White Space

It’s like House. Terrified, her aqua sundress purpling with her blood, she clamps her torn arms to her heaving chest. Her eyes skip from store to store. No people. Except for BETWEEN THE LINES, the other stores are only blank fronts with blacked-out windows. Her gaze falls to the curb, the gutter, then drags up to the trees silhouetted against a milky sky that she knows was blue and bright only minutes before. No trash, no dead leaves. No sun. Yet not everything has vanished. The Dickens Mirror lies on the pavement, facedown, its covers in a wide splay.

There is movement out of the corner of her eye, on the grimy asphalt. Glancing down at the growing pool of her blood, she sees a glimmer along the crimson surface, which quivers and gathers itself—into a long, rippling red worm.

Oh. All the small hairs on her neck and arms rise. Her scalp prickles with horror, and she can feel her titanium plates, the lacy one on her forehead and its twin at the very base of her skull, heating beneath her skin as if a switch has been thrown and a connection forged in her brain. Oh, this can’t be happening.

But it is. Her blood is alive, slithering, eeling from side to side, snaking its way over gritty asphalt. Frozen in place, she watches the red slink as it seeps across the road, never spreading, never veering, but creeping up the curb and onto the sidewalk, heading straight for the book. As soon as her blood touches the cover, dragging itself like a moist crimson tongue along the edges, curls of steam rise—and the book … quickens.

It’s like my blink, when I saw Lizzie’s dad—Frank McDermott—at the Dickens Mirror. Except it is a book, not a strange mirror, drinking her blood, greedily sucking and feeding, the pages pulsing and swelling, the covers bulging … And then she spies …

Oh God.

2

THE SPIKE OF a claw rises from the book, like a trapdoor has suddenly opened to let something deep underground find the surface. And then she sees another claw. And a third.

“No.” The word is no more than a deathless whisper. Trembling, she watches as the taloned fingers of whatever is living in that book hook over the cover’s lip. It is as if The Dickens Mirror is not paper sandwiched by cardboard but a mouth, the rim of a deep well, a pit, a cave. A second stygian hand snakes free to clamp onto the edge. The razor-sharp claws clench; and now two spindly and skeletal arms appear. They bunch and strain, the elbows straightening like a gymnast’s working parallel bars, as the thing living inside strains to be born. It boils from The Dickens Mirror: first the head and now shoulders and a leathery scaled torso, which is now green, now silver, now black. The book-thing twists its long, sinuous body right and left, corkscrewing its way from the page. Then, it pauses as if gathering its strength—or maybe only deciding what it ought to do next.

Quiet, be quiet. Clamping her lips together to corral the scream, Emma holds herself very still as the rounded knob of its head lifts, the thing seeming to taste the air, sniff out a scent. Don’t see me, don’t taste me, don’t smell me.

But then … it turns.

No. Please, House. A dark swoon of terror sweeps her mind. Her skull plates are so hot her brain ought to be boiling. Please, show me a door, House. Sweep me away in a blink. Do something, do anything, but please show me a way out of here!

House, if it is listening, does nothing. And this thing is … not quite formed, not yet. It has no face. Where there should be eyes, a nose, a forehead, a mouth, there is only an ebony swirl. A nothing. A blank. But Emma knows: somehow, it sees her.

There you are. The voice ghosts over her brain in a whisper that is the sound of brittle ice; of glass frit spilling over a metal marver. I’ve wanted to play with you for such a long time, Emma. Come. Staaay. Stay and plaaay, Blood of My Blood—

She drags her voice up from where it’s fallen. “N-no. No, you’re not real. This isn’t happening. I saw this in a blink. It was just a—”

All at once, the thing’s eyes pop into being, but not on its face. Two eyes stare from its hands, one on each palm, and they are not black but blue as sapphires. They are her eyes. Even at this distance, she can see the golden flaw floating in the iris of the eye on the right.

Get up, Emma. Somehow, she has pulled herself into a crouch. Her arms are no longer bloody; in fact, there are no wounds at all, not even a scratch. Get up, Emma, get—