White Space

Lizzie nodded. “But he couldn’t help himself from starting again, even though he promised. He said books were like really bad colds you just never got over until you wrote them down and got them out of your blood. Maybe he put so much of me in you, it was harder for him to stop himself, but I don’t know. Anyway, he just never finished you, and that’s why you got out. But that’s also what makes you really special. You’re not like the others, especially the guys whose stories are over.”

He never finished me? She means, there’s no period to the end of that sentence; there’s no The End. But I know what happened after I went down cellar. I’m not twelve anymore; I’m seventeen, and I have memories and a life and I go to school. Then she thought, Oh my God. Eric.

“Special.” Her voice came out in a croak. “Not over yet? What is this?” She grabbed her middle with both arms, trying to hold it together. She was going to be sick; she was going to lose it; she was losing it; she could feel the burn flickering up her throat. In another second, she would break a window and go shrieking out into the snow. No wonder it was called Alice in Wonderland syndrome: This is just like London, because we’re all mad here. “What do you mean, I’m closest to you? That I got out? Out of where? What are you saying?”

“Emma, you’ve got the most of me in you … you know, like our eyes and stuff. You pull words from White Space. The Sign of Sure recognizes you just like it knows who I am. So I figured you were special enough to help me hold all the others in place.”

“The most of y-you. The guys whose stories are o-over.”

“Uh-huh.” Lizzie nodded. “You know, like Rima and Bode and Tony. They’re harder to do because they’re over and can’t change much.”

Oh shit, oh shit. She was gulping now, her breath coming in jerky, shuddery gasps. God, please, please, please let me wake up. “Different books. You’re talking about characters from different books, from your dad’s books.”

“Well, sure,” said Lizzie. “I just had to show you how to do it by opening the right books and dropping you into different book-worlds until you figured out how to pull me into your White Space, your story. Oh boy, it took you long enough.”

“Opening the right … dropping me into book-worlds …” Emma choked. All her blackouts. She looked down at the parchment scroll, with its unfinished story of her life. All those blinks when she lost time; when she saw things … “Are you s-saying … are you t-telling me that all I am is s-some character from a goddamned book?”

“Well, yeah.” Lizzie’s lips wobbled. “Kind of.”

RIMA The Thing That Had Been Father Preston

“GO!” TANIA DROPPED into the passenger’s seat. Whiter than salt, her face glistened with sweat. Another spasm of pain grabbed the girl’s middle, and she grunted through gritted teeth, the knuckles of her right hand tightening around the rifle, as she clicked her shoulder harness home. “G-go, Rima, g-get us moving!”

“Hang on!” Mashing the accelerator, Rima felt the hard knock of the snowcat’s engine throttling up to a full-throated roar. The vehicle surged forward in a squalling grind of grating treads and screaming metal. Through the windshield, she could see the thing that had been Father Preston sprinting away, his cassock unspooling like a cape, flowing around his ruined body like black oil. Preston was moving fast, faster than should be possible for a man, almost skimming over the snow.

“Get him, Rima!” Tania straight-armed the dash against another wave of pain. “G-get that son of a b-bitch,” she panted, sweeping a hank of sweat-dampened hair from her forehead. “Go, Rima, g-go!”

Go. Rima rammed the joystick. Dropping on its hydraulic slave, the snowblower came alive with a mechanical scream, the massive orange auger chewing and biting snow that, finally, had decided to behave a bit like real snow. The discharge chute belched glittering arcs of pulverized ice. Rima gunned the engine, and the machine lunged forward like a ravening insect, steel mandible ripping, tearing. Go, go, go, go!

The thing was now past the cemetery, almost to the woods, but they were gaining. Sixty yards … fifty … thirty. They were so close now that she could see the thin puffs of ice crystals kicked up by the thing’s mad passage. The edge of the snowblower’s casing was ruler-straight, and as they neared and the thing that was once a man—a gentle priest who believed that touching whispers was a gift, and not a curse—dropped below this new horizon, Rima shouted, “We’ve got him, we’ve got him, hang on!”