Katalepsis

A press of patients swarmed the front entrance of Cygnet Hospital — a wall of backs barring the way inside, a baying beast of many bodies, joined together into one collective organism.

Raine and I slowed to a trot across the crunchy gravel of the driveway, then halted at the foot of the steps, joining the rear of the ragged mob.

Young women were crammed shoulder-to-shoulder at the top of the steps, jostling over the front row view. Others peered around the door frame or pressed their faces to the fringe of frosted glass, squeezing past their friends to get a peek of the action. Girls were going up on tip-toes, or wriggling through the crowd, or complaining loudly to anybody within earshot. Shouts of “What is it? What’s happening? I can’t see!” mingled with ribald jeers of “Get her! Get her! Twat her in the head, Minky!”

A cry like a football chant was growing at the front of the crowd, rolling back down the steps and over the lawns: “Hands off! Hands off! Hands off our bitches!”

The noise of the crowd paled in comparison to the wordless screams of outrage coming from indoors — a chorus from at least a dozen throats, all working in unison, filling the shadowy vault of the entrance hall. The cry rose and fell, sometimes jerking and halting with staggered interruption. But it always resumed once again, a split-second later, stronger than ever after each pause. The war-cry drowned out the more practical shouting from the nurses: “Stop that! All of you girls, stop this at once!”; “Haley, you’ll get a week in isolation for this, unless you drop that right now!”; “We need the restraints, somebody bring the restraints!”; “Help!”

As Raine and I arrived, the war-cry and the counter-shout and the crowd-chant were all interrupted by an almighty metallic clang-clang-calangalangalanglang.

Like a box of pots and pans tossed down a concrete stairwell. I winced, ears ringing.

The jarring din stilled the crowd and muted the shouting, but only for a moment. As the echoes faded, some maniac soul took up two of whatever had made all that noise, and started banging them together in a rhythmic clang—clang-clang-clang.

Not everybody was impressed by this, nor interested in rubbernecking the unfolding incident; some girls were leading others away by the hand, drifting apart from the edge of the crowd, flinching from the terrible noise, or steering well clear of the sudden chaos. One younger girl was cringing, red in the face, on the verge of tears. She was quickly rescued by an older patient who clamped both hands over the girl’s ears and helped her away from the noise. A few others were struggling out of the crowd, panting for air, backing away from the commotion.

“Oh!” I heaved for breath after our short, sharp sprint across the lawns. My palm was sweaty in Raine’s hand. Going up on tiptoes showed me nothing except more backs and shoulders. “Oh! Oh my gosh. I-I can’t see what’s going on in there! Raine? Raine, we need to get in there!”

“On it!” Raine said. She reeled me in like a dog pulling on her leash, then pressed me to her side and wrapped an arm around my waist. “Hold on tight!” she shouted above the racket. “Do not get separated in all this!”

“Can’t be as bad as with Praem, I don’t— oop!”

Raine unsheathed her elbows and cut through the crowd.

She sliced her way into the gaps between heaving bodies, dragging me alongside. Suddenly I was surrounded by shouting and chanting, by whirling faces and shoulders like cliff sides, by girls much taller and heavier than myself — or so they seemed, with Cygnet pajamas and unwashed flesh and sweat and stress and excitement in every direction. Raine made herself narrow to force people apart, then simply pushed, shouting as she went.

“Coming through! Make a hole! Hot potato here, ladies, hot potato! Shift or get burned!”

Most of our fellow inmates were content to get squeezed aside, too focused on trying to see what was going on indoors. A few tutted and huffed as we passed, muttering about proper queuing etiquette. A small handful of patients were brave enough to stand their ground, looking back with disapproving scowls, mouths opening to tell us off; but all of them misplaced their courage when they saw Raine, muscled and butch, her tank-top still splattered with blood, her eyes burning with manic light.

I held on hard, one arm around Raine’s waist, my other clutching my yellow blanket, lest it be torn away in the press of bodies. My ankles snagged on other people’s legs, my head was buffeted by hard shoulders, my stomach took glancing blows from passing hips and stray elbows. I almost closed my eyes, trusting Raine to see us through, but then—

A sliver of russet fur ducked and weaved between the ankles just ahead of us. A black-tipped bushy tail brushed against pajama-clad calves, sending a rolling shiver through the crowd. A few girls looked down, but most didn’t even notice.

“Fox?” I muttered. “Fox! Um … Saye! Saye Fox! Hey, hey, it’s us!”

My voice was lost in the growing cacophony. If the fox heard me, she didn’t stop.

Raine mounted the concrete steps, cut through the thickest part of the crowd, and won us a place at the front, just by the right-hand edge of the door frame. We burst from the press of people, stopping at the threshold of the entrance hall.

Inside was chaos.

The distinctive war-cry came from a ring of patients, a dozen girls who had linked arms in a circle, locking their elbows together in an apparently unbreakable union. All of them were shouting, wailing that wordless outrage together. The interruptions came from the nurses; every now and again two or three of the hospital staff rushed at the circle in a vain attempt to break the circular daisy-chain. But the ring of girls absorbed each charge by bowing inward before the impact, drawing each nurse a step or two further on — and then counter-attacking with bites and kicks, shoving each nurse back like a wall of rubber.

Two nurses were on the floor, one with a bleeding ear, another down on her hands and knees, vomiting bile. Another pair of nurses looked like they’d just clambered back to their feet after getting bowled over.

The mobile scrum-fortress was not the only piece in motion. A dozen other girls were darting about all over the place, dodging nurses and throwing things. Unfortunately for them, individual action was not as effective as whatever the first dozen were doing; several of them seemed to have been caught and pinned to the floor already. One was being carried off by a pair of nurses, cackling at the top of her lungs.

“Avenge me, lasses and ladies!” she howled, laughing and kicking. “Look to the east on the dawning of the third—”

A nurse slung a soft gag around her mouth, shutting off the rest of her speech.

A landslide of pots and pans was strewn about in front of the mess hall entrance, as if somebody had hurled a crate full of kitchen supplies through the air; this was presumably the source of the deafening noise earlier. Three girls stood tall amid the clutter, treating it like a minefield. The pots and pans made it much more difficult for any nurses to approach the trio without getting tangled up or slipping over. One of the girls was banging two pots together over her head, shouting, “Free Mina! Free Mina! Free Mina!” The other two were brandishing pans at the nurses creeping closer, bodyguards to their rabble-rouser.

One nurse levelled a finger at one of the pan-armed girls. “Don’t you dare! Don’t you dare throw that, Emily! You’re a good girl, usually. What has gotten into—”

‘Emily’ — a long-limbed young woman with bug eyes and frizzy red hair — cut the nurse off by hurling the pan like a frizbee. The whirling metal connected with the nurse’s ribs with a loud smart smack. She let out a little ‘oof’ and doubled over.

The crowd cheered.

There was no sign of the fox, not in the chaos of the entrance hall, nor slipping into one of the side corridors. All routes in and out of the entrance hall were crammed with crowds of patients watching the spectacle unfold, spilling from the dayroom and the corridors, the press of bodies inching along the walls at the edge of this sudden arena, as more and more joined the audience. Plenty of places for the Saye Fox to hide.

“Bloody hell!” I yelped, then tried to apologise: “S-sorry, I can’t— ah!” I flinched as another two nurses charged at the central circle of patients. They were repelled once again, with lots of kicking and shoving and one very impressive head-butt. That final move drew another great cheer from the crowd.

Raine howled with laughter. “Lozzers came through for us!”

“I-I don’t see her anywhere!” I said. “What on earth has she done here?!”

“Used her powers for good!” Raine shouted. “She’s started a riot!”

The riot seemed to be intensifying as Raine and I watched — on both sides. Some of the girls from the audience of onlookers began to join in, pushing past the few nurses left on crowd-control duty. One unlucky rioter went down, pinned by a pair of nurses, her jaw making a sickening crack as it bounced off the floor; but then she was released a moment later when three other patients jumped the nurses from behind. Other girls dragged the dazed and bleeding patient to her feet, hustling her off behind the edge of the audience. The ring of patients at the centre of the whole thing got louder and louder, shouting themselves hoarse at every fresh outrage and new offense. The staff weren’t slacking either; a group of nurses had succeeded in clearing one of the passages which led off into the depths of the hospital. Now they were faffing about back there, donning thick mittens and fabric helmets, readying long ‘man-catcher’ style poles with padded metal loops at the ends.

Lozzie’s riot was on a time-limit. This brief breach of the peace would be shut down sooner or later, no matter how hard the patients fought.

For a moment I forgot what Raine and I were supposed to be focused on — though heaven forbid I ever truly forget my beloved Evelyn, even in a nightmare. The riot unfolding before my eyes cried out to my deepest desires and oldest fears, to taboos I didn’t even know I’d been holding onto. As another pair of nurses tried to get the central scrum under control again, I felt my lips peel back from my teeth and my eyes go wide and wild, a cheer rising in my throat along with the crowd.

I wished I had all my tentacles, all my teeth and barbs, my spikes and spines, my warning colouration and toxic skin and steel-shod fangs. I could see the logic of the riot and the counter-violence about to end it all. My heart ached to hold back the waves from crashing shut over this glorious moment.

The nurses went down, pushed away by the circle, tumbling onto their backsides, bruised and battered for their efforts. I spotted the name tags: ‘A.FILTH’ and ‘A.PIG.’

Another cheer ripped from the throats of the crowd. I joined in.

Would I have cheered if these were real nurses, real people, with lives and families and wounds of their own? Would I have screamed in triumph to see this happen, in reality?

Maybe. Perhaps not. I’d been too young to hold the concept whole and complete, back in the real Cygnet.

But the catharsis now was real, even in a dream.

Raine was elbowing a girl to our left, a young woman about our age, dressed in a faded t-shirt and Cygnet standard off-white pajama bottoms. She had her hands cupped around her mouth, shouting a suggestion to one of the participants.

“Hey, hey!” Raine said to her. “Hey, how’d this start? Did you see it?”

The girl blinked at Raine, sparing her moment’s attention. “Dunno!” she shouted back. “Some nurse hit a girl! Fuck them, right? They’re not meant to knock us about like that! It’s not legal!”

“Right!” Raine cheered. “Fuck the screws!”

I reached out and tugged on the girl’s t-shirt. She did a double-take, then looked down at me, eyebrows raised.

“Why don’t we rush them all at once?” I asked — and I couldn’t believe the words coming out of my own mouth.

The girl frowned at me like I was crazy. “What?!”

“We’ve got ten times their numbers!” I said. “The nurses, I mean! We could win! Actually win!”

The girl balked, cringing at me through clenched teeth. She gestured toward the nurses in the little hallway — the ones picking up man-catcher poles and slipping restraining ropes over their shoulders. “I think it’s almost over. Come on, what can we do?”

“Everything!” I said.

But she was already turning away, mind made up. There would be no victorious revolt here today, no liberated prison.

Raine put her lips next to my ear, and hissed: “I get it, sweet thing. Trust me, I really do. But riots and revolutions have an internal flow. This one is about to get dammed up, and bad. We gotta move while we’ve still got cover. Eyes on the prize, Heather. Eyes on the prize.”

I whined in protest, but then stopped when Raine pointed at the big steel security door, the one marked V.I.P. VISITORS ROOM. It was over on the right hand wall of the entrance hall, half obscured behind a thin line of patients shouting and cheering.

No handle, no window — and no keyhole.

“Wait, wait!” I said. “How are we going to get in?”

Raine’s eyes flicked back and forth across the chaos of the riot, the baying crowd, the nurses trying to keep control, and the various improvised projectiles flying through the air. She slid something white into her palm — the little plastic knife from the kitchen. “I can try to jimmy the lock. No time for anything more complex. If this doesn’t work, we’re gonna have to retreat and try again. Heather?”

“Y-yes?”

“Keep your head down. Hold on tight.”

Raine darted to the right, sticking to the wall. She pulled me along by one hand, shoving and squirming us behind the thin layers of the crowd. My heels felt like they were made of rubber, like my feet were moving too fast for my brain. We passed one corner, exposed for a moment, then pushed our way through the knot of patients spilling from a corridor.

Pots and pans clattered off a nearby wall — a misfire from the trio by the mess hall doorway, almost friendly fire. Girls scattered out of the way, squealing and yelping as kitchen shrapnel clanged to the floor. Raine and I scurried with them, crammed against the wall for a second, ribs creaking in the press of bodies. For a moment I lost my grip on Raine. I thought we’d been pulled apart. I didn’t know which way was forward and which way was back.

Then somebody yanked on my arm and pulled me free. I stumbled forward, lurching and heaving. Raine caught me and held me steady.

“Easy, Heather, easy. Almost there,” she hissed. “Here, hold this.”

She pressed a small cast-iron frying pan into my hands. How she’d caught it, I had no idea.

“W-what—”

“A weapon! A weapon,” she hissed, a grin splitting her face and filling my vision. “It’s no police-issue nightstick, no foot-long machete, but it’ll do in a pinch. Come on!”

Raine pulled on my hand and led me a few more paces. The security door stood silent and shut at the edge of the chaos. We were sheltered behind the crowd, but it was only a few bodies thick, and we had only moments to spare.

Raine let go of me and whipped out the plastic knife. I pressed myself to the wall, head ducked low, as if I might be able to blend into the brick and plaster. My heart was pounding, my skin was drenched with sweat, and my bloodstream was full of adrenaline. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever been in a crowd like this before; the energy was infectious, an electric charge up my spine and down my limbs.

I wanted to swing the frying pan at somebody or something — preferably at a nurse.

Raine stuck the knife into the gap between the door and the steel frame, but the metal was so flush that the blade wouldn’t fit. Raine forced the utensil inside, wiggling it up and down, bending the plastic and sending little shavings of white fluttering to the floor.

Behind us, the crowd rose into a chorus of booing and jeering. I went up on tip-toes to risk a look.

A squad of nurses had emerged from their little corridor redoubt — wielding man-catcher poles, lengths of padded rope, and anti-spit masks. They had a doctor with them now, an older man with grey hair, terrified eyes blinking behind massive glasses. He held what looked like an electric stun gun in one shaking hand. He seemed much less enthusiastic than the burly, well-armed nursing staff.

The nurses closed on the central scrum of linked girls, spreading out to take them from all sides at once.

“Raine!” I squeaked.

“I know.”

“We have to hurry!”

“I know,” Raine answered through gritted teeth, eyes glued on the tiny gap she had managed to wedge between the door and the frame. She rocked back on her heels, jaw clenched tight. “I know. I know.”

The knife was bent. The smallest touch might snap the plastic.

Angry shouts broke out behind us. “Not fair! Stop cheating!”, “Fucking pigs! Why don’t you all go home and leave us to it!”, “You started it! You started it!”

The crowd was turning ugly now that their side was losing, and I didn’t blame them one bit.

“Raine!” I hissed.

“I’ve fucked it,” she muttered, then lashed out and grabbed my hand. “We gotta run, sweet thing. Mission failed. We’ll be back, we—”

A blur of russet fur darted between my legs. A little black nose touched the door frame, nuzzling the steel.

Click!

The security door popped open by about an inch. Before Raine or I could react, a vulpine paw padded at the side of the door and nudged the gap wider, just wide enough for a sleek and furry body to slip through. Our surprise visitor slithered inside, bushy tail vanishing after her.

Raine grabbed the door a second later, wrenched it wide, and bundled me over the threshold. She slipped through in my wake, then carefully closed the door behind us.

A lock or a catch clicked into place. The sounds of the riot were suddenly muffled behind metal and concrete.

Silence descended, unnaturally thick and potent, like heavy fog hanging in the air.

Raine whirled, fists raised, ready for anything.

“There’s nothing here!” I yelped, panting hard. “There’s nothing here. Nothing here. G-good girl, Raine. Down. Down. Down, girl.”

The room beyond the steel security door — the ‘V.I.P Visitor’s Room’ — was nothing more than a bland and expensive waiting room.

Blue fabric armchairs stood in short rows, facing toward each or glowering over little glass coffee tables. A scratchy blue carpet gave the illusion of softness, rasping beneath my white slippers. Insipid paintings hung on the walls, pictures of fruit or cracked coffee mugs or half-dead trees. A few wilted flowers sat in sad, dry vases on the tables, surrounded by halos of vapid magazines with titles like ‘Wow!’ and ‘Fresh!’

Two doors stood shut on the opposite side of the waiting room, plain pale wood with unremarkable plastic handles. One sported a little brass plate which read ‘Consultation Offices.’ The other was labelled ‘Correction.’

The place was completely deserted, except for myself and Raine.

And the Saye Fox.

She was sitting on her haunches, up on the seat of a nearby armchair, alert and alarmed. Bright orange eyes like the hearts of twin bonfires returned my curious stare. Black-tipped ears twitched and swivelled, perhaps still picking up the sounds of the collapsing riot back in the entrance hall. She looked unaffected by the dream, toned and sleek, fluffy-furred and bushy-tailed.

Raine cracked a grin and pointed at the fox. “That’s nothing, huh? Am I hallucinating now?”

The Saye Fox stared at the end of Raine’s finger, then back at Raine’s eyes.

“No, no,” I said quickly, still trying to catch my breath after our escape. “She’s on our side. I mean, if she’s actually really here, and not some kind of dream construct. I don’t think she is, anyway.” I bit my lower lip, frowning at the fox. “I can’t figure out how she got in here. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Opened the door,” Raine said. “Nice trick, especially with no thumbs.”

The Saye Fox went: “Yip!”

I held up an apologetic hand — waving the cast iron frying pan around like a moron. Raine plucked the improvised weapon from my fingers, saving me further embarrassment.

“Sorry!” I said to the Fox. “Sorry, I didn’t mean any offense by that. Neither did Raine, she just doesn’t remember you right now, or anything much, in fact. I’m just very confused. I don’t understand how you’re here? You weren’t in Wonderland with the rest of us. Unless you snuck in somehow. Did Zheng carry you in there, in secret? Were you hiding inside Zheng’s jumper?”

The Fox tilted her head, ears twitching. I sighed.

“Well,” I said. “Anyway, whatever, it doesn’t matter. Thank you for opening the door! Thank you so very much. You saved us just now. We were stuck. Thank you. I’m still not a hundred percent sure if you’re real, though.”

Raine clucked her tongue. “You’re gonna have to explain this one to me, sweet thing. You got a Doctor Dolittle thing going on here? That fox talking back to you?”

“She’s more than just a fox,” I said quickly. “She’s related to Evelyn somehow, though I’ve never figured out exactly how that works. She’s either a gestalt entity, congealed from Evelyn’s ancestral home, or she’s the spirit of Evelyn’s grandmother, inhabiting a fox via long-term carrion-based osmosis. Um. Sort of. Maybe. And I can’t hear her, no. She is a fox. She doesn’t speak.”

Raine nodded. “Evee’s descended from furries, got it.”

“Yeerp!” went the fox.

Raine cracked a grin — not for me, but for our unexpected vulpine companion. “Sorry, little vixen, but I can’t help myself. You’re Evee’s familiar, right? Every witch needs a familiar.”

I tutted. “That’s not entirely correct.”

The Fox didn’t seem to mind. She stood up, turned in a little circle on the chair, and glanced at both of the doors on the opposite side of the room. I hurried over, following her lead.

“Do you know where Evee is?” I hissed. “Do you know where they’ve taken her?”

The Saye Fox hopped up onto the back of the chair, then down to a coffee table, knocking gaudy magazines onto the floor. She sprang over to the left hand door — the ‘Consultation Offices’ — then stopped and looked at me, one paw raised, ears sharp and tall, tail held straight out.

“Okay!” I said. “Raine, I think we can trust her on—”

But then the Saye Fox darted the other way, to the door labelled ‘Correction’. She assumed the same urgent pose.

“Damn,” Raine purred. “Guess again, Fantastic Mrs Fox.”

“Yiiip!” went the Fox, much louder than before. “Yap!”

I sighed. “We’ll just have to try … Raine? Um, Raine?”

I realised that Raine was staring at the fox with a look of smug victory. The Fox was staring back, goaded into a silent confrontation.

“Mm?” Raine grunted, but she didn’t look away from the Fox.

“Raine!” I snapped — and she snapped too, head flicking round to look at me, to obey the voice of her mistress. I quickly reached up and took the back of her neck, trying not to show that my hands were shaking, or that my breath was catching in my throat. I held Raine’s gaze and spoke quickly. “You are a good girl. You are very a good girl, Raine. You are my good girl. Just because you couldn’t get that door open does not make you any less of a good girl. The fox has not shown you up or bested you somehow. And you are not in a rivalry with the Saye Fox. Okay? I-I need you to not do this, not right now. Please.”

Raine blinked once, then grinned slowly. “Sorry, sweet thing,” she purred. “Can’t blame me for territorial pissing, can you?”

“This is not the time,” I said. “Don’t be a … a b-bad girl. And no urinating on the furniture.” I cleared my throat. “Oh I can’t believe I said that! Tch!”

Raine purred in her throat, a deep and satisfied little rasp. But she nodded and winked, then pulled away from my hand. She met the Fox’s gaze again, and nodded her head. “We’re cool, little Saye. I got the wrong scent up my nose, that’s all. No hard feelings?”

The Fox turned in a little circle, bounced over to the ‘Consultation Offices’ door again, paused, sprang back to the ‘Corrections’ door, and went, “Yip-yap!”

“I know, I know!” I said. “I’m worried about Evee, too. But which door do we take?!”

Raine said, “Pick either. It’s fifty-fifty.”

“No,” I said. “I think it’s a riddle. It has to be.” I wet my lips, then pointed. “Corrections. Let’s try there. That sounds ominous enough.”

“Yeah,” Raine murmured. “Sounds grim enough.”

Raine took the lead, one hand on the door handle, the other raising the stolen frying pan to repel whoever or whatever might be lurking on the other side. I stuck to her heels, holding my breath. The Saye Fox hopped into position behind us without encouragement.

Raine cracked the door. It opened without resistance. She waited several seconds, listening for voices, braced for a reaction. When none came, she eased it wider. We peered through together, me and Raine and the Fox.

A corridor stretched off toward a distant right-hand turn. The walls were clean institutional white, lined with simple wooden doors. The floor was covered with more cheap and scratchy carpet.

Empty and silent, except for the distant whisper of an air conditioning system.

“Spooky,” Raine hissed, stepping over the threshold. “Too squeaky clean for my filthy tastes. Give me prison dirt over this any time.”

I followed her into the corridor, my heart pounding in my chest. My skin had gone clammy, my palms sticky with sweat, my breath short and my head light. “Y-yes,” I hissed, stammering a little. “Spooky. That’s— that’s right. Spooky. Not what I was expecting.”

Even the Saye Fox did not venture far; she hopped past our ankles, then stopped, ears up, orange eyes wide, staring down the corridor.

Raine must have noticed my discomfort. She reached back and grabbed my hand. “Hey, what’s wrong?”

I swallowed and forced myself to take a deep breath, then tugged my yellow blanket tighter around my shoulders. “This looks too much like a corridor at the real Cygnet Hospital. One of the doctor’s areas, something like that. It’s slightly too real. Just dredging up a buried memory, that’s all. I’ll be fine. We have to find Evee.”

Raine nodded. “Gotcha.” She spoke quick and quiet. “Do we check the doors one by one, or push on until something more obvious?”

“Good question,” I murmured, chewing on my bottom lip. The doors did not have windows or keyholes through which to spy their insides, just grey plastic handles and plain surfaces in pale wood. Upright, sensible, clean. Oh so very reassuring, when you were subjecting a child to the truth behind the tidy facade. “I don’t think we have a choice,” I hissed. “We need to check the doors. Evee could be anywhere.”

Raine hefted the frying pan. “If we bump into a nurse or a doctor, I’m gonna have to take them out, sweet thing. We ain’t got a choice, not if we’re gonna find our Evee. We can’t afford to get caught, right?”

I swallowed down the lump in my throat. “I-I understand. You have permission, Raine. Express permission. Anything you need to do, as long as it’s not to a patient.”

Raine eyed me carefully, unsmiling and focused. “Be ready,” she purred. “We throw open a door, we may have to fight. Not gonna have time to think. Whatever happens, follow my lead.”

My breath came in a shuddering wave. But I set my shoulders and nodded hard. “I’m ready. Let’s go.”

We opened the doors one by one, zig-zagging down the corridor from room to room. Raine always went first, and always used the same technique — she took each door handle and eased it downward, then waited for a response. When none came she cracked the door away from the frame, waited again, then threw the door wide with a sudden explosive shove.

The first half-dozen rooms were nothing more than doctor’s offices, decorated in pale wood and functional furniture, some with examination tables and weighing machines and blood-pressure cuffs, nothing one wouldn’t find in a real modern hospital. All of them were deserted, spotlessly clean, and perfectly silent. My heart was in my throat every time Raine burst over a threshold, frying pan raised in one hand, the Saye Fox hopping past her heels. But these rooms looked as if they had never been used at all, with no rubbish in the waste bins, no stray paperwork on the desks, not even a speck of lint around the skirting boards.

Fake. A thin veneer over the reality. A comfortable dream before the nightmare.

On the seventh door, the truth of this place revealed itself.

Raine opened a door identical to all the others thus far — and then paused, because the interior was different. Dark and dingy, narrow and tight, with whitewashed walls and a bare lino floor. A trio of cheap plastic chairs faced the only light source: a huge window which dominated one wall.

The window looked into the next room.

Raine crept inside, eyeing the massive window and the room beyond. I followed, frowning with incomprehension. The window looked into a clean, white, brightly-lit room, bare except for a single chair and a whiteboard set on a wheeled frame. The chair was huge, a sort of dentist’s chair made of wipe-clean plastic, bolted to the floor, with a mechanism for reclining the back. It was covered in restraints and straps, thick enough to hold a gorilla. A separate door led out of the clean white room, in the opposite direction to the corridor we’d been exploring.

“Oh, this is some real sick shit,” Raine murmured.

A strange feeling crept into the pit of my stomach — recognition, like I’d seen this place before, though there was nowhere like it in the real Cygnet Hospital. It looked more akin to some nonsense one might witness in an exploitative film about asylums and mental illness.

“I … I don’t understand what I’m looking at,” I said slowly.

Raine nodded at the huge window and the clean white room beyond. “Two-way mirror. For watching somebody strapped into that chair.”

“Yes, Raine,” I said, “I know it’s a two-way mirror, I didn’t mean that. I meant the … the … ”

A memory surfaced. My eyes went wide and my blood ran cold. A wave of fury and bile clawed up my throat.

Raine must have seen the change come over me. “Heather? Heather, what’s wrong?”

“It’s the chair,” I hissed.

“What’s with the chair?” Raine almost growled. “You gotta tell me, sweet thing. You see something I don’t, you gotta tell me—”

“Evee’s chair. Her mother’s chair. The chair that Evelyn’s mother kept in the cellars beneath her house. The chair where she used to strap Evee down to be possessed by a demon. This one is all clean and new, not old and rotten, and the real one is sized for a child, not an adult, but it’s the same chair.” I whirled on Raine, feeling my eyes bulging in my face, my lips peeling back from my teeth. “We smashed the real one!” I shouted, gripped with uncontrollable anger. “Me and Praem! We smashed it to pieces with a sledgehammer! It’s dead!”

“Heather—”

“We have to find her!” I said. “Right now!"

“Yip-yerp!” went the Saye Fox, dashing out of the dingy little room.

“We can’t waste all this time searching!” I snapped. “We have to—”

Raine grabbed my hand and all but yanked me off my feet, whisking me back out into the corridor.

We threw caution to the wind. Raine slammed the doors open without pause, banging them off the concrete walls of the sad and dingy little observation rooms. Each one was identical, the same three chairs looking through the same two-way mirror, into the same clean white clinical space, dominated by the same hateful piece of torture machinery, restored to gloating life by the mechanics of this dream. Over and over again we saw that chair, replicated in room after room. Empty, clean, and silent. No Evee.

I scurried to keep up, breath heaving in my lungs. The Saye Fox darted ahead, sniffing at the door frames, yipping at us to hurry up, leaping in little circles as she went.

“She’s not here! She’s not here!” I wailed after the twelfth empty room in a row. “I don’t know why! Evee!” I shouted her name, my voice echoing down the silent white corridor. “Evee, where are you!?”

Raine yelled too. “We’re not too late! Don’t even think it! You’re never too late to help!”

“Evee!” I whined. “Evee!”

Door number thirteen crashed open, slamming into the wall and bouncing back on its hinges. Raine darted inside, just as she had with all the previous rooms. I scurried after her, already grabbing her arm to drag her back into the corridor, to try the next, the next, the next—

Raine froze, staring through the two-way mirror. The Saye Fox jumped up onto a seat. My stomach fell through the base of my guts.

Correction room number thirteen was in use.

Two nurses stood by the back door, meaty arms folded over their chests, hair like helmets, jaws like bulldogs. ‘A.SHOVE’ and ‘A.PUSH.’ They could have been twins. Evelyn’s wheelchair stood between them. Her grey dressing gown was pooled on the seat.

Evee was strapped into the torture chair.

She looked so tiny, wearing nothing but a thin pajama top and a long skirt, both in faded institutional white. She was withered and atrophied and reduced, dwarfed by the clean white room, swallowed by the surfaces of the chair. Her body was engulfed in straps and restraints, criss-crossing her torso and throat, holding her skull in place with a padded leather line across her forehead. Her eyes were dull and empty, tear-tracks dried on her sunken cheeks. Her blonde hair was a stringy mass of greasy rat-tails. The scar tissue of maimed hand was weeping onto the shiny plastic of the chair’s arm, leaving a stain of pinkish blood plasma on the spotless surface.

The restraints were wasted on her withered left leg, like a stick wrapped in chains. Her missing right leg had not been spared the incarceration either — the straps went over her skirt and stump, pinning even the empty notion of her severed limb.

She was facing another one of those wheeled whiteboards. This one was filled with text, with notes spiralling outward from three central bubbles. The bubbles contained the words ‘filial piety’, ‘loyalty’, and ‘sacrifice.’

The rest of the text was a jumbled mish-mash of overlapping mantras, the letters pressed into the board so hard that they had scored the surface.

‘I am your mother I am your mother I am your mother—’ ‘—gave birth to you my own flesh and blood and this is how you repay me—’ ‘—born for one reason and one reason alone born for one reason and one reason alone—’ ‘—murderer murderer murderer murderer murderer murderer murderer murderer murderer murderer murderer murderer murderer murderer murderer murderer murderer murderer—’ ‘—waste of effort if you can’t learn, waste of skin even if you can—’ ‘—have to get better so you can come home and be with me and your father you want to come home don’t you want to come home be quiet when the doctor is here don’t say a word don’t you dare tell them anything or I’ll make it so much worse than it already is—’

Coiled around the chair — crouched on Evelyn’s chest and shoulder like a sleep paralysis demon from hell, gesturing toward the whiteboard with half a dozen feelers of black scribbled static — was the dream-memory of Evelyn’s mother, Loretta Julianna Saye.

She had no face, no recognisable human outline, not even hands or feet or visible clothes. She was nothing but a churning mass of black static, whispering madness and hate into Evelyn’s ear.

Evee looked barely conscious. Her jaw was slack, cold drool running down her chin. The chair’s restraints and straps were the only thing keeping her upright

“Evee!” I hissed. “Raine, we have to—”

“Awoooooooooooo!” Raine howled a wolfish war cry.

The two nurses on the other side of the glass — Push and Shove — jerked their heads around. They looked right at us.

Raine wound back her arm and hurled the frying pan directly at the glass. The window burst outward in an explosion of flying shards, blinding the pair of nurses, drawing screams of surprise from twin throats. The frying pan clattered off a wall as the nurses flailed, clawing at their faces.

Raine leapt through the shattered window and hurled herself at our foes. The Saye Fox followed with a little hop over the fringe of broken glass, growling and snarling and snapping at the top of her tiny lungs.

I followed, driven half by love and half by rage, clambering over the broken two-way mirror. I was neither as elegant as Raine nor as small as the fox, so I cut one shin on the edge of broken glass. When I staggered upright in the correction room, blood was seeping into one leg of my pajama bottoms. I didn’t care. I barely even noticed. The pain was nothing, blotted out by white-hot anger.

“Evee!” I yelled. “Evee!”

Raine darted for the fallen frying pan while Push and Shove were still reeling and blinded by the fragments of glass. She scooped it up and twisted round on one heel — but a second too late. Push came at her like a wrecking ball of flesh, hands outstretched to grab Raine’s throat.

Raine ducked to the side and smashed Push in the face with the edge of the pan. Blood fountained from a broken nose.

Push fell over, clutching at her nose, screeching like a banshee, but Raine didn’t stop there. She brought the frying pan down again, and again, and again. Soft tissues went squelch and splat. Hard bones went crack—a-crack.

Shove rallied, wiping glass fragments from her eyes with the back of one hand, tearing open tiny wounds in her face. She threw herself at Raine too.

The Saye Fox darted between my legs and yowled at the black static enveloping Evelyn, snapping and yipping, darting around the edge of the void-dark mass, trying to nip at ankles which the nightmare simply did not possess.

“You!” I yelled at it — at her, at Evee’s mother, at this nightmare resurrection of Loretta Saye. “Get off her!”

My fists were balled up, nails digging into my palms. My breath ripped down my throat like fire. My face was burning red.

The Memory of Loretta Saye reared up, uncoiling from around Evelyn like a snake from around a rodent. She pointed a scribbled mass toward me, as if I was nothing more than a competing predator, come to steal the kill from beneath her fangs.

“You’re not even real!” I screamed at the thing. “You died! Raine and Evee killed you once already!”

A voice whispered from the black static, low and husky and thick with cold. She had Evelyn’s accent, archaic Sussex drawl tucked neatly beneath modern Estuary English. Evelyn’s voice, but thirty years older, marred by a cruelty that Evelyn could never have mustered.

“Smart mages live forever,” said the memory. “This is my lifeboat, not yours. Leave before I have you kill—”

I screamed and flung myself at her.

I had no tentacles. No barbs and spikes and spines. No toxic flesh, no poison mucus. No armoured chitin, no reinforced muscles, no steel in my tendons. In this dream I was but one, singlet, alone inside my body, and all too human. I had the weak and noodly arms that I’d had most of my life, unfit for lifting heavy objects, let alone having a fight. I had little experience, less strength, and no idea what I was doing.

But something came over me, something I had only felt before in the context of abyssal instinct, pushed onward by extra-human chemicals and Outsider enzymes rushing down my veins and filling my heart with liquid courage.

I lost my temper. I lost it like a nasty little ape, all fists and teeth.

I collided with Loretta Saye’s memory like a chimpanzee set on murder. I punched and kicked and bit and spat, my face full of black static, my fists sinking into rubbery air, my feet repelled by nothing but empty space. I made the most terrible noises, more animal than human, rasping and croaking and screeching.

That voice whispered forth again: “My daughter will always be mine. Even from beyond the grave. You think I’m gone? You think I’m truly dead? Foolish runt. I don’t even know what you are. Begone.”

The static whirled like a vortex in front of my chest, gathering as if to throw me off or ram a spike through my flesh.

I reached in with both hands, with one thought on my mind — and found meat beneath the static.

A face, a skull, with hair and skin and cold, cold cheeks.

The memory of Loretta Saye gasped, trying to flinch away. But I had a grip on her now, sticking my fingers into an eye socket. “How— how can you—”

“Evee loves me more than she ever thinks about you anymore!” I howled into the black static. “Get back in the ground!”

And then I punched her.

I slammed fists into her hidden face and rammed feet into her shrouded belly. I leaned forward and bit down on any flesh I could find, drawing screams from a figure I could not see, spitting out mouthfuls of mangled skin and a fragment of her nose. She collapsed beneath me, going down in a tangled heap; she tried to fight back, but her blows were weak, her arms nothing but dust and rot. I rode her to the ground, feral before we even got there, smashing and shoving and kicking and kneeing and biting and feeling my fists grow slick with blood and bruised with repeated impacts.

I regressed into a state I had never before considered possible without abyssal encouragement.

Eventually I grabbed her skull in both hands and bounced it off the floor. That made her stop moving, so I did it again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again—

Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack! Crunch! Crunch!

She wasn’t moving anymore. I slowed, then stopped.

I was straddling the back of a corpse. My whole body was shaking. I was panting as if I’d sprinted a mile. My knees were wet, dipped in a pool of spreading blood. My hands were soaked with crimson, my knuckles bruised and aching, my arms seizing up.

The corpse had blonde hair, matted with gore. She was face down on the floor.

The Saye Fox looked on from a few feet away, staring at the fallen memory. Her orange eyes seemed almost sad.

“R-Raine … ” I croaked. “Raine.”

A firm grip found my armpits and hoisted me to my feet.

“Hey, hey, Heather, Heather, sweet thing, hey,” Raine said, clicking her fingers in front of my eyes, dragging me away from the corpse. “You’re fine. You’re whole. You’re good. Well done. Well done, sweet thing. Hey. Hey, look at me. Look at me!”

I focused on Raine’s eyes. I was still panting hard. My knuckles screamed when I moved my fingers. Raine was covered in blood too — though nowhere near as much as me.

Behind her, the room was a wreck. Push and Shove had also been turned into corpses, both skulls caved in with a frying pan, which now lay on the floor amid the fragments of broken glass.

“How—” I croaked, glancing at the corpse of Loretta’s Memory again. “How did I— I-I—”

Raine grinned. “People do that sometimes, when they care enough. And hey, well done, you did well. I was tied up dealing with the clones back there.” Raine glanced at the corpse too. “She didn’t seem like much in the end. This is a wizard, huh?”

“Uh … n-not in a dream, I think?” I shook my head. “I think I found her weak point. Conceptually speaking. Metaphorically. This wasn’t the real thing, anyway.”

The Saye Fox was sitting on her haunches, staring at the corpse of this dream-memory of Loretta Saye.

“I’m sorry,” I croaked. The Fox looked up at me. “I know she was your … relative, somehow, no matter how bad she got. Even if this is just a dream. Even if—”

Evelyn slumped to one side.

The restraints around her head and neck and upper torso had come loose somehow — perhaps we had knocked them during the fight, but I suspected her sudden partial freedom had more to do with dream-logic than with material reality. She lurched sideways, as if slipping over the side of the chair. Raine and I both darted to catch her, uncaring of the blood all over our hands.

“Off!” Evelyn snapped — her voice scratchy and scarred, but oddly strong.

She finished leaning over the side of the chair, made a snorting sound deep in her throat, and spat on the dream memory of her mother’s corpse.

Raine and I helped her sit back up.

“Evee?” I hissed. “Evee, Evee, it’s us. You’re safe now, Evee? Evee?”

Rheumy eyes looked up at me, squinting with incomprehension, beneath a craggy frown that could have frozen a bonfire. Exhausted, stained with tears, wracked with chronic pain — but those eyes were clear.

“Heather?” Evelyn croaked. “Raine? What— why am I strapped down?” She jerked against the restraints. “Get me out of this shit! I was having a terrible nightmare, that’s all, that … ” She trailed off, glancing left and right, then squinting down at her mother’s corpse again. She froze. All the colour drained from her face. “Or not.”

“Evee,” I whispered very gently. “Maybe— maybe don’t look at that. Evee? Evee, please. Evee! She’s— she’s dead. She’s dead.”

Evelyn looked up and frowned at me again. “Of course she’s fucking dead. Where the fuck are we? And why does Raine look like she hasn’t bathed in six months? And where’s my leg?”

“Oh, Evee!” I sighed with relief. I could have hugged her. I could have danced a little jig.

We’d banished one personal nightmare.

Evelyn Saye was wide awake.