by Ilsa J. Bick
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, curle
d 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.”
