McDermott—the McDermott captured in the picture—comes to life. As if suddenly aware that there is a world outside that photograph, Frank looks straight out to throw Emma a wink.
“Ah!” With a wild, incoherent cry, she stumbles back, her half-finished Frappuccino flying in a fan of whipped cream and mocha-flavored coffee from her left hand. The Dickens Mirror, a book that shouldn’t exist from a series that was never written, flutters to the pavement like a wounded bird. Around her neck, the galaxy pendant suddenly smolders.
“Hey,” Lily says.
“Emma?” Eric—a boy she has yet to meet, who shouldn’t be here—reaches for her. “What’s wrong? Are you all right?”
“No! No, you’re not real! This isn’t right!” Emma flinches away. She turns, her treacherous feet trying to tangle, trip her up, spill her to the sidewalk. “Get away from me, get away, don—” Backpedaling, she blunders from the curb into oncoming traffic on East Washington. A horn blasts as a car churns past, its hot breath swirling around her bare legs, snatching at her sundress. She can hear the sputter of the car’s radio through an open window: Investigators continue the grisly task of removing the remains of at least eight children believed to be the latest victims of—
“No, stop, I’m not listening, I don’t hear you, I don’t hear you!” She takes a lurching stutter-step and tumbles to rough asphalt. As she hits, the fingers of her right hand reflexively close around something hard and jagged.
She looks—and every molecule in her body stills. Everything stops.
The dagger of glass is absolutely flawless and wickedly sharp—and she knows this shape. It is nearly identical to the shard she will fish from that discards bucket and turn over and over on that afternoon when she feels Plath’s bell jar descending to engulf her mind in a dense, deathless fog. When she will think, I didn’t see anything, there was nothing down in Jasper’s cellar; it was just a crawl space, there was nothing inside, I didn’t find …
But there is a difference. This dagger isn’t clear but smoky and black, polished to a mirror’s high gloss. Her reflection within this black dagger is so crisp she can make out the terror in her eyes, the curve of her jaw, every glister and sparkle of that galaxy pendant.
It’s a piece of the Mirror. She is jittering so badly her breaths come in herky-jerky gasps, and she thinks she might be one second away from passing out. It’s from the Dickens—
A sudden bite of pain sinks into her left wrist, bad enough to make her cry out. What was that? God, that hurt. Her eyes shift from the black dagger to her wrist—and then a scream blasts from her throat.
A thick, stingingly bright bracelet of blood has drawn—no, no, is drawing itself, inch by inch, across the skin of her left wrist.
“N-no,” she says. It’s like watching someone unzip her. She still clutches the black dagger in her right hand, and a single glance is enough to show her that the glass is pristine, not a splash of blood on it at all. And anyway, I didn’t, I didn’t, I don’t do it! I only thought about cutting my …
“Aahhh!” Another slash of pain, on her right wrist this time, the lips of yet another slice gaping open. She shrieks as the moist tissues pull apart to reveal a silvery glint of tendon and deeply red meat. Blood instantly surges into the belly of the wound, pumping and slopping from slit arteries, splish-splish-splish-splish, surging with her heart. A nail of panic spikes her throat. The warmth drains from her face, her lips, and her guts are ice. Her vision’s going muzzy, and in the black dagger, her reflection’s turned runny, the features shifting and melting as a new and different face knits together: same eyes, same golden flaw in the right iris. Same jaw and chin. Only the hair, wavy and golden blonde, is different. Still, she knows who this is.
I’m Lizzie? A violent shudder makes the reflection jitter. We’re the same person?
“NO!” A shriek scrambles past her teeth. “No, I’m me, I’m Emma!” Still screaming, she hurls the black dagger away. It cuts the air, flashing end over end like a scimitar. Both her arms are spewing blood now, and as Emma scuttles back on her hands like a crab, vivid red smears paint the road, marking her path. There is blood everywhere, too much, a whole lake of it. Anyone who’s bled this much ought to have fainted—hell, ought to be dead. For that matter, she’s landed in the middle of a busy street. She should be squashed under a bus by now, or flattened by a car.
But there are, suddenly, no cars, no people. No taunts from a radio. When she glances back at the bookstore, she sees that Eric and Lily are gone, too.
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.