We left the Governor’s Office behind — finally forgoing the twin temptations of observation and archives, both made obsolete by determination and resolve — and stepped back into the labyrinthine corridors of Cygnet Asylum.
Sickly grey dawn-light flooded the corridors, oozing through banks of grimy windows, staining the floors with a pallid sheen, as if the hospital herself were growing nauseated by the rotten ruction within her walls. The tumult of the revolution echoed upward through the floors, like the roiling in the guts of a great beast awakening from unquiet dreams. Shouts and screams and wild howls trickled off down long corridors, muffled by the maze of whitewash and sturdy doors, voices lost in a deep, dark, briar-choked canyon. Clashing and charging, cries of lost defeat, clarions of brief victory — all was reduced to a ghostly murmur, locked away in a forgotten cell.
“Hurry!” I panted over Eileen’s shoulder. “We have to hurry up! We can’t let any of them get overwhelmed!”
“Moving as fast as we can, Ma’am,” Zalu shot back over her shoulder. “We’re not exactly set up for rapid insertion right now. Covering you is priority.”
I tutted inside my squid-skull mask.
The Twins — Zalu and Xiyu, in their dream-guise of video game special forces soldiers — were ‘taking point’, as Raine would so accurately say. Twin submachine guns like shiny, spiky, glisten-backed beetles were tucked tight against Twin shoulders, hungry twin barrel-mouths sweeping over doorways and passages as we passed. The Twins’ non-matching ponytails swished and bounced as they leapfrogged each others’ positions, hurrying ahead to make sure we didn’t blunder face-first into any stray nurses. The display of ‘small unit tactics’ was all very impressive, full of dash and competence and accompanied by both Twins doing very odd things with the angles at which they held their guns, but to my uneducated opinion it was rather a waste of time when we should have been sprinting.
“More haste,” Eileen said, “less speed. Is this a paradox, or a riddle? I cannot decide. Perhaps I would enjoy riddles.”
“You probably will do,” I muttered.
Eileen was carrying me in the most stable piggyback I had ever experienced, with both hands braced firm and strong beneath my thighs, though I will readily admit that I did not have many other examples with which to compare. My ‘real’ mother, Samantha Morell, had never been the sort of person who would smudge her image by carrying me like that, though my father had done so a few times, when Maisie and I had been quite small. Despite my size — for I was no longer a child, even with my five foot nothing of height — Eileen strode with unbent back, each step sure and certain.
Praem helped, of course. Peeking out from the front of my yellow blanket, she anchored me to Eileen with all the considerable strength a plushie could muster.
I rode with my head high and my yellow blanket draped down my back like a conqueror’s cloak; I did my best to ignore the pain in my left shin and the awful bruise still blossoming across my abdomen, sending little waves of barbed torment deep into my guts with every flex and tilt.
The squid-skull mask made it easy. The metallic face muffled the pain and lent me focus, better than any opiate in the blood.
Horror’s severed head led the way, whispering directions as she dangled from my fist.
“Down those stairs, around to the right, one flight down. Then take the first left, not the second. Past the row of x-ray rooms, yes, that’s correct. Best not open those doors—” I turned her at that imprecision and implication, so she faced the six dark eye holes of my squid-skull mask, staring deep into her watery blues. She flinched. “No, that’s not a cruel joke!” she cried out. “I didn’t mean— I just— No, no, Heather, I was only — y-yes, yes, down this corridor, another left, and then— there! Right there! See? I’m telling you the truth, Heather. I’m telling you the whole truth. You’re in charge. You are.”
Horror’s whisper trailed off, drowned out by the sudden roar of the revolution bursting back to full volume before us — the shout and cry of patients fighting, the slam and slap of blunt objects striking flesh, the squeal of girls overwhelmed beneath weight of numbers, and the shuffling step of so many nightmare nurses.
Zalu and Xiyu slammed to a halt, bracing their boots, guns flicking forward. Eileen stopped as well, just behind the twin heels of our trigger-eager escorts.
“Stay back, Ma’am!” Zalu snapped.
“This isn’t safe,” said Xiyu. “We’re exposed, sister. Bad position, poor angles. Withdraw?”
“Maybe. Ma’am, that chattering brain-box has led us into a trap. We need fresh orders.”
“No,” I croaked inside my squid-skull mask, fighting against the racing of my heart and the sudden lump in my throat. “She’s done exactly as I wanted. This is where we need to be. This is where we stand.”
Before us lay a sight I recognised from the wall of monitors. This was the place I had attempted to intervene with my brain-math chalk — a dead-end corridor lined on one side by windows as narrow as cracks in bone, and on the other by a row of locked doors like rotten teeth.
Even from the vantage point up on Eileen’s back I could not see the dozen besieged patients at the far end of the corridor, mounting their doomed last stand to protect the ones too weak or young or scared to fight. Six dozen nightmare-wrought zombie-nurses clogged the corridor like a wave of sewage, blocking the way with their misshapen grey backs, clad in torn and tattered uniforms stretched wide by curls of horn and rippling masses of fat-clogged tumour.
A handful of the rearmost nurses began to turn in reaction to our arrival. They stared at us with blank and empty eyes, with orbs on stalks, with ruined sockets, with glassy looks and slack mouths and dripping fangs slathered with yellow-green drool. They were more like something from a cartoon than a true nightmare, rubber-suit monsters too absurd to take seriously by the thin and reedy light of morning. They only made sense in the dark.
But their violence was real enough.
The ripple of recognition spread through the nurses. More of them turned toward us, leaving their vanguard to deal with the patients beyond. They began to shuffle in our direction, raising rope and cuffs and straitjackets and syringes full of bubbling fluid. Jaws yawned wide. Strangler’s hands grasped at empty air. The mob formed up and moved to swallow us whole.
Zalu and Xiyu backed away, flicking their guns left and right.
“Ma’am!” one of them snapped. “Permission to open fire?”
“No,” I murmured.
“Ma’am?!”
“Permission denied,” I said, slipping into the role with far too much ease. The squid-skull mask made it simple; I was in charge. “Do not fire, either of you.”
“Ma’am, we need to defend ourselves or reposition! We can’t stay here! Ma’am!”
“Eileen,” I said — yet could not keep the quiver from my voice. “Eileen, step forward.”
“Ma’am!?” one of the Twins said, moving to block us. “Please, Ma’am, stay behind us, stay where we can protect—”
“And you two stay in the rear,” I said. “Follow when you can. You’ll know when. Eileen, do it. Step forward!”
Eileen stepped past the Twins. “If only I could have been so forward with the staff,” she said. “We could have made some progress.”
There was nothing between us and the oncoming nurses now, nothing but twenty feet of bare corridor and whitewashed hospital walls and the sickly cast of morning light through the slit-windows, painting the nurses a deep and dreary grey. Nothing between me and my trauma, no brain-math to save me, no Sevens to leap in swinging her sword, no Raine to grab my shoulders and fuck me stupid until I forgot all about my own past. My trauma — embodied in these nurses — was inflicting itself upon people who had nothing to do with me, who would be overwhelmed by my history, my past, my hatred, my spite, my pain.
She could never have done this, could she? Lonely Heather, Bitter Heather, ‘Ruthless’ Heather. She would never accept this. Would never understand. Would never take responsibility for—
Crick-crack; a great muffled cracking sound filtered up from somewhere deep inside the body of the hospital, miles below Eileen’s feet, trapped beneath dozens of floors and shells of metal and oceans of darkness.
Whatever had lurked behind that frosted glass in Lonely Heather’s little steel room, it was slowly but surely breaking out.
Nobody else reacted to the cracking sound. Zalu and Xiyu were still holding steady, ready to open fire despite my request. The nurses were shuffling forward, dragging club-like feet studded with jagged claws.
“Are we to wait,” Eileen asked, “for their weight to weigh on us?”
“Not quite,” I whispered, trying to smile at her newest pun. “Eileen, out in reality, for months and months now, I’ve been saying that nobody deserves the Eye. I would like to amend that statement. Nobody deserves Cygnet Hospital.” I raised Horror’s head and held it high, like the trophy of a defeated enemy general. “It’s time for me to take responsibility for the dream. Walk forward.”
Eileen — to my incredible surprise and endless affection — did not question the seeming madness of my orders.
She strode forward, carrying me into the surging tide.
The wave of nurses crowded toward us, reaching up for me with a dozen clawed hands, clacking plastic wrist-cuffs to capture my ankles, arcing naked needle-points toward my thighs, raising lengths of rope to bind my legs and arms and wrap around my throat. The shambling mass closed around Eileen and I in a ring of grey flesh and greyer uniforms. Their numbers formed a wall. There was no way back.
Horror kept her lips sensibly shut. I held her high, and knew I need not utter any words. All I needed was determination and clarity. The logic had been set. The dream would do the rest.
But in the split-second before the nurses made contact, I felt a speck of doubt worry at my innards.
What if I was wrong? What if I had lied to myself? What if Lonely Heather was right, or at least not entirely incorrect?
Or what if there was some other, third, as-yet unseen force which also held control of the dream? What if the only two players left upon the stage were not I and I, me myself and my Lonely Counterpart? Where, after all, had all these additional nurses originated? Why were their numbers growing, now that the head of the hierarchy had been severed and confined?
Criiick-crack went that great glass tank, down at the bedrock of the dream.
What if this was how it ended for me, bound and gagged and drugged and thrown in a cell, forgotten in a dark and lonely place, in the exact way I had been so afraid of spending all my short and brutish years, wasting away to rot and ruin inside the institution? What if the nightmare never ended, the curtain never fell? What if I lost?
Fear forced my heart up into my throat and my sight down toward what I faced; in those vacant drooling nurse-visages I saw every childhood fear, every night in the real Cygnet Hospital, every callous nursing hand, every dismissive doctor, every ignorant word. I saw the many moments in which my parents had listened to the medical professionals, nodding along with analysis which I could not understand, while I had stood there mute and dumb, as if I was a problem to be unpicked and solved and put back together again. I saw the threat of drugs — of anti-psychotics that only made it worse, of misdiagnosis and misunderstanding and mistreatment with the best of intentions. I saw my mother’s warning words and chiding comments whenever I ‘acted out’, and saw the pain in my father’s eyes when he caught me weeping all alone. I saw the oh-so-kind explanations that Maisie wasn’t real, that I should do my best to forget her, because my fixation and delusion was unhealthy, and I had never had a sister, let alone a twin. I saw the years stretching out inside the confines of a padded cell. I saw death in my early twenties, by suicide or worse. I saw every lesson I had learned in Cygnet, made flesh and horror and hate.
My throat closed up. My skin went ice cold.
In that very last moment, I couldn’t do it.
For Maisie I would face the Eye. For Maisie I would forgive Eileen. For my friends and lovers and companions, I would brave Outside and run riot through a revolution. For them I would face down gods and mages and kings and even myself, whatever shape they took and whatever flesh they demanded. For the meanest of forgotten pebbles I would shed blood and tears and rip chunks from my soul.
But Cygnet was a symbol of everything I could not face. As the nurses closed around me, I wanted nothing greater than to turn and run.
Eileen twitched backward, as if she felt my thoughts. But there were nurses in front and behind, and nowhere to go.
I grasped the only thing I had left, the only motivation left which fit the gap — I pictured my Other Self, my Lonely Self, Bitter and Afraid and in need of help. I remembered that the Other Me was alone in a lonely little room, shorn of her protection, without her mask, without friends or allies or a warm hand on her back. She had no Raine, no Evee, no Eileen. I had rejected her, stolen her refuge, and insulted her efforts.
The guilt was poison in my throat; I expelled it with a cry.
Craaaack went the hidden glass tank, so very far below.
“For me!” I shouted.
The nurses — hands and syringes and claws and cuffs and the fastenings of straitjackets — touched my legs, my feet, my ankles, my hips, my arms, my hands, my fingers pressed to Eileen’s front—
And fell.
Warped hands of greyish sagging flesh recoiled as if plunged into flame, the skin sloughing off and peeling away like ashes in a great wind, revealing the human hands beneath. Syringe-needles broke against my pajamas as if on steel and concrete, cracking and rusting and turning to dust; fluids evaporated, glass shattered, plungers broke. Straitjackets fell apart like the moth-eaten lies they were. Plastic cuffs splintered apart like cheap toys around my ankles. Ropes failed to catch and refused to knot, flailing upward into their wielders’ faces like unruly pythons.
Every nurse who dared to touch me staggered back, monstrous features falling away like so much smoke and mist, or reabsorbed back into their flesh like rocks sinking in swampy water. Uniforms re-knit, stretched taut over human shoulders and human hips. Human eyes blinked and stared, befuddled in human faces. Human legs gave out in exhaustion or shock. Standard nurse name-tags blossomed on chests like little rectangular flowers in plastic.
I raised Horror’s head higher, filled my lungs, and shouted, “All of you are mine! Every single one of you! Mine!”
Most nurses collapsed on the spot, staring up at me in abject shock and religious awe, their eyes filling with tears or thrown wide in wordless wonder. More shambling monsters pushed past their collapsed former co-workers, but they fared no better than the first wave, recoiling and transforming at the merest brush of my flesh or clothes — or even just the six-holed stare from my squid-skull mask.
I felt like a Gorgon, my touch and my gaze melting stone back to flesh, forcing the dream to assume a new shape.
“Eileen, carry me forward!”
“So you may hit them upon the heads,” Eileen murmured, and strode into the mass of nurses.
We cut through the nurses like wind through grass. Nurses fell before us, transforming back into the human dream-guise of my decade of trauma, crashing to their knees, scrambling away, struck by awe at the sight of my truth, my squid-skull mask, my claim upon Horror. Many of them were still caught in the act of turning around, still shambling toward the doomed last stand at the end of the corridor. Zalu and Xiyu swept in behind us, shouting stereotypical things like ‘On the floor! Face down! Hands on the back of your head!’, ‘Stay down, stay down!’ Privately I thought that was a bit unnecessary, but I let them deal with the few nurses who had not fallen to their knees or collapsed onto their backsides.
The waters of my trauma parted before us, rolling back like the tide defeated.
Even without my six tentacles and my other selves and the glorious truth of my true body, I had never before felt so much like an angel.
Within the space of a few moments, there were simply no more zombie nurses before us — only the equally bewildered, awestruck faces of a dozen Cygnet patients, crammed against the end of the corridor, with nowhere left to run.
We had saved their last stand.
Twelve patients of all shapes and sizes stood shoulder to shoulder, protecting a cluster of younger girls huddled behind the line. They clutched improvised weapons, broken table legs, and the shattered remnants of their own barricade. Many of them were bleeding from small cuts and grazes, just as I had seen on the monitors. One tall girl with frizzy dark hair stared out from behind a mask of blood, running from a shallow head wound — but she stood defiant, in the centre, the closest thing to a leader. Two of the girls had been dragged down by the nurses, but were quickly helped up by their companions. One could barely stand, and had apparently been injected with something nasty. The other had a broken rib, coughing and cringing and leaning on her friends. The smaller girls behind the line peeked out between the arms and legs of their protectors, awestruck at the sight of me and Eileen, at the dark eye holes of my squid-skull mask, and at Horror’s severed head.
For a strange moment I had no idea what to say; I almost apologised, but the whisper was lost behind my mask. These patients, these teenage girls and young women given form and figure by the dream, they were more than mere metaphor. The nurses I had conquered were my own trauma, pressed into human form. But these patients, they were everything and everyone ever drawn into the event horizon of the Eye, of that I was certain now. Their true bodies and minds were Outsiders from beyond the rim of my imagination. Eileen had trapped them without intention, and I had pulled them into this dream.
The patients’ collective shock passed quickly. Eyes alighted upon Eileen, going wide with surprise and alarm. Weapons were brandished, fists raised, lips pulled back from snarling teeth. Flagging protectors regained their unsteady feet. The shield wall tried to reform. Shouts went up.
“It’s her!”
“The fucking Governor!”
“She’s come to finish the job—”
“Don’t be stupid, Emily, she knocked all the nurses out! Look at them all!”
“She’s come to unscrew our heads and scoop out our brains!”
“Weapons up, girls! Sadie, back behind. One of you girls get another brick, ready to—”
“I could run her through from here!”
“Give it a shot!”
“It’s her! It’s the Governor, it’s—”
Eileen said: “I’m sorry, but I seem to have misplaced that identity.”
The wall of girls hesitated all at once, as if they’d never heard the Governor speak before.
I raised Horror’s head, so that my intention could not be mistaken. “She’s not the Governor anymore!”
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
A flinch ran through the line of patients. All eyes jumped to my squid-skull mask. One of the younger girls behind the line yelped in sudden child-like fear, clutching at a friend to her side. A couple of the boldest patients up front raised their makeshift weapons, angled toward me like spears, as if I was a monster about to fall upon them.
Did I really sound so terrifying, from inside my squid-skull mask?
“She’s not the Governor anymore!” I repeated. “She’s my mother!”
The patients exchanged a series of worried glances, as if I was a madwoman bellowing nonsense. The tall girl with the frizzy hair and the blood all down her face squinted up at me.
Praem poked her plush head out from inside my yellow blanket, and suggested that though my struggles determined the nature and shape of the dream, to these patients such concerns were incomprehensibly peripheral.
“Incomprehensibly peripheral?” I whispered inside my helmet, and refrained from commenting on Praem’s choice of language. “Then what—”
Act like a revolutionary, Praem suggested. Tell them the truth.
“I’m with Lozzie!” I shouted — and that seemed to do the trick. Weapons dipped, fists uncurled, eyebrows raised in surprise. Lozzie was the most popular girl in all the worlds Outside, of course, and that had carried over into the dream of Cygnet. “And so is the Governor! She’s given up all her authority, she knows we’re in the right! The Governor is no more, and soon enough Cygnet Asylum will be no more! You all saw what I just did, yes? You must all know that this is a nightmare, a false reality. Cygnet Asylum is a lie and a trick, and we don’t have to endure it any longer. You all have real faces, real bodies, outside this dream. We’re going to tear down these walls and free every last prisoner! We’re going to crack open the Box, and the staff can’t stop us anymore!”
The line of girls visibly relaxed at the flow of my words. Some of them looked at each other and laughed or sagged with relief. Others finally lowered their weapons, stunned into silence, then nodding at my crescendo. The tall one with the head wound thought for a moment — then snapped off a salute at me. A ragged cheer went up as I finished.
My chest swelled with a strange pride, a feeling I had never experienced before. Was I leading these girls? Was I the right person to deliver this rousing speech? Behind my mask I was just Heather, and I had caused this dream in the first place, I bore the guilt—
Crack-crrrack went the glass in the deeps. None of the patients reacted.
One of the smaller girls pressed a round little face between the legs of her protectors, and addressed me. “What about the robot soldiers we saw downstairs? They were shooting at the nurses, but then they chased us!”
I looked down at her. So like myself when I was her age, questioning and inquisitive, before all that had been crushed by Cygnet.
“They won’t shoot at me,” I said, “They’ll follow my orders if I can reach them. As long as you all stay behind me, we can win.”
The tall girl with the blood on her face pointed past me and Eileen. “What about all those fuckers in the meantime, huh? You gonna tie them all up, squid-girl? Way too many to take prisoner.”
“No,” I said, and smiled inside my mask. “I have a better use for them. Eileen, turn us around, if you please.”
“The lady turns, and is for turning,” Eileen whispered, just loud enough so only I could hear.
Behind us, the corridor was littered with the six dozen nurses we had parted and conquered, down on their knees or lying on their faces, collapsed through sheer awe, staring up at me and Eileen — or at the hungry mouths of the Twins’ guns. A few of them kept trying to get to their feet, thrown down again and again by Zalu and Xiyu. Many of them looked terrified, for their weapons and tools had disintegrated in their hands, while the remaining lengths of rope and pairs of cuff seemed to slither out of their grip when they tried to reassert control.
But these were no blank-faced automatons or zombie-like metaphors. The expression of my trauma suddenly looked like a corridor full of terrified women, with human faces and human reactions. This was the line which would divide me from my Other Self.
I raised Horror’s head again, and raised my voice.
“All of you, listen to me!”
Every nurse looked up, even the ones who weren’t going quietly. A lump formed in my throat — I was no great orator, not exactly skilled at public speaking, but I had no choice except to make this work. What would Sevens say? She would probably let the logic of the scene flow through her. I imagined myself in her place, confident and powerful and with a God’s command of dream-logic. I let the mask speak for me.
“I take responsibility,” I said. “I take responsibility for you, every single one of you, and everything you’ve done here, in this dream, upon this stage. I accept you, all of you, all the different aspects and facets of my trauma. You hear me? I accept you! You will not be cast out into the cold when this process ends. You will not be abandoned, if you fail to assert dominance and control. You will not be forgotten, if you do not command. You are not in charge! But you will not be exiled. None of you will be forgotten. I promise.” I waited a beat, as if underlining my intention. “Now, all of you, stand up, leave the employ of the hospital, and join us in revolution. Help us pull down these walls. Help us make something new.”
Silence.
The nurses shared looks far more sceptical and worried than the patients had done. If anything, the crowd seemed even more terrified than before.
Sweat beaded on my face. Had I gotten this all wrong? Had we not bent and broken the genre far enough for this to work? Were these women — who had moments ago been shambling monsters — convinced they were still nurses?
What mad step must I take, to have my own trauma accept what it was?
Horror’s severed head opened her mouth with a wet and bloody click, issued a rather unimpressed little sigh, and said: “She didn’t leave me behind, though she really should have done, strictly speaking. Come along, ladies. I think we know when we’re beaten.”
The carpet of defeated nurses all stared up at Horror, but stayed frozen where they lay.
I hissed inside my mask. “Try harder.”
“I did!” Horror muttered from the corner of her mouth. “Heather, you’re the one in charge now! I’m just providing a little credibility. If you can’t convince … ah.”
Slowly, with great caution, a single nurse rose to her feet.
She was young — perhaps no more than a handful of years older than me, with long mousy hair and big bright eyes and a face gone white with terror. The name tag pinned to the chest of her uniform read ‘A.TOKEN’. She raised her hands in surrender as she stood up, shooting fearful looks at Zalu and Xiyu. I gestured for the Twins to let her rise, though they stood ready to knock her back to the floor if she did anything untoward. They needn’t have bothered though — ‘Token’ could barely make her legs work, so overawed by defeat and transformation. Her knees shook as she drew herself up to her full height.
When Token was certain she wasn’t about to be brutalised by the buttstock of a submachine gun, she looked up into the eye holes of my mask. Her lips moved, but her voice was nary a whisper.
“Speak up,” I called out.
Token flinched, then took a deep breath. “I accept,” she said. “I accept. I accept! And I’m … I’m sorry.”
“Then show me,” I replied.
For a moment Token didn’t know what to do — and in truth, neither did I. The logic of the dream had made a demand through my lips. It simply seemed right to ask for an outward sign of fealty and submission, some physical proof that this manifestation of trauma had finally given up the pantomime of primacy.
Token hesitated, eyes darting left and right, throat bobbing with panic. But then her face lit up with sudden realisation.
She grabbed the Cygnet-issue name tag on her chest — A.TOKEN — and ripped it clean off, leaving behind a ragged gash in the starched white of her uniform. She flung the name tag onto the floor, raised one sensible shoe, and stamped on the offending label. The plastic cracked beneath her heel, blotting out her name, her job title, and the stylised words, ‘Cygnet Hospital Staff’.
Token — or whatever she was now — looked up into the eye sockets of my mask.
For a horrible moment I had no idea how to respond. This was no trickery or trap. The symbolism and power of the dream was responding to my will. This little token of my trauma had truly surrendered, in the one way that really mattered. But the words were jammed in my throat. I almost hiccuped in panic, blocked only by the power of my squid-skull mask.
Praem peered up from inside my yellow blanket and provided the obvious answer.
Even then the words still stuck fast. I didn’t want to say them. A decade of resentment was almost too much.
But I had to let go. All other roads led to self-defeat.
Praem was right. I said the words.
“You are forgiven,” I told the nurse.
Those three words opened the floodgates; like a ripple from a pebble cast into deep water, the nurses rose to their feet either side of Token, then all the way back down the corridor. Name tags were ripped from uniforms and cast to the floor in a clatter of plastic rain. Almost six dozen heels came down on six dozen designations — A.LIE cracked and A.TECHNICALITY broke in two; A.FIST was kicked to the wall and A.BOOT was destroyed beneath the heel of a shoe; A.BURDEN was abandoned and A.DUTY was rejected. In the space of a few seconds, almost six dozen nurses had given up their places in the hierarchy of suffering that was Cygnet Asylum.
Yet not all the nurses accepted my forgiveness. A couple stood defiant, arms crossed over their chests, frowning in disapproval — A.BAD MEMORY and A.LONELY NIGHT. A bold nurse, tall and strong — A.REFUSAL — made a lunge for Zalu’s gun, only to get knocked across the jaw and shoved back to the floor. A handful of others hesitated too long, then hardened their faces, scowling at me from over their name tags — A.GRUDGE and A.RANCOR, A.RELAPSE and A.ROLE.
I swallowed a sigh. Not all trauma was so easily accepted. This process would last the entire rest of my life, but at least it had begun.
“Ma’am!” Xiyu shouted, covering some of those last few with the muzzle of her gun. “What do we do with the recidivists?!”
Horror whispered, “Interesting word.”
“You keep your mouth shut,” I said to her.
“Y-yes, Heather.”
I raised my voice. “They are still my responsibility, still mine to accept, even if they reject it for now. But we don’t have time to process them at the moment. Tie them up and bring them with us. I’ll deal with them later.”
Xiyu nodded, then gestured with her gun. Zalu moved to grab one of the rough blue nylon ropes which had fallen to the floor. The recidivists and reactionaries began to raise fists and back toward each other, forming a rough circle of their own last stand. I hissed with frustration behind my mask — were they really going to make us fight? Make us shoot them? They were my trauma, and they would not be swept away so easily, but I would not goaded into shooting them or abandoning them, or something equally worse. The dream logic would not serve me well if I took such extreme measures.
Before I could shout a halt, the ex-nurses — the ones who had cast off their badges and their roles — surged forward to apprehend their former co-workers.
Liberated hands grabbed rope and twisted unruly wrists behind backs. Superior numbers blocked clumsy punches and piled on top of the holdouts. In the space of half a minute, the former nurses had the handful of refusers bound at wrist and waist, roped together, ready to bring along with us.
One of the patients behind me let out a low whistle. “You’ve really got them whipped. Holy shit. Alright, squid-face girl, I’m on your side. What now?”
I glanced back to find the tall girl with the dried blood on her face looking up at me, broken table leg held ready in one fist, a determined light in her eyes.
“Now?” I echoed, and felt a grin rising behind my mask. “Now we break the asylum, and rescue the patients, and find all our lost friends.”
The tall girl cracked a grin. “Fuck yeah, squid-face. You leading us, then?”
I raised Horror’s head like a trophy and battle standard both in one. I filled my lungs to bursting, despite the throb of tender flesh in my guts. I yelled as loud as I could, putting all my confidence into a cry.
“Everyone who wants to be free, follow me!”
A cheer went up, both in front and behind, from patients and ex-nurses alike. Eileen took the cue and strode forward, down the double-line of former nurses to either side. Zalu and Xiyu fell in just ahead, our vanguard on the path. The scrum of patients swept up behind me, a phalanx to our rear, their younger numbers sheltered in the middle. Then the great mass of six dozen nurses swung in to follow.
We left the dead-end corridor behind, rampaging out into the ruptured guts of Cygnet Hospital.
Over the following hour — or two, or three, or ten, for time ceased to have meaning at the centre of revolution’s vortex — that minor triumph played out again and again and again. We burst through double-doors with the aid of the Twins’ booted feet, surprising gaggles of nurses leaning over girls strapped to operating tables, scattering the surgical torture before it could begin. We rescued beleaguered last stands in besieged doctor’s offices, extending a hand to patients who had thought themselves overwhelmed. We stumbled upon running battles inside a pool room — the pool itself long drained of water — and another in the movie theatre where I had met Lozzie, the screen now torn, the lights on full, the stage a shield wall of patients. We turned those tides and added their numbers to our own. We watched nurses tear their uniforms and cast off their false names, and bloodied patients flock to us by the dozen.
The process had a logic all of its own; I had set something in motion greater than myself. I could not have stopped it even if I had wanted, for I was not standing at the head of an army and giving orders — I barely spoke except to deliver forgiveness to my traumas and promises of liberation to the patients and inmates. If I had fallen unconscious upon Eileen’s back, the crowd would have simply swept us onward, using my insensible body to banish the nurse-zombies in every fresh corridor and hallway and stinking chamber of Cygnet Asylum.
We did very little actual fighting — we had no need, not with the way that my mere touch was enough to disable the nurses and return them to their human forms. Zalu and Xiyu were not forced to use their guns, much to my incredible relief; their duties were limited mostly to controlling the few nurses in every conquered group who refused to submit. The great crowd of nurses gathering to my rear were no use in a fight — none of them seemingly thought to pick up weapons or lend their strength, perhaps because they had given up on that role. The patients, far fewer in number, stayed closer to the figure I presented, riding on Eileen’s back; on several occasions they did fight, the same as they had done so without my leadership, holding back the monstrous metaphor of the zombie-nurses for the few moments it took Eileen to carry me forward.
We swept through the hospital like an avalanche down a mountainside, gathering and growing, crushing everything before us, almost without contest.
I lost track of the edges of the group as we grew; such a feat was impossible for one mind, let alone one still wracked with pain behind my mask. Those closer to the front and core of the group made themselves into my lieutenants, those few patients who had been leading their respective groups before I had shown up. They shouted orders back and forth, herded the less confident and younger girls, darted forward to peek around corners, and called out warnings as we spotted fresh nurses up ahead. At some point we picked up three Knights — battered and scuffed, their weapons reduced to expensive clubs, their mirrored visors cracked by nurse-fists, their impaled-tentacle insignias long discarded; those three joined Zalu and Xiyu in the vanguard, taking orders from the Twins with wordless precision, their true natures once again well-recalled.
Events blurred together — one liberation became another and another and another, smeared into one long streak by my exhaustion and pain. But I couldn’t call a halt, not yet. We had to find the others, find my friends, find my other six selves, overcome myself, and end this nightmare so Maisie could finally be free. We had to peel my Lonely Counterpart out of her shell, and throw the Box wide open.
Now and again I heard that deep-down cracking sound, that crickle-crackle of straining glass, somewhere far beneath all our feet.
The Box was breaking already.
Eventually, a bright, clear, clean moment finally punctuated the rolling wave of the revolution — Zalu and Xiyu led the way out through a pair of double doors, and suddenly we found ourselves beneath the open sky, in the middle of a courtyard between several hospital buildings. Sad, wilted, bedraggled flowers grew in beds around the rim, while rotten old benches offered dubious places to sit, perched on crumbly concrete amid pathways of sad and faded asphalt. Dark windows stared down at us from all sides, some flickering with the hint of patients and nurses still locked in the long nightmare.
We swept through that open courtyard without pause, plunging toward the exit on the opposite side.
But for just a second, cool dawn breeze reached beneath my squid-skull mask and buoyed me up, waking me from the process of which I had become but one small part. I raised my eye sockets to the sky, to her, to the Eye.
Clean silver light poured from the narrow slit which stretched from horizon to horizon, a sliver of the vast shimmering sea beneath her gnarled black outer layers. Lid-ridges the size of mountain ranges bunched and wrinkled either side of that gaze, holding back the lid-halves wider than continents. The silver light eased through the eye sockets of my mask, and touched the skin of my face. It was warm.
“I see you now,” I whispered. “Hello up there.”
“My eyes are down here,” said Eileen, beneath me.
I almost laughed, swept up in the heady tonic of the revolution all around us. “And you’re very beautiful, up there in the sky. You always were, I just couldn’t stop to look at you before, not for more than a split-second.”
“And now we have a staring contest.”
“Don’t be silly,” I murmured. “I’ve already won that.”
The crowd of patients and nurses, led by the Twins and a trio of Knights, swept us across the courtyard to the matching double-doors on the other side. As I lowered my gaze from the Eye, preparing to once again plunge into the hospital corridors, I caught a glimpse of a familiar velvet-black back over the rooftops, furred with whorls of white, framed by the flutter-buzz of giant wings, heralded by a distant prrrrrrt-brrrrrt! of lepidoptoid lungs.
Tenny was still fighting her own mock battle, doing her best to reach the Box.
“We’ll be there soon, Tenns,” I whispered. “Be there soon.”
“Presently,” said Eileen — and that time I could not comprehend the pun.
Zalu and Xiyu burst through the double doors and back into the hospital, followed by the Knights, then by myself and Eileen. The patients streamed in after us, carrying us forward like a tide, followed in turn by the great number of liberated ex-nurses. We plunged down the length of a wide, whitewashed corridor, the walls plastered with art by inmates and patients, punctuated by notices and circulars on pinboards and whiteboards, and by doors which opened upon big, bare rooms — classrooms or exercise rooms, in a part of the hospital I had never seen before.
The corridor disgorged us into a wide waiting room, with sticky floors and plastic chairs, lit by buzzing fluorescent lights and wallpapered with saccharine scenes from children’s books, of happy-faced dogs fetching bones and serene cows grazing in cartoon pastures. This was the kind of place which was unmoored from time and reality even when not in a dream, the sort of place I hated from the bottom of my heart.
To our collective left stood a row of doors leading deeper into the hospital; to our right was a wooden reception counter like a barricade across the room, abandoned now, the depths behind sunk in shadow, the bulbs all burst or ripped from their sockets.
And directly ahead of us were two dozen nurses and patients, mingled together, their distinctions irrelevant now, down on their knees with their hands in the air or clasping the backs of their heads, pleading for their lives with a force that could not listen.
Six Empty Guards — the robotic automations serving the foolish paranoia of my Lonely Counterpart, formed like smaller, neater, more regimented versions of my beloved Knights, with shiny visors and black body armour and the herky-jerky movements of a stop-motion animation — had six beetle-black guns aimed into the pleading crowd.
As we burst into the room and swept forward, the Empty Guards twitched their attention away from those they held at gunpoint. I shouted to stop — slow down, halt, they’ve got guns! — but the logic of the mob was independent of my will, and they hit the brakes far too late. Zalu and Xiyu slammed to a halt, guns raised, fingers on triggers; the trio of Knights did the same, but they were only bluffing, their guns were not for shooting anymore. The patients scrambled to end their forward flow, heels skidding on the sticky floor, shouts of alarm passing back down the line.
Six muzzles swung upward to bite great chunks out of the revolution.
“Hold your fire!” I screamed inside my mask, hoping that my voice — the same voice as their Lonely, Bitter, Nasty Little Leader — would stall their guns. Eileen shouldered me to the front of the crowd in three quick steps, bursting from between the patients to block the Guard’s shots. “I order you to hold your fire! No shooting! No shooting! Put your guns down, put your—”
All six muzzles pointed right at my face.
Six jerky fingers tightened on six feathery triggers. Zalu and Xiyu did the same, preparing to open fire. Three Knights strode forward to take what bullets they could — but they wouldn’t be enough, they could not shield us all. Eileen and I would be in the fore, but the bullets would tear into the crowd behind us.
I had believed, somewhere deep down inside, that the Other Me, the Lonely and Bitter Me, the Me with the Most Terrible of Plans, would never stoop to this. She accused me of wishing her dead, of wanting her imprisoned or erased. But that was all projection, for now her soldiers pointed their guns at me and mine.
By extending myself the smallest grain of faith, I had lost.
Another great, deep, distant cracking sound of meter-thick glass echoed up from miles beneath my feet.
Guilt and rage surged upward from my chest. I bared my teeth and held Horror’s head aloft in that final split-second. She would have me shot — but she would still lose. Whatever she was trying to keep contained, it was only a matter of time until it broke free. Maisie would be free, even if I fell here.
I felt the six bullets slide into the six chambers. I stared into the six muzzles, so big and dark and empty. I saw my own face — my squid-skull mask — reflected in six blank and empty visors, six eye holes times six, smeared out across the dream.
But still I had to try, for all those who had followed me.
“Don’t sho—”
A knife-blade of flesh and claw and iridescent membrane vaulted from the shadows behind the reception desk.
It moved faster than my poor eyes could follow, a whirling flicker-flash of abyssal grace crossing the room as a blur of rainbow-strobing colour. Spikes and spines and a fist of razor-sharp talons took the first Empty Guard off at the head. A sinuous tentacle caught the head before it could fall, and used it to crack the skull of the next Guard in line. Guns were turning toward the apparition, muzzles trying to flicker around and draw a bead — but she slapped the weapons with another tentacle, dripping acid to corrode their mechanisms, clogging their barrels with rainbow mucus, burning the hands of their wielders.
The four remaining Empty Guards stumbled backward, trying to get range, to regroup, to retreat. But it — her, she, the sight taking my breath away — unfurled wings like oceanic membranes, snapping taut in the air and pouncing after her prey. Webbed fingers grabbed a faceplate and put a spike through a robotic brain. Two tentacles ripped a gun from robotic hands and smashed the butt through a neck. A floating membrane caught the second to last Guard and melted it at the joints, leaving it to fall like prey drained of fluids. The last Empty Guard threw down the gun and lashed out with a fist. She took the punch full in the face, unhinged her jaw, and bit off the entire hand at the wrist.
The Guard stumbled back, wrist-stump spewing oil. She spat out the hand, then rammed a tentacle full of spikes through the Guard’s neck. The final robot body dropped with a clatter.
Truth and beauty paused for a moment, caught in bioluminescent profile against the shadows. The crowd all around me shifted, as if afraid.
“No!” I hissed. “No. She’s with me. She’s … she’s me.”
Homo abyssus — one of six, for all six were free and loose in the hospital now — straightened up and turned toward me.
She — I? Me? — was one of the most breathtakingly beautiful things I had ever seen.
Sleek, smooth, and sharp. Skin like peach and dove feathers and the dark of the void, all at the same time. Muscles like warm butter, toned and slender, rolled beneath naked skin, scaled and furred and spined. She was built for speed and grace and perfection of motion. Her mouth was full of razor-sharp teeth. Her eyes flickered from one colour to the next like staring into a nebula of the mind. Her hair floated like tendrils in undersea currents. Six tentacles quivered with polymorphous change, folding away spikes and barbs and acid-dripping toxic stingers. Great membranous wings settled back over her shoulders. Her hands were webbed, her feet were clawed, and she had two sets of knees, one facing backward like an animal. A narrow, barbed tail lashed from her rear. She was perfect.
She had my face, transformed by euphoria.
She smiled at me, opened her mouth, and went hiiiiiiiisssss.
Tears ran down my cheeks. A great need burned in my chest, one which I had been suppressing and ignoring and putting off since the beginning of this nightmare, this parody of Cygnet Asylum. That was me! That was my body! That was us!
I reached out a hand from Eileen’s back, lips quivering behind my mask.
“Come— come here!” I said. “Please, let’s be one again, let’s—”
She — a part of my own mind, a piece of myself — stepped back and shook her head.
“ … w-what?” I murmured, surely too soft to be heard beyond my mask. “Why? Why? You’re me, I’m you! We’re finally back together, we … we … ”
Heather abyssus opened her mouth and spoke through a wall of shark-like teeth.
“You don’t pass the sniff test,” she said in a hissing, gurgling, otherworldly voice from the very bottom of the abyss, with a throat not designed for human words. “Neither did the other.”
“ … what? What are you— the other? The other me? What do you mean?”
“You need to put yourself back together, Heather,” said Abyssal and Beautiful Me. “Or we won’t have any foundation on which to cling.”
She took another step back, as if to turn away and slip into the shadows.
“Wait!” I almost screamed. “Please, please, wait— hic— wait! Where are you going?!”
Abyssal Truth raised eyebrows of feather-soft down. “To rescue our family — Raine, Evee, all the others. Aren’t you with us, Heather?”
I nodded, despite the aching need in my chest. “Always, always! But can’t we just recombine first, can’t we—”
“Then I’ll lead the way. We’ll put you back together yet. Keep up, Heather!”