“L-Lizzieee.” Mom’s voice is weak, no more than a halting whisper. “G-get … a-awaaay …”
The phone is still beeping. The fog has crept to Lizzie’s chest and continues to rise, snaking higher and higher, coiling around her shoulders in a white rope to hold her fast.
Got to finish the special forever-Now, Lizzie thinks. The symbols she’s already formed are starting to fade, the purpling mad bleeding away like her mother’s blood. Got to make the last symbol.
Symbol? Emma no longer wonders how she knows what Lizzie feels or thinks. She only wants this to end. What symbol?
“R-run.” Mom coughs, and crimson gushes from her mouth. “L-Lizzie … h-h-h-hide …”
“Momma, I … I can’t.” The lick of the fog, bright and cruel, is cold enough to burn, and very strong, stronger than Lizzie, and the phone is still ringing, ringing, ringing. The fog’s tongue tastes Lizzie’s chin. Its ice-fingers tickle her nose. She twists and turns, she holds her breath, but the fog doesn’t care. It slips in; it slithers up her nose. Its fingers crawl over her brain and dig into the meat and worm behind her eyes. Lizzie has one last symbol to make, only one, but whatever it was, she can no longer see it in her mind. No, no, it’s not fair, she is so close; she was almost done! If only she hadn’t waited! The fog plucks at the cords of her nerves and muscles. Her legs flop; her arms jitter and twitch—
I’ve got to do something, Emma thinks, frantically. I’m so close, just a sliver of White Space. There’s got to be something I can do.
Through Lizzie’s eyes, Emma watches the day gray as the darkness that is the fog flows over and through Lizzie’s vision like black oil, like something out of X-Files, when the aliens slip inside and hijack a ride.
And then the light is gone, and Lizzie is blind. She opens her mouth to scream—and can’t. Her mouth is stitched shut. No, no, that’s not right. Lizzie’s mouth is no longer there.
Oh my God. If Emma’s heart still beats, she no longer feels it. Lizzie’s face, her face!
Lizzie’s face is going blank and whisper-man black, the way the words on a page are erased and scrubbed away, one by one, letter by letter, word by word, line by line.
Then, the cell phone ceases its relentless beeping.
Time’s up.
A moment’s silence. A pause.
Then, a click.
And then,
a soft …
tiny …
eep.
And the phone says …
EMMA
Space Tears
1
“NO!” EMMA SHRIEKS. Her palms flatten against the edge of White Space. “House, stop this! Don’t listen, Lizzie, don’t listen!”
House does nothing, and Emma knows there’s no more time for words. The galaxy pendant around her neck is a bright beacon, like a searchlight telling her mind where to go and what to do.
Bridge the gap. Cross the space. This is like the mirror in the bathroom; this has to be why House showed me how to do this in the first place: to get me ready, prime my brain to believe I can. Just reach out and pull her across and do it now, do it now!
So Emma thrusts her hand, hard; feels the White Space resist and deform and rip and then—
Then there is pain.
Oh God. She opens her mouth to scream, but her lungs won’t work. What is this? This isn’t like the bathroom mirror, where it was only cold and then burning. She isn’t prepared for how much this hurts, as if the glassy teeth of the broken window from that domed chapel for the mad have snagged her after all. This is altogether different than what she’s just done: crashing from the past through a phantom black slit-mirror to this Now. That didn’t hurt at all. One minute, she was in the snow, on the roof, sprinting from the spidery thing erupting from Kramer’s body—and then she was on a road.
And this is not even close to what happened years ago: when she was twelve and found something down cellar in Jasper’s cottage that she’s determined not to think about. Because that might prove that, really, she’s only crazy.
Now, the White Space rips. It gapes in a fleshy wound, and Emma is suddenly teetering on the lip between two worlds, two times, two stories. The Space tears, and she tears with it, her skin ripping, flayed from her bones the way paper splits along a seam. She can feel her heart struggling in her chest in great shuddering heaves, and then there is no thought at all, only a blaze of white-hot agony.
Too late to go back, even if she wanted to: there is the car and Lizzie, right in front of her. She stretches, gropes for a handhold, as the gelid fog burns and scores her flesh. Her fingers slide over something solid: a small wrist, slick and tacky with blood. Her hand closes around Lizzie, and then she is pulling with all her might, dragging the girl from the car and away from the greedy fingers of that murderous fog, reeling her across shuddering time and shimmering White Space, bridging the gap between two letters, two words, two Nows. The White Space flexes, folds …
2
AND THEY TUMBLED back in a heap.
Emma was knocked flat, smacking what little air she had left from her lungs. For a moment, all she could do was lie there, gulping like a hooked fish flipped onto a dock. Her heart hammered against her ribs. Blood bounded in her neck and head, her pulse beating time in her throbbing temples.
The downstairs hallway, where she’d come back to find herself at that slit-door, was gone. She now lay on plush white carpet in a room with blush-pink walls edged in white trim. To the left, a pine loft bed hovered five feet off the floor. A dollhouse huddled just beneath, and a wine-red tongue of quilt, speckled with colorful glass, dangled over the lip of the bed.
“Oh boy.” Sprawled on the carpet to Emma’s right, Lizzie lifted her head and said, weakly, “Wow, Emma, I thought you were never going to figure it out.”
RIMA
Something Inside
DUCKING AROUND THE cold red brick of the church, Rima scuttled through the open door and fetched up against the last row of pews. The church was a ruin. The altar had been junked; a huge wooden crucifix lay in two jagged splinters as if snapped over a knee. Beyond the altar rail, an over-large Bible with gilt covers flopped facedown in a colorful halo of shattered, bloodred stained glass. A body, all in black, lay beyond the chancery railing where it had fallen back against a lectern, which was splashed with gore and liverish chunks of flesh. But there was something off about the body, too. The hands didn’t seem … quite right.
There was the slight grate and pop of glass on stone as Casey came to crouch alongside. “Why did you run? Wha—” He sucked in a small gasp. “You hear that?”