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.
“What?” I croaked. “Where— wha— what?”
Bare walls echoed back my own voice, tinny and timid. I blinked and squinted and swiped at my eyes to clear my sleep-soaked vision. Lonely shadows blessed with me empty outlines beyond the boundaries of my solitary bed. Far away somebody was crying and sobbing, their sorrow muffled behind layers of brick and plaster; further out a distant night-terror scream echoed inside an empty cell.
My left hand followed a dimly remembered instinct, scrabbling across the thin mattress and slapping at cold plastic until I hit the light switch.
Weak illumination bloomed at my side, from a cheap lamp standing on an even cheaper bedside table.
The shadows barely retreated, hovering at my beck and call. The cramped room unfolded like a dream-flicker amid a sea of darkness.
For a long moment I sat unmoving except for the rise and fall of my chest. My legs were tangled in sweat-soaked sheets. My eyes were wide and staring. I lost my voice to a closing throat, swallowed three times, and shook my head.
“Absolutely not,” I spoke out loud.
I climbed out of bed, slowly and carefully, as if the floor might eat me from the ankles up. My feet were bare, which was very frustrating, because the floor was not carnivorous but it was freezing cold. My socks and slippers were on the other side of the room and I was too shocked to bother putting them on. I scurried to the door and hit the main light switch just to the right of the handle. A single strip-light in the ceiling flickered to life, buzzing with that incessant whine I remembered all too well.
“No,” I hissed, as I took in the room a second time. “No. Absolutely not. No way.”
Cygnet Children’s Hospital. ‘My’ regular room — room number 34, the little cell to which I had returned time and again, whenever I was due for another ‘short residential stay’, as decided upon by the doctors and my parents and my ‘treatment plan’.
Except it wasn’t Cygnet; it was a parody.
The leftmost wall was a true Cygnet wall, exactly as I recalled it — a wobbly blue wave was painted along the bottom, with plain cream-white on top, illustrated with a jolly little cartoon duck promenading from left to right, followed by a line of little baby ducks, all in green and yellow. I had come to hate that stupid duck. The hospital was called Cygnet, not Duckling, so why wasn’t it a swan?
But the right wall was bare brick, brown and red, with water stains running from a spider web of cracks. A pair of chains were screwed into the brickwork, complete with steel manacles at the ends.
Cygnet had been bad, oh yes. For me it was one of the worst places on Earth.
But it wasn’t a nineteenth century ‘insane asylum’. Cygnet was built in 2002.
The back wall was institutional white, plastic and plain, like something from a doctor’s office. It lacked the one window from the real room 34, which should have looked out over the sad little exercise courtyard and tennis court, of which Cygnet was so very proud. The bedsheets were correct — the scratchy, over-warm, too-large Cygnet special — but the bed was a iron frame, painted black, with springs and a carved headboard. The bedside table was not the faux-warm wood that Cygnet had used, and the bedside lamp was like something from the 1970s, a weird round blob with a thick red shade on top.
The floor was half Cygnet’s regular white lino and half creaking wooden floorboards, like from a Scooby Doo cartoon. The door was Cygnet, but the frosted window had bars inside the opaque glass. The light switch was correct, but the strip-light in the ceiling was absurd. Cygnet had those in the common areas, but never in patient residential rooms.
A desk stood against one wall, but it was crooked and twisted, like a stage prop from the room of a stereotypical tortured artist living in a dusty attic. An iron radiator was bolted next to the desk, which was also wrong — that was straight from a school, not Cygnet at all. A sink and a mirror lurked in one dark corner, and they were about right, but next to the sink stood a stainless steel toilet, like from a prison.
“This isn’t real,” I said out loud. My heart was racing, my throat closing up. Reality did not recoil from my words, so I said it again. “This isn’t real!”
But this didn’t feel like a dream.
Whatever this was, it had none of the soothing emotional calm of one of Lozzie’s dreams, none of the sub-lucid fuzzy logic of dream construction and imaginary spaces. My feet were freezing cold on a lino floor, my skin was slathered in cold sweat, and my hair felt greasy and—
My, my, I, I!
Where were the rest of us!?
I looked down at myself and ran my hands over my sides. Smooth flesh, unbroken flanks. No tentacles.
My throat threatened to close up, not with abyssal change but with the lack of it, with the lack of any of my other selves, with the lack of the smallest hint of abyssal biology. I reeled in horror, staggering over to the tiny mirror, slamming one leg into the steel toilet. I hissed with pain and gripped the edge of the sink, then stared at my own reflection.
My skin was white-pink beneath the harsh fluorescent lighting. My eyes were plain brown, bloodshot and ringed with dark bags. My hair was a mess. I looked strung out and exhausted. I looked mad.
My tentacles, my chromatophores, my additional eyelids, my spikes and spines and barbs, all of it was gone.
My other selves were silent — or absent.
“C—c-calm,” I urged myself in the mirror. My voice came out as a strangled choke. “S-stay calm. Stay calm. Calm down, Heather. Heather! Ha- haha- ha- ahhh. Hic. Ow! Ow!” I hiccuped and smiled too hard and realised my eyes were bulging in panic. I slammed one hand against the sink; the pain brought me back. “Breathe. Breathe!” I shouted at myself, manic and wild, on the verge of hyperventilating. “What would Raine tell you to do? Hm? Breathe. Concentrate. Breathe. Come on Heather, come on, come on, we can do this, just breathe. Just breathe. This isn’t real, this isn’t real, this isn’t real. None of this is real. It’s a dream. It’s a trick. It’s not real. Breathe. Slowly now. Breathe.”
Long, slow, deep breaths fought back the encroaching edge of a panic attack. My head pounded with the beat of my own pulse, hard and urgent and rushing through my veins. I wrapped my arms around myself, clinging hard. I started to cry, slow and silent, confused beyond words.
I was so very alone.
Moments ago — or hours ago, or last year, or in a dream? — we had been in Wonderland, standing beneath the Eye, in the middle of a plate of Caterpillar carapace, protected by Evelyn’s great spell. The Eye had tried to close, to trap us inside a sort of black hole of observation, collapsing reality into a single point. I had speared it with a lance of hyperdimensional mathematics, then—
Then.
Then what?
Nothing. I had no working memory of anything after that moment.
The Heather of one year ago would have curled into a screaming, fetal ball if she had felt reality buckle and break and deposit her ten years into the past, back in Cygnet Children’s Hospital. The Heather of six months ago would have broken down sobbing, her heart speared on the assumption that none of her salvation had been real — that Raine and Evelyn and everyone else were products of a delusional imagination, the fruits of schizophrenia finally filling her overtaxed brain with friendly ghosts.
But I was not that Heather anymore; I knew what I was, and I knew I was right.
I lost my temper.
“This is a travesty!” I hissed at the walls and the ceiling — at the Eye. I scrubbed my tears off my face and spat with rage. “This is … it’s … offensive! Do you understand that? Did you make this? To do what, to upset me? To wound me? To— to— to break me? You think this is enough to get me to lie down and give up? You think this is going to convince me that I was crazy all along, that the last year of my life never happened?”
No reply came. A distant sobbing echoed from another room, far away.
I swallowed. Doubt crept into my mind.
“ … did I make this?” I whispered.
Reality — or dream, as it were — did not answer.
“Is this … inside the Eye?” I kept talking out loud, my mind finally working at speed. “A metaphor for inside the Eye? Have I … forced shape and reality on it? I know I said I would break reality rather than die. Or see any of my friends die. But this isn’t what I expected.”
I swept my hair back and tried to calm down — then stared at myself in the mirror again. I had to establish one very important fact — was I still me? I squinted at my own eyes, comparing self-image to reality.
Yes, still Heather. The same mousey brown hair, the same muddy brown eyes, the same awkward little nose and crooked mouth and small chin.
A hellish vision. Not a good look, all sweaty and greasy and exhausted, wracked by the aftermath of wordless terror and confused fear. Still, this was the face that Raine had fallen in love with, so it couldn’t be all bad.
“And I’m not ten years old,” I said, looking myself up and down. “That would be very bad. I still look the same.”
I peered into my mouth, wiggled my tongue around, and jammed a finger against my tonsils. I pulled at my eyelids and looked up my own nose and felt no desire to rip off my own skin. My skin felt real, the sweat on my back felt real, drying rapidly in the chilly air. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. My body truly was devoid of any abyssal biology; I double-checked, running my hands beneath my thin pajamas and down my sides and even between my legs. That was normal, too.
My pajamas were soft pink, worn from years of use, frayed at the cuffs and the elasticated waistband, sporting a pattern of little red strawberries.
Like Maisie’s pajama top, the one she’d sent with the message.
Abyssal dysphoria crept up on me, now the panic attack had passed. Panic was sharp and hot, but the dysphoria was cloying and slow, like a muddy weight on my back. I hadn’t felt this way in months. No tentacles, no other selves, nothing but a single lonely ape.
I had been reduced.
“Forget the room,” I hissed, shaking. “This is a much worse offense.” I clawed at my sides, at my hips, wishing I could dig my tentacles out from beneath my flesh. “Give me myself back. Give me back! Give me—”
My left sleeve rode up.
The Fractal was intact, right where it was meant to be. Angular black lines coated the skin of my left forearm. Raine had refreshed it last night. I ran my fingers over the sigil, taking slow, deep breaths.
The first and greatest gift Raine and Evelyn had ever given to me.
“Okay,” I hissed. “Okay, Heather, think. What would Raine do? Well, Raine would escape and make an improvised weapon and murder the Cygnet staff, but that’s not really my style. Or is it?”
I went back to the door and tried the handle. It was locked, of course, at this time of night. All the good little girls and boys were secured in their rooms, so safe and quiet. I rattled the knob a couple of times to make sure, then bent down to look at the lock — but the door was designed to open inwards, so I couldn’t even see the bolt. There was also no keyhole. The door had an exterior rotating latch, just like back in the real Cygnet Hospital.
Luckily I didn’t need a key to make a lock go away.
I gripped the handle tight and—
And.
And nothing.
No brain-math. No hyperdimensional equation. No sump of my soul full of black tar and burning truth. I felt nothing where the Eye’s lessons should have been.
“Oh come on,” I said out loud. My temper frayed. “This is … b-bullshit! As Raine would say. And no, I’m not apologising for that one. Am I not even myself!? What is this!?”
Forcing the door with raw strength was also impossible. Alone, as one Heather, without the help of my tentacles or abyssal biology, I did not have the muscular power to pull the door off its hinges or yank the lock out of the wood. I pulled helplessly against the handle for a moment, then gave up with an almighty huff.
Alone. Trapped. Locked in. Back in hospital. Singlet, by myself, powerless.
A creeping terror crawled up my spine. Abyssal dysphoria made me feel wrong inside my own skin. I wanted to smash the walls down and peel my flesh open and scream until my throat bled.
“Don’t let that feeling win,” I hissed. “Don’t let it win. If this is a metaphor, then … then you have to work within the rules of the game. Play along. You can do this, Heather. You did it for years.”
I switched off the overhead light, plunging the room back into single-bulb gloom. The tiny bedside lamp did little to push back the shadows, and I lacked the habitual improved night vision of abyssal biology, but the darkness was somehow comfortable and safe. Better already.
The little frosted window set into the door showed me almost nothing, but I pressed my face against the cold glass anyway, trying to peer through the bars and make out what shapes I could. A dark corridor stretched off to the left and right, punctuated by the blank slabs of other doors. A distant window admitted a shaft of silvery moonlight, but I couldn’t see the window itself or where it was located.
Somebody in one of the other rooms was still crying, sobbing loud and lonely into the night. A second voice was wailing, somewhere far away, perhaps in another corridor. A thumping was echoing off a distant wall — somebody punching their bed in frustration? Those were not unfamiliar nocturnal sounds, back in the real Cygnet hospital.
I sighed. “Other patients? Real, or—”
A darker shadow suddenly swept over the frosted window — hulking, misshapen, towering taller the doorway, hurrying along the corridor with a lurching gait.
I smothered a yelp — but too late. The twisted thing turned and stared at me with a glint of glassy eyes in a plate-sized face.
I pressed myself against the wall next to the door, holding my breath, biting my lip so hard I tasted blood. The horrible thing out in the corridor moved closer to the frosted window of my cell, hovering at the threshold, peering inside. The faint light from the bedside lamp picked out sagging, pale, wormy flesh, a pair of whirling eyes spinning in a flat face, and a hint of ragged white clothing, stained with brown smears and rotten red streaks.
Two more figures joined the thing, two looming faces in the gloom, a trio of nightmares writhing and undulating at my door.
The door had a simple external latch and no internal bolt; if those monsters wanted in then I could not stop them. I had nothing, no way to defend myself, no tentacles nor brain-math, not even a sharp rock. I was covered in fresh sweat. I made a fist, squeezing my nails into my palm.
And then the maggoty figure swept away again, leaving my cell behind. Its fellows did the same, wandering after it.
The shadows thumped off into the distance, down the corridor, and vanished into the dark.
I was shaking all over, clutching at my own ribcage.
“Okay,” I hissed. “Okay, now that, that is some Scooby Doo nonsense. Absolutely not real. Absolutely not.”
The words helped, but only a little.
I padded over to my socks and dragged them onto my feet, scrunched my toes against the cold floor, and slipped them into a pair of standard Cygnet slippers.
Then I set about investigating the rest of the cell, while keeping one eye on the door for the return of the nocturnal watchmen.
In the real Cygnet we had been allowed almost any personal possessions we wished, along with books and board games and other sundry items from the common areas, not to even mention toiletries and clothes. Cygnet was not a 19th century torture chamber.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
But this parody of a room was oddly sparse. It lacked any personal touch. No cupboard, no dresser, no little set of drawers. The desk was piled with some of my favourite books from childhood — Watership Down, The Hobbit, among others — but the books looked brand new, their spines untouched by creases. They were not the well-thumbed copies from the shelves in Cygnet. I flipped a few of them open just to see if they contained the correct words. They did.
“At least I’ve got something to read,” I said.
The usual hiding places were empty — under the lampshade, beneath the bed, and inside the toilet cistern. I ran my fingers underneath the rim of the bedside table and found nothing; I felt around behind the radiator and discovered only dust; I crawled under the desk and got nothing but exercise. The absurd manacles chained to the brick wall clanked when I moved them, but they were solid and real and did not conceal anything, not even a silly little secret compartment.
As I straightened up and stood straight in the dark, I heard a faint tapping.
Tap-tap — tap — tap — tap-tap-tap.
The noise was coming from the iron radiator, transmitted down the pipes from some distant source in the depths of the slumbering Cygnet. The tap-tapping was so faint that I could barely hear it over the sound of my own heartbeat. I crouched down and held my ear over the pipes, trying to count the beats or recognise a pattern in the pauses, but I couldn’t make head nor tail of it.
Was somebody in another room tapping on the pipes, trying to communicate?
Hadn’t I seen this in a film?
As an experiment, I tapped back. Just once, with a fingernail against the metal.
The tapping stopped. I waited, shivering and tense, but it did not resume.
I stood up with a big sigh and cast my eyes around the room again.
“Well,” I said, “if you were trying to convince me that the last year of my life was all a dream, then you’ve done a very poor job of making a convincing room. You should probably have cut the monsters in the corridor, too. They’re a dead give away. I would have a lot more books than this. And a hoodie. And Raine. Can I have Raine? Can I summon her from the ether? If I’m going to be stuck in here, then can I at least have sex?”
The Eye did not reply.
“Or did I do all this?” I said. “Did I make this?”
I let out a big sigh and sat down on the bed. Rusty springs complained about my weight. The pillowcase did not contain any secret messages, nor did the mattress reveal any hidden cache when I ran my hands over the sides. My feet were freezing when I removed them from the slippers, so I tucked them below the covers, scrunching my toes and rubbing my calves. What else was there to do? I slid back into bed and pulled the covers up over my knees.
And then I noticed the warm, yellow layer between the bedsheets.
“Sevens!” I whispered, lighting up with a smile.
It wasn’t the Yellow Princess herself, at least not in the flesh, but the colour was unmistakable. I pulled the yellow blanket free from its false sisters and pressed it to my face, inhaling the scent of home. The yellow blanket was warm with body heat and soft with tender care, thick and plush and gentle to my fingers. It was the exact right size to drape over my shoulders and pull tight around my body. It glowed with a ghostly light, golden and green and grey and black, more akin to the lonely shadows than to electric illumination.
I switched off the bedside lamp. We didn’t need it now.
By the soft and spreading light of Sevens’ eternal gift, we sat up amid sweat-stained bedsheets, and scoured our memories.
We ran through every recollection of the past couple of days, from sleeping together with Raine and Evelyn, through to the last moments in Wonderland as the Eye had ‘closed’. We could detect no gaps, no fuzzy definitions, no periods we did not recall properly. We double-checked a list of everybody who had come to Wonderland with us — Raine, Evee, Praem, Twil, Lozzie, Zheng, Sevens, thirty Knights, Six Caterpillars. The Forest Knight had been among the Knights, couldn’t forget him. And Mister Squiddy had been in a bucket, strapped to another Knight. Maisie’s empty vessel had been there too, but that didn’t count as a person, not yet.
I sighed into the false darkness of my cell. “If I had forgotten anybody, would I even know about it? I suppose not. But I feel … well, no, I don’t feel whole. I don’t. But I feel coherent. I’m all here. I’m lucid. Aren’t I, Sevens?”
I pressed my lips to a corner of the yellow blanket, and decided to wait for morning.
Morning was very far away. Moonlight stretched out long claws in the corridor beyond the frosted glass, creeping down the hallway and vanishing into the shadows. The ragged pale figures did not appear a second time, but I heard strange sounds echoing from the depths of the hospital — thumping, wailing, the scrape of bone on metal. I shivered and shook and forced myself to take deep breaths. None of this was real. Not a thing.
Perhaps I slept a snatch here and a few moments there, with my chin nodding onto my knees, but I neither laid my head upon the pillow nor stretched out my legs to the foot of the bed. I had to be ready for whatever came through that door.
Dawn broke hours later, as a haze of undirected light, a brightening of the institutional whites and creams and grey-beige paints.
Little sounds started to filter into my cell from beyond the walls: the murmur of soft voices in other rooms, in the corridor outside; the beeping of an alarm clock; laughter, far off, echoing off bare plaster and lino floors; the squeak of a trolley, the slam of a distant door.
Human sounds. People sounds. Cygnet sounds.
Reality, of a kind, was waking up.
I heard doors start to open — click-click as locks were turned, clack-clack of smart feet following, creak-creak of trolley wheels behind.
The cell to my right opened with a soft mechanical clunk. Soft, warm, gentle voices floated through the thick wall, muggy and heavy. I couldn’t make out the words.
I bunched a fist in my sheets. I still had nothing with which to fight. The sounds seemed normal, but who was to say the sources were remotely human? Anything might be about to step through that door. I had nothing, none of my skills, my weapons, my tentacles. Just fists and teeth and a scrap of faith.
My heart was racing. Cold sweat broke out on my skin.
Wheels creaked closer. A shadow loomed through the frosted glass, huge and misshapen. My throat closed up. My jaw creaked with clenching. My teeth hurt.
Click-click went the bolt on my cell door. The handle turned. I readied to leap, to flee, to run.
And in swept a nurse.
“Good morning, Miss Morell! Good morning! And how are we this very fine day? And it is fine, trust you that. The sun is just wonderful today. Not a cloud in the sky. I drove here with all the windows down in my car. Can you believe that? This time of year, in England? Amazing, isn’t it?”
She was young, and blonde, and comfortably plump. She was dressed in Cygnet institutional whites, not very flattering, but perfectly serviceable. She was all smiles and soft cheeks and no make-up, with her hair pulled up into a smart bun. In one hand she carried a tray full of transparent plastic cups, each one labelled with a name and filled with pills. In her other hand she had a jug full of water.
I did not recognise her, not from life or memory or fiction or anywhere else. She had no place in my mind.
A little name tag on her top read: ‘A.HORROR.’
Miss Horror did not wait for me to answer. She placed her tray down on the foot of my bed, inspected the plastic cups briefly, and located the one labelled with ‘H.Morell’. She held it up and opened her mouth to speak, then finally paused and frowned down at me, coiled up on the bed.
“Heather?” she said, her voice soft with concern. “Honey? I’m sorry to be so familiar, but are you alright? You look like you just woke up from a nightmare, dear.”
I did not trust myself to speak, so I just nodded.
Horror smiled, a little too bright and plump and friendly. She rattled my cup of pills. “So, this morning we have a wonderful menu. Six pimavanserin, four haloperidol, three ziprasidone, a whopping great eight molindone, one teeny little aripiprazole, two chlorpromazine, and three pimozide.” She peered into the plastic cup. “Plus a single paracetamol. They always add that for you, but I’m not sure why. You’ve never complained about pain, have you? Or, oh!” She grimaced. “Is it your time of the month? Do you need a tampon? I can bring you spares, you know? And I’ve got some ibuprofen for handing out, if you need that. We can always fetch you a hot water bottle, too.”
Numb and shocked, I just shook my head.
“You’re certain?” she pressed. “You can tell me if you’re bleeding.”
“No,” I croaked. “I’m fine.”
I hadn’t taken my anti-psychotic medication in years, not since I’d decided it did nothing to make the ‘hallucinations’ go away, but even when I’d been a good girl and popped my pills daily, the dose had been nothing more than one or two tablets.
That cocktail inside the plastic cup may as well have been hemlock.
Horror placed the cup down on my bedside table, along with a second, empty cup, which she quickly filled with water from the jug in her other hand. Then she picked up the tray, stepped back, and paused as if second-guessing herself.
She smiled and shot me a little wink, then lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “We both know I’m meant to stay and watch you take your medicine, but you’re one of my best behaved girls, Heather, and I’m so very busy this morning. I’m running behind, got in late. My cat was being sick all over the doormat when I got up this morning. So, I’m going to trust you to take your pills, while I go see to everyone else along this wing. Can I trust you, Heather?”
Old habits slipped back over me like a protective leather glove. Lie, fake, cheat, and steal, or survival would be impossible.
I swallowed and nodded, then forced myself to smile. “I-I will. I promise. Just … one by one. Some of the pills are kind of large.”
“Good girl,” Horror whispered. That made my skin crawl. Whatever she was, she did not get to call me that. She raised her voice back to normal. “You feeling up for some breakfast this morning, then? Going to head to the mess on time? Or are you going back to sleep? I only ask because we do have to note it down, you know?” She paused and smiled. “But there’s bacon and eggs in the mess. If you want them. Take my advice, always accept the free food.”
Hunger gripped my belly. I’d been sitting there for hours, waiting for dawn. Confusion and terror were odd bedfellows for an appetite. “Breakfast, I think.”
“Wonderful!”
The nurse swept back out of the room and into the corridor. She had some kind of cart out there, filled with more trays and more cups and endless pills. She grabbed the cart and started pushing it past my door, but then paused and stuck her head inside again.
“Oh, and, Heather?”
“ … yes?”
“Do you want me to take a message to your sister?”
My blood froze in my veins.
I must have looked gormless with shock, because Horror let out a bubbly little giggle. She shrugged. “Just a thought was all. I’m on box duty today, so I wouldn’t have to go out of my way or anything. I know you haven’t seen her in a while, with her cooped up in there, but … ”
Was this a trap? Some kind of trick?
I didn’t care.
Maisie was here.
“Tell her I love her,” I said.
Horror beamed. The smile turned my stomach; it was the look of a person watching a cat do something sweet and stupid, or an adult watching a baby pretend to be all grown up. She nodded, winked, and walked off again. The wheels of her trolley made little squeaks as she went.
I should have asked where my twin was located. But it might have been a trap.
I sat in bed and listened to Horror open the next door along the corridor, heard her sweep into that room and bubble with her bright morning’s greetings. I sat very still and waited for her to leave that room and move to the next, then the next, until the nurse was well out of earshot.
When I climbed out of bed, I kept Sevens’ yellow blanket tight around my shoulders. I grabbed the little plastic cup with the absurdly lethal dose of pills, then scurried to the door and pushed it shut as quietly as I could.
I dumped the pills into the toilet, closed the lid, and hit the flush.
They went down in one go. Rattle-splash.
I covered my tracks with all my old tricks; I made sure to drink all the water in the second cup so the mark of my saliva and lips would be left behind on the plastic. I sat on the bed and waited for a few minutes, to fill the time I would have spent on swallowing pills. I rubbed my face and worked my jaw, making myself look ever so slightly slack and dull. Drugged and bound, slow and steady, numb to the world. I’d had more than enough practice simulating this in the past.
I didn’t care if this was a dream or inside the Eye or a collaborative fiction built from hyperdimensional mathematics. I was not taking those pills.
Maisie was here.
I needed a clear head and a strong heart. I had to act.
The institutional slippers were not warm or comfortable, but they kept my feet off the floor, so back on they went. Sevens’ blanket was not a suit of armour, but it made me feel safe and secure. The door in my cell was no great portal, but I opened it wide and stepped out into the corridor.
Just like my lonely cell, the corridor was an attempt to mimic my memories of Cygnet Children’s Hospital. The floor was speckled lino, rough and grippy on one’s soles — except where it melded into bare wooden floorboards, creaking beneath each step. The walls between the cell doors were painted with bright pastel scenes of happy smiling suns or ponds full of fish or frolicking animals — but every illustration was subtly wrong: the sun had sharp teeth, the fish were eyeless and bleeding, the deer and dogs and little cats had too many legs and joints in all the wrong places. The cell doors themselves were a jumbled mixture of real Cygnet security doors, metal bars, and heavy wooden slats, like something from a horror movie Raine might have shown me.
At least the other ‘patients’ were normal enough.
A few other girls were emerging from their rooms, scuffing their slippers against the floor as they headed down the corridor, presumably looking for breakfast. Some still wore pajamas, others were wrapped in dressing gowns, while a few were fully dressed in ordinary clothes. All were young, either older teenagers or young adults like myself, though I spotted a couple of girls who could not have been a day over fourteen, holding hands and sticking close to each other.
They all looked human, normal, mundane — though tired, empty-eyed, and hollow inside.
My leftmost cell mate trudged out of her room and greeted me with a wary nod. She had long stringy dark hair and flat grey eyes, a build like an abandoned dancer, and the slumped shoulders of eternal defeat.
I didn’t recognise her at all.
“Going to breakfast?” she mumbled at me.
“Mm. In a minute.”
“Cool.”
She turned away and wandered in the same direction as the others. I watched her go, then quickly examined the gaits and faces and frames of all the girls I could see. I peered into the opposite cell — empty already — and into the one to the right of my own. The girl in the right-hand cell was sitting on her bed, staring at a blank wall, lost in thought. Short blonde hair, sleepy eyes, older than me by several years. I didn’t recognise her either.
Were my friends here, deposited alone and confused in cells of their own, in the same manner as I had been? I couldn’t spot anybody who looked like Raine or Evelyn.
What about my six other selves? Were they all locked up here too?
Perhaps if I went to the mess hall.
After all, I’d first met Raine over bacon and eggs.
I tugged my yellow blanket tight around my shoulders and followed the shuffling girls toward the end of the corridor, past all the open cell doors. The corridor turned right and opened out into a wide intersection. On my left, stairs rose toward a second floor, with other girls descending the steps to join the ragged breakfast-ward flow. On my right was a little security station — a low desk with a lamp and some newspapers, guarding another corridor which seemed darker and more forbidding, studded with steel doors, blocked off with a mesh gate set in a wall of bars. The station was occupied by a nurse — fast asleep, arms folded over her chest. Her name tag read ‘A.NIGHTMARE’.
Ahead was more corridor, more girls, more shuffling feet heading for breakfast — and a wash of sunlight.
Daylight poured into the building through a bank of windows on the right-hand side of the corridor. A few girls were stopped, staring out across the landscape with dull eyes, like they’d seen all this a million times before.
I stopped too, and sighed with irritation.
Beyond the windows was the idyllic ideal of a healthsome and regenerative asylum; grassy lawns were punctuated by neat flowerbeds and little wooden benches, topped here and there by the cosy shade of spreading oak trees, weaved together by the warm and inviting threads of brick pathways. A few people were out there already, sitting on the benches or wandering aimlessly. Morning sunshine dusted the gardens with an aura of gentle gold.
The gardens were bordered by a high wall of scorched brick and black iron, topped with coils of rusty razor wire. Bits of rotten meat were snagged in the wire. Past the wall was a rolling landscape of hills and vales and little hedgerows, a cartoon of rural England.
The real Cygnet Hospital did not have grounds, or an exterior wall. It was a modern facility in the heart of London. If you ‘escaped’ then they’d just call your parents, or social services.
The sunlight had no source.
There was no sun in the sky, for there was no sky in which a sun might shine.
The roof of the world was a flat plane of void-black wrinkles, from horizon to horizon.
The underside of the Eye.
“Well,” I whispered to myself, with my lips pressed to a corner of Sevens’ yellow blanket. “If I was in any doubt about this not being real, there’s my proof. Wonderful. How did I even do this?”
A young woman had stopped just to my left. She stared at me when I spoke, a little alarmed. I cleared my throat, smiled and shrugged, and turned to carry on down the corridor, weaving through the shuffling figures.
Were these real people, or dream simulacra?
Were these all human beings and others who had been trapped inside the Eye, or were they just fakes, empty and blank, with nothing behind their gazes?
They all seemed so real, every one of them.
They were also all girls and young women, without a single male among their number; that was probably another reflection of my own memories. Cygnet Children’s Hospital had been gently segregated by gender, with boys’ and girls’ residential rooms in separate wings of the hospital, though we had shared a canteen and some other facilities.
The corridor finally terminated in what I assumed was the main hub of this imitation Cygnet, a wide entrance hallway, walled with more subtly twisted cartoons, floored in slightly more fancy lino. Dead ahead was a walled-off reception area and a set of fancy glass doors looking out on a gravel driveway. To one side of that was an additional pair of sturdy wooden doors which looked like they’d been ripped out of a Church, standing wide open, admitting patients out into the walled garden.
Nurses manned the reception desk, though they had nobody to receive. A doctor — an older gentleman — was leaning over to talk to one of the nurses. I paused long enough to read his name tag: ‘A.HATER’.
Most of the other girls were trudging away to the right. I followed them toward a pair of archways.
One of the arches led to a big mess hall. It didn’t look anything like the canteen in Cygnet; the real Cygnet hospital did not actually have very many patients, certainly not more than a few dozen residentials at any one time, and most of them only stayed for a few days or a couple of weeks. I had been a rare case, in and out often enough to get to know the place more than I wanted. The real Cygnet canteen had been all little desks and a short counter for food.
The imitation was more like something in a military barracks. Row upon row of plastic benches stretched across a massive hall, dotted with lonely eaters and little clusters of quiet friends. Girls clustered around a long row of counters. Dinner ladies — like in primary school — spooned bacon and eggs and oats and sausages and tomatoes and more onto waiting trays, filling bowls and plates and dishes with better food than the real Cygnet ever had.
“Okay,” I whispered, stomach rumbling. “At least the food isn’t weird grey slop or something. That’s a good sign.”
I stopped on the threshold of the mess hall and peered through the second archway. It led into the hospital’s main dayroom — a very large space, like a re-purposed sports hall, carpeted in soft white. It was a cartoon of a real dayroom, much too large and well-appointed. The space was dotted with groups of armchairs and sofas, with televisions standing like mushrooms at random intervals. Bookshelves lined the walls, board games were spread out on low tables, and a bank of obsolete computers sat quietly in one corner. A massive window looked out over the grounds and up at the wrinkled underside of the Eye.
A few girls were already in there, sitting in little groups or by themselves, though they were all very quiet and reserved. A few stared at the televisions, watching cartoons. A trio were standing by the window, staring out at the gardens; all three of them were very smartly dressed, as if ready for school.
And one girl was alone, sitting in a wheelchair, looking down at a half-finished board game.
My heart leapt into my throat.
Appetite forgotten, I pulled free from the flow of other patients and hurried into the dayroom. The thick white carpet soaked up my frantic footfalls. One of the trio by the window glanced at me with an angelic frown, but I ignored her, tutting a silent apology. I darted between the low tables, rounded a sofa and approached the lonely girl in the wheelchair.
Relief flooded my chest. I lit up, almost laughing, and collapsed into the chair across from her.
“Evee!” I hissed. “Evee, it’s me. It’s Heather … it … Evee?”
Evelyn did not look up from her solo board game.
Up close, I realised it was a miracle I had recognised her at all. Evelyn did not look well.
Her hair was lank, loose, and limp, hanging in greasy unwashed rat-tails. Her golden blonde tresses had gone dull and dusty. Her face was pinched and pale, cheeks sunken, eyes rheumy. She wore a thin white pajama top beneath a grey dressing gown several sizes too large, but the bulky robes could not hide her withered frame. She was thin with malnutrition, not her usual plump and plush self. All her fat was gone. Her maimed hand was coiled in her lap, the skin of her scars raw and weeping, leaving a stain on her pajama top.
A skirt lay almost flat against the seat of her wheelchair. She had no prosthetic leg on her right, just empty fabric. Her left leg was so withered that it was almost invisible beneath the skirt, just a line of fleshless bone.
There was no sign of her walking stick, her bone-wand, or Praem.
She did not look up at me. Her cloudy eyes were fixed on the board game — some kind of war game with little hexes and symbols and pictures of tanks.
My voice caught in my throat. My heart ached.
The imitation Cygnet was obscene. Taking away my true body, my brain-math, my abyssal modifications, that was an insult of the highest order.
But doing this to Evelyn was an atrocity which would not stand. Outrage and fury clawed up my throat.
I reached out for Evelyn with a shaking hand.
“Evee!” I hissed again. “It’s me! It’s Heather! Evee, none of this is real, none of this is … ”
Evelyn Saye lifted her rheumy eyes at last, and stared back into my own. She blinked slowly, out of sync. She frowned with a pale ghost of her habitual irritation; I could have whimpered with relief. She was still herself, still—
“This is a private game,” she rasped. “Single player.”
“Evee, it’s me! It’s Heather. It—”
“Go away.” She pulled herself tighter, retreating into the safety of her wheelchair, as if wary of me, as if afraid I might hurt her. “Go away.”
“Evee—”
“I don’t know you. Go away.”