White Space

But the candle flame was still there. I felt it. This would be the same. The trick would be filling them in, making them visible. She let herself see the barn as Lizzie had described it: a black void into which she could drift, like slipping in on the breath of a dream. Now—she felt Eric’s hand in hers—start to fill them in; draw us onto and into the space.

There came the familiar tingle of a blink ripsawing through her skin, a lancet of white pain as the bruised lips of that spiky maw parted in the dark before her eyes. A red rose of heat bloomed on her forehead. Between her breasts, there was a sudden warm flush, and she knew the galaxy pendant must be glowing. A jolt crackled in her chest, an atomic bomb of light and heat that lashed down her arms and out her fingers. Someone gasped. Casey said, wonderingly, “Did you feel …?” But Emma barely heard, was suddenly past hearing. In the blackness of her mind, behind her eyes, she saw them all—Casey, Bode, Eric, her—as cutouts edged with the same kind of glow that had haloed Kramer. His had been the color of a sick, creeping evil, but theirs was true light spun in pulsing filaments from their fingers, knitting their hands together with …

Colors. It was Eric, not speaking but floating in her mind nonetheless. Emma, do you see this?

Man. Bode. It’s like a spider’s web, tying us together.

Eric’s light was a deep cobalt blue, a near match, although hers was edged with a golden nimbus finer than lace, as fiery as the sun’s corona. Bode’s color was very strange, deeply vermillion, but blurry and indistinct, as if whatever Bode was bled and oozed like an open wound. For a second, she could’ve sworn that Bode was not a single color but two.

But Casey … Casey was many and all colors, a nacreous, wavering shimmer that was now rose, now sapphire, sulfur, violet. Casey was anybody, anyone.

Her ears filled with the rush of a thousand birds, as the colors looped up their arms, drawing them tight, tight, and ever tighter, as woven together as the glass creatures knotted in her galaxy pendant. Then she felt a swooning, the earth dropping away, which swept through her like a chilling wind, and they were suddenly falling, their light tangling to a streaming rainbow. The galaxy pendant fired as space folded, flexed, and then …

EMMA Monsters Are Us

COLD. DARK. SHE felt the press of the black, heavy as an anvil.

She opened her eyes, then fluttered them in a rapid blink because, for a second, she wasn’t sure they were actually open; it was that dark. Then, from the nothing in front of her eyes, she teased their colors, faintly luminous, misty as frayed cobwebs. For the moment, they were still linked, their circle unbroken by their passage into whatever space she’d hurled them.

Yeah, but are we inside? Is this the barn? There was something solid beneath her feet, icier than a tombstone, and she thought, Oh crap, I dropped us in the wrong place.

Casey’s voice reached out from the dark. “Did we get in?”

A scuffling sound, and then their circle winked out as Bode let go. “Oh yeah,” Bode said. “I know inside when I feel it. Just like dropping into a black echo. Man, you don’t know what bad is until—”

A whisper of alarm sighed across her neck. Why? Something Eric had said that, now that she thought about it, echoed a blink; the way McDermott had talked about stories and how ideas were infections … And we wondered what the barn might make.

“Until you’ve run into these things,” Bode continued, “big as your—”

The monsters are us. The thought was sudden, immediate, explosive. Bode’s story is written, and the monsters are in—

“Bode!” she shouted, frantic. “Bode, no!”

RIMA Blood Have the Power

“DON’T FIGHT IT, baby. Look what you’re doing to yourself. You’re bleeding.” Anita’s skin was pasty and her breath fruity with cheap wine. “Trust your momma, honey, and this will be over quick. You’ve got a black stain on your soul, only I’ll wash it clean. Take care of that stain once and for all.”