“Well, no, not really. Like Inspector Battle said, you saved yourself, Miss. I just brung you to hospital is all.” Doyle had a touch of a brogue, different from Kramer or Battle, his accent like something that might’ve come from Sean Connery or Ewan McGregor. Face shiny with sweat, he slid an uncertain glance to Battle, then back. The tiny muscles around his eyes twitched. “Inspector Battle thought it might be good to have a familiar face, yes? You remember me, Miss? Conan Doyle?”
“No.” She was starting to hyperventilate; her skull was going hollow again. Slow down; can’t faint. Gulping a breath, she held it a moment, listening to the rush of blood in her ears, the banging of her heart. “I’m s-sorry,” she said, trembling all over, hearing the minute tick-tick-tick of her teeth. “But I d-d-don’t know what you’re …” She stopped.
“Elizabeth?” Kramer said.
She only half heard. Doyle. He said his name is … “You”—she swallowed—“is … is your first … is your name Arthur?”
“How do you know that?” Battle rapped, at the same moment that Doyle, startled, went a deep shade of plum and spluttered, “Sir … Inspector, I did nothing familiar; I would never presume to—”
“Oh Jesus. Where am I?” Although she thought she now knew; the city, anyway. Her weird and accented voice came out ancient and rough, like flat tires crunching gravel. “What year is this?”
She watched as Kramer and Battle exchanged glances, and then Kramer seemed to shrug an assent, because it was Battle who said, “You are in London. It is December 1880. You have been remanded to the care of Dr. Kramer and the staff of the Bethlem Royal Hospital at His Majesty’s pleasure until such time as you are sound of mind.”
London. And Bethlem Royal Hospital … they called it Bedlam. She remembered because Jasper had told her so; the article had been on a CD, a compilation of works taken from one of Dickens’s magazines. All the Year Round? Or maybe it had been Household Words. Unless this Now had no Dickens, or if it did, maybe he wasn’t a writer at all. Battle said 1880. Was Dickens still alive then? She didn’t think so. God, what if he was dead? Would there even be a Dickens Mir—
Wait just a minute. Her runaway thoughts suddenly bucked as if they’d been tethered to a galloping horse the rider had just wrestled to a halt. His Majesty. Had Battle just said there was a … a king?
She almost blurted, Where’s Victoria? but said instead, “Why am I in the hospital?” She looked to Kramer again. “I’m not sick. I’m fine. You said I got away, that I’m a witness? So why am I in an asylum? I’m not crazy. What the hell are you people talking—”
Then, everything—the words poised on her tongue, her thoughts that would not stay still—turned to dust. That was the moment she finally realized what was wrong with Kramer’s face.
Half of it wasn’t his.
3
IF SHE’D BEEN looking more carefully—if she hadn’t just popped out of the Dark Passages, lost her friends, nearly died—she might have thought he’d gotten too much Botox or plastic surgery, like Cher, who looked more like a wax mannequin or an alien than anyone real.
Kramer’s forehead was absolutely smooth. No worry lines. It didn’t wrinkle at all, and his nose didn’t move either. His left eyebrow was a thick black gash with no arch, and while Kramer’s wiry gray tangle of mustache looked normal on the right, the left half was perfectly smooth and much darker.
Not paralyzed. Not a stroke.
He’s wearing a kind of mask, like the Phantom, only painted to look like skin and hair.
Her gaze shot to Graves. Instead of panops, a pair of steel-framed spectacles perched on her knife’s-edge of a nose. The nurse’s face seemed flesh and blood, but her left eye was fish-belly white, with no tracery of thin red capillaries. A muddy gray iris floated in its center like a dirty mote.
It’s artificial. It’s glass. Oh my God. Now that she knew what she was looking for, Emma saw that one attendant held his right arm at a stiff, forty-five-degree angle. The fingers didn’t move, but they weren’t paralyzed. The arm and hand were prostheses. Another man wore an odd leather headpiece to which a pair of tin ears, gray as an elephant’s, had been nailed. A nurse was minus a hand, the sleeve of her blouse neatly sewn shut at the wrist. Still another woman’s nose had been eaten clean away until there was nothing but two black pits set in a shriveled, weathered gargoyle face marred by strange, fleshy knobs that sprouted from her skin like mushrooms.
What happened here? How could these people be so different from what House had shown her? Then she remembered what the shadow-man had said, right before he faded: that she mustn’t hang on too long or let the creeping black that was the whisper-man reach her. He called it an infection. That must be what he meant: something of the whisper-man, a creature of the Dark Passages, remains bound to the blood. She had been bleeding, her skin torn and slashed by the birds. Worse, the whisper-man had already used her before, many times over, whisking her away in blinks to other timelines, different Nows. So had this final exposure to the whisper-man’s energy, his blood, been enough to tip the balance?
Or could this be something different? McDermott was always worried about the characters he didn’t finish infecting other book-worlds and Nows. She’d assumed it meant breaking a Now in the same way that the snow had disintegrated around Eric and Casey and the others, but these people … Her eyes darted to Graves’s artificial one, that nurse’s prosthetic hand. Kramer’s mask. Was this what McDermott meant?
Am I to blame for this?
She had to get out of here. There must be something like the Dickens Mirror here; there had to be. Maybe that’s why House showed me this before. The bell jar’s the key. She threw a glance at the dead-eyed, stuffed cockatoo under glass. Got to get back to the domed chapel, get out onto the roof, and then … Would a slit-mirror appear as it had before? Maybe not. This reality, this Now, was very different from what she’d been shown. Still, she had the cynosure; felt the weight of it between her breasts, on Eric’s beaded chain with his dog tags. So not everything’s disappeared; but why don’t I have skull plates anymore? Because this was where she belonged? This was her true and real Now?
“Oh.” She inhaled. A different Now meant a different version, another Emma. Had she then slipped into that Emma’s body? She remembered that deflated, flat feeling before everything snapped into focus. Yes, that would explain what was happening here. But wasn’t there something wrong with that? If this body belonged to a different Emma … Then why don’t I have her memories? Where is she?
Here. A wisp of sound drifted past her right ear, light as the decaying mist of a dying dream. Here.
“What?” She jerked her head around for a wild look. There was only the dead cockatoo, with its eternal stare, in a shell of glass. “Where? Where are you? Who’s there?”