White Space

by Ilsa J. Bick

  “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 Bo
de’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.