Holding out his arms, Dad does a slow turn like the tiny pink ballerina in Lizzie’s music box. Taking a step back, Mom peers at Dad through purple lenses. You’ve brought back hangers-on from the Dark Passages before and not realized it. Oh, for God’s … Sighing, Dad lets Mom get a good look, front and back. Really? Pulling out her panops, she extends the temple arms, flips out the two extra side lenses, and then hooks the spectacles behind her ears. Which is kind of bad, considering.ĭAD SWEARS UP and down that he didn’t have anything to do with it: I told you, Meredith. So, really, she’s just about what Lizzie expects. Not a thing, except this gluey, gucky, purple maw, as if the crazy lady spends all her time slurping blood jelly. She doesn’t utter one single, solitary peep.īecause she can’t. When the sheriff tries asking questions, the crazy lady only stares and stares. She smells really bad, too, like someone raised by mole rats or bears. Her hands, sooty and man-sized, are hard with callus, the cracked nails rimed with grime. The crazy lady is something out of a bad dream: a rat’s nest of greasy hair skin all smeary like she’s taken a bath in oozy old blood.

Well yeah, okay, that might happen to normal people who live in towns and cities and don’t know how to reach through to the Dark Passages and pull things onto White Space, or travel between Nows. The sheriff thinks she’s been hiding since fall and sneaking out for food at night: She coulda slipped in when the contractors were here.

So she turns her head real slow, her gaze inching up to the ceiling vent-and there they are: two glittery violet eyes pressed against the grate like an animal’s at the zoo. That’s when Mom feels someone watching, too. But then Mom spies a dirty footprint high up on the wall of her walk-in closet. Marmalade, the orange tom, is such a good mouser. AT FIRST, MOM thinks there are mice because of that scritch-scritch-scritching in the walls.

White Space by Ilsa J. Bick