“It’s really nice.” Rima knelt beside the little girl. The dollhouse was a painted lady: a riot of Victorian bric-a-brac, with gabled roofs and turrets. “So, is this where you spend most of your time?” Odd. She hadn’t thought about that until now, but here was this ageless little girl stuck where time had no meaning and there was virtually no sense of place. It’s like being locked in a padded cell on a mental ward. She eyed the toys. Or trapped in a dollhouse.
“Some.” Lizzie hunched a shoulder, her attention focused on sifting through and pulling out very specific dolls that, at a glance, seemed oddly mismatched, as if they came from many different sets. “I like to play, but I’m not always here. I can leave for a little while.”
“Leave the house to come get one of us from a”—she stumbled—“a book-world.” She did believe the girl’s story and Emma’s theories, but only because arguing against what was going on didn’t change anything and she knew what she’d experienced. And I have to believe that Tony, or some version of him, is alive somewhere. If Emma and Eric were right about alternative timelines, Tony could be anywhere, even lurking in a future chapter of her own story. Casey, too: slotted into the life she knew as a boy she simply hadn’t met yet.
“Yeah,” Lizzie said. “It’s kind of hard, but I can do that. I can visit, too.”
“Visit?” She blinked. “What do you mean?”
“You know … come over and visit. To play.”
“A …” She fumbled. “Like a playdate?”
“Yeah. I play with most of you guys, but mainly Emma.” Lizzie was unwinding a miniature scarf from a girl doll’s neck, spooling and unspooling it around a finger the way a chameleon shot and then recalled its sticky tongue. “I only come when you’re asleep, though.”
“When I’m …” Her heart did a quick, surprised fillip. “Why? I mean … why when we’re asleep?” And what do you mean, we play?
“Because you guys are harder. You’re, you know … you’re set. Emma’s way easier. She and I play a lot. In a way, it’s nice when you’re set the way you are, because it makes you easier to see and find. But it can also be a bad thing.”
“How come?” She couldn’t believe she was actually having this conversation, although she wasn’t sure that while she could say the words, she understood their meanings. See us better because we’re set? “Are you saying that it’s easier to find us on the … the page? In the book-world?”
“Yeah. I mean, it’s not super easy, because for a bookperson, the book-world is the Now. It’s all you know, but you can still go a lot of places in it. Dad called them subplots and subtexts and things that happen off stage. They’re like … hidden compartments in a jewelry box or something. In a book, you can read about a book-person’s day or one hour out of a day or five minutes, and then—poof—a chapter later, or the very next page or paragraph, it’s the day before or after or next week or even two months later, a year. You could be on a different planet. But what about all the time and space in between, see? Those are the hidden, secret parts, all the good stuff between the lines nobody ever thinks about but that has to be there. Book-people can find their way there and do all kinds of things, especially when they’ve got parts of what lives in the Dark Passages in them. That’s why people liked my dad’s books so much; the book-worlds were so real they could get lost in them. Dad said the stories got under their skin and lived inside. A ton of people even wrote themselves into the book-worlds and dressed up like their favorite characters and went on and on and on, sometimes for their whole lives. Dad called it”—Lizzie screwed her face in thought—“fan fiction.”
The whole universe between the covers of a book. But parts of what lives in the Dark Passages? Did she mean the energy in the Dark Passages … whatever that was?
“But it’s also kind of bad, too,” Lizzie continued. “To grab the book-world you, I mean. It’s like you’re wearing a big old sign: I’m Rima. That makes it way easier for the others in the Dark Passages to notice you. Then they try to grab on, like catching a ride, and oh boy, you don’t want that.”
Forget words she could say: she felt like she’d stumbled into a blurry foreign film from Outer Mongolia with no subtitles. “Others? You mean like what grabbed Emma when she was a little girl?” Then she thought of something else: “Wait a second, you said you came to visit book-worlds, right? But Lizzie, you said a book-world’s not a Now. A … a timeline is a Now, an alternative universe. And the Dark Passages … you said they were big halls between Nows. There aren’t Dark Passages between you and book-worlds, right?”
“Right, only between the Nows, and they’re big, long, really dark halls,” Lizzie said, “with lots and lots of shadows and places to hide.”
Places to hide? “But Lizzie, if you can only grab book-people with some of you in them and they only know book-worlds, even the books with lots of hidden compartments … how are the book-people getting into the Dark Passages?”
“Because I take them.”
“But why? How? Don’t you need the Mirror for that?”
The little girl gave Rima a no, silly look. “I’ve never needed the Mirror to get from one Now to the next. All I have to do is think a Now, then the Sign of Sure shows me and I go and play for as long as I want. Well …” A finger of dark oil seemed to glimmer through her blue-blue eyes. “I used to be able to stay a long time. I can’t now. Like I said, I always get pulled back. It’s never long enough.”
“Oh.” She swallowed. “What lives in the Dark Passages? It’s not, ah, just energy?”
“Oh, it’s energy all right, but really bad energies, like the whisper-man. When they notice you, they try to grab and hang on so you’ll pull them through, too.”
“And that’s not good for a Now.”
“Right. Too much of their kind of energy is terrible for a Now, like an infection. It can break the Now. That’s why it’s important to play with you book-people while you’re sleeping. That way, you don’t see them, and they can’t see you very well either.”
“Why?” But she thought she understood. No science whiz, even she knew that large portions of the brain shut down with sleep.