by Ilsa J. Bick
“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 momen
t 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 … t
o 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.
