IT WENT LIKE this.
Jasper was obsessed with a lot of things: the Dark Passages and horrific nightmarish creatures and Nows—and Dickens. So Emma knew a fair amount about the writer, including this: sometime in the mid-1860s, Dickens, along with his mistress and her mother, was in a catastrophic train accident that should’ve killed him. Of the train’s seven first-class carriages, Dickens’ car was the only one not to plunge from a viaduct and into a river at Staplehurst in Kent. For hours after the accident, Dickens tended the injured. Some died before his eyes.
The accident was something academics like Kramer loved to point to as the metaphor for Dickens himself: imperious, selfish, bombastic, a bit of the egomaniac whose life was going off the rails. At the time of the crash, the writer had been in the middle of Our Mutual Friend, which might have been lost if Dickens hadn’t remembered to retrieve the manuscript from his overcoat, which he’d left in the railway carriage, before boarding an emergency train to London.
Badly shaken and already in poor health, Dickens actually lost his voice for several weeks. His kids and friends said he never fully recovered, would get the shakes on any but the slowest of trains. Worse, Dickens struggled to finish Our Mutual Friend. Never at a loss, his next installment was several pages short. Either he was used up or traumatized—probably a bit of both; the guy was pretty manic to begin with—but his best writing days were behind him, the crash the beginning of the end. Our Mutual Friend bombed, and Dickens didn’t attempt another book for five long years. But when he did, he decided to try something that, for him, was pretty radical: a murder mystery. He decided on The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
But he never finished. Exhausted from grueling reading tours in the intervening years, Dickens keeled over from a stroke at his Gad’s Hill estate after a day’s work on Drood, and that was that.
She and Jasper used to try to work out the rest of the story, figure out whodunit, just for fun. So did a lot of people; several authors had taken stabs. Some literary groups and fan clubs still held Drood competitions as part of Dickens festivals.
And way, way back—early 1900s, she thought—there was even a mock trial, where a bunch of famous people, like George Bernard Shaw, got together and heard evidence about the character that Dickens hinted in a letter to his biographer, Forster, was the murderer.
She might be writing her life, yet one thing was now dead certain: if Jasper was a creation, he wasn’t hers. In fact, she now wondered why she’d never noticed this before.
Because Edwin Drood’s killer was John Jasper.
3
OKAY. HER HEART was galloping in her chest. Calm down. Think this through.
Say, for argument’s sake, that Eric was right. In this universe, she was like Jasper, a character created under very special circumstances with weird tools and constructed of a bizarre sort of energy that had gotten loose to write her own life. She—and maybe Jasper, too—was unique because certain, very special machines recognized her: the cynosure, for example, and whatever lurked in Jasper’s cellar. The Dickens Mirror might have responded to her as well, if Lizzie’s mom hadn’t destroyed it.
But why would it? Because she had too much of whatever McDermott had pulled from the Dark Passages? Meredith McDermott always sealed extra energy away in a Peculiar, a Bose-Einstein condensate that rendered the energy inert, unable to … well, get free, do damage, whatever. So the machines recognized her, one of their own, because she was unbound, unfinished, filled with just enough juice? And if the energy to make her came from the Dark Passages, did that mean these devices originally belonged to whatever lived there?
Lizzie says tangled a lot. If she followed Rima’s reasoning—that the versions of Rima and Tony and Bode she was seeing now were set because they’d come from a book-world—then Lizzie’s finding and hanging on to her, a character who was unbound, ought to be a lot harder. Unless this version of me, the one McDermott was writing, is tangled up with all the other book-worlds, as well as Lizzie, her dad, and the whisper-man. Following Lizzie’s loopy logic, that meant she had McDermott in her, too.
Just as Jasper had some of Dickens in him?
What did that mean? Could McDermott have actually known Dickens in that other London? And what about the fact that there was no KRAMER on Lizzie’s quilt? She supposed not every single character in every single McDermott novel could be modeled on or incorporate bits of Lizzie. But if you believed the academics, writers always slotted in portions of their lives into their work, whether they knew it or not. So could Kramer be a piece of—or stand-in for—something or someone else? McDermott, perhaps? His first name was Frank … no, Franklin. So that would work; all the letters you needed to make KRAMER were right there.
Following that reasoning, she ought to have pieces of all of them: Bode, Tony, Rima, Chad, and on and on. So would that same tangled-ness make it easier for the machines to recognize her? It might even explain these weird echoes—how they all tended to use the same phrases, for example.
Whoa, wait. What if she was the one making up all of them? What if she had dreamed up Lizzie? But why would she do that?
Well, Jesus, all she had to do was think about her so-called life. She’d taken that psych course. Why did any little kid dream up imaginary friends? Because she’s lonely. No one wants her. She fit the bill: cast-off, ugly, traumatized, all-around weird. Sure, Jasper pulled a save, got her fixed up, made her … well, into a normal-looking person, a girl someone might even think was halfway decent-looking. Maybe.
But had she made herself a protector—because she’d desperately needed one? John Jasper was Edwin Drood’s uncle, and his guardian. So had she heard or read the story and then somehow brought John Jasper, unbound and unfinished, to her? Conjured up these people and this situation because she wanted friends? It fit. Wasn’t she the one lusting after an imaginary guy whose story she couldn’t finish?
Wait, wait. Slow down. She could feel the heat in her cheeks. Yes, Eric was nice; he was perfect, exactly what she’d always imagined. She felt the connection, this pull. Look how he’d risked his neck to come after her and Lily. The way he looked at her made her feel … special.
But there’s Casey; don’t forget that. She gave herself a mental shake. Eric knows him. Casey’s his brother. So that clinches it right there, you nut: you can’t possibly be causing this. Stop freaking yourself out. For God’s sake, you didn’t dream up Frank McDermott or purple panops or a cynosure or a Dickens Mirror.