What if you wrote a story for a class only to find out it is
almost identical to a hidden manuscript of a now-dead
writer?
Emma Lindsay can disappear into other worlds, blinking from
one reality to another. Her blinks are tied into the life of
the writer, Frank McDermott, and his daughter, Lizzie. Emma
meets a large cast of characters in her blinks but will she
be able to sort out what is real and what is not?
WHITE SPACE is the sort of book that will either have you
gasping in awe over the clever complexity or scratching your
head at what appears to be a jumbled mess. I enjoy when the
point of view shifts from character to character but in
WHITE SPACE not only does the point of view change but so
does the reality of the characters. However, if the reader
is willing to give it time, the ending is nothing short of
brilliant. In fact, once I read the ending, I wanted to
reread portions of WHITE SPACE to see just how neatly all
the pieces fit together. I love it when an author surprises
me and Ilsa J. Bick most certainly does that with WHITE
SPACE. I'm a little curious to see how this will evolve as
a series and if we will learn more about the Dark Passages
and the host of strange inventions and creatures, such as
the Peculiars. WHITE SPACE is a brilliant, complex, and
somewhat disturbing as Ilsa J. Bick takes readers on a very
bizarre journey.
In the tradition of Memento and Inception comes a thrilling
and scary young adult novel about blurred reality where
characters in a story find that a deadly and horrifying
world exists in the space between the written lines.
Seventeen-year-old Emma Lindsay has problems: a head full of
metal, no parents, a crazy artist for a guardian whom a
stroke has turned into a vegetable, and all those times when
she blinks away, dropping into other lives so ghostly and
surreal it's as if the story of her life bleeds into theirs.
But one thing Emma has never doubted is that she's real.
Then she writes "White Space," a story about these kids
stranded in a spooky house during a blizzard.
Unfortunately, "White Space" turns out to be a dead ringer
for part of an unfinished novel by a long-dead writer. The
manuscript, which she's never seen, is a loopy Matrix meets
Inkheart story in which characters fall out of different
books and jump off the page. Thing is, when Emma blinks, she
might be doing the same and, before long, she's dropped into
the very story she thought she'd written. Trapped in a
weird, snow-choked valley, Emma meets other kids with dark
secrets and strange abilities: Eric, Casey, Bode, Rima, and
a very special little girl, Lizzie. What they discover is
that they--and Emma--may be nothing more than characters
written into being from an alternative universe for a very
specific purpose.
Now what they must uncover is why they've been brought to
this place--a world between the lines where parallel
realities are created and destroyed and nightmares are
written--before someone pens their end.
Excerpt
Lizzie slips from the house with Marmalade on her heels. The
night is deep and dark and very
cold. The stars glitter like the distant Nows of the Dark
Passages. Icy gravel pops and crunches
beneath her shoes.
At the barn door, though, Marmalade suddenly balks. “Oh,
come on, don’t be such an
old scaredy-cat.” When the orange tom only shows his
needle-teeth, she says what Mom always
does when Lizzie misbehaves: “My goodness, what’s gotten
into you?” (Really, 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—
The loft is one big space. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves line
the north and west walls. Feeble light
fans from table lamps. The only 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 bunch more. Whenever Dad
finishes a scary book—one so frightening that Mom would
absolutely and positively have a
stroke if she knew Dad’s read a single word to Lizzie or,
worse yet, that Lizzie’s visited—Mom
slips on her special panops, which help her see all the
thought-magic of the book-world: the
energy of real life mixed with make-believe. Like when her
dad says, Oh sure, honey, let’s give
that brave, smart girl your eyes. Or, Hmm, how about we take
a couple letters from your name
and put them riiight here? If you know how to look, there’s
her whole life, all these Lizzie bits
and pieces, tucked in her dad’s books: the orange tom here,
the squiggle-monsters there, Dad’s
big red barn.
Mom draws out a bit of all that thought-magic to seal in a
Peculiar, because it’s already
way too easy to slip into one of her dad’s books. It’s why
Dad’s famous, a bestseller. People are
always dying for him to hurry up and write the next book
already. They love that feeling of being
lost somewhere and somewhen else. Sometimes Lizzie doesn’t
want to pull herself out of a book-
world at all, just like kids who pretend to be superheroes
and run around in costumes.
As her eyes slide from the Peculiars to Dad’s desk, Lizzie’s
throat suddenly squeezes
down to a straw. She’d hoped that Dad would be there,
looking at the night through a big picture
window facing the high heifer pasture. Lots of times he’ll
just sit there, and Lizzie swears he’s
watching something play itself out, as if on a big
television tuned to a secret channel. Mom says
Dad flashes back, kind of like visiting a very special,
private Now. Not for real; he doesn’t go
anywhere or slip through any other Dark Passages than the
black basement of his brain, where
there are whispers from waaay back, when he was a boy and
lived in this creepy old farmhouse
at the very bottom of a deep, cold valley surrounded by
high, snowy mountains in a very bad
Wyoming.
But right this second, Dad’s not flashing back to that
valley. He’s not at his desk, and
Lizzie feels that awful, heavy blanket weigh her down just a
little bit more. She thinks, No, Dad,
no. You promised. You crossed your heart. But he must’ve
been dying inside, the story in his
blood hotter than the highest fever, burning him up.
Dad has been a busy, busy bee. A new skin-scroll is unfurled
over his desk. What he’s
already pulled onto the scroll’s White Space with special
ink is a bright red spidery splash: letters
and words and whole paragraphs. A heavy scent, one that is
like a crushed tin can left out in a
storm, fogs the air.
Dad stands at the Dickens Mirror, which is not an oval but a
slit, like the pupil of a
lizard’s or cat’s eye, with all sorts of squiggle-monsters
and arguses and typhons and spider-
swoozels and winged cobcraas squirming through its wood
frame. The glass isn’t normal either
but smoky-black, like old char left from a great big bonfire.
And Dad . . . he’s not acting like Dad. What he’s doing
doesn’t even seem human.
Because Dad is growling, like something’s waking up in his
chest, raking curved claws over his
insides, trying to break his bones and bust from his skin,
just like the mom’s cancer in Now Done
Darkness, or the million creepy, furry spithres that tremble
like spiky petals from that girl’s
mouth in Whispers. Dad’s face is all twisted and crooked, as
if his head got ruined in Mom’s
Kugelrohr oven.
In his right hand is his wicked-sharp lunellum. Normally,
Dad only uses the knife, which
is decorated with special symbols, when he makes his White
Space skin-paper. Not tonight,
though, and Lizzie knows doom when she feels it. The person
in front of that Mirror is in the
middle of becoming a thing she’s never seen before.
So make a sound! A tiny panic-mouse claws her brain. Sing a
song! Do something to
save him! Do something, Lizzie, do anything, before it’s TOO
LATE!
But then too late happens.
The blade kisses her 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 her father 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!
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