White Space

She might have been here before, but when she wasn’t ready or hadn’t acquired the necessary skills. He studied Emma as she snipped paper tape to secure the gauze wrap around his leg. So what if all this—the crash, this valley, all this death—what if this has been designed for Emma, too?

Aloud, he said only, “The house might have a lot of her mom in it.”

“Or what a little kid would wish for and associate with her mom. Lizzie said Meredith died before Lizzie could finish this place.” Emma paused, then added, with a shrug, “On the other hand, no one ever found a body, so it’s a decent thought. House is the only place with light. It’s warm. There’s food.”

“So if a piece of her mom, or the idea of her, takes care of Lizzie and makes food, gives us a place to rest and be safe,” Casey asked, “what does her dad … what does the barn make?”

“Maybe what Frank McDermott made best,” Eric said.

“Books?” Bode asked.

“No.” Emma shook her head. “Monsters. Death. Things that live in the dark.”

“Hell,” Bode said after a pause, “you’re talking about a tunnel. A lot of nightmares in a black echo, and they aren’t all human.”

“For you,” Eric said, and glanced at his brother. “I’ll bet it’s a different nightmare for each of us.”

“Different characters, different books.” Emma gave them all a strange look. “I wonder if that’s why the others Lizzie brought here before failed.”

“How do you mean?” Bode asked.

“I get it.” As soon as she’d said it, Eric knew what she was driving at. “Once they hit the barn, they must meet up with their monsters.”

“Jesus.” Bode’s eyes widened. “You mean they die? Like that kid, Tony?”

“I don’t see how it can be any other way,” he said. “Otherwise, the people she’s brought before would still be here, trying to figure a way out.”

“Aw, man.” Bode hooked his hands around the collar of his BDU as if it was a ledge and he was hanging on for dear life. “Aw, man.”

“Eric, if that’s true, and we’re all … you know, his, like he’s our father”—Casey shot him an anxious look—“then what about us? What does that make us? If everything is all tangled here, doesn’t that make us a little like him, and all the monsters? And God, what does that make Liz—” Breaking off, Casey frowned up at the ceiling at the same moment that Eric heard something: sharp but short, as if cut in two.

“Did you—” Emma began as Bode said, “Hey, you hear …”

But it was Casey who moved first. “Oh God,” he said, bolting up from the table so quickly his mug overturned with a slosh. “That was Rima.”

RIMA A Safe Place

“WOW, GREAT ROOM,” Rima said, and meant it. She took in the plush carpet, pink walls, the litter of toys. “I’ve never seen a loft bed before.”

“It was my idea.” Lizzie was crouched beneath the bed, fiddling with a wood box overflowing with various miniature Ken and Barbie-like dolls clearly meant for play with that dollhouse. “I wanted a private space just like my dad, so Dad got it built for me special, same as my dollhouse.”

“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?”