Authors: Ilsa J. Bick
“I think Emma’s book was the one my dad was working on when Mom … when she … you know.” The little girl pressed the heel of a hand to her pooling eyes. “There was a whole bunch of thought-magic spilling out all over the place, and that’s when Emma got loose.”
“ ‘One June afternoon,’ ” Eric read, and lifted his eyes to hers. “It says that you went down cellar for a book. Did that happen?” When she nodded, he said, “Can you tell us what happened next? Do you remember?”
Oh yeah, in spades
. The family room seemed suddenly much too hot. She didn’t want to talk about this, and not only because it had scared her silly. Talking would make it real, because she would be putting words to an experience that felt like the distant cousin to what was happening to them now.
And everything—my
blinks,
my blackouts—all that started where McDermott’s fragment ends
.
She cleared her throat. “Like it says, I was a kid. I decided to forget it, try never to think about it. Most of the time, it’s muddy, like a dream. But what the parchment says is right. It was June, a week after I turned twelve,” she said, “when I went down cellar to look for a book.”
THE FIRST THING
she notices down cellar is the icy tongue of a draft licking her ankles.
Well, that’s weird
. Emma frowns. The cellar’s got two rooms. The first has nothing very interesting: a boiler, a washer and dryer. But this second room is like a cave filled with treasure, chockablock with boxes and shelves and heaps of novels, including a special glassed-in cabinet of first-edition Dickens books Jasper keeps here, down cellar, where the temperature is always cool and the air kept very dry. There are also old comic books and stacks of science fiction, as well as tomes on science and history and art. There’s a massive antique rolltop desk, too, locked up tight. She’s run her hands over that thing a dozen times, searching for a hidden catch or knob that might release the rolltop. Her jewelry box has a secret compartment, so maybe there’s some über-secret way of getting into the desk, too, but she finds nothing. Picking the lock also turns out to be way harder than in the movies, and she’s finally let it be. Probably Jasper doesn’t
remember the desk’s even here, hunkered in the dark.
But the draft is really strange. It doesn’t belong at all. Inching on hands and knees, she follows the chill behind a tower of boxes butted against the south wall. There, etched on the wall and along the floor, is a perfect two-foot square. Instead of the gray wash used on the rest of the cellar’s cinderblock, however,
this
square is a blinding, featureless, bone-bright white.
She rocks back on her heels, the better to study that blank. There is no doubt in her mind that Jasper has slathered the same paint here that he does on his canvases, but why? Is something beneath this? A painting on the cinderblock? She wouldn’t put it past him. But the idea doesn’t feel quite right.
Then her eyes catch a slight wink of brass, and she sees a pull-ring on the right, about midway down. The pull-ring is Emma-sized, just right for her hand. Had that been there a moment ago? She isn’t sure. But there’s no doubt now.
Wow
. A little mouse of excitement scurries up her spine.
A door? Another room?
She laces her fingers through the pull-ring—and hesitates. She’s not an idiot. There might be spiders, or bats, or dead things with gooshy innards waiting in the dark. Maybe Jasper’s hidden this door for a good reason. Nightmares live under the white paint on his canvases, for heaven’s sake.
Still, she can’t resist, and pulls. At first, nothing happens, and she is about to pull harder when small flakes of white paint begin to snow in a fine flurry to the cool concrete. She feels the door gasp and shudder, as if suddenly waking from a deep sleep. Then the door gives; it
yawwwns
open on a silent, rushing exhalation of pent-up breath, the way she porpoises
out of Superior’s blue-black waters on a hot summer’s day.
But behind the door, there is nothing. It is Pitch. Black. Just an inky square. The darkness almost doesn’t look real. She can’t see an inch into all that nothingness, and it smells funny: like when she scraped both her knees bloody the day she took a header off her bike.
Light
. She races back upstairs, then pulls up and tiptoes into the front parlor. In the kitchen, the radio is yammering to itself, the reporter excitedly talking about police and victims and
murder
, but she doesn’t care. Jasper is gone; probably sketching but mainly boozing before heading off to make arrangements for a kayak trip they’ll take in a week’s time to Devils Island. Sal’s taken the truck to town for groceries. So Emma’s safe, at least for the rest of the afternoon. Perfect. Stretching up on her toes, she filches a pack of matches from the fireplace mantel. In the kitchen pantry, she finds a plastic bag of used candles—Sal’s
such
a cheapskate—and fishes out three blue stubs left over from her and Jasper’s birthday cakes the week before.
Back downstairs again, lickety-split. She strikes a match:
psssttt!
The match head splutters to life, and then she raises her tiny torch to the dark. The blackness does not give. Inky shadows flee
from
her, splaying over the cement behind, but no light penetrates this third room. At. All.
Okay, that’s even stranger. That’s not the way light works. Or darkness, for that matter: if the room is empty, then nothing should prevent light from penetrating.
She reaches a tentative palm, like a mime tracing an invisible door, and instantly snatches it back. Whoa,
cold
. She
haahs
warm air onto her fingers, shaking her hand until the feeling
needles back in darts and tingles. What she’s felt is so frigid it burns—and hard, like a pane of black glass. Yet in that brief contact she felt the darkness, well … seem to
give
a teeny, tiny bit: as if the glass, smooth as a sheet of quartz crystal, morphed to a dense yet pliable cellophane.
But there
is
something else: a sound, scratchy with distance, seeping from that gloaming. What is that? She cocks her head, straining to tease out the components. The sound is as crackly as the weather band radio Jasper listens to whenever there’s a big blow and Superior gets wild. So someone left on a radio? Like Sal has done upstairs? That doesn’t make any sense, not even for Jasper. Probably just hearing a weird echo. And yet there is
something
making noise in there. No matter how hard she tries to pull the sound to her, however, all she gets are static-filled whispers, like the hiss of sand spun into a dust devil.
Whoa, wait just a second
. The hairs on her neck suddenly spike with alarm as another thought occurs to her. What if there’s someone
living
under Jasper’s house? That stuff can happen. Over on the mainland, down around Ashland, bums hole up in broken-down shacks all the time. The news says so.
I shouldn’t go in there
, she thinks.
What if there are snakes? Or rats? Or something worse, like monsters and shadows, in the dark?
That could be. Maybe that’s why Jasper’s walled this up, so what’s inside can’t get out.
Or what if the black
is
the monster?
“That’s just silly,” she says. “It’s your imagination. It’s like when you listen to a seashell and hear the ocean. You’re listening to air, that’s all.”
Candle in one hand, she reaches for the blackness, wincing
as her fingers meet that icy, glassy darkness, but forcing herself not to flinch back—and this time, there’s a difference. This time, she hears the faintest, tiniest
click
. Like the snap of a light switch or the sound her little jewelry box makes when she reaches underneath and presses the little brass nib and
—snick-click
—the hidden compartment springs open.
Oh!
Her heart does a spastic little flip. Now the glassy black membrane seems too thin and gives easily, and she watches as her hand and the candle slide into the dark.
Almost instantly, the flame dies and goes out.
What?
Maybe the draft blew it out. But when she pulls out the candle, the yellow arrow of its flame still flickers.
Huh?
She eases the candle in again, and right away, the flame disappears—and so, she notices now, does her hand. Yet she still feels molten candle wax spilling onto her fingers. The sensation is distant, the wax’s warmth leeching away quickly, as if sucked into a deep well. No pain, though. Just
cold
and—
And then, something inside hooks her wrist and
tugs
.
“Oh!” Emma ekes out a tiny, wheezing cry.
“No!”
She tries taking her hand back, but this something only tugs
harder
. From deep inside, the whispers suddenly swell, growing louder and more excited, the sound like the
scritch-scratch
of rats scurrying over glass. Stifling a shriek, she plants her feet on either side of the door and
pulls
. The darkness gives like grudging, soft taffy and then lets go with a sensation like the snap of a rubber band:
ka-twannnggg!
She tumbles back, gasping. Her hand is still attached, all fingers accounted for, but the tips are white and icy. The candle’s dead. A thin streamer of smoke curls from the blackened wick—and the molten wax has
frozen
.
There really
is
something—someone—in there. She sprawls, unmoving, paralyzed with fear, her heart going
thumpity-thumpity-thumpity-thump
in her chest. She felt a
hand
. There were
fingers
, and she
heard
it …
them
. They almost got her.
And what about the candle? Her hand? Once she pierced that darkness, she hadn’t been able to see either. She’s paid attention in science: no light + brain-freeze cold = … outer space? Or a really cold vacuum? But neither makes sense. There can’t be a black space-hole under Jasper’s house.
Then her mind jumps:
Matchi-Manitou, in his deep dark cave
. The Ojibwe say there’s a big evil demon in a huge black cave under Devil’s Island. Jasper goes over there all the time. He paints nightmares and then covers them up. He boozes and babbles about White Space and broken
Nows
and Dark Passages.
So maybe this is one of them, a Dark Passage, and this is like Devils Island
. Her lungs are going so fast she’s dizzy.
Catch a clue, Emma. You
live
in a cottage overlooking Devil’s Cauldron
. So is this a tunnel that connects the two? Is
this
the Dark Passages Jasper’s so scared of? No wonder Jasper’s covered this over. He doesn’t want whatever’s in there getting out.
Or me or anyone going in. Something grabbed me. Something’s whispering
. If Matchi-Manitou had gotten a really good grab and—
bam!—
she’d gotten hooked and reeled in like a salmon, what then? Would she have been able to see at all? Maybe she wouldn’t want to. She’d be dinner. Matchi-Manitou would drink her blood and crunch her bones and eat her up,
munch-munch-munch
. Even if she’d managed to get away, where would she be? What if she ended up somewhere—some
when
—else?
You are not going to think about this anymore
. The sweat pops on her forehead as she levers that door, really throws her weight against it.
You are going to forget all about this. Stick your fingers in your ears and la-la-la-la all the way back upstairs
.
The door is pissed. Doesn’t want to close at all, nosirreebob. She can feel it protesting, or maybe that’s only what lives inside the dark exerting some force to keep her from closing it off again. From deep within, the whispers seethe, but there are so many she can’t make out the words, which she thinks is probably good. She doesn’t hear them; she’s not
listening
, la-la-la-la …
Finally, grudgingly, the door grumbles shut. She doesn’t dare look at that white blank too long either. If she does, she might see the ring again, and then the urge to pull open the door and
push
against the dark would be too strong.
Nope, no way, not going there
. She works fast, wedging all those boxes tight-tight-tight against the white cinderblock. She covers that door and blots it from view. Hours later, when Jasper stumps back in, reeking of fish slime, bourbon, and the turp he uses to clean his brushes, she’s at the kitchen table, an untouched glass of chocolate milk she doesn’t want in her hands, as the radio yammers on and on about death and murder and blood, so much blood. Lost in a boozy fog, Jasper doesn’t spare her a glance, and
she’s
not telling. In fact, she decides right then and there not to …
“… THINK ABOUT IT,”
she said. “Until today I was doing a pretty good job, too. But some of what’s happened
echoes
and circles back to that, even down to that little click. I heard the same thing at the library door.” And in the vision of that insane asylum, come to think of it, when she’d locked the door in that iron grille.
“What if what you found was a force field put up by some machine?” Eric asked. “Like a … a device or
tool
or something?”
“That’s what Dad called the Mirror,” Lizzie said. “Same with the panops and Sign of Sure. He said they were all tools from a long time ago and another
Now
. I never thought of it before, but the time I saw my dad at the Mirror? When he … when he c-cut himself?” She knuckled her eyes, but Emma saw the tears starting again. “When he t-touched the M-Mirror,
it
made a c-click.”
“But I didn’t cut myself,” Emma said. “It just
happened
.” Then thought:
Force field or barrier might be right, too. I keep
thinking about where the barriers are thinnest. What would happen if those went away or sprang a leak?
“Might work like a fingerprint ID for a computer,” Eric said.
“You’re saying the machine
recognized
me?”