly scarlet blush shimmered and began to dissolve as if she’d somehow lost her grip on whatever was shuddering its way to the surface. Against her palm, the galaxy pendant began to cool.

“Don’t worry, it’ll come back,” Lizzie said, her voice still a little watery and oddly indefinite. “Remember, you’re the bait. Everything you need lives in you. Just find your words, Emma. Let them come. You’re not like Mom. You don’t need the purple panops to see that far down or between.”

Panops. All-seeing. Her chest tightened. Kramer had purple glasses. So did Graves. But to see what? She opened her mouth to ask but then felt her questions fizzle as a familiar tingle she always felt before a blink swept through: a sense of falling and space opening up. In her hand, the cynosure burned but not as hot or bright as in the London blink. Nothing solid, no path of light leapt to show her the way.

Maybe that’s because it’s functioning as a lens now, bringing something into focus.

Something was definitely happening. On the parchment, that pink smudge was deepening and becoming more distinct. It was, she thought, like watching Jasper prep a design onto a primed canvas, except there was no hand other than the one in her mind, drawing and pulling out meaning. In the next instant, a snarl of brilliant red bloomed over the page, spreading over the surface in the complex tangle of an intricate calligraphy, spinning into letters and words, and she read:

MCDERMOTT-SATAN’S SKIN-FOLIO 45

Everything she knew about her bio parents fit the back of a stamp, with room to spare. Dear Old Drug-Addled Dad tried a two-point set to see if Baby really bounced against a backboard. (Uh, that would be no.) Mommy Dearest boogied before Dad …

2

NO. SHE COULD feel a fist of dread close around her throat. No, this isn’t happening. This was Kramer’s office all over again, just a different story this time. Her eyes flicked to the header: Satan’s Skin. That was the book where her story came from, the one she’d written for Kramer’s class. So what was she doing in the same manuscript?

It can’t be. All the air whistled from her lungs. She hadn’t written herself into her story. All she’d done was dream up the characters. McDermott’s novel fragment, Satan’s Skin, is a about a demon-book written on demon-skin. Kramer said the gist of the plot is that characters don’t stay put in their own stories. They keep jumping out. Then: That’s what worried McDermott. He said that if the characters’ stories didn’t resolve—

“I remember when Dad said he’d give you my eyes.” Lizzie’s voice reached her from what seemed like another planet. “If you know where to look, you’ll find my whole life in Daddy’s books.”

But not my life. She smoothed the scroll to bring the words into greater clarity, her clumsy fingers fumbling as the White Space resolved into crimson blocks of text:

Cue ten years of Child Protective Services and a parade of foster parents, group homes, doctors, staring shrinks, clucking social workers. Her headaches got worse, thanks to Dear Old Dad …

Jasper said the island got its name from the old Ojibwe legend that Matchi-Manitou, some honking huge evil spirit, was imprisoned in a giant underground cave at the entrance to the spirit worlds, and only the bravest warriors could pass through the black well at the center of the island to fight the thing, blah, blah. Some vision quest crap like that. The only well she knew on that island was near an old lighthouse and keeper’s cottage. Still, whenever there was a really big blow, the roar and boom of the sea caves—of big, bad Matchi-Manitou …

She felt her knees trying to buckle. This is like that John Cusak movie where the characters are nothing but alters, hallucinations. But my life is mine, I’m me, I’m real.

And then her gaze snagged on this line, floating on its own like a crimson banner dragged by an airplane:

One June afternoon, Emma wandered down cellar for a book and

3

AND. SHE WAS panting now, chest heaving. She stared so intently at that parchment, the scroll should’ve burst into flames. And? “And what?” she said, and shook the parchment as if she could dislodge the words stuck between the lines. “And WHAT?”

“Emma?” Lizzie’s voice filtered through a high burr. “Are you okay?”

No, I’m nuts. I’m insane, and this is about down cellar. Her hands shook. This is about when I was twelve and found that door. No one knows about that. But there it was, in screaming red calligraphy spidering over white parchment.

“Where’s the rest?” Her voice grated like an engine that just wouldn’t turn over. “The sentence just stops. Why is that? What happens next?”

“Don’t you know?”

“Yes. I mean … I don’t like thinking about it, but …” She clamped her lips together, willed herself to get out a complete sentence. “Why isn’t it here? How can it just stop like that?”

“Because that’s where our dad stopped. It’s as far as he got before Mom …” Lizzie’s eyes pooled again. “Before she did what she did.”

“Where he …” The memory quilt slipped in a muted tinkle of glass from her trembling hand, followed a moment later by the flutter of the parchment scroll filled with that bloody scrawl. She put a trembling hand to her mouth. “I thought your dad’s notes and unfinished novels were locked up somewhere.”

Lizzie nodded. “But he couldn’t help himself from starting again, even though he promised. He said books were like really bad colds you just never got over until you wrote them down and got them out of your blood. Maybe he put so much of me in you, it was harder for him to stop himself, but I don’t know. Anyway, he just never finished you, and that’s why you got out. But that’s also what makes you really special. You’re not like the others, especially the guys whose stories are over.”

He never finished me? She means, there’s no period to the end of that sentence; there’s no The End. But I know what happened after I went down cellar. I’m not twelve anymore; I’m seventeen, and I have memories and a life and I go to school. Then she thought, Oh my God. Eric.

“Special.” Her voice came out in a croak. “Not over yet? What is this?” She grabbed her middle with both arms, trying to hold it together. She was going to be sick; she was going to lose it; she was losing it; she could feel the burn flickering up her throat. In another second, she would break a window and go shrieking out into the snow. No wonder it was called Alice in Wonderland syndrome: This is just like London, because we’re all mad here. “What do you mean, I’m closest to you? That I got out? Out of where? What are you saying?”

“Emma, you’ve got the most of me in you … you know, like our eyes and stuff. You pull words from White Space. The Sign of Sure recognizes you just like it knows who I am. So I figured you were special enough to help me hold all the others in place.”

“The most of y-you. The guys whose stories are o-over.”

“Uh-huh.” Lizzie nodded. “You know, like Rima and Bode and Tony. They’re harder to do because they’re over and can’t change much.”

Oh shit, oh shit. She was gulping now, her breath coming in jerky, shuddery gasps. God, please, please, please let me wake up. “Different books. You’re talking about characters from different books, from your dad’s books.”

“Well, sure,” said Lizzie. “I just had to show you how to do it by opening the right books and dropping you into different book-worlds until you figured out how to pull me into your White Space, your story. Oh boy, it took you long enough.”

“Opening the right … dropping me into book-worlds …” Emma choked. All her blackouts. She looked down at the parchment scroll, with its unfinished story of her life. All those blinks when she lost time; when she saw things … “Are you s-saying … are you t-telling me that all I am is s-some character from a goddamned book?”

“Well, yeah.” Lizzie’s lips wobbled. “Kind of.”

RIMA The Thing That Had Been Father Preston

“GO!” TANIA DROPPED into the passenger’s seat. Whiter than salt, her face glistened with sweat. Another spasm of pain grabbed the girl’s middle, and she grunted through gritted teeth, the knuckles of her right hand tightening around the rifle, as she clicked her shoulder harness home. “G-go, Rima, g-get us moving!”

“Hang on!” Mashing the accelerator, Rima felt the hard knock of the snowcat’s engine throttling up to a full-throated roar. The vehicle surged forward in a squalling grind of grating treads and screaming metal. Through the windshield, she could see the thing that had been Father Preston sprinting away, his cassock unspooling like a cape, flowing around his ruined body like black oil. Preston was moving fast, faster than should be possible for a man, almost skimming over the snow.

“Get him, Rima!” Tania straight-armed the dash against another wave of pain. “G-get that son of a b-bitch,” she panted, sweeping a hank of sweat-dampened hair from her forehead. “Go, Rima, g-go!”

Go. Rima rammed the joystick. Dropping on its hydraulic slave, the snowblower came alive with a mechanical scream, the massive orange auger chewing and biting snow that, finally, had decided to behave a bit like real snow. The discharge chute belched glittering arcs of pulverized ice. Rima gunned the engine, and the machine lunged forward like a ravening insect, steel mandible ripping, tearing. Go, go, go, go!

The thing was now past the cemetery, almost to the woods, but they were gaining. Sixty yards … fifty … thirty. They were so close now that she could see the thin puffs of ice crystals kicked up by the thing’s mad passage. The edge of the snowblower’s casing was ruler-straight, and as they neared and the thing that was once a man—a gentle priest who believed that touching whispers was a gift, and not a curse—dropped below this new horizon, Rima shouted, “We’ve got him, we’ve got him, hang on!”

They hit: a sudden, jarring blow. Both girls slammed forward. Tania managed to hang on to the shotgun but lost her grip on the hammer, which clanked off the windshield and went spinning to the floor somewhere behind them, in the passenger cab. With a gasp, Rima threw up her arms as she catapulted forward and saw the wheel rushing for her face. At the last second, her shoulder harness caught and held, jerking her back like a hooked fish. Above the cat’s stuttering clank and roar, she heard a long, bubbling, unearthly wail. Beneath them, the snowblower seemed to stagger and mutter a stuttering, muted gargle, like a person simultaneously trying to breathe and talk with his mouth full.

“No no no no no.” Rima stiff-armed the cat’s balky controls. “Don’t you quit, don’t you quit!”

With a choked bellow, the cat coughed a mucky jet of macerated flesh and bone from its discharge chute. Blowback splatted against the windscreen, but instead of the moist red and purple and pink of a man’s blood and tissues, what hit that glass was viscous and black as oil and no longer human.

Choking again, the cat lurched and clanked to a shuddering halt. In the cab, the sudden stop catapulted the girls forward once more, and this time, Rima’s shoulder harness failed. Pain exploded in her right cheek as she slammed into the steering wheel, and her vision sheeted red.

“Rima?” Tania’s voice was tight and breathless. “R-Rima?”

“I’m … I’m okay. I’m fine,” she lied. Her cheek felt like a bomb had detonated and blown a hole through the roof of her mouth. She felt the warm spurt of blood on her cheek and down her neck, and there was more blood on the steering wheel.

“N-no,” Tania said in that same cramped voice. “That’s n-not what I meant. Look, Rima.” She pointed. “L-look at the windshield.”

Rima did—and then wished she hadn’t.

The windscreen was a nightmare of steaming flesh and ropy streamers of black blood.

And all of it was moving.

EMMA Whatever They Make Will Be Real

1

“KIND OF?” EMMA’S chest imploded. This was insane; she might be nuts, but she was real, she did things, she could feel. “Is that kind of no, I’m not a character in a book, or is that kind of yes?”

“I mean, kind of.” Lizzie’s face was a tiny white oval. Her cobalt eyes were dark as India ink, the shadows that ghosted through before somehow even more pronounced than before. That birthmark glittered as brightly as a finely cut yellow diamond. “It’s sort of like that—”

“Sort of? Kind of? What are you talking about? I have a life!” Her hands flashed out to grab the little girl’s shoulders. Crying out, Lizzie tried backing away, but Emma wouldn’t let go and shook the kid, hard, like a floppy rag doll she was suddenly very tired of playing with. “Stop this shit! I have a past! I go to school! I watch X-Files and Lost and write stupid papers about crazy dead writers! I drink goddamned mocha Frappuccinos!”

“I kn-know! I’ve v-v-visited!” Mouth sagging open, Lizzie was bawling her head off, sobbing the way only little kids do. “The words are al-all th-there!”

“Stop saying that! I’m not just words on a page!” Her chest was going like a bellows, the air scouring her throat. She felt the prick of furious tears. Of all the things her mind could light on, this is what she thought: Kramer would just love this. This is so Philip K. Dickilicious; I write this up, and I’ll get a damned A for sure.

Then she thought about that fragment of a sentence penned in red ink, a sentence that refused to resolve: Wait a second. There’s no period. Nothing comes after.

“What about all the rest of my life? Is Kramer in your dad’s story?” Her voice came out sounding as dry and raspy as shriveled cornstalks stirred by an October wind. Her fingers dug until she felt the girl’s bones. “Is Holten Prep? Is Starbucks?” Is Eric?

“No. That’s one of the reasons you’re so special, Emma.” Tears gleamed on Lizzie’s cheeks. “You did all that by yourself.”

2

“I …” SHE COULD feel the kid’s words like something physical, a slap, hard enough that she let go of the little girl and actually took a staggering step back. “I … I what? I did what?”

“You heard me.” Lizzie’s eyes glimmered again with those odd, curling, smoky, X-Files shadows. “You got loose and wrote yourself. You’re still writing yourself.”

“That’s crazy.” The words came out raspy and harsh, as if they were glass ground on a Dremel or abrasive stone. Her eyes dropped to that limp tangle of parchment. That had been blank, but she’d pulled McDermott’s words, what Lizzie said was a story that he never finished, from nothing. “This isn’t The Matrix. I’m not Neo. I’m a real person.”

“And what’s that?” Lizzie said. “Maybe you’re only real because you think you are.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t prove something like that. You just know.”

“But what’s that?” Lizzie pressed. “What’s knowing? It’s still all just stuff that happens in your head, right?”

“Come on, there’s more to it than that.” Emma felt a sweep of … not déjà vu, exactly, but a feeling that she was having an argument with some older version of herself: a girl who wouldn’t let the Great Bloviator off the hook. No, stop that; you are not her. She put her hands on her cheeks. “I feel my face. I’ve got a real cut from a real steering wheel.” I got a girl killed. I’ve got titanium skull plates and scars. “I hear you. I see you.”

“But the tools for all that are in your head. Like you touch something, but then you give it a name.” Lizzie picked up her memory quilt. “This is a quilt because we say it is. That’s how you write yourself—don’t you get it? Everything you know is because of what happens inside your head. Without your brain to turn this”—she gave the bunched quilt a shake that made its glass tick and chime—“into cloth and stitches and glass, you wouldn’t know what it was.”

“No. Thoughts and perceptions aren’t tools. They’re not really real. You can’t hold or even see them.” Which wasn’t exactly true, she knew; you could take a picture of the brain and see what parts were firing when, say, you saw a pencil or tasted an apple. “I mean, when I think about making or writing something, it doesn’t just happen. First, I have to have the idea, and then do something with it. The idea comes first. Ideas are …” She groped for the right word while at the same time thinking how odd it was that she was having this conversation with a little girl who couldn’t be more than five years old. “Ideas are energy. When you strip it all down, thought is just a bunch of the right cells firing at the right time in the correct sequence. That’s all ideas are. Thoughts are physics and chemistry.”

“Emmaaa.” Lizzie did an eye-roll. “What do you think thought-magic is? A pen and paper are just tools to make thought-magic real, but that doesn’t mean they’re the only tools.” She held up the galaxy pendant, stitched into its spiderweb. “The Sign of Sure is a tool. It helps you find your way between Nows and see better. Dad’s Dickens Mirror, and his special paper and ink, and Mom’s panops—they were just different tools for grabbing and fixing thought-magic. And even then, it’s why Mom had to make Peculiars to hold the extra thought-magic, so everything stayed where it was supposed to.”

“Stayed where it was supposed to. You mean, on the page,” Emma said. Weird how talking this out, actually thinking about it, calmed her a bit. Maybe because thinking and science are what I’m good at. She almost understood this, too; she could feel her mind inching toward some kind of comprehension, the way Meg Murry had groped after that tesseract and what made a wrinkle in time work. The whole character-from-a-book thing, she didn’t buy. She was a person, and that was that, right? Right? But she’d felt the heat from the galaxy pendant, that cynosure, feeding off her thoughts, her intentions. And in the blink or whatever that was at the slit-door, I felt a click, a change, like House was trying to hammer it home through my thick skull: the Dickens Mirror is a tool.

Or a machine?

And what’s a story but symbols penned in black ink on white paper? The symbols wouldn’t mean anything if there wasn’t White Space, that blank page. It’s the emptiness that defines the shape, that tells me that the symbol I’ve just written is an a or an s.

“So the … the fog that came after you and your mom,” she said. “That wasn’t just the thing your dad pulled through the Mirror?”

Lizzie shook her head. “Mom said that when the Peculiars melted, all the thought-magic that wasn’t able to go anywhere got loose. So the fog’s all of that tangled up with the whisper-man and … and …” Lizzie’s lips shook and her face tried to crumple again.

“And your dad?” Thinking, It’s like burning a log. The wood vanishes, but it doesn’t really go away. Its energy is released as heat. The energy changes form, that’s all. So the fog is …

“Yeah,” Lizzie whispered. Her eyes glistered and wavered like cut blue glass in deep murky water. “The whisper-man and my dad are all mushed together, tangled up. They were like that even before I finished my special Now and swooshed the fog here so it couldn’t go anywhere else. The whisper-man and … and Dad … they’re part of the thought-magic now, the fog, except the whisper-man is way stronger. I don’t know exactly why, but he can use the thought-magic, and I can’t stop him. The only good thing is this is pretty much the only place he can use it.”

“Because we’re in your special forever-Now? Something like your mom’s Peculiars?” She thought about the snowy, frigid valley. Something about cold was important … something in chemistry … no, physics? I know this; thought about this same thing not too long ago. But what, when?

Instead, she said, “That’s why there’s House. You had to make a safe place for yourself to stay. So this, the bedroom, the House, is kind of you, but everything else belongs to the … the whisper-man? The fog?” When Lizzie nodded, she went on, “You said the others, Rima and Eric, Casey … you said they’ve fallen between the lines because you couldn’t hold on to all of them. But Lizzie”—bending, she retrieved the parchment with its unfinished story of an odd girl with even odder gifts—“there’s only White Space between lines.”

“I know that,” Lizzie said. “Why do you think it’s so important to find them? They’re between the lines of this Now, and the Now is full of the fog, and the fog is thought-magic. They’re in nothing, and that’s bad because the really strong ones will make it into something.”

“Wait, wait.” She held up a hand like a traffic cop. “You’re saying that wherever they are, the others will use the … the thought-magic, the energy, to make their stories?”

“Right.” Lizzie’s face flooded with relief that Emma seemed to have finally caught on. “Especially the ones whose stories are done. They’re the strongest because they’re set.”

Set. “You mean set as in a period, the end of a story,” Emma said. “Their stories are like road maps that they must eventually follow, no matter where they are. Only what happens won’t just be words on a page. If they’re in the fog, whatever they make will be real.”

“Uh-huh,” Lizzie said. “With teeth.”

CASEY AND RIMA Fight

1

MOANING, CASEY ROLLED to his hands and knees. When he gave another moist, ripping cough, the spray that spattered the snow reminded him of those red sprinkles they put on cupcakes. Whenever he moved, it felt as if the bones of his ribcage were grating together. With every breath, a glassy, jagged pain hacked at his lungs.

To his left and very far away, easily a couple football fields, and almost at that distant black wall of trees, he saw the silent snowcat crouching in the center of a goopy, slimy mess that was a little like the tar they used on roads in summer. Spatters of the same goo glopped over the driver’s cab.

Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a small flick, and turned a look. Something was out there, just sliding from the trees. He squinted, trying to bring whatever it was into focus—and then his heart skipped a beat.

This time, instead of one thing racing for the snowcat, there were three.

2

MY GOD, IT’S moving. Rima’s stomach turned a slow, gurgling somersault. On the windscreen, the glistening, shredded, oily chunks of the thing that had been Father Preston pulsed and quivered in a slow, shambling creep. Ropy clots of black blood eeled like inky water snakes. Like in biology, when they make you cut up a worm; only the worm doesn’t glue itself back together. She could hear them, too: a high-pitched SMEEE-smeee, SMEEE-smeee, a sound of fingers smearing steam from a bathroom mirror. Horrified, she watched as two pieces met, their seams thinning and mending, the bits of raw stygian flesh sewing themselves together into a much larger chunk that squirmed off in search of another mate. The entire windscreen was alive with shivering, creeping flesh laboriously knitting together bit by bit.

“R-Rima?” Tania’s voice trembled. She pointed, using the rifle she still clutched in her right hand. “It … it’s re-repairing itself. It’s m-making itself all over again.” She stared at the rifle. “I bet I could shoot it a hundred t-times and it would … it would … God, how do you k-kill something like that?”

“I don’t know.” She cut her eyes away from the mess and toward her friend, then started back in alarm. “Tania! At the window! Look out!”

Too late. The glass on Tania’s side exploded in a hail of gummy fragments. Two arms—long, lean, impossibly strong—thrust into the cabin. Both unfurled hooked claws. One latched onto the rifle, yanking it from Tania’s hand; the other lashed out.

“OHHH!” Tania shrieked. Bright red blood jetted from her right shoulder. She tried twisting away, but that clawed hand only dug in, slashing deeper, and gave her another mighty yank, tearing her halfway from her seat.

“No!” Rima lunged. Snatching double fistfuls of Tania’s parka, she braced herself, planting one boot against Tania’s seat, the other against the transmission box, and heaved. “I’ve got you, Tania! Pull, Tania, pull!”

“I c-can’t—aahhh!” Jammed against the shattered window, unable to pull free, Tania screamed again. Her shoulder harness had snapped. The only thing saving her from going through altogether was that the window was just a touch too small. “I can’t, Rima! It’s too strong, it’s too—”

Going to lose her, going to lose her! Or whatever had her would tear Tania apart a piece at a time. Frantic, Rima tried to think of what to do, something she could use. The rifle was gone. There was the dropped hammer, but she would have to loosen her grip on Tania to find it, and patting around the foot well would take precious time she didn’t think they had. So what else was there? More tools in the equipment lockers in the passenger cab? Maybe, but there was no time, no time!

So she let go of Tania and did the only thing left.

3

EVERY STEP BROUGHT a blast of fresh agony, but after the first five steps, the pain wasn’t worse, just constant. The important thing was Casey was on his feet, and he’d found the shotgun. Ahead, he saw the things swarming over the snowcat; heard the explosion as the glass let go and then a scream. Why weren’t they moving? He was still too far away to do any good with the gun, and he couldn’t afford to waste shells, especially since he didn’t know how many he had left. Tania took two shots, maybe three, in the church. He was pretty sure there was a round in the chamber; he’d racked the pump, but he didn’t know all that much about guns. God, he didn’t even know how to check. How many shells did a shotgun hold? What if there was no shell in there at all?

Just got to hope there is, and that I’ll have time to get close enough for one good shot. To do that, he’d have to get right on top of them, because he was pretty sure that shotguns weren’t as good as rifles, didn’t have the range, and he didn’t much trust his aim anyway. If he could just get there in time.

Then, he heard the snowcat’s engine grind, and felt a burst of elation. Yes, yes, come on, Rima; get it going, get it—

The cat turned over once, twice, coughed, and then revved to a howl.

“Yes!” Casey cried, ignoring the fresh lancets of pain that stabbed at his chest. He pumped his fist. “Hit the gas, Rima, hit the gas! Go! GO!”

4

WITH THE CAT still in neutral, Rima stamped on the accelerator. The engine responded with an earsplitting clatter, followed by a bark that ground and gathered itself in a whooping crescendo shriek—and then she slapped the transmission lever with all her might. The cat dropped into drive and surged forward, its treads ripping snow with a great, shuddering roar.

Through the shattered window, above the clatter and squeal of the cat’s treads, there came another, new note: a high, shrieking wail as the thing that had Tania lost its balance on the running board. Too late, Rima thought, Oh God, don’t foul the treads! She held her breath as the cat lurched, that side bumping up and then crashing down—

5

ON THE SNOW, now no more than seventy yards away, Casey watched as the cat swung round; saw clearly—and heard—the moment when the man-thing was reeled, squealing, beneath the cat’s treads. Its shriek abruptly cut out as if hacked by an ax.

Yes, yes! But where were the other two? Shaken off? Run away? No, they wouldn’t leave; he knew that. So where? His eyes raked the snow and then sharpened on the cat once more.

“Rima!” God, could she hear him over the engine roar? He was running as fast as he could, but he was still managing nothing more than a staggering stumble that was slow, much too slow! “Rima, the roof! There’s one on the—”

6

GOT YOU. EASING back on the gas, Rima felt the growling cat grind to a halt. She was shaking all over. I got you.

Tania moaned, and when Rima got a good look, that fleeting sparrow of triumph fled. The other girl’s parka was scarlet. More blood was spurting from Tania’s right shoulder, the entire arm only just hanging on by a thread of torn flesh and splintered bone.

“Rima.” Tania’s voice was less than a whisper, and so weak there was barely any sound at all. Already whiter than salt, her face was going translucent and glassy, the color bleaching away. “R-Rima?”

“Oh God.” Rima started to unwind Tony’s scarf, still knotted around her neck. If she could slow down that bleeding, get them to someone who could help. In the school, the nurse’s office, there’s got to be—

There was an enormous, splintery crash, followed by the instantaneous hoosh of cold air. Rima’s eyes jerked front, expecting to see a fist pistoning for her face. But the windshield was intact. Oh shit. Heart thudding, Rima inched round to look over her shoulder and back toward the passenger cab. In the next instant, a thin, strangled, squeaky sound midway between a moan and a scream dribbled from her mouth: “Ohhh!”

This second man-thing was much taller and beefier, with a dense, furry ruff sprouting from its neck and glistening skin as slick as a black grub’s. When it saw Rima look, the creature’s yellow eyes lit with a feverish, feral gleam. Its lips skinned back from a bristle of teeth and a tongue as ropy and muscular as a black snake.

Time seemed to hesitate for a span no longer than the pause between two heartbeats. In that moment, Rima heard the splash of Tania’s blood and her faltering breath growing weaker and weaker; she could smell the man-thing, wild and animal and utterly alien, and taste it, too, rank and raw in her mouth. She even had time to wonder about Casey, who must be dead by now, torn apart, because where there was one thing and then two, there were probably a lot more.

And she had time to know this: she could run or she could fight, simple as that.

Without taking her eyes from the thing, she squatted, reached down—and felt her fingers close around the hammer.

Fight.

BODE Whatever This Place Makes Next

“WHAT IS THIS stuff?” The billowing fog surrounding the Dodge sponged up all sound, so that Chad’s voice came out flat and, Bode thought, a little dead. “Can’t see for shit. You ever seen anything like this, Bode?”

“Nope, never, not me, not even after they drop smoke, you know?” As soon as the fog swallowed them, Bode had taken his foot off the accelerator, but the Dodge still thrummed, the engine having settled down to a steady rattle. He took a sniff and grimaced. “Smells weird. Not like phosphorus or how napalm stinks when it’s cooking off. Like burnt diesel.”

“Naw. This smells like”—Chad’s blade of a nose wrinkled—“like, you know, blood. And I don’t mean cooked neither, like from an explosion, but fresh. Man, I don’t know what this shit is.”

“Do you?” Shifting his gaze to his rearview mirror, Bode saw two faces: Eric’s, pinched with strain but intent, and the blasted ruin no one else could see that was Sergeant Battle. He said to Battle, “You know what’s going on, Sarge?”

Got some ideas. Battle’s face twisted, but given that half the sergeant’s head was blown apart, his left eye dragged on his cheek, and his brains slopped over his neck in a wormy pink goo, Bode couldn’t be sure if Battle was frowning—or cracking a grin. None of ’em you’re going to care for.

“Yeah?” Bode eyed the white world beyond the Dodge. He really couldn’t tell whether they were still on the snow, on a road, or hanging in midair. The truck was nowhere—and nowhere was deep within the fog, which boiled and curdled and rushed by in dense clots. He understood the Dodge wasn’t going anywhere and only the fog was moving, but the optical illusion was disorienting, like sitting by a train’s window as another train the next track over pulled from the station. “Well, I don’t much know if I care for what’s going on now. You want to give me the straight dope?”

Wouldn’t believe me if I told you.

“Try me,” Bode said.

You’re not ready to hear it yet. The mortar had chunked a blast crater just above the sergeant’s left ear, so that when Battle shook his head, Bode saw straight through to the fog. The view reminded him of peering out the murky window of a Huey flying low and NOE, nap-of-the-earth, through the tangles of a jungle’s early morning mist. Same way you didn’t listen outside that honky-tonk. Told you to let it go, but no … you just had to pull that trigger.

“Let it go? Let it go? Oh, that would’ve turned out really great.” Bode snorted. “Sorry, Sarge, but a court-martial wasn’t in my plans.”

If they catch you, son, it’s the firing squad for sure. You’re supposed to kill the enemy, not your LT.

Yeah, yeah. The problem was, Sarge couldn’t know what it was like to be Bode. The man was dead, after all, and what did ghosts know about being haunted? Bode could mute Battle’s voice with drugs. In ’Nam, there’d been pot and hash and Binoctal and booze, but opium was best, Bode’s consciousness floating away and Battle’s face pulling apart on a cloud of sweet-smelling smoke. Stateside, opium dens were scarce, but you could score all kinds of drugs if you had the dough and knew where to look and who to ask. Things got dicey, though, when your prick of a lieutenant followed you into a bar and threatened to turn you in.

From the backseat, Eric said to Bode, “Well, we can’t just sit here. As crazy as this sounds, we got to get moving. The others are still out here.”

“Where you want to go, huh?” Chad flapped a hand toward the windscreen. “How? Inquiring minds want to know.”

“Maybe we could check how far ahead we can really see,” Eric said.

“Yeah, you go right ahead, be my guest.” Chad was pick-pick-picking at his mouth sore again. “I ain’t going out in that. I say we sit tight, wait it out. Shit’s got to go away sometime. Just gotta, you know, wait for the sun to burn it off.”

“Forgetting for the moment that less than a half hour ago, it was night,” Eric said, “I don’t think that’s too likely, Chad. This isn’t any kind of regular fog. You saw how it came after us. It ran us down.”

“Yeah, thanks, I was there. So what are you saying?” Chad twisted his head around to scowl at Eric. “You saying it’s alive? Like it ate us for food or something?”

In the rearview, Bode saw Eric glance askance, as if searching for the right words. “No.” And when Eric looked back, Bode read the dread. “But it wants us for something.” Eric’s darkly blue eyes searched out Bode’s. “You feel it, right?”

“No,” Bode said, uneasy. For a kid he’d only just met, Bode still trusted this devil dog; felt as if they shared something in common besides uniforms. “What do you feel?”

“You’re listening to this guy?” Chad demanded.

“This”—Eric bunched a fist over his chest—“pull. Like something’s digging in, trying to hang on or get a hold. I’m not really sure.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet. You,” Chad said, “are so frigging stunned, man. Got yourself into some el Diablo, you ask me.”

“What?”

Listen to the devil dog, Battle said to Bode. You know he’s right.

Bode frowned. “But Sarge, Chad’s also right. I don’t feel anything like what Eric’s saying.”

That’s because he’s got more of a connection. He’s not set the way you are.

“Set?” What did that mean? “Connection? Sarge, connection to what?”

Not what. Battle raised the charcoal smudge of his remaining eyebrow. Who.

“All I’m saying is, I think we need to get moving.” Eric licked his lips. “And we need to do it now, before the fog decides for us.”

Chad opened his mouth to object, but Bode said, “Yeah, it’s not a bad idea. I hate just sitting on my ass, waiting for something to happen. Here.” Bode reached across Chad, pawed open the glove compartment, and pulled out a flashlight. “You take that, Eric, see how far you—” He broke off as the Dodge’s engine suddenly revved.

“Man, what are you doing?” Chad said.

“Nothing, I’m not doing anything. My foot’s not even on the gas.” Bode stamped the brake. “We’re just—”

“Starting to move,” Eric said.

He was right. The Dodge hitched and staggered, the wheels seeming to spin on ice—or thin air, Bode thought—and then the tires found and caught on something, as if a road had suddenly materialized, making itself out of the fog. The Dodge started to roll, the tires beginning to hum, and the hum rising to a steady high note.

“Well, do something, man!” Chad braced himself as the Dodge picked up speed. “Try the emergency brake, try—”

You can’t stop this, Battle said. It’s using you, gathering you together. It’s forcing her to try and pull you through onto the same White Space.

“What? Who?” Bode asked Battle. “Try what? What the hell’s White Space?”

“You can’t fight it.” Eric’s hand closed over Bode’s shoulder. “The fog won’t let us stop. We’re being pulled toward something for a reason. I feel it, this …”

“Tug,” Bode said, because he felt it now, an insistent finger hooked in the meat of his brain. “In my head.”

“You guys serious?” Chad looked from Bode to Eric and back again. “You’re serious. I don’t feel anything, except like I might take a dump in my pants, man.”

Eric ignored him. “Bode, please, give me a weapon. The shotgun, the rifle, I don’t care, but give me something and do it now.”

“What?” Bode asked. “Why?”

“So I can fight.” Eric’s skin was so dead white he seemed a creature spun of fog. “So I can kill whatever this place makes next.”

CASEY AND RIMA Look at Her Face

1

HANG ON. TOO far away to help when he’d spotted the man-thing breaking into the snowcat’s passenger cabin, Casey was closer now, running as fast as he could, grimacing at the grab and tear in his chest, trying to look everywhere at once, the pain stinging his veins. Thirty more yards, twenty, ten …

A howl blasted from the passenger cabin, followed by a shriek. No, God, please. “Rima!” Hooking one bloodstained hand on the jamb, he wheeled round and onto the steps, and then he was bursting through, bringing the shotgun to bear. “Rima! Get—”

The thing barreled into him. Crashing to the metal floor, Casey screamed as a swoop of pain churned through his chest. He made an instinctive move to cover up, protect himself, raise the shotgun, but the thing swatted the weapon away. Before he could do anything to save himself, the thing clamped its powerful hands around his throat and dug in.

No! Panicked, pulse galloping, fingers scrabbling for purchase over furry knuckles, Casey surged, tried bucking the man-thing off, but it was too heavy, and he was only sixteen, not very tall, and already hurt. The thing was shaking him hard enough that the back of his head thunked and clunked and bounced on metal. Losing it … His arms were going as limp as overdone noodles. Wavering blood-spiders unfurled in front of his eyes, his vision going blotchy before suddenly squeezing down to a pinprick: red spangles going to black, diminishing to a single bright speck, like the end of a very long tunnel. The world muted, flattened, and he thought, stupidly, of that deadening fog. And then even that was slipping away, and Casey saw nothing, couldn’t hear anything other than the feeble thump of his heart, and that was dying, too.

But then … something happened. He felt the thing jerk, but the sensation was very far away, a whisper that his brain didn’t seem to have the will or energy to hang on to. Another jerk, a faraway flop, the way a fish struggled to free itself from a hook.

All of a sudden, the pressure around his neck was gone.

He wasn’t thinking anymore, didn’t know what was going on. What happened next was instinct, reflex. He heard, very dimly, a tortured, wheezy caw, the rasping cry of a bird fighting the jaws of a cat with the last of its strength. A razor of cold air sliced his throat. In the next instant, his chest exploded a bright hot burn as his tortured lungs struggled to inflate. Casey’s eyes snapped open, unseeing, his vision still blinkered, patchy, and molten, and he began to retch. Gawping, he managed another stinging, croaking bird’s caw of a breath, and another—and then, above the thunder of blood in his ears, he made out a very strange sound: a hollow, dull thuck!

Running over pumpkins. The thought was hazy, hard to hang on to, like trying to cup a fine mist. Running over pumpkins on Halloween.

2

“AH!” RIMA SWUNG again, with both hands, bringing the hammer whizzing down. Its black claw whickered, cleaving air. She’d gotten it between the shoulders the first time and was aiming for the head now, but even hurt and surprised, the thing was fast. At the last second, it flinched away, and she missed, the claw whizzing past, pulling her off-balance. She stumbled, her right knee banging into an equipment locker. Gasping against a starburst of pain, she caught herself on her hands, the hammer gripped in her right hitting the lid with a dull clank. To her left, the man-thing let out a huge bellow that she felt, blasting over her back and humming through metal.

Stand up, get up! But she already knew she was too late. She was turned around, facing the wrong way. From the corner of her left eye, she saw the thing rearing up, large as a mountain. Shifting the hammer to her left hand, she put her weight into it, whipping the hammer around and up in a vicious slice.

The creature never saw it coming, and then, in the next instant, it couldn’t, at least not from that left eye. Rima felt the bone give as the claw slammed into the ridge above the socket. Gravity and momentum did the rest. Snagged on shattered bone and soft tissue, the claw tore out the socket. The eye burst in a sludgy spray of gelatinous yellow muck. Bawling with rage and new pain, the thing reeled, pawing at the ruin as snot-colored goo slithered down its snout.

She cringed back from the mess. She couldn’t help it; it was automatic, a reflexive moment of disgust and horror; and so she didn’t understand her mistake until a half second too late—because the thing still had that one good eye.

With a roar, the man-thing drove its fist, hard and fast as a piston. The blow slammed just above the bridge of her nose, and pain detonated in her forehead to spread in molten fingers. It felt like he’d broken every bone in her face. Her mind skipped a beat, and she stumbled, her consciousness suddenly slewing to one side like a car sliding off an icy cliff.

Stay with it. Fight. But her hand was empty. Hammer … dropped it …

Another blow, solid as a battering ram, drove into her belly, punching out her breath and what was left of her strength. Doubling over, trying to pull air into lungs that would not obey, she simply crumpled.

Get up. She knew her feet were moving, but only in a useless shuffle. Her head felt as if someone had buried the business end of an ax in her skull. Her grudging lungs balked. C’mon, get up, get—

There was a sudden blinding flash of yellow light, firecracker-bright, as a deafening ba-ROOM filled the cab. The blast was so strong she felt it shiver through the deck and into her teeth.

The thing’s chest erupted in a liquid black halo. An oily rain of blood and mangled flesh sheeted over the walls and fell on Rima in a viscous shower. For a moment, she was too stunned to do anything, much less understand. The roar had been replaced by a muzzy, muffled hoosh, like water rushing past her ears. But then she felt something: a slick creep along her skin, a worming sensation over her clothes, eeling through her hair.

“Ahhh!” Rima clawed her way to her feet. To her left, the man-thing splayed, its chest replaced by a huge crater of obliterated bone and tissue. Frantic, she began swatting at the mucky bits of the monster’s flesh squirming over her chest and arms and hair. “Get off, get off, get them off!”

Through the hoosh, she heard someone say, “Rima, what is it?” Then: “Casey, are you … Jesus, what the hell?”

Still disoriented, she turned a wild look. An older boy, with dark hair and eerie blue eyes, crouched in the entrance to the passenger cab. Openmouthed, the boy stared at the wriggling bits and shivering globules of black blood. “My God, its chest,” the boy said. “It’s moving.”

“Re-repairing it-itself.” Her voice felt rusty, her tongue thick. From where she stood, Rim could see strings of the thing’s chest muscles nosing and then coiling together. Closing her eyes against a bolt of nausea, she pressed her trembling lips together and gulped against the sudden acid bite on her tongue. Something squiggled on her thigh, and she swatted it away in a fast sideswipe. The black slug of muscle sailed across the cabin to hit the far wall with a moist splot. For a second, it clung there, trembling as if trying to clear its head, before beginning a slow slither toward a neighboring splotch. She turned aside with a shudder. “Just like Father P-Preston.”

“Who?” Shotgun still in hand, the older boy was helping Casey ease to a sit against an equipment locker. “What’s going on? What is this thing?”

“D-don’t know.” Groaning, Casey clamped an arm to his left side. “My th-throat f-feels broken,” he croaked. “H-hurts to … ahhh!” He threw his head back as the other boy probed his chest, and Rima saw a necklace of purple-black bruises ringing Casey’s neck. “God, Eric, d-don’t.”

Eric. Of course, his name is Eric. He and Casey are brothers. She put a hand up to her throbbing forehead and felt the beginnings of a knot. Why couldn’t I remember? What’s wrong with me?

“I’m sorry, Case,” Eric said, calmly enough, although Rima saw a ripple of fear as the older boy touched a gentle hand to Casey’s bruised jaw. “My God, what happened to your face? Can you walk?”

“Y-yeah. It’s a long story.” Wincing, Casey backhanded a trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth. “Where’s Emma? How did you guys find us?”

“She’s back at this farmhouse we found. The fog pulled us here, me and these two guys out in the truck …” Eric made a face. “That sounds pretty nuts.”

“No, it doesn’t. Fog got us, too,” Casey said, then looked up as Rima dropped to her knees by his side. “Rima, are you … God, you’re hurt.”

“I’m fine.” She covered his hand with hers. An impulse, not something she really thought about, but which, once done, felt entirely right. “Thank you for coming, for not letting that thing g-get …”

“Would never l-let that happen.” His eyes fastened on hers, and she could feel a slow flush working its way up her neck. He turned his hand over, palm up, and gave her fingers a squeeze. “Tania?”

“Who?” Eric asked.

“Oh God.” She felt a pang of guilt. In all the commotion, she’d forgotten. Hurriedly pushing to her feet, she edged past the thing, sparing it a swift sidelong glance, then stopped dead and gave a much longer stare.

“What?” Eric was there in an instant. “What is … oh shit.”

“Yeah,” she breathed against a clutch of dawning dread. A moist mesh of fresh connective tissue had already formed; a toothy cage of remodeled bone arced over a gray sponge of new lung. Whips of thickening muscle waggled, and she swore she saw that thing’s left hand convulse in a sudden spasm.

“I think we’re out of here, now,” Eric said, and moved to help Casey make his feet. “What about your friend? Is she …?”

“Just a second.” Dead ahead, the pudding that remained of Father Preston was still SMEE-smeeing over the windscreen. She wondered what they could possibly be rebuilding themselves into. The snowcat’s auger had chopped the priest to hamburger. Could all those pieces be finding their way back together again? How could you kill something that kept regrowing like those nematodes Rima had sliced and diced in eighth-grade science?

Betcha fire would do it. Steeling herself, she worked her way around the driver’s side transmission box. Cook those suckers.

Then she forgot all that, pushed it away as irrelevant, when she got a good look at Tania’s face. The girl’s skin was the color of cottage cheese, and her lids drooped, the whites showing in half-moons. Her ruined right arm was dusky, and her lips were purple. She wasn’t breathing. Blood saturated her clothing and had gathered in a crimson lake on Tania’s seat, spilling over into the foot well.

“Rima?” Casey called.

“Just … just give me a second.” She closed her eyes against the prick of tears. Come on; do what you have to. Steeling herself, she opened her eyes, blew out a hard breath, then touched her fingers to the angle of Tania’s jaw below her left ear.

A second later, over the sudden slam of her heart, she heard Casey: “Rima?” When she didn’t answer, Eric said, more sharply, “Rima, what’s wrong?”

“Oh my God,” she said. “Look at her face.”

RIMA Doomsday Sky

1

RIMA! RIMA! SOMEONE … Casey … was shouting, and now another voice, Eric’s, joined his, both boys screaming from the back of the passenger cab and a million miles away: Rima, get down, get down, get out of the way!

But she couldn’t move. She was beyond shock, into deepfreeze. Her body was icy, numb, like that little kid with the splinters of an evil mirror in his heart and eyes; a child fit only for the world of the Snow Queen. Rooted in place, she could only stare at Tania, her face, her neck, and if she thought at all in those first few seconds, it wasn’t in words so much as sensations: the skip of her heart, the slickness of new alien blood on her fingers, the hard scent of iron and blasted flesh and spent gunpowder, the airless dead space in her lungs as they emptied.

And the boys, of course, still screaming from so far away: Rima, Rima, get down!

Tania’s throat and face were moving, not twitching but undulating and worming as something eeled just beneath the surface, the suddenly elastic skin puffing and then deflating, over and over again, as if Tania were growing gills. Trickles of black leaked from the dead girl’s nose and dribbled out of both ears. Fat, ebony pearls swelled from the half-moons of her eyes. A deep ripple worked its way across Tania’s face from right to left, from one cheek to the opposite, skimming under and lifting Tania’s lips as if the girl were dragging a thick, fleshy tongue over and around her teeth.

Tania’s mouth suddenly sagged, the jaws unlocking—and at that, Rima’s brain eked a single, small oh. Then she blanked, her mind blinkering white with terror as a nightmare of legs, jointed and bristled as a tarantula’s, unfurled from Tania’s lips like the spiky petals of an alien rose. Deep in the heart of this bizarre flower, two sets of long, pointed fangs clashed, working from side to side like a spider’s mandibles, grating together with a coarse rasp, like the grind of metal files.

Rima felt a crack of horror, like a jag of lightning, scorch through her mind to burn from her mouth in a high, terrified scream as Tania’s eyes snapped open. The whites were a jet-black sea of hemorrhage. The pupils belonged to a lizard, a snake, the vertical slits narrowing as Tania let go of a shrill, chittering squeal.

“Rima!” There came a hard jolt as someone crashed into her from behind, a solid body blow that knocked her to one side. Panicked, taken by surprise, she flailed, but Casey grabbed her arms and then he was bullying her back, slamming her flat against a far wall, covering her up, using his weight to hold her in place, screaming, “Shoot! Shoot it, Eric, shoot it!”

The cab flooded with bright yellow light, and the roar from the shotgun was so huge Rima thought her eardrums would explode. The blast punched whatever Tania had become in the chest, but it wasn’t like the movies. Instead of flying back, Tania, who also had a new gaping hole where her heart used to be, blundered back to crash against the cat’s transmission box. But she didn’t go down, not the way the man-thing had. Still pinned, Rima watched as Tania made a left-handed grab, steadied herself against a seat, and pulled upright. Another roar from the shotgun, and all of a sudden a spool of guts boiled in wet spaghetti tangles. This time, Tania lost her feet, coming down hard and with a sodden splash. Almost at once, she rolled onto hands and knees and then clawed her way upright again.

“Jesus,” she heard Casey say, his voice catching with pain, and she realized just how much wrestling her out of the line of fire had cost him. Slick with sweat, he was panting, his breaths shallow, his stormy eyes wide with shock. “Look at how fast.”

She saw. The damage to Tania’s chest and abdomen was already repairing itself, the tissues knitting together at a ferocious rate, so fast the skin seemed to boil. The entire interior of the cabin was now alive with squirming tissue, creeping blood. On the deck, she saw the man-thing shudder with a fresh convulsion and thought they had only a few seconds left.

“Case! Rima! Now!” Eric was suddenly there, expression taut. He hooked a hand under Casey’s arm. “Shotgun’s dry. You’re out, too, Case. Come on, we go to go.”

Of course, the guns are out of ammunition. She darted a look at Tania, who was setting her feet. The hole in her chest was gone, and as Rima watched, the last loop of intestine, not pink or white or blue but smoky gray, was sucked back in the way a kid slurped up that last juicy noodle. Even Tania’s nearly severed arm was stitching back into place. Eric and Case could pump out shots all day, maybe even make oatmeal out of Tania’s head and brains, and the end result would be the same. As she crowded after Eric and Casey, she half-expected the jittering man-thing to grab her by the ankle, but she swept past and then she was out, bolting from the cabin, hopping to the snow, running from the nightmare. Wondering if the fog would let them go.

2

“THIS WAY!” A boy’s voice, coming from her left. Turning, she spotted a rust-red truck, its gray-white exhaust pluming in the still, frigid air. Eric and Casey were nearly there already, although Casey was listing now, leaning heavily against his brother. Two other boys stood on the running boards. One, so lanky and thin he was like the slash of an exclamation point, hoisted a rifle in the air one-handed, like a cavalry commander ordering a retreat. “Over here, come on, come on!”

Rima sprinted for the truck. Above the shriek of her breath, she heard the birds, still crowding the dome of the sky, but the grating, mechanical clacks of their cries seemed closer than before. Flicking a quick glance, she heard herself gasp, and for a second, she actually faltered and slowed. Maybe it was an illusion, but was the sky lower? She thought so. It felt as if the glowering, inky sky was beginning to crouch and crowd down. Or perhaps there were only more crows whizzing back and forth, coming together in darker clots before unwinding in screaming spirals to sweep over the trees—where, she saw, the fog huddled. Drawing down the death, she thought, not really understanding what that meant but knowing it was true because the death-whispers she’d sensed before were still gone, taken away when the crows spumed from the snow.

“Come on, come on, move it!” The wiry kid who’d called was already dropping into the passenger seat. “We got to boogie!”

Running out of time. Tearing her gaze from the crows winging over that doomsday sky, she got herself moving. But her chest was fizzing with panic, suddenly filled with a terrible foreboding. The space of this place was being closed up, pinched off, extinguished the way an upended jar smothered a flame.

Eric had just slotted in the two empty shotguns and was helping Casey clamber through the back passenger’s side door, so she rounded the nose for the opposite side. She wheeled around the back door just as the driver craned a look—and she almost screamed. Because this was another boy she already knew, had met before, and she thought now as she had then: What are you?

“Get in!” Then a look of shock swept through the boy’s face, and Bode’s mouth unhinged. “Whoa. What the hell, what are you doing here?”

She almost said, Trying not to die, but the lanky kid—Chad, she remembered now—interrupted. “Oh shit.” She looked and saw Chad staring back the way she had just come. “Aw, Jesus,” Chad said.

From his place directly behind Chad, Eric said, “What?” Rima saw his head snap a look, and then his body stiffen. “Oh God. Bode. Bode?”

“Yeah.” Bode’s tone was grim. “I see them.”

So, now, did Rima. Tania was on the snow and so was the man-thing Eric had shot. Instead of coming for them, both Tania and the man-thing were heading toward those distant woods, and she thought back to Father Preston’s lightning dash. Tania and the man-thing weren’t exactly running; even half-mended monsters must have a few residual aches and pains. But they weren’t tottering, shambling zombies either. Still, hit the gas, and the truck would leave them in the dust, no sweat.

The problem was … how the hell to outrun the others.

RIMA Think My Hand

THE DENSE WOODS beyond Tania and the man-thing and the stalled snowcat, and over which the fog brooded, were alive with creatures—hundreds, thousands streaming from the trees. They were like the crows that had bulleted out of the snow, and Rima watched, stupefied, as they joined into broad, sweeping formations, spreading out to flank the truck like an army. They were a wall, a tidal wave of death, and all the more terrible because they came in absolute silence.

“Rima!” Casey grabbed her wrist and pulled. She tumbled in, and then Casey was reaching past her, dragging the door shut with a chuck as Chad screamed, “Go, Bode!”

“We’re gone!” Bode hammered the gas, the sudden acceleration throwing Rima back against her seat as the Dodge surged forward with a throaty vaROOOMMM. But Rima felt the change almost instantly, after less than twenty feet: how the truck balked and tripped and stumbled, as if they’d hopped onto railroad tracks by mistake. After another moment, the Dodge bogged down even more, suddenly churning what felt like taffy, the tires miring in deep snow that had been as solid as ice only two seconds ago.

“What the …” Cursing, Bode butted the stick into first and gunned the engine. This time the Dodge jolted forward by less than a foot.

“Aw, Christ,” Chad said. “Look, right under us. Look what’s happening to the goddamned snow.”

Rima plastered her face to the window glass and peered down. The snow was no longer unbroken or a vast white expanse but seamed with jagged cracks growing wider by the second. Yet a quick glance past Eric and toward the trees showed the snow there to be intact and unchanged. Beneath the truck, more splits appeared and the seams became ruts that rapidly filled with gelatinous ooze, like lava bubbling from the deep heart of a volcano. Except this lava was black and boiled up so quickly, it overflowed and began to spread over the snow in a tarry lake. It didn’t seem to be hot, but Rima thought it was the fog’s dark twin: quivering and molten, sucking at the truck’s tires to hold it fast. Looking back across Casey and Eric, she saw the creatures still coming, but now those fissures and cracks in the snow were spreading out, stretching in jagged fingers.

We’re the focal point. It’s all centered on us. It was as if they were the spider spinning a fractured web. Above the woods, the birds were still drawing down in an obsidian curtain, blacking the sky, shutting the lid on this day, this place, their lives. We’re causing this, making it happen. But how?

“Bode, do something. Get us moving!” Chad screamed. “The things are almost here, man, they’re almost here!”

But they may not be able to get to us. Rima saw that, further away, the snow seemed to be pulsing, the swells widening in ripples like a pond after you heaved in a heavy stone. Like Tania’s face, her neck. She eyed a swell, saw how fast it raced under the snow. Even at this distance, she could see Tania, who’d now linked up with the creatures, stagger.

“Can’t!” Bode yanked the truck’s gearshift, dropping them into first and pumping the accelerator, fighting the black lava’s grab, trying to rock them the way you might try to jump a car out of a deep rut. The truck’s engine whined, its growl rising to a high howl, and still they were only crawling over the snow, going nowhere fast. Now Rima could smell something burning. The pistons, the engine block itself—it didn’t matter.

“Is there anything we can do?” Eric asked, tensely. “Bode?”

“I got nothing, man,” Bode said, tersely, teeth bared. Sweat beaded on his forehead. “We’re sitting ducks. I don’t know what else I can do. I’ll keep fighting this hunka junk, but …” There was another tremendous grind of gears. “How you and your brother set for ammo?”

“My gun’s dry,” Eric said. “Case is out, too.”

“Which leaves the Winchester with five”—the Dodge bucked as Bode fought the stick—“and eight in the Colt. Plenty to go around.”

“Plenty? Aw, man, you crazy?” Chad moaned. He’d clapped both hands to his head. “Thirteen measly shots or thirteen hundred, there are too many of them, man.”

“He’s not talking about enough bullets for them,” Eric said.

There was a moment’s trembling silence, which the birds’ shrills filled, as the Dodge’s engine muttered a basso counterpoint. “Oh no,” Chad finally said, shaking his head. “Bode, you are out of your mind. If you think I’m gonna eat a bullet …”

“Better than them eating you,” Bode said.

“We’re not there just yet,” Eric said.

But we will be soon. Rima felt Casey’s hand find hers. “Do you know what’s happening?” he asked.

She shook her head. But God, she thought this might be her fault. She knew Tania; she knew about Father Preston, the church. And for a while, that world was so real, as if she had pulled something together out of her mind, or memory, or both, knitting a world as surely as those creatures could remake and mend their flesh.

Then stop this. She closed her eyes. Please, Fog, or whatever you are … please stop or show me how. Even if I have to stay. Please. She pushed out the thought as hard as she could, wondering if there really was anything to hear it. Let the others go. I don’t want Casey to die.

“Hey, hey.” She opened her eyes to find Casey staring, her hand clutching his in a death grip. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t let go.”

“Casey.” She swallowed. “I think …”

“Guys?” Eric broke in. “Look.”

About fifty yards away and all around them, the creatures were at a dead stop, gathered in a silent, milling throng at the edge of that advancing flood of coal-colored goo. Rima could see Tania pacing back and forth, looking for a way across, as the black tide lapped and gurgled around her ankles. Several of the man-things were actually backing away, and most were stumbling as the snow continued to fracture.

“Man, you know,” Chad said, “if it’s not hurting them, maybe be better to take our chances.”

“I wouldn’t base anything on what happens to them,” Eric said. “I blew holes in that girl and she—”

All of a sudden, Tania let out a bawling screech so loud it cut through and over the birds’ cries. Rima heard herself gasp as Tania gave a sudden, violent lurch, as if she’d been grabbed around the ankles. Her hands flew up as she dropped, straight down, the dark liquid instantly closing over her head.

“Jesus,” Bode said. “Like quicksand.”

“No, it’s too fast,” Casey said. Outside, more and more of the creatures had wheeled around to try and run, but what was left of the snow was breaking apart under their feet, the surface crumbling and collapsing. Silent before, the creatures now brayed in rusty barks. Black sludge steamrolled over the snow in a remorseless juggernaut, slopping over and slurping up the white. The crazed, ravening birds were so low now, they swarmed directly overhead, thick as blowflies over dead meat. “They’re not sinking,” Casey said. “It’s like they’re being pulled back.”

“Or down,” Eric said. “Like something’s grabbing—” He broke off as a violent shudder vibrated through the truck. “Oh boy. Bode, Bode.”

Chad’s eyes bugged. “What the hell?”

“Oh God,” Rima said, and then screamed as the vehicle suddenly jolted downward, canting at a crazy angle. “It’s happening to us.”

“We’re sinking!” Chad braced himself against the dash. “Jesus, it’s got us, we’re sinking, we’re sinking!”

“Can you get us moving, Bode?” Rima said. The boy shook his head, and, as the truck rose, Rima’s stomach swooped, then tried cramming behind her teeth as they plummeted on the other side of a swell. “Then what do we do?”

“I know what I’m doing!” Chad popped his door. “Bode, we got to go, we got to go, we got to go go go!”

“No, Chad!” Bode and Eric screamed at the same time. “Chad, stop!” Bode shouted. “You can’t go out there!”

“Well, I’m not dying in here!” Chad shouted, and then he was flinging himself out of the truck.

“Get him!” Rima shrilled, even as Chad tumbled out. She tried springing over the backseat, but Casey grabbed her waist and held her back. “Casey, no, we have to get him! Bode, don’t let it touch him, don’t let it—”

But Chad was out. The moment his feet hit the churning black, Chad … didn’t sink. The surface actually stilled, as if it were holding itself steady in order to make sense of this strange new taste. Maybe I was wrong. Still hunched up against the Dodge’s ceiling, with Casey’s hands battened onto her waist, Rima stared as Chad cautiously straightened. Maybe it will let him go. Maybe it senses that we’re different.

Then she saw how the surface shuddered, just a bit, and what echoed through her mind then wasn’t a sight but a sound: that squeaking, wet-fingers SMEE-smee of Father Preston’s meat inching over glass. “Chad!” she said.

“H-hey,” Chad exhaled, as if suddenly realizing what he’d just done. Turning, he looked back and spread his arms. “L-look, man, it’s coo—”

Flashing out from the murk, a black tendril shot out like the sticky tongue of a chameleon unfurling to snatch a moth on the fly. Chad shrieked as it roped around his left leg.

“Chad!” Bode bawled.

“God, get it off, get it off!” Chad wailed, struggling to pull himself free. His clothes were cooking, the steam rising not in white but black curls. As he bent to snatch at the black tongue around his leg, another spun out to wind around his right wrist. “JESUS GOD!” Chad threw back his head in an agonized scream. The first tentacle had coiled all the way up his leg to his groin, and Chad’s pants were shredding, dissolving to threads. The flesh of both his left leg and right arm began to bubble, as if Chad were a plastic bag filled with water reaching the boiling point. Then, all of a sudden, fountains of blood jetted in pulsing red ropes from where the flesh had been burned, and Chad let go of a wild shriek: “Bode, it’s burning, it’s burning, IT’S EATING ME!”

Of them all, it was Eric who reacted first. “Oh my God, oh my God.” He swept Rima out of the way and scrambled into Chad’s seat. “Chad, Chad, grab my hand, grab it!”

“Eric!” Letting go of Rima, Casey lunged for his brother, and just in the nick of time, because Bode, wide-eyed and ashen, was still paralyzed, seemingly unable to move. As if sensing what Eric meant to do, the inky tarn gave a mighty heave, and the truck dropped again with another stomach-churning lurch. Off-balance, only inches from the open door, Eric pitched forward. With a yell, Casey made a snatching grab, hooking Eric’s waistband, and then he was working his way up Eric’s back, hugging Eric in a tight embrace. “I got you, but hurry, Eric, hurry!”

“Chad!” Eric had stretched himself on the seat until his chest hung over the pulsing muck, now less than a foot from his face. Maybe a taste of Chad was all it had needed, because the black goo had morphed into a writhing sea of muscular, ropy tentacles that coiled over and around Chad to burn into his skin and draw out his blood. Everywhere they stung Chad, fresh black steam smoked, drifting up in an inky cloud toward the birds, which were so close and thick, it was as if they were all that was left of a sky.

“Chad!” Eric shouted again, and thrust out both hands, straining as far as he could. “Chad, grab my hands, give me your hands!”

Saturated with blood, blind with pain, his skin steaming and bubbling and tearing open, Chad tried. He was crumpling now, not sinking so much as being eaten alive, dissolved in a vat of black acid, but his left arm was still free. Twisting, Chad made a frantic grab—and missed.

“No!” Eric shouted. Rima thought he would have leapt from the truck if not for Casey and now Bode, who finally seemed to have snapped out of it, was dragging back on Casey to keep them both from falling. “Chad,” Eric screamed. “Chad!”

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?”

RIMA The Thickness of a Single Molecule

1

“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

2

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 …