Authors: Ilsa J. Bick
Wait
, she thought, suddenly.
That’s not how it usually hap—
There was another huge
boom
as the van exploded. This second fireball was eye-wateringly bright, and she saw the wreck’s mangled metal skeleton actually
lift
from the snow. Pieces rocketed into the air and then streamed down in blazing arcs just like those big firecrackers on the Fourth of July, the kind that blossomed in a thousand different directions. A flaming tire whizzed past the car; twisted bits of scorched metal rained in a hot shower.
“Oh shit,
shit
!” Scrambling over the front seat, Casey landed half on, half off the rear bench, then flung himself at the passenger’s side door. He gave the handle a ferocious yank, then cursed. “Rima, pop the locks! We got to get out! Come on, get out,
get out of the car!
”
She saw them coming now, too: flaming streamers of burning gasoline slithering toward them over the snow. No, not snow now:
ice
, odd and milky—but why wasn’t it melting? She watched in a kind of horrified paralysis as the greedy flames gobbled up distance and raced through the dark, heading right—
“Pop the locks!” Casey bawled.
“Rima, pop the goddamned locks!”
With a gasp, Rima stretched, tripped the control, heard the
ka-thunk
of the locks, and then threw herself against the door. This time, the door flew open and she tumbled out. Casey was already there, scrambling to his feet.
“Come on,” he shouted, making a grab for her arm. “Come on, Rima! Run,
run
!”
Her flesh shrank from his touch, and she had to swallow back the scream that tried crawling past her teeth. But she knew what to expect now: that she would feel the ghost of Big
Earl’s hard, meaty, callused hands instead of Casey’s because his father’s death-whisper, clinging to the flannel shirt, was that strong.
“Come on!” Casey cried, hauling her to her feet, and then he was churning through that lake of gasoline, dragging her along as they slipped and scrambled away from the car: two steps, four, six, ten …
Don’t look back
. Rima dug in, willing herself to stay upright, feeling the treacherous ice trying to upend her.
Don’t look back; run, run, ru—
The Camry blew.
The explosion was a fist between her shoulders, and Rima was suddenly airborne, flying over the snow on a gust of superheated air. The concussive force tossed her a good forty feet, and she had time to remember that weird, rock-hard ice and what something as solid as stone might do to a person smacking into it with such force. She had time to think,
I’m dead
.
Then she crashed—but not against the ice. Hurtling like a spent meteor, she bulleted into thick snow. She was not a big girl, or heavy, but the blast jammed her deep. Snow pillowed into her mouth and plugged her nostrils. Spluttering, she flailed, trying to fight her way back to the surface, but she was socked in tight.
In her parka, Taylor’s death-whisper shrieked with the terror that Rima felt explode in her chest. Her lungs were already burning from lack of air. A red haze blurred the margins of her vision. Out, out, she had to get out! But which way was up? How much air did she really have? Her heart galloped in her chest. She was cocooned so thoroughly, her
parka bound her as tightly as a mummy’s wrappings. With Taylor twisting and squirming, the feeling was like being trapped in a gunnysack with a nest of snakes.
Completely disoriented, she swept her arms to either side, trying to scour out an air pocket. The snow in front of her face gave, and then there was space: not a lot, but more than before.
Okay, that’s good, come on, you can do this; you
have
to
. Rima kept sweeping, doing the breaststroke over and over again. She felt the hollow grow from the size of a baseball to that of a basketball. There was also a little more air than before, because the snow wasn’t solid ice; there were air pockets and even slivers of space between flakes. She pulled in a thin breath and then another. The air was close, but she could breathe. Although her chest and arms and face were cold, heat palmed her calves.
Must be fire from the explosion
. So now she knew which way was up.
Not good, not good …
A sharp nail of panic scraped the back of her neck. If she felt heat on her leg, that meant …
My God, I’m upside down. My feet are above my head. I’m like a cork in a wine bottle
.
But wait a minute, wait …
I feel heat
. That meant part of her—her legs, her boots—
must
be visible. Yeah, but someone had to be looking for her. Casey might be dead or in just as much trouble. If he wasn’t dead, well, she didn’t think that Big Earl would let Casey stick around.
She thought of that touch, the death-whisper that was Big Earl. Casey must be wearing something of his father’s. The parka? No, she thought it must be the shirt, that red-checked flannel she’d spied dragging over his knuckles earlier but that
had seemed to retreat as the hours went by: a shirt that was first too big and now just right. Casey wouldn’t save her, because Big Earl wouldn’t give a damn. Any second now, those flames would die, and then, if Casey was still alive, she’d catch the muted cough of that snowmobile.
Wait!
What was that? Had she heard something? She strained, her ears tingling.
There was something there, I heard
…
Something above her, beyond this prison of deadening snow … shuffled.
Her heart surged. Casey? Or maybe Eric and Emma had come back with help. She opened her mouth to shout—then clamped back, her throat closing down, as something else occurred to her.
The thing that killed Tony is gone. But what if there’s another?
A shiver rippled down her spine.
Oh God
. Her chest was a sudden scream of pain, as if Taylor’s terrified death-whisper were trying to gnaw a hole through her skin and burrow itself deep inside to hide. But Rima could only wait, quivering, in a darkness that was growing thicker and more airless by the second—and it was a choice now, wasn’t it? Say nothing, do nothing, and she would suffocate.
But something is there, it’s getting closer, it’s right on top of—
Something slithered around her ankle, and closed.
AS HER MOTHER
muscles the stick and they race away from what’s left of their home, the fog—all that remains of her father tangled with the Peculiars’ energy and that of the whisper-man—is both a fist, closing down over Lizzie’s past, and a ravening monster with a mouth, gobbling up the road and this world, and still coming on strong. Seeping from the cell’s speaker, the whisper-man’s voice is a faint, mournful sough:
Come down, Blood of My Blood; come plaaay, come down, come …
Lizzie fishes up her mother’s phone. Crackling with the energy of Lizzie’s thought-magic, the magic-glass of her memory quilt is a shimmering dazzle. The special Sign of Sure, the tool her dad has used to get himself back and forth from
Nows
through the Dark Passages, is as iridescent as the Milky Way. But she thinks the fog has to be much closer. Maybe she has to let it
inside
, allow it to slip into and wear her the way she does the book-people and her dolls. The way her father has invited whatever’s in the Dark Passages.
But he’s done it with blood, by cutting himself, so will this work? Can I grab it hard enough?
She just doesn’t know. Yet this she does understand: everyone wants what they can’t have, same as when Lizzie whines for a second scoop of chocolate ice cream. They
especially
want what’s hard to get.
So make the whisper-man mad. Make it really work hard, get so greedy-pissed it flies for her like a moth to the hottest flame, so it doesn’t get what Lizzie’s doing until way too late.
I’ll show you. Come on, you big show-off. Let’s play
my
game
. She thumbs the phone to silence. The cell rings again at once. This time, she turns off the power, which she already knows won’t make a dent, and it doesn’t. When the phone begins to chirp again, she pitches the machine into the black mouth of the foot well because there is no way, no
way
she’s answering again. Let that whisper-man stew. That’ll show him.
“Good girl,” Mom says, misunderstanding. As Lizzie scrambles to buckle in, her mother chokes back another sob. “I’m so sorry, Lizzie.”
“It’s okay, Mom.” She knuckles away tears. “It’s going to catch us, isn’t it?”
“If it really wants us, yes. I don’t think there’s much I can do about that, but it’ll have to work to do it.” Her mother’s foot drops and the car surges with a roar. “Listen to me, Lizzie, this is important. If it wants something … if it needs to bind someone, it can take me. I won’t let it hurt you, honey, but you have to promise me to run, run as far away as you can, and don’t look back, all right? I’ll be …” Her voice wavers, then firms. “I’ll be able to hold it. But you run, promise?”
“I promise,” Lizzie says, already knowing that this is a
pinky-swear she will break. Run, and as bad as this is, she thinks things could get to be a hundred million zillion times worse, because there is so much power here, enough to break this
Now
wide open. So what happens next won’t be up to her mother.
Come on, come and get me
. As the woods spin by beyond the car, Lizzie hunkers down into her memory quilt. Behind her, hanging in the air, the symbols for Lizzie’s new
Now
hum and purple with a weird, mad energy drawn from ideas deep down cellar and from the dark where the strongest—the worst—imaginings live. Just a few more seconds and one more symbol …
Come on, come get me
, Lizzie thinks.
Get mad and want me, wear me, want me
.
FROM HER PLACE
on the snow-covered farmhouse porch, Emma watched the red wink of taillights disappear into a mouth of darkness that finally closed, swallowing up that creaky old Dodge. God, she didn’t want to let Eric out of her sight. What would happen to him if she weren’t around?
Well, I’m sure to find out
. She pressed a finger to an aching temple. Her head
killed
, probably a combination of concussion and all those
blinks
, a lot of them. Too many. Ever since waking up in this valley, she’d been zoning out, losing chunks of time. She didn’t think the others had noticed, although Casey—that nasty kid, someone she’d never have imagined related to Eric—kept throwing her speculative looks.
I see the same girl, too, over and over again, in every
blink.
Kid even has a name, and that’s a first
. “Lizzie,” she said, trying it out in her mouth. Saying the little girl’s name made all those
blinks
feel much more real, not like dreams at all but as if she was a stunt double slotting into a film of Lizzie’s life. Not completely in the kid’s head but close.
And everything I see is
happening to her right now, at this moment
. This last time, the kid had been … running from something?
Afraid of her dad; something happened to her father
. She thought that was right. Emma just couldn’t quite grab hold of what it was about Lizzie’s dad that was freaking the kid out, although she retained a wisp of an image: Dad doing something really, really scary in front of a very odd mirror.
Coming back from these
blinks
was so different, too, like surfacing with the tangles of nightmares clinging to her like sticky seaweed.
They feel like memories, something I’ve always known
. She had this odd notion that if her brain was a hallway lined with doors, all she had to do was open the right one to walk into Lizzie’s life.
Or pull her into mine
. A weird thought. And this last
blink
… “Want me, wear me,” she whispered, hugging herself against the cold. Tony’s space blanket let out a tired crinkle like soggy cellophane. “What does that mean, Lizzie?” Made about as much sense as Jasper going on about … “Dark Passages,” she said, slowly, to the still, cold night. “Lizzie knows about them—and different
Nows
? Like Jasper? But Jasper was
drunk
half the time.”
Was Jasper talking about something that exists?
The fingers of another shiver skipped up the rungs of her spine. No matter how many times she’d asked, her guardian never had explained. In the end, she’d chalked it up to the fact that he was pretty permanently pickled.
But what if the Dark Passages and the
Nows
are
why
he drank? Not just to forget or because he was so freaked. What if Jasper drank so it—they?—couldn’t find him?
This idea had an itchy, tip-of-the-tongue feeling, something that felt true.
As if I once knew this but … forgot?
Another, more bizarre thought:
Or is this something I was
made
to forget?
“Oh, don’t be stupid, you nut.” A flare of impatience. “Jasper was soaked, and the
blinks
are seizures. They’re hallucinations, like dreams. Of course, you’re going to slot in stuff you know about. That’s the way dreams and hallucinations are.” Yeah, but she didn’t
know
a Lizzie.
“Emma, stop, you’re not going to solve this right now.” She really ought to go inside. Yet the idea made a twist of fear coil in her gut. Why? It was stupid. There was light inside the house, and it was warm. There was
food
. She could still smell the faint, rich aroma of cheddar from a mac and cheese casserole. Bode and Chad seemed fine, if a little odd.
But this farmhouse …
I have seen you before, over and over again
. In the
blinks
? Yes, and no: she thought she’d actually seen a picture of the house somewhere. She ran her eyes over the porch railing, the bay window, that snow-covered swing on its chains. Come spring, she’d bet money a froth of red geraniums would replace the mounds of white humped in those hanging planters.