Katalepsis

I was watching the Governor finish writing down her story — leaning on the edge of the neat little desk in the archives, tracking the swish and flick of the marker pen across the page, witnessing her undergo a transition from personal narrative to introspective philosophy; I was also trying my best to keep my mouth firmly shut, unless I was asked specific questions, because I did not wish to unduly influence her choice of destination. This was her story, her process, her thoughts to think, and I would not interrupt unless I was sorely needed. Even when the words ‘It is the same thing!’ and ‘I am still blind!’ spilled forth from her quivering hand, threatening once again to spill tears from her pinkly glowing eyes, I kept my lips sealed and my opinions to myself, though I did risk a gentle hand on her shoulders. She was not alone in this, even if she was the sole author of her experiences. I had pushed her to this solution, and though I still harboured a terrible bitterness toward her, after reading her metaphor of the abyss, I could no longer hate her.

She had been lost and alone and so very tiny, so deep in the darkness, surrounded by predators and monsters. But unlike my own long abyssal descent, she had never learned to soar through the black, never seen beauty in herself, never found anything but nature so red in tooth and claw.

I was still watching — at that moment of her decision to help me — when the ground began to shake.

The floor of the archives juddered and jarred, as if slammed sideways by some incredible violence. At first I assumed one of Lozzie’s Caterpillars had finally regained true size and burst through a distant wall, but then the quaking continued. The whole vast library-chamber vibrated with tectonic force, shaking the little table from side to side and almost knocking me off my feet. I went reeling backward, clutching at my crutch as the tip lost traction and skidded across the carpet.

All my body weight slammed down on my injured left leg.

“Ahhh!”

A gasp-scream of white hot pain spluttered from my lips. Tears filled my eyes, burning and blinding. For a moment my lungs refused to work.

I tottered backward, grip and footing both gone, about to crack my head open on the ground — but then the Praem Plushie, Praem herself, was suddenly back at my side, wedged tight beneath my right arm, providing more support than a ball of felt and fuzz could possibly have exerted.

I lurched to regain my feet, clinging to my crutch like driftwood in a storm. I tried to thank Praem, but I could only splutter; my leg was like a cracked bell.

Praem told me to concentrate on keeping my balance.

All around us the ground was creaking and groaning; the concrete pillar which contained the stairwell emitted the most terrible cracking and splitting, like an oak tree finally beaten by a storm. A little way from the desk, Horror’s detached head wobbled back and forth inside the corral of books we had used to pen her in, then fell sideways as the books collapsed on top of her. The free-standing chalkboard swayed back and forth; the table with the Lozzie Puppet rode the shaking, but threatened to topple the incomplete figure onto the floor. The distant walls, lost far beyond the infinite fog of the archives, moaned like the insides of a ship at sea. The fog itself churned and whirled as if kicked up by a sudden breeze, but did not — or could not — enter the octagonal refuge in the hub around the entrance. Beyond the fog, I heard the tumble of thousands of books and volumes and manuscripts sliding from their shelves and crashing to the floor in great waves of paper and card. The shelves themselves shook hard in their rails, rattling and banging back and forth.

I heaved for breath, the wound in my leg screaming for the attention of every bodily cell. Sweat ran down my face. My heart raced in panic.

But the Governor — the Eye — kept on writing, her pink-glow gaze glued to the shaking page.

With a jolt of fear, I recognised the quaking beneath our feet — not an earthquake, not the clash and grind of tectonic plates, but the same sensation of bucking and roiling that we had experienced back in the real Wonderland, before the dream-play world of Cygnet Asylum had blossomed from our collective unconsciousness.

An Eye-quake. Wonderland itself, changing beneath our feet.

Praem told me to hold on. Wait a moment. Wait and hope. There was nothing else we could do.

But I opened my mouth and shouted over the furious noise: “Are you doing this?! Is this you?! Stop, stop it, you’ll bring the whole place down on us!”

The Governor lifted her pen from the page. She straightened up and stared straight ahead.

The quake ceased.

For a moment neither of us moved, poised in the sudden silence of the aftermath. The fog on every side rolled back and settled amongst the shelves once more, like waves receding into a maze of coral. I panted for breath, straightening up on my crutch, every muscle tense and ready for an aftershock or second round. A few loose books tumbled to the floor somewhere far away, slipping and sliding and clattering against their fellows. Horror’s severed head was making a soft ‘mmm-mm!’ noise, muffled to near silence by the towel stuffed into her mouth.

“What … ” I croaked, then cleared my throat. “What was that?”

The Governor did not look at me; she continued to stare straight ahead, at nothing. For a moment I was terrified that she had broken herself somehow, broken her place in the dream and the play, and returned to being just the giant eyeball up in the sky. Or perhaps she had regressed, and stopped seeing at all. Perhaps she had blinded herself, and become something less than the sum of her terrible fears of darkness.

“ … Governor?” I croaked, for want of a name.

She swallowed, then blinked several times. Twin trails of glistening tear-tracks were drying on her cheeks.

“I have finished writing,” said the Governor.

“Okay? Okay. That’s … that’s good. Well done. Um … may I … may I take a look?”

“Yes.”

I adjusted my weight on my crutch, trying not to wince at the flare of pain inside my left shin; my ungainly stamp during the earthquake had done real damage, and the limb throbbed and burned as if acid was eating away inside my flesh. I staggered back over to the little desk, then caught the edge to take my weight. The Governor still did not look up at me, so I peered at the final words she had written on the page. The letters were broken up and mangled by the motion of the quake.

'th e groun d is sha king this all fe els so ex citing !

I he ar so many nurs es?? no t mine. hea ther ’s. we w ill get r id of th em together .

I

o p e n'

My blood went cold.

“What do you mean, ‘I open’?” I said, voice all a-quiver. “What do you mean? Governor? Governor? Hello?”

The Governor finally turned away from nothing and looked at me; I was equally shaken and relieved to find her gaze was still wide and intense, gone almost bug-eyed now. She took a deep and cleansing breath. She did not quite smile — I don’t think she was capable of the expression — but I saw the elation and release in her eyes, the new life in their pinkly glowing depths. I saw, to my great surprise, my own face reflected in her eyeballs, myself within her, shown in miniature.

“I am opened,” she said. She sounded almost surprised.

“Metaphorically, allegorically? Or do you mean literally? I’m sorry if I sound a little concerned, but whatever you did it caused an actual, physical earthquake. I’m glad you’re … ” I waved my free hand, searching for the right response. “I’m glad you finished writing, yes, that’s undeniably very good for you, but … what did you do to the dream? Just now, did you change something? Or change yourself? Or … ?”

“I am open,” she repeated. The smile in her eyes intensified.

I pointed at the ceiling, hidden far beyond the fog. “Do you mean up there, in the sky of the dream? Because if you — the main you, I mean — is literally open, that puts everyone at incredible risk. Unless you’re not … I don’t know … oh dear.”

Praem suggested I calm down and use my ears; I took a deep breath and took her advice. If the Eye was open and actively observing, then Cygnet Asylum would be rapidly burned down to scorched atomic debris, within minutes at most. The dream would turn to ash and smoke. But I couldn’t hear a thing, certainly not a planet-sized conflagration roaring and crackling above my head; there was no chorus of a thousand melting throats, no fire like a star burning itself out, no mighty collapse of this dream-bubble reality.

“Okayyyyy,” I said. “Okay. So, you’re ‘open’ now. What does that mean, in practical terms?”

“It means I can help you,” said the Governor. “It means that is my purpose, for now.” She replaced the cap on the marker pen and held it toward me.

“Are you sure you’re finished?”

“I will get my own pen,” she said. “And then I will pen additional words.”

The smile around her eyes intensified further; I accepted the marker pen, trying to frame another question — what was happening here? What transition had the Governor achieved within herself? But as soon as I had accepted the pen, the Governor closed up the manuscript and slipped it inside her laboratory coat. She scooted the chair back and stood up from the desk.

Her shoulders were back, her chin was high, her eyes were wide and bright, alive and dancing with inner light, so unlike before. Now she looked at each thing in turn with unbroken clarity, with a single moment of total focus, as if she were truly present for the first time since I’d met her. She looked at Praem, then at the fog, then at the half-filled blackboard, then at some of the tumbled books sitting in piles at the feet of the nearest shelves. Each thing was like the dawn in those eyes of pink-cloud lightning.

“Forgive me for pressing you so quickly,” I said. “But what did you mean by those final words you wrote? I’m a little alarmed, to put it lightly.”

The Governor stared at me as if I was the sun and she was trying to blind herself. “Which words?”

“About hearing so many nurses,” I said. “I don’t hear any, at least not down here. Except for her.” I gestured at Horror, still wriggling and flexing beneath a little avalanche of books.

“In all the hospital,” said the Governor. “There are many more nurses than before. We will deal with them together, because I will help you.”

“ … more nurses?” I echoed, frowning with confusion, trying to think past the waves of pain echoing upward from my leg. “Wait, what? How? The nurses represent stuff about me, and I realised that, I rejected it, I rejected them! How can there be more of them now? What’s changed?”

“My authority,” said the Governor. “It no longer exists. I have given it up.”

I squinted harder, trying to figure out what this meant in the context of the dream; the Governor had given up on running the Asylum, so the nurses were out of control? But I could barely think past the pain, it absorbed so much of me.

The Governor held out one hand. “Chalk, please.”

“Ah? Pardon?”

“The chalk I gave you. I have need of it now. Please.”

“Uh … sure, yeah.” I fumbled around inside my yellow blanket and found the stick of chalk the Governor had gifted to me.

When I pressed it into her hand, she turned away without a word, and strode toward the blackboard. She stopped in front of the half-completed equation and raised the chalk.

“Wait, no!” I cried out, realising my mistake too late.

The Governor pressed the stick of chalk to the board — and struck through the figures.

She crossed them out with one diagonal line, then another, forming a large, clear X-shape across the very equation she had wished me to finish. Then, seemingly as an afterthought, she raised the opposite sleeve of her lab coat and drew it across the already negated equation, blurring and smudging what was left.

“Oh,” I said, panting with relief. “I thought you were going to try to finish it.”

The Governor turned back to me. “The project is over. It will never be complete. Completion was always impossible. And that is okay.”

I couldn’t help but smile, and almost laugh; here we were on the verge of two metaphysical crises — the opening of the Eye and an apparent sudden influx of new Cygnet staff — but the most important thing in that bubble of reality right then was the self-actualisation of an addicted reader, and her new freedom.

“Well done,” I said, and I meant it. “I don’t know if it’s appropriate for me to say this, but I suppose we’re well beyond any sense of propriety now. I’m proud of you. Well done for writing down so much. Well done for sharing all of that. That was … a huge revelation for you, I think, and in such a short space of time. But, slow down a moment, please. What do you mean by you’ve ‘given up’ your authority? The dream has changed, and I need to understand.”

The Governor walked back over to me as I spoke. She stopped with her hands in the pockets of her laboratory coat, at the exact most comfortable distance from me — closer than a friend, further than a lover, at the position a real mother should stand.

How did she achieve such perfection? I don’t think she did. I think the dream did it for her.

“I am no longer the Governor,” she said. “That is the price of introspection.”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay, I mean, that’s good, but—”

“I wish to be called Eileen,” said Eileen.

My brief but brutal war against the cringe which rose to my face was a narrow victory for my better nature, but a victory nonetheless, as I kept it contained within the darkest reaches of my sour and soiled gut; Praem fought at my side as my greatest ally, by reminding me to be kind. I would never cringe at a human telling me their name, no matter how silly or archaic or old-fashioned, would I? If the Eye had made a choice, it was hers to make, whatever my own tastes and aesthetic sensibilities.

“O-okay,” I said. “Okay, good. Hello, yes, nice to … um?”

For a moment I assumed some stealthy skirmisher of unkind emotion had crept onto my expression, because the smile in Eileen’s eyes intensified so much I thought they might literally boggle from her head.

“I know,” she said. “It is a pun.”

“You … you know? Then why … ?”

“You may laugh if you want,” she said. “You may point out that it is silly. I would prefer if you did.”

“Ummm.” I asked Praem for guidance or advice, but she had none. “But … why?” I managed. “I don’t want to offend you or be rude to you. It’s your name, if that’s what you truly want. I’m sorry I advised you against it before, if it’s what your heart truly desires. I’ll call you anything you like.”

“No,” said the Eye — Eileen. “Say it.”

“Say what?”

“Say it. Please. Say it.”

I hesitated, clearing my throat, my awkwardness so powerful that for a moment I forgot the throbbing pain in my leg. “Eileen sounds kind of like … ‘eye’.”

“Yes!” she cried. “Yes, it does.”

“And you like that?”

“Very much. I like puns, and homophones, and double meanings. Thinking with writing has taught me that. I like things which mean more than one thing at once, things which look like twins but which are not. English is a very silly language. I like this.”

“Ah, well, um.” I fought a losing battle against every good-girl impulse I had. “It is a very … a very silly pun, indeed. I mean, you are a giant eyeball in the sky, after all. ‘Eileen’ is just too obvious. Everyone will think it’s a joke.”

“Good,” said the Eye. “Iris was a runner up.”

I winced. Eileen eye-smiled even harder, as if she was having the time of her life. “Really?” I said. “You’re serious.”

“Cornelia and Clara come in distant third,” she said. “Clara is a poor substitute, not nearly punny enough. Did you know that in Japanese, the word ‘eye’ is spelled ‘me’? This is amusing, but unfortunately in Japanese this word is pronounced ‘may’, which ruins the pun. And it would be very confusing if everybody called me ‘Me’, and ‘May’ is a nice name but it is not a pun in English. Therefore, I have settled on Eileen.”

I puffed out a massive sigh, then shook my head, utterly flummoxed. “Well, Raine is going to be delighted and insufferable about this. That was her suggestion, you know that?”

“Yes. But no. It was my choice. Not hers.”

“True. And Evee … I have no idea how she’ll react to this. She might be rude about it.”

What was I even saying? Evelyn would take one look at the Governor and either try to kill her, or pass out.

“Reactions,” said Eileen. “I desire those. I would be most disappointed if everybody politely ignored the pun. I have fallen in love with puns and double meanings, and now I myself am also a pun. Eye, and I, and Eileen, am a pun. This is the first step to loving myself.”

I blinked in surprise. “Wow, um. That’s a step further than I expected, and so quickly, too.”

“I am open now,” said Eileen.

“You’re also a lot more talkative. Is that on purpose?”

“I am myself. I!”

“Fair enough.” I sighed, trying to clear my head. The pain was throbbing back upward from my leg. “So, what now?”

Eileen raised her eyes from me and ran her gaze up the concrete cylinder which led back to her office. “We must leave the archives. I have nothing left to do here. We must leave them for good, and return to the hospital, where we can take action, and aid your revolution.”

“Right. Right! I … wait, if you’ve relinquished your authority, who are we even revolting against?”

Eileen looked back at me, wide-eyed and very intense, as if surprised. “I do not know.”

“Huh, okay, um. Well, with any luck, the dream will sort itself out somehow. Maybe the revolution will win by default now?” I winced and held up my free hand. “Wait, wait a second, we can’t just go gallivanting off yet. What about her?”

I pointed past Eileen, indicating the sad framework of the Lozzie Puppet, built from chicken wire and felt fabric and scraps of meat.

Eileen turned and looked. “Her?”

“Yes, her! You made her, do you understand that? You created her, but you left her incomplete, like a parody of life. It’s too cruel, far too cruel to leave her like that, unfinished. You made her, she was a ‘failure’, and then you abandoned her again. You have to take responsibility for her, too. And I don’t mean putting her out of her misery! Don’t you dare do that. You have to take responsibility.”

Eileen just stared and stared and stared at the sad lump of the Lozzie Puppet. Not once did her eyes waver or flicker away, nor even blink. Sweat gathered beneath my armpits and down my back; the stinging, aching, stabbing throb in my left shin intensified in the fog-wrapped silence, with nothing to distract my body and mind. I clenched my teeth; was it time for morphine yet?

Praem told me to wait. Not just yet.

Eileen finally turned back to me. “I will finish her.”

A sigh of relief slipped from my throat. “Good, okay—”

“But not right now. We are needed upstairs. My … ” Eileen blinked as if struck dumb; I realised it was the first time I’d seen her blink since she’d finished the manuscript. She took a moment to recover. “My biological child can wait. Your revolution and your sister cannot.”

“Biological child?” I echoed, wide-eyed. “Actually no, don’t worry, don’t try to answer that yet. Yes, you can get back to her later, fine. And, one more thing. I made a promise to a whole group of people, and I’m trying to make sure I keep that promise, and this might be the last chance you and I get to talk like this. You have to release the remains of Alexander Lilburne’s cult. Do you understand who they are?”

Eileen stared at me. “No.”

“Back in my reality, on Earth, you’re in all their heads, all the time. You have to release them. Do you understand?”

Eileen considered this for a moment, eyes locked on me. “I shall write them a letter of marque.”

“A … sorry, pardon?”

“A letter of marque and legitimacy.”

I blinked several times, utterly stumped. What on earth would that mean, beyond the metaphor of the dream? Was the Eye going to set them free, or bind them closer? Praem suggested I take this at face value for now. Perhaps it was as much as Eileen could promise from within the framework of the play.

“All right, thank you,” I said. “But you have to promise. They’re under my protection. If you don’t free them, I’ll consider it a betrayal.”

“I promise,” said Eileen.

I let out a sigh, unsure if I should be relieved or confused. “Thank you. Right then, let’s get out of here and back upstairs.”

“Let’s.”

Together we made our way back toward the door which opened into the concrete cylinder of the stairwell. Walking was becoming more and more of a challenge for me, even across so small a distance as that; the morphine had almost finished working its way through my bloodstream, metabolised and processed, leaving the wound in my shin raw, exposed to the torture of my own nerves, no matter how carefully wrapped in bandages and gauze. I was afraid that the stomp during the earthquake had popped some of my stitches. The pain crawled down into my sole, piercing every footstep with knife-points, and reaching fingers of barbed wire upward into my knee-joint and thigh, scraping against the inside of my hipbone.

A dozen paces to the door left me shivering and sweating, heaving through my teeth.

“Praem?” I whined. “Now?”

Not yet, she said.

“Nnnnnnnnhhh,” I made a terrible sound. “I can’t … ”

Eileen took a brief detour to retrieve Horror’s severed head. She picked up the gruesomely animated nurse by the sling of towel about her skull, then rejoined me at the door. Horror twitched her jaw and flexed the muscles of her face, but she was wrapped too tightly with towel to achieve anything, gagged and muffled and blinded.

“I suppose … ” I panted, trying to gather my breath past the pain. “Suppose we can’t … leave her down here … alone. Who knows what mischief … she would … get up to.”

“She will assist us,” Eileen said.

I pulled a doubtful grimace. “Not so sure … about that. She represents all the … worst, most negative impulses … toward my own history. How can she help us?”

“As a hostage.”

“ … ah, well. Fair enough.”

Eileen opened the door into the stairwell. I had hoped to find it transformed somehow by the power of the dream, into a lift or an escalator, or some other form of ascent which would not invoke walking up twenty seven flights of stairs. But alas, there it was — bare concrete, naked bulbs behind wire mesh, the edge of each step a harsh, hard, unyielding lip of shadowless grey. Going up. For twenty seven flights.

I believe I let out some kind of guttural moan, and not the fun kind, then swung myself over the threshold in exhausted resignation.

Eileen followed, but then paused, her hand lingering on the door handle, staring out into the fog beyond the clearing. Her pink and glowing eyes rested on the rows of shelves deep in the mist, with their millions of books and untold number of stories.

“Eileen?” I croaked. The pain was so bad I had to squint through tears.

“It is difficult to say goodbye,” she said.

“But you’re not,” I blurted out before I could think.

“I’m not?”

“No. No, of course you aren’t!” I huffed, my patience wearing thin under the weight of pain besieging my leg. “Leaving the project unfinished, admitting it can never be finished, that doesn’t mean you can’t ever read any of these books again. It doesn’t mean you can’t choose to read some, for … for pleasure, or fun, or for some specific piece of information. It’s okay! It’s fine! You can come back down here, you know? You’re going to have to come back down here, anyway, to finish the Lozzie Puppet. Or did you forget already?”

“Ah,” said Eileen. “That is true.”

“Good.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Now please, shut the door. We should … we should … mm. Nn!”

The pain built to a crescendo, rocking up and down inside my leg like a tide of acid and fire. I had to squeeze my eyes shut and grip my crutch to ride the wave. I didn’t see Eileen shut the door, but I heard the click of the latch.

When I opened my eyes again, my vision was blurred by a veil of tears. I whined deep in my throat, gritting my teeth and shaking my head from side to side, like an animal with a broken limb, insensible to the reason for my pain.

Eileen stepped past me and stared up the echoing tube of the stairwell. Then she looked at me, then back at the stairs, then back at me again.

“Yes?” I croaked.

“We have a problem.”

I tried to laugh, but only sobbed. “Yes,” I squeezed out. “Twenty seven flights! I— I doubt I can make it up— one fight— like this, I—”

Praem informed me that four hours had just passed. Praem instructed me to take two pills from the white bottle.

Gasping like a drowning sailor at the choppy surface of the sea, I fumbled inside my yellow blanket and drew out the little white bottle of morphine tablets. My hands were coated with sweat, slipping on the child-safe cap; I hissed with frustration as I tried to align the little notches on the lid — and then lost my grip. The bottle popped from my hands and clattered to the floor, rolling across the concrete with a rattle of pills.

“Nnnnnh!” I whined, choking down my pain with anger, staggering a step forward on my crutch. Bending down was going to be impossible, but I had to—

Eileen scooped up the pill bottle and held it out for me.

“Ah, uh … thank— thank you,” I croaked, taking the bottle from her outstretched hand.

I stared at the child safety cap for a moment. My hands were slick and shaking. Sweat ran down my face. Claws of pain left great wounds in my nerves.

“I … I can’t do this alone,” I said.

Eileen offered me her hand. Wordlessly, without request, I gave her the bottle. She popped the lid off and shook two pills into her palm, then replaced the lid and held out the pills. I shook my head and just opened my mouth, feeling more helpless and childlike than I had in years. A dull and slow part of my brain realised that I would never, ever let my real, biological, human mother feed me pills, ever again, at the cost of any indignity, any pain. But this? I did not hesitate.

Eileen placed the pills on my tongue. One, then two, then done.

The pills went down hard and dry. We didn’t have any water, nothing to drink, nothing to ease their passage. But I got them down in one rough swallow, feeling them squeezed down my throat to splash into my stomach.

Eileen pressed the pill bottle back into my hand. I shoved it into my yellow blanket, then stood for a long time with my eyes closed tight, clinging to my crutch, praying to my own bloodstream to flow fast and true.

“It’ll take … fifteen or twenty minutes … for that stuff to start working,” I said slowly. “Even then, I don’t know if … I can walk up those stairs. I’m … I’m stuck, I … ”

“Climb aboard,” said Eileen.

I opened my eyes to find her crouched in front of the first step, with her back toward me and her hands waiting to accept my arrival, ready to give me a piggy-back.

“You’re joking,” I rasped.

“I am not joking.”

“You can’t make it up twenty seven flights of stairs with me on your back.”

“I should have carried you from the beginning.”

That stopped all the words in my throat. I was very still for a long moment, poised on the cusp of something which meant both less and more than I felt it did. Praem gently reminded me that there was no other way up those stairs, and that everybody else needed my help. The longer we delayed the worse things might get. The Eye — Eileen — was my ally now, of a sort, though against what I did not yet know. She was not trying to trick me. She would not betray me; if she wanted to, she could defeat me with ease right then. She was merely offering her help.

“All right,” I said eventually, staggering over to Eileen. “All right, just … just take it as slow as you need.”

“I will stop to rest if I need to.”

“Okay … ”

Like a very tired little girl at the end of a very long day, I climbed onto Eileen’s back.

I wasn’t sure where to put my crutch, but I recalled handling it to her so she could put it away somewhere safe, perhaps inside her lab coat. Praem tucked herself into my yellow blanket, high up so she would not be squashed. I leaned against Eileen’s back and put my arms around her neck. She took my weight in her hands, braced beneath my thighs; the burning iron cage of my left shin dangled free.

Then she stood up, as if I weighed nothing at all, and walked up the first flight of stairs.

Eileen took the steps slowly and smoothly, so as not to jog my wound. She breathed without difficulty, carrying me without a care. On the first flight I kept my head up, but on the second the effort became too great, and I laid my cheek against her shoulder. She smelled of nothing in particular, except the well-worn fabric of her laboratory coat. By the third flight my eyes grew heavy, lashes dipping. On the fourth, Praem suggested I nap.

I couldn’t truly sleep, of course. Who can sleep in a piggy-back, except the most innocently guileless of real children, in the arms of perfect safety and security? But I came strangely close. The rhythm of Eileen’s ascent up from the depths of her own memory lulled me to the liminal edge of slumber.

Carelessly, I murmured: “My real mother never carried me like this.”

“I am your real mother,” said Eileen.

“My biological mother,” I corrected. “You’re not my biological mother. You’re … ”

Eileen did not argue further. She kept walking, pulling me up, one step after the other, never faltering, never complaining, never straining at my weight.

She felt like a mother, but I didn’t say that out loud. I did not have the best relationship with my ‘real’ mother, even after I had exposed her to the revelatory truth of Maisie; would I ever have a good relationship with Samantha Morell, after she had knowingly or unknowingly done me so much harm? But Eileen — the Eye — was no different. She had hurt me more than I could put into words. Her thoughtless obsession had tortured me in ways I could not express, taken my twin sister from me, and turned any hope of young happiness to ashes in my mouth.

But without her, I would never have met Raine and Evee. I would never have visited the abyss. I would not have the family and comrades and home and life I had built in the ruins of the previous life which never came to be. Would I have never reached beyond the veil of my flesh? Would I have gone my entire life without abyssal transformation? Probably.

And now here I was, cradled against her back, cheek upon her shoulder, eyes closed in safety and security.

Could I forgive the Eye?

I didn’t know — and for now, that was okay. I could not allow myself to confront that question right then. Forgiveness or unforgiven, I needed Eileen’s help with the revolution and with cracking open Maisie’s prison cell; she was not holding that help hostage beyond a forgiveness I could not — and maybe never would — grant. So we would face the same foe, until this was all over.

But — what foe?

That thought drifted off, as true sleep almost won.

What felt like hours later, Eileen woke me gently. “We’re here.”

“Uhhh?”

I raised my head from her shoulder, blinking bleary eyes against the harsh light. A thick metal door stood before us, set in a concrete wall. We had reached the top landing of the stairwell.

Eileen gently lowered me back to my feet, crouching down so I could find the floor myself. I kept both hands on her back until she passed me my crutch, then she straightened up and helped me wedge the crutch back into position beneath my armpit.

The pain in my left leg was silenced, reduced to a half-heard echo beneath the smothering blankets of morphine in my bloodstream; a strange tremor passed through my leg as I put pressure on that foot, but that was all.

Eileen opened the door to her office and led me back inside.

The Office of the Governor of Cygnet Hospital, Asylum, Prison, and Maximum Security Containment Facility was exactly as we had left it. A wide room with scratchy brown carpet and off-white walls, so well lit that not a single shadow lingered — a habit I now understood, with a pang of sympathy. The room was equipped with two desks, one normal and covered with blank papers, the other a steel monster acting as the root for a tree of monitors which stretched to cover the entire left-hand wall.

Dawn was breaking, beyond the window on the right hand side of the room.

A ruddy orange glow poured down upon the hospital grounds, soaking into the lawns and sinking beneath the lake of gently swaying trees, dying every surface red and dark, as if the world itself was bleeding.

An open wound lay across the forest and the lawns — a track of destruction cut into the landscape.

I stood gaping for a moment. Eileen didn’t seem to care; she crossed to the desk and dumped Horror’s towel-wrapped head onto the surface with a wet and meaty thump. I recovered myself with a deep breath and hurried over to the window, lurching forward on my crutch, flanked between the filing cabinets and glass display cases and the one tall bookshelf.

The window was cold to the touch; dawn would be chill this day. I braced myself against the glass and stared down at the damage.

A long, wide, winding trail had been cut into the woods which surrounded the asylum, as if a herd of elephants had knocked the trees aside and tramped down the trunks to kindling. The damage had exploded out onto the lawns as a series of narrow marks like puncture wounds in the grass, as if massive poles had been plunged into the ground and withdrawn in sequence. Something with a lot of very thin, sharp feet had scurried across the lawns — something much larger than any fully grown and restored Caterpillar.

The damage to the lawns was not isolated, but was accompanied by a chaotic slew of other paths, criss-crossing each other, winding back and forth over the main direction of damage. Some of those additional trails had simply crushed the grass flat and thrown up a lot of mud, but others were clearly the ruts of wheels or tracks, as if a whole squadron of armoured vehicles had been fighting a running battle with some giant monster.

“What on earth?” I hissed.

Whatever had happened, it was now happening on some far side of the asylum, for I couldn’t hear any gunfire or explosions, nor see any stragglers below.

As I concentrated on the damage to the hospital grounds and pressed my ear to the glass, I realised that the Governor’s Office was no longer so silently sound-proofed.

Distant shouts and calls echoed upward from below us, trapped behind walls of brick and steel, though too muffled and far away to make out any words. A sudden deep thump shook the floor several stories down. Running feet, screaming and howling, the banging and smashing of improvised weapons — all of it rose up out of the depths. I strained my ears in fear, listening for the tell-tale firecracker pop-pop-pop of guns, but I heard nothing of the sort. I didn’t know if I should be relived or worried.

“The revolution has started, I assume,” Eileen said.

“Yes, I assumed so too, but what’s—”

I ducked my head and twisted where I stood, hoping to get a better view past the brickwork of the hospital’s exterior, to see if I could spot whatever giant creature had left those marks on the landscape.

But, as I did, I finally saw the false sky of the dream once more — the blank and wrinkled surface of the Eye, filling the sky from horizon to horizon, just as it had every moment since we had arrived in this compacted metaphor of Wonderland.

But no longer was the sky the unbroken surface of the underside — the inside, the back-side, while we played at being cornea and vitreous humour down in the dream below.

Mountain ranges of black flesh stood aside, continents of lid flowed beyond their world-spanning length, open on a chasm larger than the universe. The lid was cracked, the halves stood parted; from within shone a silver so deep and dark that it could have swallowed all the oceans of the world and every thought ever born in flesh.

A split, a parting, a crack in an orb from horizon to horizon, a gash in reality, an opening of the way, of knowledge and knowing as the universe itself peeled back and—

The Eye was open.

Staring down at Cygnet Asylum.

I reeled back from the window in ancient fear, with instinctive dread and terror and the mortal horror of being flayed atom by atom. Clutching my chest, panting in pure fight-or-flight reaction, I stared down at the landscape — and required Praem’s gentle reminder that the trees were not burning, the grass was not turning to ash, and the air itself was not on fire.

The Eye was open, but it was not observant.

“I … o-okay,” I stammered, then hiccuped twice, painfully. “I mean— r-right. This is a dream, a m-metaphor. I suppose. Okay, it’s fine, it’s fine! It’s safe! Safe … ”

From behind me, Eileen said: “I am looking inward.”

I glanced back at her, at her pink eyes framed by blonde hair, the hair in turn framed by the wall of monitors. Every monitor was another chaotic view of the inside or outside of the asylum and hospital, too much confusion to pick out details without heading over there and sitting down in the massive metal swivel-chair. I had unconsciously kept my eyes away from the bank of monitors when we’d entered, for fear of being unable to tear myself apart from my dear Maisie once I spotted her again.

“As long as you don’t start melting everything down,” I said.

“The project is over,” said Eileen. “The archives are closed. Further additions are not required.”

I sighed and rubbed at my chest, trying to still the wild racing of my heart. “Okay. Okay! Fine. Forgive me for having trouble accepting it’s as simple as that. Seeing you, open, in the sky, does bring back some rather traumatic memories.”

“No forgiveness is necessary. No transgression has been made.”

I stared at Eileen for a long moment, framed by the flicker and static of her monitors; she stared right back at me, unblinking, bug-eyed, no longer distracted. The sound of distant shouts broke the silence between us, drifting up from the lower floors of the hospital. Far, far away, something clanged, metal against metal. A voice laughed, then cut off as if smothered. A rousing cry like a war chant rose, then fell. From even further afield — beyond the walls — something made an oddly familiar trilling, fluttering noise, like a giant fan had opened somewhere out on the grounds. That noise faded too, leaving us alone once more.

“Thank you,” I said slowly. “Right, so, you want to help me. How do we start? How do we do this?” My eyes flicked to the front door of the office. “Is Sevens still … ?”

“The Director has doubtless departed, in a new direction.”

I nodded at the door. “Let’s check anyway. Please?”

Eileen walked over to the door. I hobbled a few paces to the side so I could peer past her. She opened it without pause; beyond the door lay an empty corridor of whitewashed walls and linoleum floor, lit by the early crest of dawn breaking through distant windows. No nurses lay spread across the floor. No Sevens strode about in platform heels.

Noise floated up the corridor from somewhere below — shouting and banging, an occasional scream, feet pounding up and down stairs.

I sighed. “Damn. I was hoping she could help us.”

“The revolution needed her elsewhere,” said Eileen.

She shut the door and turned the latch to secure the bolt.

“You’re locking us in?” I asked. “Why?”

Eileen stared at me, without any hint of a smile in her stilled expression. “I am no longer in charge,” she said. “I have relinquished my authority. I cannot defend us.”

A shudder of realisation climbed up my spine. Eileen was unarmed, no matter what she represented, and she did not seem particularly inclined to martial arts. I was barely able to walk, glued to my crutch, and stuffed with opiate painkillers. Praem was currently in plushie form. If we were caught by nurses out there in the corridors, we’d have no chance.

“We’re trapped here,” I hissed. “We can’t help at all!”

“One is never trapped,” said Eileen, with a hint of pride, “if one can but observe.”

She walked over to the second desk, beneath the wall of monitors, and stopped by the metal throne, mounted on a ball-and-socket joint set into the floor. She touched the chair with a fingertip so that it spun around to face me, then she gestured an invitation with one hand.

“Be seated.”

I almost laughed. “You’re joking?”

“I am, yet again, not joking,” she said. “Be seated. You will see.”

I sighed. “Is that meant to be another pun?”

“It is not a good enough pun,” she said. “I must practice further.”

I lurched over on my crutch and very carefully sat down on the offered seat. The metal observation chair was gigantic, about three sizes too large for me; I felt like a child queen sitting in her mother’s throne, sinking into the plush fabric layered atop the metal and plastic. I cleared my throat awkwardly and lay my crutch across my thighs. At least I was finally off my feet.

Eileen gently turned the chair on the ball-and-socket joint, until I was facing the wall of monitors. I deliberately kept my eyes off the various views, knowing I would get sucked into looking for my friends, or watching Maisie, and might have trouble surfacing again. My heart raced all the same, afraid for my friends and family, for every single one of them, for the joint fate of Lozzie’s bespoke revolution.

“Very well then,” I said, looking up at Eileen. “What’s the plan? What do we do?”

“We will observe.”

“Yes, I got that much.”

“And then we will intervene.”

“How?”

“Through observation.”

I frowned at her. “We do have to physically get there first. You do understand that, right? We can’t just reach out and do things at a distance. We’re going to have to be there. Do you … ”

Eileen was staring at the monitors, eyes flicking back and forth. “There are too many nurses. More than I thought.”

“Ah?” I risked a glance at the monitors, just long enough to confirm she was right.

The nurses were all over the place, in every corridor and room, chasing clusters of scared girls or facing down makeshift phalanxes of armed patients. The dawn had not returned them to their human masks; they were stuck now in their night-shift nightmare truth, a myriad of mutations and impossible monsters, flowing up and down the hallways of the Asylum, brandishing syringes and straitjackets.

I shook my head. “This still doesn’t make any sense. If you’ve relinquished your authority, who’s in charge of all this? Who’s running this now?”

“The Director?” Eileen suggested. She sounded uncertain.

“Sevens, you mean. And no. She broke out, she came to rescue me. She’s not doing this.” I chewed my lip. “Maybe this whole play really was originally meant to be for you, to show you how much me and my friends all love each other. Why we matter to each other. Why we’re … not like you, I suppose. Maybe that process isn’t over. Maybe you need to keep witnessing all this?”

“Mmmmmm,” Eileen hummed, doubtful.

“Yes, right,” I said, trying to convince myself. “That must be it. You’ve turned inward, which is good. But you’ve not yet understood my attachment to my friends and lovers. You need to know that the future is not lonely. You need to know community! That’s what the play is for!” I tried to laugh, then leaned forward and waved at the screens. “You need to see everybody! Here, help me spot Raine and Zheng, let’s start with them, let’s—

Bang!

The door to the Governor’s Office burst open and banged off the wall, lock shattered, hinges bent.

Eileen turned; a touch of her fingertips turned the seat with her, so I was not left craning my neck to see what new horror bore down upon us.

Knights poured in through the ruined doorway — ten of them, black-booted and black-clad in body armour and helmets, their mirrored visors and tight gloves leaving not a scrap of skin showing. They had their big shiny black guns raised, pressed to their shoulders, sweeping the room like in a movie or one of Raine’s video games. Shock gave way to relief — we had our escort!

“Oh!” I almost laughed. “You came to … pick … us … up.”

Relief curdled.

These were not Knights; the resemblance was clear, but the details were wrong. They moved with mechanical precision, more like automatons than my delightfully living Knights —flicking their guns left and right, clicking their heads around like little searchlights. The insignia over each heart was different — where the Knights had borne a patch showing a trio of tentacles impaled on a spike, these strange new arrivals wore a symbol that showed a crimson halo over a crowned head, the face a featureless white void on a field of black.

They finished the sweep with the muzzles of their guns, then lowered the weapons to aim at the floor; I couldn’t help but realise they had never once pointed the weapons at myself, but had gladly threatened Eileen.

“Clear,” one of them said.

It spoke in a machine-voice, clipped and empty, neither masculine nor feminine, nor anything else, buzzing like a computer-generated sound from decades past. There was nothing in there, nothing but empty space.

One of the not-Knights — just armed guards, really, without the Knights’ true chivalry — stepped over to the main desk and picked up Horror’s towel-wrapped head.

For a moment I thought the worst was happening, and they were going to free her again. But then the Empty Guard spoke into a radio attached to the uniform’s shoulder.

“Targets one and two secured, Ma’am,” said that robotic voice.

I exploded.

“Who?!” I shouted, gesticulating with both hands, almost knocking my crutch to the floor. Praem peered out of my yellow blanket and tried to get me to calm down, but I politely refused her. Three of the guards flinched, but they didn’t point guns at me; I was beyond caring. “Who could you possibly be talking to?! Who’s in charge of you lot? There can’t be anybody! Another head nurse?! Who?”

The Empty Guard spoke into the radio again: “Target one is vocalising. Yes Ma’am. Understood. Not to be harmed. Understood. Yes M’am.”

I glanced at Eileen. She was staring at the guards with as much surprise as me. “Eileen!” I said. “There isn’t another part of your ego out there or something?”

“No,” she said. “I do not know what—”

The Empty Guard spoke again: “The ex-Governor is also here. Orders?” A pause. “Understood. Yes Ma’am. Understood.”

“Who can you possibly be talking to!?” I yelled again. “This is absurd!”

The Empty Guard lowered the radio and lifted the gun.

The other nine all followed their leader.

All ten Empty Guards aimed at Eileen.

“Eliminate the target.”