by Ilsa J. Bick
“Don’t you know?”
“Yes. I mean … I don’t like thinking about it, but …” She clamped her lips together, willed herself to get out a complete sentence. “Why isn’t it here? How can it just stop like that?”
“Because that’s where our dad stopped. It’s as far as he got before Mom …” Lizzie’s eyes pooled again. “Before she did what she did.”
“Where he …” The memory quilt slipped in a muted tinkle of glass from her trembling hand, followed a moment later by the flutter of the parchment scroll filled with that bloody scrawl. She put a trembling hand to her mouth. “I thought your dad’s notes and unfinished novels were locked up somewhere.”
Lizzie nodded. “But he couldn’t help himself from starting again, even though he promised. He said books were like really bad colds you just never got over until you wrote them down and got them out of your blood. Maybe he put so much of me in you, it was harder for him to stop himself, but I don’t know. Anyway, he just never finished you, and that’s why you got out. But that’s also what makes you really special. You’re not like the others, especially the guys whose stories are over.”
He never finished me? She means, there’s no period to the end of that sentence; there’s no The End. But I know what happened after I went down cellar. I’m not twelve anymore; I’m seventeen, and I have memories and a life and I go to school. Then she thought, Oh my God. Eric.
“Special.” Her voice came out in a croak. “Not over yet? What is this?” She grabbed her middle with both arms, trying to hold it together. She was going to be sick; she was going to lose it; she was losing it; she could feel the burn flickering up her throat. In another second, she would break a window and go shrieking out into the snow. No wonder it was called Alice in Wonderland syndrome: This is just like London, because we’re all mad here. “What do you mean, I’m closest to you? That I got out? Out of where? What are you saying?”
“Emma, you’ve got the most of me in you … you know, like our eyes and stuff. You pull words from White Space. The Sign of Sure recognizes you just like it knows who I am. So I figured you were special enough to help me hold all the others in place.”
“The most of y-you. The guys whose stories are o-over.”
“Uh-huh.” Lizzie nodded. “You know, like Rima and Bode and Tony. They’re harder to do because they’re over and can’t change much.”
Oh shit, oh shit. She was gulping now, her breath coming in jerky, shuddery gasps. God, please, please, please let me wake up. “Different books. You’re talking about characters from different books, from your dad’s books.”
“Well, sure,” said Lizzie. “I just had to show you how to do it by opening the right books and dropping you into different book-worlds until you figured out how to pull me into your White Space, your story. Oh boy, it took you long enough.”
“Opening the right … dropping me into book-worlds …” Emma choked. All her blackouts. She looked down at the parchment scroll, with its unfinished story of her life. All those blinks when she lost time; when she saw things … “Are you s-saying … are you t-telling me that all I am is s-some character from a goddamned book?”
“Well, yeah.” Lizzie’s lips wobbled. “Kind of.”
RIMA
The Thing That Had Been Father Preston
“GO!” TANIA DROPPED into the passenger’s seat. Whiter than salt, her face glistened with sweat. Another spasm of pain grabbed the girl’s middle, and she grunted through gritted teeth, the knuckles of her right hand tightening around the rifle, as she clicked her shoulder harness home. “G-go, Rima, g-get us moving!”
“Hang on!” Mashing the accelerator, Rima felt the hard knock of the snowcat’s engine throttling up to a full-throated roar. The vehicle surged forward in a squalling grind of grating treads and screaming metal. Through the windshield, she could see the thing that had been Father Preston sprinting away, his cassock unspooling like a cape, flowing around his ruined body like black oil. Preston was moving fast, faster than should be possible for a man, almost skimming over the snow.
“Get him, Rima!” Tania straight-armed the dash against another wave of pain. “G-get that son of a b-bitch,” she panted, sweeping a hank of sweat-dampened hair from her forehead. “Go, Rima, g-go!”
Go. Rima rammed the joystick. Dropping on its hydraulic slave, the snowblower came alive with a mechanical scream, the massive orange auger chewing and biting snow that, finally, had decided to behave a bit like real snow. The discharge chute belched glittering arcs of pulverized ice. Rima gunned the engine, and the machine lunged forward like a ravening insect, steel mandible ripping, tearing. Go, go, go, go!
The thing was now past the cemetery, almost to the woods, but they were gaining. Sixty yards … fifty … thirty. They were so close now that she could see the thin puffs of ice crystals kicked up by the thing’s mad passage. The edge of the snowblower’s casing was ruler-straight, and as they neared and the thing that was once a man—a gentle priest who believed that touching whispers was a gift, and not a curse—dropped below this new horizon, Rima shouted, “We’ve got him, we’ve got him, hang on!”
They hit: a sudden, jarring blow. Both girls slammed forward. Tania managed to hang on to the shotgun but lost her grip on the hammer, which clanked off the windshield and went spinning to the floor somewhere behind them, in the passenger cab. With a gasp, Rima threw up her arms as she catapulted forward and saw the wheel rushing for her face. At the last second, her shoulder harness caught and held, jerking her back like a hooked fish. Above the cat’s stuttering clank and roar, she heard a long, bubbling, unearthly wail. Beneath them, the snowblower seemed to stagger and mutter a stuttering, muted gargle, like a person simultaneously trying to breathe and talk with his mouth full.
“No no no no no.” Rima stiff-armed the cat’s balky controls. “Don’t you quit, don’t you quit!”
With a choked bellow, the cat coughed a mucky jet of macerated flesh and bone from its discharge chute. Blowback splatted against the windscreen, but instead of the moist red and purple and pink of a man’s blood and tissues, what hit that glass was viscous and black as oil and no longer human.
Choking again, the cat lurched and clanked to a shuddering halt. In the cab, the sudden stop catapulted the girls forward once more, and this time, Rima’s shoulder harness failed. Pain exploded in her right cheek as she slammed into the steering wheel, and her vision sheeted red.
“Rima?” Tania’s voice was tight and breathless. “R-Rima?”
“I’m … I’m okay. I’m fine,” she lied. Her cheek felt like a bomb had detonated and blown a hole through the roof of her mouth. She felt the warm spurt of blood on her cheek and down her neck, and there was more blood on the steering wheel.
“N-no,” Tania said in that same cramped voice. “That’s n-not what I meant. Look, Rima.” She pointed. “L-look at the windshield.”
Rima did—and then wished she hadn’t.
The windscreen was a nightmare of steaming flesh and ropy streamers of black blood.
And all of it was moving.
EMMA
Whatever They Make Will Be Real
1
“KIND OF?” EMMA’S chest imploded. This was insane; she might be nuts, but she was real, she did things, she could feel. “Is that kind of no, I’m not a character in a book, or is that kind of yes?”
“I mean, kind of.” Lizzie’s face was a tiny white oval. Her cobalt eyes were dark as India ink, the shadows that ghosted through before somehow even more pronounced than before. That birthmark glittered as brightly as a finely cut yellow diamond. “It’s sort of like that—”
“Sort of? Kind of? What are you talking about? I have a life!” Her hands flashed out to grab the little girl’s shoulders. Crying out, Lizzie tried backing away, but Emma wouldn’t let go and shook the kid, hard, like a floppy rag doll she was suddenly very tired of playing with. “Stop this shit! I have a past! I go to school! I watch X-Files and Lost and write stupid papers abou
t crazy dead writers! I drink goddamned mocha Frappuccinos!”
“I kn-know! I’ve v-v-visited!” Mouth sagging open, Lizzie was bawling her head off, sobbing the way only little kids do. “The words are al-all th-there!”
“Stop saying that! I’m not just words on a page!” Her chest was going like a bellows, the air scouring her throat. She felt the prick of furious tears. Of all the things her mind could light on, this is what she thought: Kramer would just love this. This is so Philip K. Dickilicious; I write this up, and I’ll get a damned A for sure.
Then she thought about that fragment of a sentence penned in red ink, a sentence that refused to resolve: Wait a second. There’s no period. Nothing comes after.
“What about all the rest of my life? Is Kramer in your dad’s story?” Her voice came out sounding as dry and raspy as shriveled cornstalks stirred by an October wind. Her fingers dug until she felt the girl’s bones. “Is Holten Prep? Is Starbucks?” Is Eric?
“No. That’s one of the reasons you’re so special, Emma.” Tears gleamed on Lizzie’s cheeks. “You did all that by yourself.”
2
“I …” SHE COULD feel the kid’s words like something physical, a slap, hard enough that she let go of the little girl and actually took a staggering step back. “I … I what? I did what?”
“You heard me.” Lizzie’s eyes glimmered again with those odd, curling, smoky, X-Files shadows. “You got loose and wrote yourself. You’re still writing yourself.”
“That’s crazy.” The words came out raspy and harsh, as if they were glass ground on a Dremel or abrasive stone. Her eyes dropped to that limp tangle of parchment. That had been blank, but she’d pulled McDermott’s words, what Lizzie said was a story that he never finished, from nothing. “This isn’t The Matrix. I’m not Neo. I’m a real person.”
“And what’s that?” Lizzie said. “Maybe you’re only real because you think you are.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t prove something like that. You just know.”
“But what’s that?” Lizzie pressed. “What’s knowing? It’s still all just stuff that happens in your head, right?”
“Come on, there’s more to it than that.” Emma felt a sweep of … not déjà vu, exactly, but a feeling that she was having an argument with some older version of herself: a girl who wouldn’t let the Great Bloviator off the hook. No, stop that; you are not her. She put her hands on her cheeks. “I feel my face. I’ve got a real cut from a real steering wheel.” I got a girl killed. I’ve got titanium skull plates and scars. “I hear you. I see you.”
“But the tools for all that are in your head. Like you touch something, but then you give it a name.” Lizzie picked up her memory quilt. “This is a quilt because we say it is. That’s how you write yourself—don’t you get it? Everything you know is because of what happens inside your head. Without your brain to turn this”—she gave the bunched quilt a shake that made its glass tick and chime—“into cloth and stitches and glass, you wouldn’t know what it was.”
“No. Thoughts and perceptions aren’t tools. They’re not really real. You can’t hold or even see them.” Which wasn’t exactly true, she knew; you could take a picture of the brain and see what parts were firing when, say, you saw a pencil or tasted an apple. “I mean, when I think about making or writing something, it doesn’t just happen. First, I have to have the idea, and then do something with it. The idea comes first. Ideas are …” She groped for the right word while at the same time thinking how odd it was that she was having this conversation with a little girl who couldn’t be more than five years old. “Ideas are energy. When you strip it all down, thought is just a bunch of the right cells firing at the right time in the correct sequence. That’s all ideas are. Thoughts are physics and chemistry.”
“Emmaaa.” Lizzie did an eye-roll. “What do you think thought-magic is? A pen and paper are just tools to make thought-magic real, but that doesn’t mean they’re the only tools.” She held up the galaxy pendant, stitched into its spiderweb. “The Sign of Sure is a tool. It helps you find your way between Nows and see better. Dad’s Dickens Mirror, and his special paper and ink, and Mom’s panops—they were just different tools for grabbing and fixing thought-magic. And even then, it’s why Mom had to make Peculiars to hold the extra thought-magic, so everything stayed where it was supposed to.”
“Stayed where it was supposed to. You mean, on the page,” Emma said. Weird how talking this out, actually thinking about it, calmed her a bit. Maybe because thinking and science are what I’m good at. She almost understood this, too; she could feel her mind inching toward some kind of comprehension, the way Meg Murry had groped after that tesseract and what made a wrinkle in time work. The whole character-from-a-book thing, she didn’t buy. She was a person, and that was that, right? Right? But she’d felt the heat from the galaxy pendant, that cynosure, feeding off her thoughts, her intentions. And in the blink or whatever that was at the slit-door, I felt a click, a change, like House was trying to hammer it home through my thick skull: the Dickens Mirror is a tool.
Or a machine?
And what’s a story but symbols penned in black ink on white paper? The symbols wouldn’t mean anything if there wasn’t White Space, that blank page. It’s the emptiness that defines the shape, that tells me that the symbol I’ve just written is an a or an s.
“So the … the fog that came after you and your mom,” she said. “That wasn’t just the thing your dad pulled through the Mirror?”
Lizzie shook her head. “Mom said that when the Peculiars melted, all the thought-magic that wasn’t able to go anywhere got loose. So the fog’s all of that tangled up with the whisper-man and … and …” Lizzie’s lips shook and her face tried to crumple again.
“And your dad?” Thinking, It’s like burning a log. The wood vanishes, but it doesn’t really go away. Its energy is released as heat. The energy changes form, that’s all. So the fog is …
“Yeah,” Lizzie whispered. Her eyes glistered and wavered like cut blue glass in deep murky water. “The whisper-man and my dad are all mushed together, tangled up. They were like that even before I finished my special Now and swooshed the fog here so it couldn’t go anywhere else. The whisper-man and … and Dad … they’re part of the thought-magic now, the fog, except the whisper-man is way stronger. I don’t know exactly why, but he can use the thought-magic, and I can’t stop him. The only good thing is this is pretty much the only place he can use it.”
“Because we’re in your special forever-Now? Something like your mom’s Peculiars?” She thought about the snowy, frigid valley. Something about cold was important … something in chemistry … no, physics? I know this; thought about this same thing not too long ago. But what, when?
Instead, she said, “That’s why there’s House. You had to make a safe place for yourself to stay. So this, the bedroom, the House, is kind of you, but everything else belongs to the … the whisper-man? The fog?” When Lizzie nodded, she went on, “You said the others, Rima and Eric, Casey … you said they’ve fallen between the lines because you couldn’t hold on to all of them. But Lizzie”—bending, she retrieved the parchment with its unfinished story of an odd girl with even odder gifts—“there’s only White Space between lines.”
“I know that,” Lizzie said. “Why do you think it’s so important to find them? They’re between the lines of this Now, and the Now is full of the fog, and the fog is thought-magic. They’re in nothing, and that’s bad because the really strong ones will make it into something.”
“Wait, wait.” She held up a hand like a traffic cop. “You’re saying that wherever they are, the others will use the … the thought-magic, the energy, to make their stories?”
“Right.” Lizzie’s face flooded with relief that Emma seemed to have finally caught on. “Especially the ones whose stories are done. They’re the strongest because they’re set.”
Set. “You mean set as in a period, the end of a story,” Emma said. “Their stories a
re like road maps that they must eventually follow, no matter where they are. Only what happens won’t just be words on a page. If they’re in the fog, whatever they make will be real.”
“Uh-huh,” Lizzie said. “With teeth.”
CASEY AND RIMA
Fight
1
MOANING, CASEY ROLLED to his hands and knees. When he gave another moist, ripping cough, the spray that spattered the snow reminded him of those red sprinkles they put on cupcakes. Whenever he moved, it felt as if the bones of his ribcage were grating together. With every breath, a glassy, jagged pain hacked at his lungs.
To his left and very far away, easily a couple football fields, and almost at that distant black wall of trees, he saw the silent snowcat crouching in the center of a goopy, slimy mess that was a little like the tar they used on roads in summer. Spatters of the same goo glopped over the driver’s cab.
Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a small flick, and turned a look. Something was out there, just sliding from the trees. He squinted, trying to bring whatever it was into focus—and then his heart skipped a beat.
This time, instead of one thing racing for the snowcat, there were three.
2
MY GOD, IT’S moving. Rima’s stomach turned a slow, gurgling somersault. On the windscreen, the glistening, shredded, oily chunks of the thing that had been Father Preston pulsed and quivered in a slow, shambling creep. Ropy clots of black blood eeled like inky water snakes. Like in biology, when they make you cut up a worm; only the worm doesn’t glue itself back together. She could hear them, too: a high-pitched SMEEE-smeee, SMEEE-smeee, a sound of fingers smearing steam from a bathroom mirror. Horrified, she watched as two pieces met, their seams thinning and mending, the bits of raw stygian flesh sewing themselves together into a much larger chunk that squirmed off in search of another mate. The entire windscreen was alive with shivering, creeping flesh laboriously knitting together bit by bit.