White Space by Ilsa J. Bick Read Free Book Online

about this novel,
Satan’s Skin
, came from this and a few other jotted entries. The plot involved a demon-grimoire stitching itself back together, only the pages had been reused in other books and so the characters kept jumping off the page while debating the nature of quantum realities. Some loopy
Matrix
meets
Inkheart
-with-a-vengeance crap like that.
    Her
story was about these eight kids stranded in a spooky house during a snowstorm who begin to disappear one byone. Okay, it wasn’t
all
original; she’d taken a cue from this awesome John Cusack movie. (Sure, the film was completely freaky. All the characters turn out to be alters: different personalities hallucinated by this completely insane, wacko killer. But the idea that people who
thought
they were real
weren’t—
well, it was just so cool.) Her first draft had written itself, pretty much. Considering how writing creeped her out, this should’ve tripped some alarms.
    As it happened, her story was a subplot of
Satan’s Skin
. There were differences. In McDermott’s version, the kids—and yeah, there were eight—were nameless. The oldest, a complete psychopath, murdered his nasty drunk of a dad, who deserved it, the abusive SOB. (All McDermott’s dads and quite a few moms were the same, too. Guy had some serious parental unit issues.) In her version, the characters had names, but her hero—this sweet, sensitive, gorgeous, hunky, completely
yes-please
guy—had killed his nasty dad in self-defense and was haunted by what he’d done.
    Both her draft and McDermott’s fragment shared something else: neither ended. Kramer said McDermott’s note stopped in midsentence, a little like
Edwin Drood
, although Dickens had the decency to put in a period before up and dying. Hers was like McDermott’s. Not only had she written herself into a corner; she couldn’t figure a way to tie up all those loose ends. The last sentence just sort of floated all by its lonesome. Since her assignment was only a first draft, she had the go-to of needing feedback from the Great Bloviator … er, Kramer.
    But, to be honest? Imagining a final period or
the end
setup a sick fluttering in her stomach. She just couldn’t do it. She’d never admit this to a soul, but … well … her hero was the perfect guy and she … she really
liked
him. In
that
way. Okay, okay, fine, she even
daydreamed
about him, and how lame was that? Mariane had this stalker thing for Taylor Lautner—seriously, the girl was obsessed with those pecs and that six-pack—but at least she drooled over a real guy. Emma’s perfect boyfriend was an idea that lived in her head, but he was also so
real
, the most well-rounded of her characters. The others were just one-dimensional placeholders. This guy she actually thought of as a complete person. Wrapping up his story would be so
final
, a lowering of that damn bell jar. Once done, her guy was finished, no way out of the box—not unless she decided to chuck science and write herself into
The Continuing Adventures of Emma Lindsay, Loser and Social Misfit
. Maybe that was why writers did sequels; they just couldn’t let the story really die.
    Anyway. Her draft and McDermott’s fragment were virtually identical.
    “Other than the madwoman in the attic, which is so utterly Brontë but perhaps understandable considering Meredith McDermott’s long history of mental illness, that subplot is baffling,” Kramer said. “It’s as if these teens in
Satan’s Skin
are … stand-ins? Alters? Different possible versions and aspects of McDermott himself? Because, clearly, the man’s reworking his abusive past. That miserable childhood in Wyoming always haunted him, and of course, the snow and deadening cold are symbolic of slow soul murder. Very Joycean, wouldn’t you agree? He does much the same with the mother in
Whispers
—absolutely brilliant; we’ll bereading that after break … and of course, madness as a slow cancer, a rot eating away at the very