White Space

“No,” she says. “I won’t.” Parents don’t have all the answers, and Mom has already failed, hasn’t she? Heart thumping, she hangs over the front seat to stare out the car’s rear window. Behind them, the fog is a greedy mouth swallowing up this reality, gaining fast. Mom just said that all the energy from the Peculiars is there, all tangled up with her dad and the whisper-man—and Mom should know: energy’s never gone. So her dad isn’t either. The whisper-man only thinks he’s got her dad.

But I’ll fix you. Just you wait and see. She punches up the cell. “Daddy? Daddy, are you there?”

“No, Lizzie.” Sparing her a sidelong glance, her mother makes a grab, but Lizzie cringes away and out of reach. “Please, hang up.”

Lizzie doesn’t answer. The glass on Lizzie’s memory quilt ticks and rattles, and she can feel it starting to heat. Gripping a tongue of fabric in her right hand, she uses her index finger to trace a special Lizzie-symbol: two sweeping arcs, piled like twin smiles, stabbed through with a zagdorn, capped with a bristle of four horns.

“Lizzie.” Mom risks a peek, but without her panops, Lizzie knows that her mother can’t see these symbols and wouldn’t know what they were even if she could. “What are you doing?”

“Dad?” Lizzie grips the cell in her left hand, tight. The barndil hovers in midair. Make a luxl next; yes, that’s the right sign. “Dad, are you there? You have to talk to me. I want you to talk to me.”

Are you sure? The reply is immediate, as if the voice has been standing at the door, waiting for Lizzie to throw open the lock and invite it in. This is what you want?

“Yes,” Lizzie says. “I’m sure. I want this. Let me talk to my dad.”

“No, Lizzie, don’t!” her mother says, sharply. “Don’t want it. Don’t invite it! Listen to me!”

No. The voice in Lizzie’s head is a sigh, a susurration, and the words are black slush, freezing her veins. Listen to me, Little Lizzie. Are you willing? Are you sure?

“You bet.” Her finger’s moving faster now, the glass of the memory quilt crackling as the symbols fly so fast and furiously she can barely keep track of all the weird shapes, how they’re knitting and weaving together: swhiri, molumdode, czitl. Teoxit. “Yes. I’m here. Talk to me, Daddy,” she says at the same time she’s drawing and thinking hard, I want this; I’ve got the Sign of Sure and I want this. Want me, use me, take me instead of …

“L-L-Lizzie?” Dad says, only hesitantly, as if he’s never had a voice and just decided to give this a try for the very first time. “H-honey?”

“Dad!” Lizzie’s heart leaps because it’s her dad, it is. Caulat! her finger screams. Stim syob duxe! “Daddy, it’s me!”

“No, Lizzie,” her mother says, “it’s not—”

“L-Liz … Lizzie?” Dad’s voice wobbles. “Lizzie, is that y-you?”

“Yes.” Her lips are quivering, and her eyes burn, but she can’t cry, she mustn’t cry now; she has to focus and be sure; she has to be quick. Frit. Yaanag. “Daddy, listen, I want to tell you a story. Are you listening?”

“Yes, I’m … I’m listening, honey. I’m … yes, I’m here,” her daddy says, but she can tell he’s not really, not all the way. He’s still down deep. Well, she’s going to fix that. Oh boy, just you wait and see.

“Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Lizzie,” she says. Ptir. Zisotin. “And she loved her daddy very, very much. Her daddy wrote books—scary, scary books—but she didn’t care, because no matter what he did, he was still her daddy.” Smin trevismin. “Lizzie thought he was very, very brave to reach into the Dark Passages where the monsters live—and she wanted to be just like him. So she tried really hard to make new Nows.”

“What?” her mother says. “What?”

Riwr. “She drew adventures and she gave her dolls names and she grabbed them from her daddy’s book-worlds, and they all went away to other Nows together.” Pripper.

“My God,” her mother whispers, “you used the dolls? You switched? Lizzie, how did you do that?”

“But th-then …” Lizzie falters, the zared only halfway to being. “Then …”

“Go on,” her dad says, like a little kid. He’s much closer now. “What happens next?”

She swallows. Come on, come on, don’t stop now. She watches her hand move—down, up, cross, swizzuloo—and complete the zared. “Then, one summer, it was really hot and dry and the plants were thirsty and she wanted to help. So she did something she’d never tried before. She made a storm, a big storm, a monster storm from a different Now, and she brought it back.”

“Oh God,” her mother says.