The truck jolted, the engine died with a gurgling rattle, and now, groaning, the Dodge listed in an excruciating slow roll, like a boat beginning to founder. Crying out, Rima jammed her left foot into the back of the front seat and the other against the raised ridge running up the center of the floor. The truck was too old for shoulder harnesses or hand loops, so she spread her arms and flattened her palms on the roof. The truck was now canted at a forty-five-degree angle, far enough that she was afraid to let up with her legs. As it was, if they tipped much more, she’d be practically standing straight up.
“Oh Jesus.” Both Bode’s fists, trembling with strain, were clenched in Casey’s parka. “Kid,” he grunted, “I’m slipping, can’t hold you! Eric, shut the door before I lose him, man! Shut it before those things get a taste of you, too! Come on!”
“Can’t!” Beyond, Eric had planted his boots to either side of the open door and was bracing Casey, trying to keep both his brother and himself from falling out. The waving, searching tentacles of that black anemone were probing the bottom right corner of the truck door, as if deciding whether they liked the taste, the sound a moist but hollow splot-splot-splot-splot. Chad was completely gone now. Either swallowed or dissolved … Rima thought it didn’t much matter. “We’ve rolled too far,” Eric said. “It’s too heavy, I can’t do it.”
“Man, we’re done, it’s over,” Bode said, and yet his body didn’t seem to believe that, because, if anything, he pulled even harder on Casey, eking out every last second of life. “Come on, kid, help me. Pull.”
“I’m trying.” Casey’s voice was as gray as his face. He flicked one quick look back at her. “Rima, if you can, pop your door or unroll your window and climb out, get on top of the truck.”
“He’s right.” Sweat coursed down Bode’s cheeks. “Get outta here, Rima. Maybe you can find your way out of this.” When she made no move to do so, he barked, “Rima, damn it, go!”
“Forget it,” she said, thinking she sounded braver than she felt. “I’m not leaving you guys. There’s no point.” Even if she could bully the heavy door or lever herself out the window, she could picture herself balancing on an ever-diminishing island of metal until the ooze finally took her, too. Worse, she would hear the others—hear Casey—as they died before her, and know she was powerless to help.
“Hey, we’re not sinking as fast,” Eric said. He sounded breathless, like he was churning through wind sprints. At his feet, the tarn kept on sampling the truck, the splot-splot-splot-splot of little black tongues flicking along the bottom edge of the door, working toward the hinge, as the truck slipped deeper by slow degrees. Eric managed another inch back. “You feel it? We’re still going down, but …”
“Good.” Bode’s teeth were bared. “Hope it’s got a stomachache. Hope it chokes.”
“But it was so fast before,” Casey said in as breathless a tone as his brother. “What’s it waiting for?”
“Maybe it’s playing around.” And then Eric grunted at the splot-splot of a tentacle over the door’s running board. “Maybe it likes it when we scream.”
And then, out of nowhere, Rima thought she heard something: slight, airy, the thinnest sliver of sound. What? That wasn’t a scream. Craning, she looked to her right and through the truck’s rear window. It was now very dark in the truck and outside, the coil of birds blotted out whatever sky remained. If anyone could look through all those birds—say, the way you could through the clear glass shell and into the intricate design at the heart of a paperweight—it would probably seem as if the truck were a small bubble of metal and glass, and they, the creatures trapped inside. Like one of those old-fashioned diving bells, the ones open at the bottom but filled with air. Other than the birds, there was no one out there.
Then, she heard that sound that almost wasn’t again, and this time she recognized a word.
“Do you hear that?” she said.
“Hear what?” Casey asked.
“Someone just called my name.” She twisted a look over her left shoulder, craning up through the passenger’s side door. More birds. “I think it was Emma.”
“What?” Bode said.
Rima. Still tentative and evanescent, but now somehow more intense to Rima than simply empty air, as if Emma was honing in on them. Then: Eric.
“What?” Eric said. His head jerked up. “Emma?”
“You heard that,” she said. “You heard her?”
“What are you guys talking about?” Casey asked. “Where?”
“I don’t know.” Rima threw a wild look around. “Emma?” she called. “Emma, where …” She listened again, and then heard Eric answer: “Bode and Casey.”
Another pause, and then Emma’s voice again, so insubstantial you might mistake it for the sough of a light breeze that held no meaning at all, saying something else.
“Jesus,” Bode breathed, at the same time that Casey said, “God, I heard that.”
“Yeah, but what’s White Space?” Eric said. “And what does she mean, think my hand?”
RIMA
The Thickness of a Single Molecule
1
“MAYBE THINK ABOUT it?” Casey said.
“I don’t think that’s what she means,” Rima said. Was White Space something on the other side of this place? She looked at the way this world was shuttering: the birds, drawing down death, obliterating the horizon, as if an eyelid were closing. “Maybe what she means is we should think her hand; not what it is,” she said, “but what it does. Like it grabs, it …” She felt the rest wick away on a gasp. “Oh my God, look.”
Just outside her window, hovering against all that blackness as if suspended from an invisible string, was a luminous silver-white slit so bright it almost hurt to look.
“Is that the fog?” Bode said.
“No. I think it’s a door,” Eric said, still stiff-arming the frame to keep from falling out. The tentacles had swarmed past the running board, and were now licking at the interior edge of the foot well. The outer corner of the door was already under. “That’s what she means by White Space.”
“Okay, but so what? How do we get through? It’s not wide enough; it’s a nothing,” Bode said. “We can’t even get there. It’s not a single step. So what would we hang on to?”