The Dickens Mirror

by Ilsa J. Bick

  ALSO BY ILSA J. BICK

  The Dark Passages

  White Space

  The Ashes Trilogy

  Ashes

  Shadows

  Monsters

  First published by Egmont Publishing, 2015

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 806

  New York, NY 10016

  Copyright © Ilsa J. Bick, 2015

  All rights reserved

  www.egmontusa.com

  www.ilsajbick.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bick, Ilsa J.

  The Dickens mirror / Ilsa J. Bick.

  Summary: In the second book of the Dark Passages series, Emma wakes up trapped in the body of a grown Victorian woman trapped in an insane asylum, and must find a way a way back to Reality or else her friends and family will die with her

  ISBN 978-1-60684-422-9 (ebook) – ISBN 978-1-60684-421-2 (hardback)

  [1. Reality–Fiction. 2. Horror stories. 3. Science fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.B47234

  [Fic]–dc23

  2014039129

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher and copyright owner.

  v3.1

  For Carolyn:

  Honestly, kid … count your lucky stars. You’re still standing.

  I am not who I am.

  —William Shakespeare

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Now

  Part One: Awakenings

  Tony: Boy in a Box

  Tony: His Side of the Glass

  Tony: The Other Tony

  Rima: That Other Rima

  Rima: Imagine Her Surprise

  Part Two: Under My Skin

  Elizabeth: London Falling

  Elizabeth: Little Alice

  Doyle: Poppet

  Bode: That Damnable Nightmare

  Doyle: Strange Ink

  Emma: Monster of My Mind

  Doyle: A Different Girl

  Emma: A Different Lizzie

  Emma: Mistake

  Elizabeth: Down Cellar

  Part Three: Rats

  Doyle: Meater

  Bode: The Other Side of the Screen

  Doyle: Bricky

  Rima: Watcher

  Bode: Lost the Fork

  Rima: She’s Here

  Bode: Everyone Dreams

  Bode: Panops

  Bode: That Business with Doyle

  Bode: Mission

  Part Four: Black Dog

  Doyle: Madding Crowd

  Doyle: Squirmers

  Doyle: Dogged by the Devil

  Doyle: Window Dressing

  Doyle: Murder Most Foul

  Doyle: Through the Looking Glass

  Part Five: Bedlam

  Emma: The Liquid Dark

  Elizabeth: Second Room

  Emma: Hands

  Elizabeth: Shadow

  Emma: Weber

  Emma: I’m Not Elizabeth

  Bode: Dungeon

  Bode: Last Gasp

  Bode: The United What?

  Rima: Lost

  Bode: Emma’s Blood

  Rima: Spider to the Fly

  Emma: Infected

  Rima: Rotters

  Emma: Why Meme Freaked

  Rima: Swarm

  Emma: Domain

  Rima: These Ravening Dead

  Emma: Way Out

  Emma: Still Waters

  Elizabeth: Shadow-Boy

  Emma: The Strength Only Shadows Possess

  Part Six: The Dickens Mirror

  Doyle: The Woman in Black

  Doyle: All Mad Here

  Emma: The First

  Elizabeth: We

  Doyle: Pot and the Kettle

  Doyle: What Remains

  Doyle: Pastiche

  EmmaS: Doll

  Emma: Escaping Destiny

  Doyle: Creature

  Emma: The Third Body

  Elizabeth: The Moment Electric

  Emma: Following the Light

  Rima: Into the Abyss

  Rima: The Way

  Doyle: Back to the Future

  This Is …

  Now

  Now

  Now

  Acknowledgments

  NOW

  1

  EMMA’S JUST TURNED twelve. She will not pass through White Space, fight a thing from the Dark Passages, lose her friends—lose Eric—and nearly die for five years yet. But every life turns on a dime, and sometimes several: pivot points after which everything changes.

  This is hers.

  This is what happens a week after down cellar.

  2

  “SAAALLL!” SCREECHING, EMMA blunders up their cottage’s front steps and yanks the ancient screen door. Caroming on a squawww of old hinges, the door slams stone with a resounding fwap that rattles windows and makes the glass buzz. Beyond the house, down in Devil’s Cauldron, the surge pounds sandstone in a relentless ba-boom-ba-boom-ba-boom that echoes the crash of her heart. Bulling through, she straight-arms the front door, tattooing a handprint in drippy blood. The other hand’s clapped to her chin. Having taken the two miles home at a dead-out, panicky run, she’s winded, terrified. Her bike’s a tangled heap down the road, front wheel bent out of true, the rear pancake-flat because she just never saw the stupid pothole and the gravel was really slippery, and she was wearing her helmet, only it popped off, and she tried to do a Lara Croft, but she is so sucky at gym … and no no no no, who knows how long she was knocked out, and why do they have to live so far from town, with no neighbors, no one she can go to for help, because she’s cut, she’s bleeding bad, and her face, her face, her face! “SAAALLL!”

  No one answers except Jack, the big orange tabby, who appears at the top of the stairs with a teeny-tiny mew? As if to ask, Whoa, Emma, why all the fuss? The only other sound above her frantic huffing and the plip-plip-plip of her blood dribbling onto the floor is a thin, scratchy line of melody dead ahead: the radio tuned to golden oldie big band crap.

  “J-Jasper? Jasper?” Gulping sobs, she streaks into the kitchen, trailing blood, hoping against hope. When Jasper paints—more like slaps monsters onto canvas, if you ask her—he mostly listens to Dickens novels on tape. (Why? Beats heck outta her. Her guardian is truly loony in so many ways.) If there’s no Dickens, though, Jasper just might be sober and actually useful for a change. Music like Ol’ Frank—Jasper’s on a first-name basis with the entire Rat Pack—he saves for when he’s out on the boat or perched in a camp chair to sketch, getting down with his bad self, as Sal, Jasper’s lizard-eyed live-in housekeeper, says. (Emma has no clue what that means; honestly, it’s not bad enough that Jasper’s pretty permanently shnockered and the village nutjob? Why does he have to be so weird?)

  A single glance around the kitchen, with its white vintage gas range, a rack of cast-iron pots on one wall, the potbellied woodstove, and century-old yellow pine floor worn to a high gloss, is enough. No one home. She’s on her own.

  “Nooo.” Her moan is bubbly and wet. Fresh tears stream down her cheeks. Her mouth tastes of salt and wet iron. Where is everybody? “I need help. It’s not fair.”

  No one seems to care but Ol’ Frank, who’s very concerned about what’s gotten under his skin. That makes two of them; she’s a mess. Her shins are speckled with bloody, glued-on grit; her skinned knees are on fire; and she’s pretty sure her left elbow needs stitches. No need for a mirror either. If her face is as torn up as she thinks,
she’s not sure she could stand looking anyway. She still remembers the sound her teeth made as the point of her chin banged rock: a snappy, crisp tock that also chipped a tooth. Her tongue aches from where she bit down. All the blood she’s swallowed has left her queasy, but that’s probably fear, too.

  For a split second, she debates about 911. Sure, this isn’t a heart attack, but still. Except that’s stupid. She’s not going to die or anything. (Oh nooo, her face’ll fall off, that’s all.) Madeline Island’s not huge, but Jasper’s cottage is almost twenty miles away from La Pointe, the island’s only town. Everyone sane lives there, so, of course, Jasper doesn’t. An ambulance will cost money, and she doesn’t need to give him one more reason to kill her, which he’ll do. All the surgeries to make her face normal, and now look. She’s ruined it, she’s messed up, and you watch, buster: he’ll throw her back, just like an undersized salmon. She’ll wind up in foster care so fast, make your head spin.

  “Stop it, you baby, stop it.” Her voice is blubbery and little-kid small. At her feet, Jack leans against her ankles, kind of propping her up as her chin plip-plip-plips. A lot of blood hits the floor, though some drips onto Jack, who paws and shakes his head—like, wuh?—but doesn’t budge otherwise. (She loves this cat, but boy, she wishes he were a dog right now; dogs’ll eat anything, even blood.) “Stop crying and do this, Emma. You can do this.” Right? Sure, she can; Jasper’s always getting dinged up, and Sal’s cleaned him up in this kitchen plenty of times. “It’s not that hard.”

  First thing, she’s got to get out all this crap. You can’t leave dirt and grime and old blood in there; she’ll get an infection, and then you watch: her face will get all pussy and bloated. It’ll sag like molten candle wax and then slide right off in big, ooky, rotten green slabs. Huge chunks of her skull and all her teeth will fall out and tik-tik-tik all over the floor like an overturned mason jar of buttons and …

  Stop it, Emma, stop it. Scuttling to the sink, she rips off a double handful of paper towel for her chin. With her free hand, she paws open the cupboard beneath the sink and wrestles out a first aid kit Sal always keeps there. But when she pushes up, a sweep of woozy vertigo whirls through her head. Her lips ice; deep in her belly, her stomach does a loop-de-loop. There’s a distant clatter of plastic on wood as the first aid kit slips from her fingers and the kitchen kind of smeeears.

  Uhhh. She rests her forehead on the counter. A fine, gritty patina of ancient bread crumbs pebbles the thin skin over her titanium skull plate. Don’t throw up. Gulping back a sour surge that tastes suspiciously like hours-old gamushed peanut butter and strawberry jam, she swallows her tummy back where it belongs. When her dizziness passes, she knuckles away the petrified bread and straightens cautiously, worried that if she passes out she might lie there, limp as Jasper after a bender, until someone finally remembers, Saaay, isn’t there this kid we’re supposed to be taking care of and, you know, responsible for? and decides to show up.

  Careful not to move too fast, she scrapes up the kit, drops it on a countertop, and pops the lid. Pay dirt: the kit’s packed with gauze rolls, surgical tape, scissors, alcohol swabs, squeeze packets of antibiotic ointment. Ducking back underneath the sink, she unearths a bottle of Hibiclens and a basin Sal uses to mix antibiotic soap with water. Still keeping one hand pressed to the paper towels wadded on her chin, she uses the other to squirt a gooey pink stream of Hibiclens into the basin. Twisting the spigot, she stands, shifting from foot to foot as she waits for the water to warm up (listening as the old water heater down cellar chuga-chugachugs to life; silly thing takes forever). She watches the water change from a murky brown to clear as it sluices gore and grit from her free hand.

  You’re going to be fine. But she has her doubts. There’s this steady throb that’s started up above the bridge of her nose as her brain pulses ba-boom, ba-boom, like IT on its dais (sooo creepy). Real whopper of a headache coming on.

  “Hey, boy,” she says to Jack, who’s jumped onto the counter to supervise, “it’s going to be okay, isn’t it?” But Jack only grooms himself and offers no opinion. So she answers for him: “ ’Course it will. You betcha.”

  But she’s not sure, mostly because she’s never been exactly right or normal. She may look okay now, but she knows what’s under her skin. Fifteen months ago, the craniofacial surgeon in charge of her reconstruction had shown her blank-eyed masks, one of which would become her face. They’re all possibilities, the surgeon explained, swapping out one face for another. On the monitor, each new mask settled like clingy Glad Wrap over a computer rendering of her deformed skull. See? The doctor grinned, really revved, like he was playing Grand Theft Auto with his brand-new, shiny Xbox. I can give you any number of looks that fit your underlying bone structure.

  She doesn’t recall who finally chose. The surgeon, most likely. All she cared about was getting rid of the monster in the mirror. Yet even now, months later, she still doesn’t know this new girl. Her eyes are the only constant: a deep and unearthly cobalt blue so pure they ought to be glass. The right holds a queer golden flaw that the doctors say is a birthmark but that glitters like a faraway star. But the rest of her face is … strange, the mask of a normal girl she has no right being. Every morning, she expects her reconstructed skin to slough like the dead husk of a lizard or snake.

  The doc said she’ll eventually grow into her looks: Just like that duckling. (She noticed he omitted ugly. That word wasn’t in his dictionary, apparently. No, no, she had cranial deformities and severe anomalies. She was in need of repair. Bone saws, chisels, skull plates, skin grafts. Hours and hours and multiple surgeries during which the doctors broke and ripped and sawed and drilled and stretched and grafted and stitched—and then the bandages, a haze of pain, the salves and treatments. The craniofacial guy says it’s a good thing she scars so well. Running her fingers through her hair and the train track of all those skillful scars is like reading the chronology of her reconstruction in braille.)

  Now, when she and that stranger in the mirror lock eyes, she thinks, People look at you, and they see someone … someone who’s … Her brain stumbles over pretty. She’ll never be that. If she even thinks the word, it’ll be like stepping on a crack or telling a birthday wish. They see someone who looks normal, but you’re only the mask. I’m still in here, and I’m weird and ugly and nobody’s kid, and nothing can change that.

  At school, the other kids pegged her right off the bat, first day. Walking the gauntlet of the lunchroom was like listening to the Doppler effect of an aural wave of Badger fans at a UW football game:

  … here she comes she’s so weird so strange so totally lame I heard her face was really gross like she had these horns what a geek such a spaz my dad says Jasper’s a drunk …

  They’re like wolves that way, cutting the weakest deer from the herd and running it to death. Under the skin, she’s the same Emma Lindsay, Loser. Thank God, school’s out for the summer. Maybe it’ll be better next year when she goes to Bayfield on the mainland. Madeline Island’s so small, everyone knows from a fart what you had for supper.

  If she had her way? Go live on an island, waaay far away. Maybe hang out in a sea cave, get herself a wolf, and eat fish and abalone, like that girl from Island of the Blue Dolphins. Or do like Sam and run away to live in a tree on a mountain and tame a falcon or hawk, maybe even an eagle. Or, you know, just set up house on Devils Island, where hardly anyone goes except a couple charters so the tourists can ooh and aah at the sea caves. When Superior really gets going, the caves’ roars and booms carry clear to Jasper’s … which is, you know, impossible. The island’s more than twenty miles northwest of the cottage. But she hears them. The Ojibwe say all that racket’s because of this big old honking evil spirit, Matchi-Manitou, who guards the entrance to the underworld, and only the bravest warriors go down there and blah, blah. She doesn’t believe it, but sometimes she daydreams about packing up and heading out there in her kayak, slipping that Scorpio into the deepest, darkest cave she can find, and checki
ng it out. Maybe there’s a whole underground world down there, bunches of tunnels and all these creatures, and here, she’s the only kid brave enough to face up to all that. Is that totally Lara Croft or what?

  Before the surgeries, the craniofacial doc made her see a shrink. Standard procedure, he said, to help with the adjustment before and after. The shrink was okay. Nice lady. They drew pictures. Played a lot of Uno. The shrink asked leading questions that, you know, a moron could figure out, mainly stuff about what life might be like after the surgeries, what Emma expected, did she think she’d become this fairy princess or something. One afternoon, Emma got onto islands and running away and Devils and Matchi-Manitou. Don’t ask her how; just happened.

  At that, the shrink got this look—and then said the one thing that’s stuck with Emma all this time: Monsters in the basement are easy, Emma. That’s where they’re supposed to live. It’s the day the monsters stare from the mirror that you should worry.

  3

  THE WATER’S WARM enough now to steam. On the radio, Frank is still going on about reality and what’s so deep in his heart that it’s really a part of him. Strange. Frowning, she cranes over her shoulder at the kitchen table. How long is that song, anyway? As with Dickens novels, she’s pretty familiar with Ol’ Frank. The song’s … four minutes, max? Even with the big, vampy trumpet doo-dah in the middle? Yeah, and she could swear she heard that right around the time she turned on the water. Hand still clamped to her chin, she turns to peer at the wall clock. As she does, her elbow catches the Hibiclens bottle. She makes an awkward grab but misses. The bottle’s plastic, but of course the squirt top pops, releasing a spume of goopy pink soap.

  “No.” She stamps her foot. Can’t she get just one stupid break? The backs of her eyes sting, and she can feel her lower lip beginning to quiver again. She needs to fix her chin, but that big pink puddle of Hibiclens glares from the floor: You bozo-brain. Already, she can just imagine the soap soaking into and plumping up tired, desiccated pine to leave a great big stain. Same with her blood, which she’s tracked all the way down the hall. God, she’s in so much trouble already, and now this. “Fine, all right, okay.” Ripping off more paper towels one-handed, she squats and begins mopping up. In about two seconds, she realizes that she’ll probably have to use the entire stupid roll and thinks, I can’t do anything right.