Read The Dickens Mirror Online

Authors: Ilsa J. Bick

The Dickens Mirror (2 page)

Uhhh
. She rests her forehead on the counter. A fine, gritty patina of ancient bread crumbs pebbles the thin skin over her titanium skull plate.
Don’t throw up
. Gulping back a sour surge that tastes suspiciously like hours-old gamushed peanut butter and strawberry jam, she swallows her tummy back where it belongs. When her dizziness passes, she knuckles away the petrified bread and straightens cautiously, worried that if she passes out she might lie there, limp as Jasper after a bender, until someone finally remembers,
Saaay, isn’t there this kid we’re supposed to be taking care of and, you know
, responsible
for?
and decides to show up.

Careful not to move too fast, she scrapes up the kit, drops it on a countertop, and pops the lid. Pay dirt: the kit’s packed with gauze rolls, surgical tape, scissors, alcohol swabs, squeeze packets of antibiotic ointment. Ducking back underneath the sink, she
unearths a bottle of Hibiclens and a basin Sal uses to mix antibiotic soap with water. Still keeping one hand pressed to the paper towels wadded on her chin, she uses the other to squirt a gooey pink stream of Hibiclens into the basin. Twisting the spigot, she stands, shifting from foot to foot as she waits for the water to warm up (listening as the old water heater down cellar
chuga-chugachugs
to life; silly thing takes
forever
). She watches the water change from a murky brown to clear as it sluices gore and grit from her free hand.

You’re going to be fine
. But she has her doubts. There’s this steady throb that’s started up above the bridge of her nose as her brain pulses
ba-boom, ba-boom
, like IT on its dais (
sooo
creepy). Real whopper of a headache coming on.

“Hey, boy,” she says to Jack, who’s jumped onto the counter to supervise, “it’s going to be okay, isn’t it?” But Jack only grooms himself and offers no opinion. So she answers for him: “ ’Course it will. You betcha.”

But she’s not sure, mostly because she’s never been exactly
right
or normal. She may look okay
now
, but
she
knows what’s under her skin. Fifteen months ago, the craniofacial surgeon in charge of her reconstruction had shown her blank-eyed masks, one of which would become her face.
They’re all possibilities
, the surgeon explained, swapping out one face for another. On the monitor, each new mask settled like clingy Glad Wrap over a computer rendering of her deformed skull.
See?
The doctor grinned, really revved, like he was playing
Grand Theft Auto
with his brand-new, shiny Xbox.
I can give you any number of looks that fit your underlying bone structure
.

She doesn’t recall who finally chose. The surgeon, most likely. All she cared about was getting rid of the monster in the mirror.
Yet even now, months later, she still doesn’t know this new girl. Her eyes are the only constant: a deep and unearthly cobalt blue so pure they ought to be glass. The right holds a queer golden flaw that the doctors say is a birthmark but that glitters like a faraway star. But the rest of her face is … strange, the mask of a normal girl she has no right being. Every morning, she expects her reconstructed skin to slough like the dead husk of a lizard or snake.

The doc said she’ll eventually grow into her looks:
Just like that duckling
. (She noticed he omitted
ugly
. That word wasn’t in his dictionary, apparently. No, no, she had
cranial deformities
and
severe anomalies
. She was
in need of repair
. Bone saws, chisels, skull plates, skin grafts. Hours and hours and multiple surgeries during which the doctors broke and ripped and sawed and drilled and stretched and grafted and stitched—and then the bandages, a haze of pain, the salves and treatments. The craniofacial guy says it’s a good thing she scars so well. Running her fingers through her hair and the train track of all those skillful scars is like reading the chronology of her reconstruction in braille.)

Now, when she and that stranger in the mirror lock eyes, she thinks,
People look at you, and they see someone … someone who’s …
Her brain stumbles over
pretty
. She’ll never be that. If she even
thinks
the word, it’ll be like stepping on a crack or telling a birthday wish.
They see someone who looks normal, but you’re only the mask. I’m still in here, and I’m weird and ugly and nobody’s kid, and nothing can change that
.

At school, the other kids pegged her right off the bat, first day. Walking the gauntlet of the lunchroom was like listening to the Doppler effect of an aural wave of Badger fans at a UW football game:

 … here she comes she’s so weird
so strange
so totally lame I heard her face was really gross like she had these horns
what a geek
such a spaz my dad says Jasper’s a drunk …

They’re like wolves that way, cutting the weakest deer from the herd and running it to death. Under the skin, she’s the same
Emma Lindsay, Loser
. Thank God, school’s out for the summer. Maybe it’ll be better next year when she goes to Bayfield on the mainland. Madeline Island’s so small, everyone knows from a fart what you had for supper.

If she had her way? Go live on an island,
waaay
far away. Maybe hang out in a sea cave, get herself a wolf, and eat fish and abalone, like that girl from
Island of the Blue Dolphins
. Or do like Sam and run away to live in a tree on a mountain and tame a falcon or hawk, maybe even an eagle. Or, you know, just set up house on Devils Island, where hardly anyone goes except a couple charters so the tourists can
ooh
and
aah
at the sea caves. When Superior really gets going, the caves’ roars and booms carry clear to Jasper’s … which is, you know, impossible. The island’s more than twenty miles northwest of the cottage. But she hears them. The Ojibwe say all that racket’s because of this big old honking evil spirit, Matchi-Manitou, who guards the entrance to the underworld, and only the bravest warriors go down there and blah, blah. She doesn’t
believe
it, but sometimes she daydreams about packing up and heading out there in her kayak, slipping that Scorpio into the deepest, darkest cave she can find, and checking it out. Maybe there’s a whole underground world down there, bunches of tunnels and all these creatures, and here, she’s the only kid brave enough to face up to all that. Is that totally Lara Croft or what?

Before the surgeries, the craniofacial doc made her see a shrink. Standard procedure, he said, to help with the adjustment before and after. The shrink was okay. Nice lady. They drew pictures. Played a lot of Uno. The shrink asked leading questions that, you know, a moron could figure out, mainly stuff about what life might be like after the surgeries, what Emma expected, did she think she’d become this fairy princess or something. One afternoon, Emma got onto islands and running away and Devils and Matchi-Manitou. Don’t ask her how; just happened.

At that, the shrink got this
look
—and then said the one thing that’s stuck with Emma all this time:
Monsters in the basement are easy, Emma. That’s where they’re supposed to live. It’s the day the monsters stare from the mirror that you should worry
.

3

THE WATER’S WARM
enough now to steam. On the radio, Frank is still going on about reality and what’s so deep in his heart that it’s really a part of him.
Strange
. Frowning, she cranes over her shoulder at the kitchen table. How long is that song, anyway? As with Dickens novels, she’s pretty familiar with Ol’ Frank. The song’s … four minutes, max? Even with the big, vampy trumpet doo-dah in the middle? Yeah, and she could swear she heard
that
right around the time she turned on the water. Hand still clamped to her chin, she turns to peer at the wall clock. As she does, her elbow catches the Hibiclens bottle. She makes an awkward grab but misses. The bottle’s plastic, but of
course
the squirt top pops, releasing a spume of goopy pink soap.

“No.”
She stamps her foot. Can’t she get just
one
stupid break? The backs of her eyes sting, and she can feel her lower
lip beginning to quiver again. She needs to fix her chin, but that big pink puddle of Hibiclens
glares
from the floor:
You bozo-brain
. Already, she can just imagine the soap soaking into and plumping up tired, desiccated pine to leave a great big stain. Same with her blood, which she’s tracked
all
the way down the hall. God, she’s in so much trouble already, and now
this
. “Fine, all right,
okay
.” Ripping off more paper towels one-handed, she squats and begins mopping up. In about two seconds, she realizes that she’ll probably have to use the entire stupid roll and thinks,
I can’t do anything right
.

As she starts to push up again, the kitchen begins its topsy-turvy, pre-passing-out spin.
Ugh
. This time, her head goes empty; her stomach bottoms out. Then, just like that, she’s starting to fall, she’s falling, the floor’s opening to swallow her up as furry black spiders scurry over her vision …

And everything goes dark.

4

OHHHH
.
HER BRAIN
leaks back into her skull a drip at a time. She comes to, splayed like roadkill, from some dark jumble of a nightmare. For a disorienting second, there are no walls; there’s no floor. Instead, there is a matte-white glare, a little like the paint Jasper slops over his canvases when he’s done. Like Meg Murry nearly tessered to a two-dimensional planet, she feels steamroller flat: a flimsy paper doll of a girl, with all the substance and depth of a molecule of ink on parchment.

Wow. She has the strangest idea that she’s smeared sideways into ghostly afterimages running away into forever, as if she’s wandered into a bathroom with mirrors front, back, up, and
down, and no matter where she looks, there goes Emma and Emma and Emma and Emma and on and on and on, and every Emma is different, can be anything anywhere anytime. A split second later, all the Emmas collapse like a deck of cards in a complicated shuffling trick where the guy’s got perfect control and all the cards
shooo
together in a blur until there are only two Emmas, twin selves: one sprawled … well, wherever she is, and the other
swooshed
back to that gravel road for a redo. If she opens her eyes, reality might just kick-start again in the
hoosh
of the wind, the nip of sharp stones against her back, and the mocking
a-hah-hah-hah, look at the stoopid huuumannn
laughter of faraway gulls spinning lazy circles against a bright blue sky. (Flying: now yer talking. Come back as a bird. Don’t see birds doing headers off bikes.) For an instant, she wonders if
this
time is when she finally wakes up for real.

Then, her chest struggles for a breath, and she lets go of a groan:
“Uhhh.” That’s
not flat; that sound’s round as a balloon. And like that, her world goes 3-D: floor under her back, walls stacked on a foundation to support a ceiling, the open cupboard beneath the kitchen sink. Like she’s stuck in a game of
SimCity
that’s hit a glitch and only now decides to cough out details. Her hands, sticky with gore, are limp as dead starfish. Her stomach pulses against her teeth. She feels sluggish, though her head’s oddly
full
, like her brain’s been
verrry
, very busy. With what?

With cold
, she thinks—and
that
makes no sense. It’s June. She’s sweaty and hot and grimy and so scuzzy bugs will snuggle in the jungle of her hair for a nice long visit. But
cold
is what jumps to the center of her skull: that, and
snow
. Some kind of valley, too, and there were other kids stuck down there, and they were trying to find a way out. A couple of them
died
. And there was a … a …

“House,” she whispers. Her tongue’s thick and gluey, and there’s a strange taste, too, almost like … gasoline? Yeah, and she can almost smell it, sticky-sweet, steaming from her clothes, but that’s crazy.

The house had been strange, too. Was it … 
alive
? She thinks so, and House had a lot of rooms.
Library—that was the most important room of all
. Only she didn’t go
inside
so much as step
through
it—through some kind of weird mirror?
Yeah, like Alice in Wonderland
. She’d gone somewhere else: into a summer’s day, on a street she didn’t recognize. She’d been different, too, not the same age as now but older, a teenager.
There was a bookstore called … Come on, come on
 … She can feel the nightmare beginning to evaporate.
What’s the name?
Her teeth grab her lower lip as if to snag the words …

Between the Lines
. “Yeah,” she breathes, “yeah, that’s right, and there was a boy, too.”
Someone I really liked, and he was talking about a … a necklace?
Her fingers drift to her chest, and she swears she feels smooth, cool glass where she
knows
there’s nothing. “Galaxy pendant,” she says, and wonders what the heck she means. Something special about the necklace. About
her
. And then …

Oh
. Despite her muzzy head, a clot of fear sears her chest.
Blood
. Her eyes jerk down to her arms.
I got cut, real bad, worse than now, only on my arms instead of my chin, and my blood …
Her blood had
moved
, like a snake, and when her blood touched a book—a really important book, but what was its name; what had it been about?—when her blood
licked
this book

“M-monster.” An invisible hand seems to close around her throat.
Sick, I’m going to be sick, I can’t breathe, I don’t want to remember anymore …
“A m-monster came out of the book and it wanted
me
. It said it w-wanted to
p-p-play
 …”

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