White Space

THE CLASS HAD started with science fiction, which was okay, although Kramer was in love with the sound of his I’m-from-Cambridge-and-you’re-not voice: To paraphrase the incomparable though deeply disturbed Philip K. Dick, whoever manipulates words manipulates the existential texture of reality, as we blahdiddy-blahdiddy-blah-blah. But when Kramer began bloviating about quantum foam and Schrödinger’s cat and dark matter and more blahdiddy-blahdiddy-blah-blah, and everyone else was oh, awesome, that’s like, dude, so Star Trek … she just couldn’t help herself. Dark matter could only be inferred. In the case of Schrödinger’s kitty, collapsing probabilities through observation had nothing to do with massless particles popping out of quantum foam. And quantum effects could be observed on the macroscopic level at near absolute zero within the energy sink of a Bose-Einstein condensate, which therefore proved Hardy’s Paradox regarding the interaction of quantum and anti-quantum particles that might actually coexist in related timelines and alternative universes …

A single death glare from Kramer, though, and she clammed up. Fine. Be ignorant. Mangle science. See what she cared.

After that, the class drifted to horror, specifically Wisconsin’s Most Famous Crazy Dead Writer, Frank McDermott, who was originally from somewhere in Wyoming and lived in England a good long time, but who was keeping score? Besides writing a bazillion mega-bestsellers, McDermott’s claim to fame was getting blown to smithereens by his equally wacko nutjob of a wife. (Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer, Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin murders, McDermott—Wisconsin was full of ’em. Had to be something in the water.) With his new! important! biography! Kramer hoped to solve the BIG MYSTERY: where was Waldo … er, Frank? Because, after the explosion, not one scrap of McDermott remained, not even his teeth. Which was a little strange.

Originally a quantum physics star—lotsa theories about multiverses and timelines and blah, blah—Meredith McDermott was fruitier than a nutcake. Years in institutions, suicide attempts—the whole nine yards. Maybe she turned to glass art the way a patient might take up painting, but what she made was unreal; museums and collectors fell all over themselves snapping up pieces.

Turned out the lady was also a complete pyro. She would’ve had plenty on hand in her studio, too: propane tanks, cylinders of oxygen, acetylene, MAPP. To that she’d thrown in gasoline and kerosene and, as a kind of exclamation point, a bag of fertilizer.

The fireball was immense. The explosion chunked a blast crater seventy feet long and fifteen feet deep. Emma bet Old Frank was tip-typing away in writer heaven before he knew he was dead.

Even so, there ought to have been plenty of Frank McDermott shrapnel: bits and pieces zipping hither and thither at high speeds to get hung up on branches or blast divots into tree trunks. Science was science. No matter what the movies said, for a person to completely vaporize, you needed either an atomic bomb or about a ton of dynamite. So why couldn’t the police find a single, solitary bone? A watch? Something? All that was recovered at the scene were the barn’s iron bolts, sliders, and hinges—and a coagulated lake of slumped, amorphous glass.

And only the barn burned. The house hadn’t. Neither had Meredith’s workshop or the woods or even the fields, despite the fact that the local fire department was twenty miles away and no response team arrived until hours after the explosion. Just plain weird.

And where was Meredith? What happened to the McDermotts’ little kid? All the police ever found was the family car, miles away after it lost an argument with a very big oak. No bodies, though. Just a dead car.

And a whole lotta blood.

6

THE UNFINISHED MANUSCRIPTS were also weird.

Three—and there might be more—were quietly decomposing under house arrest in some vault in England. No one was allowed to see or handle them, period. All scholars like Kramer got were a few choice bits copied from the originals: not enough to make much sense of the stories but just enough to whet their appetites.