Cue ten years of Child Protective Services and a parade of foster parents, group homes, doctors, staring shrinks, clucking social workers. Her headaches got worse, thanks to Dear Old Dad. All that head trauma started off a chain reaction of growing fractures. She got older and uglier as her skull grew lumpier and bumpier.
Then Jasper, a crusty old sea dog with a fondness for bourbon, Big Band, and paint, showed up. Why he wanted to foster a kid, especially one with her history and looks, she never could figure. (Before her surgeries, she could have been a stunt double for those bubble-heads playing the Mos Eisley Cantina.) Jasper got her surgerized so her brain wouldn’t go ker-splat all over the floor. Fixed up her face, too. Then he whisked her away from all the do-gooders to an ancient stone cottage waaay up north overlooking Devil’s Cauldron, a dark blue inlet of rust-red sandstone layered over ancient volcanic rock on the northern tip of Madeline Island in Lake Superior.
By day, Jasper piloted charters and wandered around in a ratty cardigan and muttered to himself. Nights, he tossed back a couple belts, cranked up a wheezy old cassette recorder, and slathered canvasses with eerie, surreal landscapes choked with bizarre creatures, as Frank Sinatra or Dean Martin burbled, or Bleak House or The Old Curiosity Shop or a dozen other Dickens novels and stories spun themselves out on the air. Some of the creatures Jasper painted, she recognized: woolly mammoths, dinosaurs, prehistoric benthic creatures, weird insects with three-foot wingspans. Others—the ones with stalk-eyes and tentacles and screaming needle-toothed navels—were so Lovecraft, they looked like they’d slithered from the deep wells of inky nightmares.
What Emma never did understand was that when he finished, Jasper pulled a Jackson Pollock, slopping thick white paint onto each and every canvas. When she complained there was nothing left to see—and what was the point?—Jasper would toss back another shot and explain that the creatures, which existed in the Dark Passages between all the Nows, were too powerful to let out: Every time you pull them onto White Space, you risk breaking that Now. (And oh well, when he put it that way, it all became so clear. So much for a straight answer.)
With a story as Harry Potter as this, Jasper ought to have been a wizard. She should have had strange powers. But no, Jasper was just odd; a small army of surgeons stenciled a road map of skillfully hidden scars onto her scalp and gave her a normal, if titanium-enriched, skull; and she loved Jasper so much that seeing him as he was now hurt like nails hammered into her heart.
9
AND NOTHING BAD happened once she was with Jasper. Summers, she biked around Madeline or kayaked over to Devils Island with Jasper, slipping in and out of sandstone sea caves or wandering the forested sandstone while her guardian sketched. Jasper said the island got its name from the old Ojibwe legend that Matchi-Manitou, some honking huge evil spirit, was imprisoned in a giant underground cave at the entrance to the spirit worlds, and only the bravest warriors could pass through the black well at the center of the island to fight the thing, blah, blah. Some vision quest crap like that. The only well she knew on that island was near an old lighthouse and keeper’s cottage. Still, whenever there was a really big blow, the roar and boom of the sea caves—of big, bad Matchi-Manitou—carried clear to Jasper’s cottage.
Still, nothing horrible happened. Okay, she was lonely. No friends. Maybe it was crusty, tipsy, bizarre Jasper, who would scare a sane kid, but no matter how hard she tried … she was a dweeb. Smart, but still inept and weird.
Whatever. Really, everything was good.
Well … until the year she turned twelve and went downstairs into the cellar to look for a book and where … where …
Well, where something happened down cellar that she’d really decided not to think about, or remember.
Really.
10
THE BLACKOUTS—THE BLINKS—STARTED a week after the incident down cellar. Each began the same way: a swarming tingle like the scurry of ants over her skin; the boil of an inky dread in her chest. The world thinned; her brain superheated. Then that purple-edged maw opened before her eyes and she would swoon into an airless darkness, tripping into the space between one breath and the next.
And then—blink-blink—she was back.
Often, she retained glimpses: the ooze of fog over slick cobblestones; a string of gaslights marching over a faraway bridge and a huge clock face that she almost recognized. A long hallway and rough carpet against her feet. A white nightgown that whispered around her legs. A huge red barn. A deep valley ringed by craggy, snow-covered mountains.
Sometimes—the worst times—she remembered things: bulbous monsters with tentacles and a patchwork of eyes; creatures that lived someplace dark, far away, and very, very cold. Or, come to think of it, that lurked behind the white paint of Jasper’s canvases.
Mostly, though, there was nothing. She would simply blink awake with a sizzling headache arcing from the plate between her eyes to another at the very base of her skull, as if a switch had been thrown and a circuit completed: zzzttt! The blinks lasted anywhere from a few seconds or minutes to a good long while, but she apparently functioned: got to class, turned in papers, took tests, worked glass, drank Starbucks. Clearly, even in a blackout, she was a girl with priorities.
The doctors said her migraines were to blame for these pesky little episodes. Her symptoms even had a name: the Alice in Wonderland syndrome. Of course the darned thing would be rare as hen’s teeth, but they assured her that she would outgrow it: don’t you worry your pretty little head about it.
She told none of the doctors the full story, how long she was gone, or what she saw. The meds she already took were bad enough. With her history—the jigsaw puzzle that was her skull, her headaches, that spiky purple mouth—they’d think her wires had gotten totally crossed and drug her so thoroughly she’d never find her way out of the fog.
She read scads about the syndrome and other, stranger cases of people almost like her: the lawyer who suddenly disappeared and turned up six months later; the schoolteacher picked up on the streets with no memory of who she was. Problem was, Emma didn’t wander or end up as a bum. Well, so far as she could remember. But she definitely went places, that inner third eye channel-surfing through movies she never followed to a conclusion. Maybe that was lucky. What would happen if the tether on her life snapped? Would she die? Float around in limbo? Remain stuck forever on the other side of the looking glass?
Well, yeah. She thought she might.
11
NOW, THE DAY was gone, the storm had them, and she and Lily were lost, no question. After her little sit-me-down with Kramer, she’d snagged Lily, rented the van, and skedaddled. No one would even know to start looking for them for a week, easy.