“Could be all three.” He’d thought about this, too. Emma has to be part of this, somehow; the reason the rest of us are here. It was the only thing that made sense. Lizzie tried various characters in various combinations, so they must each have a part to play—but Lizzie said that Emma was more tangled with her than the rest of them. Only Emma had been shown the memory quilt. If that cynosure was a machine, it recognized Emma, and she’d used that to reach through and pull them here. This house showed Emma something very much like this Dickens Mirror.
Emma has to be the key, a focal point.
Which made him wonder: assuming Lizzie had always known Emma was more tangled than they, had Emma been here before, with others, but failed? Or maybe only they died in this place, but Lizzie somehow got Emma out? That actually might be just one more component to Emma’s strange seizures or fugues, those blinks.
She might have been here before, but when she wasn’t ready or hadn’t acquired the necessary skills. He studied Emma as she snipped paper tape to secure the gauze wrap around his leg. So what if all this—the crash, this valley, all this death—what if this has been designed for Emma, too?
Aloud, he said only, “The house might have a lot of her mom in it.”
“Or what a little kid would wish for and associate with her mom. Lizzie said Meredith died before Lizzie could finish this place.” Emma paused, then added, with a shrug, “On the other hand, no one ever found a body, so it’s a decent thought. House is the only place with light. It’s warm. There’s food.”
“So if a piece of her mom, or the idea of her, takes care of Lizzie and makes food, gives us a place to rest and be safe,” Casey asked, “what does her dad … what does the barn make?”
“Maybe what Frank McDermott made best,” Eric said.
“Books?” Bode asked.
“No.” Emma shook her head. “Monsters. Death. Things that live in the dark.”
“Hell,” Bode said after a pause, “you’re talking about a tunnel. A lot of nightmares in a black echo, and they aren’t all human.”
“For you,” Eric said, and glanced at his brother. “I’ll bet it’s a different nightmare for each of us.”
“Different characters, different books.” Emma gave them all a strange look. “I wonder if that’s why the others Lizzie brought here before failed.”
“How do you mean?” Bode asked.
“I get it.” As soon as she’d said it, Eric knew what she was driving at. “Once they hit the barn, they must meet up with their monsters.”
“Jesus.” Bode’s eyes widened. “You mean they die? Like that kid, Tony?”
“I don’t see how it can be any other way,” he said. “Otherwise, the people she’s brought before would still be here, trying to figure a way out.”
“Aw, man.” Bode hooked his hands around the collar of his BDU as if it was a ledge and he was hanging on for dear life. “Aw, man.”
“Eric, if that’s true, and we’re all … you know, his, like he’s our father”—Casey shot him an anxious look—“then what about us? What does that make us? If everything is all tangled here, doesn’t that make us a little like him, and all the monsters? And God, what does that make Liz—” Breaking off, Casey frowned up at the ceiling at the same moment that Eric heard something: sharp but short, as if cut in two.
“Did you—” Emma began as Bode said, “Hey, you hear …”
But it was Casey who moved first. “Oh God,” he said, bolting up from the table so quickly his mug overturned with a slosh. “That was Rima.”
RIMA
A Safe Place
“WOW, GREAT ROOM,” Rima said, and meant it. She took in the plush carpet, pink walls, the litter of toys. “I’ve never seen a loft bed before.”
“It was my idea.” Lizzie was crouched beneath the bed, fiddling with a wood box overflowing with various miniature Ken and Barbie-like dolls clearly meant for play with that dollhouse. “I wanted a private space just like my dad, so Dad got it built for me special, same as my dollhouse.”
“It’s really nice.” Rima knelt beside the little girl. The dollhouse was a painted lady: a riot of Victorian bric-a-brac, with gabled roofs and turrets. “So, is this where you spend most of your time?” Odd. She hadn’t thought about that until now, but here was this ageless little girl stuck where time had no meaning and there was virtually no sense of place. It’s like being locked in a padded cell on a mental ward. She eyed the toys. Or trapped in a dollhouse.
“Some.” Lizzie hunched a shoulder, her attention focused on sifting through and pulling out very specific dolls that, at a glance, seemed oddly mismatched, as if they came from many different sets. “I like to play, but I’m not always here. I can leave for a little while.”
“Leave the house to come get one of us from a”—she stumbled—“a book-world.” She did believe the girl’s story and Emma’s theories, but only because arguing against what was going on didn’t change anything and she knew what she’d experienced. And I have to believe that Tony, or some version of him, is alive somewhere. If Emma and Eric were right about alternative timelines, Tony could be anywhere, even lurking in a future chapter of her own story. Casey, too: slotted into the life she knew as a boy she simply hadn’t met yet.
“Yeah,” Lizzie said. “It’s kind of hard, but I can do that. I can visit, too.”
“Visit?” She blinked. “What do you mean?”
“You know … come over and visit. To play.”
“A …” She fumbled. “Like a playdate?”
“Yeah. I play with most of you guys, but mainly Emma.” Lizzie was unwinding a miniature scarf from a girl doll’s neck, spooling and unspooling it around a finger the way a chameleon shot and then recalled its sticky tongue. “I only come when you’re asleep, though.”
“When I’m …” Her heart did a quick, surprised fillip. “Why? I mean … why when we’re asleep?” And what do you mean, we play?
“Because you guys are harder. You’re, you know … you’re set. Emma’s way easier. She and I play a lot. In a way, it’s nice when you’re set the way you are, because it makes you easier to see and find. But it can also be a bad thing.”
“How come?” She couldn’t believe she was actually having this conversation, although she wasn’t sure that while she could say the words, she understood their meanings. See us better because we’re set? “Are you saying that it’s easier to find us on the … the page? In the book-world?”
“Yeah. I mean, it’s not super easy, because for a bookperson, the book-world is the Now. It’s all you know, but you can still go a lot of places in it. Dad called them subplots and subtexts and things that happen off stage. They’re like … hidden compartments in a jewelry box or something. In a book, you can read about a book-person’s day or one hour out of a day or five minutes, and then—poof—a chapter later, or the very next page or paragraph, it’s the day before or after or next week or even two months later, a year. You could be on a different planet. But what about all the time and space in between, see? Those are the hidden, secret parts, all the good stuff between the lines nobody ever thinks about but that has to be there. Book-people can find their way there and do all kinds of things, especially when they’ve got parts of what lives in the Dark Passages in them. That’s why people liked my dad’s books so much; the book-worlds were so real they could get lost in them. Dad said the stories got under their skin and lived inside. A ton of people even wrote themselves into the book-worlds and dressed up like their favorite characters and went on and on and on, sometimes for their whole lives. Dad called it”—Lizzie screwed her face in thought—“fan fiction.”