She thought of that touch, the death-whisper that was Big Earl. Casey must be wearing something of his father’s. The parka? No, she thought it must be the shirt, that red-checked flannel she’d spied dragging over his knuckles earlier but that had seemed to retreat as the hours went by: a shirt that was first too big and now just right. Casey wouldn’t save her, because Big Earl wouldn’t give a damn. Any second now, those flames would die, and then, if Casey was still alive, she’d catch the muted cough of that snowmobile.
Wait! What was that? Had she heard something? She strained, her ears tingling. There was something there, I heard …
Something above her, beyond this prison of deadening snow … shuffled.
Her heart surged. Casey? Or maybe Eric and Emma had come back with help. She opened her mouth to shout—then clamped back, her throat closing down, as something else occurred to her.
The thing that killed Tony is gone. But what if there’s another? A shiver rippled down her spine. Oh God. Her chest was a sudden scream of pain, as if Taylor’s terrified death-whisper were trying to gnaw a hole through her skin and burrow itself deep inside to hide. But Rima could only wait, quivering, in a darkness that was growing thicker and more airless by the second—and it was a choice now, wasn’t it? Say nothing, do nothing, and she would suffocate. But something is there, it’s getting closer, it’s right on top of—
Something slithered around her ankle, and closed.
PART THREE
THE FOG
LIZZIE
Wear Me
AS HER MOTHER muscles the stick and they race away from what’s left of their home, the fog—all that remains of her father tangled with the Peculiars’ energy and that of the whisper-man—is both a fist, closing down over Lizzie’s past, and a ravening monster with a mouth, gobbling up the road and this world, and still coming on strong. Seeping from the cell’s speaker, the whisper-man’s voice is a faint, mournful sough: Come down, Blood of My Blood; come plaaay, come down, come …
Lizzie fishes up her mother’s phone. Crackling with the energy of Lizzie’s thought-magic, the magic-glass of her memory quilt is a shimmering dazzle. The special Sign of Sure, the tool her dad has used to get himself back and forth from Nows through the Dark Passages, is as iridescent as the Milky Way. But she thinks the fog has to be much closer. Maybe she has to let it inside, allow it to slip into and wear her the way she does the book-people and her dolls. The way her father has invited whatever’s in the Dark Passages.
But he’s done it with blood, by cutting himself, so will this work? Can I grab it hard enough?
She just doesn’t know. Yet this she does understand: everyone wants what they can’t have, same as when Lizzie whines for a second scoop of chocolate ice cream. They especially want what’s hard to get.
So make the whisper-man mad. Make it really work hard, get so greedy-pissed it flies for her like a moth to the hottest flame, so it doesn’t get what Lizzie’s doing until way too late.
I’ll show you. Come on, you big show-off. Let’s play my game. She thumbs the phone to silence. The cell rings again at once. This time, she turns off the power, which she already knows won’t make a dent, and it doesn’t. When the phone begins to chirp again, she pitches the machine into the black mouth of the foot well because there is no way, no way she’s answering again. Let that whisper-man stew. That’ll show him.
“Good girl,” Mom says, misunderstanding. As Lizzie scrambles to buckle in, her mother chokes back another sob. “I’m so sorry, Lizzie.”
“It’s okay, Mom.” She knuckles away tears. “It’s going to catch us, isn’t it?”
“If it really wants us, yes. I don’t think there’s much I can do about that, but it’ll have to work to do it.” Her mother’s foot drops and the car surges with a roar. “Listen to me, Lizzie, this is important. If it wants something … if it needs to bind someone, it can take me. I won’t let it hurt you, honey, but you have to promise me to run, run as far away as you can, and don’t look back, all right? I’ll be …” Her voice wavers, then firms. “I’ll be able to hold it. But you run, promise?”
“I promise,” Lizzie says, already knowing that this is a pinky-swear she will break. Run, and as bad as this is, she thinks things could get to be a hundred million zillion times worse, because there is so much power here, enough to break this Now wide open. So what happens next won’t be up to her mother.
Come on, come and get me. As the woods spin by beyond the car, Lizzie hunkers down into her memory quilt. Behind her, hanging in the air, the symbols for Lizzie’s new Now hum and purple with a weird, mad energy drawn from ideas deep down cellar and from the dark where the strongest—the worst—imaginings live. Just a few more seconds and one more symbol …
Come on, come get me, Lizzie thinks. Get mad and want me, wear me, want me.
EMMA
A Choice Between Red and Blue
1
FROM HER PLACE on the snow-covered farmhouse porch, Emma watched the red wink of taillights disappear into a mouth of darkness that finally closed, swallowing up that creaky old Dodge. God, she didn’t want to let Eric out of her sight. What would happen to him if she weren’t around?
Well, I’m sure to find out. She pressed a finger to an aching temple. Her head killed, probably a combination of concussion and all those blinks, a lot of them. Too many. Ever since waking up in this valley, she’d been zoning out, losing chunks of time. She didn’t think the others had noticed, although Casey—that nasty kid, someone she’d never have imagined related to Eric—kept throwing her speculative looks.
I see the same girl, too, over and over again, in every blink. Kid even has a name, and that’s a first. “Lizzie,” she said, trying it out in her mouth. Saying the little girl’s name made all those blinks feel much more real, not like dreams at all but as if she was a stunt double slotting into a film of Lizzie’s life. Not completely in the kid’s head but close. And everything I see is happening to her right now, at this moment. This last time, the kid had been … running from something? Afraid of her dad; something happened to her father. She thought that was right. Emma just couldn’t quite grab hold of what it was about Lizzie’s dad that was freaking the kid out, although she retained a wisp of an image: Dad doing something really, really scary in front of a very odd mirror.
Coming back from these blinks was so different, too, like surfacing with the tangles of nightmares clinging to her like sticky seaweed. They feel like memories, something I’ve always known. She had this odd notion that if her brain was a hallway lined with doors, all she had to do was open the right one to walk into Lizzie’s life.