White Space

by Ilsa J. Bick

  Her thumb got her to Grand Rapids. After a night shivering in the thin light of the visitor’s center doorway, she was contemplating the merits of a bus to Milwaukee when Tony’s vintage Camry, a drafty four-door hatchback from the early Pleistocene, rattled into the lot, trailing a single crow that bobbed along like a black balloon on an invisible string.

  Okay, crows were bad. But there was only the one. So maybe this wouldn’t be so much of a problem. She decided to chance it.

  They got to talking. He was a preacher’s kid, not a born-again, and a nice guy. Same age, same grade, and from his stories, the public high school bullshit factor sounded about the same as Catholic school’s, minus the uniforms and grim-faced nuns, some of whom could definitely use a shave.

  When he offered a lift, she said yes, despite the crow. Settling into the front passenger seat, she cringed as the whisper sighed and cupped her body.

  “You okay?” Tony asked. “I know the seat’s a little shot, but I got the car for a song.”

  Yeah, no shit. No one would want a car whose last passenger had, literally, lost her head when the impact catapulted her right out that busted windshield like a cannonball.

  “I’m fine,” she said, and this was true. The woman had been dead-drunk when she died. A fuzzy moment of awareness, a spike of fear, and then blam! No white light, no meet-up with old friends and family, no floating around for final good-byes or if-I-stays. Just hello, darkness, my old friend, which meant the dead woman’s whisper was easily soothed. After an hour, Rima couldn’t finish a sentence without punctuating with a yawn. Dropping her seat, she blacked out, only coming to when

  4

  THERE’S A THUNK of a lock and a squeal of hinges as Tony drops into the driver’s seat, wreathed in the aroma of fried eggs, salty grease, and coffee.

  “Here.” He thrusts a large brown paper sack into her hands. “I didn’t know if you liked ham or sausage, so I got one of each. There’s coffee, too, and some sugar and milk. Or they’ve got that artificial stuff, in case you like that, or orange juice.”

  “No, this is great. Thanks.” The paper sack warms her hands, and the aroma is so good her stomach moans. She hasn’t eaten in almost two days. “You didn’t have to do this.”

  “I know. It’s just I would’ve felt guilty eating in front of you.”

  He doesn’t lie well. He could easily have wolfed something inside and she’d never have known. “I don’t have a lot of money,” she says, which is the truth. Her nest egg’s a whopping $81.27, all that was left after her mother found her stash. Again. All that coke, it’s a miracle Anita still has a nose, much less a sense of smell. Dirty socks Anita’ll let go until they sprout hair and teeth and start moving up the evolutionary ladder, but squirrel away a wad of cash? Then the woman morphs into a frigging bloodhound.

  A blush stains Tony’s jaw. “Hey, don’t worry about that. You’re doing me the favor. Otherwise, I’d have nothing to do but listen to the radio, and all they talk about are those murders. Can you imagine that poor kid finding—”

  “How about we eat inside?” The last thing she wants to dwell on is death, especially murder. “It’ll be warmer and we won’t mess up your car.”

  “Too late,” Tony says, throwing a rueful glance. The Camry’s backseat is strewn with clothing, crumpled fast-food bags, three shoeboxes of cassettes—mostly Lloyd Webber musicals (if Rima hears “I Dreamed a Dream” one more time, she might be forced to hurt someone), a wheezy old cassette recorder, vintage comics like Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror, and a couple Lovecrafts with nightmare covers of gruesome monsters boiling with tentacles.

  She laughs. “How about we don’t mess it up more than it is already? Those comic books must’ve cost a fortune.”

  “Um, no, I paid regular price, but it’d be nicer inside, yeah.” Tony’s grin is hesitant, but when it comes, his whole face lights up. With his mop of brown curls and light blue eyes, he’s really pretty handsome.

  “Great,” she says, and reaches for the door handle.

  “Hang on.” He depresses the master lock on his door. “The power locks are all screwed up so you can only open them from my side. I keep meaning to get them fixed.”

  Crossing the lot, she spots the birds: five very large, glossy black crows ranged round a rust-red truck slotted beneath a gnarly, naked maple. Four crows brood on a trio of low-hanging branches, their inky talons clamped tight. A fifth teeters above the grinning grill like a bizarre ornament.

  She knows, instantly. Death—very recent, very strong—has touched that truck. Like the crow floating above Tony’s Camry, the birds are a dead giveaway, no pun intended. The more there are, the closer they come to a house or car or place, the more violent the death. One bird, she can handle. Times when whole flocks blanket the roof at the Goodwill, she takes a pass. And forget cemeteries.

  “You okay?” Tony tosses a look at the truck. “What?”

  “Nothing.” He doesn’t see the crows. No one normal ever does. Still, as she hurries inside the rest stop, she holds her breath. She doesn’t actually believe that old saw about breathing in dead spirits, but there’s always a first time for everything and she has enough problems.

  Just as she’s about to turn into the ladies’ room, a hard-faced kid in baggy, olive-green fatigues cuts a sharp dogleg. “Hey,” she says, pulling up short. “Watch it.”

  “Say what?” He whirls, incredibly fast, his fists coming up. The kid’s pupils are huge, black holes rimmed with a sliver of sky blue. Then he spazzes, blinking away from whatever horror show he’s watching. “Oh. Hey,” he says. “I’m sorry. I thought you were—”

  “Hey, Bode!” Another kid, also in olive drab, stands at a table in the fast-food joint. Even at this distance, she spots the angry sore pitting the left corner of his mouth, and the kid’s so meth-head jittery he could scramble a couple eggs.

  “Hey, Chad,” Bode says. And then to Rima: “I got to go.” Before she can shrink back, he puts a hand on her arm. “You sure you’re okay?”

  His touch is volcanic, atomic, so hot she can feel the death cooking into her flesh. “Oh, yeah,” she says, faintly. “I’m good.”

  As soon as he lets her go, she bolts into the bathroom, making it to a stall just in time. Later, as the taste of vomit sours her mouth, she hangs over the bowl—lucky for her, no one died on that seat—and thinks about Bode. The guy’s touch was mercifully brief and fragmentary, but she’d seen enough. Ten to one, he’s that truck with the death-crows. The real question is who, exactly, is dead?

  Because when Bode touched her, he changed. Just for an instant, but enough so she saw Bode’s head—

  5

  “OH, HECK,” SAID Tony.

  Rima blinked back to the here and now. “What?”

  “The truck’s gone,” Tony returned grimly.

  “Maybe there’s a turnoff.” Something sparkled then, and she squinted through the snow frothing the windshield. Way off to the right, there was a sharp glint—glass?—and something very black and formless floating over the snow. “Is that …?” She almost said smoke, but the word died halfway to her teeth.

  Not smoke.

  Crows.

  And, in a crush of splintered trees, an overturned van.

  PART TWO

  THE

  VALLEY

  LIZZIE

  Whisper-Man Black

  ONLY MOM POPS out of the barn, and she is screaming: “Get in the car, get in the car, just get in the car!” Mom hauls Lizzie down the porch steps, practically throws Lizzie into the front seat. She thrusts the memory quilt into Lizzie’s lap: “Hang on to that; don’t let go, no matter what!” Mom’s hand shakes so bad the ignition key stutters against metal, and she’s sobbing: “Oh please, oh please, oh please, come on, come on, come on goddamnit, come on!” She lets out a little cry as the key socks into place and the engine roars.

  Then they are moving, moving, moving, going very fast, racing after their headlights, her mother hammering the accelerato
r. The force slams Lizzie back against the seat; her teeth come together—ka-chunk—and her tongue screams as the taste of dirty pennies floods her mouth. But Lizzie is too scared to cry; she is absolutely silent, quiet as a mouse, as the car fishtails, kicking up gravel rooster tails.

  We’re never coming back. She clutches her memory quilt in both hands. The glass might be magic, and those stitches as strong as her mother, but Lizzie’s life is unraveling. I’ll never see my house again. I’ll never find Marmalade.

  She cranes over her shoulder. Peering through the rear window is like seeing a movie through the wrong end of a telescope. She watches as their farmhouse, Wisconsin-sturdy and built to last until the end of time, recedes. To the left and across the drive, the big prairie barn hulks in the gloom, and that is when her sharp eyes pick out the pulse of a weird orange glow that is very, very wrong.

  “Mom!” she says, urgently. “Mom, the barn’s on fire!”

  “I know,” her mother says. “I set it.”

  “Mom!” A blast of horror rips through her body. “We’ve got to go back! We’ve got to get Marmalade! We’ve got to find Daddy; we have to save him!”

  “We can’t save your dad.”

  “But Mom!” Lizzie’s frantic. Why doesn’t her mother understand? “Daddy needs us!”

  “No, he needs it, Lizzie. He hangs on, takes it inside, and the horrible, awful things it asks in return …” Her mother’s voice falters, then firms. “Lizzie, why do you think we came here after London? Why do you think we live so far away from other people?”

  So no one gets hurt. She thinks of the terrible things in her father’s books: squiggle-monsters and spider-things growing in people’s chests and crawly things in tunnels and parents eating their kids. What Mom says is true.

  Because when her father turned from that mirror … his face was gone. No eyes, no nose, no mouth. Nothing but a shuddering, churning blank.

  Then this thing with no face raised her dad’s hands like a policeman stopping traffic. The cuts were gone. Her father’s palms were smooth—until the skin split and lids peeled back and there were eyes, one on each palm. They were not her father’s eyes, because they were not hers. Like father, like daughter, their eyes are identical: a deep indigo with a tiny fleck of gold on one iris. Lizzie’s birthmark floats in her right eye and is the mirror image to her father’s on his left.

  But the eyes that stared from her father’s palms were whisper-man black. The whisper-man was in there, and her dad was the glove, just as Mom said he’d been, years back and before Lizzie, in the other London.

  But what if I can make the whisper-man want me instead? This is a new thought, and so stunning Lizzie’s chest empties of air. If I can get it to leave Dad and slip into me—

  There is a sudden, massive flash. The light is so bright the inside of the car fires the color of hot gold. A split second later, Lizzie hears the rolling thunder of an explosion.

  “Oh God,” Mom says. In that molten glow, Lizzie sees the shine of her mother’s tears. “Oh God, forgive me.”

  “No, Momma, no!” She could’ve fixed it; she could’ve made it better. “Why did you do that?”

  “You don’t understand.” He mother drags a hand across her eyes like a weary child. “It was the only thing left.”

  “No, it wasn’t! I could’ve fixed things, I could’ve helped—”

  From the backseat comes a flat, mechanical beep. Her mother gasps. The sound is so jarring and out of place it seems to come from the deep, dark valley of a dream.

  “It’s your phone,” Lizzie says.

  “I know that,” Mom says.

  Beep.

  “Should I answer?” Lizzie asks.

  Beep.

  “No,” her mother says.

  “But what if …” Like a birthday wish, Lizzie’s afraid to say it out loud. “Mom, what if it’s Dad?”

  Beep.

  “It might be his voice, but it wouldn’t be him, Lizzie. Your father’s gone.”

  Beep.

  “But what if—”

  “I said no!” her mother snapped. “Sit down and—”

  No, Lizzie thinks, furiously. Against her palms, she feels the sudden tingling surge as the Sign of Sure, sewn on her memory quilt, feeds on her thoughts: all that energy stored up in her brain that wants to whisk her through the Dark Passages, that must find a way out. No, Momma’s wrong; I can fix this. I’ll make it want me. I’ll build a forever-Now and swoosh the whisper-man there with the Sign of Sure.

  She unbuckles her belt.

  “What are you doing?” her mother raps. “Sit down, young lady.”

  “I don’t have to listen to you,” Lizzie spits, and then she is scrambling up, twisting around in her seat, reaching for her mother’s purse. Through the rear window, she can see the forest’s black walls squeezing the road, as if her past is a book whose covers are slowly, inexorably closing. Then, in the sky, she sees something else, and for a second, her heart forgets how to beat.

  “M-Mom?” The word comes out in a rusty whisper. Her throat clenches as tight as a fist. “M-Mom, the s-sky … i-it’s …”

  “Oh no.” Her mother’s eyes flick to the rearview, and then she cups a hand to her mouth as if she might be sick. “Oh my God, what have I done?”

  “Mom?” Lizzie can’t look away. “Mom, what is that?”

  “The Peculiars … all that stored energy, I’d hoped it would be enough to take out the Mirror, but I didn’t stop to think that your father had already opened the gateway; he’d bound that thing and … My God, I’ve only given it more fuel.” Mom sounds as broken as the Peculiars and the Mirror. “What did I do?”

  Behind them, the sky is moving. High above the trees, something steams across the night: a boiling wall of white so dense that the stars are winking out, one by one.

  Something has bled into this world, all right. Something is storming after them. Something is running them down.

  Not an aurora.

  Not clouds.

  What is coming for them is the fog.

  EMMA

  Not the Way I’m Made

  “EMMA.” PAUSE. “EMMA.”

  A voice, very distant, as tinny as a radio. For a horrible second, her ears heard that weird hiss—peekaboo, I see you—and she thought, Kramer?

  “Emma?”

  She didn’t answer. Wouldn’t. Couldn’t. God, she was freezing. She hurt. The cold was intense, the snow burning across her skin like a blowtorch. When she pulled in a breath, she heard a jerky little cry jump out of her mouth as something with claws grabbed her ribs and ripped her chest.

  “Emma?” The voice was closer now, on her right, and it wasn’t the radio or Kramer at all. Why would she even think that? “Emma, come on, wake up.”

  A … a boy? Where? Emma tried moving her head. There was a liquid sound, and then a thick, choking chemical funk.

  “Emma, can you hear me?”

  Her neck screamed. So did her back. Her forehead throbbed, a lancet of pain stabbing right between her eyes, not only from the blink but …

  We crashed. I’m still in the van, but I saw that little girl again, too, and someone or something was … chasing her? But what? She couldn’t remember. The threads of the vision were fraying, unraveling. Didn’t matter. She dragged a hand to her aching forehead. She felt the familiar nubbins and that bigger circle of her skull plate just beneath her skin, but also something wet and sticky that was not gasoline.

  Blood. Cut. How deep? Her fingers slid over torn flesh but not metal. She must’ve hit pretty hard. Her head was swimmy and she was already dizzy from gas fumes. Her stomach did a long, slow roll. No, please, I don’t want to puke.

  “Emma, can you hear me?”

  “Yeah,” she breathed. She tried prying her lids open. They felt sewn shut, and she had to work to make her muscles obey. Then the darkness peeled away, and she winced against a stab of silver-blue light. “Bright.”

  “Sorry.” The featureless blot of the boy’s head and
shoulders moved between her and the snowmobile’s headlight.

  “Better?”

  “Uh,” she said, and swallowed, waiting for her stomach to slither back down where it belonged. It was only then that she realized he was on his hands and knees, peering through a window. The van had flipped. She was lying on the roof. Or was it the ceiling? She couldn’t think. What was the last thing she remembered from this world? The sensation of whizzing through space, a free fall, and then the bang as the van plowed into something nose-first. Her back had slammed the windshield, and she’d rebounded, flying past the steering wheel, her shoulder clipping the driver’s side headrest as she shot for the rear window, as Lily screamed and screamed.

  “Lily?” Her voice came out in a weak little wheeze. “Lil?”

  “Hey.” The boy squirmed in, sloshing through gasoline until his face was right up to hers: so close she could feel his warm breath on her cheek. “Hey, look at me, stay with me. Here,” he said, lacing his fingers around her left hand. “Feel that? Remember me? Eric?”

  “Yes, I … I do. I remember.” It took a lot of work and concentration to swallow. “But where’s Lil?”

  “We need to get her out of there.” Another boy, a voice she didn’t recognize. “That gas isn’t stopping. I’ve never seen so much gasoline. How much you think this thing holds?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know.” Eric tossed the words over his shoulder, while his eyes never left hers. “You guys got a blanket or maybe a first aid kit? She’s bleeding pretty bad.”

  “First aid kit in the trunk,” the boy said again. “Hang on.”

  A girl’s voice: “I’ll come with you.” The boy and girl moved off, their voices dissipating like smoke.

  “You’re going to be okay.” Eric’s grip on her hand tightened. “I’ve got you now, Emma. You just keep looking at me. Don’t worry about anything else, all right? Can you tell me what hurts?”

  Everything? “My head. Chest. Hurts to breathe. I think I hit the steering wheel.”