White Space

by Ilsa J. Bick

  “Why isn’t there a book about us?” Casey suddenly asked. “We’re here, but there’s no Eric book, no Casey book.”

  “Terrific.” Bode snorted. “Which means you guys are the only real people?”

  “I told you, I don’t know anything about that,” Lizzie said.

  “There’s no Emma book either,” Eric said.

  “Not exactly,” Emma said, and gestured at the parchment she’d brought down from Lizzie’s room. She’d half-expected that red spidery scrawl to have disappeared, but it hadn’t: One June afternoon …

  “I think Emma’s book was the one my dad was working on when Mom … when she … you know.” The little girl pressed the heel of a hand to her pooling eyes. “There was a whole bunch of thought-magic spilling out all over the place, and that’s when Emma got loose.”

  “ ‘One June afternoon,’ ” Eric read, and lifted his eyes to hers. “It says that you went down cellar for a book. Did that happen?” When she nodded, he said, “Can you tell us what happened next? Do you remember?”

  Oh yeah, in spades. The family room seemed suddenly much too hot. She didn’t want to talk about this, and not only because it had scared her silly. Talking would make it real, because she would be putting words to an experience that felt like the distant cousin to what was happening to them now. And everything—my blinks, my blackouts—all that started where McDermott’s fragment ends.

  She cleared her throat. “Like it says, I was a kid. I decided to forget it, try never to think about it. Most of the time, it’s muddy, like a dream. But what the parchment says is right. It was June, a week after I turned twelve,” she said, “when I went down cellar to look for a book.”

  EMMA

  Down Cellar

  THE FIRST THING she notices down cellar is the icy tongue of a draft licking her ankles.

  Well, that’s weird. Emma frowns. The cellar’s got two rooms. The first has nothing very interesting: a boiler, a washer and dryer. But this second room is like a cave filled with treasure, chockablock with boxes and shelves and heaps of novels, including a special glassed-in cabinet of first-edition Dickens books Jasper keeps here, down cellar, where the temperature is always cool and the air kept very dry. There are also old comic books and stacks of science fiction, as well as tomes on science and history and art. There’s a massive antique rolltop desk, too, locked up tight. She’s run her hands over that thing a dozen times, searching for a hidden catch or knob that might release the rolltop. Her jewelry box has a secret compartment, so maybe there’s some über-secret way of getting into the desk, too, but she finds nothing. Picking the lock also turns out to be way harder than in the movies, and she’s finally let it be. Probably Jasper doesn’t remember the desk’s even here, hunkered in the dark.

  But the draft is really strange. It doesn’t belong at all. Inching on hands and knees, she follows the chill behind a tower of boxes butted against the south wall. There, etched on the wall and along the floor, is a perfect two-foot square. Instead of the gray wash used on the rest of the cellar’s cinderblock, however, this square is a blinding, featureless, bone-bright white.

  She rocks back on her heels, the better to study that blank. There is no doubt in her mind that Jasper has slathered the same paint here that he does on his canvases, but why? Is something beneath this? A painting on the cinderblock? She wouldn’t put it past him. But the idea doesn’t feel quite right.

  Then her eyes catch a slight wink of brass, and she sees a pull-ring on the right, about midway down. The pull-ring is Emma-sized, just right for her hand. Had that been there a moment ago? She isn’t sure. But there’s no doubt now.

  Wow. A little mouse of excitement scurries up her spine. A door? Another room? She laces her fingers through the pull-ring—and hesitates. She’s not an idiot. There might be spiders, or bats, or dead things with gooshy innards waiting in the dark. Maybe Jasper’s hidden this door for a good reason. Nightmares live under the white paint on his canvases, for heaven’s sake.

  Still, she can’t resist, and pulls. At first, nothing happens, and she is about to pull harder when small flakes of white paint begin to snow in a fine flurry to the cool concrete. She feels the door gasp and shudder, as if suddenly waking from a deep sleep. Then the door gives; it yawwwns open on a silent, rushing exhalation of pent-up breath, the way she porpoises out of Superior’s blue-black waters on a hot summer’s day.

  But behind the door, there is nothing. It is Pitch. Black. Just an inky square. The darkness almost doesn’t look real. She can’t see an inch into all that nothingness, and it smells funny: like when she scraped both her knees bloody the day she took a header off her bike.

  Light. She races back upstairs, then pulls up and tiptoes into the front parlor. In the kitchen, the radio is yammering to itself, the reporter excitedly talking about police and victims and murder, but she doesn’t care. Jasper is gone; probably sketching but mainly boozing before heading off to make arrangements for a kayak trip they’ll take in a week’s time to Devils Island. Sal’s taken the truck to town for groceries. So Emma’s safe, at least for the rest of the afternoon. Perfect. Stretching up on her toes, she filches a pack of matches from the fireplace mantel. In the kitchen pantry, she finds a plastic bag of used candles—Sal’s such a cheapskate—and fishes out three blue stubs left over from her and Jasper’s birthday cakes the week before.

  Back downstairs again, lickety-split. She strikes a match: psssttt! The match head splutters to life, and then she raises her tiny torch to the dark. The blackness does not give. Inky shadows flee from her, splaying over the cement behind, but no light penetrates this third room. At. All.

  Okay, that’s even stranger. That’s not the way light works. Or darkness, for that matter: if the room is empty, then nothing should prevent light from penetrating.

  She reaches a tentative palm, like a mime tracing an invisible door, and instantly snatches it back. Whoa, cold. She haahs warm air onto her fingers, shaking her hand until the feeling needles back in darts and tingles. What she’s felt is so frigid it burns—and hard, like a pane of black glass. Yet in that brief contact she felt the darkness, well … seem to give a teeny, tiny bit: as if the glass, smooth as a sheet of quartz crystal, morphed to a dense yet pliable cellophane.

  But there is something else: a sound, scratchy with distance, seeping from that gloaming. What is that? She cocks her head, straining to tease out the components. The sound is as crackly as the weather band radio Jasper listens to whenever there’s a big blow and Superior gets wild. So someone left on a radio? Like Sal has done upstairs? That doesn’t make any sense, not even for Jasper. Probably just hearing a weird echo. And yet there is something making noise in there. No matter how hard she tries to pull the sound to her, however, all she gets are static-filled whispers, like the hiss of sand spun into a dust devil.

  Whoa, wait just a second. The hairs on her neck suddenly spike with alarm as another thought occurs to her. What if there’s someone living under Jasper’s house? That stuff can happen. Over on the mainland, down around Ashland, bums hole up in broken-down shacks all the time. The news says so.

  I shouldn’t go in there, she thinks. What if there are snakes? Or rats? Or something worse, like monsters and shadows, in the dark? That could be. Maybe that’s why Jasper’s walled this up, so what’s inside can’t get out.

  Or what if the black is the monster?

  “That’s just silly,” she says. “It’s your imagination. It’s like when you listen to a seashell and hear the ocean. You’re listening to air, that’s all.”

  Candle in one hand, she reaches for the blackness, wincing as her fingers meet that icy, glassy darkness, but forcing herself not to flinch back—and this time, there’s a difference. This time, she hears the faintest, tiniest click. Like the snap of a light switch or the sound her little jewelry box makes when she reaches underneath and presses the little brass nib and—snick-click—the hidden compartment springs open.

  Oh! Her heart does a spastic li
ttle flip. Now the glassy black membrane seems too thin and gives easily, and she watches as her hand and the candle slide into the dark.

  Almost instantly, the flame dies and goes out.

  What? Maybe the draft blew it out. But when she pulls out the candle, the yellow arrow of its flame still flickers. Huh? She eases the candle in again, and right away, the flame disappears—and so, she notices now, does her hand. Yet she still feels molten candle wax spilling onto her fingers. The sensation is distant, the wax’s warmth leeching away quickly, as if sucked into a deep well. No pain, though. Just cold and—

  And then, something inside hooks her wrist and tugs.

  “Oh!” Emma ekes out a tiny, wheezing cry. “No!” She tries taking her hand back, but this something only tugs harder. From deep inside, the whispers suddenly swell, growing louder and more excited, the sound like the scritch-scratch of rats scurrying over glass. Stifling a shriek, she plants her feet on either side of the door and pulls. The darkness gives like grudging, soft taffy and then lets go with a sensation like the snap of a rubber band: ka-twannnggg!

  She tumbles back, gasping. Her hand is still attached, all fingers accounted for, but the tips are white and icy. The candle’s dead. A thin streamer of smoke curls from the blackened wick—and the molten wax has frozen.

  There really is something—someone—in there. She sprawls, unmoving, paralyzed with fear, her heart going thumpity-thumpity-thumpity-thump in her chest. She felt a hand. There were fingers, and she heard it … them. They almost got her.

  And what about the candle? Her hand? Once she pierced that darkness, she hadn’t been able to see either. She’s paid attention in science: no light + brain-freeze cold = … outer space? Or a really cold vacuum? But neither makes sense. There can’t be a black space-hole under Jasper’s house.

  Then her mind jumps: Matchi-Manitou, in his deep dark cave. The Ojibwe say there’s a big evil demon in a huge black cave under Devil’s Island. Jasper goes over there all the time. He paints nightmares and then covers them up. He boozes and babbles about White Space and broken Nows and Dark Passages.

  So maybe this is one of them, a Dark Passage, and this is like Devils Island. Her lungs are going so fast she’s dizzy. Catch a clue, Emma. You live in a cottage overlooking Devil’s Cauldron. So is this a tunnel that connects the two? Is this the Dark Passages Jasper’s so scared of? No wonder Jasper’s covered this over. He doesn’t want whatever’s in there getting out. Or me or anyone going in. Something grabbed me. Something’s whispering. If Matchi-Manitou had gotten a really good grab and—bam!—she’d gotten hooked and reeled in like a salmon, what then? Would she have been able to see at all? Maybe she wouldn’t want to. She’d be dinner. Matchi-Manitou would drink her blood and crunch her bones and eat her up, munch-munch-munch. Even if she’d managed to get away, where would she be? What if she ended up somewhere—some when—else?

  You are not going to think about this anymore. The sweat pops on her forehead as she levers that door, really throws her weight against it. You are going to forget all about this. Stick your fingers in your ears and la-la-la-la all the way back upstairs.

  The door is pissed. Doesn’t want to close at all, nosirreebob. She can feel it protesting, or maybe that’s only what lives inside the dark exerting some force to keep her from closing it off again. From deep within, the whispers seethe, but there are so many she can’t make out the words, which she thinks is probably good. She doesn’t hear them; she’s not listening, la-la-la-la …

  Finally, grudgingly, the door grumbles shut. She doesn’t dare look at that white blank too long either. If she does, she might see the ring again, and then the urge to pull open the door and push against the dark would be too strong.

  Nope, no way, not going there. She works fast, wedging all those boxes tight-tight-tight against the white cinderblock. She covers that door and blots it from view. Hours later, when Jasper stumps back in, reeking of fish slime, bourbon, and the turp he uses to clean his brushes, she’s at the kitchen table, an untouched glass of chocolate milk she doesn’t want in her hands, as the radio yammers on and on about death and murder and blood, so much blood. Lost in a boozy fog, Jasper doesn’t spare her a glance, and she’s not telling. In fact, she decides right then and there not to …

  EMMA

  All Me

  “… THINK ABOUT IT,” she said. “Until today I was doing a pretty good job, too. But some of what’s happened echoes and circles back to that, even down to that little click. I heard the same thing at the library door.” And in the vision of that insane asylum, come to think of it, when she’d locked the door in that iron grille.

  “What if what you found was a force field put up by some machine?” Eric asked. “Like a … a device or tool or something?”

  “That’s what Dad called the Mirror,” Lizzie said. “Same with the panops and Sign of Sure. He said they were all tools from a long time ago and another Now. I never thought of it before, but the time I saw my dad at the Mirror? When he … when he c-cut himself?” She knuckled her eyes, but Emma saw the tears starting again. “When he t-touched the M-Mirror, it made a c-click.”

  “But I didn’t cut myself,” Emma said. “It just happened.” Then thought: Force field or barrier might be right, too. I keep thinking about where the barriers are thinnest. What would happen if those went away or sprang a leak?

  “Might work like a fingerprint ID for a computer,” Eric said.

  “You’re saying the machine recognized me?”

  “It kind of fits, doesn’t it? Whatever was down cellar let you … well, log on.”

  “What?” Bode asked. “What a log got to do with anything? A log’s just wood.”

  “It’s just another word for a special kind of key,” Casey said. “Only this key unlocks a machine.”

  Key. Emma felt the word hook her attention. Lizzie said … or was it her dad … one of them mentioned a key. But hadn’t Frank McDermott also said that this key was something they’d read? Yes, he said manuscript, and they found it in London.

  “But log on to a machine that can do what?” Rima asked. “Draw out energy that you can use to make a book? Or glass?”

  “Or anything.” Eric ran a hand over the hard edge of the coffee table. “Even something as simple as this. In the real world, the one we all think of as real, the only reason this wood table stays a table is because the energy required for wood and iron to hold their shapes is exactly right—for that reality. Add more energy—say, touch a match, start a fire—you destroy the wood’s ability to hold that shape. You’ve added too much energy to the system and initiated a different reaction.”

  “Like the phase transition of ice to water, or water to steam,” Emma said. “To fog.”

  Eric nodded. “So I guess this … this Dark Passages energy stays put in our reality only if you use a certain amount and no more.”

  “You know … what happened out on the snow—those creatures just appearing, the church, Tania?” Sliding a copy of Whispers from the pile of books, Rima studied the cover art: the portrait of a girl with wild, staring eyes as black as oil and a frill of spider’s legs blooming from her mouth. “If I let myself just accept the idea for a second that my story’s already been written and the fog is energy waiting to be used and molded and fixed … it kind of explains a lot.”

  Bode barked a laugh. “How?”

  “Look, outside this house, there’s fog. Call it thought-magic, call it energy … whatever. Casey and I started out caught in a whole lot of nothing. Just … just fog,” she said, although from the look she shot Casey, Emma almost thought she had been about to say something else. “But then I made things out of the fog because of who I am,” Rima continued, skimming a light finger over the portrait’s forehead as if trying to smooth back the girl’s bangs. “I made Tania, and I did it because Lizzie’s dad had already written it all out for me. I made …” She offered up the book with a slight shrug. “I made the story that I came from, or it built itself around me.” />
  “But then why did it get so crazy?” Bode asked. “The way everything fell apart on the snow like that? Is that in the book?”

  Lizzie sighed. “I told you. The book-world Now that she made broke. I think there were too many of you guys all together for too long on the White Space of the wrong story. Dad said that whenever a lot of book-people end up on the same White Space, they break it, because the stories can only go in certain directions. It would be like everyone all piling into a car and wanting to go his own way. But you’ve only got the one car,” Lizzie said, like a kid regurgitating a lesson she’s gone over so many times she could recite it in her sleep. “He said the wrong characters are like, you know, the things that give you a cold.”

  “You mean viruses? An infection?” Eric asked.

  “It actually makes sense,” Rima said. “That world was going pretty strong until you and Bode and Chad showed up and brought the … the energy of your stories. Like what you just said about adding energy to ice or wood? Only it was the world I was building from my story that broke.”

  “So where’d Chad go?” Bode said. “He’s dead, right?”

  “No. Well, sort of,” Lizzie said. “He’s just gone from here, this whole Now. He’s back where he belongs, in his book-world.”

  “But Tony …” Casey nudged out Now Done Darkness, a book whose cover art—a bulbous, slimy-looking monster, with more tentacles than an anemone and what seemed a million eye stalks, chewing its way out of a woman’s stomach—made Emma actually ill. “We saw him die. So, is he really dead? Does he die in his book?”

  “No,” Lizzie said. “I’ve visited that book-world a bunch of times.”

  “But he’s dead,” Casey repeated.

  “Yeah, kind of,” Lizzie said. “He got killed here, so he’s gone from here. But he’s not dead dead. Just who he was here is gone.”

  “What?” Casey said, but Rima interrupted, “I think there’s a difference between dead and gone. I know what we saw, but …” Rima’s fingers crept to a crocheted scarf wound in a loose cowl around her neck. “His whisper, in the scarf? And his mother’s? They just disappeared, as if they’d been erased, and that never happens. Taylor, for example.” Rima stroked an arm of her ratty parka. “She’s still here. Even when her whisper finally fades, there’ll still be the tiniest trace, like a watermark. That makes sense because she’s written into my story already. But there’s nothing in this scarf. Tony isn’t tangled up in my book, and if he was never a person but just the idea of one—the energy it takes to make a person come to life on a page—maybe that’s why. It’s like his chapter closed. Tony was never supposed to be here permanently.” Rima nodded at Now Done Darkness. “That’s the version of Tony we met, and he belongs there.”