White Space

Eric changed the subject. “Look, Bode, if I thought we stood a chance on the sled, I’d try, but we don’t, because there are too many of us, and I’m not leaving anyone behind. Even if we could, where would we go? We might wander around for hours and be right back where we started, or lost in the snow, which would be ten times worse—if the fog even lets us get that far.”

“He’s right.” Emma squirted a thin worm of clear antibiotic ointment into Eric’s gash. “We’re not going anywhere until we finish this thing.”

“Whatever this thing is,” Bode said. “Me, I personally don’t get it. What’s so hard about getting her dad out of some creepy old barn?”

“Well,” Casey said, blowing on his hot cocoa, “obviously something. Eventually, we’re going to have to go over and find out what.”

“Aw, no.” Bode raised his hands in a warding-off gesture. “Count me out. Let the kid fight her own battles.”

“So what, you’re going to sit here, eat macaroni and cheese, and complain?” Eric said as Emma began to wrap a gauze roll around his calf. “That’s your plan?”

“For that matter, what makes you think House or the fog will let you?” Emma looked up at Bode. “House created rooms and sent me places. So we’re doing the barn, Bode. It’s only a matter of when … and who. I don’t think we can go out one at a time either. She brings people over in groups for a reason, probably trying to find the right combination.”

“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.