Katalepsis

And there, at last, she was.

That distant speck of flesh bore neither face nor feature; a formless smudge crushed in the shackles of ten trillion gallons of pressure and darkness. She — for it was she, it could be no other — was too far away, too deeply buried in her watery grave, beyond meters of glass and miles of ocean, locked in the heart of a machine of which she was both purpose and core, the reason for this reality, the fuel in this engine of suffering.

But still she struggled.

Even at that abyssal distance, hints of desperate motion shivered and shuddered the waters about that scrap of humanity, as if she was trying to swim. But her fight availed her nothing; she was held in place by a million wires glinting like spider-silk beneath moonlight, thrumming in silent mockery as her motion churned the deeps. Each stainless steel line linked that speck of flesh to the interior walls of the tank, holding her in place as surely as the pressure and the glass and the murk. Even if all the water in the world were drained, she would still not be free. She would have to be cut out of her prison, line by line.

Her name escaped my lips again; I tasted my own tears upon my tongue.

“Maisie?”

It was her. It was her. It was her. I could not see her face, but I knew it was her, with all the logic of the dream and the play.

My right hand splayed against the monitor, my broken reflection peering back between my fingers. I pressed — harder and harder and harder still — until the bones of my hand ground against the cold glass. I showed my teeth, hissing and whining with frustration beyond human speech, willing the dream to bend and break beneath my will, to push through the screen and tumble free onto the gantries and bare metal of that hidden place, with the leaking water and the flashing alarms and the lethal lithe predators darting through the shadows. For one glorious moment I thought I might shatter the dream asunder just as I had reality, to burst this final barrier of video and camera, to place myself before my lost twin sister.

But the screen was only glass. It creaked in the monitor’s frame.

I screamed in a way I never had before, howling with rage and denial. I pulled back my hand and thumped the screen, but nothing happened. I screamed again, and hit the monitor again, but all I did was hurt my hand.

Praem, still tucked down in the crook of my right arm, bade me gently to stop. This was neither window nor door, it was a camera feed. Observation at a distance, with no touch or taste or truth of presence. Stop, Heather. Stop. Stop. Stop.

I ignored her and pulled back my fist a third time, hiccuping and choking and heaving for breath. Maisie was so close!

Praem pointed out I would need both hands intact and unbroken, if I was going to free Maisie from the water and the wires. This would not help her. Stop, Heather. Stop.

I stopped, lowered my fist, and nodded, choking down a final sob. Crying would not save my sister now. I scrubbed my tears from my cheeks, sniffing back the rest, then cast another glance at that struggling scrap of flesh.

“Maisie, I’m coming,” I whispered. I framed her form with my fingers again, palm on unfeeling glass. “You just hold on. I’m almost there. I love you.”

If she heard me, she showed no sign.

Before I turned away from the wall of monitors, I took note of one essential detail; on the bezel of each monitor was a label — sometimes printed, sometimes stamped, some hand-written with the indecipherable scrawl of a professional doctor. Many of them were nothing but corridor numbers or locations within the hospital — ‘Floor 3, Corridor 8B’, ‘Main Hallway, Ground Floor’, ‘Cell Block H’. I had seen no physical cameras during my time out there in the nightmare of Cygnet Asylum, but that hardly mattered. None of this was literal. This bank of monitors was the Eye’s view of the world, of Wonderland, or at least of what I had broken Wonderland into.

The label on the bezel of Maisie’s monitor read: ‘Maximum Security Containment Facility / Core / Subject Zero.’

Eyes hot with the memory of tears, cold fury in my throat, with a quivering in my belly and my fingers clenched into a fist, I turned away from the wall of monitors, the inside of the Eye’s sight, and fixed my own observation upon the Governor.

She stood by the other, smaller, mundane desk, dark blonde hair framed by the night beyond the wide window on the opposite wall, like a halo of light in the darkness. One hand rested atop the towel-wrapped bundle of Horror’s head. Eyes of soft and rain-streaked sunrise stared right through me.

Her lips parted with a moist click, deafening in the silence of the office. “The archives are through—”

“Maximum Security Containment Facility,” I snapped. “Is that the ‘Box’ I’ve heard the nurses talking about?”

The Governor closed her mouth. Her gaze wandered away to rove across the monitors, then drag itself over the walls, then finally yawning wide at the door to the archives.

“Mm,” she grunted. “MSCF. Box. Same thing.”

“How do I get in there?”

“Through one of the main security doors,” she said, voice faraway and badly distracted. “There’s four of those. But they’re locked and guarded. And then inside there’s guns, and checkpoints, and other special guards. All sorts of things.”

“Take me there. Get me inside.”

Her gaze wandered back to mine.

“Take me there!” I repeated, my temper flaring hot and furious. “You’re in charge of this place, the hospital, this ‘containment facility’, whatever, all of it is you, yours! You take me there, you open the door, and you let my sister go!”

The Governor’s eyes wandered away again. “I can’t do that.”

“You—” I almost shouted, stomping forward, stopped only by the jarring flare of pain up the length of my left shin. My crutch almost slipped, threatening to send me sprawling. I righted myself and groped for the arm of the massive steel throne. The seat swung around on the ball-and-socket joint set into the floor, smooth and silent and perfectly balanced, inviting me to sit.

I all but collapsed into the chair, clutching Praem to my chest and my crutch to my side. Praem gently suggested I not get too comfortable; I assured her there was no threat of that, not with Maisie so close.

I panted for breath, sweat on my brow, shaking with anger and frustration and that heady drug I’d felt so little of for half my life — hope.

“Why?” I demanded, trying to keep my voice level. “Why can’t you take me there? Why can’t you let her go? You’re the one in charge here, aren’t you? Or is this another ‘night shift’ thing? I refuse to believe that I’m somehow the one keeping her imprisoned. I’m not, that’s absurd. That’s been you, all along. It’s always been you. Sevens is dealing with my nightmares, back out there. Everything from this point onward is you!”

The Governor shrugged beneath her white laboratory coat. “You’ve seen the containment facility. I can’t just walk in there and release her by myself. Questions would be asked. Systems would lock down, or lock up, or lock us out. We would probably both get shot.”

“Then we get shot!” I shouted. “Fine!”

The Governor glanced at me for an extended moment, then away again. “No.”

I sighed and rubbed the bridge of my nose, then looked back over my shoulder at the wall of monitors, at the scrap of Maisie inside that distant tank of water; the throne of steel made it easy, rotating on the ball-and-socket joint with the lightest touch. I stared at Maisie for a long time, perhaps thirty seconds, maybe thirty minutes. The other views on the monitors tempted and tugged at my peripheral vision, but they could not dislodge me from my goal, my twin, my Maisie.

I turned back.

“What do I need to do?” I asked. “To get in there, and get her out, what do I need to do?”

The Governor shrugged again. “I don’t know. She’s been there as long as I can remember.”

On the desk, Horror’s decapitated head twitched and let out a muffled, “Mm-mm-mmmm!” from behind her mouthful of towel. The Governor glanced at her without interest. “Mmmmm! Mmm-mmm!”

“Be quiet,” said the Governor.

“Mmmm!”

“Quiet.”

“Wait,” I interrupted. “Wait. Ungag her for me, please? I may as well hear her suggestion, it’s not as if I’ve got many other leads right now, if you can’t help me. Go on, please, remove her gag.”

The Governor unwrapped the lower part of the towel, leaving Horror still blind and bound, then uncorked her mouth.

“Pah! Peh, ugh. Bleh!” Horror spat and stuck out her tongue, working her lips up and down. “Oh, that was just frightful. You know there’s really no reason to keep me gagged—”

“How do I get into the Box?” I demanded. “The Maximum Security Containment Facility. Give me something useful or you’re going back in the towel. Talk.”

Horror tutted and sighed. Her head wobbled on the desk as if she was trying to tilt it sideways. “Oh, Heather. This is what I’ve been trying to protect you from! You don’t want to go in there! You do not want to confront that. You’re not ready or able or—”

“Wrap her back up,” I said.

“Wait!” Horror yelped. “Just look, look at the screens! You don’t want to go in there!”

I almost ignored her, but then some perverse and darkly urgent need sent my eyes over my shoulder, back toward the monitors.

And there, for a split-second, caught in the flickering, jerking, blood-red light of a blaring alarm, something looked back.

Sharp and spined and slick all over, strobing with dark-lit skin; too many teeth in a wide-set maw, below eyes made of glowing coal and bright-blown toxins; ghostly membranes dragged behind, flitting through the shadows; naked flesh was wet with ocean water, blood and gore dripping from clawed hands.

It vanished into the gloom, somewhere beyond the base of Maisie’s vast aquarium.

“You see!” Horror heaved. “You cannot go in there, not with those things running around, you—”

I burst out laughing in relief. Horror did not understand me at all. And Maisie was not alone.

“Wrap her back up,” I told the Governor. “Please.”

Horror was gagged again in seconds, muffled behind her towel. She complained a little, ‘mmm-mm’ing into the fabric, and then fell silent.

“Now,” I said. “Please, how do I get in there? How do I free Maisie? Just tell me how.”

The Governor shrugged.

I took a deep breath and tried to swallow my anger, my bitterness, my hate; the realisation that Maisie was not alone did help, but she was still beyond my reach. I could hate the Eye with incredible ease, for here we were inside the seat of her mind, with the evidence of her eyes before us — or behind my back, splashed all over the wall of monitors — and she still claimed she did not know how to let Maisie go.

“If … if forgiveness is what will free her, then I will forgive you,” I said, squeezing words up past the lump in my throat. “I am willing to accept that all of this was a mistake, an accident, ten years ago. We — Maisie and I — we fell into your world, into Wonderland, by accident, because of the actions of a man we’d never met, and you didn’t even know about, who was trying to feed you with things you didn’t even want or understand. And you took us for your own, because that was all you could see, isn’t that right? All you could see was yourself, reflected in us, in our minds, or something, I don’t know. I’m willing to accept this was an accident. I’m willing to forgive you. But you have to let her go.”

“I can’t. We’ll be stopped. There’s nothing to be done.”

I clenched my teeth, anger throbbing back. “If I’m your daughter, then isn’t she your daughter too? Don’t you want to free her? Can’t you see she’s suffering?”

“You are. She is. I do. I can. But I can’t. We’ll be stopped.”

“By other parts of you!” I snapped. “I don’t care if there’s armed guards, or automatic guns, or any of those things! You’re the authority here! You’re the boss, the ego, the mind. Let her go! Just let her go!”

The Governor stared at me for a moment, then picked up Horror’s head, dangling by a fistful of towel. “You couldn’t stop her.”

“What? What does that have to do with it?”

“You couldn’t stop her. You needed the Director. I can’t stop this. You and I are the same.”

I frowned at the Governor for a long moment, then grudgingly accepted she may have had a point; if Horror and the nurses were rooted in my own trauma, yet I could not simply order them to cease, then whatever this all represented for the Eye was not truly within her control either.

I snorted. “Being in charge doesn’t give you control, then? It’s lonely at the top?”

“Yes.”

“All right.” I sighed. “What if I help you? Can you free her then?”

The Governor looked down at the floor before my feet. Her expressionless face creased with a puzzled frown.

“The archives would be incomplete,” she said.

“ … pardon?”

“The archives would be incomplete. I’d have to start over again. It’s already taken so long.”

“What? I don’t understand, what does—”

“Help me with the project, with the archives,” she said, raising those pink-soft eyes to meet mine. “And then it’ll be done.” The Governor blinked. “Though I still won’t be able to get you in there to reach her. But they might.”

She raised her arm and pointed at the wall of monitors. I glanced back over my shoulder and realised she was not indicating Maisie. She meant the others, my friends and family and allies, all of them.

Raine and Zheng careening down a hallway, shoulder-checking a nurse aside; Lozzie leading her advance pack of feral patients, arming themselves with broken table legs and stolen crowbars and makeshift shivs; Praem and her group of Knights down in the dripping deeps of the prison, fighting some unseen foe; the slamming sextet of dark shapes out in the grounds which could only be the Caterpillars, chased by a mob of clambering shadows; the sleek dark form of the fox darting through the trees; Evee and Twil, holding the door of the infirmary; the unknown giant shape looming over the broken perimeter wall of the hospital grounds; and Sevens, waging her one-woman war against the staff in a corridor of abyssal darkness.

Lozzie’s revolution was bucking and tearing at the bonds of the dream. By morning the battle would be in full swing, one way or another.

All I had to do was make it through the night, and we’d start pulling down these walls, Governor or no Governor.

I turned back to her. “Do I even need your help?”

“I need yours.”

“ … pardon?”

She shrugged. “The project is unfinished. The archives are incomplete. Please. I don’t want to go back again.”

Realisation was cold comfort. I longed to leave this office and rejoin the fray, though my own limited strength and wounded body could make little contribution. But now I understood. My role was here, in the heart of the dream. Sevens had said it so clearly; I was the only one who could solve the Eye’s problem, the only one who could fix this knot of trauma, however alien it might be.

With the Governor on our side, the revolution could not be stopped, and the way would lie clear to Maisie’s prison.

“I help you, you help me, that’s how we’re going to do this?” I asked. “I help you with this project, and you’ll smooth the passage of the revolution? You’ll call off the nurses, announce a ceasefire, whatever I need? You’ll do all of that?”

The Governor shrugged. “I don’t see why not.”

“Promise me.”

“I promise you.”

I bit back a thick wad of anger still lingering in my throat; this was not what I had expected. I needed more than this, more than just a resolution. I needed closure, but maybe that was not to be had. Maybe that was the price of Maisie’s rescue.

“Do you … ” I swallowed, knowing I would regret this. “Do you understand what you’ve done to us? To her? To me? Do you understand any of it?”

The Governor stared at me, then looked away, to the big steel door on the right of the monitors. “The archives are through there.”

I sighed, bitter and disappointed. Would I never have real answers? “Why did I escape and Maisie didn’t?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why did you keep her here this whole time? Why did you never let her go?”

“I couldn’t.”

“Why not? What does this metaphor really mean?”

A shrug.

“Why did you try to teach me hyperdimensional mathematics? Why the ten years of nightmares? Why any of it? Why? Just give me something, anything.”

The Governor’s gaze flickered back to me. “I need to see.” She looked away and pointed again. “The archives are through there.”

Praem quite sensibly suggested that these lines of inquiry were fruitless, and I was sadly forced to agree. The Governor may have been the Eye’s ego, but she simply did not have any answers to my questions. In truth there was never a figure I could take vengeance upon for Maisie’s ten long years of confinement, and what that had done to me in turn. The Governor was no more than a metaphor herself, a representative of something which simply did not understand human beings. I had already gotten my revenge, hadn’t I? I had cast a harpoon into the Eye to force it wide, to force it to not look away from me. Revenge was pointless. Revenge would not bring back my sister.

I used my crutch to lever myself up and out of the massive rotating steel throne, staggering back to my feet. The Governor stepped away from the desk, heading for the door.

“No,” I said, pointing with Praem, pointing at Horror’s gagged and blindfolded head left behind on the desk. “She’s not staying here unsupervised. Sevens told you to take responsibility for her, so take responsibility.”

The Governor went back to the desk and picked up Horror’s head. Horror sighed through her gag, clearly disappointed.

I limped over to the heavy steel door. The Governor joined me and operated the locks built into the wall — one was a combination lock, the second a code pad, the third a thumb-print reader. Each lock beeped in turn, little red lights flashing to green. The door to the archives popped open with a hiss of air as the pressures equalised. The Governor swung the door wide, steel hinges silent in their dress of grease.

A bare concrete staircase, lit by naked bulbs behind wire cages, going down.

The Governor stepped over the threshold and descended the stairs, boots echoing against each concrete step. She did not look back to make sure I was following.

I glanced over my shoulder one last time, to gaze upon that hint of Maisie, that struggling scrap trapped in her ocean of water, a speck of pale meat flickering and twitching behind the glass of the monitor.

A face peered back at me from another screen — skin of peach-leather and dove-down and void-dark, shifting into a dozen colours, sleek and smooth and sharper than sound. Muscles rolled, oiled and buttery, built for grace and speed and sinuous perfection. Clean spines, razor teeth, poison quivering in her barbed tips. Polychromatic eyes went yellow, then pink, then black. Membranous wings unfolded over her shoulders, slick with water dripping from their rims. The webbed fingers of one hand splayed against the glass of the camera, as if she was trying to push her way out of the prison and into the world, as if she was trying to reach me — as I was her.

“I’m coming for you, too,” I whispered. “Hold on, and watch Maisie. I’ll be there soon.”

The face of Homo abyssus vanished, darting back into the shadows of the Maximum Security Containment Facility, chased by the stutter-flash of silent gunfire.

I turned to follow the Governor, down into the archives. The metal door swung shut behind me with a sharp click, echoing on the bare concrete.

“Down we go,” I hissed.

Descending those concrete stairs began easily enough, but did not stay trivial for long; I took the first flight quickly, my crutch-tip gripping each step, my slippers scuffing, my left leg grumbling but not bursting into open complaint. The stairs met a narrow landing, then turned, then continued downward into the harsh-lit earth. The Governor stayed a few paces ahead as we went. A second flight led me forward, then a third snagged my soles, then a fourth slowed my feet, all joined by those narrow landings of dull and empty concrete. The electric lights blazed, not a shadow in any pitted nook or rough corner, just harsh white illumination forever and ever. Our footsteps echoed down and down and down.

By the third flight my left leg began to ache worse than before. By the fourth the arm which gripped my crutch whined with the effort of holding me up. By the fifth I almost stumbled, lurching forward, scrabbling with my free hand to catch the bare metal bannister. I did, and saved myself a trip to the floor.

Six, seven, eight, nine, on and on, down and down, numbing my mind to nothing but a nub. By ten flights down I was sweating and shaking. No abyssally-toned muscles here, no Raine to carry me in her arms, no tentacles to fling myself down the shaft at top speed. Just feet and sweat and down, down, down, down, down, down—

On the eleventh flight, I tripped.

My crutch flew out from under me with a catch-start slip. My right hand flailed to catch the bannister again, but I could not do so without letting go of Praem. I felt a desperate grip flutter at my elbow — strong and firm, secure in her competence, Praem trying to keep me steady. But her perfection was not enough, not without her full physical body. I screamed, careening forward, about to crash down the flight of stairs and slam my skull into the wall or bounce my neck off a corner or break a bone on a—

The Governor caught me, hands on my shoulders.

She righted me without comment, jammed the crutch firmly back into my hand, and tucked Praem into the crook of my other arm.

“Watch your step,” she said. “Long way down.”

Then she turned away and carried on.

I expected to feel some shivering disgust at her touch, but her hands were simply hands, neither too warm nor too cold. She had smelled of nothing except the fabric of her lab coat. I tucked Praem halfway into my yellow blanket, just over my heart, so she could peer out and keep watch, then placed my right hand on the handrail. No chances this time, no messing about. I gripped hard, and carried on down.

And down.

And down.

And down.

Down.

Down.

Dow-

D—

—

The concrete stairwell terminated after twenty seven flights of stairs. I reached the bottom ragged with exhaustion, sagging under my own body weight, but still in one merciful piece — except for all the sweat I’d shed into my clothes, technically. The final landing was a plain concrete box with one door leading out.

The Governor paused before that plain white interior door, her hand hovering a few inches from the stainless steel handle, for far too long.

“What’s wrong now?” I asked.

“This is it,” she said.

“The archives, yes? Is something wrong?”

“Nobody but me has ever been inside before,” she said. “This is a strange feeling. It is enough that you help me.”

The handle creaked, as did the hinges; a taste of cold fog and the scent of paper brushed my face. The Governor stepped through without fanfare, onto an oddly familiar thin brown carpet. I followed on her heels, prepared for the utmost extremes of alien metaphor.

Instead, I found myself standing in a library, one which wore familiar clothes.

Rolling stacks stretched off into fog-drowned distance — library shelves made of grey plastic, tall and heavy and wide-set, mounted in rails on the floor, with handles on their ends so they could be moved back and forth. I recognised those shelves, that configuration, that colour, that shape; the carpet, the scent in the air, the close-packed silence. All of it I knew so very well.

All of this was Sharrowford University Library, wrapped in heavy fog lying in dense canals between the shelves.

Endless rolling stacks marched away into the fog ahead of us, swallowed up by the grey gloom and questing tendrils of mist. To the left and right, the same scene repeated at a forty five degree angle, then at another forty five degree angle, endless rows of shelves stretching out into misty infinity. The Governor and I had emerged from a solid cylinder of concrete which rose up and vanished into the hanging fog a mile above our heads. To either side of the concrete cylinder more rows of stacks stretched away into endless mist, and the same behind, so that the stacks formed an octagonal shape around this vertical entrance to the archives. The cylinder was the hub of a wheel, the rows of shelves a set of sixteen parallel spokes. But the rim was lost in the fog, too far away to see.

The Governor shut the door.

“Here we are,” she said. “The archives.”

Her voice was muffled by the fog, swallowed by the immensity of the dreamlike room, sinking into millions upon millions of books.

I tore my eyes away from the clinging infinity of book and shelf, and looked closer to hand. The space between the concrete cylinder and the start of the shelves was perhaps twenty feet of plain brown carpet. A desk stood close to the door — nothing special, a simple writing desk with sturdy legs and a wooden top. It was littered with bound manuscripts in flimsy plastic covers, like archived dissertations in the basement of the real Sharrowford University Library. A few battered hardback tomes weighed down the various manuscripts, stuffed with bookmarks and little strips of paper.

Further away from the door was a free-standing blackboard, half-covered in an unfinished equation which I recognised; it was the same equation the Governor had been writing on the blackboard in the infirmary, the one she had halted before handing me the chalk, expecting me to finish the mathematics. This version ended at the exact same point.

A little way toward the start of the library stacks themselves stood a long, low table made of clean white wipe-clean plastic. It was occupied by a lumpy, incomplete figure.

I gaped at the thing lying on the table, then staggered closer for a better look.

The head was made of felt and fuzz, with eyes punched through the fabric; blood and bile and other fluids had seeped through the material and dried on the plastic table. Hair was string, yellow for blonde, unravelled and loose, stained with grease. No jaw, just a slash for a mouth, with teeth made from pieces of paper left to curl with age and blacken with sticky fluids. The body was mostly green garden wire, held together with messy clumps of duct tape, stuffed with handfuls of raw meat and mouldy sticks to serve as bones. The hips were a mess, the joints were all wrong, though an attempt had been made to get some kind of articulation for the femurs — made of old broom handles snapped and taped together. For arms the figure had tubes of chicken wire; forks served as hands, gone rusty and corroded. The feet were stubs of wood. The only piece of clothing was a pitiful attempt at sewing a poncho; the colours were all wrong, grey and black.

It wasn’t moving. It wasn’t even alive, just unconnected inanimate matter.

The Governor walked up beside me.

“It’s Lozzie,” I murmured. My voice was as muffled as the Governor’s, as if the fog and the books had robbed me of the power of speech. I cleared my throat and spoke up. “Or, no. It’s your attempt at her, isn’t it? This is the Lozzie-thing, the Puppet, the thing you made!”

The Governor stared down at the mess on the table. I tried to read her expression, but there was so little in there, no creases around her eyes, no twitch in the corners of her lips.

“I couldn’t get it right,” she said. “No matter how hard I tried.”

“Get what right?” I demanded. “You tried to create — what, a person? Why?”

The Governor stared and stared and stared, but the Puppet did not move; tides of fog lapped from the open mouths of the nearby library aisles, over-topping the shelves with pale grey-green waves, reaching toward the Lozzie Puppet with tendrils of mist, always fading to nothing before they could touch.

“Why?” The Governor echoed. She finally raised her eyebrows, as if surprised by her own thoughts. “If I created her well enough, then she might see me. She might look back at me. She might help me with the project.”

I shook my head. “A person as a mirror?”

The Governor shrugged.

“Why Lozzie?” I pressed.

The Governor’s surprise sank back into the foggy placidity of her face. “Somebody gave me a lot of information about her.”

“ … Alexander Lilburne? Her brother. Yes?”

“I’m not good with names. I have to keep notes. Whoever it was, they gave me a lot of information. I thought that would be enough to create a new one. But it wasn’t. It’s never enough. No matter how much I gather.”

“But then you sent her to bring me back to Wonderland. You sent her to fetch me. Do you not remember that?”

“Only when I realised she couldn’t see me.”

“Is that all you wanted me for? To see you? To look back at you? Well, here I am! Is this not enough?”

The Governor shrugged, still staring down at the Puppet.

“Why … why not have Maisie see you, then?” I asked, groping for meaning. “She’s been here for ten years. Isn’t that enough time to do whatever it is you’re trying to do here?”

The Governor finally raised her eyes from the dead matter of the Puppet, but she did not look at me. She stared into the fog-drowned library stacks ahead of us, then off to the left and the right.

“Yes,” she said. “But it’s not enough to merely collect. The project has to be finished.”

I sighed, long and hard and losing my patience.

All of this was a dream, a metaphor, a play made of obsessions and traumas, as much the Eye’s as my own. But this fog was so much more frustrating than a simple opponent to scream at or slay. I believe I would have preferred if the Eye’s avatar was some cackling, gloating, dark lady villain, straight out of a Saturday morning cartoon, somebody I could hate with ease and fight to the death without a second thought. If only she’d been like Evee’s mother, or akin to Horror, or some horrific floating eyeball trailing tendrils like the stingers of a jellyfish.

But instead of catharsis and release, I had this befuddled old doctor, so softly spoken, obsessed only with her private library, without an evil bone in her body.

I flexed my hands — my empty right, and my sweaty left wrapped hard around the plastic handle of my crutch. I tried to imagine my fingers crushing the Governor’s windpipe. Could my pain-sapped, morphine-doused, dream-born strength knock the Governor to the floor and bounce her head off the carpet until her skull excavated the concrete beneath? Could I claw at her eyes and pluck out those pinkly glistening orbs? Could I kill her?

Praem — still tucked into the side of my yellow blanket, peeking out to offer her aid — suggested this was a rather counter-productive notion.

I sighed again, this time in total agreement. Toward the figure of the Governor I could muster no real anger, certainly not killing intent. With Evelyn’s mother I had been consumed by rage and the need to rescue my beloved friend. If the Governor stood over Maisie and kept her imprisoned, that would have been a different matter, oh yes, then I could have fought. But she simply didn’t hold those keys. Rage was pointless.

“Tell me,” I said, speaking up to attract the Governor’s attention; that didn’t work, as she continued to stare off into the fog and the library shelves. “What is all this? All these books, this library.”

“Everything,” said the Governor.

“Be specific. Is this a Library of Babel situation? Do you have all of reality compressed in here? Or all of Wonderland? Is that what we’re looking at?”

“Everything.”

I resisted the urge to whack her with my crutch, not wanting to fall onto my backside all over again, and instead swung myself away from the pitiful Lozzie Puppet laid out on the table. I limped over to the little desk next to the door.

The topmost book on the pile of manuscripts was titled ‘Reflections of Orange Cut Swift, Volume MMMMDLXXIII.’ I flipped it open to one of the bookmarks.

‘—the great tower came down all in a hush on the year my fourth daughter died. That was all I recalled in the six months between sunrise and sunset, for I was afflicted most terrible with the grief and the wailing; three of my wings had been broken when I had cast myself from the window of our apartments; scarcely could I drag myself here and about for water and toilet; so that Bites Freely and Upon The Sound Of Rushing Water had to nurse me for the entire period of day. Great shame lay heavily like rocks upon my grief; but then toward the hours of dusk the Priest who I had known as a larva called Not So Wise came to visit and we talked for many hours about what comes after death and what follows is an account of our musings and—’

Up and down that page and onto the next the text went on much the same. I moved the book aside and selected another, titled ‘Of The Years Between, Volume 5.’

‘—starlight to the left, nebula to the right. Travel. Eight hundred and seventy eight years, three months, seven days, fourteen hours, two seconds. Interstellar hydrogen harvest falling short. Hungry. Swarm maintained coherency. After time, gas giant light reflected from star strong enough for readings. Unsuitable home. Disappointment. Four dead on system exit. Argument resolved. We swing outward again. Next star, 20,000 years distant. Wings folded. Currents exchanged. Course set. Predicted—’

I flicked forward a few times, but the book went on and on like that for well over a thousand pages. I pushed it aside and flipped open a manuscript instead, to a random page. This one was called, ‘Memories Of Feeding.’

‘—there was blood in my mouth after the act, but it was too much at first, too much to swallow without it spilling out down my cheeks, falling into my belly in waves of gushing gold and green. It had become to me like a seminal fluid, sweet and noxious as life itself; Caratus had been correct, the transformation had changed even my sense of taste and the sensibility of my loins. The man did not struggle in my arms long, for my fangs eventually found his nerves as well as the channels of his blood, and he died before he could shout a warning to the brood-guard before the portal—’

Another — ‘The Long Year On The Hills.’ Random page.

‘—two sheep fell down a crack today. Couldn’t get them out with my stick, so I had to fetch some rope, which meant a trip into town, which meant I saw the old woman outside the florist again. The flowers had mated and the result was all a-terrible screaming—’

Another.

‘—seven is not a magic number and this I refute before council and queendom, on pain of being food for our most blessed queen so to for fill her stomach with enough meat for a thousand eggs laid—’

Another.

‘—the trees were all dead after the eruption but the land was clean and ready for the next stage of the process—’

Another and another and another, on and on and on. I flipped open more manuscripts, but they were much the same — endless stories of all kinds, some dramatic or horrific or human, but many so obviously alien, written for alien audiences by alien minds. Had the dream compressed these down into a human form, an interpreted version of whatever texts these had originally been? Were these books from Outside, translated into English?

The Governor paid me no attention, still staring off into the fog.

“What are these?” I called out to her, holding up one of the bound manuscripts. She finally looked around. I waved the manuscript, this one titled ‘Break Down In The Sump Where I Died Of Starvation And Thirst And Exposure’. I had wisely declined to read any of that one; far too grim for our current circumstances.

The Governor stared at the manuscript in my hand, then said: “Everything.”

I pursed my lips. “You are supremely unhelpful. Did you know that?”

“No.” The Governor shook her head. If she was offended by my rebuke, she didn’t show it.

I sighed and slapped the manuscript back down on the table. “I don’t understand. What is this, a collection of books you’ve acquired from Outside? A catalogue of meaningless drivel? And what about that?” I gestured at the blackboard. “What is that equation for? What does it do?”

“That is the expression of the project. You can finish it.”

“And what is the project?”

“To read it all.”

My turn to shake my head. “I don’t understand. I don’t understand what any of this means. What is this room? What are all these books? What is this?”

The Governor turned away again, staring off into the fog which rolled and pillowed between the library stacks; for a moment I thought I’d lost her attention, and that I would have to walk over and poke her in the side before I could get any sense out of her.

But then she raised a hand and pointed ahead, into the row of shelves directly opposite the door.

“I’ll show you,” she said. “Then you can see.”

Without so much as a backward glance, the Governor strode off between the shelves, instantly welcomed and swallowed by a thousand tongues of fog.

“H-hey!” I squeaked. “Wait, wait for me!”

I hurried to join her. At the threshold of the shelves I paused, where the fog seemed to thicken and tug, fingers of mist plucking at the edges of my yellow blanket and tracing the bulge of my bandaged leg, wrapping empty fingers around the base of my crutch and cupping Praem’s plush chin.

The Governor was receding into the distance, an indistinct figure sinking into the still and silent murk.

Praem pointed out that once again, I did not have any other choice, and I did not want to get left behind without my guide in these strange and dreamlike depths.

I plunged ahead, clutching hard to my crutch, trying to ignore the mounting throb deep down inside my left shin.

Unlike every previous time I had hurried after the Governor, she quickly got away from me; the tail of her white lab coat vanished into the fog ahead, her booted footsteps swallowed up by the murk, her dark blonde hair turning pale, then translucent, then gone.

“Wait!” I croaked. “Wait— wait for me! Wait!”

Within moments, I was alone in a deep cistern funnel filled with fog and shelves and books.

“Dammit,” I hissed. “What now?”

Praem suggested I carry on; perhaps I would find what the Governor wanted me to see. I agreed, if only because there was nothing else to choose.

The tip of my crutch caught steady and secure against the rough carpet of the library. My leg ached with a subtle pulse of pain, but after a few steps the sensation became routine, easily dismissed, as if the pain was being leached away by the tendrils of fog. My pace was slow but steady, passing by the towering shelves set in their rails, with their well-oiled handles and their grey plastic faces.

Each set of shelves had a label on the end which faced into the aisle. Some were printed, others stamped; a few were hand-written, similar to the labels on the monitors upstairs. Was this the Governor’s own penmanship?

Most of the labels were completely incomprehensible — alien names, date formats from impossible times, subject areas which sounded like riddles — but as I progressed down the empty aisle between the rows, I began to notice a pattern. The library was organised not by category, that was merely an illusion caused by the sheer number of texts; the shelves were descending in alphabetical order, though we had entered somewhere around the letter ‘J’.

A sinking feeling settled into the pit of my stomach.

“No,” I hissed. “No, it’s not possible.”

It is, Praem said.

“Easy for you to say,” I whispered into the fog. “I … I would rather not know … ”

But I could only push on.

Doing so was easier thought than performed. I limped deeper into the fog for what felt like hours, reading the esoteric and occult labels on the end-caps of the shelves, and peering into an occasional open row, at thousands of books wedged tight in their places. The ache in my leg got worse and worse; how long had it been since my last dose of morphine? Praem said not yet four hours. I must wait. I must be sensible. So I waited and I walked, hobbling onward, lurching, staggering, past the end of ‘J’ and through the wilds of ‘K’ and ‘L’, until I finally reached the outskirts of ‘M’.

By then my suspicions were worse than the pain. My heart was in my throat, a fist in my guts. A few minutes later I stopped next to a row of shelves with a very familiar name written on the end — handwritten by the avatar of the Eye herself.

‘Morell, Heather.’

A dozen rolling shelves all bore of my name. And after those dozen came another, almost swallowed by the lapping edges of the cold and clammy fog — ‘Morell, Maisie.’

I clung to my crutch like driftwood in the sea, dwarfed by the grey plastic shelves like the shores of some vast and undiscovered continent, peering into the first open row labelled with my own name. I wanted to be sick. I wanted to shut my eyes. I wanted to run away.

“Praem,” I hissed. “What is this?”

We better have a look, Praem advised.

“But what … ”

Praem did not know.

I crept into the row, slinking beneath the shadow of the bookshelf. The plain plastic shelves themselves were stuffed with loose-leaf manuscripts, hardback tomes, spiral-bound notebooks, and laminated cards. A few of the hardbacks boasted actual titles, ones I recognised — there was Watership Down, and there was The Hobbit. I pulled both of those off the shelves and checked their contents; they seemed normal enough, matching the stories I knew so well. Here too was a collected works of Shakespeare, with Hamlet and Lear in their proper places.

But the hardbacks were in the minority. None of the other entities had titles, only catalogue numbers printed on the spines or on little sticky labels stuck to the covers. There were hundreds of roughly bound manuscripts on one shelf alone, and six shelves to each row, and a dozen rolling shelves in total. Too many.

I walked deep inside, where the shadows were heaviest and the fog the darkest.

There I found the text marked ‘M.H.1.1.’

Shaking hands drew it forth, feeling nothing like my own. Praem told me I was going to be okay. I balanced the manuscript on one arm and opened the first page.

‘On the day I met Raine, the first thing I did was jerk awake in bed and vomit nightmares into my lap.’

Eyeballs blossomed in my brain, peering and searching; fingers scratched and groped at the inside of my skull.

I slapped the manuscript shut, gasping for breath, choking back a wave of vomit. “What … what … what is this … oh, oh, no, no no, that’s … me? I—”

I grabbed another bound manuscript from further down and yanked it off the shelves, then let it fall open at random.

‘Of course, that wasn’t how it happened at all. There was no lightless abyss, no hole and no wall, no voice to whisper and no ears to hear. We didn’t use words, we used mathematics. We spoke in the language of atomic force and gravity, of starshine and photons, but I can’t tell you about that. I can’t even tell myself about that.’

I dropped that manuscript and grabbed a third.

‘I’d grown used to Evee’s anger by then. I thought I understood it, that I understood her, at least better than I had back when we’d first met. Before we’d become real friends — and then perhaps more — I’d found Evelyn’s anger intimidating at best, actively frightening at worst. Short-tempered, bitter, acerbic, often directly insulting, sometimes accompanied by threats of physical violence, omni-directional, not even sparing herself from her own ire, it was easy to see Evelyn Saye as the ‘nasty bitch’ she so often tried to project. But I’d come to understand that Evee wore her temper like a suit of armour.’

I threw that one at the shelves and staggered back, breath ripping through my throat, on the verge of hyperventilating.

Eyes, eyes inside my brain, looking down into my soul; hands and fingers and all scrabbling about against the limits of my skull. I clawed at my own forehead, heaving for breath, as if I could pull the sensation out of me.

Praem told me to take a moment and breathe — but I could not. I lurched upright and staggered out of the row, back into the central aisle, fog clutching at my ankles and whirling past my shoulders. I limped down to the furthest of the shelves labelled with my name, then plunged back into the stacks, looking for where it all ended.

I grabbed one of the last manuscripts — ‘M.H.24.1.’ My fingers shook so hard I could barely peel back the pages.

‘My eyes snapped open, deep in dreary dread-drenched dark, in a place I did not know.

I jerked upright, clawing at my racing heart, clutching scratchy bedsheets to my heaving chest. My breath came in ragged gasps. My skin was coated in cold sweat, gluing my pajamas to my clammy back and belly. Rusty bedsprings creaked beneath my slender shifting weight.’

That was me, when I had arrived in Cygnet Asylum; I felt those clawing fingers scraping at the inside of my skull again as if trying to scratch me clean, eyes blossoming in my own grey matter and peering into my deeps. I tossed that manuscript aside and grabbed the next, then the next, then the next, then—

‘That was me, when I had arrived in Cygnet Asylum; I felt those clawing fingers scraping at the inside of my skull again as if trying to scratch me clean, eyes blossoming in my own grey matter and peering into my deeps. I tossed that manuscript aside and grabbed the next, then the next, then the next, then the next, until I found the very last. I stood reading my own words unfolding upon the pages as I created them. It made me want to tear the paper apart or turn and void my guts onto the floor. Praem told me to stop, but my eyes were dragged on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on—’

“Do you see?”

A gasp snapped me back to reality. I flung the manuscript at the shelves, like the pages were laced with poison; it fell to the floor with a moist slap. For a moment I was terrified it would twitch and rise and scuttle after me. I stumbled back, crashing into the shelf at my rear, clutching for support, heaving for breath, shaking all over.

“You see.”

The Governor stood at the end of the row, blotting out the fog, her shadow stretching to brush my toes.

“That was—” I panted, trying not to surrender to a panic attack. “That was me! It was all me. All me. The inside of my own head, splayed out in text. Me, standing right here, reading it. What … what … ”

“Yes,” said the Governor.

I looked toward her. Pink eyes frosted in the fog.

My breathing slowed. The eyes in my brain eased shut, scabbing over with neurons. The clawing fingers against the inside of my skull ceased to scratch. I pulled myself upright, leaning on my crutch.

“This is the inside of you,” I said. “Isn’t it? The inside of your head, inside your mind.”

“Yes,” said the Governor.

“Me, Maisie. Everyone you ever observed. All the others, all those lives dragged into your orbit, from a thousand — or a million universes. This is the inside of you.”

“It is.”

“This is everything you’ve ever observed.”

“Everything,” echoed the Eye.