White Space

EMMA Elizabeth

1

“ELIZABETH.” A SLIGHT buzz to the z. Whoever this man was, he had a lisp, so the name seemed to have been mouthed by a rattlesnake: Elisssabess. A pause. “Elizabeth?”

“Wh-what?” The word burred on her tongue, slow and hesitant. She sounded like a Little Mommy My Very Real Baby Doll with a faulty motherboard. Or HAL, from 2001, getting his memory banks yanked. “Whaaat?”

The same man said, “Elizabeth, is that you? Can you hear me?”

“H-hear?” She felt the sounds as much as she heard them, a kind of fading in and out, there and gone, as if her brain were an ancient radio and she had to feather the knob to get the scratchy broadcast bounced halfway around the world to gel. She realized, belatedly, that she was standing. Swaying, actually. Worn wool chafed her bare feet. A sheet, or maybe a very long nightgown, clung to her legs, chest, and back. Her skin, hot and damp, smelled sour, and her lank hair reeked of sweat and grime. Bad dream? Her chest, her stomach, the inside of her skull … felt very strange: flat and hollow, a limp glove of a girl—all skin, no innards. The last time she’d felt this wan and washed-out was when she was ten and coming out of anesthesia after the surgeons put in her plates. Then, her mind had slowly bled back into her body, the blood inching through to plump up arteries and veins and the pink sponge of her brain and guts, the way air leaked into the nooks and crannies of a deflated Macy’s Day Parade balloon. I’ve been sick? Where was she?

“Who’s Eliz … I’m …” She lost the thread of the question and her answer, the words unraveling on her tongue. Her head ached. Eyes watering with pain, she tried to bring the world into focus, but it was foggy and fuzzy, a chaotic blur seen through a broken kaleidoscope, the colored bits of glass refusing to arrange themselves into patterns. The only thing she recognized with any clarity was a yawning chasm, an inky hole at the center of her vision. The edges of the gap wavered, as if the world around it was only an uncertain outline and just now on the verge of becoming.

That must be the way I came in. She was in a new Now? The hard eye of her titanium skull plate burned. Wincing, she pressed the heel of her left hand to her forehead, then heard herself drag in a sickly gasp. No gash. She pressed harder, her fingers searching through muscle and skin. Wait a minute, where’s—

“Now, now, are you in pain?” A different voice, female, much clearer, the static starting to fade. The words were clipped, a little dry. “Another of your headaches?”

Oh God. Her heart iced. Was there an accent? No, you’re imagining things; this is House, up to its old tricks. With a fresh blast of panic, she pressed harder, using the fingers of her left hand and the heel of her right because she was … clutching something, a pen or stick or maybe a fork. She couldn’t tell, but for whatever reason, she didn’t relax her grip; felt as if that was the wrong thing to do. Where is it, where is it? It had to be there. She felt the plate burning in her mind. Give her a pen and she could ink its exact margins, every curve, even where the screws were. But under her fingers there was only skin and muscle and bone.

No plate. How can that be? I feel it. Gasping, she fought a rising tide of black horror as she ran her fingers over the rest of her scalp. No scars. But I had them just a few seconds ago.

“Elizabeth? You are there, yes?” The guy with the whisper-man lisp again, right in front, behind that hole in her vision. God, if she hadn’t just seen the thing die—with Eric and Casey and Rima, and Eric, oh Eric—she’d have sworn she pulled that monster through with her. “Come now, no need for a fuss. Let’s all be calm, shall we?”

Calm? Oh, that was a good one. “Wh-where …” Her mouth tasted awful, like she could scrape mold off her tongue. “Where am I?”

“Oh my, disoriented again”—although, from her tone, the woman sounded more put-out than sympathetic. “Poor dear.”

“Doctor, I thought you said she was well enough to withstand this.” A second man: older, gruffer, with a note of impatient authority. “You assured me mesmeric interventions would help, not hinder our work. This is the best you can do?”

Mesmeric. She knew that word, an old-fashioned term. He means hypnosis.

“Thus far, what you’ve obtained is nothing but fantastical fabrications: ravings of doubles, body-snatching, animism.” Gruff sounded disgusted. “What good your work if nothing you unearth is of the slightest merit? I’ve murders to investigate, and she is the only living link. I need what she knows, what is locked in the stronghold of her mind, Sir, not the hysterical rants of a lunatic.”

“Please do recall that she has refused or purged herself of her medicines,” the first man said, the one who could’ve doubled for the whisper-man. “Even if the Lunacy Commission gives us license in these extreme times, we are doctors, not barbarians.”

Extreme times? Doctors? Lunacy? The words kicked, as if someone had planted a boot in her back and given her a hard shove. She felt the sudden slam of recognition and memory, and then it was as if the machinery of her mind whirred into overdrive. The world firmed, that dark mote at the center of her vision cleared, and everything rushed to a crisp, colorful, painful focus.

Oh shit. She felt her legs trying to fold. I’m back.

2

THE GALLERY WAS both the same and very different. Above, the whitewashed iron plates of that strange ceiling stretched not to a dead end but a T junction. Ceiling-mounted gas lamps hissed, and the light from wall sconces, mounted high on dingy, soot-stained walls, was yellow and too bright. The hall itself was long and very stark, with no pictures, bric-a-brac, or floral arrangements, and only a few stuffed birds, like the snowy, still cockatoo poised on a branch made of wire and covered with coarse brown cloth, trapped under a bell jar on a small table to her right. Every door was closed and locked, but she could hear the muffled cries and shouts of the others on this and every floor, a continual background yammer that steamed through iron grilles set low. The smell was right, but much stronger: a choking fug of overflowing toilets, unwashed skin, and old vomit.

They ranged before her as they had when House whisked her here, but with a few differences. While Nurse Graves, rigid as a post and decked out in her navy blue uniform, seemed unchanged, neither she nor Kramer wore panops this time around. A long white doctor’s smock hung from Kramer’s bony frame instead of a suit coat. Jasper was nowhere to be seen, although Weber, the blunt-faced attendant, held a strong dress clutched in one huge fist and seemed poised for a grab. She caught only a brief glimpse of another ward attendant—younger, with muddy brown hair—in a slant of shadow just behind Weber, and felt her attention sharpen. That kid … I know him.

She thought the same about a young man to her far right: not much older than a boy, really; tall and lean and a little hungry looking, although his face was square and his neck thick, like he’d once been a linebacker in high school and then decided working out was too much trouble. His skin, pallid and pinched, tented over his cheekbones. A brushy moustache drooped from his upper lip. His hair, a lank mousy brown, was slicked back from a broad forehead and plastered to his scalp with a pomade or oil that gave off a slightly rancid odor, like he might not have washed his hair for several days. He wore some sort of military-looking uniform, navy blue with big buttons and numbers done in tarnished brass on a high collar.

Towering over them all was a much older man. Burly and thick-necked, Gruff was a study in gray: dark gray checked flannel trousers, with a matching vest and jacket and a light gray houndstooth coat. A steel-colored bowler firmly planted atop a thick mass of salt-and-pepper hair made him seem much taller than he already was. But it was his eyes, piercing and bright, that drew her most: so light blue they were nearly as silver as bits of mica.

“Elizabeth.” Her eyes ticked back to Kramer. She couldn’t shake the feeling that Kramer was, somehow, even more different than before. His face was … off, a little out-of-kilter and unnatural. She couldn’t put her finger on what was wrong. Hand outstretched, Kramer eased toward her. “Come now. You’re back with us, Elizabeth.”

Why does he keep saying that? And Jasper, where was … Still staring in wonder at Kramer, that’s when she saw. That’s when she understood why his voice was so odd.

When Kramer spoke, only the right half of his face actually moved. She saw now that the entire left side of his face, from forehead to jaw, was waxen and immobile, and there was something wrong with his nose, too. He looked, she thought, as if he’d had a stroke.

Just like Jasper. Her skin fizzed with fresh anxiety. Another echo.

“Let’s not make a scene,” Kramer continued, his lips twisting into a grimace that might have been a smile. “What say you put down that knife and we go to my office for a chat and a nice hot cup of tea?”

Knife? She stared at her right fist. The blade’s steel—six inches, wickedly sharp—was smooth and so flawless she could make out the deep blue of her eyes. What had she fallen into the middle of?

“Wh-why do you keep calling me Elizabeth?” Her voice was still rusty, as if the gears powering her mouth just didn’t want to mesh. “That’s not my name.”

“You see? This will not do, Doctor,” Gruff said, darkly. “She’s even more disordered. She’s always come back as herself before.”

“Yes, yes, Inspector, and she is herself now,” Kramer said, without taking his eyes from Emma. “But please do remember, Battle, that the girl’s endured a severe trauma.”

“Battle?” The name flew from her mouth. Knife still in hand, she took a half step forward. “Battle, it’s me, Emma. Don’t you recognize—”

And then she actually heard herself for the first time. Not only was her voice higher and lighter; she had an accent, too, as if she’d just stepped out of a Jane Austen novel. Oh my God, oh my God, oh my—

“Of course I recognize you, Miss Elizabeth.” There was no warmth in Battle’s coldly analytical stare. “We’ve spoken several times from the very first, while you were in hospital immediately after your escape. Do you”—Battle cocked his massive head as if inspecting a fascinating new species—“do you remember my man, Constable Doyle?” He hooked a beckoning finger over a shoulder, and the kid in the dark blue uniform, with that face she thought she ought to recognize, took a reluctant step forward. “You found him after clawing your way out of that warren of catacombs. He conveyed you to safety, to hospital. Do you recall that?”

“Recall …?” Murders? Catacombs? Her eyelids fluttered. What … like tunnels? The only catacombs she knew about were crypts where they put dead people. She peered into Constable Doyle’s light, slate-colored eyes … eyes that seemed to want to jitter away from hers. “We’ve … I know you? You saved me?”

“Well, no, not really. Like Inspector Battle said, you saved yourself, Miss. I just brung you to hospital is all.” Doyle had a touch of a brogue, different from Kramer or Battle, his accent like something that might’ve come from Sean Connery or Ewan McGregor. Face shiny with sweat, he slid an uncertain glance to Battle, then back. The tiny muscles around his eyes twitched. “Inspector Battle thought it might be good to have a familiar face, yes? You remember me, Miss? Conan Doyle?”

“No.” She was starting to hyperventilate; her skull was going hollow again. Slow down; can’t faint. Gulping a breath, she held it a moment, listening to the rush of blood in her ears, the banging of her heart. “I’m s-sorry,” she said, trembling all over, hearing the minute tick-tick-tick of her teeth. “But I d-d-don’t know what you’re …” She stopped.

“Elizabeth?” Kramer said.

She only half heard. Doyle. He said his name is … “You”—she swallowed—“is … is your first … is your name Arthur?”

“How do you know that?” Battle rapped, at the same moment that Doyle, startled, went a deep shade of plum and spluttered, “Sir … Inspector, I did nothing familiar; I would never presume to—”

“Oh Jesus. Where am I?” Although she thought she now knew; the city, anyway. Her weird and accented voice came out ancient and rough, like flat tires crunching gravel. “What year is this?”

She watched as Kramer and Battle exchanged glances, and then Kramer seemed to shrug an assent, because it was Battle who said, “You are in London. It is December 1880. You have been remanded to the care of Dr. Kramer and the staff of the Bethlem Royal Hospital at His Majesty’s pleasure until such time as you are sound of mind.”

London. And Bethlem Royal Hospital … they called it Bedlam. She remembered because Jasper had told her so; the article had been on a CD, a compilation of works taken from one of Dickens’s magazines. All the Year Round? Or maybe it had been Household Words. Unless this Now had no Dickens, or if it did, maybe he wasn’t a writer at all. Battle said 1880. Was Dickens still alive then? She didn’t think so. God, what if he was dead? Would there even be a Dickens Mir—

Wait just a minute. Her runaway thoughts suddenly bucked as if they’d been tethered to a galloping horse the rider had just wrestled to a halt. His Majesty. Had Battle just said there was a … a king?

She almost blurted, Where’s Victoria? but said instead, “Why am I in the hospital?” She looked to Kramer again. “I’m not sick. I’m fine. You said I got away, that I’m a witness? So why am I in an asylum? I’m not crazy. What the hell are you people talking—”

Then, everything—the words poised on her tongue, her thoughts that would not stay still—turned to dust. That was the moment she finally realized what was wrong with Kramer’s face.

Half of it wasn’t his.

3

IF SHE’D BEEN looking more carefully—if she hadn’t just popped out of the Dark Passages, lost her friends, nearly died—she might have thought he’d gotten too much Botox or plastic surgery, like Cher, who looked more like a wax mannequin or an alien than anyone real.

Kramer’s forehead was absolutely smooth. No worry lines. It didn’t wrinkle at all, and his nose didn’t move either. His left eyebrow was a thick black gash with no arch, and while Kramer’s wiry gray tangle of mustache looked normal on the right, the left half was perfectly smooth and much darker.

Not paralyzed. Not a stroke.

He’s wearing a kind of mask, like the Phantom, only painted to look like skin and hair.

Her gaze shot to Graves. Instead of panops, a pair of steel-framed spectacles perched on her knife’s-edge of a nose. The nurse’s face seemed flesh and blood, but her left eye was fish-belly white, with no tracery of thin red capillaries. A muddy gray iris floated in its center like a dirty mote.

It’s artificial. It’s glass. Oh my God. Now that she knew what she was looking for, Emma saw that one attendant held his right arm at a stiff, forty-five-degree angle. The fingers didn’t move, but they weren’t paralyzed. The arm and hand were prostheses. Another man wore an odd leather headpiece to which a pair of tin ears, gray as an elephant’s, had been nailed. A nurse was minus a hand, the sleeve of her blouse neatly sewn shut at the wrist. Still another woman’s nose had been eaten clean away until there was nothing but two black pits set in a shriveled, weathered gargoyle face marred by strange, fleshy knobs that sprouted from her skin like mushrooms.

What happened here? How could these people be so different from what House had shown her? Then she remembered what the shadow-man had said, right before he faded: that she mustn’t hang on too long or let the creeping black that was the whisper-man reach her. He called it an infection. That must be what he meant: something of the whisper-man, a creature of the Dark Passages, remains bound to the blood. She had been bleeding, her skin torn and slashed by the birds. Worse, the whisper-man had already used her before, many times over, whisking her away in blinks to other timelines, different Nows. So had this final exposure to the whisper-man’s energy, his blood, been enough to tip the balance?

Or could this be something different? McDermott was always worried about the characters he didn’t finish infecting other book-worlds and Nows. She’d assumed it meant breaking a Now in the same way that the snow had disintegrated around Eric and Casey and the others, but these people … Her eyes darted to Graves’s artificial one, that nurse’s prosthetic hand. Kramer’s mask. Was this what McDermott meant?

Am I to blame for this?

She had to get out of here. There must be something like the Dickens Mirror here; there had to be. Maybe that’s why House showed me this before. The bell jar’s the key. She threw a glance at the dead-eyed, stuffed cockatoo under glass. Got to get back to the domed chapel, get out onto the roof, and then … Would a slit-mirror appear as it had before? Maybe not. This reality, this Now, was very different from what she’d been shown. Still, she had the cynosure; felt the weight of it between her breasts, on Eric’s beaded chain with his dog tags. So not everything’s disappeared; but why don’t I have skull plates anymore? Because this was where she belonged? This was her true and real Now?

“Oh.” She inhaled. A different Now meant a different version, another Emma. Had she then slipped into that Emma’s body? She remembered that deflated, flat feeling before everything snapped into focus. Yes, that would explain what was happening here. But wasn’t there something wrong with that? If this body belonged to a different Emma … Then why don’t I have her memories? Where is she?

Here. A wisp of sound drifted past her right ear, light as the decaying mist of a dying dream. Here.

“What?” She jerked her head around for a wild look. There was only the dead cockatoo, with its eternal stare, in a shell of glass. “Where? Where are you? Who’s there?”

“Elizabeth,” Kramer began.

The breathy voice, so small, came again: Here. Something stirred, like the creepy-crawly scuttle of spider’s legs, in the middle of her mind. And who am I? No, the question is who—

“Are … you.” That spidery scuttle had worked its way onto her tongue, and now it clambered, a leg at a time, over the fence of her teeth to move her mouth, form words with this new strange voice: “Wh-who … are …” Stop, stop! Choking, she clapped a hand over her mouth. Don’t let it win. Be quiet, be quiet! Oh, but the urge to speak, let this thing squatting in the center of her mind have its say, was ferocious, like a burn. I am me, she thought back to whatever this was, fiercely grinding this alien presence under the boot of her will, killing it, killing it. I am Emma, and I don’t hear you, I don’t know who you—

“Are you in pain, Elizabeth?” Kramer oozed forward. “Maybe a tonic …”

“No!” She whipped the knife down, and Kramer stopped dead in his tracks. But she was grateful for the distraction—for anything that might muffle that spidery little voice. “Just back off and let me think. Don’t push me, don’t crowd me!”

“Of course.” Without turning, Kramer put up a hand, and Weber, who’d been sidling closer, stopped as well. “Let’s not get excited.”

Oh, easy for you to say. This was a different London, but Jasper—whether he was a Dickens creation or not—might still be her guardian. Did he have a house with a cellar? If so, there might be a door, a way into the Dark Passages. She could push through, go somewhere else, get back to her own life where there must be versions of Rima and Bode and Tony. But not Eric, and there won’t be a Casey. God, could she bring them back somehow? Might they really exist as something more than words on a page?

Worry about that when I can. Nothing will happen if I don’t get out.

“I want to go home,” she croaked. “I want to see my guardian. I want Jasper.”

“Guardian?” Despite the knife, Kramer sidled just a touch closer. “Elizabeth, we’ve spoken about this at great length. You have no guardian and no home to which you may return.”

“No …?” She felt that sudden flower of hope wilt. “Listen to me, please. I’m fine. All I need is to get out of here. I only want to go … to go …” She pulled in a short, hard breath at a sudden pop of memory.

“Go where?” Kramer said. “Where would you go, Elizabeth?”

Lizzie. She would find Lizzie and her mother, Meredith. In one of her Lizzie-blinks, there had been talk of London and something bad happening that they couldn’t reverse. Was this it? Had to be. She and Lizzie were tangled, so the chances were good the McDermotts were here, in this London. Wait, hadn’t Lizzie and her mother left for several months? To go where? But if I can find them, find McDermott, I’ve got a chance …

“Elizabeth?” Kramer prodded. “Tell us which home you mean.”

“My … house, of course.” If he asked where, she was screwed, but if she had a life in this Now, she must live somewhere. She hurried on. “Where I live.”

“And where is that?” When she didn’t reply, Kramer said, “Or don’t you remember that there is no longer a home to which you may return?”

Something about the way he said that made a cold knot form where her stomach ought to have been. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Then let me refresh your memory. Do you remember going down … what did you call it … such a curious phrase …” Battle pulled his brows together in a frown. “Down cellar?”

Oh Jesus. Okay, be calm; you can talk your way out of this, if you just stay calm. “Yes, of course I remember,” she said, carefully. “I went down cellar to look for a book.”

“So you say.” Battle’s icy gaze stroked a shiver. “But do you recall what you found instead? You discovered a … what did you call it? Ah, yes, a gateway, correct? A secret passage to other realms filled with beings that exist between worlds?”

Oh crap. She must have talked about the door, the click, the cold that ate the flame, and something living in the dark. How nutty would all that sound to these people? “I might … I might have made a mistake about that,” she said.

“Yes? And what mistake might that be?” When she was silent, Battle said, “Or mightn’t there have been something else you discovered below stairs, secreted down a hidden passage off the servants’ quarters? Something so horrible that your mind completely unhinged? That this is a hysterical fantasy of dual identities you’ve manufactured because it is preferable to the truth?”

“No,” she said, with a sudden, sickening dismay. “I … I know what I saw.” But did she? The doctors were always so pissed that she wouldn’t take her meds, and she blinked away so often.

Stop this. You know what you know. Listen to the way you think. It’s not like them at all. You know things they don’t. You’ve seen the future.

Kramer said, “No one doubts your sincere belief in the fiction you’ve written or the characters; the duality of the brain and variations de la personnalité that allow you to people your world. Anything is better than remembering what was really there: not a door—”

“No.” She felt her fist tighten around the knife. This was like The Bell Jar: Esther Greenwood going slowly nuts, déjà vu all over again. “No, there was a door, a hand, and it was cold, it was—”

“It was not a door, but a gap, a tomb, an abomination of a reliquary,” Battle said. “A pile of rubble, a heap of crumbling mortar and disintegrating brick. Not a phantasmagorical tale out of Poe or Wilkie Collins, but something real, with texture and color and a stink of decay—”

“Stop. I won’t listen to you.” This couldn’t be happening. She knew about 9/11 and movies, relativity and Hardy’s Paradox and Starbucks. “I don’t remember anything but my life, my life, my real—”

“And bones,” Battle interrupted. “Bones, Elizabeth.”

“B-bones?” She couldn’t pull in enough air. “No, no, I don’t know … I didn’t see—”

“But I did. I’ve seen the evidence myself in the blackened skeletal remains of the corpses you discovered below stairs. You found the murderer hard at work, a demon masquerading as a man; a monster that spirited you away and would’ve made you his next victim. There is no house to which you may return because he burned it to the ground in a futile attempt to obliterate any evidence of his crime. In that, at least, he has failed. But make no mistake: whatever feelings you may still have for him, this man is a lunatic. He is depravity and evil incarnate,” Battle said, in a voice so heavy with doom, with words so weighty with the inevitable, they felt as remorseless as hammer blows. “And he wears your father’s face.”

4

THE WORLD STOPPED. It just. Paused. The time was short, only as long as the speed of thought, but it was as if she were falling again, swooning into a great darkness from which she would never escape.

Then the world began to spin once more, and a flood of horror washed through her veins at the same instant that a bright flash, like the death of a lightbulb, popped in the black of her mind, as if the private movie that was her life had decided to start up again.

The image, every sensation, was crisp and brutally clear: broken bits of mortar on chill, packed earth; the funk of mold and something gassy and much fouler, like meat going green with decay; an empty black square from which rotten bricks had tumbled; and a scurrying, scritch-scratchy sound of rats’ feet over stone. Of whispers from shadows, in the dark. And when she lifted her candle and reached in … When she reached in, she’d touched …

Fingers, limp and still. A hand as cold and smooth as glass with nothing beyond the wrist but hard bone stringy with dead flesh and leathery sinew …

And, farther back, gleaming in the candle’s uncertian light, a face with wide, black, staring sockets …

No. Her mind shied away. No, that can’t be right, not when I can remember the others and Eric, Eric, where are you, where—

“Listen to him, Elizabeth,” Kramer said. “Inspector Battle is telling the truth. Your father was a monster. He would’ve murdered you.”

No, no, that wasn’t true. Her father was a pathetic asshole who strangled himself with the ratty laces of tattered All Stars. “No, I know what I saw, what I felt.” She was panting again as sobs swelled in her chest. “When I reached into the Dark Passages, something grabbed me and … and …” Her tongue stumbled.

“Yes?” Kramer prompted. Two attendants had sidled closer, but he put out a restraining hand. “What is it?”

The radios. She almost said those words aloud, but she’d sound even crazier spouting nonsense about boxes that talked. Radios would not be invented for, well, a long time. Yet talk of the murders had been on every station. Lily mentioned how that was all the radios talked about. Lily had known. So had Bode. Had the others?

The important thing was she hadn’t known one single solitary thing about the murders. Not. One.

And yet, at different points during this long night, she’d heard radios and words, so broken and distorted she barely understood. What issued from their mechanical throats were always portions of the same story, like the recurring theme of a melody she didn’t know, whose words she just couldn’t catch.

Police. Investigation. A young girl’s discovery of …

’Orrible murder. She could hear the Kramer of her Now in an exaggerated Cockney: ’orrible murders and ghastly crimes fit for a Victorian tabloid.

My God. She was shaking so hard, it was a wonder her body didn’t break into a million pieces. This Now … this is my reality? The rest was a … a delusion? A hallucination?

“Would you like to know how many children your father murdered, Miss Elizabeth?” Battle asked.

No, she didn’t need him to tell her, because she knew, exactly: There will be—

“Eight bodies,” Battle intoned, in his heavy doom-voice. “Eight children. Five boys, three girls. You’d have been the ninth.”

The same number I put in my story, the one I wrote for Kramer; the one he accused me of stealing from a dead man. Her heart boomed. Her skull was breaking apart. This was like when she’d perched on the other side of White Space, watching Lizzie crash, her mind so tangled in the little girl’s she’d felt Lizzie’s terror, known her thoughts. But that was House …

—no, this house, an asylum with its stark walls and many rooms and whispers issuing up from grates and the dark.

That was the whisper-man

—Kramer, with his lisp and snaky hiss—

manipulating me, showing me what to do until I understood enough to use the cyn—

Wait a minute; wait just a goddamned minute. Her free hand crept to her neck. The galaxy pendant, the cynosure, was a dead cinder, a chill ball of lifeless glass on a beaded chain, but the relief that washed over her mind made her want to cry out. That was real. Her fingers traced the edges of Eric’s dog tags. Eric had been real; everything in that valley happened.

“You’re trying to trick me,” she said, and thought, Shit, I sound paranoid. “I know what happened. You can’t take that away—”

From the corner of her left eye, Emma caught a sudden flurry of movement and jerked her head around just as Weber passed off that sack of a strong dress to the boy behind him, and charged. As Weber danced forward, she threw the knife, not with the intention of hitting anything, but she needed Weber to look at something else for a split second. He did, batting the knife to one side with his arm, and in that instant, she whirled, snatched up the cockatoo’s bell jar in a one-handed grab, and hurled it as hard as she could. There was a dull bock as the heavy jar struck Weber above his nose, right between the eyes. Bellowing, Weller staggered back against Kramer and Battle, and all three men crashed to the floor.

“Elizabeth!” Kramer managed to get to one knee. “What are you—”

“Doyle!” Battle shouted, struggling to extricate himself from the bawling, bleeding Weber. “Stop her! Don’t let her—”

She didn’t stay to hear more. Turning, she vaulted in a bloom of white down the hall and saw, instantly, that there was no iron gate, no inset door, but only another T junction. Shit. The layout was different. She dug in and ran as fast as she could. So, which way: right or left?

This is no way out. It was the spidery voice again, and nothing hesitant about it this time around. They’ll trap you the way you’ve trapped me.

No, no! Air tore in and out of her lungs. She was Emma Lindsay; she didn’t belong here. She had a life elsewhere, else-when. And Eric, I remember Eric, how he felt, his voice, his eyes, how he smelled and tasted, and I remember Casey. She could hear them coming now, as she had before, the heavy footfalls. They’d be on her soon. Think, Emma, think; there has to be a way.

At the T, she doglegged a sharp right, and then she saw it at the end of yet another very long, very stark corridor: an oval flash.

A mirror. The Mirror. Yes. She forced her legs to go fast, faster. I’ll go there, I’ll go through!

“Emma!” It was Kramer, behind her. “Don’t! You can’t. It’s not what you think!”

How could he know what I— That made her falter, but for only a moment. Emma, he called me Emma. He knows I’m telling the truth. Or maybe he was only humoring her, trying to get her to hesitate just long enough for them to catch up. No, not going to fall for that. The way out was right in front of her. All she had to do was run, and then she would be through, falling to some other—

“Don’t do it, Emma!” Kramer cried. “That’s not—”

“I’m not listening to you!” She charged. Get me out, she thought to the cynosure, get me out, take me anywhere but here; just get me out! Behind, she heard Kramer still shouting, the thud of boots as the others closed, but she had a head start, was nearly there; so close now she saw her reflection rushing to meet her—

But something was wrong. There was no bloom, no heat, no swoon, no purple maw chewing holes through the back of the world. On the beaded chain, the heavy glass orb and Eric’s tags only clattered against her chest.

There is no Sign of Sure. Spider, in her web, in the dark heart of her brain, and what was left of this body’s rightful owner. Yet what and who that girl had been in this Now, Emma couldn’t tell. It’s only glass, Spider rasped. Those are strips of ordinary tin, only so much rubbish picked from a dustbin. You’re a mad girl in a ruined world. Look in the mirror, Little Alice, loooook.

Dead ahead, there was a girl rushing through the mirror, ready to break free and—

Wait. Heart pounding, she realized what else was wrong, what was different, as her face filled the glass and became the world—this Now—blotting out all else.

She saw eyes. They were cobalt, with that golden birthmark, but they were all she truly recognized. Oh, there was a girl, a wild thing with hair bright as corn and violent as a gorgon’s serpents, but she did not have Emma’s face.

The girl hurtling headlong to meet her—twin to her twin, image to her reflection, this Now’s version of all that she was—was little Lizzie, all grown up.

“NO, NO, NO!” she shrieked, and rocketed for the mirror with all she had left.

5

MAYBE A PIECE of her knew the truth or had listened to the seeds of doubt Spider planted, because, at the very last second, she’d thrown up her arms to shield her face.

It was an explosion. The impact was as much sound as it was something physical, a bright detonation of shock and pain that wiped away all thought in a stunning, violent burst. There came a glissando splash as the mirror shattered and rained razor-edged daggers. A second later, there was a heavier crash as the now-empty frame—and it was only blank, unblemished wood—toppled.

The world stuttered. Someone began to wail, the sound wordless and horrible and black. From the coppery taste at the back of her throat, she realized that this wailing someone was she. Staggering, she felt her knees wobble, then buckle, and then she was sinking into a warm, wet tangle of bloodied nightclothes and torn flesh as a Babel of voices swelled: She’s bleeding, she’s bleeding; quick, fetch bandages; I’ll need my bag … someone fetch the surgeon; hold her, hold her; she’s a spitfire, sir, an alley cat; hold her fast, don’t let her …

“Easy, Miss Elizabeth, easy.” There were rough, hard, strong hands on her now, wrapping her up, bracing her shoulders. But the voice was young, that of a boy not quite yet a man, and reached through the fog of her pain to stir memory. “I’ve got you, Miss … Here, here, what’s your name—Doyle? Take her hands; soon as we’ve got her into the strong dress, we’ll slip on those gloves.”

“No, no!” Gasping, she looked up and then let out a small cry that was half a scream, half a sob. If her mind had been glass, it would have ruptured as the mirror just had. My God, it’s … “Bode,” she rasped. “Bode, help me, please, let me go, please don’t do this, don’t!”

“Shhh, shhh, I’ve got you, you’re safe now.” His hair was longer but the same muddy brown, and looking into Bode’s eyes was like staring into a cloudless sky. “I knew you’d recognize me, Miss, yeah? Your old pal?” This Now’s Bode turned a grin that twitched a thin thread of scar stitching its way from the corner of his jaw down his neck and under his ear. “I won’t let them hurt you, Miss Elizabeth, but you got to stay still now.”

“Bode. Listen to me,” she moaned as Doyle, his face flushed and a splash of her blood on his jaw, wrapped his huge hands around her wrists. “Please, I don’t need the dress. I’ll be quiet, I won’t make trouble, but please …”

“Shhh. You know the rules.” Nodding at Doyle, who thrust her right arm into a sleeve of the strong dress, Bode tipped her a wink. “Not that I blame you,” he said, as Doyle shoved her left arm to. “Got a good one off. Wouldn’t mind taking Weber down a notch …” He grunted as she bucked, arching her back and thrashing. “Now, Miss Elizabeth,” he said, expertly rolling her onto one side before straddling and then holding her clamped between his legs as he secured the strong dress with leather straps. She heard the chink of metal chain and the snick of hasps. “None of that. You’ll make it worse for yourself.”

“All right, that’s enough.” It was Kramer, somewhere over her head, out of sight. “I’ll finish dressing her wounds. Bode, if you would, make sure the others stay back while I tend to her? And for God’s sake, someone find that surgeon.”

“N-no,” she said, and choked on thick blood. She tried to spit it out but was so weak her tongue only managed to shove a gob of foamy spit past her lips. She could feel it worm down her jaw like a slug. “Puh-please, Bode, d-don’t leave …”

“I can stay.” Bode sounded both sympathetic and, she thought, pretty freaked out. “I don’t mind. She knows me, sir. She’ll listen to me. Please, sir, I want to help her.”

“No. Thank you for your assistance, Bode, but if you and the constable would now withdraw?” There was a pause, followed by the fading clop of boots. Through a haze of pain and blood, she saw Kramer suddenly float into her field of vision like a bad dream.

“Well,” Kramer said, reaching into an inner pocket of his waistcoat and withdrawing a pair of brassy spectacles, “let’s take a look at the damage, shall we?”

Her breath thinned to a wheeze as he unfolded the earpieces. Yet only when she caught a flash of purple and saw him carefully unhinge the third and fourth lenses was she certain. I was right. He knows …

“Ah,” Kramer said, and used the tip of his pinky to push his spectacles up the bridge of his nose. As he did so, she heard an anomalous sound, something that didn’t belong: the faint tick of metal … against metal. “That’s better,” he said, sinking to the floor and gathering her onto his lap. “All the better to see you with, my dear.”

Balanced on Kramer’s nose was a pair of panops.

6

“YOU … you’re wearing …” Trussed and chained in the strong dress, she couldn’t fight him, and the pain was so intense, she could see it, raw and white and too bright. “You called me Emma. You know I’m telling the truth.”

The magenta lenses seemed to smolder. “I know what you are, yes. Here.” He pressed a bottle to her lips. “Drink this.”

“No, I don’t w-want …” A sickly, cloying scent curled into her nose, and she gagged, tried turning away, but Kramer clamped her aching head to his chest with one arm and pinched her nostrils shut until she couldn’t hold her breath any longer and opened her mouth. Gagging against the too-sweet syrup flooding her throat, she thrashed and spat out a rust-red spume of a tonic of laudanum and passionflower. “N-no!”

“Yes.” Kramer slapped her cheek, twice, hard enough to make her gasp, and then the drug was streaming down her choking throat. “Drink it.”

She had no choice. He was killing her. This was prison; this was poison. Emma felt the swoon beginning to overtake her as a remorseless, inexorable tide, and it would have her, it would carry her away, and she was lost, and Eric, the others—

“You … you know the truth. I’m n-not Elizabeth. Puh-please,” she moaned, and the higher, lighter register of her voice—this stranger’s—frightened her even more. “Let me go. You know I don’t belong here.”

“But you do. In this world, you are the mad daughter of a lunatic genius who is, unfortunately …” Kramer held up a hand, turning it back and forth in an echo of McDermott for Meredith: See? Not a scratch. “A killer. A murderer. A host to a black evil from the Dark Passages … just as this body is for you. I wondered when you would return, be drawn back.”

Return? Drawn back? She’d been here before? Maybe so. The whisper-man had stolen her in blinks. And Lizzie said a different London … But the Lizzie she’d known was a little girl. Yet this Now was new—and so was Lizzie? Wouldn’t Lizzie have remembered being older? Maybe not, if whatever had happened to her mother to cause those odd gaps in her memory had affected Lizzie, too. But what? “Wh-what do you want? Why are you d-doing this?”

“You have knowledge I need. I will help you, Emma, and in return, you will help me,” Kramer said in his sibilant, snaky whisper. They were on the floor together, her body pressed to his, and his mouth so close to her ear that she heard the sigh and felt the hot steam of his

—Breath of My Breath—

breath.

And she saw it then, reflected back to her from the purpling mad lenses of the panops: her true face, the one she had always worn, seeming to bloom the way the shadow-man had smoked from Casey’s body. Like the characters in that painting of Dickens, bleeding out of thin air into outlines and filling with color. It was eerie, like looking at a nearly transparent mask trying to seat itself and failing. It was, in fact, very similar to what it had been like when she was a child—ugly and orphaned—and the craniofacial doc had sat her down at a computer to show what new face he might make for her.

Everything echoes. She could feel her mind slipping. Everything repeats.

“Yes.” Kramer’s cradling arms tightened and held her fast. “I know you for who and what you are, Emma; I see you. You ran for the mirror. That means you’ve seen the Dickens Mirror. You’ve used it, and I will have what you know. Battle and I are alike, but only in that way. He wants to catch a murderer, but I would save this world.”

“Save this … Wh-what …?” The Mirror’s real; it exists; I have to find it. But how would she manage that? She was trapped. Her lips were cold as marble, and she heard herself beginning to slur. She could feel her blood, fresh but starting to cool, oozing through the strong dress and dribbling from a ragged gash on her forehead. Kramer’s hands were smeary, with rust crescents under his nails.

Blood binds. Spider flexed and then folded her many legs. You belong here, to this Now. You belong to him.

No, I am Emma; I’m still Emma. She had to hang on to that. Don’t let them take that away. Quiet, Spider, quiet. She slicked her lips, her tongue curling against sweet poison and salty blood. “What are you t-talking about?” she said to Kramer. “What do you w-want?”

In answer, Kramer raised a hand to his left ear—

And removed his face.

7

IF NOT FOR the drug, the scream might have made it out of her chest.

The mask was painted tin. What remained beneath was a ruin. Kramer’s flesh was raw and oozy; the purple bellies of exposed muscle jumped and quivered. His left eyelid was gone. His nose had sheared away or rotted, leaving behind two mangled, vertical black slits like the nasal pits of a viper. Below a purplish ridge of upper gum, the entire left side of Kramer’s lower jaw looked to have been carved with a paring knife. Naked bone showed in a dull gleam, from which the pegs of his teeth thrust in an impossibly white row, like the posts of a picket fence.

And he had no tongue. What was left was only a liverish, vestigial stub, like a worm cut in two.

“Take a good look, Emma,” Kramer hissed, his naked left eye fixing her with a baleful glare. “You and your kind are blight and infection, but you are the key.”

“M-my kind? The k-key?” She could barely find her voice. Her mind was slewing, sliding away into the deadening fog—and who would she be when she woke? “To what?”

“To that which you are.”

“And what …” She swallowed, working to peel the words from her thickening tongue. She was so thirsty. She could feel her brain slowing down, like a clock whose battery’s nearly dead. “What’s that?”

“Well, let’s see, shall we?” And then she felt his fingers, cold and dry, snaking over the collar of her strong dress to slither over her neck. There was a tick of glass against metal as Kramer reeled out her beaded chain.

And all of a sudden, she didn’t want to look. She couldn’t. Maybe it was a good thing her vision was starting to fuzz, because she was afraid. If everything, all that she’d experienced, echoed and doubled on itself, what really hung around her neck? Was she Schrödinger’s cat, trapped in a box, neither alive nor dead? Waiting for someone to look; to collapse all probabilities to a single path, a solitary outcome? Were these tags, this complex bit of alien glass, like her skull plates: phantoms caught in between and given substance and finality depending on who looked, with no more real reality than the spoon Neo decided wasn’t there? Forget that Kramer called her Emma or that she thought her real face swirled in the violet whirlpools of the panops. Doctors humored their patients, especially the really sick ones. Hadn’t there been a novel and then a movie about this, some island where everyone pretended to be characters in a patient’s private drama? For all she knew, only she saw that those lenses were purple and not clear—because what is color but perception dependent upon the machinery of the mind to capture light in a very specific way? How red is red? Is red only red because that’s what everyone agrees is true?

Am I Emma only because Kramer thinks so, too?

Or …

In this London, could only she and Kramer see Eric’s tags and the cynosure for what they were? To everyone else, were they nothing more than scraps of tin and a worthless, if very pretty, marble?

Alive or dead, alive or dead … Round and around. It felt like a prayer. Please, God, please. I am me; I am real. I felt Eric; we touched, and blood binds. I have to be me.

Because what else was there? Everything she was depended on what Kramer said next.

“Ah, yes. Excellent.” A satisfied sigh. A musical tinkle. “I will tell you what you are now. You are mine, Emma, you are mine, and I want what you know, what you’ve seen. I want what only you can do.” Kramer brushed the hair from her face with a touch as gentle as a lover’s, but his voice was a serpent’s from somewhere deep and dark and very distant now, because she was sinking fast, going down full fathom five.

“I want it all, Emma,” Kramer said. “I want everything.”