White Space

Wheeling around with a roar, the thing that had been a priest sprinted away from Casey in a mad, ravening dash. At first, he thought it was heading for the snowcat, but then he saw it suddenly veer in a sharp dogleg left and away, toward a distant wall of dark trees. It was, Casey saw now, trying to get away.

And that was when the snowcat began to move.

EMMA All I Am

1

“WHERE DID YOU get this?” Emma’s tongue was thick and awkward. From its place on Lizzie’s memory quilt, the glass galaxy of lush cobalt and fumed silver gleamed. Beneath a transparent shell, tiny people and creatures floated in a writhing gorgon’s knot. “I haven’t made this. I don’t know how. I’m not good enough yet. It’s just an idea.”

“Our mom found it.” Lizzie stroked the pendant with a reverent finger. “Of all the glass, this is the one with the most magic. It’s the Sign of Sure.”

“Sign …” Mrs. Graves’s pinched, disapproving face suddenly swam up from memory, and she could hear Weber’s broad, almost comical cockney: You sure she didn’t lay her hands on one of them marbles? “My God, not Sign of Sure. You mean cynosure. A guide, a …” Oh, come on, what was the right word? “A focus.”

“Well, yeah.” Although the little girl might as well have said, Duh. “I just said that. It’s how you don’t get lost and end up in the wrong Now.”

She didn’t pretend to understand any of this. But any kid who’d suffered through PSAT prep knew what a cynosure was. A focus. A lens. Couldn’t it also be a beacon?

So, go with this: Lizzie used this to focus her mind? Or bring something distant into focus, like the lens of a telescope? What had the kid said? I use it all the time to find you guys. Emma thought back to the bright, unwavering, seemingly solid path of light that had sprung from the pendant as she vaulted off the roof toward that apparition of the Mirror. Some kind of mental flashlight? If that was true, the cynosure was a way of seeing through to, well, somewhere and, maybe, a somewhen.

But a flashlight worked both ways. Whatever lived in the dark might not see you exactly, but they sure had a pretty good idea of where you were.

So did it work that way when you were trying to find the words to your story? Would the words … well, find you if only they had some help figuring out where you were?

This is crazy. “What do I think about?” Emma skimmed a hesitant thumb over the pendant in its brightly colored web of embroidery. “What am I supposed to see?”

“You. Read you like you want to find out more about your book, as if you want the words that are your story to make sense in your head, to bring them all closer from way down where you can’t see them.” Lizzie nibbled on her lower lip, then brightened. “Like an ocean, you know? White Space is like water that’s way deep. Just because you can’t see what’s way down there doesn’t mean things aren’t swimming around, right? So, pretend you’re fishing or the pen you’re using has no ink, and you want to hook the words.”

“I don’t have any bait,” Emma said flatly. “Without ink or pencil or crayon or paint, you can’t write anything.”

“Emma, you’re the bait. That’s what the Sign of Sure’s about. You could write this if the pen pulls instead of puts,” Lizzie said. “Like when Dad reached into the Dickens Mirror, he was the bait. Pretend you’re that kind of pen.”

Oh well, that made things so much clearer. She wouldn’t have been surprised if Keanu Reeves popped by for a visit: There is no spoon.

And then she thought, Wait, wasn’t that almost exactly what I thought when Jasper talked about White Space and Dark Passages? An eerie ripple of déjà vu wavered through her—this feeling that everything in her life was the echo and twin to something else: Emma taking a right turn here, a left turn there, going up here, down there—and all simultaneously.

How could Jasper have known anything about this? The guy piloted chartered fishing boats and pickled himself until he stroked out. But this clearly couldn’t all be coincidence. That weird obsession Jasper had for Dickens’s novels and stories—had Jasper been looking for clues, trying to find the Mirror? To do what?

What she knew was this: Jasper had talked about White Space and Dark Passages. Jasper painted nightmare creatures and then—she wet her lips, tasting salt on her tongue—then he covered them over with thick white paint. She stared down at the parchment. With his version of White Space.