White Space полностью

“Don’t be a nut,” she said, but it was more of a tic, no force behind it. She eyed that slit-door. No knob. No hinges. No way in that she could see. So are you part of the test, a way of seeing if I’m ready? Ready for what?

All of a sudden, her ears pricked to a trickle of static. Radio. Much louder now, yammering to itself and coming from behind this slit-door. She actually made out a few words: at large … murder … bodies.

An eerie dark sweep of déjà vu gusted through her brain. That’s what we heard in the van. Lily said the murders were all over the news. So, if this was such a big story, why hadn’t she heard about some little girl who’d found bodies in some … “Cellar,” she said, and then wished she could call that back. Some little girl found bodies down cellar.

“But I didn’t find bodies,” she said out loud. “I don’t know what I found in Jasper’s cellar.” Yet that was a flat-out lie, or at least half of one. “Come on, Emma, you thought that thing down cellar was a door.” She studied not the slit itself but the color. That shade of white was right, maybe identical. And I heard whispers seeping out of the dark, just like now. When I pushed, when I finally got my hand through, I felt … She shoved away from the rest. God, for something she was determined to forget and hadn’t thought of for years, she could feel the memories piling up to bulge against some mental membrane—

(where the barrier’s thinnest)

as if what had happened down cellar was related to what was going on now.

“What do you want, House?” And then she answered her own question: “Of course, you nut, it wants you to open the door.” She thought back to earlier: her sense that if she found the correct door in her mind, she might walk into Lizzie’s life. “That’s right, isn’t it, House?”

The house didn’t answer. But the radio crackled on: horrible … gruesome discovery of—

“I’m not listening to this, House.” Shuddering, she hugged herself tight. She felt sick. Her stomach coiled as if a snake had decided that her guts were a nice, dark, moist place to hang out. “I don’t hear it. I don’t care.” She let out a high, strained laugh through a throat that didn’t want to cooperate. “It’s not like I can go in, anyway. There’s no knob.”

Which hadn’t stopped her when she was twelve. Then, she’d had the same thought: no knob, no way in. A second later, she’d spotted that small, Emma-sized pull-ring, just right for a twelve-year-old. Had it been there all along? She’d always had the queer sense that the door down cellar had made the pull-ring for—

In front of her eyes, the slit-door suddenly undulated, like thick white oil.

“Shit!” Staggering, she stumbled back on her heels and nearly set herself on her ass. Holding herself up against the far wall, she gaped, stunned, as the slit-door wavered and rippled. A moment later, a knob—brassy and impossibly bright—blistered into being like a weird mushroom pushing its way out of bone-white loam.

Just like down cellar. Closing her eyes, she counted to ten, made it to five. The knob was still there, and now, something more, something that hadn’t happened all those years ago, down cellar.

In that milky slit, a tangle of creatures swarmed to the surface in a clutch of sinuous arms and legs and bodies. Some had what passed for a face: vertical gashes for mouths, a bristle of teeth, serpentine stalks where there should be eyes and ears. But the details were incomplete, running into one another, the features oozing and dripping together, as if all that white space was thick paint. The creatures were bizarre, a little like those Hindu gods and goddesses, the ones with animal heads and spidery frills for arms and legs and all-seeing eyes.

Whoa, I know these. I’ve seen these, and not in a blink either. Despite her fear, she found that she was also as curious now as she’d been when she was twelve. Easing from the wall, she slid a few slow steps closer. Jasper painted these, then covered them up.

“With white paint.” Like the door down cellar. She put a trembling hand to her lips. “White slit, white door, white space.” That means something, too. What had Jasper said? Every time you pull them onto White Space, you risk breaking that Now.