The Dickens Mirror

by Ilsa J. Bick

  As she starts to push up again, the kitchen begins its topsy-turvy, pre-passing-out spin. Ugh. This time, her head goes empty; her stomach bottoms out. Then, just like that, she’s starting to fall, she’s falling, the floor’s opening to swallow her up as furry black spiders scurry over her vision …

  And everything goes dark.

  4

  OHHHH. HER BRAIN leaks back into her skull a drip at a time. She comes to, splayed like roadkill, from some dark jumble of a nightmare. For a disorienting second, there are no walls; there’s no floor. Instead, there is a matte-white glare, a little like the paint Jasper slops over his canvases when he’s done. Like Meg Murry nearly tessered to a two-dimensional planet, she feels steamroller flat: a flimsy paper doll of a girl, with all the substance and depth of a molecule of ink on parchment.

  Wow. She has the strangest idea that she’s smeared sideways into ghostly afterimages running away into forever, as if she’s wandered into a bathroom with mirrors front, back, up, and down, and no matter where she looks, there goes Emma and Emma and Emma and Emma and on and on and on, and every Emma is different, can be anything anywhere anytime. A split second later, all the Emmas collapse like a deck of cards in a complicated shuffling trick where the guy’s got perfect control and all the cards shooo together in a blur until there are only two Emmas, twin selves: one sprawled … well, wherever she is, and the other swooshed back to that gravel road for a redo. If she opens her eyes, reality might just kick-start again in the hoosh of the wind, the nip of sharp stones against her back, and the mocking a-hah-hah-hah, look at the stoopid huuumannn laughter of faraway gulls spinning lazy circles against a bright blue sky. (Flying: now yer talking. Come back as a bird. Don’t see birds doing headers off bikes.) For an instant, she wonders if this time is when she finally wakes up for real.

  Then, her chest struggles for a breath, and she lets go of a groan: “Uhhh.” That’s not flat; that sound’s round as a balloon. And like that, her world goes 3-D: floor under her back, walls stacked on a foundation to support a ceiling, the open cupboard beneath the kitchen sink. Like she’s stuck in a game of SimCity that’s hit a glitch and only now decides to cough out details. Her hands, sticky with gore, are limp as dead starfish. Her stomach pulses against her teeth. She feels sluggish, though her head’s oddly full, like her brain’s been verrry, very busy. With what?

  With cold, she thinks—and that makes no sense. It’s June. She’s sweaty and hot and grimy and so scuzzy bugs will snuggle in the jungle of her hair for a nice long visit. But cold is what jumps to the center of her skull: that, and snow. Some kind of valley, too, and there were other kids stuck down there, and they were trying to find a way out. A couple of them died. And there was a … a …

  “House,” she whispers. Her tongue’s thick and gluey, and there’s a strange taste, too, almost like … gasoline? Yeah, and she can almost smell it, sticky-sweet, steaming from her clothes, but that’s crazy.

  The house had been strange, too. Was it … alive? She thinks so, and House had a lot of rooms. Library—that was the most important room of all. Only she didn’t go inside so much as step through it—through some kind of weird mirror? Yeah, like Alice in Wonderland. She’d gone somewhere else: into a summer’s day, on a street she didn’t recognize. She’d been different, too, not the same age as now but older, a teenager. There was a bookstore called … Come on, come on … She can feel the nightmare beginning to evaporate. What’s the name? Her teeth grab her lower lip as if to snag the words …

  Between the Lines. “Yeah,” she breathes, “yeah, that’s right, and there was a boy, too.” Someone I really liked, and he was talking about a … a necklace? Her fingers drift to her chest, and she swears she feels smooth, cool glass where she knows there’s nothing. “Galaxy pendant,” she says, and wonders what the heck she means. Something special about the necklace. About her. And then …

  Oh. Despite her muzzy head, a clot of fear sears her chest. Blood. Her eyes jerk down to her arms. I got cut, real bad, worse than now, only on my arms instead of my chin, and my blood … Her blood had moved, like a snake, and when her blood touched a book—a really important book, but what was its name; what had it been about?—when her blood licked this book …

  “M-monster.” An invisible hand seems to close around her throat. Sick, I’m going to be sick, I can’t breathe, I don’t want to remember anymore … “A m-monster came out of the book and it wanted me. It said it w-wanted to p-p-play …”

  Stop. Pooling with frightened tears, her eyes squeeze shut. She doesn’t want to remember any more. It’s just a dream. Just a b-bad dream. Let it go.

  At that, inside her skull, something unclenches, her brain relaxing as the knot of that nightmare unravels into disparate strands as insubstantial as fog. In moments, the dream—those visions of a valley and snow and monsters and that boy—is gone.

  5

  GROGGY, SHE LABORS to a stand. In the sink, a geyser of steam chuffs from hot water still gushing from the spigot. Her shorts, sodden where she splooshed into Hibiclens, stick to her butt. And to heck with the floor.

  She twists on cold water. Steam dews her face, and she can feel her eyes pooling again. The sink wavers and glimmers as if someone’s dropped a stone into a still pond. Crap. She blinks against a salt sting of tears. Why does everything have to be so …

  That thought trickles away. Because that’s when she realizes that the waver has spread from the center of her vision to encompass the sink, the countertop. The walls. Jack’s body looks like a furry orange sack filled with worms. She can feel the same squirming inside and under her skin as wave after wave ripples from head to toe, her skin actually rolling as if she’s suddenly no more substantial than water. If she could put a sound to this, it would be a whining wiggle, like music drawn from a whippy handsaw: wuh-WHINGWHINGWHINGWHINGWHING.

  “What?” In the time it takes for the word to leave her mouth, however, the sensation’s fled. The kitchen solidifies again, and so does she.

  But then Jack growls.

  Now, she loves Jack to pieces, but cats are definitely weird animals. Dogs are easy; most are big, goofy galumphs, and you can tell what they’re thinking. Cats are plain strange. Times when Jack’s staring up at trees or between shadows, and then his mouth twitches open in no-sound meows as his tail swish-swishes—you could swear he’s tuning into some alien cat-channel, or seeing things slipping in and out of dimensional gateways, like in Star Trek or something.

  But she’s never seen him like this: ears flat and tight against his skull, a Mohawk of hackles on his spine, tail like a bristle bottle brush. Growling, the cat is staring out the kitchen window above the sink.

  “Jack?” Puzzled, she follows his gaze. “Is there a …” Maybe she was going to say bird or another cat. Really, she doesn’t know. Her mind blanks. If she were a cartoon, there’d be that empty thought bubble and not even a question mark.

  Then, her brain kicks in, and she thinks, What? Huh?

  6

  THE KITCHEN LOOKS northeast, and it’s late in the day, after three, so the sun’s moved behind the house now. The view is one she knows well and loves: the curve of Presque Isle Bay on Stockton Island on the left, a stretch of open water, and then Michigan Island, its two lighthouses on the far right. When the lake really gets going like it is now, the waves are so furious she can see explosions of white spray blasting from the tip of Stockton’s rocky tombolo. This time of day, the sun dyes the lake a deep blue and splashes the islands with brilliant swathes of golden light.

  That is not what she sees now.

  In the glass, her face is sketchy, as if outlined in faint pencil, though her eyes are black as stones. Her birthmark is a white-hot cinder with no color at all. There’s nothing normal about this reflection.

  That is because what lies beyond the glass is flat and matte-white, like taut canvas on a frame that Jasper has yet to prime. A piece of her mind understands this has to be fog—wait, hadn’t she just been dreaming about that?
—but it is the strangest she’s ever seen. It doesn’t flow or seem like mist at all, and is so dense that if she didn’t know better, she’d swear the house was floating in midair.

  Whoa, wait a second. Her throat works in a nervous, liquid swallow. Except for Jack’s growl, the steady splash of water against porcelain, and Frank still going on about his skin, his skin—same song; it hasn’t changed at all—it is eerily silent. There is fog … but no foghorn. After another few seconds, she realizes that the sound of the lake is gone, too. No thump of waves against sandstone. No throbbing, relentless ba-boom, ba-boom keeping time with her headache. There’s nothing.

  “What?” Her voice is a reedy squeak. With a hand that trembles, she twists the spigot. The water quits. The house goes still. She holds her breath and listens. Except for Frank and the still-growling Jack, the silence is white. Empty. Craning over a shoulder, she looks back toward the front door. A glare the color of a fish belly shines through its pebbled sidelights.

  “What is this?” She feels so small. The silence is crushing. Turning back to the kitchen window, she whispers, “What’s going …”

  And now, at the window, there is a woman.

  7

  BEYOND THE FACT that she shouldn’t be there at all, Emma thinks the woman is both familiar and completely alien, a steampunky nightmare-vision straight out of Dickens. Her chestnut hair is done in an old-fashioned coil, and she wears a frilly, poofy-sleeved blouse with a high lace collar.

  But what grabs her are the woman’s eyes. They’re purple as old blood clots. Glasses? Yeah, but really funky, with four lenses, two to a side. They make the woman look pretty got a screw loose, a can shy of a six-pack insane. For a very long second, the woman and Emma stare at one another while, on the kitchen table and a million miles away, Frank is urging Emma to wake up to reality.

  No, Frank. The thought is dreamy, surreal. No, you’re wrong. This can’t be …

  But that’s when her brain drops out again.

  Because that’s the moment the woman reaches through glass and hooks a hand over the sill.

  8

  WITH A WILD screech, Emma blunders back from the sink as Jack rockets off the counter in an orange blur. Stumbling, she tries to turn and run after the cat, but she’s doing too many things at once and has forgotten that slick, treacherous puddle of Hibiclens. Her right foot comes down and then shoots out from under. Crashing to the floor in a spectacular pratfall, she lands on her rear. An electric shock shoots up her spine, and she screams again, this time in pain and terror.

  Above her, at the sink, the woman heaves herself over the sill: first that hand and then the other. A long leg, draped in a jet-black skirt, stretches for the sink. For a disorienting second, Emma can’t decide if the fog’s spitting her out or the woman’s a hungry spider who’s tired of waiting for Emma to bumble into her web already.

  Run, run! Rolling to her hands and knees, Emma plants a toe and heaves to her feet. Behind, she hears the rustle of fabric, the clops of boots on porcelain and then Formica. In that instant, she has three choices: front door, kitchen side door to her far left, or the door to her immediate right that will take her down cellar. All have their problems. Get herself trapped down cellar with a crazy woman and she’s dead meat, because there are only so many places to hide. But outside there is the fog, and this woman came in or through it (or is it; there’s no way to know). Front door or side, even if she gets away, bumbling around in the fog’s a crummy idea. With her luck, she’ll run into a tree and add a broken nose to her already torn-up face, and this crazy lady will still be on her tail. Worse, boogie out the side door and get herself turned around? There’s no gravel out there, no way to tell if she’s heading to the road. Dense woods hug this cottage front and back. Make the wrong turn, and she could find herself pinballing around trees only to finally step off the bluff above Devil’s Cauldron. From there, it’s a real long way down. Hit the rocks, she’ll burst like an Emma blood-balloon. She’ll be fish food. They probably won’t find her right away either. Current’ll sweep her north and east to drift until what’s left beaches somewhere in Michigan. Or Canada. Or nowhere, ever.

  “Emma.” Unlike the high, scritch-scratchy spider’s chitter Emma expects, the woman’s voice is smooth as buttery caramel. Her accent, though, is straight out of Dickens. “Wait, dear.”

  She almost does. Because take away the glasses; hell, forget the fact that this woman just came out of fog and climbed through what had been solid glass … and she sounds so reasonable. Kind of how Emma’s always thought a mom should sound, or like Mrs. Whatsit. And Emma’s still just a kid. When an adult says jump, you ask how high; you don’t tell an adult where to go and what she can do with herself. So Emma hesitates. “What?” She starts to turn. “Who are …”

  The woman’s hand flashes in a grab. Gasping, Emma jerks away as the woman’s fingers whisk through her long hair. Turning, Emma hurtles through the basement door. Snatching the knob, she slams the door and jams the thumb lock. The key’s long gone; when someone accidentally hits the lock now, Jasper or Sal jimmies it open with a long wire pick they keep above the header. She’s hoping the woman won’t think of that.

  “Emma?” Still reasonable, so now, honey, we can talk about this. The knob rattles. Frank’s still wondering what’s under his skin, and if Emma never hears that song again, it will be too soon. “Emma, please open the door.”

  Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me. Huddled on the third step, Emma’s eyes are level with the gap between the door and floor. The woman’s shadow oils right to left and back again, like the photonegative of a ghost. The tips of her boots—very old-fashioned, with button closures—show beneath folds of black wool. For an insane moment, Emma worries that the woman will drop to her knees and then she’ll be eye to eye with those crazy purple glasses.

  The hard bap of a boot kicking wood makes her heart claw up her throat. “Emma!” Not so there-there now. “Trust me, this is for your benefit.”

  Oh yeah, like she really believes that. But what do I do now? Emma clatters halfway down rough, open-backed steps. She doesn’t need a light. This is a layout she knows by heart. Boiler on the right, next to the stairs; washer and dryer along the wall beyond that; shelves of canned food and jars Sal’s put up that stretch three-quarters of the way down the left wall to end at the threshold for that back room. This, Emma explored just last week when she went looking for a book. The room’s chockablock with boxes, canvases, an old Victorian rolltop desk—and something she’s told herself never to think about again but can’t forget: that inky square that might be a tunnel or trap or wormhole hidden behind the wall. In the week since, she’s been tossing it around, whether she should tell Jasper or not. Mostly, she thinks not, because this is obviously something Jasper didn’t want her to find. Sometimes, when her mind drifts back to the moment she reached inside, she’s wondered if she hasn’t found a whole other dimension, like on Star Trek. She really doesn’t want to go into that room now if she can help it.

  Sal … Jasper … someone, please come home! Darting under the handrail, she jumps to poured concrete. The air smells of laundry detergent and scorched cotton. Behind and above, she hears those boots thunk back and forth. Probably looking for a key. Gosh, she hopes the crazy lady doesn’t think about feeling above the jamb. Or maybe hunting for something to break down the door. Uh-oh. Her heart freezes at the thought. All that crazy lady has to do is look out the kitchen side door, and she’ll see Jasper’s ax next to the woodpile. If the woman finds that, the cellar door’ll be match-sticks in no time flat. It’ll be just like the scene in that ancient fossil of a movie Jasper watched a couple days ago, about a crazy writer and his family trapped in some haunted hotel. (On the other hand, that chopping scene was the best part: Heeere’s Johnny!)

  As if the woman’s read her mind, Emma hears her clop away. There’s the crash of a door. Then, nothing … and more silence … and then the boots are back. This time around, they’re heavier, like the lady’s p
ut on a couple pounds or is carrying …

  No, come on. Emma’s stomach plummets to her toes. That’s so not fair.

  The woman’s back at the door. “Don’t do anything stupid, Emma.” Then, BLAM! The door lets out a huge bawl, and Emma discovers the sound of an ax biting wood really isn’t a chop but a detonation.

  “Don’t run, Emma,” the woman says. “Trust me, you’ll only make this worse.”

  Running will make this worse? What could be worse than an ax? What am I going to do, what am I going to do? Her thoughts spin like gerbils racing on a wheel of pure panic. Another BLAM! Now, the wood actually cracks. She hears the clatter as pieces rain to the steps. A third BLAM! She’s got to do something, try to hide—but where?

  Suddenly, out of the corner of her eye, Emma sees a streak of orange shoot from behind the washer and dart into the second room. Follow the cat. Jack has the right idea. Lots of boxes in the second room, books, the desk. Maybe she can block off the entrance. Springing from her crouch, Emma races past the washer and dryer. As she passes the shelves, she thinks, Why not? With a great sweep of her arms, she sends jars and cans crashing to the floor. The air fills with a scent of vinegar that is strong enough to make her throat try to close and her eyes water. If her aim was any good, she might lob a couple jars, but while Lara Croft would peg that crazy lady, no sweat, Emma’s truly hopeless at softball. Mainly, she’s only trying to make as much of a mess as she can.

  Above and behind, the tenor of the ax hacking wood changes as the door caves.

  Go! Emma dashes into the back room just as boots clatter down wood steps. There’s enough grainy yellow light seeping from the kitchen door the lady just killed for Emma to make out a dim jumble of boxes and books and Jasper’s old rolltop, but not much else. Of course, the gloom cuts both ways; she’ll be just as hard to see, especially if she holds herself real, real still. On the other hand, now she’s out of running room. So maybe this was a really terrible idea after all. Where to hide? Terrified, she tosses a wild look. Duck behind boxes? The old secretary?