Her reflection moved toward her.
“Oh shit.” Emma breathed. Rooted to the spot, she watched as her reflection took a step and then another and another until it was plastered against the glass, its features flattening like those of a kid peering into the darkened front of a candy store. Run, you nut, run. But she couldn’t make herself move. It was as if she’d turned to stone.
Something tugged her wrist.
“What?” She stared at her right hand, which was starting to jitter. Her fingers twitched. “Stop that,” she said to her hand. “Cut that out. Stop!”
Her hand … moved. On its own. Without her telling it to.
No. Stop, she thought to her hand. Stop what you’re doing. “Don’t, Emma,” she said, hoarsely, as her fingers floated for the mirror. “Don’t, don’t!”
Her hand didn’t care. She watched herself reach for the glass and thought back to earlier that day: that strange compulsion to push through her driver’s side window—where the barrier’s thinnest—and bleed to some other time and place.
“Bleed,” she said, and felt her heart give a tremendous lurch. In my blink, Lizzie’s dad cut himself. When his blood touched that weird mirror, the glass began to change.
“Don’t touch it,” she quavered. All the tiny hairs on her neck and arms bristled. This wasn’t the same mirror; she hadn’t cut herself. But then why wasn’t her hand obeying? Whoever heard of a reflection that acted more like a double trapped on the other side of the glass? Alice in Wonderland syndrome is right. “Emma, don’t do this.”
But her hand just wouldn’t listen. As her fingers met the bathroom mirror’s silvered glass, a startled cry tore from her lips. The icy mirror burned; her fingers instantly numbed, and yet she was still reaching, pressing, pushing …
This is like when I was twelve and wandered down into Jasper’s cellar to find a book, she thought with stupefied horror. I couldn’t stop myself back then either. This was a nightmare, like Neo at the mirror, after he’d swallowed the red pill. Stop, I want the blue pill, she thought, crazily, as she kept pushing. “Help,” she panted, “somebody, help, he—”
Now, the glass dimpled. It rippled and swam. It opened itself like a mouth.
“No!” Her heart smashed against her ribs. Wrapping her free hand around her forearm, she braced her feet and tried pulling her hand free, but her arm only kept going as first her fingers and then her hand sank into the glass …
And met the flesh of her reflection.
“God … House, stop!” she shouted. In the mirror, her reflection was still rigid and unmoving. The space on its side of the mirror was icy cold and felt … Dead. It feels dead, like a corpse, like Lily. It was as if her hand didn’t belong to her anymore, or that the lines between her brain and her hand had been cut. Instead, she could only watch as her fingers spidered over her reflection: its cheeks, its nose, its jaw. Dark—this is what dark feels like.
“I don’t even know what that means,” she said, her voice breaking with terror. And dark … in her blinks, Lizzie knew about the Dark Passages. Was this what she was talking about? Had this been what Jasper meant?
But this is just a bathroom. Jasper was a lush. It’s the wrong mirror. It’s not the mirror I saw in a blink; it’s not even close to the Dickens Mirror—
“Dickens Mirror?” Where did that come from? She watched her thumb skim her reflection’s lower lip. “House, what the hell is the Dickens Mi—” She shrieked as a phantom finger ghosted over her lower lip. What she was doing to that reflection, she felt: her touch over her skin, on her side of the glass.
“Ahhh … God,” she moaned. She couldn’t even turn her head away. Her whole body crawled as if she’d thrust her arms up to the elbows in a vat of decaying flesh and slick, gooey pus. If she could’ve unzipped and shrugged out of her skin, she would’ve. I am crazy. “Please, House,” she gasped, “please, God, let this be a dream! I promise, I’ll take my meds. I don’t care if I walk around in a fog for the rest of my life; I don’t want to see this or be here! I only want to wake—”
Quick as a snake, her reflection seized her hand, still buried on its side of the mirror, by the wrist.
“AH!” Emma tried shrinking back but couldn’t break her reflection’s grip. It pulled, yanking Emma in a stumbling lurch toward the glass. She was aware, but only vaguely, that there was now no sink in her way. There seemed, in fact—and for the briefest of moments—to be no bathroom at all: the walls, the floor, the ceiling wrinkling to nothing, evaporating in a glimmer.
“NOOO!” Wailing, Emma fell into the glass, or maybe it was the mirror that rushed for her fast, and then faster.…
LIZZIE
Mom Makes Her Mistake
THE FOG—HER DAD, the whisper-man, the energy of the Peculiars all tangled together—rushes for them, fast and then faster and faster, swallowing trees, gobbling up the sky. The fog is not a wall but a roiling mass like the relentless churn of a tornado, and very fast, much faster than they are. Lizzie knows they’ll lose this race. In fact, she’s counting on it.
But Mom doesn’t understand and would never agree if she did. So she tries. Her mother will not give up. She is brave, so brave, and screaming now, not at that fog but their car: “Come on, you piece of shit, come on!” Teeth bared, the cords standing in her neck, her mother is defiant, determined, enraged, and she has never been more beautiful. Through her terror, through whatever else is to come, Lizzie’s heart swells with pride and love, and she grabs hold of this one clear thought: she will always remember the moment when her mother tried to save them.
I have to be brave; be as brave as Mom, as the kids in Dad’s books. As brave as Dad.
Their car leaps forward, and then they are vaulting, storming down the road, the woods whizzing to a blur. They are traveling much too quickly for this road, which twists and turns and climbs and drops—and still the fog is remorseless, a ravening white monster.
Come on, Lizzie thinks, urging it on. Hurry up, come on, come on, want me, want me! Her whole body burns, screams with the need to finish the Now, finish the Now, finish it. Behind her, the symbols for her special forever-Now purple the air; they are so strong they snap and crackle as if the world were electric. Her hand is on fire. The best symbol, the most powerful and the one she must draw if the forever-Now is to work, begs to come into being. The Sign of Sure is so strong, the path it will blaze through the Dark Passages so brilliant, that Lizzie’s head is a hot bright ball, like a sun a second away from exploding into a supernova.