The whole universe between the covers of a book. But parts of what lives in the Dark Passages? Did she mean the energy in the Dark Passages … whatever that was?
“But it’s also kind of bad, too,” Lizzie continued. “To grab the book-world you, I mean. It’s like you’re wearing a big old sign: I’m Rima. That makes it way easier for the others in the Dark Passages to notice you. Then they try to grab on, like catching a ride, and oh boy, you don’t want that.”
Forget words she could say: she felt like she’d stumbled into a blurry foreign film from Outer Mongolia with no subtitles. “Others? You mean like what grabbed Emma when she was a little girl?” Then she thought of something else: “Wait a second, you said you came to visit book-worlds, right? But Lizzie, you said a book-world’s not a Now. A … a timeline is a Now, an alternative universe. And the Dark Passages … you said they were big halls between Nows. There aren’t Dark Passages between you and book-worlds, right?”
“Right, only between the Nows, and they’re big, long, really dark halls,” Lizzie said, “with lots and lots of shadows and places to hide.”
Places to hide? “But Lizzie, if you can only grab book-people with some of you in them and they only know book-worlds, even the books with lots of hidden compartments … how are the book-people getting into the Dark Passages?”
“Because I take them.”
“But why? How? Don’t you need the Mirror for that?”
The little girl gave Rima a no, silly look. “I’ve never needed the Mirror to get from one Now to the next. All I have to do is think a Now, then the Sign of Sure shows me and I go and play for as long as I want. Well …” A finger of dark oil seemed to glimmer through her blue-blue eyes. “I used to be able to stay a long time. I can’t now. Like I said, I always get pulled back. It’s never long enough.”
“Oh.” She swallowed. “What lives in the Dark Passages? It’s not, ah, just energy?”
“Oh, it’s energy all right, but really bad energies, like the whisper-man. When they notice you, they try to grab and hang on so you’ll pull them through, too.”
“And that’s not good for a Now.”
“Right. Too much of their kind of energy is terrible for a Now, like an infection. It can break the Now. That’s why it’s important to play with you book-people while you’re sleeping. That way, you don’t see them, and they can’t see you very well either.”
“Why?” But she thought she understood. No science whiz, even she knew that large portions of the brain shut down with sleep.
“Because part of you, the one that says hi, I’m Rima, turns off. Even if they do manage to get their hands on you and I drop you along the way—like into a strange Now? It’s still okay because you’re asleep and everyone expects dreams to be weird. I always find you guys again because we’re tangled, so that’s okay.”
“Oh.” She was starting to feel dizzy. Emma and Eric might get this, but physics had always given her a headache. Had Lizzie just said book-world people like her could go to different Nows? She somehow takes me out of the book-world? How would that work? And God, what does go on between the lines? “So when you come to … to play … if we’re … we’re turned off, what do we do?”
“Not a lot, but that’s also because I always put most of you-you in a safe place, anyway. It would be really bad for you to wake up in another Now.”
“What?” She was startled. “What do you mean, you put me in a safe place? How can you both visit and then put me somewhere?”
“Easy.” Lizzie’s blue eyes, dark as India ink, were surprisingly calm. They were, Rima thought, very deep, as if filled with water found only at the bottom of the sea. “I can … if I trade places with the part of you that’s mostly Rima and just play with … you know … the outside.”
“The outside. You trade …” The words knotted in Rima’s throat. “Places.” She swallowed against a rising dread. Isn’t that what Emma thought happened with this girl’s father and the whisper-man? Something Emma says she saw in one of her visions? “You mean you take our place? Like a substitute?”
“No.” Lizzie’s face gathered into another you silly, and then she pinched her own left forearm and levitated that with her right hand, the way a puppeteer manipulated strings. Rima saw that Lizzie had wound that tiny doll-sized green scarf around one finger, the way you’d knot a string so as not to forget something. “I take you.”
“Take?” A slow horror spread through her chest. “You … you live inside us? But … but …” You can’t take a whole body across. Could she? Wow, she really could use Eric or Emma; this was so Star Trek. Then the idea—intuition, really, a leap—popped into her brain to spill from her mouth: “You’re not taking my body, are you? You’re taking the essence, the energy that makes me Rima. That’s what you bring to different Nows.”
“Yeah, that’s right.” Lizzie beamed. “Only I don’t take the whole you-you. I can’t. Well, I could, but then it gets too crowded and another Rima would go crazy, and that’s not fair. Really bad things happen then. I remember a couple times, when I wasn’t very good yet? Other Rimas and Emmas and stuff tried killing themselves because of all the noise in their head. Some of them even ended up in the hospital.”
“Another …” Different timelines. Alternative universes. When she put her hand to her lips, she felt the shuddering thump-thump-thump of her pulse. She’s talking about slipping part of me and herself into another, different Rima. While that Rima was asleep? No, that must be what she means by crowded, why she says the other Rima would go crazy. You’d have two minds—three, if you count Lizzie—occupying the same body.