White Space Read Online Free Page B

dad’s left palm, quick as a snake, and Dad goes,
AARRGGHHH!
His head whips back as another roar boils and bubbles:
AAAHHHH!
    On the ladder, Lizzie jumps.
Dad!
the panic-mouse in her brain squeaks.
Dad, Daddy!
All the hairs on her neck and arms go spiky as a porcupine’s quills. She watches in mute horror as a bloody rill oozes down her father’s wrist to weep ruby tears.
    The knife flashes again. The skin of Dad’s right hand splits in a red shriek. The lunellum
thunks
to the floor as herfather slams his bleeding hands, really, really hard, against the Mirror. The stand wobbles; there is a squeaking, wet sound as her father’s blood squelches and smears the glass; and Lizzie hears a very distinct, metallic
click
like the snap of a light switch.
    And then the lizard-eye of that Dickens Mirror … changes. It starts to shimmer. The surface wobbles and ripples in undulating black waves, like a river of oil spilling across ice. Her father’s blood pulses, hot and red and
alive
; his blood writhes over the Mirror, and where his blood touches, the smoky glass steams. Long, milky fingers of mist curl around her father’s wrists and begin to pulse and suck—and all of a sudden, they are not white as milk or heavy mist but first pink and then a deep, dark bloodred.
    The Mirror is drinking her father. The Mirror’s greedy fingers spiral up and up and up in a tangle of rust-red vines to web his neck and face, as if her dad is a piece of blank parchment onto which something new is being written in blood.
    “Blood of My Blood,” her father says, but what comes out of his mouth is a voice of one and many: overlapping echoes and whispers from down deep and very far away. “I feed you, Blood of My Blood, Breath of My Breath. I feed you and I invite you. I release you and I bind you and I draw you. Together, we are one, and there are the Dark Passages and all of space and time to bridge.”
    The mist twines around her father in a shimmering vermillion spiderweb. The blood-web tightens and squeezes, hugging her father right up to the churning, rippling glass. The black glass gives, the inky mouth of that Mirror gapes, and then her father’s hands slip through,
sinking
into the glass,as he reaches down its throat and into the Dark Passages.
    Run!
the panic-mouse screeches.
Run, Lizzie, run! Get Mom!
But she doesn’t. Her heart
bumpity-bumpity-bumps
in her chest, and she has never been so scared. In all the Lizzie-worlds she’s made and the
Nows
she’s visited and the hours she’s spent here with her father, she has never seen anything quite as terrible as this—and she simply can’t move.
    The glass fills with something white and sparkly and thick and formless as fog that swirls and ripples—and knits together to form a face. But not Dad’s face, oh no. Whatever lies beyond the glass is still becoming: oozy and indefinite, there and then not, as if the face is pulling together the way hot glass slumps and folds and becomes something else. Even as she watches, the face solidifies into a nightmare of raw meat, bristly teeth, a snaky black tongue—
    And eyes.
Eyes
. Two are black. They are a crow’s eyes, a cobra’s eyes—dead eyes with no pupils and no eyelids either.
    But the third is different. Instead of the blue-black cyclops eye that is her monster-doll’s, this third eye is a silver storm, both mirror and ocean—and her father is there, his reflection pulling together from the swirling, smoky whirlpool to eel like a serpent, and oh, his face, her dad’s
real
face!
    Maybe she makes a sound. Or maybe, like a snake, the whisper-man tastes her with his tongue, because all three eyes cut sideways and then—
    He sees me
. Her hand catches the ball of a shriek.
He sees me, he sees me, he sees me!
    And then.
    Her father.
    Turns—

EMMA
Blink
1
    “EMMA. EMMA?”
    “What?” Emma snapped back, awareness flooding her mind in an icy gush, an arrow of sudden bright pain stabbing right between her eyes. Blinking past