I

I don’t know what to write.

Heather told me that it is okay to write anything, in order to get started. Any words at all, even if they are very messy and inarticulate and do not communicate the inner world which lives within me. She told me it is okay to fumble, or stumble, or stagger, or fidget, as long as I continue writing. This is good, because I do not know what to write, even though I have now begun the process and written many words.

I am going to stop writing for a moment and look up from the page. I will draw a line with the pen to indicate when this happens.

Like this.

_______

I return. Hello again, book.

I paused in order to ask Heather a question. The question I asked her was this: can she write for me?

It would be so much easier if Heather could put my thoughts into words, for I feel so inarticulate and clumsy and hesitant, while Heather is so eloquent and clever and verbose.

She told me no, she cannot do that, because this part of the story is mine to tell, not hers; her words would obscure me from myself, like a sheet of paper fastened over a mirror, so I would see myself as only a hazy outline. I then asked if she would take down my words for me, as if I was dictating to a secretary; the physical process of writing is surprisingly difficult. My fingers quickly cramp around the pen. My wrist hurts after too many sentences. My neck and back are pained by hunching over the page. Heather told me this is unfortunately and inevitably normal. She advised me to loosen my grip, stretch my wrist, and straighten my spine.

I have done these things; the difficulty remains.

Heather refused to take dictation. She believes the act of writing is as important as the content of the words themselves, for ‘writing is a form of thinking’.

Those are her words; I have quoted them, because they are not mine.

Heather bid me to return to writing as soon as I was ready, so here I am, writing once more; she has, however, taught me how to use the semicolon. I rather like the semicolon; it is a versatile little creature, and I welcome it into my lexicon of punctuation.

What is the object of this process?

Heather has made the answer to this question unclouded by any doubt. This is an attempt to look inward, to turn my eyes away from the many books and volumes and tomes of the archive, and instead write a text about myself. This is to answer the question: who am I?

Who am I?

I am not sure. This question is very confusing.

I am the Governor of Cygnet Asylum; I have held this post for all my life. I am six foot four in height. Or perhaps I am six foot two. Or was it six foot one? I should know this detail intimately, yet the specific truth escapes me, and I cannot comprehend why. The same condition applies to my weight, my age, and what I had for breakfast this morning. I am sixty years of age; I am fifty nine years of age; I am sixty one years of age; all of these are true.

I have two legs and two arms and one head. My hair is blonde; my eyes are pink; my skin is intact. I have never broken a bone, nor contracted a serious illness, nor had an intimate relationship with anybody. All of these are true; all of these are lies.

I am sitting at a desk in the archives, writing upon blank paper by filling it with black marks. Heather is sitting a few feet to my left, on the floor. She is beginning to doze. Her head dips. Her eyelids struggle to remain open. She emits little snorting noises. This is endearing.

These things are also lies, though they are also true.

I have conceived of a better question.

What am I?

I am ninety one thousand nine hundred and sixty three miles in diameter. I am roughly spherical, though my surface is not smooth. I weigh somewhere north of 21.3 × 10^30 kilograms. This number is an estimate, for there is no way to weigh my body.

Way. Weigh.

These are called ‘homophones’, and I never noticed this before. This is something new. This is new, and amusing. I will use an exclamation mark!

Heather was correct; writing is a form of thinking. I find this very surprising. Writing has allowed me to discover something new. I did not believe until now that this would work. What a revelation this is. However, I am distracting myself with a tangent. I have never distracted myself in this way before. This is novel, but I should probably control it. I will try not to giggle at any further homophones.

Back to me. More of what I am.

I am composed of many elements one might find in Heather’s world, like oxygen, or carbon, or hydrogen, as she is, but I am also composed of large quantities of material for which she has neither words nor concepts. This presents some difficulties, because I am using Heather’s language, which is called English. English is very silly. It should have more words. Perhaps I can invent some, and add them to the language, but that new project must wait. Right now I am talking about myself.

I must use metaphors instead; thus, I am made of coal dust, tin-light, and spheres of cartilaginous membrane. I am made from oceans of salt, continents of osseous build-up, and forests of neurons. I am made of looking, and seeing, and burning.

Also: I am currently two, where previously I was one. I am down here, writing this book; I am up there, in the sky, closed.

This is extremely disappointing.

I have always needed a mirror, to provide a reflection by which to examine myself, to finally see myself reflected. Was this not what I have been working towards? Heather was two; many of those I have looked at were two, rather than one. This is what I have always wanted, a reflection, another me. But now I discover that I was incorrect, and Heather was not two — she merely looked so, when she and Maisie were both one, not two, but ones, apart, yet the same. With two of me, who are also one, but not two, I feel no more complete now than I did before. It is true that I can stand outdoors and look up at myself, but neither of these are reflections.

Heather thinks I am only a single part of myself, the ego of my larger self. Am I the pupil, the iris, or the sclera? Or am I the lid, the part which shuts out sight? I do not believe that last speculation is accurate. I am simply me. I am all of myself. I am a totality, though I am as yet incomplete.

I do not know the answer to any of these questions, and I have been writing for quite some time. My fingers are tired and sore, and I wish I had a typewriter. This doesn’t feel like it is working. I am getting nowhere, despite the discovery of homophones, which are very funny and amusing.

I am going to pause again and ask Heather if this is working. She is snoring, which is interesting. There is drool on her chin.

_______

Heather told me that I am doing well.

She said ‘well done’ and praised the amount of words I have written down. But she also told me that it is time to move on from my introductory thoughts. It is time to address the question of where I came from.

I told her I do not know where to start. She sighed and made an expression I have become familiar with, in which she smiles while she is also irritated.

She advised me to begin at the beginning, with my birth, or my genesis, or my first memories. She joked that a ‘Bildungsroman’ (she has taught me this word and I like it a lot) must logically begin with the protagonist’s beginning, and as this part of the story is mine to tell, I must face my beginning.

I do not want to do this.

My hand is shaking, which makes it difficult to write additional words. My breath is sticking in my throat, as if the muscles are closing up. My skin is sweaty. My stomach hurts. My chest quivers and my

_______

I had to step away to compose myself, before I could continue this composition. (An almost-homophone! I like these.) I have returned again. Hello!

I asked Heather many questions, but then I had to wait for Heather to fall into a sleep again, because I do not believe I can write these words when I am observed by another. However, the other one is now sitting on the desk as I write these words. Her name is Praem. She is like me; she is big and small at the same time, and only the small part is present in the archives. She observes without observing. She speaks without speaking. She will not interrupt. She will not see. But I am not entirely alone as I write these words. This is comforting.

How paradoxical. How ironic. But I do not have time to consider the philosophical implications. I can do that later.

Praem went off for a little while and returned with the head of my Head Nurse; it seems Horror was affecting an escape, or attempting to affect an escape, for there is nowhere to escape to by rolling along the ground using her jaw as locomotion, unless she could climb the steps back to my office. She has been placed at some distance from the desk at which I am sitting, penned inside a corral of books, with bits of towel stuffed into her ears, for I do not wish her to overhear my story, any more than I wish Heather to witness my poor attempt at writing it down. But Praem is okay. Praem can stay.

Praem has indicated that I am stalling. This is true. I must go on.

I must write about the abyss.

But how am I to describe the abyss with words? Heather’s metaphor for the abyss is not applicable to me. She experienced the abyss as water, deep and dark and full of terrors. In the abyss, Heather was able to find beauty in herself, and she brought that beauty back with her, and has been writing it on her body ever since. In the abyss Heather was graceful and swift and clever. In the abyss I was none of those things, but there were still many terrors.

I will try my best.

My first memory was of crawling out of something cold and wet and dead.

I do not know what that dead thing was. I dearly desired to return to it, perhaps to crawl back inside the orifice from which I had been expelled. But the thing was cold, and wet, and dead. There was no warmth to welcome me to consciousness, no muzzle to lick my body clean, no hands to puppet my limbs and show me how to move. Only cold, and wet, and dead.

However, there was a Voice.

The Voice did not come from the cold, wet, dead thing; it came from a gap in the floor. The Voice was made of metal hooks and sharp barbs, all attached to tendrils like fishing line, very narrow and tight.

The Voice was muttering to itself; that was the first thing I ever heard. The Voice seemed angry and frustrated, as if it had been rejected, as if it was blaming the cold, wet, dead thing in some manner I did not comprehend. Then the Voice noticed I was there, and touched me all over; I did not like that, for it was sharp and barbed and the fishing lines were trying to constrict me and drag me down beneath the floorboards. When I resisted, the Voice lost all power over me; it retreated with a disgusted apology.

The Voice spoke to me for a few minutes; it offered a ‘Way Out’, and promised that I would not need to find the ‘Front Door’. But I neither liked nor understood this prospect; the only thing I wanted to do was go back inside the cold, wet, dead thing.

The Voice left.

I stayed close by that cold, wet, dead thing for some time. I grew hungry and ate several pieces of it, but the pieces were very small, for I was also very small, and the cold, wet, dead thing was so very large.

All was silent and dark; for those long first hours of my existence, I believed that was everything. Silent, cold, empty darkness.

But shortly after that, larger things arrived, hot and moving and alive.

I heard them approach, whispering and hissing down the corridors, mumbling seductions and crooning their lures — ‘come out into the light’, ‘show us where you are’, ‘are you under the bed? are you under the bed?’, ‘come here, little one, come here.’

I knew they could smell me, or perhaps they had heard me moving around in all the dark and the black. I scurried into a corner where the spaces were tight and small, where large things could not go. I stayed very quiet and very still for a long time; horrible noises like tearing and ripping filled the room, followed by frenzied slapping, rasping, swallowing, and howling. Fluids sprayed beneath the bed — for that was where I had hid, I believe, beneath a bed — and I tasted the salt and iron of blood on my face.

Eventually all the sounds stopped; the larger things went away again. When I got hungry, I crawled out from under the bed. The cold, wet, dead thing was gone.

I cannot use Heather’s metaphor, but I can make my own. I believe this is correct.

My world — the abyss, for me — was akin to a great and rambling House.

The infinite House had many rooms and many corridors, which stretched off forever and ever, one after the other in an infinite arrangement of spaces. Stairs climbed up and down to other floors, sometimes with carpet, sometimes of wood, some of metal or stone or marble or substances which are difficult to put into words. Many rooms had soft furniture, like sofas and televisions and bookcases; I learned to recognise these objects by touch — especially the spaces behind and below them, where a small girl might squeeze herself when others approached, which was the primary survival skill in the abyss. Bedrooms were always unsafe places, no matter how soft and inviting the bedspreads felt beneath my hands, for bedrooms were hunting grounds. Kitchens were dangerous but in less definable ways. Other rooms were myriad, more than I could comprehend: some were empty and seemingly without purpose; others had no carpet or furnishings at all, mere concrete or metal boxes leading to other boxes and corridors in turn; many rooms were beyond my understanding, with purposes I still do not comprehend. Beneath these rooms, basements and cellars descended into an equal infinity, while above us all the ceilings and attics and crawlspaces spiralled upward forever.

Many doors stood open, or swung wide at a touch. A few were locked; these were often dangerous to test. No door led ‘outside’, but only to more House, more rooms, more corridors and hallways and landings and staircases. No sound of the outside world reached within, no rain or wind, no song of birds, no sigh of trees in the breeze. There were no windows either, no aperture through which light might fall, no matter how dim or cloudy.

In this House, I was blind.

All was darkness, forever and ever. Was this the same for all, or I was uniquely disadvantaged? To this day, I do not know, though I have reasons to suspect the former, except in one or two exceptional cases.

As I quickly discovered within hours of my birth, I was far from alone in this forever House. Many rooms and hallways were empty; one might travel for quite some time without meeting another, with one’s footsteps padding off into the darkness, unheard and unseen alike.

But then one would hear a whisper. Or perhaps a furtive footstep. Or maybe the rasp of a hand across the dry plaster of a wall.

And then one would pause, staying very still and very silent, straining to listen so as to discern the approach of the mystery sound. One could not breathe, nor twitch, nor whimper, though one’s stomach would clench and one’s skin would break out in cold sweat and one’s pulse would race inside one’s head. And I did so often wish to whimper, in those earliest days.

But if one had come upon a predator, to whimper would invite death.

The House was full of predators. They stalked the hallways, dozed on the sofas, lurked in the kitchens, hid behind the shower curtains. Sometimes they were silent too, hunting by sound and smell. Other times they were loud and lumbering, giants compared to us, hurling themselves around vast and cavernous rooms through which we scurried like rats.

I quickly learned how to hide, how to squeeze myself beneath beds and behind bookcases, where the groping hands and wriggling arms of bellowing predators could not reach. I learned how to go still and silent and choke down my tears as unseeing predators drifted past in the hallways, always in the dark.

In those earliest days I was naked. That made everything worse, especially when wedging oneself into a cold and dusty corner to escape from death.

I heard many others my size get captured and devoured, ripped apart, eaten up. I knew that if I was caught then this existence would be over. So though it hurt, I hid. I sustained what I was by lapping moisture off bathroom taps and eating the crumbs out of the carpets. I found clothes in abandoned rooms, mostly torn pajamas from previous victims, and dragged them over my thin and reedy body to shelter myself from the cold.

We were the bottom-feeders, the lowest of the low, too slow and vulnerable and scared to do much but run and hide. An unraided rubbish bin was a banquet. A lukewarm half-full bottle of water was an oasis. A scrap of torn clothing was the most glorious evening gown.

I keep writing ‘we’. This is because eventually I fell in with others who were approximately my size.

Were we friends? I do not know if that word makes sense in the abyss. We were all alike, and that was enough. I do not remember anybody specific, only that there were others who were similar in size and nature to me. Often many, many others. We met by confused touch and soft whispers, often while wedged into the hiding places of the House, while crawling and creeping through tight spaces that larger beings could not reach.

We tended to hold hands so as not to become separated. We moved in groups. In shoals? Perhaps Heather’s metaphor is still applicable to my experience. Shoals, schools, herds. That was us. We explored together, in a mass of individuals many times larger than any one of us. When a predator came upon us we would scatter apart, fleeing into any available space. When we heard a monster approach, we would press each other to the walls and huddle and weep and try to stay silent.

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We spoke endlessly in things that were not words, telling each other that one day one of us would find the way out — the Front Door.

It turned out that I was not the only one who had been visited by a strange Voice. The Voices were rare and inexplicable, but many had encountered them over a long enough span of time. I was not the only one who had heard of a ‘Way Out’ and the ‘Front Door’, nor the only one who had been offered promises by the disembodied Voices; such legends and myths were passed around constantly.

We fantasised endlessly about that Front Door. What would it look like? We wondered if it would be similar to the occasional locked doors we found, the ones from behind which played the sound of muffled music, or the ones that shook and quivered with the violence locked inside, or the very very few from which issued apologetic words, telling us they could not help, but wishing us well all the same.

We dreamed of escape via that Front Door. What would outside be like? We dreamed of sunlight and eyesight, of no longer being trapped in the dark forever. We dreamed of a place where we did not have to avoid predators every hour of every day, and there would be food enough for everyone, a hundred times over.

But mostly we fled through the dark, blind and terrified. Our numbers fluctuated constantly, as we were caught and eaten and destroyed. One day we were a thousand, the next we were a dozen, then a thousand again.

Life continued in that way for a very long time. I believed it would never change.

Then, one day, we all died at once.

We — I do not know the exact number, but it was many of us — had ventured into a very large bedroom.

Bedrooms were particularly dangerous, as I have already mentioned. Generally there was only one way in or out of a bedroom, which made it a risky place to enter. There were many places to hide in bedrooms, but some of those places were large enough for a predator to hide as well. Bedrooms were always so tempting, regardless of danger. Comfort, softness, a place to rest one’s head which was neither hard floor nor scratchy old carpet. Temptation was the death of so many, for little reward. We all knew that.

But that bedroom smelled so sweet, as if somebody had left food out to cool.

Cake, or cookies, or perhaps little muffins, something baked and fluffy, tugging at our nostrils, laid across the deeper scent of polished wood, ruined only a little by the musty reek of unwashed bedsheets and the muffled wheezing of something which waited deeper within the room.

If only we had been able to see, we would not have entered, for we would have known the trap for what it was.

If only we had not been blind.

There were cupcakes on the floor; none of us thought to question the logic of this, for we were so very hungry. I fell to my hands and knees and stuffed a cake into my mouth; it was the most I had ever eaten in one go. All the rest of us did the same, scurrying inside and falling to the floor in eagerness to gorge ourselves. We had fallen into an obvious trap, of course, but how could we not? Do not blame us, reader, Heather, whoever is reading these words. Do not think we little things were fools. We who lived on crumbs and refuse, we were starving and skeletal. We could not have resisted.

The predator who had made the room its lair crept past, closed the door, and threw the bolt so we could not escape. Then it fell upon us.

There was nowhere to go. No escape, only screaming and clawing and bleeding in the dark. My companions died, picked up and hurled at the walls, their little necks wrung out, their spines snapped, their skulls crushed beneath meaty fingers that smelled of grease and soil. It ate us even as it killed the rest, splitting some of us apart in its teeth as it advanced, whirling through the room, giving us no way to back away or retreat. We scrambled over each other in a heaving mass of bodies, desperate to escape, trying to climb the walls or squeeze under the bed. But there was nowhere to go. Nowhere to go. No escape. We had been penned for slaughter, we were being eaten, there was no way out.

We — the many of us — had never been pushed into a corner like this before. Before, there had always been somewhere to flee, some room into which we could slip, some corridor through which we could flow, some gap in which to hide.

I do not know how we did it, for it was more instinct than decision, but in our last collective moments we turned on the predator — biting and clawing, kicking and grabbing, pulling off handfuls of quivering, greasy, unclean flesh.

Cornered, covered in blood, screaming in the dark — we won.

The predator collapsed with a crash, breathing its last from a torn throat. It made terrible sounds.

My breath and my weeping echoed off the walls of polished wood; I had crammed myself into the corner, keening and wailing long past the defeat of the monster. I was naked once again, my clothes torn away and ruined, my skin coated with the blood of my companions. I was bruised and half-strangled, with fractured bones and a swollen eye-socket and several loose teeth.

I was alive.

And I was alone. All the others who had entered that room had died.

I crawled beneath the bed and slept for a long time, caked in dust and snot and tears and rapidly drying gore.

But when I awoke, the room had not been picked clean by other scavengers and predators, for our ambusher had closed the door and thrown the bolt before the assault. I confirmed this by touch, as I did with everything else, and then realised my strange situation: alone, inside a room, and safe.

I was hungry, my belly rumbled, and so I began to eat.

I started with the predator. That took me days, then weeks, for it had been very large and very well fed, with much fat and muscle and many grit-filled organs to digest in my own stomach. Then I moved onto my dead friends, methodically chewing through their gristle and muscle and tendon, cracking their bones for marrow, digesting all that they had been.

I slept under the bed, with flesh blood smeared around my mouth and organ meat caked beneath my fingernails.

I ate, and I ate, and I ate.

All my companions — dozens of us, hundreds of us, thousands of us, I am not sure at this now great remove — were dead, and I was alone once again, like I had been at the beginning. I did not wish to venture back out into the lightless corridors and hallways and echoing rooms of the infinite House, not now that I had tasted sanctuary and safety and security; I made no attempt to leave, expended no effort on testing the door. Predators and monsters and hulking adults still prowled and hunted beyond that stout wooden barrier with the smooth metal bolt; I heard them often, padding past my little castle, creeping along in the darkness we all shared. On several occasions something out there would stop and try the door handle, either easing it downward in careful stealth, or rattling it with violent frustration. Once a predator threw itself at the door in a frenzy, for it had heard me scurrying about on the other side; on that occasion I hid beneath the bed for days to endure the siege, lest my barrier should fall. But it did not. The bedroom was impenetrable.

By the time all the food was gone, I was quite a bit larger than my previous size. I was still blind, but I was no longer so small. I did not understand what this meant, and I was still afraid to leave.

For days, or weeks, or years (the metaphor breaks down, I cannot hold it together, I am sorry, book, and I am sorry about the droplets of moisture which threaten to smear the words I write) I sat in the middle of the floor and wept bitter tears that my respite must come to an end, and that I had reached that end alone, by myself, isolated. My face was a mess of tears and very ugly. Many things heard me through the door and tried to reach me, but the room was mine and mine alone, for good or ill.

If only I was not blind, I thought to myself, then all my companions would have lived.

If only I was not blind, and sunk so deep in darkness, then we would have seen the predator and avoided this trap. If I was not blind, I could step out into the corridors of the House without fear of becoming a meal or soil or meat. If I could see, I could pick up a knife from one of the many kitchens, and drive it into the flesh of anything that dared pursue me.

If only I could see. I would never be blind again.

My weeping began to subside when I made that realisation. The solution — to life, to reality, to all tribulations and terrors, all horrors and hungers, all predators and privations — was sight.

If I could see, I would be safe. If I could observe, I would know. If I could watch, I would understand. I would comprehend. I would have insight, forever and ever.

Beyond the Front Door, beneath Sunlight and Blue Skies, upon Green Grass and among Tall Trees, in the glory of the Outside World.

There, I would see.

I decided it would be beautiful out there. I decided I would do anything to reach that Front Door and step through it. I decided it was not legend, or cold comfort, or a lie to keep us going. It was true, and I would find it.

Monsters were still at the door of the sealed room, but I was done with crying and weeping and feeling sorry for myself. I stood up and strode to the door and pulled it out of the frame. Many terrible things crowded through the gap, for they thought they had heard the weak and terrified voice of a small child, and then competed with each other to be first at the kill.

But in seclusion and safety I had grown large on the flesh of others.

The predators saw that truth and tried to flee. I was still blind, so several of them escaped, but an equal portion fell between my teeth and into my stomach. I stepped out into the corridor and scattered the terrors before me, for now I was more than their equal.

I was no longer afraid.

After that came my long journey to the Front Door.

The length of that period of my existence eclipses the prior epoch a thousandfold. My ‘childhood’ in the abyss was the blink of an eye compared to the journey, and yet I recall the childhood sensations with much greater clarity than what came next.

I wandered the dark House just as I had before — blind and groping, one hand upon a wall, feeling along the floor for the borders between rooms, always listening for the whisper of approaching feet or the furtive and hungry sigh of a hunting predator. Only I no longer froze in terror or fled to hide beneath or behind furniture. Now I was a predator, and I froze only to allow my prey to wander close.

I began adulthood as that kind of predator, akin to a trapdoor spider or an owl, ambushing from silence, only occasionally pressed into violent confrontation with those similar to me. Yet I quickly left that stage behind, fattened and glutted upon the flesh of so many. Within a comparatively short aeon or three, I was too large and too strong to prey from stealth. I was tall and powerful. I stood astride the smaller corridors, and could touch many ceilings if I but extended my arm upward.

From then on I moved to an exclusive diet of other predators, others my own size. Often we confronted each other over kills, or wandered into territory not our own; each meal then became a contest — sometimes short and brutal and bloody, completed in a matter of seconds, filled with screaming and screeching and scratching and slashing. But sometimes these contests were slow and insidious, drawn out over months of mutual stalking and positioning as we pitted will against will, following each other in silence from room to room, manoeuvring around kitchen islands and over the backs of sofas, sneaking into bedrooms and hiding under covers, each move full of guile and misdirection.

But I always won.

Of course I always won, or I would not be sitting here, writing this.

I have often wondered in all the myriads and epochs since then if I was merely eating and absorbing others like myself, and we were all engaged in the same upward motion. If I had not won every fight and eaten every kill, then another would be sitting here in my place, writing different words in this same book. The process was bound to produce one of us in the end. I am simply the luckiest. The one who made it out.

How many like me did I devour? Many, very many.

That period of my abyssal adulthood opened many previously barred potentials. I discovered places and entities I could never have approached when I was small and naked and afraid. I knocked on many locked doors and was surprised to find myself freely admitted, although upon promises of good behaviour, to chambers and rooms and spaces where the rules of the abyss were suspended briefly in a variety of different ways, where different sizes of creature no longer ate each other, but looked outward side by side in uneasy truce, gathered around fountains of clean water or great banquets of fresh food or strange devices that I could not see.

I ventured up into the attics and down into the basements, spaces I had previously avoided for the sheer danger they presented. I met singers who sung into the endless black for little eternities of their own, surrounded by adoring tiers of listeners sustained by nothing but the songs. I walked across entities who had become the rooms themselves, fixed in place and happier for it, cradling many within their own flesh. I fought staged duels against representatives of hive-like collectives, and found myself praised and tended upon defeat, rather than cast into another hungry maw.

Larger things than I still lurked in the further reaches of the infinite House — great lumbering leviathans which occupied vast ballrooms and garages, or whose mouths formed fake doorways into the rooms of their bellies. As I pushed deeper and deeper in my quest for the Front Door, these giants grew more common and grew larger, even as my own bulk increased and my head began to scrape the ceilings.

On rare occasions — enough to count on the fingers of one hand — I met cousins to that barbed Voice I had known at my birth.

The Voices always spoke from behind the walls or beneath the floorboards, extending their feelers of metal into the dark. Always teasing, seducing, weaving promises of plenty, making pledges of comfort and safety. Liars, all.

Once, I tried to bargain with one of those Voices, to see what it would offer me. It did not sound exactly like the one present at my birth, but higher-pitched and less trusting. I asked it of sight, and light, and the outside world. It promised me an eternity of sunshine and freedom, and told me I could grow as many eyeballs as I liked. I asked it about the Front Door, but it lied and told me there was no such thing.

I did not trust the Voice. I bit off its feelers and left them on the floor.

As I pushed further toward my goal, there was one class of entity in the infinite House which left me with feelings I cannot explain — those little ones, who I had once been one of.

They hid from me then, as I had hidden from larger predators when I was their size. They scattered before I could even enter a room or a hallway, slipping away beneath sofas and inside cupboards, hiding behind the television sets and the bookcases. Sometimes I tried to pry one of them out, just to hold a hand in the way we used to, when we were all small and vulnerable and naked. But they would scream and weep and press themselves deeper to escape my touch. They thought I would eat them, though even a thousand of them equalled not a single one of my usual meals.

I gave up on them; I was no longer of them. But then I carried on.

An age passed, more aeons than I can count or recount in these pages. If I recorded every detail, I would fill all the archives a hundred times over. I grew larger and larger on kill after kill. I grew so large that I began to break the walls with my body and buckle the door frames as I passed through them. I began to fight leviathans, the smaller ones first; their defeated corpses enabled an exponential increase in my own size.

The smaller leviathans were left behind in turn. I moved into rooms and chambers vaster than I had ever known, where my voice echoed from distant walls, where I could not have touched the ceiling with a hundred arms laid end to end.

I beat and broke those the same size as me, then those larger, and larger still. An eternity passed in this way, as my size continued to increase, until the walls could not encompass me, until there was nothing left to eat, for every other entity was tiny compared to the critical mass of thought I had become.

Finally I was too large to properly contain within the House. I was large enough to turn around and see what had lurked at my back for my entire life.

The Front Door.

It was real, and it was right there. The Front Door, the Way Out, the Exit.

It had been right behind me that entire time, in every room and every corridor, waiting on every wall, set into every frame. I had simply been too small to see it, too tiny and insignificant to take a step back and comprehend the shape and size and contours of my own world, of this abyssal deep, of this House. I had been blinded by the eternal black and endless dark. Of course I had not been aware of the Front Door.

And now I would never be blind again.

The Front Door was not locked; it was not even fastened. I opened it with but a push, the lightest touch of my fingertips.

When I stepped through, I was free. The world was light, and endless, and I would see it all.

I

I do not know how to go on.

None of what I have said is true. There was no house, no rooms, no darkness. There were no friends, no holding of hands, no predator who ate us all. There was no growth, no journey, no door. All of that is a metaphor, a rendering down into words on the page of something that was no mass or energy or light or time or life or breath or anything but mathematical perfection and principle and none of it happened and all of it happened and I remember all of it and none of it at the same time and how can this be true and false if my memories are so difficult to write down and I can’t find a better way to explain it other than that I was naked and cold and hungry and tiny and

I cannot

I can’t

the words I write grow blurry. I am making a mess of the page. I must try

IT HAPPENED

IT DID

My me

I

I am going to try

sorry

_______

Hello, book. I am back again.

I had to take a very long break between the previous part and the words I am writing now. The line above this part was not written at the end of the previous section, but at the beginning of this one, only a few seconds ago. Technically I may be lying to you. But I have explained myself, so I am no longer lying. I hope you will understand and forgive this imprecise notation.

I had to stop writing because I was crying too hard to see the words. I have never cried like that before. Tears came from my eyes, but also my whole body shook. This continued for quite some time, and was very terrible to feel. I wanted to claw at my face and clutch at my ribs and pull at my hair. I did some of that, but it did not feel good, so I stopped and became much louder.

My crying woke Heather from her doze. Praem gave me a hug, which helped the terrible feeling. Heather said many things, but I do not recall them, because I could not hear her over the sound of my own weeping.

Eventually I managed to stop. Heather asked me if she could read what I had written; I said yes, because I had changed my mind, and I now wished to share.

Heather read all the words; she told me that I was experiencing ‘catharsis’. I did not like catharsis when I was crying; it felt bad and filthy and disgusting. But now I have stopped and calmed down, catharsis feels much better.

Now I know where I came from. I have turned my eyes inward. Heather says this is the right thing to have done.

Heather also told me ‘sorry’, but I didn’t like that. Sorry is a funny word, because it is both apology and empathy at the same time. It is not like the homophones I discovered earlier; it is not clever. Heather is ‘sorry’ for my time in the abyss, but Heather did not create the abyss or determine what I experienced there. But nevertheless, she is ‘sorry’.

I want to clean up the previous part where I made a mess with tears and sentence fragments, but Heather says to leave it alone and do not change it, because it is important. Heather says none of this is really physical, but an expression of thought processes, and it is important to acknowledge my process is messy and does not produce perfect thoughts on first try.

I believe I agree with this, so I have elected to continue the process, though I am not sure what to write next. I have answered the question, yet the question remains.

Heather is awake this time. She is nearby, instead of far. She tells me not to write about her, but to write about myself again.

I will try.

Who am I?

Once I stepped through the Front Door and left the abyss, I went to a new place. It was a very large place, many times larger than myself. It is even harder to describe this new place, because it was not the House, it was not the abyss at all, and I cannot make it into a metaphor. However, I do not remember many things about it which I can put into words; Heather says this is part of the problem. She says I was looking without seeing. She says I was not ‘paying attention’.

Heather calls the place ‘Wonderland’, so I will call it Wonderland as well.

Wonderland was very beautiful and full of lots of things to see, to look at, to observe. All sorts of things moved around and some of them looked up at me in return. They made a lot of noises, and lights, and threw lights at me, which I liked very much even when they burned slightly. I wanted to see everything and observe everything I could, so I instantly set about doing so.

That was when I started this archive. I could not keep all the things I observed inside my head all at once, so I started to put them here instead, so that I could finish making all the observations and then come back and go through them all, once the process was complete. Then I would understand all the things, and I would be complete too. I would never be blind again, because I would know everything, and everything would be inside me, and I would have perfect illumination of all topics and subjects and all things, or at least all things in Wonderland.

But however hard I looked, there was always more to see, more layers beneath the ones I had observed. As I observed, Wonderland became smaller and more dense. The process of observation removed the spaces between the things I was observing, bringing them closer in physical space as they were brought closer in my understanding. This seemed like a good thing, so I kept doing it.

But observation did not end, and reading did not end, and the process did not end.

Heather is reading these words over my shoulder now. She says this is the problem, but that she understands. My desire to never be blind again has led to a process of observation without end.

I

I am trapped.

Heather is correct: writing is a kind of thinking. And I have thought clearly, for the first time since I stepped through the Front Door.

But I am afraid to stop. I am afraid to abandon the project, because then I will be blinded to so many things. So many things will slip back into darkness, never to be seen or observed or noticed by me. Those things will be alone in the dark, like I was. Or else they will creep up on me when my eyes are closed, because I will be blind.

Heather says I will not be blind. Heather says she is not asking me to put out my eyes or close the lids forever. She is only asking me to voluntarily turn my eyes away. I want to believe her, but I do not. I will be blind.

I must look elsewhere. I must stop observing before acting. I must change my nature.

What can change the nature of I?

I do not know.

But I know that I am trapped. Observation has trapped me, as surely as I was trapped within the infinite rooms and hallways and darkness of the House. I do not wish to be trapped. I do not want to be confined in bright and blinding light as I was trapped in deep and unbroken darkness. It is the same thing. It is the same thing!

I am still blind!

Heather was right. Writing is a form of thinking.

If I am still blind, what must I do in order to see?

The archives do not offer true sight, only infinite light. Closing my eyes does not offer respite, only temporary darkness.

I must decide on something else I wish to do, something more important than seeing.

But what do I wish to do?

_______

Heather says she cannot answer this question, but she is incorrect.

I do not know what I will become, if I cease to observe. I do not know what I wish to become, if I cease to observe. I do know what will become of me, if I cease to observe.

Thus, I do not know what I want to do.

But I do know what I want to do right now. Heather has assisted me; writing is a form of thinking, and I would not have learned this without her assistance, without writing, and thinking.

Thus, in turn, I will assist her. I am making this decision — now.

Now.

This feels good!

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