White Space

“No, you’re wrong! I’m not listening to you.” Lizzie presses her hands over her ears. “La-la-la, I can’t hear you. Mom is strong and smart, you’ll see. Mom will beat him, Mom will—”

All of a sudden, across the yard, the barn door crashes open with so much force, the muted smash of wood and metal seeps through the window and into the kitchen. “Yes!” Lizzie’s heart, full to bursting with fear and worry, seems to rocket out of her chest. She is dancing on tiptoe, bouncing up and down. “Yes, Mom, yes, you got him, you …”

But then Lizzie’s voice dies on her tongue, because all she sees

EMMA Eyes, and Nothing Else

ALL EMMA SAW in the rearview mirror were eyes, and nothing else. The eyes weren’t hers, which were a deep, rich cobalt: an unearthly, glittering blue that almost didn’t look real. Her right eye, with its tiny golden flaw in the iris, was especially strange. A birthmark, the doctors said, but get a few drinks into Jasper and he’d say it was her third eye, which made about as much sense as all his wild talk of Nows and Dark Passages.

These things in the mirror … she’d never seen anything like them. Two were black as stones and smooth as glass, with no whites, no pupils. The third eye was a mercury swirl floating in midair, suspended in a milky cloud. No face, at all, stared back.

No, Emma’s mind gabbled. No, no, no, no! This was worse than a blink. This was like the barrier between her life and someone else’s was breaking down, some freaky parallel universe leaking into hers. I should do what the doctors want. I should take the pills. Dimly, she was aware that the radio was still sputtering about a manhunt: … so far authorities believe at least eight children may have met—

She watched, paralyzed, as that milky cloud in the mirror gathered itself, folded—and then the silvered glass moved.

“Ah!” Emma flinched, her hands jerked the wheel, and then the van shimmied, first right and then left. Emma fought the impulse to slam on the brakes. The snow was deep and very wet, with a thick layer of compressed ice beneath. The van wallowed, the heavier rear trying to swing past and outrun the front. Oh no no no, God, God, don’t lose it!

“Emma!” Lily screeched. “Look out, look out, look out!”

Emma’s eyes snapped to the road just in time to see a flash, dead ahead: a sudden bright pop like the death of a light bulb after a blown fuse.

“Shit!” Emma jinked right, much too sharply. Already skidding on a knife’s edge of control, the van’s wheels locked, the rear slewed, and Emma felt the van begin to spin at the same moment she realized that this was not lightning dead ahead but a light: a single bald eye, bouncing and bright and very large—and growing.

“NO!” Lily screamed.

ERIC Poof

1

SNOW BLASTED HIS helmet. The west wind screeched like a cat. Eric wrestled the Skandic Ski-Doo back on course, leaning and carving through deep snow as the sky flared with a flash of lightning. The storm’s fingers pried and tugged at the loose folds of his jacket, slipping in through minute gaps in the zipper, chilling him to the bone. He couldn’t feel his face and, worse, the shakes had him now: one part cold, three parts shock. Fear kept slithering up his throat, trying to suffocate him.

What have I done? What am I going to do now?

A crisp click in his helmet and then a voice sizzled through the tiny speaker: “Eric?”

“Yeah, Case.” His voice came out strained, a little breathless. Come on, get a grip. You’ll just freak him out more than he is already. “What’s up?”

“Do you know where we are?”

“Sure, we’re—” He stopped. They were on a road.

A road?

Whoa, wait, that wasn’t right. When had they left the trail? His eyes flicked left, then right. The sled’s sole headlight was good but not great, and it was like trying to look beyond the limits of a silver fishbowl. He made out a forested hill on the left: a black-on-white expanse that rose beyond the limits of his headlight, the snow-shrouded trees slipping away as he passed. The hill felt large, too high, a little unreal.

Mountains. There were mountains? Actual high peaks? In Wisconsin? Swallowed by dark and snow, he couldn’t see to the very tops, but he just had this feeling that it was true. To his right was a black chasm of a valley, its drop-off outlined in the intermittent wink of green reflectors along a guardrail.

What was going on? His eyes fell to the Skandic’s odometer, his brows knotting to a frown. The gauge said they’d already gone sixty miles. That far? In the storm, their speed hovered around fifteen. Do the math, and they’d been on their sleds for four hours.