His touch is volcanic, atomic, so hot she can feel the death cooking into her flesh. “Oh, yeah,” she says, faintly. “I’m good.”
As soon as he lets her go, she bolts into the bathroom, making it to a stall just in time. Later, as the taste of vomit sours her mouth, she hangs over the bowl—lucky for her, no one died on that seat—and thinks about Bode. The guy’s touch was mercifully brief and fragmentary, but she’d seen enough. Ten to one, he’s that truck with the death-crows. The real question is who, exactly, is dead?
Because when Bode touched her, he changed. Just for an instant, but enough so she saw Bode’s head—
5
“OH, HECK,” SAID Tony.
Rima blinked back to the here and now. “What?”
“The truck’s gone,” Tony returned grimly.
“Maybe there’s a turnoff.” Something sparkled then, and she squinted through the snow frothing the windshield. Way off to the right, there was a sharp glint—glass?—and something very black and formless floating over the snow. “Is that …?” She almost said smoke, but the word died halfway to her teeth.
Not smoke.
Crows.
And, in a crush of splintered trees, an overturned van.
PART TWO THE
VALLEY
LIZZIE
Whisper-Man Black
ONLY MOM POPS out of the barn, and she is screaming: “Get in the car, get in the car, just get in the car!” Mom hauls Lizzie down the porch steps, practically throws Lizzie into the front seat. She thrusts the memory quilt into Lizzie’s lap: “Hang on to that; don’t let go, no matter what!” Mom’s hand shakes so bad the ignition key stutters against metal, and she’s sobbing: “Oh please, oh please, oh please, come on, come on, come on goddamnit, come on!” She lets out a little cry as the key socks into place and the engine roars.
Then they are moving, moving, moving, going very fast, racing after their headlights, her mother hammering the accelerator. The force slams Lizzie back against the seat; her teeth come together—ka-chunk—and her tongue screams as the taste of dirty pennies floods her mouth. But Lizzie is too scared to cry; she is absolutely silent, quiet as a mouse, as the car fishtails, kicking up gravel rooster tails.
We’re never coming back. She clutches her memory quilt in both hands. The glass might be magic, and those stitches as strong as her mother, but Lizzie’s life is unraveling. I’ll never see my house again. I’ll never find Marmalade.
She cranes over her shoulder. Peering through the rear window is like seeing a movie through the wrong end of a telescope. She watches as their farmhouse, Wisconsin-sturdy and built to last until the end of time, recedes. To the left and across the drive, the big prairie barn hulks in the gloom, and that is when her sharp eyes pick out the pulse of a weird orange glow that is very, very wrong.
“Mom!” she says, urgently. “Mom, the barn’s on fire!”
“I know,” her mother says. “I set it.”
“Mom!” A blast of horror rips through her body. “We’ve got to go back! We’ve got to get Marmalade! We’ve got to find Daddy; we have to save him!”
“We can’t save your dad.”
“But Mom!” Lizzie’s frantic. Why doesn’t her mother understand? “Daddy needs us!”
“No, he needs it, Lizzie. He hangs on, takes it inside, and the horrible, awful things it asks in return …” Her mother’s voice falters, then firms. “Lizzie, why do you think we came here after London? Why do you think we live so far away from other people?”
So no one gets hurt. She thinks of the terrible things in her father’s books: squiggle-monsters and spider-things growing in people’s chests and crawly things in tunnels and parents eating their kids. What Mom says is true.
Because when her father turned from that mirror … his face was gone. No eyes, no nose, no mouth. Nothing but a shuddering, churning blank.
Then this thing with no face raised her dad’s hands like a policeman stopping traffic. The cuts were gone. Her father’s palms were smooth—until the skin split and lids peeled back and there were eyes, one on each palm. They were not her father’s eyes, because they were not hers. Like father, like daughter, their eyes are identicaclass="underline" a deep indigo with a tiny fleck of gold on one iris. Lizzie’s birthmark floats in her right eye and is the mirror image to her father’s on his left.
But the eyes that stared from her father’s palms were whisper-man black. The whisper-man was in there, and her dad was the glove, just as Mom said he’d been, years back and before Lizzie, in the other London.
But what if I can make the whisper-man want me instead? This is a new thought, and so stunning Lizzie’s chest empties of air. If I can get it to leave Dad and slip into me—
There is a sudden, massive flash. The light is so bright the inside of the car fires the color of hot gold. A split second later, Lizzie hears the rolling thunder of an explosion.
“Oh God,” Mom says. In that molten glow, Lizzie sees the shine of her mother’s tears. “Oh God, forgive me.”
“No, Momma, no!” She could’ve fixed it; she could’ve made it better. “Why did you do that?”
“You don’t understand.” He mother drags a hand across her eyes like a weary child. “It was the only thing left.”
“No, it wasn’t! I could’ve fixed things, I could’ve helped—”
From the backseat comes a flat, mechanical beep. Her mother gasps. The sound is so jarring and out of place it seems to come from the deep, dark valley of a dream.
“It’s your phone,” Lizzie says.
“I know that,” Mom says.
Beep.
“Should I answer?” Lizzie asks.
Beep.
“No,” her mother says.
“But what if …” Like a birthday wish, Lizzie’s afraid to say it out loud. “Mom, what if it’s Dad?”
Beep.
“It might be his voice, but it wouldn’t be him, Lizzie. Your father’s gone.”
Beep.
“But what if—”
“I said no!” her mother snapped. “Sit down and—”
No, Lizzie thinks, furiously. Against her palms, she feels the sudden tingling surge as the Sign of Sure, sewn on her memory quilt, feeds on her thoughts: all that energy stored up in her brain that wants to whisk her through the Dark Passages, that must find a way out. No, Momma’s wrong; I can fix this. I’ll make it want me. I’ll build a forever-Now and swoosh the whisper-man there with the Sign of Sure.
She unbuckles her belt.
“What are you doing?” her mother raps. “Sit down, young lady.”
“I don’t have to listen to you,” Lizzie spits, and then she is scrambling up, twisting around in her seat, reaching for her mother’s purse. Through the rear window, she can see the forest’s black walls squeezing the road, as if her past is a book whose covers are slowly, inexorably closing. Then, in the sky, she sees something else, and for a second, her heart forgets how to beat.
“M-Mom?” The word comes out in a rusty whisper. Her throat clenches as tight as a fist. “M-Mom, the s-sky … i-it’s …”
“Oh no.” Her mother’s eyes flick to the rearview, and then she cups a hand to her mouth as if she might be sick. “Oh my God, what have I done?”