White Space (25 page)

Too late: in that churning, rippling blank of a face, a third cyclopean eye—as dark as black smoke—peels open.

Blood of My Blood
. The thing plants a webbed foot on the sidewalk. Something is happening in that third eye, too; the black blank is eddying and bunching, pulling together, molding itself.
Breath of My Breath
.

That is when she remembers what she’s already been shown.

Get up, get up before it really
sees
you, the way it did McDermott!
Her brain screams the words, but she’s frozen in place. Where could she possibly go in a nightmare, anyway? But she has to move. There is no one to save her. She must get out of here before she ends up
in
the eye.

Come and play a game, Emma
. The thing spiders, legs and elbows bent, body crouched low on the sidewalk, its position a mirror image to her own. Boring into her, looking deep, its third eye churns as, within, the glassy oval of a face begins to waver and shimmer up, the way a drowned body floats for
the surface—and she knows she only has seconds left.

Come play
, the whisper-man sighs. In the third black-mirror eye, lank tendrils of dark hair swirl about a face that now shows the faintest impressions of eye sockets and the swell of lips, like molten glass being worked and molded by a jack—and now there is the ridge of a nose, the slope of a forehead.
Come with me through the Dark Passages to the Many Worlds, into
Nows
and times …

“No!” The paralysis that has gripped her breaks. Emma surges to her feet. “No, I won’t let you!” Whirling on her heel, Emma bullets across the street and

AND NOW, EVERYTHING
has changed.

Madison is gone, yet a clot of heat—the galaxy pendant from the
blink
or hallucination or whatever the hell that illusion of Madison was—rests between her breasts. But that day or vision or room into which House has let her wander … all that is over.

Now, instead of an aqua sundress, she wears a thick white nightgown. Barefoot, she stands on a scratchy rough carpet covering a long hallway with a dark wood floor. Above, the ceiling is slightly ridged like the planked hull of an old boat, and that’s when she realizes that what she’s looking at are whitewashed iron plates. Ceiling-mounted lights hang from rigid metal rods, and give the space a sterile, institutional look, although the air is close and stuffy with a sewage reek, as if all the toilets have overflowed and no one’s slopped up the mess of old urine and runny feces.

As if to counter the stink, the hallway is also lined with cheery, flower-filled vases, hanging baskets, and porcelain
figurines. Framed pictures of flowers, done in intricate needlework, hang on the walls. Exotic stuffed birds—colorful parrots, a snowy cockatoo, a white dove—perch on artfully arranged branches beneath glass bell jars. The walls are sea-foam green, and there are many shuttered windows and dark wooden arched doors with tarnished brass knobs, set slightly back in cubbies like the openings to catacombs but bolted tight with queer rectangular iron locks. The gallery is ghostly, lit by hissing lamps that spill wavering gouts of light and shadow at regular intervals. The whole setup could be from a museum, like one of those exhibits where you stand behind Plexiglas and peer into places where people lived and died long ago.

This hallway
. She tips a look to a table just a few feet off to the right where a staring stuffed toucan perches on a fake branch of wire and silk leaves beneath a clear glass dome.
I’ve been here before, in a
blink.

“You see her, Mrs. Graves?” The voice is male and rough, the accent like something from Monty Python. Startled, she looks up. Perhaps thirty feet away, in what had been an empty hall only seconds before, stands a trio of burly, mustached men in rumpled white trousers and shirts. One clutches a smudgy, sacklike dress of strong, heavy, flannel-lined wool. The dress has no buttons but long ties that run up the back and around each wrist. A pair of padded leather gloves bulge from the pockets of a second attendant a step behind the first.

Strong dress. They’ll tie me up in that thing
. And then she thinks,
What? How do I know that?

The attendant with the strong dress says, “You got her in your sights?”

“Indeed I do, Mr. Weber.” An older woman, with a grim
set and clipped tone, steps toward her in a swirl of floor-length navy blue crinoline beneath a tightly cinched white over-apron that reaches to her knees. She would look like a fancy cook if not for the stiff, crisp nurse’s cap tacked to her head like a cardinal’s biretta. A large ring of bright brass keys jingles from a chatelaine at her waist, and the outlines of a small watch are visible, tucked in her blouse’s watch pocket and secured by the delicate links of a brass buttonhole chain, from which hangs a tiny, smoky agate fob. Threaded beneath a high, starched white collar, a strange pendant dangles on a red silk ribbon over the shelf of her breasts: some kind of polished black disk set in brass.

But it is her glasses that grab Emma’s attention. Rimmed in bright brass, the spectacles are not round or oval but D-shaped lenses. Each lens is hinged at the temple to allow for a second to open and shield the sides of either eye. The four lenses are not clear glass either. They are, instead, a storming magenta swirl.

Purple glasses
. Emma hears herself hiss a breath.
Panops?

“She got a hanger-on?” Weber, the attendant, says. “Anyone else fall out?”

“Thanks heavens, no, not that I see. Come now, Emma. Time to return to your room.” The woman—Mrs. Graves—extends a weathered hand, its knuckles swollen with arthritis and age, but her voice is as starched as her collar. “Let’s not make this more difficult than it need be.”

Nurse’s cap. Locked doors.
A hospital?
No. Her gaze clicks to the strong dress Weber holds, those bulbous, too-large gloves.
Jesus, this is a psych ward, an asylum
. But Weber’s accent and Mrs. Graves’s brusque tones …

Wait a second … I’m in England?

Emma’s stunned gaze jerks to those hissing lights of glass globes and brass pipes. Now that she knows
how
to look, Emma spots inky smudges on the sea-foam wallpaper: soot from brass wall-sconces.
Gas lamps. Oh my God
. Her chest squeezes with panic.
I’m in the
past,
like something straight out of Dickens
.

“How’d she fall out is what I wants to know,” Weber says. “You sure she didn’t lay her hands on one of them marbles?”

Marble
. She nearly reaches for the galaxy charm but catches herself.
He’s talking about the pendant?

“Yes, I’m
sure
, Mr. Weber.” Graves’s own jet pendant winks a weird, smoky green in the gaslight. With her spectacles in place, her eyes are bruised sockets. “I fear she’s stronger. If this keeps up, she might not require a cynosure at all to make the leap.”

Cynosure?
Emma’s pulse skips.
What is that, some kind of tool? Is that what Weber meant by a marble?

“What’d I tell you? Them dark ones is cagey. Why we’re bothering altogether, seeing as how them and their kind bring the plague …” Weber’s face screws with suspicion. “We ain’t never going to understand how to use them tools right, which of them dark ones is safe, so best to do away with the lot, I say.”

“Might we have this discussion later, Mr. Weber?” Graves’s eyes shift back, her mouth thinning to a crack above a sharp chin. “Emma, please, you’re working yourself into a state. Come along. You’re safe with us, dear.”

“N-no,” Emma says, and yes, this is
her
voice: no accent, nothing different about that at all. “Please, I just want out.”

“Now, now.” Graves moves closer, accompanied by the jingle and chime of brass keys. Her jet pendant gleams. “Let us take care of you, and in turn, you can help us.”

“Help?” The thought that she
is
insane—that she really
must
belong here—sparkles through her mind, because she does have a dim understanding of what will happen next. If the nurse gets a hand on her, if the orderlies get close enough, they’ll manhandle her into that sack of a dress, jam her hands into gloves, and truss her up before marching her down to a windowless cell deep underground where only the sickest, noisiest, most violent patients live. Someone will force open her mouth, then pour something thick and rust-red and too sweet down her choking throat. They’ll pinch her nose if she won’t drink; they’ll suffocate her until she does. Swallow that tonic, and a thick, cloying fog will descend over her mind, and she’ll float away on the breath of dreamless sleep. This, she
knows
—and if that’s so, she must belong here. She’s crazy. What other explanation is there?

It’s how I felt reading
The Bell Jar.
But that must not be a real book
. She stares at the stuffed birds trapped under domes of clear glass.
Those jars
 … 
I’ve slipped in real details from
this
place, the way you do in dreams
. Everything she thinks she knows: Jasper and Madeline Island; bookstores and Holten Prep and icy, sweet Frappuccinos.
I’ve hallucinated the future of a girl who doesn’t
exist?

At that instant, the blister of a bright pain erupts between her eyes as a headache thumps to life, and she raises a tentative hand. The deep gash she got when her van jumped the guardrail and tumbled into that lost valley is gone.
But of course it would be, because that never happened
. Yet there
is
something
there. Slowly, she traces the hard, unyielding, perfect circlet of lacy metal, and suddenly, she thinks,
Wait
. She can feel her heart ramp up a notch as she reaches around to sweep through her hair.
Matching plate, at the base of my skull
. This one is harder to feel because of all the muscle, but she knows exactly what that edge is—and there is hash-marked scalp, the network of scars thin and minute.
Wait a second. That’s not right
.

“Oh dear.” Graves glides a little closer. “Another of your headaches? Come, let me give you your medicine, dear. A nice tonic, a little cordial for what ails you. How does that sound?”

The titanium skull plates and screws don’t belong. They haven’t been invented yet, but …
“Jesus,” she breathes. She has no accent, she
thinks
with different words, and these skull plates shouldn’t exist.
Which means that I’m still me. What I remember
is
real
. But she is awake now and aware in a way she’s never been in a
blink
before.
Maybe this is like Madison. House is showing me something for a reason
. She doesn’t know why she thinks that, but she senses she’s on the right track—but to where and why?
The Lizzie
-blinks
and everything that’s happened in House feel like building blocks, one brick being added at a time
.

“Mrs. Graves?” A new voice: another man, his tone peremptory, authoritative. “Do you have her? Did anyone else get out?”

Her thoughts scatter like a clutch of startled chicks. A knife of pure panic slices her chest. Stunned, she gapes as two men angle through the orderlies. Both sport old-fashioned suits with high collars and silk waistcoats, although one is bearded, darkly handsome, and decked out in an expensive-looking tailcoat and black gloves. With his gold fob watch and
walking stick, he looks like he’s been pulled away from a fancy party or the opera.

“No, sir,” Graves says, without looking away. “Our Emma has managed it all on her own, it seems.”

“Oh dear.” The bearded man tut-tuts. “Emma,
why
do you insist on making such a scene? They’re trying to help you.”

“Best let me.” The doctor’s head swivels as he searches her out. He is older, and his eyes are deep purple sockets, his glasses identical to Mrs. Graves’s. “Now, Miss Lindsay, are we having a bad night? What do you say we go to my office for a chat and have ourselves a nice hot cup of tea?”

No
. A thin scream is slithering up her throat, worming onto her tongue.
No, no, no, it can’t be
.

The bearded man in evening clothes is Jasper.

And the doctor is Kramer.

“WHERE ARE WE?”
Rima asked. Casey’s snowmobile was still running, the engine chugging between her legs. Yet everything else had changed. The fog was everywhere. The whiteout was so complete, Rima felt as if they were marooned in a small pocket of air, trapped beneath a bell jar at the bottom of a viscous white sea. The night was gone. The sky—well,
up
—was the milky hue of curdled egg white and bright as a cloudy day with the sun at its height. The fog was brutally cold and smelled odd.
Metal
, she thought.
Rust?
“Are we still in the valley? How did we even get here?”

“I don’t know.” Casey’s voice sounded odd: curiously flattened, paper-thin. His face was mottled from windburn, his many scratches and scrapes rust-red, his right cheek and jaw as purple as a ripe plum. “It sure feels different, too. Like the fog grabbed us, and we got beamed to some other planet or something. You know?”

Or maybe we’re only a different place
inside
the fog
. She wasn’t
even sure why she would think that, or what it meant. “What do we do?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think we should stay here.” Casey threw an uncertain look over both shoulders. “The problem is, without knowing where we are, I have no idea where we’d be headed. There are no landmarks, just … 
white
. We could drive around in circles until I run out of gas, and then we’re screwed.”

“
If
we run out of gas.” When he turned to stare, she said, “I don’t know if regular rules still apply.”

“Like the gas from the van,” he said.

She nodded. “There was too much, and the way the snow turned to ice and that monster … None of that belongs in—”