White Space Read Online Free

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 IS one big space. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves line the north and west walls. Feeble light fans from table lamps. Theonly 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