by Ilsa J. Bick
“Hey, hey,” Eric said, raising his hands in surrender. “Easy, Chad, easy, it’s cool, we’re cool.”
“We are not … COOL!” Spit foamed at the corners of Chad’s mouth, and he rammed the gun into Eric’s flesh so hard the front sight clawed his skin. “We will be cool if you shut up, if you shut up, if you just shut up!”
So Eric shut up. There was nothing else he could do. This was out of his control. He shut up, and after a long second, Chad jerked the gun away.
This is a nightmare, but I’m living it. Eric felt blood welling from the fresh wound on his cheek. I’m real; I’m bleeding; you can’t bleed if you’re not real. He watched that fog, all that brilliant empty white, storming after them, filling the world. You can’t be scared to death if you’re already dead.
The truck swayed, slewing into a turn, the world beyond tilting, and Eric’s blood iced, every hair on his neck prickling with a kind of stupid shock, because he suddenly understood.
The snowstorm had been a warm-up. The storm had only been a way of bringing them all together. It was the fog that mattered, the fog that would run them down and swallow them whole.
What then? Where—and when—will we be then?
“Oh JESUS!” Chad screamed. “It’s right on top of us, Bode, it’s right on top—”
RIMA
No Time
“RUN!” CASEY SCREAMED, and then he was dragging her over the snow. Rima staggered, nearly fell, but Casey gave her a mighty jerk, hard enough that a shout of pain balled in her shoulder.
“Casey,” she gasped as they floundered, their legs digging post-holes through deep snow, “the sled, where’s the sled?”
“Blast blew her off the road!” Casey’s grip on her hand was iron. “Saw it from the tree, to the left, in a ditch! No!” He tugged her harder. “Don’t look back!”
But she did—and all the strength drained from her body to seep into the snow.
The fog was a gigantic thunderhead stretching so far overhead there was no limit to it. The fog was a pillar of nacreous, roiling white that built on itself, piling higher and higher. Unlike a cloud, the fog also spread from side to side, and everything it touched, it swallowed. Rima knew the night sky was still there, that above this deadening veil were true clouds and the stars beyond, but the fog was lowering itself, filling the bowl of the valley, obliterating the sky. The fog surged, an avalanche of white steamrolling right for them.
“Come on,” Casey urged. “Come on!”
Something bullet-shaped gleamed a dull silver and black from a deep wallow to her left. “There!” Rima cried. As soon as she stepped off the road, Rima sank up to her thighs, but she bullied through, trenching out a path to Casey’s snowmobile. “What should I do?”
“Dig under the nose!” Casey was stamping snow, beating out a trail. “We got to pack down the snow, then roll it onto the runners and get it pointed downhill.”
No time. Rima could barely move. With every step, the treacherous snow grabbed and pulled, and she was conscious of the fog boiling across the night, pressing against her back. They only had maybe a minute, if that, before the fog reached them. “Casey, there’s no time!”
Casey tossed a wild look over his shoulder. His face glistened with sweat. His teeth were bared in a grimace of fear and frustration. “Damn it. All right, leave it; come on, let’s flip it!”
They wallowed around to the downhill side, and then Casey backed into the sled, hooked his hands under the seat. Rima slid her left shoulder under the left handlebar, felt the snowmobile rock to the right and then try to tumble back, but she dug in and heaved. The snowmobile tilted, and she nearly slipped as the sled wobbled and then did a slow, heavy tumble onto its runners.
“Come on, get on, but don’t sit down!” Straddling the seat, Casey waited until she’d scrambled onboard before pulling up the kill switch, twisting the ignition key, yanking on the start cord—once, twice …
Hurry. Rima shot a quick look over her shoulder. The fog was still coming. Hurry, Casey, hurry, hurry, God, come on, come on!
The sled’s engine sputtered, caught. The machine gave a sudden lurch, and Rima tumbled forward. With a cry, she made a wild grab, snagging Casey’s tattered parka just as they began to move.
“Okay, down!” Casey shouted. “Rima, sit down!”
Arms wrapped around Casey’s middle, Rima obeyed, dropping onto the seat. The sled roared out of the gully, a rooster tail of snow flying behind, and then they were streaking across a sparkling plain of silver-blue snow. With no faceplate for protection, Rima gritted her teeth against bitter air that cut like a bristle of knives.
“Hang on!” Casey shouted as they banked into a tight, fast turn. She felt the back of the sled swing, and for a heart-stopping moment, she thought they’d spin out. But Casey wrestled the handlebars back to true, and the sled spurted over the snow with a roar. He shot a quick glance over his shoulder, and she felt his body go rigid. “Shit, shit!”
“What?” But even before she looked back, she knew. The fog was there, a seamless curtain stretching from the sky to hug the snow, chasing after them in an inexorable tide: two hundred yards back and gaining. One-fifty, a hundred yards, eighty. Fifty …
Casey, I’m sorry. Squeezing her eyes shut, she buried her head into his back, hugged him tight. If it hadn’t been for me, you would’ve gotten away.
The fog slammed down.
EMMA
Black Dagger
1
ON A STREET drawn from that terrible summer of The Bell Jar when Emma will become so lost in that book, she will think she really might be better off dead; as she stares at the jacket photo of a McDermott novel she’s never heard of—the hand in the photograph moves.
Horrified, Emma watches those bizarre fingers unfurl and stretch and sprout talons. Its talons lengthen like a cat’s claws. Oozing over the windowsill, the hand slithers down the apron, and now Emma can see that the skin is as scaly and cracked as that of a mummy. The hand bleeds onto the photograph in an inky stain, a black blight, and Frank McDermott …
McDermott—the McDermott captured in the picture—comes to life. As if suddenly aware that there is a world outside that photograph, Frank looks straight out to throw Emma a wink.
“Ah!” With a wild, incoherent cry, she stumbles back, her half-finished Frappuccino flying in a fan of whipped cream and mocha-flavored coffee from her left hand. The Dickens Mirror, a book that shouldn’t exist from a series that was never written, flutters to the pavement like a wounded bird. Around her neck, the galaxy pendant suddenly smolders.
“Hey,” Lily says.
“Emma?” Eric—a boy she has yet to meet, who shouldn’t be here—reaches for her. “What’s wrong? Are you all right?”
“No! No, you’re not real! This isn’t right!” Emma flinches away. She turns, her treacherous feet trying to tangle, trip her up, spill her to the sidewalk. “Get away from me, get away, don—” Backpedaling, she blunders from the curb into oncoming traffic on East Washington. A horn blasts as a car churns past, its hot breath swirling around her bare legs, snatching at her sundress. She can hear the sputter of the car’s radio through an open window: Investigators continue the grisly task of removing the remains of at least eight children believed to be the latest victims of—
“No, stop, I’m not listening, I don’t hear you, I don’t hear you!” She takes a lurching stutter-step and tumbles to rough asphalt. As she hits, the fingers of her right hand reflexively close around something hard and jagged.
She looks—and every molecule in her body stills. Everything stops.
The dagger of glass is absolutely flawless and wickedly sharp—and she knows this shape. It is nearly identical to the shard she will fish from that discards bucket and turn over and over on that afternoon when she feels Plath’s bell jar descending to engulf her mind in a dense, deathless fog. When she will think, I didn’t see anything, there was nothing down in Jasper’s cellar; it was just a crawl space, there was nothing inside, I
didn’t find …
But there is a difference. This dagger isn’t clear but smoky and black, polished to a mirror’s high gloss. Her reflection within this black dagger is so crisp she can make out the terror in her eyes, the curve of her jaw, every glister and sparkle of that galaxy pendant.
It’s a piece of the Mirror. She is jittering so badly her breaths come in herky-jerky gasps, and she thinks she might be one second away from passing out. It’s from the Dickens—
A sudden bite of pain sinks into her left wrist, bad enough to make her cry out. What was that? God, that hurt. Her eyes shift from the black dagger to her wrist—and then a scream blasts from her throat.
A thick, stingingly bright bracelet of blood has drawn—no, no, is drawing itself, inch by inch, across the skin of her left wrist.
“N-no,” she says. It’s like watching someone unzip her. She still clutches the black dagger in her right hand, and a single glance is enough to show her that the glass is pristine, not a splash of blood on it at all. And anyway, I didn’t, I didn’t, I don’t do it! I only thought about cutting my …
“Aahhh!” Another slash of pain, on her right wrist this time, the lips of yet another slice gaping open. She shrieks as the moist tissues pull apart to reveal a silvery glint of tendon and deeply red meat. Blood instantly surges into the belly of the wound, pumping and slopping from slit arteries, splish-splish-splish-splish, surging with her heart. A nail of panic spikes her throat. The warmth drains from her face, her lips, and her guts are ice. Her vision’s going muzzy, and in the black dagger, her reflection’s turned runny, the features shifting and melting as a new and different face knits together: same eyes, same golden flaw in the right iris. Same jaw and chin. Only the hair, wavy and golden blonde, is different. Still, she knows who this is.
I’m Lizzie? A violent shudder makes the reflection jitter. We’re the same person?
“NO!” A shriek scrambles past her teeth. “No, I’m me, I’m Emma!” Still screaming, she hurls the black dagger away. It cuts the air, flashing end over end like a scimitar. Both her arms are spewing blood now, and as Emma scuttles back on her hands like a crab, vivid red smears paint the road, marking her path. There is blood everywhere, too much, a whole lake of it. Anyone who’s bled this much ought to have fainted—hell, ought to be dead. For that matter, she’s landed in the middle of a busy street. She should be squashed under a bus by now, or flattened by a car.
But there are, suddenly, no cars, no people. No taunts from a radio. When she glances back at the bookstore, she sees that Eric and Lily are gone, too.
It’s like House. Terrified, her aqua sundress purpling with her blood, she clamps her torn arms to her heaving chest. Her eyes skip from store to store. No people. Except for BETWEEN THE LINES, the other stores are only blank fronts with blacked-out windows. Her gaze falls to the curb, the gutter, then drags up to the trees silhouetted against a milky sky that she knows was blue and bright only minutes before. No trash, no dead leaves. No sun. Yet not everything has vanished. The Dickens Mirror lies on the pavement, facedown, its covers in a wide splay.
There is movement out of the corner of her eye, on the grimy asphalt. Glancing down at the growing pool of her blood, she sees a glimmer along the crimson surface, which quivers and gathers itself—into a long, rippling red worm.
Oh. All the small hairs on her neck and arms rise. Her scalp prickles with horror, and she can feel her titanium plates, the lacy one on her forehead and its twin at the very base of her skull, heating beneath her skin as if a switch has been thrown and a connection forged in her brain. Oh, this can’t be happening.
But it is. Her blood is alive, slithering, eeling from side to side, snaking its way over gritty asphalt. Frozen in place, she watches the red slink as it seeps across the road, never spreading, never veering, but creeping up the curb and onto the sidewalk, heading straight for the book. As soon as her blood touches the cover, dragging itself like a moist crimson tongue along the edges, curls of steam rise—and the book … quickens.
It’s like my blink, when I saw Lizzie’s dad—Frank McDermott—at the Dickens Mirror. Except it is a book, not a strange mirror, drinking her blood, greedily sucking and feeding, the pages pulsing and swelling, the covers bulging … And then she spies …
Oh God.
2
THE SPIKE OF a claw rises from the book, like a trapdoor has suddenly opened to let something deep underground find the surface. And then she sees another claw. And a third.
“No.” The word is no more than a deathless whisper. Trembling, she watches as the taloned fingers of whatever is living in that book hook over the cover’s lip. It is as if The Dickens Mirror is not paper sandwiched by cardboard but a mouth, the rim of a deep well, a pit, a cave. A second stygian hand snakes free to clamp onto the edge. The razor-sharp claws clench; and now two spindly and skeletal arms appear. They bunch and strain, the elbows straightening like a gymnast’s working parallel bars, as the thing living inside strains to be born. It boils from The Dickens Mirror: first the head and now shoulders and a leathery scaled torso, which is now green, now silver, now black. The book-thing twists its long, sinuous body right and left, corkscrewing its way from the page. Then, it pauses as if gathering its strength—or maybe only deciding what it ought to do next.
Quiet, be quiet. Clamping her lips together to corral the scream, Emma holds herself very still as the rounded knob of its head lifts, the thing seeming to taste the air, sniff out a scent. Don’t see me, don’t taste me, don’t smell me.
But then … it turns.
No. Please, House. A dark swoon of terror sweeps her mind. Her skull plates are so hot her brain ought to be boiling. Please, show me a door, House. Sweep me away in a blink. Do something, do anything, but please show me a way out of here!
House, if it is listening, does nothing. And this thing is … not quite formed, not yet. It has no face. Where there should be eyes, a nose, a forehead, a mouth, there is only an ebony swirl. A nothing. A blank. But Emma knows: somehow, it sees her.
There you are. The voice ghosts over her brain in a whisper that is the sound of brittle ice; of glass frit spilling over a metal marver. I’ve wanted to play with you for such a long time, Emma. Come. Staaay. Stay and plaaay, Blood of My Blood—
She drags her voice up from where it’s fallen. “N-no. No, you’re not real. This isn’t happening. I saw this in a blink. It was just a—”
All at once, the thing’s eyes pop into being, but not on its face. Two eyes stare from its hands, one on each palm, and they are not black but blue as sapphires. They are her eyes. Even at this distance, she can see the golden flaw floating in the iris of the eye on the right.
Get up, Emma. Somehow, she has pulled herself into a crouch. Her arms are no longer bloody; in fact, there are no wounds at all, not even a scratch. Get up, Emma, get—
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
EMMA
Them Dark Ones Is Cagey
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.