“Come on,” Casey urged. “Come on!”
Something bullet-shaped gleamed a dull silver and black from a deep wallow to her left. “There!” Rima cried. As soon as she stepped off the road, Rima sank up to her thighs, but she bullied through, trenching out a path to Casey’s snowmobile. “What should I do?”
“Dig under the nose!” Casey was stamping snow, beating out a trail. “We got to pack down the snow, then roll it onto the runners and get it pointed downhill.”
No time. Rima could barely move. With every step, the treacherous snow grabbed and pulled, and she was conscious of the fog boiling across the night, pressing against her back. They only had maybe a minute, if that, before the fog reached them. “Casey, there’s no time!”
Casey tossed a wild look over his shoulder. His face glistened with sweat. His teeth were bared in a grimace of fear and frustration. “Damn it. All right, leave it; come on, let’s flip it!”
They wallowed around to the downhill side, and then Casey backed into the sled, hooked his hands under the seat. Rima slid her left shoulder under the left handlebar, felt the snowmobile rock to the right and then try to tumble back, but she dug in and heaved. The snowmobile tilted, and she nearly slipped as the sled wobbled and then did a slow, heavy tumble onto its runners.
“Come on, get on, but don’t sit down!” Straddling the seat, Casey waited until she’d scrambled onboard before pulling up the kill switch, twisting the ignition key, yanking on the start cord—once, twice …
Hurry. Rima shot a quick look over her shoulder. The fog was still coming. Hurry, Casey, hurry, hurry, God, come on, come on!
The sled’s engine sputtered, caught. The machine gave a sudden lurch, and Rima tumbled forward. With a cry, she made a wild grab, snagging Casey’s tattered parka just as they began to move.
“Okay, down!” Casey shouted. “Rima, sit down!”
Arms wrapped around Casey’s middle, Rima obeyed, dropping onto the seat. The sled roared out of the gully, a rooster tail of snow flying behind, and then they were streaking across a sparkling plain of silver-blue snow. With no faceplate for protection, Rima gritted her teeth against bitter air that cut like a bristle of knives.
“Hang on!” Casey shouted as they banked into a tight, fast turn. She felt the back of the sled swing, and for a heart-stopping moment, she thought they’d spin out. But Casey wrestled the handlebars back to true, and the sled spurted over the snow with a roar. He shot a quick glance over his shoulder, and she felt his body go rigid. “Shit, shit!”
“What?” But even before she looked back, she knew. The fog was there, a seamless curtain stretching from the sky to hug the snow, chasing after them in an inexorable tide: two hundred yards back and gaining. One-fifty, a hundred yards, eighty. Fifty …
Casey, I’m sorry. Squeezing her eyes shut, she buried her head into his back, hugged him tight. If it hadn’t been for me, you would’ve gotten away.
The fog slammed down.
EMMA
Black Dagger
1
ON A STREET drawn from that terrible summer of The Bell Jar when Emma will become so lost in that book, she will think she really might be better off dead; as she stares at the jacket photo of a McDermott novel she’s never heard of—the hand in the photograph moves.
Horrified, Emma watches those bizarre fingers unfurl and stretch and sprout talons. Its talons lengthen like a cat’s claws. Oozing over the windowsill, the hand slithers down the apron, and now Emma can see that the skin is as scaly and cracked as that of a mummy. The hand bleeds onto the photograph in an inky stain, a black blight, and Frank McDermott …
McDermott—the McDermott captured in the picture—comes to life. As if suddenly aware that there is a world outside that photograph, Frank looks straight out to throw Emma a wink.
“Ah!” With a wild, incoherent cry, she stumbles back, her half-finished Frappuccino flying in a fan of whipped cream and mocha-flavored coffee from her left hand. The Dickens Mirror, a book that shouldn’t exist from a series that was never written, flutters to the pavement like a wounded bird. Around her neck, the galaxy pendant suddenly smolders.
“Hey,” Lily says.
“Emma?” Eric—a boy she has yet to meet, who shouldn’t be here—reaches for her. “What’s wrong? Are you all right?”
“No! No, you’re not real! This isn’t right!” Emma flinches away. She turns, her treacherous feet trying to tangle, trip her up, spill her to the sidewalk. “Get away from me, get away, don—” Backpedaling, she blunders from the curb into oncoming traffic on East Washington. A horn blasts as a car churns past, its hot breath swirling around her bare legs, snatching at her sundress. She can hear the sputter of the car’s radio through an open window: Investigators continue the grisly task of removing the remains of at least eight children believed to be the latest victims of—
“No, stop, I’m not listening, I don’t hear you, I don’t hear you!” She takes a lurching stutter-step and tumbles to rough asphalt. As she hits, the fingers of her right hand reflexively close around something hard and jagged.
She looks—and every molecule in her body stills. Everything stops.
The dagger of glass is absolutely flawless and wickedly sharp—and she knows this shape. It is nearly identical to the shard she will fish from that discards bucket and turn over and over on that afternoon when she feels Plath’s bell jar descending to engulf her mind in a dense, deathless fog. When she will think, I didn’t see anything, there was nothing down in Jasper’s cellar; it was just a crawl space, there was nothing inside, I didn’t find …
But there is a difference. This dagger isn’t clear but smoky and black, polished to a mirror’s high gloss. Her reflection within this black dagger is so crisp she can make out the terror in her eyes, the curve of her jaw, every glister and sparkle of that galaxy pendant.
It’s a piece of the Mirror. She is jittering so badly her breaths come in herky-jerky gasps, and she thinks she might be one second away from passing out. It’s from the Dickens—
A sudden bite of pain sinks into her left wrist, bad enough to make her cry out. What was that? God, that hurt. Her eyes shift from the black dagger to her wrist—and then a scream blasts from her throat.
A thick, stingingly bright bracelet of blood has drawn—no, no, is drawing itself, inch by inch, across the skin of her left wrist.