“Yeah,” Lizzie whispered. Her eyes glistered and wavered like cut blue glass in deep murky water. “The whisper-man and my dad are all mushed together, tangled up. They were like that even before I finished my special Now and swooshed the fog here so it couldn’t go anywhere else. The whisper-man and … and Dad … they’re part of the thought-magic now, the fog, except the whisper-man is way stronger. I don’t know exactly why, but he can use the thought-magic, and I can’t stop him. The only good thing is this is pretty much the only place he can use it.”
“Because we’re in your special forever-Now? Something like your mom’s Peculiars?” She thought about the snowy, frigid valley. Something about cold was important … something in chemistry … no, physics? I know this; thought about this same thing not too long ago. But what, when?
Instead, she said, “That’s why there’s House. You had to make a safe place for yourself to stay. So this, the bedroom, the House, is kind of you, but everything else belongs to the … the whisper-man? The fog?” When Lizzie nodded, she went on, “You said the others, Rima and Eric, Casey … you said they’ve fallen between the lines because you couldn’t hold on to all of them. But Lizzie”—bending, she retrieved the parchment with its unfinished story of an odd girl with even odder gifts—“there’s only White Space between lines.”
“I know that,” Lizzie said. “Why do you think it’s so important to find them? They’re between the lines of this Now, and the Now is full of the fog, and the fog is thought-magic. They’re in nothing, and that’s bad because the really strong ones will make it into something.”
“Wait, wait.” She held up a hand like a traffic cop. “You’re saying that wherever they are, the others will use the … the thought-magic, the energy, to make their stories?”
“Right.” Lizzie’s face flooded with relief that Emma seemed to have finally caught on. “Especially the ones whose stories are done. They’re the strongest because they’re set.”
Set. “You mean set as in a period, the end of a story,” Emma said. “Their stories are like road maps that they must eventually follow, no matter where they are. Only what happens won’t just be words on a page. If they’re in the fog, whatever they make will be real.”
“Uh-huh,” Lizzie said. “With teeth.”
<p>CASEY AND RIMA</p><p>Fight</p>1
MOANING, CASEY ROLLED to his hands and knees. When he gave another moist, ripping cough, the spray that spattered the snow reminded him of those red sprinkles they put on cupcakes. Whenever he moved, it felt as if the bones of his ribcage were grating together. With every breath, a glassy, jagged pain hacked at his lungs.
To his left and very far away, easily a couple football fields, and almost at that distant black wall of trees, he saw the silent snowcat crouching in the center of a goopy, slimy mess that was a little like the tar they used on roads in summer. Spatters of the same goo glopped over the driver’s cab.
Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a small flick, and turned a look. Something was out there, just sliding from the trees. He squinted, trying to bring whatever it was into focus—and then his heart skipped a beat.
This time, instead of one thing racing for the snowcat, there were three.
2
MY GOD, IT’Smoving. Rima’s stomach turned a slow, gurgling somersault. On the windscreen, the glistening, shredded, oily chunks of the thing that had been Father Preston pulsed and quivered in a slow, shambling creep. Ropy clots of black blood eeled like inky water snakes. Like in biology, when they make you cut up a worm; only the worm doesn’t glue itself back together. She could hear them, too: a high-pitched SMEEE-smeee, SMEEE-smeee, a sound of fingers smearing steam from a bathroom mirror. Horrified, she watched as two pieces met, their seams thinning and mending, the bits of raw stygian flesh sewing themselves together into a much larger chunk that squirmed off in search of another mate. The entire windscreen was alive with shivering, creeping flesh laboriously knitting together bit by bit.
“R-Rima?” Tania’s voice trembled. She pointed, using the rifle she still clutched in her right hand. “It … it’s re-repairing itself. It’s m-making itself all over again.” She stared at the rifle. “I bet I could shoot it a hundred t-times and it would … it would … God, how do you k-kill something like that?”
“I don’t know.” She cut her eyes away from the mess and toward her friend, then started back in alarm. “Tania! At the window! Look out!”
