White Space (55 page)

Got to get out
. But how? Where could she go? If these really were doors to other
Nows
, then she—or a piece of her, another version—must exist in each. She belonged everywhere and nowhere. Would she, on her own, break a
Now
to pieces? What would happen if she met up with or even slipped
into
herself in another
Now
?

Can I do that?
Maybe. She was different. The whisper-man said so; it had taken her while she was awake, dropping her into her many alters, because she was a creation with no set path.

Then put me where I belong
, she thought fiercely. She felt the cynosure crackle with a new and vicious heat.
Drop me into the
Now
where I’ll find them again: Eric and Casey and Rima and Bode and—

“ELIZABETH.” A SLIGHT
buzz to the
z
. Whoever this man was, he had a lisp, so the name seemed to have been mouthed by a rattlesnake:
Elisssabess
. A pause. “Elizabeth?”

“Wh-what?” The word burred on her tongue, slow and hesitant. She sounded like a Little Mommy My Very Real Baby Doll with a faulty motherboard. Or HAL, from
2001
, getting his memory banks yanked. “Whaaat?”

The same man said, “Elizabeth, is that you? Can you hear me?”

“H-hear?” She
felt
the sounds as much as she heard them, a kind of fading in and out, there and gone, as if her brain were an ancient radio and she had to feather the knob to get the scratchy broadcast bounced halfway around the world to gel. She realized, belatedly, that she was standing. Swaying, actually. Worn wool chafed her bare feet. A sheet, or maybe a very long nightgown, clung to her legs, chest, and back. Her skin, hot and damp, smelled sour, and her lank hair reeked of sweat and grime.
Bad dream?
Her chest, her stomach, the
inside of her skull … felt very strange: flat and hollow, a limp glove of a girl—all skin, no innards. The last time she’d felt this wan and washed-out was when she was ten and coming out of anesthesia after the surgeons put in her plates. Then, her mind had slowly bled back into her body, the blood inching through to plump up arteries and veins and the pink sponge of her brain and guts, the way air leaked into the nooks and crannies of a deflated Macy’s Day Parade balloon.
I’ve been sick?
Where was she?

“Who’s Eliz … I’m …” She lost the thread of the question and her answer, the words unraveling on her tongue. Her head ached. Eyes watering with pain, she tried to bring the world into focus, but it was foggy and fuzzy, a chaotic blur seen through a broken kaleidoscope, the colored bits of glass refusing to arrange themselves into patterns. The only thing she recognized with any clarity was a yawning chasm, an inky hole at the center of her vision. The edges of the gap wavered, as if the world around it was only an uncertain outline and just now on the verge of becoming.

That must be the way I came in
. She was in a new
Now
? The hard eye of her titanium skull plate burned. Wincing, she pressed the heel of her left hand to her forehead, then heard herself drag in a sickly gasp.
No gash
. She pressed harder, her fingers searching through muscle and skin.
Wait a minute, where’s—

“Now, now, are you in pain?” A different voice, female, much clearer, the static starting to fade. The words were clipped, a little dry. “Another of your headaches?”

Oh God
. Her heart iced. Was there an accent?
No, you’re imagining things; this is House, up to its old tricks
. With a fresh
blast of panic, she pressed harder, using the fingers of her left hand and the heel of her right because she was … clutching something, a pen or stick or maybe a fork. She couldn’t tell, but for whatever reason, she didn’t relax her grip; felt as if that was the wrong thing to do.
Where is it, where
is
it?
It had to be there. She
felt
the plate burning in her mind. Give her a pen and she could ink its exact margins, every curve, even where the screws were. But under her fingers there was only skin and muscle and bone.

No plate. How can that be? I
feel
it
. Gasping, she fought a rising tide of black horror as she ran her fingers over the rest of her scalp.
No scars. But I had them just a few seconds ago
.

“Elizabeth? You are there, yes?” The guy with the whisper-man lisp again, right in front, behind that hole in her vision. God, if she hadn’t just seen the thing die
—with Eric and Casey and Rima, and
Eric,
oh Eric
—she’d have sworn she pulled that monster through with her. “Come now, no need for a fuss. Let’s all be calm, shall we?”

Calm?
Oh, that was a good one. “Wh-where …” Her mouth tasted awful, like she could scrape mold off her tongue. “Where am I?”

“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
.

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 moment 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—