Oh my God. Emma felt a flutter, like the wings of a trapped butterfly, in her throat. She’d spouted the same thing to Kramer. Drop the temperature enough … She’s saying that a Peculiar creates the conditions for a Bose-Einstein condensate.
“So after Mom blew up the barn and everything,” Lizzie said, “all that thought-magic from the whisper-man and my dad and all those Peculiars, which were full of extra thought-magic left over from your book-worlds—”
“Stop, stop,” Bode said. “What do you mean, extra?”
“I mean … extra. Leftovers. Like, you know, you made too much macaroni and cheese.” When Bode looked blank, Lizzie said, impatiently, “Well, you don’t just leave leftovers out on the table or the floor, right? You put leftovers away, into something. Mom did the same thing with the thought-magic that Dad used to pull stories onto White Space. She had to, or the stories wouldn’t stay on the page. So all that extra thought-magic in the Peculiars got loose and tangled up, all mixed together, with my dad and the whisper-man and became, you know, the fog.”
There was a moment’s silence. Emma didn’t know about the others, but her head was crammed with so many questions, she wasn’t sure in which order to ask or even think them. Having skimmed shelves of McDermott novels, she knew this much: there was a Bode novel, a Rima book. Now Done Darkness was Tony’s story, and she’d counted twenty-two other novels. If he’d kept it up, McDermott might be into Stephen King territory by now.
But in all of that, there wasn’t one completed book about—
“Why isn’t there a book about us?” Casey suddenly asked. “We’re here, but there’s no Eric book, no Casey book.”
“Terrific.” Bode snorted. “Which means you guys are the only real people?”
“I told you, I don’t know anything about that,” Lizzie said.
“There’s no Emma book either,” Eric said.
“Not exactly,” Emma said, and gestured at the parchment she’d brought down from Lizzie’s room. She’d half-expected that red spidery scrawl to have disappeared, but it hadn’t: One June afternoon …
“I think Emma’s book was the one my dad was working on when Mom … when she … you know.” The little girl pressed the heel of a hand to her pooling eyes. “There was a whole bunch of thought-magic spilling out all over the place, and that’s when Emma got loose.”
“ ‘One June afternoon,’ ” Eric read, and lifted his eyes to hers. “It says that you went down cellar for a book. Did that happen?” When she nodded, he said, “Can you tell us what happened next? Do you remember?”
Oh yeah, in spades. The family room seemed suddenly much too hot. She didn’t want to talk about this, and not only because it had scared her silly. Talking would make it real, because she would be putting words to an experience that felt like the distant cousin to what was happening to them now. And everything—my blinks, my blackouts—all that started where McDermott’s fragment ends.
She cleared her throat. “Like it says, I was a kid. I decided to forget it, try never to think about it. Most of the time, it’s muddy, like a dream. But what the parchment says is right. It was June, a week after I turned twelve,” she said, “when I went down cellar to look for a book.”
EMMA
Down Cellar
THE FIRST THING she notices down cellar is the icy tongue of a draft licking her ankles.
Well, that’s weird. Emma frowns. The cellar’s got two rooms. The first has nothing very interesting: a boiler, a washer and dryer. But this second room is like a cave filled with treasure, chockablock with boxes and shelves and heaps of novels, including a special glassed-in cabinet of first-edition Dickens books Jasper keeps here, down cellar, where the temperature is always cool and the air kept very dry. There are also old comic books and stacks of science fiction, as well as tomes on science and history and art. There’s a massive antique rolltop desk, too, locked up tight. She’s run her hands over that thing a dozen times, searching for a hidden catch or knob that might release the rolltop. Her jewelry box has a secret compartment, so maybe there’s some über-secret way of getting into the desk, too, but she finds nothing. Picking the lock also turns out to be way harder than in the movies, and she’s finally let it be. Probably Jasper doesn’t remember the desk’s even here, hunkered in the dark.
But the draft is really strange. It doesn’t belong at all. Inching on hands and knees, she follows the chill behind a tower of boxes butted against the south wall. There, etched on the wall and along the floor, is a perfect two-foot square. Instead of the gray wash used on the rest of the cellar’s cinderblock, however, this square is a blinding, featureless, bone-bright white.
She rocks back on her heels, the better to study that blank. There is no doubt in her mind that Jasper has slathered the same paint here that he does on his canvases, but why? Is something beneath this? A painting on the cinderblock? She wouldn’t put it past him. But the idea doesn’t feel quite right.
Then her eyes catch a slight wink of brass, and she sees a pull-ring on the right, about midway down. The pull-ring is Emma-sized, just right for her hand. Had that been there a moment ago? She isn’t sure. But there’s no doubt now.
Wow. A little mouse of excitement scurries up her spine. A door? Another room? She laces her fingers through the pull-ring—and hesitates. She’s not an idiot. There might be spiders, or bats, or dead things with gooshy innards waiting in the dark. Maybe Jasper’s hidden this door for a good reason. Nightmares live under the white paint on his canvases, for heaven’s sake.
Still, she can’t resist, and pulls. At first, nothing happens, and she is about to pull harder when small flakes of white paint begin to snow in a fine flurry to the cool concrete. She feels the door gasp and shudder, as if suddenly waking from a deep sleep. Then the door gives; it yawwwns open on a silent, rushing exhalation of pent-up breath, the way she porpoises out of Superior’s blue-black waters on a hot summer’s day.
But behind the door, there is nothing. It is Pitch. Black. Just an inky square. The darkness almost doesn’t look real. She can’t see an inch into all that nothingness, and it smells funny: like when she scraped both her knees bloody the day she took a header off her bike.
Light. She races back upstairs, then pulls up and tiptoes into the front parlor. In the kitchen, the radio is yammering to itself, the reporter excitedly talking about police and victims and murder, but she doesn’t care. Jasper is gone; probably sketching but mainly boozing before heading off to make arrangements for a kayak trip they’ll take in a week’s time to Devils Island. Sal’s taken the truck to town for groceries. So Emma’s safe, at least for the rest of the afternoon. Perfect. Stretching up on her toes, she filches a pack of matches from the fireplace mantel. In the kitchen pantry, she finds a plastic bag of used candles—Sal’s such a cheapskate—and fishes out three blue stubs left over from her and Jasper’s birthday cakes the week before.