“Of what?” Bode asked.
“Skills? We all must have something. Rima’s got that whisper-sense going. Emma can use the memory quilt, and she pulled us here,” Eric said.
“Yeah, well …” For an instant, Bode’s eyes unfocused, flicking left before firming on Eric’s face. “I’m nothing special. What about you and the kid?”
“Beats me.” Although he thought he saw a shadow whisk through Casey’s face. “Maybe it depends on what the barn throws at us.”
“So you think the barn’s like House?” Emma said.
“Has to be.” He’d been thinking about this. “Remember what Lizzie said: not my dad’s in the barn. She said he’s the barn. It’s kind of subtle, but given your experience in this house …”
“So what?” Bode said.
Eric watched Emma think about this, then give a slow nod. “You mean that the barn was his space. It’s where her dad worked. So the barn is … him? A manifestation, a way for her to see him?” she said. “Or only a product of how she thinks about him?”
“Maybe all those things,” he said.
“Then why not just make him a person?” Casey asked.
“She might not be able to. She keeps saying tangled. Maybe that barn’s as much of her dad as the fog allows her to see.” Of course, this begged the question of just how they were supposed to untangle the guy’s, well, energy or essence or whatever.
“Huh.” Casey took a meditative sip of his cocoa, then stared into his mug. “Kind of makes you wonder what this house is. Or who.”
“It’s probably like the barn. Not one thing or person, but pieces all mixed together.”
“But with one dominant personality, maybe,” Emma said. “As scary as the rooms and visions have been, everything I saw and did was built upon what came before it. Every situation put me into another where I was given an example of what I had to do and then”—Emma seemed to test the word before she said it—“prompted to do exactly what I’d been shown. Sort of okay, here’s how and now you try. I don’t know if House was playing with, showing, or training me up until I finally got the idea of what I was here to do. Just like Lizzie said.”
“Could be all three.” He’d thought about this, too. Emma has to be part of this, somehow; the reason the rest of us are here. It was the only thing that made sense. Lizzie tried various characters in various combinations, so they must each have a part to play—but Lizzie said that Emma was more tangled with her than the rest of them. Only Emma had been shown the memory quilt. If that cynosure was a machine, it recognized Emma, and she’d used that to reach through and pull them here. This house showed Emma something very much like this Dickens Mirror.
Emma has to be the key, a focal point.
Which made him wonder: assuming Lizzie had always known Emma was more tangled than they, had Emma been here before, with others, but failed? Or maybe only they died in this place, but Lizzie somehow got Emma out? That actually might be just one more component to Emma’s strange seizures or fugues, those blinks.
She might have been here before, but when she wasn’t ready or hadn’t acquired the necessary skills. He studied Emma as she snipped paper tape to secure the gauze wrap around his leg. So what if all this—the crash, this valley, all this death—what if this has been designed for Emma, too?
Aloud, he said only, “The house might have a lot of her mom in it.”
“Or what a little kid would wish for and associate with her mom. Lizzie said Meredith died before Lizzie could finish this place.” Emma paused, then added, with a shrug, “On the other hand, no one ever found a body, so it’s a decent thought. House is the only place with light. It’s warm. There’s food.”
“So if a piece of her mom, or the idea of her, takes care of Lizzie and makes food, gives us a place to rest and be safe,” Casey asked, “what does her dad … what does the barn make?”
“Maybe what Frank McDermott made best,” Eric said.
“Books?” Bode asked.
“No.” Emma shook her head. “Monsters. Death. Things that live in the dark.”
“Hell,” Bode said after a pause, “you’re talking about a tunnel. A lot of nightmares in a black echo, and they aren’t all human.”
“For you,” Eric said, and glanced at his brother. “I’ll bet it’s a different nightmare for each of us.”
“Different characters, different books.” Emma gave them all a strange look. “I wonder if that’s why the others Lizzie brought here before failed.”
“How do you mean?” Bode asked.
“I get it.” As soon as she’d said it, Eric knew what she was driving at. “Once they hit the barn, they must meet up with their monsters.”
“Jesus.” Bode’s eyes widened. “You mean they die? Like that kid, Tony?”
“I don’t see how it can be any other way,” he said. “Otherwise, the people she’s brought before would still be here, trying to figure a way out.”
“Aw, man.” Bode hooked his hands around the collar of his BDU as if it was a ledge and he was hanging on for dear life. “Aw, man.”
“Eric, if that’s true, and we’re all … you know, his, like he’s our father”—Casey shot him an anxious look—“then what about us? What does that make us? If everything is all tangled here, doesn’t that make us a little like him, and all the monsters? And God, what does that make Liz—” Breaking off, Casey frowned up at the ceiling at the same moment that Eric heard something: sharp but short, as if cut in two.
“Did you—” Emma began as Bode said, “Hey, you hear …”
But it was Casey who moved first. “Oh God,” he said, bolting up from the table so quickly his mug overturned with a slosh. “That was Rima.”
RIMA
A Safe Place
“WOW, GREAT ROOM,” Rima said, and meant it. She took in the plush carpet, pink walls, the litter of toys. “I’ve never seen a loft bed before.”
“It was my idea.” Lizzie was crouched beneath the bed, fiddling with a wood box overflowing with various miniature Ken and Barbie-like dolls clearly meant for play with that dollhouse. “I wanted a private space just like my dad, so Dad got it built for me special, same as my dollhouse.”