(where the barrier’s thinnest)
as if what had happened down cellar was related to what was going on now.
“What do you want, House?” And then she answered her own question: “Of course, you nut, it wants you to open the door.” She thought back to earlier: her sense that if she found the correct door in her mind, she might walk into Lizzie’s life. “That’s right, isn’t it, House?”
The house didn’t answer. But the radio crackled on: horrible … gruesome discovery of—
“I’m not listening to this, House.” Shuddering, she hugged herself tight. She felt sick. Her stomach coiled as if a snake had decided that her guts were a nice, dark, moist place to hang out. “I don’t hear it. I don’t care.” She let out a high, strained laugh through a throat that didn’t want to cooperate. “It’s not like I can go in, anyway. There’s no knob.”
Which hadn’t stopped her when she was twelve. Then, she’d had the same thought: no knob, no way in. A second later, she’d spotted that small, Emma-sized pull-ring, just right for a twelve-year-old. Had it been there all along? She’d always had the queer sense that the door down cellar had made the pull-ring for—
In front of her eyes, the slit-door suddenly undulated, like thick white oil.
“Shit!” Staggering, she stumbled back on her heels and nearly set herself on her ass. Holding herself up against the far wall, she gaped, stunned, as the slit-door wavered and rippled. A moment later, a knob—brassy and impossibly bright—blistered into being like a weird mushroom pushing its way out of bone-white loam.
Just like down cellar. Closing her eyes, she counted to ten, made it to five. The knob was still there, and now, something more, something that hadn’t happened all those years ago, down cellar.
In that milky slit, a tangle of creatures swarmed to the surface in a clutch of sinuous arms and legs and bodies. Some had what passed for a face: vertical gashes for mouths, a bristle of teeth, serpentine stalks where there should be eyes and ears. But the details were incomplete, running into one another, the features oozing and dripping together, as if all that white space was thick paint. The creatures were bizarre, a little like those Hindu gods and goddesses, the ones with animal heads and spidery frills for arms and legs and all-seeing eyes.
Whoa, I know these. I’ve seen these, and not in a blink either. Despite her fear, she found that she was also as curious now as she’d been when she was twelve. Easing from the wall, she slid a few slow steps closer. Jasper painted these, then covered them up.
“With white paint.” Like the door down cellar. She put a trembling hand to her lips. “White slit, white door, white space.” That means something, too. What had Jasper said? Every time you pull them onto White Space, you risk breaking that Now.
“Okay, House, time-out,” she said. “I get it, I do. I’m supposed to walk through this door and into that room. I’ll bet that even if I leave—go outside and wait by the snowmobile—eventually, I’ll end up here again after another blink, because this is what you want.” This is a … test? Part of a process? What I’ve been brought here to learn and do? That all felt right. So, really, the only choice was whether she turned the knob this time around, or on the hundredth repetition.
Just do it already, you coward.
The brass knob was icy. Heart thumping, she tried giving it a twist, but it wouldn’t turn and nothing happened when she pulled.
Push, the way Lizzie’s dad did with the Mirror.
That did something. She felt the shift under her hand, almost a … a mechanical click? Same thing when I touched that … that membrane down cellar, when I was twelve. As if I’ve activated something. She instinctively backed up a step as the slit-door glimmered, not opening so much as dissolving. Melting, like a phase shift, the way ice changes to water. And then she thought, What the hell?
The slit-door vanished. A faint coppery aroma, like the rust-scent of that snow, seeped on a breath of frigid air. Inside, there was no light at all. From deep within, however, she could hear the buzz and sputter of that radio. Otherwise, it was pitch-black.
No, that’s not quite right. She realized the reason the door opened out. My God—she stared at the smooth, glassy, jet-black barrier—it’s solid.
It was, she thought, like the mirror in her blinks. And what I found in Jasper’s cellar. A week after she had, the blinks had begun. And I’ve got the feeling there’s something else I’m not remembering; was made to forget. But what? And why would anyone make me forget anything? Who could even do something like that? How?
At her touch, the black shuddered. Her hand instantly iced, then fired to a shriek, but she could stand this; and although her heart was still hammering, she wasn’t as frightened. It’s like what happened upstairs, in the bathroom. As if that had been a demonstration designed to show her what to do.
Beneath her fingers, the darkness gave and rippled, that weird sense of something transitioning from one state of matter to another, and then she was moving, pushing, feeling the suck of that oily black, stepping through
2
INTO SUMMER.
She is on East Washington in Madison. She knows this because the capitol’s white dome is just up the hill. To her left is the bus stop on Blair that will take her back to Holten Prep. The air is warm, a little humid from Lake Mendota, where sailboats scud like clouds over lapis-blue water. Her left hand is cold. She looks, expecting to see that her hand isn’t there but still wrist-deep in blackness. Instead, she holds a mocha Frappuccino topped with a pillow of whipped cream, fresh from the Starbucks down the block. In her right hand is a book.
This is a memory. She cranes a look over her shoulder. There is no room, no slit-door. The street presses at her back. A steady stream of cars hums past. Distant tunes and radio voices tangle and swell, then fade, trailing after the vehicles like pennants. Light splashes her shoulders because it’s summer. A light-aqua sundress that brings out the indigo of her eyes floats around her thighs. This is from six months ago. “That’s really cool.”
“What?” Disoriented, she turns back to discover that she stands before a table heavy with boxes of half-priced books. Her eyes crawl to the storefront window. There is a sign advertising the sale, and the bookstore’s name emblazoned in black-edged gold: BETWEEN THE LINES.
I remember this. I was here in June, after exams, a week before my birthday.