“Ahh!” she groans as her bare foot sinks into snow, then flinches away at a sharp bite of glass in her heel. Go, go, muscle through this. Come on! Gritting her teeth, she pulls her left leg after and clambers out of the bell jar and into the storm.
2
INSTANTLY, SHE SINKS to her ankles in snow. She stands on the narrow ledge that surrounds the dome. Through a wavering curtain of whirling wet flakes, she spots the curved rails of an iron ladder bolted into the stone. Must be the way down. Below, the asylum’s roof is a wide, flat, white expanse edged with a decorative marble cornice.
So now what? Where is she supposed to go? For a stunned moment, she can only huddle against the icy dome. Snow blasts over her skin. The wind cuts, ripping the breath from her mouth, and she can feel her determination, the certainty that this was the right and only way, beginning to bleed away.
“So now what, House?” She watches the wind fling her words into the storm. “What was the point? Why are you showing me this?”
Only the wind answers, in a howl. A dullness settles in her chest. Either she stands here until Kramer or one of his men finds a ladder and comes through that broken window, or …
I am insane. Floundering, her feet beginning to numb, she gropes her way to the iron ladder and carefully lowers herself a rung at a time. At the very bottom, she pauses, looking up at the massive bell jar of the dome hunched against a moonless night with no stars. Icy pellets of snow needle her cheeks and sting her eyes, which are starting to tear. She is here to find something; she has to believe that, because the alternative is just too awful.
So what is it, House? What do you want me to see, to do now? Dropping into snow, sinking up to mid-calf, she grimly slogs toward the marble cornice at the front of the building. Walking against the wind is like shoving her way through pins. The dome rises off her right shoulder. Far below and across a long, very black expanse that must be the asylum’s front grounds, she can just make out the faint glow from gas lamps mounted on high iron posts to either side of a wide gate, and at ground level, the flicker of a lamp inside some kind of structure that reminds her a little bit of those ranger kiosks at park entrances. Raising a hand to shield her eyes, she squints against a pillow of wind-driven snow. Gatehouse? Beyond are other lamps, spaced at long intervals on tall posts along an empty street fronted by dark shops. Above those, lozenges of fuzzy light spill from apartment windows where anyone sane is riding out the storm. To the far right, through a distant tangle of bare tree limbs, she spots a glister of many colors, faint and fractured. Stained glass, she thinks. That’s a church. But where in England is she, exactly?
At that, the storm seems to pause a moment, or maybe it’s only the wind deciding to pull in a breath, because the snow shifts. Now, to her left and in the distance, she spots the dark spear of a tower thrusting above the far trees—and its clock face, bright as a moon.
All right, that answers that question. Other than Dickens and that crazy stunt where Queen Elizabeth parachuted into the Olympics with Daniel Craig, she might not know much about England, but she recognizes that clock tower. Everyone does. Big Ben.
That’s when she remembers something else, from a Lizzie-blink: a different London. Lizzie had thought that; her parents had mentioned it directly. But what did that mean—another London? Or would a little girl like Lizzie see the past as a different place, a separate Now?
Or maybe it’s both. Her eyes snag on a furred arc of green-white balls of light strung between the clock tower and the bank opposite. What if we’re talking about not only travel between two points but also different times?
Her thoughts suddenly fizzle and her vision seems to waver as the darkness ripples. For an instant, she thinks, Shit, can’t pass out now. But then, when she doesn’t and the darkness stops moving, her mind simply blanks.
Because there, hovering just beyond the decorative marble cornice at the roof’s edge, is a tall jet slit, narrow as a lizard’s eye and outlined by the glister of a blare-white glow.
No. You’re not real. Squeezing her eyes shut, she flutters them open again to find that the view hasn’t changed. If anything, the glow is stronger. Why did you make this, House? What do you want from me?
“Emma.”
At the sound of her name, her heart catapults into her mouth. I think about times and Nows, and House makes the Mirror appear. Gulping against a sour surge of fear, she turns. House makes him.
Kramer is there, not far away, on the roof. His body is a well of shadow, the details indistinct. But like that slit-mirror that cannot really be there, Kramer is backlit by a faint, undulant luster, as sickly green as an old bruise. In a way, Kramer is the Mirror in human form: a blank daguerreotype, a cutout with no face and nothing she recognizes. But, oh, she knows that gargle of a voice that is one and many, because she has heard it before: in a Lizzie-blink, and on a Madison street conjured from memory.
“There’s nowhere in this Now left to run,” Kramer says, his voice burring and humming as if the words are being run through a faulty synthesizer. “Or rather … you have a choice of where and in which Now you choose to be.”
Where and in which Now? Having rested long enough—allowing her to see what it is that House wants her to know—the greedy wind starts up again to grab her gown, snatch at her hair. Glancing back over her shoulder at the hovering slit-mirror, she feels that familiar burn in her forehead, which had ebbed as soon as she bashed out that window, beginning to brighten and sting, coring like a laser through her brain.
“I’m not going anywhere with you.” She eases back a slow step and then another, her bare soles digging troughs in the snow. “Just let me go. I want to go home. I want out of this valley and this creepy house with its weird doors and rooms. I only want to wake up.”
“Emma, this is your home and where you belong,” Kramer says. “This is your Now.”
“I don’t believe you.” Between her breasts, the galaxy pendant on its crimson silk ribbon smolders and heats. I have plates that haven’t been invented; I carry the memory of the future. “If I’m only crazy, how come you know about Nows? You’re a liar. I’m still in the valley. I’m in House.”
“Touché. But did I really say something just now?” Kramer cocks his head. “Are you sure you’re not imagining that I said something you’d like to hear? Even if I did speak, it is my word against your very intriguing delusion. Tell you what: if I’m not real, come to me.” Arms spread wide, Kramer starts toward her. Where she’s struggled and slipped on fresh-fallen snow, he seems to glide, and that is when she sees that his shoes aren’t sinking. She isn’t altogether sure his shoes even touch the snow at all. Something is also gathering … behind him? No, Kramer is shifting, going fuzzy at the edges, his body beginning to steam. “Come,” he says, skimming over snow. “Come with me.”