Ilsa Bick: White Space

Because, really? Some monster-doll thoughts are … kind of exciting. He shows her how to do stuff in other Nows , too, most of which isn’t that scary. Well, except for that humongous storm this past July. Wow, it took her three whole days to figure out how to turn that thing off. But she’s got it under control.

Like Dad.

5

LIZZIE SLIPS FROMthe house with Marmalade on her heels. The night is deep and dark and very cold. The stars glitter like the distant Nows of the Dark Passages. Icy gravel pops and crunches beneath her shoes.

At the barn door, though, Marmalade suddenly balks. “Oh, come on, don’t be such an old scaredy-cat.” When the orange tom only shows his needle-teeth, she says what Mom always does when Lizzie misbehaves: “My goodness, what’s gotten into you ?” (Really, it’s the other way around; Mom doesn’t know the half of it.)

But then Marmalade lets go of a sudden, rumbling growl and spits and swats. Gasping, Lizzie snatches her hand back. Wow, what was that about? She watches the cat sprint into the night. She’s never heard Marmalade growl. She didn’t know cats could . She thinks about going after the tom, but Dad always says, De cat came back de very next day .

Sliding into the still, dark barn is like drifting on the breath of a dream into a black void. Ahead, a vertical shaft of thin light spills from the loft. Voices float down, too: her dad—

And someone else.

Lizzie stops dead. Holds her breath. Listens.

That other voice is bad and gargly, like screams bubbling up from deep water. This voice is wrong. Just wrong .

Uh-oh . Her skin goes creepy-crawly. If Dad’s doom-voice could be a feeling, that’s what drapes itself over her now, like when she gets a high fever and the blankets are too hot and heavy. Only she can’t kick this off. She remembers how Marmalade didn’t want to come inside. How Marmalade sometimes stares, not at birds or bright coins of sunlight but the space between , while his tail goes twitch-swish . The cat sees something Lizzie doesn’t. So maybe Marmalade knows something now, too.

Lizzie chews the side of her thumb. She has a couple choices here. She can pretend nothing’s happened. She can run right back to her nice, safe house where her mother waits and there is hot chocolate and supper, warm on the table. Or she can lie and say Dad wasn’t hungry. Or she could sing, La-la-la, hello, it’s Lizzie, Daddy; I’m coming up now! Yeah, she likes that one. Make a noise; give Dad a chance to pull himself together so he can keep his promise to Mom, and it will be their pinky-swear secret.

But wait, Lizzie . The whisper-voice—she knows it’s not her—is teeny-tiny but drippy and gooey somehow, like mist blown from a straw filled with India ink. Don’t you want to see how he really uses the Mirror? He’s never let you watch. Go out and play, he says. That’s what adults always say when what they mean is, Get lost, you stupid little kid .

This, she considers, is true.

Oh, come onnn, Lizzieee , the voice coaxes. Thisss is your big chance for something really gooood .

The tug of that voice is the set of a fishhook in her brain. It is, she thinks, a little bit like the monster-doll’s voice. But so what? She’s played with the monster-doll in lots of times and Nows , and no big deal. Besides, wouldn’t she like to know about the mirror?

You bet I do . Her tongue goes puckery, and her heart gives a little jump of excitement. So she decides, Just a peek .

Lizzie creeps up the ladder, oh-so-carefully, quietly. Three more steps … two … Then, she hesitates. Lizzie might be just a kid, but she’s no dummy. The gargly voice reminds her of when she’s stayed too long in her monster-doll’s head: a feeling that is sticky and gucky and thick.

Oh, go on, you old scaredy-cat , the whisper-voice says. You’ve come this far .

So Lizzie watches her fingers wrap themselves around the last rung, and then she’s easing herself up on tiptoe—

6

THE LOFT ISone big space. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves line the north and west walls. Feeble light fans from table lamps. The only picture, a copy of Dickens’ Dream , hangs on one wall. Dad says what makes Dickens’ Dream so interesting is that the painter died before he could finish, and that guy had taken over for another artist who blew his brains out after working on a couple of Dickens’ books. (Which kind of makes you think, Whoa, who got inside his head? )

On a low table just beneath the painting, Mom’s purple-black Peculiars gleam. Lizzie knows each by sight: there is Whispers , and there are Echo Rats and Shadows, In the Dark. Purpling Mad. Now Done Darkness , where the poor mom gets eaten up from the inside out, that monster-cancer chewing her up, munch-munch-munch . And a whole bunch more. Whenever Dad finishes a scary book—one so frightening that Mom would absolutely and positively have a stroke if she knew Dad’s read a single word to Lizzie or, worse yet, that Lizzie’s visited —Mom slips on her special panops, which help her see all the thought-magic of the book-world: the energy of real life mixed with make-believe. Like when her dad says, Oh sure, honey, let’s give that brave, smart girl your eyes . Or, Hmm, how about we take a couple letters from your name and put them riiight here? If you know how to look, there’s her whole life, all these Lizzie bits and pieces, tucked in her dad’s books: the orange tom here, the squiggle-monsters there, Dad’s big red barn.

Mom draws out a bit of all that thought-magic to seal in a Peculiar, because it’s already way too easy to slip into one of her dad’s books. It’s why Dad’s famous, a bestseller . People are always dying for him to hurry up and write the next book already. They love that feeling of being lost somewhere and somewhen else. Sometimes Lizzie doesn’t want to pull herself out of a book-world at all, just like kids who pretend to be superheroes and run around in costumes.

As her eyes slide from the Peculiars to Dad’s desk, Lizzie’s throat suddenly squeezes down to a straw. She’d hoped that Dad would be there, looking at the night through a big picture window facing the high heifer pasture. Lots of times he’ll just sit there, and Lizzie swears he’s watching something play itself out, as if on a big television tuned to a secret channel. Mom says Dad flashes back , kind of like visiting a very special, private Now . Not for real; he doesn’t go anywhere or slip through any other Dark Passages than the black basement of his brain, where there are whispers from waaay back, when he was a boy and lived in this creepy old farmhouse at the very bottom of a deep, cold valley surrounded by high, snowy mountains in a very bad Wyoming.

But right this second, Dad’s not flashing back to that valley. He’s not at his desk, and Lizzie feels that awful, heavy blanket weigh her down just a little bit more. She thinks, No, Dad, no. You promised. You crossed your heart . But he must’ve been dying inside, the story in his blood hotter than the highest fever, burning him up.

Dad has been a busy, busy bee. A new skin-scroll is unfurled over his desk. What he’s already pulled onto the scroll’s White Space with special ink is a bright red spidery splash: letters and words and whole paragraphs. A heavy scent, one that is like a crushed tin can left out in a storm, fogs the air.

Dad stands at the Dickens Mirror, which is not an oval but a slit, like the pupil of a lizard’s or cat’s eye, with all sorts of squiggle-monsters and arguses and typhons and spider-swoozels and winged cobcraas squirming through its wood frame. The glass isn’t normal either but smoky-black, like old char left from a great big bonfire.