by Ilsa J. Bick
“What does she mean, Frank?” Meredith said, slowly, though Emma couldn’t tell if Meredith had already guessed and wanted Frank to lie. (Because, sometimes, people really want that. Sometimes the truth hurts so much, you’d rather close your eyes and let someone tell you a nicer story, one that feels better to believe.) “This time around … what is she talking about?”
Oh boy. Frank looked like he couldn’t decide if he wanted to cry or claw his eyes out. Emma actually felt sorry for him. Meredith, you really don’t want to know.
“Nothing. Darling, sweetheart … please.” Frank’s voice was as watery and wavery as the air. “Let this go.”
“Let it go? Frank, we’re in a goddamned cell. I don’t even know how we got here. One second I’m on the ward, in the bathroom, just out of a shower, brushing my teeth, and … there was the mirror, so foggy. I thought, well, it’s the steam, or my eyes even, not wanting to focus. They’d given me a shot, and I had the strangest dream.” Meredith pressed a trembling hand to her mouth. “About us, Frank. I was afraid of you because you couldn’t stop with some damned book, and so I took Lizzie … except it wasn’t her. I mean, it was, but she was so young, a little girl again, and then we’re in the car and there’s an explosion and this strange fog began chasing us …”
Wait a second. Emma clapped a hand to her mouth to keep in the shout. Meredith’s words were like a clear white dagger plunging straight through her brain. That sounds like a story I know. Did I read it, or was it a movie or …
“Meredith, darling.” Frank tried catching her hands. “It was just a bad dream. It was the drugs, that’s all.”
“Felt so real. I … I killed you, Frank. I killed our daughter; I crashed the car … and I died, I felt myself die …”
Dream. Emma’s insides curled like snails frightened into their shells. She recognized this now as part of her nightmare. She also had a sense she was the only one of them all to have had it, too. Rima doesn’t know this part, and neither does anyone else. Only me, just me.
“Darling, you’re stressed. You’ve been through a ringer. The hospital, the treatments.” Frank drew his wife’s hands to his chest. “Love, it’s Lizzie’s illness eating at you. Remember what the doctors said. You have to take it easy, let it go.”
“Take it easy?” Snatching her hands back, Meredith let out a cawing, almost crazed laugh. Her hands fluttered like broken-winged birds. “Let it go? Look where I am, Frank! It’s one thing to visit; it’s another to be brought by her, and there are these others who shouldn’t be here at all, who don’t belong outside their …” She choked that off. “And you don’t think I have the right to know what the hell’s going on? What that bitch means by the first?”
“Temper.” The crazy lady did a tut-tut, like Mary Poppins gone over to the Dark Side of the Force. “I mean precisely what I said. Everything you are, what you see when you look in the mirror, my dear? You owe all that to me.”
“No.” But Emma could tell that this was the kind of no that meant no no no, I can’t hear this. “No,” Meredith repeated. “That’s not right. Look where you are. It’s the other way around.”
“Deep in your soul, you know that is not true. You know that I am the template, the first and the last, your alpha and omega,” the crazy lady said. “I am the original Meredith McDermott, not you.”
ELIZABETH
We
1
I KNEW IT. We’re the originals. These others are only impostors and pieces.
As she’d watched and listened to everything unfold through the mind’s eye in Emma’s down cellar prison, Elizabeth thought she would feel more smug about that, but something her mother said gnawed: I am the template. The first Meredith; the original Meredith; Meredith, the person. Yet if that was true, why had her father felt the need to make a copy at all?
Her eyes strayed to the other Meredith, her bandaged arms. Her own mother had done that. The scars were hidden by her long sleeves, but they were there.
And I’ve done the same. Her hand strayed to her scarred left forearm. But mine was for a purpose. There was a reason. I needed to understand the symbols. But for her and her mother and now this other Meredith … for them all to do so was wrong. She’d have thought her father would have corrected that in the copies. Unless he can’t. Maybe it’s as fundamental as the color of our eyes. So each and every piece of her or her mother was contaminated? Like mother, like daughter? Self-murder was inevitable? Is that why, every now and again, she actually thought she sometimes heard her mother’s voice
can’t you see how sick she is
that’s not your father
in her head as well? She never had understood that.
But no, that can’t be. Mother’s not a piece. She’s original. She is herself, as am I. She was hearing a … a memory, some argument between her parents drifting to the fore, that was all.
Her destiny might not be fixed or inevitable either. That copy’s daughter—that Meredith’s Elizabeth—had died from a disease she’d never heard of. Leukemia? Yes, and that was the event that unhinged her. She wondered when that had happened, at what age the other Meredith’s daughter took ill. Because I am sick. There were moments she thought she really might be dying and that living a life cooped up in hospital was all the life she knew.
Ridiculous, of course; that constable had come on her fleeing some horror. But I can’t remember from whence, or what it was I saw, other than vague impressions of coming on bodies in some underground labyrinth. Like this place, down cellar? No, ridiculous. Absurd. My father was doing something to the bodies, those girls and boys, if I remember right. They’d been roughly her age—although had there been a younger, smaller child, or two? She couldn’t recall.
Here was something else that didn’t tally. When Doyle found her, she’d been bleeding, badly. Yet if her father had been there with her, wouldn’t he have done something to staunch the flow, bandage her? Prevent her from being injured in the first place? So why hadn’t he? Unless he really wasn’t there at all—and where was that, exactly? Was it even in this Now?—and I only imagined it.
But there were bodies. That inspector, Battle, said so, as did Kramer. That hadn’t been her imagination.
My God. Her stomach tightened. Kramer said that what had bound itself to her blood would save this world and remake it. He’d said that her blood, rich with shadows, was responsible for healing Weber’s injuries. The shadows hadn’t always been there, of course; they’d come with Emma.
Yet what if her father had been after roughly the same thing?
I carry pieces. I hear voices.
So did her father require what she carried in her body and mind: a certain piece, an animus that would infuse a spark in a way that was wholly different from the faceless, anonymous man-things of Kramer’s construction?
What if her father needed her blood to make those girls and boys … into people?
2
SOMETHING ELSE NIGGLED.
How had she escaped her father? He was strong, a man, and she was a slip of a thing and ill, besides.
Perhaps the correct question was, had she escaped at all?
What if he’d let her go, returned her to this Now?
Or if she’d never left it … how had he gotten out?
And why hadn’t he taken her with him?
3
“I TOLD YOU,” she said, slipping her gaze from the mind’s eye to her right. “You’re pieces and copies, and that’s all you’ll ever be.”
“If that makes you feel better.” Emma’s voice had taken on the curious burr of Eric and the others, who were all clustered round as if she were the candle and they, the moths. It had started as soon as Emma unlocked their down cellar prison and Eric unfurled like a blighted black rose. Elizabeth hadn’t liked that, but Bode’s life had hung in the balance and there was no other way. Unnerving, too, the way Emma could be both here, in this down cellar, and out there—talking to Kramer, her mother, her father, the false Meredith—at the same t
ime. Even more troubling was how the longer Eric stayed with Emma, in the very front of her mind, the closer these other silhouettes and shadows clustered.
So like those blanks in the cells, too. And what had they been about? Yes, she’d sometimes thought of the other patients as faceless, nothing but open mouths and sound, but Meme had been the one to say it.
Emma thought it had something to do with energy—look at the way the rocks glow; everything wavers; it’s like the barn in the valley—though it was beyond Elizabeth what the other girl was babbling about.
“Whether Bode is a real person or just a piece who thinks he is, your mother or Kramer will get rid of him. They’ll kill this London’s Tony and Rima, too.” Of them all in this down cellar space, Emma’s face was the most substantial, because she really was strongest. Elizabeth had noticed that even in this gloaming, the other’s birthmark was a very bright glister. Kramer was right; the shadows were Emma’s power. “Obviously Meme would have to go, too, considering that she’s my double,” Emma said.
“But not an exact match.” It was the one Emma called Rima. She was not as well-defined as Emma or even half as fleshed out as Eric, though Elizabeth could make out obsidian stones in the deep hollows of the thing’s eyes. Unlike Eric, it had taken time for Rima to put together sentences. At first, her voice had been only a toneless sough. The longer Emma was here with them, though, the more defined they all became. “Your eyes are different,” Rima said.
“She’s way more complete than the man-things, though.” It was a shadow-boy, more a smoky pillar than anything formed, but she thought that was because the stain left in Casey ran deep. He couldn’t seem to settle well, and his voice oscillated amongst several registers. To Elizabeth, the boy’s tones grated like a symphony of kazoos, each buzzing a different tune. He was a strange one, too, his eyes so different even from Emma’s. Of the precious few glimpses she’d gotten, she saw they were indeterminate, never quite settling but slipping from black to silver to gray and back again. “I wonder why?” Casey said.
“I’m sure I don’t know about Meme,” Elizabeth said. “She’s Kramer’s creature.” Never realized the literal truth of that. “Until now, I didn’t know my mother was in league with Kramer at all. I haven’t seen her in ages.”
And how do I feel about that? Really? To know that my mother has been rounding up these people? She frowned over that last word. It wouldn’t do to think of them as complete, whole individuals. And yet … her eyes fixed on the Tonys, dying in their cages. On Rima, so willing to give of herself to save another. That little girl, Emma: how she cared for them. They bleed. They feel.
What did she know of that kind of connection? What had she ever felt but anger and pain and confusion?
Have I been nothing but a pawn, a … a vessel? My God, if Kramer really could empty her of all the pieces, bleed her dry, what would be left? She could almost imagine that she might be like those faceless man-things: the approximation of a person, but soulless. Perhaps she was even closer to Meme than she realized? Even if they were nothing but copies and pieces based on her, Emma and the shadows, Bode and his friends … they all had lives. They could love. Did love and care for one another, and fiercely.
But have I ever? What am I? Who am I, really? Where is Elizabeth in all this?
“What about little Emma?” Rima’s words oscillated like the rapidly plucked strings of a violin. “Is that really you out there? Do you remember this at all?”
“No.” Emma touched her chin. “But I remember clocking myself. Took that header off my bike the week after down cellar. My blinks started up around the same time. But I sure don’t remember blinking here.”
“Could be a different Emma.” Eric’s voice was a hollow hum. “Maybe your accident is a branch-point. A pivot: you went one way, and that little girl went another.”
“Maybe.” Emma sounded troubled. “You know what I don’t understand? For the sake of argument, let’s say what we heard in the valley is the truth: we’re all characters from McDermott books.”
“And you’re the only escapee,” Eric said. “The one who got free of the page and then gave that ability to me and Casey.”
“That’s kind of too much to process, but okay. Think about it. So far, Elizabeth’s mom has gone only into books I recognize: Rima’s, Tony’s. Chad is from Echo Rats. I’m not saying that we all don’t feel or aren’t, weren’t real … but why hasn’t Elizabeth’s mother gone outside book-worlds to other Nows? Where’s the Rima from a spaceship or something? Where’s Chad as a girl, or the guy who didn’t go to ’Nam?”
“Oh, isn’t it obvious?” Elizabeth couldn’t contain herself. “The point is to rid me of you, not go around murdering innocent, true, whole people.”
“Or perhaps your mom can locate only those versions who were actually there, in the valley,” Emma said.
“Doesn’t explain the McDermotts,” Rima said.
“No. Actually, I think it might.” When Emma shook her head, her hair and face eddied and smoked into swirls of shadow that drifted and undulated before settling back into place like the coils of an elaborate coiffure. “Meredith said she dreamt about being afraid of Frank and blowing him up, remember? Well, I saw a lot of that in those Lizzie-blinks. House showed me the moment of the crash. I know Meredith was dying. She thinks it’s a nightmare or a hallucination or something, but it really happened.”
“Yeah, but if Elizabeth’s mother is right,” Eric said, “how do you know that what you saw didn’t happen in a book?”
A burst of impatience. “What is that?” Elizabeth demanded. “This nightmare you all keep yammering on about. I’ve no idea what you mean.”
“Nightmares? They happen when you sleep,” Eric said.
“What? Sleep is sleep. Sleep is nothing. It’s blank.”
Emma and Eric looked at one another, and then Emma said, “Elizabeth, what happens when you go to sleep?”
“Happens?” When was the last time she’d slept? She couldn’t recall. Have I ever slept? She really wasn’t certain. “Nothing. I close my eyes. I open them. That’s all.”
“So no images, no pictures? It’s just … black?”
“Well, yes. It’s the same for everyone. Nothing is all anyone sees when they sleep.”
“Well, clearly not everyone, right? Meredith knows what a dream is. Where I come from,” Emma said, “everyone dreams. You see pictures. Stories, sort of. It’s a way of sifting through your day and storing memories.”
“Doesn’t sound very restful. Have you considered that’s something common to pieces because you’re imaginary? Of course you’d insert yourself into stories, because that’s all you know. Real people have no need for dreams.”
“Then how do you explain your mother?” Emma said. “She knows what nightmares are. It’s how she found the others.”
Elizabeth felt a twinge of disquiet. “I don’t know. Why is it important? Who cares?”
“You know,” the shadow-Casey said, the words wobbling and reverberating, “now that we’re talking about it, I’m not sure I remember ever having a dream. I know what they are, but …” (She noticed how close his shadowy pillar had sidled to Rima, and they did seem a pair, just as Eric and Emma did.) “Do you remember, Rima?” Casey asked. “From before?”
“No.” Rima sounded troubled. “And why would our Tony and Chad think something that happened was only a bad dream instead of the real thing?”
“They both died there,” Emma said. “Maybe that’s the only way they can think of what happened. When you wake up, you’re relieved it was only a nightmare.”
“But we get right back to the same problem: why has the nightmare bled into this London’s Tony and Rima and Bode?” Eric said. “Why them and no other?”
“For that matter, why hasn’t Meme had the dream? She’s your doppelgänger,” Elizabeth said, surprising herself. Why am I helping them? Perhaps that was her purpose? Was this the pivot upon which her life might turn? “If she’s so close to you in eve
ry other way, shouldn’t she?”
“She’s right,” Eric thrummed.
It bothered her that she actually felt a flicker of accomplishment: See, I’m not completely hopeless; I can hold my own. “Why haven’t I had that nightmare? Except for Eric and Casey, you’re all pieces in me. Why doesn’t it bleed back into me?” Elizabeth said. “Because you’re right, Emma: how does my mother use a nightmare if I don’t know what a dream is? If no one here does? God,” she said, truly listening to herself, “what if people here don’t … because they can’t? What if dreaming isn’t a glitch or mistake? What if no one here dreams because …” Say it, make it real; look at Meme and these doubles; look at my mother and that other Meredith. It’s the only logical conclusion. “What if they don’t dream because it’s not in their nature … and it’s not in mine? God”—she exhaled a quavering gasp—“what if it’s because of the way we’re all made?”
“Hey, hey, take it easy.” Laying a hand at once solid and vapor, flesh and shadow, on her shoulder, Emma gave a gentle squeeze, and only then did Elizabeth feel the wet on her cheeks and the sting in her eyes. “We can’t be certain of anything,” Emma said.
But Elizabeth thought she was perilously close to understanding something. The words were taking shape on her tongue and then lives of their own. “If my mother is the only one in this London who dreams, doesn’t that make her closer to you? And then, because I can’t … doesn’t that make me like Meme? Like Kramer?”
“They don’t have us in them,” Eric said. “That might explain it. Maybe we keep you from dreaming.”
“Oh, how fortunate,” she said, but with no venom. Her voice was watery. Through her tears, she noticed that, like Emma, Eric had moved closer. All the shadows had, and she recognized, with a start, that they felt something for her. Not pity so much as … understanding. Empathy. We know how you feel; we are here to help you if we can.