White Space

Her gaze shot to Graves. Instead of panops, a pair of steel-framed spectacles perched on her knife’s-edge of a nose. The nurse’s face seemed flesh and blood, but her left eye was fish-belly white, with no tracery of thin red capillaries. A muddy gray iris floated in its center like a dirty mote.

It’s artificial. It’s glass. Oh my God. Now that she knew what she was looking for, Emma saw that one attendant held his right arm at a stiff, forty-five-degree angle. The fingers didn’t move, but they weren’t paralyzed. The arm and hand were prostheses. Another man wore an odd leather headpiece to which a pair of tin ears, gray as an elephant’s, had been nailed. A nurse was minus a hand, the sleeve of her blouse neatly sewn shut at the wrist. Still another woman’s nose had been eaten clean away until there was nothing but two black pits set in a shriveled, weathered gargoyle face marred by strange, fleshy knobs that sprouted from her skin like mushrooms.

What happened here? How could these people be so different from what House had shown her? Then she remembered what the shadow-man had said, right before he faded: that she mustn’t hang on too long or let the creeping black that was the whisper-man reach her. He called it an infection. That must be what he meant: something of the whisper-man, a creature of the Dark Passages, remains bound to the blood. She had been bleeding, her skin torn and slashed by the birds. Worse, the whisper-man had already used her before, many times over, whisking her away in blinks to other timelines, different Nows. So had this final exposure to the whisper-man’s energy, his blood, been enough to tip the balance?

Or could this be something different? McDermott was always worried about the characters he didn’t finish infecting other book-worlds and Nows. She’d assumed it meant breaking a Now in the same way that the snow had disintegrated around Eric and Casey and the others, but these people … Her eyes darted to Graves’s artificial one, that nurse’s prosthetic hand. Kramer’s mask. Was this what McDermott meant?

Am I to blame for this?

She had to get out of here. There must be something like the Dickens Mirror here; there had to be. Maybe that’s why House showed me this before. The bell jar’s the key. She threw a glance at the dead-eyed, stuffed cockatoo under glass. Got to get back to the domed chapel, get out onto the roof, and then … Would a slit-mirror appear as it had before? Maybe not. This reality, this Now, was very different from what she’d been shown. Still, she had the cynosure; felt the weight of it between her breasts, on Eric’s beaded chain with his dog tags. So not everything’s disappeared; but why don’t I have skull plates anymore? Because this was where she belonged? This was her true and real Now?

“Oh.” She inhaled. A different Now meant a different version, another Emma. Had she then slipped into that Emma’s body? She remembered that deflated, flat feeling before everything snapped into focus. Yes, that would explain what was happening here. But wasn’t there something wrong with that? If this body belonged to a different Emma … Then why don’t I have her memories? Where is she?

Here. A wisp of sound drifted past her right ear, light as the decaying mist of a dying dream. Here.

“What?” She jerked her head around for a wild look. There was only the dead cockatoo, with its eternal stare, in a shell of glass. “Where? Where are you? Who’s there?”

“Elizabeth,” Kramer began.

The breathy voice, so small, came again: Here. Something stirred, like the creepy-crawly scuttle of spider’s legs, in the middle of her mind. And who am I? No, the question is who—