“But you do. In this world, you are the mad daughter of a lunatic genius who is, unfortunately …” Kramer held up a hand, turning it back and forth in an echo of McDermott for Meredith: See? Not a scratch. “A killer. A murderer. A host to a black evil from the Dark Passages … just as this body is for you. I wondered when you would return, be drawn back.”
Return? Drawn back? She’d been here before? Maybe so. The whisper-man had stolen her in blinks. And Lizzie said a different London … But the Lizzie she’d known was a little girl. Yet this Now was new—and so was Lizzie? Wouldn’t Lizzie have remembered being older? Maybe not, if whatever had happened to her mother to cause those odd gaps in her memory had affected Lizzie, too. But what? “Wh-what do you want? Why are you d-doing this?”
“You have knowledge I need. I will help you, Emma, and in return, you will help me,” Kramer said in his sibilant, snaky whisper. They were on the floor together, her body pressed to his, and his mouth so close to her ear that she heard the sigh and felt the hot steam of his
—Breath of My Breath—
breath.
And she saw it then, reflected back to her from the purpling mad lenses of the panops: her true face, the one she had always worn, seeming to bloom the way the shadow-man had smoked from Casey’s body. Like the characters in that painting of Dickens, bleeding out of thin air into outlines and filling with color. It was eerie, like looking at a nearly transparent mask trying to seat itself and failing. It was, in fact, very similar to what it had been like when she was a child—ugly and orphaned—and the craniofacial doc had sat her down at a computer to show what new face he might make for her.
Everything echoes. She could feel her mind slipping. Everything repeats.
“Yes.” Kramer’s cradling arms tightened and held her fast. “I know you for who and what you are, Emma; I see you. You ran for the mirror. That means you’ve seen the Dickens Mirror. You’ve used it, and I will have what you know. Battle and I are alike, but only in that way. He wants to catch a murderer, but I would save this world.”
“Save this … Wh-what …?” The Mirror’s real; it exists; I have to find it. But how would she manage that? She was trapped. Her lips were cold as marble, and she heard herself beginning to slur. She could feel her blood, fresh but starting to cool, oozing through the strong dress and dribbling from a ragged gash on her forehead. Kramer’s hands were smeary, with rust crescents under his nails.
Blood binds. Spider flexed and then folded her many legs. You belong here, to this Now. You belong to him.
No, I am Emma; I’m still Emma. She had to hang on to that. Don’t let them take that away. Quiet, Spider, quiet. She slicked her lips, her tongue curling against sweet poison and salty blood. “What are you t-talking about?” she said to Kramer. “What do you w-want?”
In answer, Kramer raised a hand to his left ear—
And removed his face.
7
IF NOT FOR the drug, the scream might have made it out of her chest.
The mask was painted tin. What remained beneath was a ruin. Kramer’s flesh was raw and oozy; the purple bellies of exposed muscle jumped and quivered. His left eyelid was gone. His nose had sheared away or rotted, leaving behind two mangled, vertical black slits like the nasal pits of a viper. Below a purplish ridge of upper gum, the entire left side of Kramer’s lower jaw looked to have been carved with a paring knife. Naked bone showed in a dull gleam, from which the pegs of his teeth thrust in an impossibly white row, like the posts of a picket fence.
And he had no tongue. What was left was only a liverish, vestigial stub, like a worm cut in two.
“Take a good look, Emma,” Kramer hissed, his naked left eye fixing her with a baleful glare. “You and your kind are blight and infection, but you are the key.”
“M-my kind? The k-key?” She could barely find her voice. Her mind was slewing, sliding away into the deadening fog—and who would she be when she woke? “To what?”
“To that which you are.”
“And what …” She swallowed, working to peel the words from her thickening tongue. She was so thirsty. She could feel her brain slowing down, like a clock whose battery’s nearly dead. “What’s that?”
“Well, let’s see, shall we?” And then she felt his fingers, cold and dry, snaking over the collar of her strong dress to slither over her neck. There was a tick of glass against metal as Kramer reeled out her beaded chain.
And all of a sudden, she didn’t want to look. She couldn’t. Maybe it was a good thing her vision was starting to fuzz, because she was afraid. If everything, all that she’d experienced, echoed and doubled on itself, what really hung around her neck? Was she Schrödinger’s cat, trapped in a box, neither alive nor dead? Waiting for someone to look; to collapse all probabilities to a single path, a solitary outcome? Were these tags, this complex bit of alien glass, like her skull plates: phantoms caught in between and given substance and finality depending on who looked, with no more real reality than the spoon Neo decided wasn’t there? Forget that Kramer called her Emma or that she thought her real face swirled in the violet whirlpools of the panops. Doctors humored their patients, especially the really sick ones. Hadn’t there been a novel and then a movie about this, some island where everyone pretended to be characters in a patient’s private drama? For all she knew, only she saw that those lenses were purple and not clear—because what is color but perception dependent upon the machinery of the mind to capture light in a very specific way? How red is red? Is red only red because that’s what everyone agrees is true?
Am I Emma only because Kramer thinks so, too?
Or …
In this London, could only she and Kramer see Eric’s tags and the cynosure for what they were? To everyone else, were they nothing more than scraps of tin and a worthless, if very pretty, marble?
Alive or dead, alive or dead … Round and around. It felt like a prayer. Please, God, please. I am me; I am real. I felt Eric; we touched, and blood binds. I have to be me.
Because what else was there? Everything she was depended on what Kramer said next.
“Ah, yes. Excellent.” A satisfied sigh. A musical tinkle. “I will tell you what you are now. You are mine, Emma, you are mine, and I want what you know, what you’ve seen. I want what only you can do.” Kramer brushed the hair from her face with a touch as gentle as a lover’s, but his voice was a serpent’s from somewhere deep and dark and very distant now, because she was sinking fast, going down full fathom five.
“I want it all, Emma,” Kramer said. “I want everything.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As always, it takes a village to make a book, and so my deepest thanks go:
To Greg Ferguson, for reading this, being thoroughly creeped out, and getting exactly what this book is about without my having to explain.