White Space

The mist twines around her father in a shimmering vermillion spiderweb. The blood-web tightens and squeezes, hugging her father right up to the churning, rippling glass. The black glass gives, the inky mouth of that Mirror gapes, and then her father’s hands slip through, sinking into the glass, as he reaches down its throat and into the Dark Passages.

Run! the panic-mouse screeches. Run, Lizzie, run! Get Mom! But she doesn’t. Her heart bumpity-bumpity-bumps in her chest, and she has never been so scared. In all the Lizzie-worlds she’s made and the Nows she’s visited and the hours she’s spent here with her father, she has never seen anything quite as terrible as this—and she simply can’t move.

The glass fills with something white and sparkly and thick and formless as fog that swirls and ripples—and knits together to form a face. But not Dad’s face, oh no. Whatever lies beyond the glass is still becoming: oozy and indefinite, there and then not, as if the face is pulling together the way hot glass slumps and folds and becomes something else. Even as she watches, the face solidifies into a nightmare of raw meat, bristly teeth, a snaky black tongue—

And eyes. Eyes. Two are black. They are a crow’s eyes, a cobra’s eyes—dead eyes with no pupils and no eyelids either.

But the third is different. Instead of the blue-black cyclops eye that is her monster-doll’s, this third eye is a silver storm, both mirror and ocean—and her father is there, his reflection pulling together from the swirling, smoky whirlpool to eel like a serpent, and oh, his face, her dad’s real face!

Maybe she makes a sound. Or maybe, like a snake, the whisper-man tastes her with his tongue, because all three eyes cut sideways and then—

He sees me. Her hand catches the ball of a shriek. He sees me, he sees me, he sees me!

And then.

Her father.

Turns—

EMMA Blink

1

“EMMA. EMMA?”

“What?” Emma snapped back, awareness flooding her mind in an icy gush, an arrow of sudden bright pain stabbing right between her eyes. Blinking past tears, her gaze sharpened on a pair of windshield wipers thumping back and forth, pushing rills of thick snow.

Driving. I’m in a car. Her hands fisted the steering wheel. But where am I going? How did I get here?

“Emma, are you okay? You look kind of out of it.”

“I-I’m fine. Sorry, Li … Lily.” She stumbled over the name, but Lily felt right in her mouth and Emma did recognize her, sort of: leggy, blonde, a touch of the valley girl.

“Have you figured out where we are yet?” Lily asked.

Oh man. They were lost? Jesus, how long had she been gone this time? “Not yet, but I bet we’ll be up … up …”

“Emma?”

“Jasper’s,” she blurted, the word catapulting from her mouth like a rock from a slingshot. “I bet we’ll be up at Jasper’s in no time.”

“Are you—” Lily let out a shriek as a fork of lightning stuttered. “Is that normal?”

“For Wisconsin,” Emma said as thunder bellowed and the lumbering Dodge Caravan—a rental; yes, I remember complaining about the bad shocks, the mushy steering—jumped. “Happens all the time, Lily.” She tried to keep it light, but her voice didn’t feel as if it belonged to her at all. God, leave it to her to vacate at the worst possible time. The blink had been so different, too: not just a blackout or snapshot flash but a whole sequence, fading fast. What had she seen? A little girl and a … a cat? Yes, but what was its name? Something to eat … Jelly? No, no, that wasn’t right.

Come on, Emma, you can do this. Just relax and let it come.

But she couldn’t relax. Her head killed. Her vision fuzzed and then blistered as her headache pillowed and swelled. The space before her eyes opened in a spiky, purple-black maw, violent as a bruise. The doctors had always dismissed it as a variant of a scintillating scotoma, a visual symptom of a migraine. But hers wasn’t anything like a normal person’s, which figured. No bright firefly flashes for her, no shimmering arc or fuzzy spiral. Hers began as a rip in thin air, like a hole being munched right out of the backside of this world. The doctors made reassuring noises about petit mal seizures and an Alice in Wonderland syndrome, but all their talk boiled down to the same thing: Honey, so sucks to be you.