White Space

It’s how I felt reading The Bell Jar. But that must not be a real book. She stares at the stuffed birds trapped under domes of clear glass. Those jars … I’ve slipped in real details from this place, the way you do in dreams. Everything she thinks she knows: Jasper and Madeline Island; bookstores and Holten Prep and icy, sweet Frappuccinos. I’ve hallucinated the future of a girl who doesn’t exist?

At that instant, the blister of a bright pain erupts between her eyes as a headache thumps to life, and she raises a tentative hand. The deep gash she got when her van jumped the guardrail and tumbled into that lost valley is gone. But of course it would be, because that never happened. Yet there is something there. Slowly, she traces the hard, unyielding, perfect circlet of lacy metal, and suddenly, she thinks, Wait. She can feel her heart ramp up a notch as she reaches around to sweep through her hair. Matching plate, at the base of my skull. This one is harder to feel because of all the muscle, but she knows exactly what that edge is—and there is hash-marked scalp, the network of scars thin and minute. Wait a second. That’s not right.

“Oh dear.” Graves glides a little closer. “Another of your headaches? Come, let me give you your medicine, dear. A nice tonic, a little cordial for what ails you. How does that sound?”

The titanium skull plates and screws don’t belong. They haven’t been invented yet, but … “Jesus,” she breathes. She has no accent, she thinks with different words, and these skull plates shouldn’t exist. Which means that I’m still me. What I remember is real. But she is awake now and aware in a way she’s never been in a blink before. Maybe this is like Madison. House is showing me something for a reason. She doesn’t know why she thinks that, but she senses she’s on the right track—but to where and why? The Lizzie-blinks and everything that’s happened in House feel like building blocks, one brick being added at a time.

“Mrs. Graves?” A new voice: another man, his tone peremptory, authoritative. “Do you have her? Did anyone else get out?”

Her thoughts scatter like a clutch of startled chicks. A knife of pure panic slices her chest. Stunned, she gapes as two men angle through the orderlies. Both sport old-fashioned suits with high collars and silk waistcoats, although one is bearded, darkly handsome, and decked out in an expensive-looking tailcoat and black gloves. With his gold fob watch and walking stick, he looks like he’s been pulled away from a fancy party or the opera.

“No, sir,” Graves says, without looking away. “Our Emma has managed it all on her own, it seems.”

“Oh dear.” The bearded man tut-tuts. “Emma, why do you insist on making such a scene? They’re trying to help you.”

“Best let me.” The doctor’s head swivels as he searches her out. He is older, and his eyes are deep purple sockets, his glasses identical to Mrs. Graves’s. “Now, Miss Lindsay, are we having a bad night? What do you say we go to my office for a chat and have ourselves a nice hot cup of tea?”

No. A thin scream is slithering up her throat, worming onto her tongue. No, no, no, it can’t be.

The bearded man in evening clothes is Jasper.

And the doctor is Kramer.

RIMA Where the Dead Live

“WHERE ARE WE?” Rima asked. Casey’s snowmobile was still running, the engine chugging between her legs. Yet everything else had changed. The fog was everywhere. The whiteout was so complete, Rima felt as if they were marooned in a small pocket of air, trapped beneath a bell jar at the bottom of a viscous white sea. The night was gone. The sky—well, up—was the milky hue of curdled egg white and bright as a cloudy day with the sun at its height. The fog was brutally cold and smelled odd. Metal, she thought. Rust? “Are we still in the valley? How did we even get here?”

“I don’t know.” Casey’s voice sounded odd: curiously flattened, paper-thin. His face was mottled from windburn, his many scratches and scrapes rust-red, his right cheek and jaw as purple as a ripe plum. “It sure feels different, too. Like the fog grabbed us, and we got beamed to some other planet or something. You know?”

Or maybe we’re only a different place inside the fog. She wasn’t even sure why she would think that, or what it meant. “What do we do?”