And then, something inside hooks her wrist and tugs.
“Oh!” Emma ekes out a tiny, wheezing cry. “No!” She tries taking her hand back, but this something only tugs harder. From deep inside, the whispers suddenly swell, growing louder and more excited, the sound like the scritch-scratch of rats scurrying over glass. Stifling a shriek, she plants her feet on either side of the door and pulls. The darkness gives like grudging, soft taffy and then lets go with a sensation like the snap of a rubber band: ka-twannnggg!
She tumbles back, gasping. Her hand is still attached, all fingers accounted for, but the tips are white and icy. The candle’s dead. A thin streamer of smoke curls from the blackened wick—and the molten wax has frozen.
There really is something—someone—in there. She sprawls, unmoving, paralyzed with fear, her heart going thumpity-thumpity-thumpity-thump in her chest. She felt a hand. There were fingers, and she heard it … them. They almost got her.
And what about the candle? Her hand? Once she pierced that darkness, she hadn’t been able to see either. She’s paid attention in science: no light + brain-freeze cold = … outer space? Or a really cold vacuum? But neither makes sense. There can’t be a black space-hole under Jasper’s house.
Then her mind jumps: Matchi-Manitou, in his deep dark cave. The Ojibwe say there’s a big evil demon in a huge black cave under Devil’s Island. Jasper goes over there all the time. He paints nightmares and then covers them up. He boozes and babbles about White Space and broken Nows and Dark Passages.
So maybe this is one of them, a Dark Passage, and this is like Devils Island. Her lungs are going so fast she’s dizzy. Catch a clue, Emma. You live in a cottage overlooking Devil’s Cauldron. So is this a tunnel that connects the two? Is this the Dark Passages Jasper’s so scared of? No wonder Jasper’s covered this over. He doesn’t want whatever’s in there getting out. Or me or anyone going in. Something grabbed me. Something’s whispering. If Matchi-Manitou had gotten a really good grab and—bam!—she’d gotten hooked and reeled in like a salmon, what then? Would she have been able to see at all? Maybe she wouldn’t want to. She’d be dinner. Matchi-Manitou would drink her blood and crunch her bones and eat her up, munch-munch-munch. Even if she’d managed to get away, where would she be? What if she ended up somewhere—some when—else?
You are not going to think about this anymore. The sweat pops on her forehead as she levers that door, really throws her weight against it. You are going to forget all about this. Stick your fingers in your ears and la-la-la-la all the way back upstairs.
The door is pissed. Doesn’t want to close at all, nosirreebob. She can feel it protesting, or maybe that’s only what lives inside the dark exerting some force to keep her from closing it off again. From deep within, the whispers seethe, but there are so many she can’t make out the words, which she thinks is probably good. She doesn’t hear them; she’s not listening, la-la-la-la …
Finally, grudgingly, the door grumbles shut. She doesn’t dare look at that white blank too long either. If she does, she might see the ring again, and then the urge to pull open the door and push against the dark would be too strong.
Nope, no way, not going there. She works fast, wedging all those boxes tight-tight-tight against the white cinderblock. She covers that door and blots it from view. Hours later, when Jasper stumps back in, reeking of fish slime, bourbon, and the turp he uses to clean his brushes, she’s at the kitchen table, an untouched glass of chocolate milk she doesn’t want in her hands, as the radio yammers on and on about death and murder and blood, so much blood. Lost in a boozy fog, Jasper doesn’t spare her a glance, and she’s not telling. In fact, she decides right then and there not to …
EMMA
All Me
“… THINK ABOUT IT,” she said. “Until today I was doing a pretty good job, too. But some of what’s happened echoes and circles back to that, even down to that little click. I heard the same thing at the library door.” And in the vision of that insane asylum, come to think of it, when she’d locked the door in that iron grille.
“What if what you found was a force field put up by some machine?” Eric asked. “Like a … a device or tool or something?”
“That’s what Dad called the Mirror,” Lizzie said. “Same with the panops and Sign of Sure. He said they were all tools from a long time ago and another Now. I never thought of it before, but the time I saw my dad at the Mirror? When he … when he c-cut himself?” She knuckled her eyes, but Emma saw the tears starting again. “When he t-touched the M-Mirror, it made a c-click.”
“But I didn’t cut myself,” Emma said. “It just happened.” Then thought: Force field or barrier might be right, too. I keep thinking about where the barriers are thinnest. What would happen if those went away or sprang a leak?
“Might work like a fingerprint ID for a computer,” Eric said.
“You’re saying the machine recognized me?”
“It kind of fits, doesn’t it? Whatever was down cellar let you … well, log on.”
“What?” Bode asked. “What a log got to do with anything? A log’s just wood.”
“It’s just another word for a special kind of key,” Casey said. “Only this key unlocks a machine.”
Key. Emma felt the word hook her attention. Lizzie said … or was it her dad … one of them mentioned a key. But hadn’t Frank McDermott also said that this key was something they’d read? Yes, he said manuscript, and they found it in London.
“But log on to a machine that can do what?” Rima asked. “Draw out energy that you can use to make a book? Or glass?”
“Or anything.” Eric ran a hand over the hard edge of the coffee table. “Even something as simple as this. In the real world, the one we all think of as real, the only reason this wood table stays a table is because the energy required for wood and iron to hold their shapes is exactly right—for that reality. Add more energy—say, touch a match, start a fire—you destroy the wood’s ability to hold that shape. You’ve added too much energy to the system and initiated a different reaction.”
“Like the phase transition of ice to water, or water to steam,” Emma said. “To fog.”
Eric nodded. “So I guess this … this Dark Passages energy stays put in our reality only if you use a certain amount and no more.”
“You know … what happened out on the snow—those creatures just appearing, the church, Tania?” Sliding a copy of Whispers from the pile of books, Rima studied the cover art: the portrait of a girl with wild, staring eyes as black as oil and a frill of spider’s legs blooming from her mouth. “If I let myself just accept the idea for a second that my story’s already been written and the fog is energy waiting to be used and molded and fixed … it kind of explains a lot.”