White Space

by Ilsa J. Bick

  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? W
hat 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.

  RIMA

  Where the Dead Live

  “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—”

  “The real world.” He paused, then said, slowly, as if testing it out, “It’s like this valley is the fog’s world, and it wanted to make sure we left the piece we were in.” He shook his head. “That sounds pretty crazy.”

  “Not to me. But assuming we could go somewhere, can you even drive in this?”

  “Oh sure. How fast we go depends on how far ahead I can actually see.” Her arms were still wrapped around his middle, and now Casey put a hand over hers and squeezed. “I’m going to get off the sled and walk a little ways, take a look, see what I can see.”

  “No,” she said, alarmed. She felt Taylor’s death-whisper squirm against her chest. Easy, honey, she thought to the girl. I know; we’re in trouble. To Casey: “I don’t think we should let ourselves get separated, even for something like that.”

  “Don’t worry; I won’t go far. If it helps, I’ll walk backward, okay? That way, you keep me in sight, I can’t disappear, right?”

  Well, unless something snakes out from the fog and grabs you. But she said, “How long?”

  “The second I start to fade out, you give a shout, and I’ll stop. But I got to know how far we can actually see in this mess.”

  He was right, but she didn’t have to like it. Perched on the sled’s runners, she held her breath as he backed up a step at a time. He never looked away, and she didn’t dare. The fog seemed sticky somehow, like a cloud of cobwebs, dragging over Casey in fibrous runnels and cloying tendrils.

  “Burns,” he said, backhanding a clog of fog from his face. “Really cold.” His nose wrinkled. “Does it smell funny to you?”

  “Yes.” She watched as more fog wreathed his chest and twined like ivy around his legs. The fog wasn’t grabbing hold so much as—okay, weird thought here—tasting Casey, the way a rattlesnake gathered information through its tongue. “Like rust.”

  “No.” Working his mouth, Casey spat and made another face. “Like blood.”

  She thought he might be right about that. “Okay, stop. You’re starting to gray out.”

  “Yeah, you’re getting kind of fuzzy, too. So”—he cast a critical eye to the snow and then back to her—“thirty feet maybe and …”

  “What?”

  “This is snow, right?” He gave her a strange look. “So why am I not sinking?”

  She didn’t understand at first, and then, staring down at the sled’s runners and his feet, she did. If this was snow, there should be clumps humped over the runners; Casey’s feet should break through the surface, but they hadn’t. There was no snow on his boots either. “Is it ice?”

  “Nope.” Squatting, he scooped a handful and studied the white mound, tipping his glove this way and that. “Looks like snow.” He gave a cautious sniff. “Doesn’t have a smell the way the fog does. This only smells … cold. Like it’s someone’s idea of snow, know what I mean? Like a movie set.”

  “Really?” She took a careful step off the sled’s runners. “Then why would the fog—”

  The shock as her boot touched the snow was like the detonation of a land mine, an explosion that ripped from the snow to scorch its way up her legs and rupture her chest. Digging in, Taylor’s death-whisper shrieked against her skin, the pain like knives, and Rima let out a sudden, sharp shout.

  “What?” Casey said, instantly alarmed. Five long strides and his hands were on her shoulders. “Rima, what’s wrong?”

  “The snow.” Gasping, groping for the sled, she stumbled back onto the runners. Taylor’s whisper relaxed, but now that she knew what lived in this weird snow that wasn’t, Rima imagined all those death-whispers shivering up the sled to seep through the soles of her boots and into her bones. “I …” Bowing her head, she swallowed around a sudden lump of fear. “I f-feel something.”

  “Feel something? In the snow?” He threw a quick glance at his feet as if expecting something to swim out and crawl up his legs. “Rima, what are you talking about?”

  Now that she’d begun, she couldn’t simply brush it off. Just say it. “People.”

  “People.” He waited a beat. “In the snow?”

  “Yeah.” She wet her lips. “The snow’s full of dead people. I feel them.”

  “You what? You feel—”

  “Yes, Casey, I know it sounds crazy, but the dead live in the snow. I feel their …” She broke off, remembering how Casey had been Big Earl, shedding his father’s death-whisper as easily as shucking the man’s shirt. He must not know; can’t sense the change much at all and only half-remembers. He just becomes. She gasped. And if the snow’s where the dead live … “Casey.” She snatched his jacket and yanked. “Casey, get off the snow, get off now!”

  “Wuh—” Off-balance, Casey reeled and lurched forward, his hands shooting out to grab the sled’s handlebars. “Okay, okay, I’m coming, relax.” She wouldn’t let go until he was straddling the seat so they faced one another. “All right, I’m on,” he said. “What’s the matter with you? What do you mean, you feel people?” Then his brows wrinkled, and he glanced away, his mouth working the way it had when he tasted the fog on his tongue. “You know, I … I remember something you said. It’s … foggy.” He let out a breathy laugh. “Which fits, I guess. But I do remember a little. In the car … I wouldn’t let you in … and I started hurting …” He raised a hand to that livid, swollen splash of purple-black bruise. “You said I needed to fight—”

  “I remember what I said.” She took his gloved hand in both of hers. “It’s something I’m … I’m able to do. I know you’ll think I’m crazy, but just listen.” As she talked, she saw the growing doubt and disbelief. Well, she knew how to fix that. “So,” she said, “that’s how I know about Big Earl: that he’s dead. That’s why I told you to fight him.”

  Yup, that did it. An expression first of blank surprise and then a swell of shock, hot and scarlet, flooded his face. “What?”

  “You heard me.” She paused, then added, softly, “I know what Big Earl did to you. I know Eric didn’t mean for it to happen, but he had no choice. He was protecting you. If he hadn’t swung that bottle
and put Big Earl down, I think you’d both be dead.”

  “How?” The question came as a harsh, hoarse whisper. “How can you know all that?”

  “Your shirt. It was your dad’s. That’s why I didn’t want you to touch me, Casey. Because whenever you did, I felt it, him, Big Earl’s death-whisper … and you, when you were wearing the shirt, you were different. You were mean. Didn’t you feel it? You feel the difference now, right?”

  His eyes faltered, his gaze sliding from her face to the snow. Some part of his mind must register the change. Perhaps he even knew but tucked that knowledge away in some dim corner where he would have little excuse to look.

  “Yes,” he said, finally. When his eyes again met hers, they were much too bright and pooled. “Before, when I looked at you and the others? I heard him talking to me, telling me what to think. But now I … I see you, like there’s no fog, nothing of Big Earl between us. It’s like I’m meeting you for the very first time.”

  She opened her mouth to say … something, she didn’t remember what. The words slipped right off her tongue, because that was when she got her first good look at Casey’s eyes as they were now. They weren’t just bright with tears. They were different. When he had worn Big Earl’s shirt, Casey’s eyes were a muddy brown. Now they were stormy. Not gray, exactly, or blue or brown or green. His eyes were all colors, and no color, nothing fixed. His were the kind of eyes that, depending on the light, were green one moment and hazel the next. Even blue.

  What does that mean? Another thought: My God, maybe he could get to the point where the change would be permanent and he’d never find himself again.

  “How did you feel then?” she asked. “When you had that shirt? Do you remember?”

  “Angry,” he whispered. “Mad at everybody, everything, even Eric. I didn’t like the feeling, and I heard Big Earl in my head and it … he was bad. Evil. Remembering him crawling around like this black spider, it makes me feel dirty. That’s never happened before either. I’d never had him in my head. Hell, I used to think someone had made a mistake. How could Eric and I have a father like that? It never felt like my dad belonged in our lives; he was a mistake, an outsider. Like … like this virus you just couldn’t shake and …” Casey let out a trembling breath. “Ohhh-kay, that sounds pretty crazy.”