Katalepsis

Scratch-tick-tap-scratch-tick-tap.

The Governor’s stick of chalk flicked and dragged across the blackboard, a stuttering white spark in the gathering gloom of an early evening, cradled in the spider-clutch fingers of a dusken hand, palm and wrist melding into the softly squirming shadows. Tendrils of shade lapped at her messy mane of dark blonde hair, as if trying to straighten out the tumbled tresses. Red-orange light filtered through thickly cloying cloud cover beyond the windows; the last glint of a ruddy sunset snagged on the metal angles of the dozen wristwatches she wore on her right forearm, framed by the rolled-up cuff of her laboratory coat. The night crept upward to swallow the swinging globe dangling from her other hand — Horror’s severed head, wrapped tight in a towel.

Scratch-tick-tap-scratch-tick-tap.

The infirmary was choked with umbral tide; evening was dead, falling gracefully into the grave of night. Through the uncurtained windows, the grounds of Cygnet Hospital lay beneath crests and peaks of flowing darkness, crowned by the thinnest remnant of the sun’s falsehood.

No sound reached out from the rest of the asylum, as if all the patients were sleeping in their beds and all the staff had gone home for the day, or retreated to their night-time posts, or simply vanished with the passing of the light. Even Evelyn and Twil were perfectly quiet in their premature slumber, though I could see their chests rising and falling with soundless breath.

All was silent and still. All, except that unceasing skitter-scatter — scratch-tick-tap-scratch-tick-tap.

Adrenaline drowned my brain and flooded my nervous system. Breathing was almost impossible. My skin broke out in cold sweat, sticking hair to scalp and clothes to flesh. I clutched the Praem Plushie in clammy palms, wide-eyed at the Governor’s back, at her bold shoulders beneath her lab coat, at her tumble of dark hair, at the swish and flick and jerk of her hand as she drew chalk across board.

How was this possible? The door was still barred by a filing cabinet, a big metal monster which only Twil could move with ease. Why had Twil and Evee not awoken? The scratching and tipping and tapping, it was so loud! The sound jabbed at the inside of my skull, prickling my eyes with tears, provoking the edge of a sneeze.

And what was she — the Governor, the Eye, the Eye’s embodied ego? — what was she doing?

Mathematics, of course.

She was writing out an equation.

Panic surged up from my guts in a wave of nausea and vertigo; the sneeze was strangled by the taste of bile in the back of my throat. The Governor had spoken to me, hadn’t she? And now she was performing hyperdimensional mathematics, and only the horrors of Outside knew what nightmares would flower from those numbers and—

Praem — a plush Praem, held in my sweaty, trembling hands — bid me to take a deep breath and stay calm.

I nodded. I took that deep breath. Panic ebbed back down my throat, though it still burned in my chest.

“Evee,” I whispered as loudly as I dared. “Evee? Evee, wake up. Wake up! Evee? Evelyn?”

Evelyn slept on; perhaps she could not hear my voice over the scratch-tick-tap-scratch-tick-tap of the chalk. I reached out and did something I would never normally contemplate, — I grabbed Evee’s shoulder without warning or permission, hard and rough and careless enough to hurt. I shook her. I squeezed. I dug with my fingertips until I found collarbone and scapula. I even used Praem, pressing the plushie to Evee’s shoulder.

But still she did not wake.

“ … Twil? Twil, wake up! I need help. Twil!”

I had to lean further to reach Twil in the same manner. She was no more responsive than Evee. They both slept on, holding hands, breathing in slow silence.

Alone. Alone with the Eye. Alone to face—

No! Praem insisted.

I dragged my eyes downward to meet those flat discs of stitched white, going grey in the thickening shadows of the night. She was right here. Praem, who was in many ways as much my spiritual daughter as she was Evelyn’s. Praem was right there with me. I need not face fear alone.

But face fear I must, or else the Governor would complete her equation without me.

“ … stop,” I croaked, raising my voice. Louder. “Stop. Stop writing. Wait for me. Stop! Please!”

Scratch-tick-tap-scratch-tick-tap. The Governor kept writing.

A plastic and metal crutch stood propped against the side of my bed; the Governor had put it there, so that I might walk on my injured leg. That was a good sign, I told myself. It meant she wanted me to get up and go over there and join her. She was not simply performing brain-math upon us, without knowledge or consent. I was expected to participate in this process, whatever it was.

My throat closed up. My hands shook all the harder.

A lesson.

The Eye wished me to join her for a lesson. We had gone without one for almost a year, had we not? And finally she had me where she wanted, back in a nightmare, back in the classroom, back with the mathematics once again.

I could not let her dictate the pace. I had to intervene.

I slipped my left arm through the supporting loop of the crutch and gripped the textured plastic handle in a sweaty fist. With my right arm, I hugged Praem to my chest, safe and secure. Then I levered myself to my feet, took one unsteady step, and—

A hundred tiny knives ripped open the flesh of my left shin.

The bandage was clean and unblemished. The dressing was intact. No blood leaked through Raine’s loving and delicate stitch-work. But the pain choked me on my own gasp, blinded me with tears, and made me want to vomit. The sole of my foot could not endure the slightest pressure. I could not walk, even with the crutch.

Scratch-tick-tap-scratch-tick-tap; the Governor’s equation now filled a full quarter of the blackboard.

“Stop … ” I whined. “Please, stop.”

If I tried to cross the room — a dozen steps? More? — the pain would knock me out or drive me mad.

A row of pill bottles stood on the counter top, amid the peeling white paint and the dubious dark stains, about to be swept into the clutch of the crawling shadows. The counter was only three or four paces from the foot of the bed. I could make that. I forced three deep breaths down my throat, then clenched my jaw until my teeth squeaked. Raine and Evelyn and Twil had bought me time and clarity. Praem supported my other arm. I could make it! Three or four steps was nothing. I could make it, I could!

Never before had I held Evelyn in such reverent respect as upon the eternity of pain I spent crossing the width of that infirmary.

Evee always made it look so easy, walking on one mechanical prosthetic and one withered leg — which could barely hold her weight — swinging her walking stick like an extension of her body. Evelyn strode, strutted, stomped, and stamped with style and substance. But me? I sweated and shook and slipped, hauling myself along on that shivering crutch, my good leg almost buckling underneath my meagre body weight, swallowing a scream when I was forced to put pressure on the sole of my injured leg.

I reached the counter top and slumped against the wrinkled wood, panting for breath, sweat running down my face, sticking my pajama top to my back. The pain was creeping higher now, fresh barbed wire forcing its way up through my veins and arteries to tear at the meat of my thigh and chip away at my hipbone.

Painkillers — codeine, hydrocodone. Pill bottles jangled and echoed, shoved aside. Not enough, not for this pain.

The bottle of morphine threatened to slip from my sweaty hands. I gripped harder, scrabbling at the lid with my fingernails. Broke the white plastic, let it clatter to the counter top. Couldn’t read the tiny text on the bottle, blurred by tears and shadow. Had four hours passed since the first dose? Would I poison myself with opiates if I took more right away? How many tablets, how many should I swallow, how many—

Praem assured me that more than four hours had elapsed. She instructed me to swallow two pills.

My juddering hands extracted four pills instead; I let two fall onto the counter and roll away, too desperate and distracted to pluck them up and return them to the bottle. I shoved the little disks into my mouth, dry and hard and small. A glass stood at my elbow, holding less than a mouthful of lukewarm water. I tossed it down anyway, then swallowed. The pills scratched and stuck as they went. I almost choked, coughing and spluttering.

But down the morphine went.

The painkillers hit my stomach like honey drowning a fire. I stood for too long, gripping the counter top, swaying suddenly, my vision eaten away by the darkness at the edges.

Praem guided me to a bottle of antibiotics. I needed my second dose, lest the first be wasted. The pills were chalky chewable circles. They tasted like lemons.

Praem told me to slip both bottles into my yellow blanket. I might need them later.

Scratch-tick-tap-scratch-tick-tap.

The Governor’s flicking stick of ghost-white chalk had reached the halfway point of the blackboard. The equation glowed in the shadows, the letters and numbers and spiral-shape figures rising in phantom phosphorescence out of the falling night. Her blonde hair swayed as she wrote, dragging across the laboratory coat. The last of the sunlight was almost gone.

“Stop,” I croaked again. “Stop writing. Please, just wait for me.”

Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that oral opiate tablets should take thirty minutes or more to start functioning, to wash away the pain and the care, to leave me able to walk without screaming and blacking out. But I did not have thirty minutes. I did not have even three.

I put Praem down on the counter top — “Just for a second, I promise, I promise, won’t leave you here” — then fumbled with the cuff of my left-hand sleeve. I pulled back the ribbed brown jumper, then the soft pink pajama top with the strawberry pattern. The Fractal shone on my skin, darker than any shadow. Stark black lines and perfect angles, pure and uncorrupted by the touch of the dream.

Praem returned to the crook of my right arm; I hugged her tight, to my chest. I gripped the crutch once again, angling my body weight so I could stagger forward.

Morphine dripped downward, leeching into my wound, pushing back the pain.

Off I went, striding into the dark, toward the Governor’s back and the ceaseless flickering of her chalk, trying not to scream as I put weight on my left foot. Where were my slippers? Raine must have removed them before she’d carried me to the infirmary bed. Ah, there they were, fallen by the door. Too far for the additional steps. Too far to divert. To swing that way would break my momentum and send me crashing to the floor. My poor feet would have to remain cold for now. A little chill hardly mattered.

I lurched like a drunkard upon the deck of a sailing ship, lost in the worst of all storms. I slammed into the desk, hissing and grunting, using the impact to re-route my own balance. Then I staggered sideways, reeling forward, and fell against the wall, next to the edge of the blackboard.

Scratch-tick-tap-scratch-tick-tap. The Governor kept writing.

“Stop,” I croaked. “Stop. Stop writing. Stop. Stop!”

Scratch-tick-tap-scratch-tick-tap.

I righted myself and stood on both feet, despite the grasping claws of pain inching upward. I extracted my left arm from the crutch and thrust it forward, pointing the Fractal at the Governor.

“Stop!”

Scratch-tick—

She stopped writing.

The Governor paused, a wavering shadow outlined by the glass of the window, a high nose and powerful cheekbones framed by a mane of darkest blonde. Her spine was very straight beneath her laboratory coat; her chest showed a swell of coffee-coloured jumper, a perfect match with my own. Her face, free of even the tiniest blemishes, without even a single mole, was blank and bored. Eyes pink as blood-frothed water glowed faint as if with distant inner light.

My mouth was bone. My hands were frightened doves. My heart hammered against Praem’s fabric-and-stuffing body.

“What are you doing?” I said.

She circled a portion of the equation with a loop of chalk. Then her arm hinged outward, offering me the shining white cylinder.

I started to shake my head, but then I took her seriously; I straightened up as best I could, taking my own weight on legs and crutch, tugging my yellow blanket tight across my shoulders. I examined the equation, but I could not make head nor tail of what it was meant to mean. It spilled across the blackboard in ghostly figures, thousands of them packed shoulder to shoulder. The numbers and symbols meant nothing.

“I’m not any good at mathematics,” I said. The words felt absurd, but they seemed the right thing to say. “Not without the rest of me. Only one seventh of me is here right now. You must know that.”

The Governor gestured vaguely with the stick of chalk, encouraging me to take it from her.

“I can’t,” I said, voice tight with new-found fury. “It doesn’t mean anything to me. I don’t understand. I never understood why you did this to me. I mean, yes, I have working theories now — you were trying to propagate yourself, spread yourself, make a copy of yourself, find a mirror into which you could look and see yourself. Or it was all a mistake, because we were just cuckoos in your nest, yes, fine. I know all that. But I still don’t understand.”

The Governor gestured with the chalk again, slow and easy.

“Look at me,” I hissed.

The Governor turned her head — slowly, haltingly, dragging her eyes across the equation as if her gaze caught upon the figures. She stared for a moment at the number seven, then a three, then at a symbol I did not recognise. She stared at the darkness beyond the blackboard, pausing upon the wall, then on the filing cabinet which blocked the door.

Finally her eyes met mine. She did not withdraw the stick of chalk.

“Take it?” she said.

Raine had been correct; the Governor spoke with a distinct Reading accent, my accent. Her voice was floaty and soft, like the wind through a field of drying cloth. We did not look alike, the Governor and I. Her face was bold and sharp where mine was round and soft. Her skin was dusken dark where mine was pale and pasty. She was taller than me by more than a head. Her hair was thick and luxuriant. Her eyes were empty and elsewhere.

Only our accents matched — and the jumpers we both wore, brown as cream-rich coffee.

“I can’t do anything with it,” I said. “I was never able to refuse you before. In the dreams, the nightmares, the decade of nightmares. I could never say no. But now I can tell you no, can’t I? Because you have ears, like this. So no, I won’t take the chalk.”

She blinked. Twice. Looked away. Then back at me again.

“It’s yours,” she mumbled. “Take it?”

Praem suggested this was a good idea. If the Eye — or the Governor — did not have the chalk, then she could not return to the equation. At the very least, we would be more in control of the situation. Good idea, Praem. I reached out with trembling fingers and plucked the ghostly white stick from the Governor’s grasp. Our hands did not touch. The idea of touching her flesh made my skin crawl.

She watched me take the chalk. She had no reaction, neither good nor bad.

As I took the chalk, I noticed something.

“Your watches have all stopped,” I said. None of the dozen watches on her right arm were ticking. All their hands had ground to a halt.

She withdrew her arm and glanced at her watches, moving her gaze from wrist to elbow, as if struggling to rake her attention across the petrified faces. Her eyes flickered away again, losing interest. Then, back to me.

Eyes the colour of crushed brick and powdered shell. Rain-clouds at dusk, swallowing a dead sun. The rim of morning. Pink like entrails, flower-buds before the storm.

I shook my head, bewildered and numb, unsure what to say. What can one possibly say, to the avatar of a nightmare which has haunted one’s dreams for half of one’s life? My mouth felt dry and my leg ached, but most of my fear had fled. Why was I unafraid? Because this metaphor for my decade of nightmares was nothing compared to the reality. The Governor was nothing compared to the Eye. The Governor was so passive.

But she was the Eye, in the same way that I was Heather.

“Are you lucid?” I said eventually. “Do you know what you are?”

The Governor shrugged, eyes wandering away. “I know I can’t leave.”

“I’ve never spoken to you before,” I said. “Not really. You and I, we don’t speak. You can’t speak. You just communicate in … well, in this.” I gestured at the inscrutable mathematics on the blackboard, the glowing letters thrusting outward from the night’s skin. “Is that what you’re trying to do? Are you trying to speak with me?”

The Governor blinked. “I don’t have time for this.”

“Time for what? Time doesn’t matter, this is a dream, time will bend to accommodate whatever we do. I’ve rendered you down into a human shape. Or at least part of you. You can just use your mouth. You can talk. Talk to me. Tell me … why.”

She shrugged.

“I never wanted your lessons,” I said, a strange cold anger dying inside my chest. “I never wanted any of it. I wanted to be a normal person, an ordinary person, and live with my sister. But you, you took all that away and shoved this shit into my head and … and … ” A shuddering breath went through me. “And if you hadn’t, I never would have met Raine, or Evee, or became what I am now. I don’t understand how I should feel about you. Should I feel anything at all?”

The Governor watched this truncated outburst without expression.

I sighed. “Why am I even saying this to you? You don’t care.”

“You need to finish the equation”, she said.

“Why? What does it do? What’s it for?”

“It’s for you.”

“I just told you, I don’t want your lessons. I cut you off a year ago, because I don’t want them anymore. You see this?” I gestured with my left arm, raising the Fractal. “This is a restraining order. No more of you.”

“I know.”

“All I want is my sister back. All I want is Maisie.”

The Governor blinked, brow crinkling — with incomprehension. Did she not understand?

The Governor looked away from me, dragging her eyes across the equation once again. Then she looked out of the window, then up at the sky — no, at the ceiling, blank and covered with a clustering of shadows. But it was the sky at which she gazed.

“How can I be both above and below?” she asked. “How can we be more than one? We’ve always been just one.”

Praem prompted me with something I would not have considered — empathy.

“ … are you lonely?” I asked.

The Governor lowered her gaze and looked at me. “I need to see myself.”

I shook my head. “I am not your mirror.”

The Governor shook her head too. “Not what I meant.”

“You can’t see yourself in a reflection,” I said. “That’s just the physical self. If you want to see yourself — your real self — reflected, then you need context. Other people. Community.” I sighed and squeezed my eyes shut. “What am I even saying? Why am I saying any of this to you? You’re … you can’t comprehend any of this. Can you?”

“We are both trapped, are we not?”

I opened my eyes to find the Governor staring back at me, still without expression.

“Have you been watching us?” I asked. “Me and my friends? Have you been watching what we’re up to, following our progress? Do you understand why we help each other, why we want to help each other? Is any of it getting through to you? Is this play reaching you?”

The Governor looked back at the equation. “I don’t have time for this. You need to finish the equation.”

I almost laughed. “I can’t! I’m reduced. I’m one seventh of myself. And it’s your institution which has done this to me, to all of us. This place is the inside of you.”

She glanced out of the window again. “Not my intention.”

“Where are the other six of me?” I demanded, not expecting an answer.

“Restrained. Captive. Boxed up.”

“ … in the ‘Box’?”

“Mm,” she grunted.

Hope surged in my chest. “And Maisie is in the Box, too?”

“Mmhmm.”

“How can I get into the Box?”

She shrugged. “Through a door, I suppose.” Her gaze wandered back to the equation again. “Are you going to finish this?”

I sighed. “I keep telling you, I can’t. I don’t understand any of the mathematics. I need you to teach me, all over again. Is that why you’re here?”

The Governor looked at me — suddenly, sharply, her pink-frothed eyes clearing of haze and distraction.

Lucid, the Governor saw me.

I almost stumbled back, clutching my metal crutch, crushing Praem to my chest in quivering fear.

“I’m here because you understand,” she said. “Because you and I understand each other. We are the same thing. We seek the same thing.”

I snorted — a weak little laugh, a feeble defence. “You’re a god and I’m your angel. Is that it?”

“You are my daughter,” she said.

I sighed, the fear ebbing away. “No, I’m not. I have an actual biological mother, who gave birth to me. You just … adopted me. Against my will. By force. I mean, you kidnapped me. Me and Maisie. Why did you never let her go? You have to understand … ” I trailed off and swallowed, surprised by the bile rising up my throat. I had not prepared for this, for a face-to-face chat with the thing which had kept my twin sister imprisoned beyond reality for ten long years. “You have to understand how angry I am with you. With what you’ve done. Keeping her and I separated, keeping her here. I … I don’t even think you understand the concepts, but I could easily hate you for that.”

“Do you hate me?”

I was lost for words. What was hate, to something like this? She didn’t care. Hate was irrelevant. “No,” I said. “Because there’s no point.”

The Governor’s gaze wandered away again, over the equation. She shrugged.

“I need to return to the archives and finish my work.” she muttered. “Then I will see.”

“ … pardon?”

She shrugged again. I’d heard her perfectly, but I didn’t understand.

“What are the archives?” I asked.

“Everything,” she muttered. “Every detail. All which needs to be seen.”

“And what does that mean? What do you need to do in the archives?”

“All I need to do is finish going through the archives. Once I’ve finished, everything will make sense. Once I understand, everything will make sense.” The Governor turned away from the equation, back to me again. “Are you going to finish this?”

I glanced at the numbers one last time, chalk pinched between my fingers. I asked Praem if she knew how to do this — she had opened the door to Wilson Stout’s office, hadn’t she? But Praem said she could not. This was true hyperdimensional mathematics, irrelevant to any maid.

“I can’t,” I said eventually. “I keep telling you, I can’t.”

The Governor nodded. She slid her hands into the pockets of her lab coat with the finality of putting on a hat and scarf.

“Wait!” I snapped. “You’re in charge of this place, Cygnet Hospital, the asylum. You are the authority, you’re in charge. If you want me to finish this equation, or you want to finish whatever you’re doing in the archives, then let us go.”

The Governor looked at me without expression, pink eyes glowing faintly in the dark.

“Let us go,” I repeated. “Dismiss all the staff, all the doctors and nurses. Throw open the cells, the prison, the high-security wing, all of it. Let us go before the next riot. Because if you don’t, the riot will grow, the revolution will win. We’ll sweep the staff aside and knock the walls down, either metaphorically or literally. And then we’ll halt your work with the archive. It’ll never be completed, whatever it is. We will halt your work.”

The Governor stared at me, and said: “I would like that very much.”

Then she stepped around me, heading for the barred door.

“Don’t just leave!” I snapped. “Let us go! Or at least explain what the archive is! Hey!”

She crossed to the door; it was no longer barred. The filing cabinet stood aside. The door itself opened, yawning on the near-to-night darkness of the corridor beyond.

“I could show you,” she muttered. “I’m going back. You can come, if you want.”

“I … I can barely walk!” I said. “My leg is killing me, and that’s with a fresh dose of morphine.”

The Governor paused in the doorway and looked back at me, then down at my leg. “Mine too. Same spot.”

“ … pardon?”

“We’re the same. I told you, we’re the same. We understand each other. You should look at the archives too. Maybe you can help. Maybe you were supposed to help all along. That would be pleasant. I would be … less … singular … ”

The Governor trailed off, turning toward the darkness. She stepped out into the corridor and turned left, heavy boots slapping on the floor as she strode away.

“Wait!” I snapped. “Wait for me, you— dammit!”

I stuffed the stick of chalk into my yellow blanket and hobbled over to my mud-befouled slippers. Getting them onto my feet was not easy, even now the morphine had soaked into my bones; putting too much pressure on my left leg sent a strange echo of pain upward from my shin and into my thigh and hip, like the sound of a bowling ball rolling slowly from wall to wall down an empty hallway. It didn’t actually hurt, but seemed as if it should, like biting one’s lip after having a dental anaesthetic. My body was calm and easy, but my mind knew that I would pay in pain later on.

With my slippers jammed onto my feet, I staggered toward the open door, swaying on my crutch like a ship with a broken mast. The Governor’s footsteps were vanishing toward the edge of my hearing.

In the doorway I paused and lifted the Praem Plushie to my face. We looked back together, toward where Evelyn and Twil slept on, oblivious to our departure.

“Should I follow her?” I hissed, asking Praem her advice. “This isn’t safe, I know this isn’t safe!”

I was addled by opiates and half-sunk in dream logic, but I was not stupid — venturing out, alone, into the darkness, on the heels of the Eye itself, barely able to walk, was by far the most stupid thing I could possibly do in this situation. I should slam the door shut and lock it fast, then try to drag the filing cabinet to re-create the barricade. But this was my chance to find out what the Eye really wanted. She would lead me straight to this ‘archive’, if only I could follow.

But was I stepping into a trap?

Praem said yes. Obviously. This was unsafe. Do not attempt to follow the Governor. Close the door and stay—

“Heather?”

The Governor’s voice floated down the hallway outside. Her footsteps had stopped.

Perhaps she had decided to give me a proper answer. I checked with Praem. Praem said it was okay to look, but don’t follow. Don’t follow. Don’t leave everyone else behind.

I lurched out into the corridor.

To my right was darkness, dingy walls, and dirty floor. To my left, twenty feet or more down the hallway, a single yellow light bulb guttered above an intersection, casting sickly grey light across the corners of painted plaster.

The white hem of the Governor’s laboratory coat flicked around one of those corners.

“Wait!” I hissed into the darkness. My voice returned as a chorus of echoes — wait wait wait wait … “Where are you going?! I’m not going to follow you! Come back! Talk to me, you—”

The light bulb in the intersection guttered out.

Darkness was absolute. For a split-second I could not even see Praem’s fabric face, tucked into the crook of my arm. I hiccuped; the sound was flat, without echoes, as if I was buried in a box.

Then the light bulb burst back to life, like a dying body gasping for one more breath.

The door to the infirmary was gone, replaced by a whitewashed plaster wall. The junction ahead had vanished; the corridor had straightened out — and out and out and out, stretching off into infinity. A corridor of infinite length, punctuated by occasional flickering light bulbs between an infinity of nothing. The Governor stood beneath the first such struggling bulb, facing toward me, hands thrust deep into the pockets of her laboratory coat. Her pink-froth eyes seemed to look past my shoulder, as if penetrating the shadows to my rear.

“Don’t dawdle,” she muttered.

She turned on one heel and walked away, boots clicking against the cold floor, stepping out of the light and into the darkness, as if her feet created the reality beneath her soles.

“Oh,” I hissed. “Oh, oh no.” I glanced back down at Praem. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Praem. I’ve left Evee behind. I’m so sorry. This is my fault, I take responsibility, it’s my fault, I shouldn’t have stepped beyond the door. I’m such a fool, I—”

Praem told me not to worry. This wasn’t my fault. I cannot have been expected to know the Governor would have authority over the physical walls and portals of Cygnet Asylum. That was just cheating.

But I should have expected anything; this was a nightmare, after all.

“We can get back to the infirmary, we can,” I whispered to Praem. “I’m not doing what the Eye — the Governor, whatever she is — wants me to do, and right now she obviously wants me to follow her, she—”

Praem directed my eyes to the corridor ahead and impressed upon me that I did not have a choice. At my rear stood a wall of darkness. The corridor ahead was a straight line, unbroken by branches or junctions, punctuated by that weak light struggling against the night beyond the walls. The Governor was receding into the distance, laboratory coat flapping about her calves. Soon she would leave me behind, alone in the dark.

No path existed save on the heels of the Governor.

“I’ll get us out of this,” I hissed, then swallowed a hiccup. “I promise I will. Hold on tight, Praem.”

I swung my crutch forward and lurched off in pursuit, driven by anger and outrage as much as fear or curiosity. The Governor — the Eye, I reminded myself with a grunt and a snarl of effort, as I caught my body weight and hauled myself onward, crutch-tip squeaking against the floor — had lured me away from my friends, away from those who mattered, and then trapped me with a dirty trick as soon as I was separated from those who helped define what I truly was.

“Wait for me, you … you … horrible thing!” I hissed at her retreating back.

The lights flickered at the sound of my voice. I cared not. Morphine pushed back the fear.

My lurching stagger ate up the corridor; my head spun with sudden vertigo, but I crammed my eyes shut and carried on. Within thirty seconds I caught up to the Governor’s clicking heels. The sober part of my mind knew that was impossible, but Praem suggested I not consider that fact too closely. We walked between pools of flickering electric light, oases of weak and watery illumination separated by oceans of darkness. In the gloom between the lights, nothing seemed to exist except her and I, and the sound of our feet.

“Where are you leading me?” I demanded.

“Where you asked to go,” said the Governor. “To the archives.”

“And what are the archives? What do they archive?”

“Everything,” she muttered, voice drifting away on the empty black air. “All of it.”

“Everything what?!” I spat, wishing she would pause for a moment so I could smash her in the ankles with my crutch. “All of what? What is in the archives, all of what?”

“Observations.”

And as she spoke that truth, the lights guttered out, plunging us into the abyss.

When they flickered back on, we were no longer walking down a corridor of infinite length, vanishing toward a point miles distant. That had just been a filthy lie to get me out of that room, to peel me away from my friends, away from my protection and my context. Now the Eye and I were walking down an ordinary hospital corridor, walls punctuated by doorways and junctions. A stairwell loomed ahead, climbing toward flickering bulbs.

Now is your chance, Praem reminded me. Get away from her as soon as you can.

Right, I agreed. Absolutely! Time to slip away and get back to the infirmary. Time to leave!

Yet the institution itself denied my escape with great and intentional efficiency; as we passed the open mouths of empty corridors and plodded up winding staircases, every route but the one ahead was choked by darkness. The Governor strode on past lightless junctions and the gaping holes of many doorways. Each was filled with black, the walls and floor vanishing into lightless immensity within a foot or two. I had no torch or mobile phone, no way to pierce the darkness except my own opiate-fogged vision. I wished for my tentacles, my other six selves, strobing as bright rainbows from my flanks; together we would have made a mockery of the darkness, turned it into a playground, no obstacle at all.

But I did not have any of that. I was one, alone, singular, and I could not see in the dark.

I hobbled on at the Governor’s heels, hoping always that the next corridor, the next junction, or the next stairwell would provide an alternative route, a flickering light bulb in the distance, a hint of a way out. I waited for an exit.

I waited in vain. Every corridor was impassable with darkness, all but the one we already trod. The Governor walked on, click-click-click, heading always for the next island of electric illumination, the next set of flickering light bulbs in the ceiling, the next buzzing fluorescent bar attached to a hospital wall. We passed banks of windows blinded by the night outdoors, the last rays of sunlight finally swallowed up by the horizon of the Eye. We hurried on through gaping hallways that seemed to open into nothing on either side, as if we walked on a tightrope above an abyss. We trod past row after row of closed doors, the little windows looking in on the unlit cells of patient residential rooms. Nothing and nobody stirred within.

Twice I almost stepped from the path, willing to brave the dark just to avoid whatever deeper trap the Eye was leading me into. But both times I halted, then scurried back toward the Governor’s heels, for I saw shapes moving in the deep darkness beyond sight — inhuman outlines, warped and twisted, wrapped in scraps of nurse-like uniform.

The staff of Cygnet Hospital still stalked the night-time corridors.

Raine might be able to outfight or outrun a nurse, but I was unarmed and disabled. If I left the Governor’s side, I would not make it back to my friends. What an irritating and insulting irony.

After several long minutes of walking — of staggering and lurching and clutching at my crutch — I drew level with the Governor, to walk beside her rather than at her heels. I glanced up at her eyes, but she simply stared straight ahead as she walked. Pink glow burned deep behind her irises.

“May I ask you a question?” I said. “Will you answer?”

“Of course. That is the first principle of teaching.”

I clenched my teeth, but I did not waste my breath on a rebuke. “Where are the archives?”

“Below my office,” she said. “Beneath.”

“And where is your office?”

“You’ve been there before. You should remember that.”

“Humour me. Pretend I don’t know. Just tell me where it is.”

“We’re going there right now.”

“Tell me where it is.”

“You should memorise the route.”

Praem reminded me that there was no point in losing my temper. This was a dream, and the Eye was not the Eye, merely an avatar, an expression, a small piece of a whole. The Governor was an idiot god at the centre of the institution, concerned with only one thing — the archives.

And myself, I supposed; she was taking an interest in me. She was taking me to the archives, but wished me to know nothing else but that which she was going to place in front of my eyes.

The Governor led me deeper and deeper into the core of the hospital. We seemed to move into administrative areas, carpeted and whitewashed, with doors that opened on lightless offices and bookkeeping rooms, with a hint of desks and shelves pinned behind the wall of night. The stretches of darkness between the electric lights grew longer and longer, with light bulbs flickering at the far ends of elongated corridors, so that we trod across vast expanses of twilight emptiness between pools of reality.

And the staff — the nurses — began to surround us.

The misshapen figures never entered the pools of light, nor came close enough for the overspill of clean yellow illumination to reveal the truth of their features. They gathered in the mouths of empty corridors and lurked around the door frames of abandoned offices. Each one wore a clean white nurse’s uniform — the only element of each figure which caught the distant, dim illumination they so steadfastly avoided. But each uniform was stretched and warped in new directions. They came in all varieties, details hidden in the shadows: lumpy, humpbacked, bulging with ropes of muscle; writhing, tentacled, wet and moist and dripping in the darkness; stick-thin and jerking, quivering and shivering faster than sight could follow. Their faces were worse, concealed by the gloom; some had their features jumbled into a chaotic mess, while others wore their expressions upside down, with eyes on the bottom and mouth up top. Many nurses had no face at all, merely a flat expanse of featureless flesh, or sagging folds of wrinkled grey, or trunks of drooping matter that looped downward to connect with a handless wrist or a shrunken belly. They carried restraints, straitjackets, plastic cuffs, and brimming syringes, all cradled in quivering, jerking, twitching hands of too many fingers with too many joints.

Here was the truth beneath the human face of the asylum, pressing in from all sides, revealed by the paradoxical darkness.

The Governor’s presence kept them at bay. Or perhaps that was Praem’s work, cradled in the crook of my arm, trying her best to protect me from harm.

“What … ” I tried to whisper, but found my mouth had turned to dust. I hiccuped, painfully. “What do they … ”

The nurses stepped out behind us as we passed through the darkness, pressing thick to our rear, filling the corridor with a mob of flesh and uniform. The Governor was leading me toward a final distant light — a thick yellow bar glowing above the frame of a plain double-door, casting clean warm welcome in a semi-circle beneath the portal. The door was open by just a crack.

How could I tell this was the final light? Dream logic, morphine, and madness.

“What do they want?” I hissed, not expecting an answer. “The nurses. What do they want?”

“To make you better,” the Governor said. “To heal you.”

“I don’t believe that for a second,” I whispered, trying to swallow, my throat closing up. “They’re a metaphor for part of you, part of what you want. Aren’t they? Yes, fine, they’re built from my own memory of medical treatment, but you can’t seriously expect me to believe this is—”

“I have no jurisdiction over the night shift.” The Governor glanced down at me, pink eyes glowing faintly in the darkness. “Night is your time.”

“ … what? You’re saying I’m doing this? But I—”

A nurse stepped out in front of us.

Human once, perhaps still so by daylight, the figure’s form was like melted candle wax stained with sewer water — mottled grey and green, sagging here, pinched there, the whole thing listing to one side as if weighed down by the mass of a bloated leg or over-large arm. She cradled a set of syringes in her hands, their fragile glass filled with noxious green fluid. She had no face, just a series of holes in a soupy grey surface.

Her name tag was illegible in the darkness.

The Governor stepped around the nurse without breaking her stride, but I stumbled to a halt and almost fell, catching myself on my crutch and my bad leg. A stab-pulse of pain jaggered up my thigh like a bolt of pale lightning, overcoming the morphine in my blood. A gasp caught in my throat, spittle running down my chin. I grabbed Praem in my right hand and held her out like a talisman, to ward off evil spirits.

The nurse reached for me with one misshapen hand, fingers like burst sausages — but then she paused. Praem held her back.

The Governor strode on.

“W-wait!” I croaked. I lurched to the side and hauled myself around the nurse, hurrying to catch up with the Governor. The nurse turned as I circled her, watching me with those empty holes in what could not be a face.

Panting for breath, I rejoined the Governor. She did not spare me a glance as she walked on.

“I am not doing this to myself!” I snapped. “This is a metaphor for you, you’re doing this. Call them off!”

“I have no jurisdiction over the night shift,” she repeated.

“You’re in charge!”

“I’m afraid of the dark.”

I was shocked speechless. I almost halted. “What? Why? What difference does the dark make to something like you?”

“Can’t see in the dark.”

I blinked several times, stunned by the simplicity. No observations could be made in the dark, if one could not see. To a being that was all observation all the time, darkness must be like ceasing to exist.

But I’d always enjoyed the dark, the shadows, the comfortable gloom where one could rest at ease.

Perhaps we were not alike after all.

I glanced around at the nurses who filled the doorways and corridors we passed. Were they on my side, in some metaphysical sense I could not yet comprehend? I gave the question serious consideration, then decided no, that was impossible and ridiculous. The nurses represented everything I hated. They were intruders, infesting the natural calm of the darkness I enjoyed. They should not be here. The institution would not be so bad if only they were gone, if only they would—

This time a trio of nurses staggered into our path.

I lurched to a halt, swallowing a scream.

The Governor stopped, then quickly turned herself sideways and slid between two of the nurses, popping free on the opposite side. Three more nurses moved in to fill the gaps through which she had fled. She turned back and looked at me, pink eyes glowing over the faceless heads and hanging trunks and mangled masses of flesh that could not be called faces.

“You have trapped yourself,” she said.

“I’m not doing this to myself!” I almost screamed, holding Praem up in one hand. “Tell them to move!”

“They’re not mine,” she said.

Behind me, more nurses were gathering, shuffling and dragging and swaying forward out of the darkness. They filled the sides of the corridor, blocking me off both in front and behind. A wall of stretched and broken white uniforms barred my way, filled with inhuman masses and dripping sores and twitching bundles of unidentifiable limbs. All flesh seemed to meld into the darkness, becoming one with the gloom, both emerging from it and merging into it at the same time.

“Get away from me!” I shouted, waving Praem as if she was a lit torch and the nurses would recoil from her fire.

They stayed back, but they did not retreat. I was trapped by a ring of staff, by the many mouths and hands and avatars of the institution.

“Are you not coming?” said the Governor.

“I can’t! I can’t push through this, they’ll— they’ll capture me, I— I don’t even want to touch them, I won’t touch them, they can’t make me, can’t make me do anything, anything, anything—”

The Governor raised a towel-wrapped bundle, dangling from her left hand.

Horror’s head. Had she been carrying it this whole time? I could not recall. I could only remember her hands being thrust into her pockets. How could she have carried Horror all this way, without my notice?

With a gentle underarm throw, the Governor tossed the towel-wrapped head into the scrum of nurses.

For a moment of reeling confusion I thought she was somehow trying to help me, trying to scatter the nurses like pins before a bowling ball. But the misshapen, twisted, flesh-beast creatures neither parted nor recoiled. They writhed as if they were a single organism, some occulted orifice accepting the bolus of Horror’s severed head.

A shudder passed through the crowd. Shoulders shrugged and heads moved aside. Arms rose, lifting an unwrapped package.

“No,” I hissed. “No, no no no no!”

Horror — A.HORROR — stared down at me, held aloft by a dozen nurses, with her loose blonde hair spilling from the sides of her decapitated head. She alone remained unchanged, the pretty face atop the ugliness of the institution.

She smiled, broad and bright. The hands leaned forward, as if the nurses’ arms had become a substitute for her neck.

“You’re dead!” I screamed up at her. “You’re dead! We killed you! And your boss is standing right there! Aren’t you supposed to be afraid of her?!”

Horror smiled.

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that, Heather,” she said, voice scratchy and raw, crusted by dried blood blocking her throat. “She can’t see in the dark.”