Authors: Ilsa J. Bick
Then she thought about that fragment of a sentence penned in red ink, a sentence that refused to resolve:
Wait a second. There’s no period. Nothing comes after
.
“What about all the rest of my life? Is Kramer in your dad’s story?” Her voice came out sounding as dry and raspy as shriveled cornstalks stirred by an October wind. Her fingers dug until she felt the girl’s bones. “Is Holten Prep? Is Starbucks?”
Is Eric?
“No. That’s one of the reasons you’re so special, Emma.” Tears gleamed on Lizzie’s cheeks. “You did all that by yourself.”
“I …” SHE COULD
feel the kid’s words like something physical, a slap, hard enough that she let go of the little girl and actually took a staggering step back. “I … I
what?
I did
what
?”
“You heard me.” Lizzie’s eyes glimmered again with those odd, curling, smoky,
X-Files
shadows. “You got loose and wrote yourself. You’re
still
writing yourself.”
“That’s crazy.” The words came out raspy and harsh, as if they were glass ground on a Dremel or abrasive stone. Her
eyes dropped to that limp tangle of parchment. That had been blank, but she’d pulled McDermott’s words, what Lizzie said was a story that he never finished, from nothing. “This isn’t
The Matrix
. I’m not Neo. I’m a real person.”
“And what’s that?” Lizzie said. “Maybe you’re only real because you think you are.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t prove something like that. You just
know
.”
“But what’s
that
?” Lizzie pressed. “What’s
knowing?
It’s still all just stuff that happens in your head, right?”
“Come on, there’s more to it than that.” Emma felt a sweep of … not déjà vu, exactly, but a feeling that she was having an argument with some older version of herself: a girl who wouldn’t let the Great Bloviator off the hook.
No, stop that; you are not her
. She put her hands on her cheeks. “I
feel
my face. I’ve got a real cut from a real steering wheel.”
I got a girl killed. I’ve got titanium skull plates and scars
. “I hear you. I see you.”
“But the tools for all that are in your head. Like you
touch
something, but then you give it a name.” Lizzie picked up her memory quilt. “This is a quilt because we say it is. That’s how you write yourself—don’t you get it? Everything you know is because of what happens inside your head. Without your brain to turn
this
”—she gave the bunched quilt a shake that made its glass tick and chime—“into cloth and stitches and glass, you wouldn’t know what it was.”
“No. Thoughts and perceptions aren’t
tools
. They’re not really
real
. You can’t hold or even see them.” Which wasn’t exactly true, she knew; you could take a picture of the brain and see what parts were firing when, say, you saw a pencil or tasted an apple. “I mean, when I think about making or
writing something, it doesn’t just happen. First, I have to have the idea, and then do something with it. The idea comes first. Ideas are …” She groped for the right word while at the same time thinking how odd it was that she was having this conversation with a little girl who couldn’t be more than five years old. “Ideas are
energy
. When you strip it all down, thought is just a bunch of the right cells firing at the right time in the correct sequence. That’s all ideas are. Thoughts are physics and chemistry.”
“Emmaaa.”
Lizzie did an eye-roll. “What do you think thought-magic is? A pen and paper are just tools to make thought-magic real, but that doesn’t mean they’re the
only
tools.” She held up the galaxy pendant, stitched into its spiderweb. “The Sign of Sure is a
tool
. It helps you find your way between
Nows
and
see
better. Dad’s Dickens Mirror, and his special paper and ink, and Mom’s panops—they were just different
tools
for grabbing and fixing thought-magic. And even then, it’s why Mom had to make Peculiars to hold the extra thought-magic, so everything stayed where it was supposed to.”
“Stayed where it was supposed to. You mean, on the page,” Emma said. Weird how talking this out, actually
thinking
about it, calmed her a bit.
Maybe because thinking and science are what I’m good at
. She
almost
understood this, too; she could feel her mind inching toward some kind of comprehension, the way Meg Murry had groped after that tesseract and what made a wrinkle in time work. The whole character-from-a-book thing, she didn’t buy. She was a person, and that was that, right? Right? But she’d
felt
the heat from the galaxy pendant, that cynosure, feeding off her thoughts, her intentions.
And in the
blink
or whatever that was at the slit-door, I felt a click, a change, like House was trying to hammer it home through my thick skull: the Dickens Mirror is a tool
.
Or a machine?
And what’s a story but symbols penned in black ink on white paper? The symbols wouldn’t mean anything if there wasn’t White Space, that blank page. It’s the
emptiness
that defines the shape, that tells me that the symbol I’ve just written is an
a
or an
s.
“So the … the
fog
that came after you and your mom,” she said. “That wasn’t
just
the thing your dad pulled through the Mirror?”
Lizzie shook her head. “Mom said that when the Peculiars melted, all the thought-magic that wasn’t able to go anywhere got loose. So the fog’s all of that tangled up with the whisper-man and … and …” Lizzie’s lips shook and her face tried to crumple again.
“And your dad?” Thinking,
It’s like burning a log. The wood vanishes, but it doesn’t really go away. Its energy is released as heat. The energy changes form, that’s all. So the fog is …
“Yeah,” Lizzie whispered. Her eyes glistered and wavered like cut blue glass in deep murky water. “The whisper-man and my dad are all mushed together, tangled up. They were like that even before I finished my special
Now
and swooshed the fog here so it couldn’t go anywhere else. The whisper-man and … and Dad … they’re
part
of the thought-magic now, the
fog
, except the whisper-man is way stronger. I don’t know exactly why, but he can use the thought-magic, and I can’t stop him. The only good thing is this is pretty much the only place he can use it.”
“Because we’re in your special forever
-Now
? Something
like your mom’s Peculiars?” She thought about the snowy, frigid valley. Something about cold was important … something in chemistry … no, physics?
I know this; thought about this same thing not too long ago. But what, when?
Instead, she said, “That’s why there’s House. You had to make a safe place for yourself to stay. So this, the bedroom, the House, is kind of
you
, but everything else belongs to the … the whisper-man? The fog?” When Lizzie nodded, she went on, “You said the others, Rima and Eric, Casey … you said they’ve fallen between the lines because you couldn’t hold on to all of them. But Lizzie”—bending, she retrieved the parchment with its unfinished story of an odd girl with even odder gifts—“there’s only White Space between lines.”
“I know that,” Lizzie said. “Why do you think it’s so important to find them? They’re between the lines of this
Now
, and the
Now
is full of the fog, and the fog is thought-magic. They’re in
nothing
, and that’s bad because the really strong ones will make it into
something
.”
“Wait, wait.” She held up a hand like a traffic cop. “You’re saying that wherever they are, the others will use the … the thought-magic, the energy, to make their stories?”
“Right.” Lizzie’s face flooded with relief that Emma seemed to have finally caught on. “Especially the ones whose stories are done. They’re the strongest because they’re set.”
Set
. “You mean
set
as in a period, the end of a story,” Emma said. “Their stories are like road maps that they
must
eventually follow, no matter where they are. Only what happens won’t
just
be words on a page. If they’re in the fog, whatever they make will be
real
.”
“Uh-huh,” Lizzie said. “With teeth.”
MOANING, CASEY ROLLED
to his hands and knees. When he gave another moist, ripping cough, the spray that spattered the snow reminded him of those red sprinkles they put on cupcakes. Whenever he moved, it felt as if the bones of his ribcage were grating together. With every breath, a glassy, jagged pain hacked at his lungs.
To his left and very far away, easily a couple football fields, and almost at that distant black wall of trees, he saw the silent snowcat crouching in the center of a goopy, slimy mess that was a little like the tar they used on roads in summer. Spatters of the same goo glopped over the driver’s cab.
Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a small flick, and turned a look. Something was out there, just sliding from the trees. He squinted, trying to bring whatever it was into focus—and then his heart skipped a beat.
This time, instead of one thing racing for the snowcat, there were three.
MY GOD, IT’S
moving
. Rima’s stomach turned a slow, gurgling somersault. On the windscreen, the glistening, shredded, oily chunks of the thing that had been Father Preston pulsed and quivered in a slow, shambling creep. Ropy clots of black blood eeled like inky water snakes.
Like in biology, when they make you cut up a worm; only the worm doesn’t glue itself back together
. She could
hear
them, too: a high-pitched
SMEEE-smeee, SMEEE-smeee
, a sound of fingers smearing steam from a bathroom mirror. Horrified, she watched as two pieces met, their seams thinning and mending, the bits of raw stygian flesh sewing themselves together into a much larger chunk that squirmed off in search of another mate. The entire windscreen was alive with shivering, creeping flesh laboriously knitting together bit by bit.
“R-Rima?” Tania’s voice trembled. She pointed, using the rifle she still clutched in her right hand. “It … it’s re-repairing itself. It’s m-making itself all over again.” She stared at the rifle. “I bet I could shoot it a hundred t-times and it would … it would … God, how do you
k-kill
something like that?”
“I don’t know.” She cut her eyes away from the mess and toward her friend, then started back in alarm. “Tania! At the window! Look out!”
Too late. The glass on Tania’s side exploded in a hail of gummy fragments. Two arms—long, lean, impossibly strong—thrust into the cabin. Both unfurled hooked claws. One latched onto the rifle, yanking it from Tania’s hand; the other lashed out.
“OHHH!”
Tania shrieked. Bright red blood jetted from her right shoulder. She tried twisting away, but that clawed hand only dug in, slashing deeper, and gave her another mighty yank, tearing her halfway from her seat.
“No!” Rima lunged. Snatching double fistfuls of Tania’s parka, she braced herself, planting one boot against Tania’s seat, the other against the transmission box, and heaved. “I’ve got you, Tania! Pull, Tania, pull!”
“I c-can’t—
aahhh
!” Jammed against the shattered window, unable to pull free, Tania screamed again. Her shoulder harness had snapped. The only thing saving her from going through altogether was that the window was just a touch too small. “I can’t, Rima! It’s too
strong
, it’s too—”
Going to lose her, going to lose her!
Or whatever had her would tear Tania apart a piece at a time. Frantic, Rima tried to think of what to do, something she could use. The rifle was gone. There was the dropped hammer, but she would have to loosen her grip on Tania to find it, and patting around the foot well would take precious time she didn’t think they had. So what else was there? More tools in the equipment lockers in the passenger cab? Maybe, but there was no time, no
time!
So she let go of Tania and did the only thing left.
EVERY STEP BROUGHT
a blast of fresh agony, but after the first five steps, the pain wasn’t worse, just constant. The important thing was Casey was on his feet, and he’d found the shotgun. Ahead, he saw the things swarming over the snowcat;
heard the explosion as the glass let go and then a scream. Why weren’t they
moving?
He was still too far away to do any good with the gun, and he couldn’t afford to waste shells, especially since he didn’t know how many he had left.
Tania took two shots, maybe three, in the church
. He was pretty sure there was a round in the chamber; he’d racked the pump, but he didn’t know all that much about guns. God, he didn’t even know how to
check
. How many shells did a shotgun hold? What if there was no shell in there at all?
Just got to hope there is, and that I’ll have time to get close enough for one good shot
. To do that, he’d have to get right on top of them, because he was pretty sure that shotguns weren’t as good as rifles, didn’t have the range, and he didn’t much trust his aim anyway. If he could just get there in
time
.
Then, he heard the snowcat’s engine grind, and felt a burst of elation.
Yes, yes, come on, Rima; get it going, get it—
The cat turned over once, twice, coughed, and then revved to a howl.
“Yes!” Casey cried, ignoring the fresh lancets of pain that stabbed at his chest. He pumped his fist. “Hit the gas, Rima, hit the
gas
! Go!
GO!
”
WITH THE CAT
still in neutral, Rima stamped on the accelerator. The engine responded with an earsplitting clatter, followed by a bark that ground and gathered itself in a whooping crescendo shriek—and then she slapped the transmission lever with all her might. The cat dropped into drive and surged forward, its treads ripping snow with a great, shuddering roar.