White Space

Lizzie’s forehead slams against her window. The pain is immense and erupts like a bomb. Her vision sheets first red and then glare-white. Something breaks in her head and tears, and then her hair is wet and warm. The car swerves left, and her head jerks right, snapping on the stalk of her neck. Another sharp crack as her head connects with glass again, and then the window has imploded in a shower of pebbly safety glass. They are spinning, whirling like a top, the world beyond dissolving into a crazy blur, going faster than any carousel. Even with her shoulder harness, Lizzie is pinned against the car door, momentum jamming her in place, crushing her like a bug. Through a red haze, she sees the trees racing for them, the trunks growing huge in the windshield.

Screaming, Lizzie throws up her arms and

EMMA Between the Lines

1

BLINK.

I’m still in the house. Pulse thundering, Emma inched her head left, saw a procession of doors, and then looked to her right. Through a bright rectangle of yellow light, she made out the front door, the braided rug, gleaming hardwood. Blank white walls. Downstairs again. I’m in that hall I saw from the foyer.

The air in this hall was brain-freeze cold, bad enough to set her teeth and steam her breath, but her right hand was on fire. Steeling herself, she turned her hand palm up and inspected her skin in the gloom. No burns, no blisters, no marks, not even a scratch. She flexed her fingers, curled them into a fist. Everything seemed to work.

What had she just seen in that last blink? “A crash,” she said. “Lizzie was in a car with her mother, and she crashed.”

She dragged her eyes up to look straight ahead at a very strange door. It was not made of any kind of wood she recognized. It wasn’t even a proper door. This door was a long slit, just wide enough to allow a single person to pass through, and as glare-white as the snow, as the sky around the sun at high noon on a hot summer’s day. As one of Jasper’s canvases, come to think of it.

She realized something else. I’ve seen this before, too. The color was dead wrong, but the shape was right. That smoky-black mirror that Lizzie’s father had in his barn was a slit, too.

“The Dickens Mirror,” she murmured, and frowned. What was that about? Dickens was … you know … überfamous. And so? They’d read Great Expectations in tenth grade—not a bad book; Havisham was a trip, like Dickens read Brontë and decided to bring the crazy lady out of the attic—and A Tale of Two Cities (total snooze). For a while there, before she was sent away to school, she had Dickens coming out of her eyeballs because of Jasper and all those tapes. They might have listened to a biography or two. No, make that a definite. Jasper had the old Dickens bio by Forster, and maybe another, more recent. And hadn’t there been something about mirrors in that one? That was right. Dickens had scads of mirrors, all through his house, in his study, everywhere. She even remembered why: when he was a kid and his dad had gone to debtor’s prison, Dickens had been forced to work in a gloomy, dank blacking factory. As an adult and even though he walked the nights away through the warren of London’s alleys and the sewers coursing through the city’s underbelly, Dickens hated darkness. He’d filled the rooms of his many homes with mirrors to bring in and magnify the light. So had there been a very special, very peculiar mirror? She just didn’t know, and she couldn’t remember a single Dickens story that revolved around a mirror.

So it’s probably not something Dickens made up. Could he have had a mirror made, or just found it somewhere? The guy went a gajillion places, climbed mountains, nearly killed himself getting to the top of Vesuvius, walked everywhere, wandered around the worst of London’s slums with some inspector. Ten to one, there were places Dickens visited where he’d have had tons of mirrors to choose from—or had he ever gone looking for one very particular mirror? And then Lizzie’s dad ends up with it? Her memory for blinks was always a little hazy, but what she did recall was an argument between Lizzie’s parents. They stole it? That felt right. They’d tracked down the mirror and stolen other things, too. But what, and why?

She gave it up. If it was important, the information would bubble up again, eventually. Maybe. Or I’ll find it in my own time, when I’m ready—and then she wondered where that had come from. My own time, as in … my time, a place where I really belong?