“It was much pleasanter when I was younger,” said Cecilia to the Wiltshire Dog. “I only ever grow smaller here, and I liked it when I could expect to be larger sometimes, too.”
“Who’s to say you’re shrinking at all? One size is as good as another, I say” said the Dog, who had it all good and well, already being quite large, in Cecilia’s opinion. “It’s really more about the size of the room. Maybe you’ve been the same size all along and the room’s just been growing, eh?”
She paced. The psych ward did have small rooms, and lately she hadn’t got out as much. “I don’t think they can do that, Dog. People can’t just grow a room, not with lots of sneaking about and rearranging of furniture. Only they haven’t let me out in so long it’s hard to tell. Can you even know the size of a thing from inside?”
The Dog walked up the wall and across the ceiling. “You can, in the only way that matters- which is to say you Kant. What is there to know from outside? Not the thing-in-itself! Mere observations, illusions of the whole! But from the inside, oh my- now we are the thing, and can know it through-and-through! So, what say you? Have we been shrinking all along?”
Cecilia shook her head. “We haven’t and I think you’re talking nonsense. Just yesterday you told me not even God could know a thing entire!”
The Dog grinned and turned its head upside down, which made it rather more rightside-up from Cecilia’s position but did leave it looking rather uncomfortable there on the ceiling. “I said Gödel, as I recall. Deification may be a little premature.”
Cecilia stamped her foot at the Dog. “Banish all your rubbish! I want out! They say I’m not well and that it’s dangerous, but they also keep saying it’s in my head and if it is, what does it matter where my head is at?”
At this the Dog’s head disconnected entirely, and began drifting about the room as his body chased its own tail on the ceiling. “Oh it matters a great deal, and not at all, depending on what you’re using it for. I hardly ever find my head in the same place twice, these days, but then I only use it to spout nonsense at little girls. You tried to tell people about the Consumption, and so find yourself with very little head-room at all.”
She crossed her arms. “It was for their own good! It’s like taking your vegetables, unpleasant at first but much worse if you don’t. How can they lock me up for telling them the truth? I once locked away Susie Ann in a closet for saying my hair looked like a trollop’s, but it was true and later I felt awful over it besides. These doctors don’t feel awful at all!”
The Dog, now just a wicked long set of teeth in the air, seemed to smile. “ You have Consumed, so you have nothing to fear from Him. If they don’t listen, that’s their lookout. They’ll feel awful in the end, one way or another.” But Cecilia had stopped listening at the mention of Him. A chill came over her, all of the sudden, and she fancied it would be much warmer under the bed.
Scrambling under, trying to ignore the rolls of thunder from the storm even now gathering outside, she elbowed her way past the Floormouse who was having none of it “Oi! Shove off, you great galoot! You’re taking up all my space!”
Cecilia sighed exasperatedly. “Oh, not this again. I say it’s big enough for us both, and more besides. If you agree and we’re the only two here, then it must be so, for who else could know? So be agreeable and let me in before He comes.”
The Floormouse was in anything but an agreeable mood. “I will not! Who d’you think you are, coming in here and manhandling epistemology like that! These are sensitive subjects, and you have no degree that I can see? Trying to tell me what I might think, like some kind of solipsist! I declare myself empirical!” He shoved her back out and pulled the bedsheets down like a curtain.
Cecilia had no time for this, no time at all. “I don’t care what you’re emperor of, please just let me under! He’s coming and I shan’t like to let him see me. Please!” Real desperation was creeping into her voice. There was nowhere else to go! She’d already Consumed, to make herself smaller, and it had worked once but what if it didn’t anymore!
Perhaps sensing her rising panic, the Floormouse hesitated. “I would, dear girl, but we cannot both exist in a space that we disagree on the nature of! There is only one way to resolve an impasse like this.” He paused, dramatically, as if waiting for her. She obliged him if only to get it over with.
“There is?”
“Oh yes! With a conference! ”
---
Marilyn Radcliffe had been with the hospital for twenty years but had only worked the psych ward for the last three. Still, she knew the names and faces of the people on her floor pretty well, and she was pretty sure that none of them were supposed to be out after 9pm.
She jumped up when she heard a door open and close in the south wing. Somebody had the genius idea to build the nurse station around one corner of the L-shaped ward, so there was a whole half a wing that was out of her line of sight. Cameras? Not on this budget. “And now they can’t even lock the damn rooms at shift change, gimme a break…” she muttered, rounding the corner.
Through the night-lite gloom of the ward hallway, a 3 foot tall white rabbit in a waistcoat was coming towards her in short little hops. It looked like it had come in from… the emergency exit? “But that’s a one-way door-” she said, somewhat oblivious to the hirsute gentleman approaching.
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“Lucky for me I only went through the one way, then!” The rabbit said, doffing his cap. “Pardon me miss but have you directions to Cecilia’s room? Only I’m terribly late for a conference.”
Marilyn shook her head slowly, as if in a dream. Something was wrong here, this wasn’t- “No, sorry, no visitors after 6pm. Certainly no conferences.”
The statuesque owl in a flat cap (had it always been there?) laid a wing on the rabbit’s shoulder and took over. “But we are conferring right now! Hypocrisy, I say! And anyway we are hardly visitors, we’ve been here long as you have!”
Marilyn backed up, wobbled, fell on her rear as the world seemed to rotate around and through her. “No, what- I- you can’t be, what am I-” quietly, muffled by the thick doors and soundproofing, loud thumps and crashes could be heard coming from half the rooms on the floor. Somehow the sounds of her charges in distress cut through the fog and she leapt to her feet. “What are you?!? What’s happening to my patients?!”
The rather irritated-looking jackdaw spoke up “Well by the evidence it seems they have been getting by with a terrible nurse! Please, miss, we are terribly busy and I- oh, good, looks like the Owl’s been useful for once. Come on rabbit, reality’s not going to make observations about itself! Unless it does, of course...” Hands out to secure their charming animal-sized british frippery, they hurried away down the hall. Marilyn wanted to pursue but she was captivated by the sight through the nearest bedroom window. Something… insectoid was clattering around in there, like a mantis the size of a person.
She stumbled back for the second time in as many moments and screamed. She’d gone mad, she had to have, have developed some kind of disorder, but she knew that. If she’d truly lost it, shouldn’t she not recognize what was happening as being unusual? She ran through symptoms in her head. Definite confusion, definite fear- appropriate to the situation though- no drug abuse, no long term dissociative episodes or mood swings. It didn’t feel like psychosis, but this couldn’t be real.
She turned to head back to the nurse’s station, and stopped abruptly. There had been no doors opening or closing this time but there, at the turn in the ward hall, was a silhouette. It didn’t make sense. The angles shouldn’t- the limbs can’t move like- too many- it turned towards her, and she saw its face. After that, whether or not she had been mad became an entirely academic point.
---
“Now then!” said the Floormouse, imperiously banging his Empiricist’s Gavel. It made a hard rap-rap-rap on the linoleum floor of the room. “I declare this meeting objectively called to order!”
The little parliament of animals around Cecilia thrummed with anger and objection. “You can’t just declare objective truths, you dunce!” said the jackdaw. “You have to observe them! As anyone can see, this conference is far from orderly. More of a mob, than a gathering of intellectuals.”
Cecilia, biting her fingernails while glancing at the door, hummed nervously. “Can’t we all agree that Floormouse misspoke and we should all come to order anyway? I do so love these games my dears but he’s coming and we really need to sort this out before he gets here!” The hemming and anger grew worse, if anything.
“Games! You call them games?” Shouted the owl, indignant. “We are here to debate the very nature of reality , stupid girl! Life or death pale in comparison. Now, as soon as we figure out whether we are, in fact, merely observed to be ordered or invited to order ourselves, we can-”
“My life feels very important indeed,” said Cecilia, growing heated. “And these semantic quibbles are all good and well when we while away the hours but nobody here has Consumed! He might ignore me but we must help all the others!” Sure enough, a loud thumping could be heard even through the thick wall to her right. Cecilia never heard the others on the floor, only the once when Mrs. Henderson had an episode in the bath and had to be taken away.
The parliament straightened with concern. “My goodness, you’re right!” said the Rabbit. “Only you did offer them Consumption and they declined, didn’t they? What more can you do?”
“Force them!” said the Floormouse, seeing an opportunity to regain center stage. “For their own good, they must Consume!” The ruckus grew once again. A real mob was in danger of forming, behind him. Half the conference seemed firmly for, and half firmly against, the concept of coercion. “Free will!” “Nobless oblige!” “Might makes right!” “Kratocracy!”
Cecilia clutched her hands to her head in the midst of the bedlam. A scream rang out. The sound pierced the cacophony, stilling all the animals in the midst of beating one another silly with tiny canes and shillelaghs. “I say, was that you?” asked the Floormouse. Cecilia paused and thought for a second.
“No,” she said, “I don’t think it was me after all. I think that was the nurse. He’s here.”
Like magic they evaporated into the dark corners of the room, as if they’d never been. Mice and birds and tiny men with outlandish hats all scampered, leaving but a few feathers and vestments to show they’d ever been. “It’s okay, the door’s locked, and they keep saying it’s all in my head. None of this is real, none of this is real” repeated Cecilia, even as she backed into the corner furthest from the door.
But she couldn’t make herself believe. The scraping was real, terribly real, like a thing too wide for the hallway it found itself in, trying to pull itself along by hand. Scraaaaaape, and pause, scraaaaaape, and pause, and as she realized he was taking the time to look in each and every room through the window it was already too late to cover hers. It had never been like this before, what was this? Another scraaaaaaape and the thin light from the hall went black. A single eye, lidless, was all she could see through the glass panel on the door.
The handle began to turn.
“I really do think it best we were off right now,” said the Wiltshire Dog, through the doorway behind her.
“What- but there’s- you couldn’t make a door before?” she asked indignantly, even as she scrambled through the low opening and onto his broad back.
“I was less substantial, before,” said the Dog, leaping away from the third story into the night. “Something or other has changed, for the better. So long as we keep him at bay.”
“Yes” said the Floormouse, climbing out of the pocket of her nightgown where he’d hidden away. “I don’t think even that cantankerous old collection of misbegotten appetizers from a huntsman’s table will disagree anymore.”
The streets flew by and Cecilia tasted freedom for the first time in years, even as she bound herself to a new task. “Everyone’s got to Consume. For their own good.”