Quiet, be quiet. Clamping her lips together to corral the scream, Emma holds herself very still as the rounded knob of its head lifts, the thing seeming to taste the air, sniff out a scent. Don’t see me, don’t taste me, don’t smell me.
But then … it turns.
No. Please, House. A dark swoon of terror sweeps her mind. Her skull plates are so hot her brain ought to be boiling. Please, show me a door, House. Sweep me away in a blink. Do something, do anything, but please show me a way out of here!
House, if it is listening, does nothing. And this thing is … not quite formed, not yet. It has no face. Where there should be eyes, a nose, a forehead, a mouth, there is only an ebony swirl. A nothing. A blank. But Emma knows: somehow, it sees her.
There you are. The voice ghosts over her brain in a whisper that is the sound of brittle ice; of glass frit spilling over a metal marver. I’ve wanted to play with you for such a long time, Emma. Come. Staaay. Stay and plaaay, Blood of My Blood—
She drags her voice up from where it’s fallen. “N-no. No, you’re not real. This isn’t happening. I saw this in a blink. It was just a—”
All at once, the thing’s eyes pop into being, but not on its face. Two eyes stare from its hands, one on each palm, and they are not black but blue as sapphires. They are her eyes. Even at this distance, she can see the golden flaw floating in the iris of the eye on the right.
Get up, Emma. Somehow, she has pulled herself into a crouch. Her arms are no longer bloody; in fact, there are no wounds at all, not even a scratch. Get up, Emma, get—
Too late: in that churning, rippling blank of a face, a third cyclopean eye—as dark as black smoke—peels open.
Blood of My Blood. The thing plants a webbed foot on the sidewalk. Something is happening in that third eye, too; the black blank is eddying and bunching, pulling together, molding itself. Breath of My Breath.
That is when she remembers what she’s already been shown.
Get up, get up before it really sees you, the way it did McDermott! Her brain screams the words, but she’s frozen in place. Where could she possibly go in a nightmare, anyway? But she has to move. There is no one to save her. She must get out of here before she ends up in the eye.
Come and play a game, Emma. The thing spiders, legs and elbows bent, body crouched low on the sidewalk, its position a mirror image to her own. Boring into her, looking deep, its third eye churns as, within, the glassy oval of a face begins to waver and shimmer up, the way a drowned body floats for the surface—and she knows she only has seconds left.
Come play, the whisper-man sighs. In the third black-mirror eye, lank tendrils of dark hair swirl about a face that now shows the faintest impressions of eye sockets and the swell of lips, like molten glass being worked and molded by a jack—and now there is the ridge of a nose, the slope of a forehead. Come with me through the Dark Passages to the Many Worlds, into Nows and times …
“No!” The paralysis that has gripped her breaks. Emma surges to her feet. “No, I won’t let you!” Whirling on her heel, Emma bullets across the street and
EMMA
Them Dark Ones Is Cagey
AND NOW, EVERYTHING has changed.
Madison is gone, yet a clot of heat—the galaxy pendant from the blink or hallucination or whatever the hell that illusion of Madison was—rests between her breasts. But that day or vision or room into which House has let her wander … all that is over.
Now, instead of an aqua sundress, she wears a thick white nightgown. Barefoot, she stands on a scratchy rough carpet covering a long hallway with a dark wood floor. Above, the ceiling is slightly ridged like the planked hull of an old boat, and that’s when she realizes that what she’s looking at are whitewashed iron plates. Ceiling-mounted lights hang from rigid metal rods, and give the space a sterile, institutional look, although the air is close and stuffy with a sewage reek, as if all the toilets have overflowed and no one’s slopped up the mess of old urine and runny feces.
As if to counter the stink, the hallway is also lined with cheery, flower-filled vases, hanging baskets, and porcelain figurines. Framed pictures of flowers, done in intricate needlework, hang on the walls. Exotic stuffed birds—colorful parrots, a snowy cockatoo, a white dove—perch on artfully arranged branches beneath glass bell jars. The walls are sea-foam green, and there are many shuttered windows and dark wooden arched doors with tarnished brass knobs, set slightly back in cubbies like the openings to catacombs but bolted tight with queer rectangular iron locks. The gallery is ghostly, lit by hissing lamps that spill wavering gouts of light and shadow at regular intervals. The whole setup could be from a museum, like one of those exhibits where you stand behind Plexiglas and peer into places where people lived and died long ago.
This hallway. She tips a look to a table just a few feet off to the right where a staring stuffed toucan perches on a fake branch of wire and silk leaves beneath a clear glass dome. I’ve been here before, in a blink.
“You see her, Mrs. Graves?” The voice is male and rough, the accent like something from Monty Python. Startled, she looks up. Perhaps thirty feet away, in what had been an empty hall only seconds before, stands a trio of burly, mustached men in rumpled white trousers and shirts. One clutches a smudgy, sacklike dress of strong, heavy, flannel-lined wool. The dress has no buttons but long ties that run up the back and around each wrist. A pair of padded leather gloves bulge from the pockets of a second attendant a step behind the first.
Strong dress. They’ll tie me up in that thing. And then she thinks, What? How do I know that?
The attendant with the strong dress says, “You got her in your sights?”
“Indeed I do, Mr. Weber.” An older woman, with a grim set and clipped tone, steps toward her in a swirl of floor-length navy blue crinoline beneath a tightly cinched white over-apron that reaches to her knees. She would look like a fancy cook if not for the stiff, crisp nurse’s cap tacked to her head like a cardinal’s biretta. A large ring of bright brass keys jingles from a chatelaine at her waist, and the outlines of a small watch are visible, tucked in her blouse’s watch pocket and secured by the delicate links of a brass buttonhole chain, from which hangs a tiny, smoky agate fob. Threaded beneath a high, starched white collar, a strange pendant dangles on a red silk ribbon over the shelf of her breasts: some kind of polished black disk set in brass.
But it is her glasses that grab Emma’s attention. Rimmed in bright brass, the spectacles are not round or oval but D-shaped lenses. Each lens is hinged at the temple to allow for a second to open and shield the sides of either eye. The four lenses are not clear glass either. They are, instead, a storming magenta swirl.
Purple glasses. Emma hears herself hiss a breath. Panops?
“She got a hanger-on?” Weber, the attendant, says. “Anyone else fall out?”