White Space

As her eyes slide from the Peculiars to Dad’s desk, Lizzie’s throat suddenly squeezes down to a straw. She’d hoped that Dad would be there, looking at the night through a big picture window facing the high heifer pasture. Lots of times he’ll just sit there, and Lizzie swears he’s watching something play itself out, as if on a big television tuned to a secret channel. Mom says Dad flashes back, kind of like visiting a very special, private Now. Not for real; he doesn’t go anywhere or slip through any other Dark Passages than the black basement of his brain, where there are whispers from waaay back, when he was a boy and lived in this creepy old farmhouse at the very bottom of a deep, cold valley surrounded by high, snowy mountains in a very bad Wyoming.

But right this second, Dad’s not flashing back to that valley. He’s not at his desk, and Lizzie feels that awful, heavy blanket weigh her down just a little bit more. She thinks, No, Dad, no. You promised. You crossed your heart. But he must’ve been dying inside, the story in his blood hotter than the highest fever, burning him up.

Dad has been a busy, busy bee. A new skin-scroll is unfurled over his desk. What he’s already pulled onto the scroll’s White Space with special ink is a bright red spidery splash: letters and words and whole paragraphs. A heavy scent, one that is like a crushed tin can left out in a storm, fogs the air.

Dad stands at the Dickens Mirror, which is not an oval but a slit, like the pupil of a lizard’s or cat’s eye, with all sorts of squiggle-monsters and arguses and typhons and spider-swoozels and winged cobcraas squirming through its wood frame. The glass isn’t normal either but smoky-black, like old char left from a great big bonfire.

And Dad … he’s not acting like Dad. What he’s doing doesn’t even seem human. Because Dad is growling, like something’s waking up in his chest, raking curved claws over his insides, trying to break his bones and bust from his skin, just like the mom’s cancer in Now Done Darkness, or the million creepy, furry spithres that tremble like spiky petals from that girl’s mouth in Whispers. Dad’s face is all twisted and crooked, as if his head got ruined in Mom’s Kugelrohr oven.

In his right hand is his wicked-sharp lunellum. Normally, Dad only uses the knife, which is decorated with special symbols, when he makes his White Space skin-paper. Not tonight, though, and Lizzie knows doom when she feels it. The person in front of that Mirror is in the middle of becoming a thing she’s never seen before.

So make a sound! A tiny panic-mouse claws her brain. Sing a song! Do something to save him! Do something, Lizzie, do anything, before it’s TOO LATE!

But then too late happens.

The blade kisses her dad’s left palm, quick as a snake, and Dad goes, AARRGGHHH! His head whips back as another roar boils and bubbles: AAAHHHH!

On the ladder, Lizzie jumps. Dad! the panic-mouse in her brain squeaks. Dad, Daddy! All the hairs on her neck and arms go spiky as a porcupine’s quills. She watches in mute horror as a bloody rill oozes down her father’s wrist to weep ruby tears.

The knife flashes again. The skin of Dad’s right hand splits in a red shriek. The lunellum thunks to the floor as her father slams his bleeding hands, really, really hard, against the Mirror. The stand wobbles; there is a squeaking, wet sound as her father’s blood squelches and smears the glass; and Lizzie hears a very distinct, metallic click like the snap of a light switch.

And then the lizard-eye of that Dickens Mirror … changes. It starts to shimmer. The surface wobbles and ripples in undulating black waves, like a river of oil spilling across ice. Her father’s blood pulses, hot and red and alive; his blood writhes over the Mirror, and where his blood touches, the smoky glass steams. Long, milky fingers of mist curl around her father’s wrists and begin to pulse and suck—and all of a sudden, they are not white as milk or heavy mist but first pink and then a deep, dark bloodred.

The Mirror is drinking her father. The Mirror’s greedy fingers spiral up and up and up in a tangle of rust-red vines to web his neck and face, as if her dad is a piece of blank parchment onto which something new is being written in blood.

“Blood of My Blood,” her father says, but what comes out of his mouth is a voice of one and many: overlapping echoes and whispers from down deep and very far away. “I feed you, Blood of My Blood, Breath of My Breath. I feed you and I invite you. I release you and I bind you and I draw you. Together, we are one, and there are the Dark Passages and all of space and time to bridge.”