Katalepsis

“It started thirteen years ago. February 2006. So, more like thirteen and a half years ago, I guess. Feels like a whole different era now, world’s all different, struggling to be born, time of monsters and all that. I remember it was February, because that was when I washed up in England. I’d never been there before. Your collection of rainy little islands are cold and dreary in February; I can deal with both ‘cold’ and ‘dreary’ like nothing, but I didn’t understand the place. Thought I’d come to the edge of the world. In a way, I had, I just didn’t know it yet. Two years and a handful of months, between when it all started and when it ended. By ‘ended’ I mean when you and your twin sister got spirited away, Heather. For you that was the start. But for me? For me it was the end of a nightmare, and the end of a vigil. A vigil I failed to keep. A self-imposed quest that I fucked up. Two years, wasted trying to do something I wasn’t made for, because the problem was more complex than just burning out an infection and incinerating the corpses to hide the evidence. And then, when I had finished fucking up, two innocent kids paid the price of one adult’s total failure and cowardice.”

Taika spoke slowly and carefully. Her voice was like a camp-fire, crackling away to itself in the middle of a deep, dark, dangerous forest, the flickering flames keeping the night at bay. She smelled of wood-smoke and coal, heated brass and sun-kissed steel.

She stared at the ceiling as she spoke, with her head rolled back to rest on the rear of her ruined white leather sofa. Her frozen-flame hair lay still and bright against the ripped leather, glinting like molten rock in the dawn light which poured through the bank of windows in the opposite wall. She nursed her beer in her lap with both hands.

I swallowed, and murmured: “Maisie and me?”

“Mmhmm,” she grunted.

Taika nodded, still staring upward at the white-cream ceiling of her penthouse apartment. She raised her head, took a sip of her beer, then leaned back again, miles away and years in the past.

Evelyn growled: “‘Washed up’ in England?”

Taika gestured by tapping her fingertips against her beer can. “Figure of speech. I came through Heathrow, like everyone else. Fuck the sea, fuck swimming.”

Evelyn frowned, unimpressed, but she stayed silent, clutching her walking stick in both hands, bone-wand over her knees like a firearm on display; she’d spent the first couple of minutes of Taika’s story sending text messages back home, to let everyone else in the house know that I was alive, intact, and a very bad set of seven squid-girls. Praem stood just behind Evelyn’s shoulder, looming over the white sofa, hands folded, looking like she would rather apply herself to the unenviable task of cleaning up the rest of the mess that Taika and I had made of the expensive penthouse apartment. Lozzie was peering at Taika with far too much interest, sitting much closer to the ‘witch’ than the rest of us, but I didn’t begrudge Lozzie; I totally understood, even under the circumstances — Taika was still dressed in tiny white shorts and a white tank top and nothing else, sprawled back on the opposite sofa, legs wide, the hem of her tank top riding up to show the kind of toned abdominal muscles that one could only obtain through lots of hard work.

Raine sipped her own beer, pistol hidden in her waistband, shooting me occasional looks to make sure I was doing okay.

I was not.

The aftermath of my emergency transformations and the ensuing cacophony of rapid-fire brain-math had left me drained and wobbly. I had dried blood crusted around my eyes, despite the effort to wash off the worst. I was vaguely nauseated and felt the beginnings of a headache throbbing at my temples. Without my bio-reactor I would have been aching for sleep. All our tentacles were limp and tired and ready to coil up and stop moving for a few hours.

But we were quivering with the need to know, in a way we had so rarely felt.

“Taika,” I prompted after a moment of silence. “I am — perhaps understandably — a little anxious and impatient to know the truth. Please?”

Taika laughed softly, without raising her head. “Thirteen years is a long time ago, kid, even for things like you and me. I don’t want to miss any details or get stuff wrong, not if you need closure, and certainly not if you need accurate info to go Beyond and punch out a titan. Give this old lady some time to think.”

Raine said: “You don’t look a day over thirty, ‘old lady’.”

Taika silently toasted Raine with her beer. “Flame is always fresh. So. February 2006. England. I ended up there because … well.” Taika pulled a rueful, melancholy sort of smile. “Because of a woman. My very own little island monkey, to whom I am still technically married, I believe. I know, I know — how is that relevant?” Taika sneered at herself. “It’s not, but I’m trying to give you context for what happened, why it happened, why I let it happen.”

We nodded, squeezing ourself with our tentacles. “That’s quite alright. Yes, please, do give me the whole thing.”

Taika rolled her eyes at the ceiling, tapping her beer can with fingertips again. “The ‘whole thing’ would take hours, and most of it is none of your business. Most of it has nothing to do with any of you. There was a … an ‘incident’, let’s say, involving me, my ‘wife’, a kid … uh, unrelated to either of us, kind of — and a vampire, though the vampire was just sort of in tow, not really important—”

Evelyn hissed under her breath: “For fuck’s sake. Vampires, again.”

Lozzie did a snort-giggle.

Taika ignored all that, carrying on “—and a series of unexplained deaths.” Taika raised her head from the back of the sofa and looked at us again; her goat-like orange eyes glowed with inner fire. “Any of you ever been to Tolchester?”

She received a series of blank looks in return. I shook my head, though I’d heard of the city. Evelyn just shrugged. Lozzie didn’t seem to care, tilting her head from side to side. Praem didn’t respond.

Raine said: “Never been there myself, but Tolchester’s a rough place, even for the North.”

Taika shrugged. “North, south, whatever. Can’t remember the geography of your rainy little island half the time, anyway. Do you remember the Tolchester serial killer case, around about then?”

Raine squinted. “Vaguely. Not really, though. Where you going with this?”

I raised one tentacle and spoke up: “I actually don’t remember that, no. I don’t make a habit of reading newspapers from thirteen years ago, or upsetting myself with wikipedia pages on serial killers.”

Taika pointed her beer can at me. “Smart, calamari. Stay away from that shit, it’s bad for your digestion. And the reason you don’t remember it is because they never caught anybody. Police made a couple of arrests, but that was just for show. Four dead, all in Tolchester, all between February and May 2006. All four died in weird, isolated places. And they weren’t the sort of victims that serial killers usually pick, right? That’s sort of why I was there. Your British newspapers didn’t get most of the truth, either. Police were right quick at cleaning up the scenes and making sure nobody took photos. Weird, ritual shit. The kinda thing you pretend doesn’t exist on television.”

Evelyn snorted. “A mage.”

Taika smiled a sudden burning smile. “Oh, you wish it was a mage. No, much worse, this was something that had wandered too far, wasn’t supposed to be here.” Taika shrugged. “I would say I dealt with it, but that would be a lie. The kid I mentioned dealt with it, but hey, that’s another story. The important bit is that I enlisted help — help I came to regret. A man — a mage, I suppose, for all that fucking word means anything — by the name of Darren Dole.”

Taika took another sip of her beer. She was sitting up straight now, seemingly warming to her subject. She raked her long, frozen-flame hair back to keep it out of her face.

“You have to understand,” she said. “We couldn’t find this thing that was doing the killings. It moved in ways we couldn’t handle, not even the vampire. Hunting it was almost impossible. You’d see it out in the open, in the middle of a crowd, and it would just look like a man. A really tall man with no face. And you’d forget it was there, your brain would slide off it, even when you tried to look directly at the thing. Nearly got one of my companions back then, just because we couldn’t see the damn thing properly, couldn’t keep it in our minds, couldn’t ‘observe’ it.”

A shudder went through me when Taika said that word — observe.

“Oh,” I murmured. “Oh no.”

Taika shot me a pained smile. “Yeah, you get where this is going, calamari. We needed better eyes. We needed ways to see.”

“You contacted the Eye,” I said. “You made a deal with it.”

Taika winced and held up a hand. “Mm, not quite, slow down. Let me get there. We needed help. The kid I mentioned, she didn’t need eyes to hunt. Followed her nose instead. She eventually solved the whole thing for me, but I screwed up at first. I didn’t want an eleven year old girl getting involved, not any deeper than she already was. I was getting desperate, because the thing that was doing the killings, it was coming for me and mine next. I could probably fight it off, but none of my companions could. But, Mister Dole? He swore up and down and left and right that he knew of an entity which could grant us sight.”

“No,” I hissed, tentacles flexing with sudden need. “You mustn’t, you—”

“I didn’t,” Taika repeated, a little harder, trying to get me to ease off. “Slow down, calamari. It’s more complicated than you think. I didn’t make any deals with the ‘Eye’ or anything like that. But I have to explain why I did what I did. Okay?”

Slowly, we nodded. We took several deep breaths. We lowered our tentacles. Raine put her beer to one side and slid an arm around my shoulders instead, to hold me steady. Taika was not the mage who had done all this, she was not responsible for everything that had happened to me.

“Okay,” we said. “Sorry. Please, go on.”

Taika nodded a guarded thank you. “So,” she said. “Dole, he had this book.” She smirked without any warmth, her fires banked. “Mages do love their books, don’t they? A lot of problems would be solved with a nice big bonfire for all those rotten old tomes.”

Evelyn hissed between her teeth, tutting out loud. “Book burner.”

Taika smirked. “It’s my nature, English rose. It’s how I deal with problems.”

A wave of disgust knocked the horror right out of me, too. “Taika!” I said. “That’s vile! I don’t care what’s in them, burning books is never the right answer.”

Taika raised her eyebrows at me. “You really think that? I’m not talking about cultural symbolism here, calamari. I’m not talking about restricting knowledge from the masses. I’m not talking about no Disco Demolition. I’m talking about magic. Would you burn a single book, to rescue your sister?”

“Well … yes, of course we would,” I admitted. “But that’s not the same principle.”

Taika waved that off; this part of her philosophy was irreconcilable with my own. “Dole had this book. Asrar almajalat ghayr almaryiya, Geheimnisse der unsichtbaren Sphären, both in Medieval German and Classical Arabic.”

“Secrets of the spheres unseen?” Evelyn translated, frowning with sudden interest. “That’s apocryphal. As far as I can tell, the book never existed, only references to it. You’re telling me it’s real?”

Taika shrugged. “Real enough when I saw it. Only copy in existence or something, Dole was proud of that. Parts of it couldn’t be copied without lethal complications, reading certain passages also performed the contents of the passages.” Taika snorted. “Typical mage bullshit.”

“Huh,” Evelyn grunted in grudging agreement. Taika nodded at that.

“Anyway,” she said. “To cut this part of the story short, Dole said there was a way to borrow perfect sight, perfect observation, from a specific Beyonder titan.”

“The Eye,” I said.

Taika nodded once. “We called it something else, but ‘The Eye’ is better.”

Evelyn said, “What did you call it?”

Taika cleared her throat. “At the time? ‘Mister Telescope’.”

Raine laughed. Lozzie giggled. Evelyn rolled her eyes.

“Mister Telescope,” Praem repeated. “Sees very far.”

“In my defence,” Taika said. “We — me and my other companions — were mostly teasing Dole. We didn’t think it would work. His ‘Mister Telescope’ was bullshit as far as we were concerned. We were all too worried about fighting the thing hunting us down.”

I said: “But it did work. Didn’t it?”

“Nope.” Taika laughed softly. “Dole vanished. Right in the middle of all that shit with the ‘serial killer’, he vanished.” She clicked her fingers.  “I thought he’d skipped town, left us to ‘face the music’, as you English say. After that whole incident got resolved, I had to take a few weeks to tidy up the loose ends. Then I went looking for Dole. His corpse hadn’t turned up during all the commotion, nobody could account for him, and I figured out he was still alive. I wanted to find him, kick his arse, maybe kill him. I hadn’t decided yet. I was angry. Stupid of me.”

Evelyn snorted. “Don’t blame you.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Raine added. She reached over and sipped from her beer again.

I said, “He hadn’t run though, had he? He’d contacted the Eye.”

Taika shook her head. “He had run, actually, but not because he was a coward. I spent about a month tracing the guy’s steps before I caught up with him. First thing I found was the place he’d done a ritual, right there in Tolchester, where he was supposed to be when he was helping. And it wasn’t a small piece of magic, not something a baby mage could do. Dole was in his fifties, experienced and principled, he knew what he was doing. I don’t know a lot of magecraft, but he had protections and wards and bullshit enough to stop anything. The whole room was plated with mirrors looking inward, as if to confuse the sight of whatever he was calling.”

“Fool!” Evelyn snapped.

“Yes,” I whispered. “Yes, the Eye … that’s not … that’s not how it works … it … it … ”

Raine squeezed my shoulder.

“Mm,” Taika grunted. “He even had a pair of animals in there. Bulls. Very traditional mage stuff, sacrificial animals and that. The bulls were supposed to act as heat sinks, take whatever damage was directed at Dole. By the time I got there they’d been dead and rotting for weeks. The bulls had exploded during the ritual, worst mess I’d ever seen. Something had gone badly wrong. And the book I mentioned? It was burned.” Taika blew out a long, long breath and took a deep swig of her beer. When she spoke again the fire in her goatish eyes seemed a touch dimmer. “After that, he’d fled the city. I traced his steps, but it was weird. You know what he did? He’d spent weeks going round all these different hospitals in England. Broke into them, but he didn’t steal anything, didn’t hurt anybody, didn’t set up any magic traps or tricks or anything I could find. And I wasn’t trying to figure out what he was doing, I didn’t care. I just wanted to kick his face in.”

“Twins,” I said. “Twins, right? He was looking for twins?”

Taika winced, slow and painfully, as if this was an old, old wound in her fire-backed hide. She nodded slowly. “Yup. Didn’t figure that out at the time, but—”

“Then I was right!” I cried out. A great shudder went through me, a unfolding of an emotion I’d been holding onto for so very long. “It was a mage! It was a mage, all along! Maisie and I were taken on purpose, it—”

“Nuh uh,” Taika said, shaking her head sadly. “Nope. It was no magecraft that took you and your sister, Heather.”

“But— this Dole person, you said—”

Taika lifted her eyes and looked right at me, eyes burning with quiet flame; something in her expression stopped me, some unspeakable horror that she had seen, something that had convinced her, utterly. “Dole wasn’t in control anymore.”

I nodded, numbed by that look; Taika was like me, wasn’t she? She’d been to the abyss, or her version of it, she’d come back changed, transformed her body to fit, yet this memory left her shaken?

Evelyn spoke in my place: “He was possessed?”

Taika shrugged. “Something like that. I caught up with him in Scotland.” She spoke almost without affect, flat and distant. “He was renting a sort of cabin, some kind of holiday place, one of those fancy houses full of decorative junk. It was out on some distant mountainside, nothing else around for miles and miles and miles, just rolling hills, no neighbours. Great views. Ha.” Taika almost laughed, but the attempt died as soon as it was born. She took another swig of beer to steady herself. “He’d filled the place with eyes. Drawn them on every surface. And I do mean every surface. Every single inch of every surface and object and … everything!” She hissed, like petrol squirted onto a bonfire. “You couldn’t look anywhere inside that cabin without those eyes looking back at you. When he’d run out of ink, he’d used shit, and semen, and then blood. I didn’t get close enough to investigate in detail, though. The eyes were everywhere, at every scale, inside each other, painted on the inside of the windows, scrawled in miniature scale on every angle of every door and wall and object and everything. Everything. Everything!”

We nodded. “We understand, Taika. We’ve seen—”

“No,” Taika said, “maybe you understand, Heather — or Heathers. Maybe you do. But your friends here probably don’t. It wasn’t just a creepy house full of mage bullshit. I’ve seen creepier houses full of much worse mage bullshit, some of it still alive and bleating. But this?” Taika stared at me and raised one hand, then pointed downward with all her fingers, indicating something coming from above. “I could feel it,” she said. “Looking down at me.”

“Oh,” I breathed. “The Eye.”

“The Eye,” she echoed. “‘Mister Telescope’. Whatever. Didn’t seem so funny anymore. It was like Dole had cracked a door open, or shunted a window aside, by just an inch, so something could peer through. And I didn’t see it, nothing like that. Nothing so simple. But I could feel it, feel this presence watching me from every surface and angle and object in that house. Worst creeping stalker feeling ever. Like Dole had broken reality within those walls.”

We let Taika finish. She trailed off, took a deep breath, and sipped her beer again.

I said: “I’ve looked into it for real, into the Eye. I’ve looked back at the Eye. I know what it feels like.”

Evelyn cleared her throat. “Raine here and myself, we’ve also seen it. Due to a similar stupid mistake on my part.”

Taika suddenly stared at Evelyn, sharper and faster than I liked.

I quickly said, “And I fixed the mistake. Taika, Evelyn is fine. I made the Eye go away, that time.”

Lozzie chirped, “I’ve seen it too! Wasn’t fun!”

Praem intoned: “Rude to stare.”

Taika simmered down and gave Lozzie a much more indulgent look. “That’s alright for you, Miss. But most of us aren’t your kind of robust. Even things like Heather and me.”

“I know!” Lozzie chirped. She smirked like she was flirting. “You’re delicate! Just like Heathy!”

“My point is,” I said before this could dissolve into flirting, “I know what it’s like.”

Taika laughed softly, dispelling the tension. “Yeah. Not a good feeling. Understatement of the century.”

Raine said: “What’d you do with it? The cabin place, I mean?”

Taika smirked. “Burned it to the fucking ground and pissed on the ashes. After I was done with Dole, anyway.”

“Good answer,” said Evee.

Taika cocked an eyebrow at her. “Now you approve of burning stuff?”

“When it comes to the Eye,” Evelyn said. “We’ve seen our fair share of what happens to mages who try to contact it. We happened to burn down a building too. Same answer, same solution. Don’t be smug because you think you’re the only one bold enough to commit arson, you overstuffed goat.”

Taika laughed, looking Evee up and down. Evelyn glared back at her, smouldering almost as much as Taika did. “Spicy kitty,” Taika said with a smirk. “What did I do to piss you off, Miss Saye?”

“Nothing,” Evelyn grunted back. 

“You jealous because I was playing chase with your girl?” Taika indicated me with a jerk of her thumb.

“Maybe,” Evelyn ground the word out.

I cleared my throat before Raine could join in or Lozzie could start rolling about. “Can we stick to the subject, please? Taika, how does this end in me and Maisie getting taken by the Eye?”

Taika puffed out a big sigh. Her breath smelled of hot iron. The brief amusement went out of her. “Darren Dole, when I found him, had stripped off most of his own skin and taken out his own eyeballs.” She shrugged. “Hate it when people do that.”

Raine said, “Happens often, in your line of work?”

Taika eyed her. “You don’t know my line of work, bulldog. Let’s keep it that way.”

Raine toasted her in silence.

Taika went on, “Anyway, Dole was a mess. And I made a big mistake. I could have kept him alive, could have questioned him. There wasn’t much left of his mind by that point, but I could have gotten something out of him, probably. But that fucking house. Those eyes. That feeling of being watched. I burned him and the building together, the whole lot of it, all up in smoke. He didn’t even resist at that point, I think he welcomed it. He was still trying to draw more eyes even as he burned. All that survived was the stuff in his car, in the house’s driveway. Part of me wished it hadn’t. He’d left extensive notes, but none of it made sense to me.”

“Notes,” Evelyn grunted. “From a mage. Great.”

“Mmhmm,” Taika agreed. “Most of it was huge lists of dates and times, star charts, spreadsheets of numbers, reams and reams of mathematics. None of it made the slightest bit of sense to me.” She shrugged. “After that house, I just wanted to forget all about it. I didn’t want to think about it ever again.”

“I don’t blame you,” I said. “I wish … I wish I’d had that luxury.”

Taika snorted, without any real humour. “Well, I blame me. I spent a month getting blind drunk, mostly in Stockholm, which is a shit city in which to get drunk all the time. Nice girls, though.” Taika pulled a smirk, but her heart wasn’t in it. “When I came out of the binge I relit my fires and went back to Dole’s notes. Terrible fucking idea. Stupid idea. Lovecraft protagonist level idea. But I needed answers, I needed closure, needed to understand what I’d witnessed.”

Evelyn snorted with derision. “Typical mage behaviour. Just have to know. Don’t we?”

Taika eyed her with those goat-like slits. “Told you once, English rose, I’m no mage. Nah, the curiosity, that’s all on me.”

Evelyn rolled her eyes. “Typical Lovecraft protagonist, then.”

Taika winced. “Ouch.”

“You said it first,” Evelyn drawled. “No offense meant.”

Taika’s turn to snort, like sparks and flame kicked up from the edge of a bonfire. “Whatever you say, English rose. Anyway, I went back to the notes. That’s when I found the list of names.”

“Twins?” I said.

Taika nodded. “One hundred and four names. Fifty two pairs. Hand-written on notepad paper. All twins, all born in the hospitals he’d been breaking into. That’s what he’d been doing, copying down their names from official hospital records, birth certificates and stuff. Twins born in a specific date range, so they were all the same age.”

“Maisie and me … ?”

Taika nodded. “You were on the list. Heather Morell, Maisie Morell.”

A strange feeling settled into my chest — a cocktail of relief, catharsis, violation, and dissociation, all piled on top of each other. We had to share the emotion among all seven of us, unfolding it down our tentacles for a crumb of release. There we were, hearing about a part of our life which we had never known about before, inflicted upon us by people we’d never met, or even heard of before that moment. It was like being told the source of a scar one had carried for one’s whole life, which had become an abstract and personal thing, and discovering that some alien hand lay behind the mark upon one’s body.

Taika was carrying right on: “No other commonality between the pairs of twins, not that I could figure out. Some rich, some poor. Some healthy, some not. Some disabled, some not. White, Black, from the continent, whatever.  Two of the sets of parents were … what do you call it? ‘In The Know’? But that was all. Thought it might be something to do with them at first, but I checked them out and they were clean, no prior connection with Dole, no knowledge of ‘Mister Telescope’, nothing.” She took a deep breath, staring into space with those goat-like eyes. “At first I thought he’d been planning to sacrifice all those kids somehow, but that made no sense. Dole was never that kind of man, I wouldn’t have worked with him if he was. Maybe under the influence of some Beyonder titan, maybe, but even then his actions didn’t line up. He never visited any of the kids whose names he’d written down. Never went anywhere near them.” Taika blew out a long breath and pulled a weird, sad wince. “I’m not exactly the world’s greatest detective. Usually I just find things and set them on fire.”

“Wheeeey,” Raine cheered softly. Lozzie went ‘oooooh’. Evelyn rolled her eyes.

“Arson,” said Praem.

“Arson with good cause,” Taika said, raising her beer in a silly toast. “So, well, I went through Dole’s notes. All the numbers, the star charts, all these equations about times and dates. Most of it made no sense at all. The dates and times were impossible, they referred to points too far in the past or in the future to be useful. But … but I worked out what he’d done. Or what I thought he’d done.”

“A deal with the Eye,” I said.

Taika shook her head. “No. There was no deal there, no exchange. It was all one way. He fed it those names, the names of all those pairs of twins, but he had no control by that point. All he did was give it the information. Gave it options, fifty-two different pairs of options. The dates and times, those were the key, even though ninety percent of them were impossible. Little windows of time where the mathematics lined up. Sounds like nonsense, right? Told you I wasn’t good at maths.”

Raine said: “This mage gave the Eye a list of times it could reach in from Outside, to kidnap a pair of children? Is that what you’re saying?”

Evelyn ground her teeth with strange anger.

Taika squinted. She didn’t like that explanation. “No, it wasn’t that simple. It was more like by doing the maths on paper, he’d shunted something to the side, just by a crack. That’s what I’d felt in that fucking cabin, like something huge was peering through a tiny crack and down at me, through all those drawings of eyes. It consumed him in the process, but he opened the way. He just didn’t know where or when exactly it would happen. Just that it would happen to one of those fifty two pairs.” She rolled her shoulders in a shrug, trying to seem casual and relaxed, but even this roiling fire-witch, this Homo abyssus from other waters, she could not hide her horror at this notion.

My mouth had gone dry. I felt vaguely sick. My tentacles were coiled around me in a protective self-hug; Top-Left and Top-Right were repeating comforting mantras. Middle-Left was squeezing our tummy, trying to hold onto our nerves. We needed this, but we didn’t like it.

Raine tightened her grip on our shoulders. Evelyn poked us in the leg with her walking stick. Lozzie got up, fluttered over, and hugged two of us — two of our tentacles. A glass of water appeared over my other shoulder, held in Praem’s perfect hand. I murmured a thank you, drained the glass, and felt a tiny bit better.

Taika watched all this with an impassive smoulder, a banked fire behind her glowing orange eyes. She sipped her beer and waited for me to recover.

“Sorry,” I murmured. “I just … ”

Taika laughed softly, a single humourless puff of air through her nose. “Yeah, it’s alright, calamari. This is some fucked up shit.” She straightened up on her ruined white sofa and shrugged, a little less stiffly. “As for why any of that happened, search me, I’ve not got the foggiest. That is how you English say it, right?”

“Actually,” I said softly. “We have a … rough, basic, estimated idea of what the Eye wants. Sort of.”

Taika’s eyes froze, like fire caught in a bottle. “Fuck me. Good luck with that.”

“Do you want to know?” we asked.

Taika eyed my companions, all four of them, lingering especially on Raine, and then Evee.

Raine smirked back at her. “Scared?”

Evelyn hissed: “She’s terrified. Yes. Scared, goat?”

I tutted. “Raine! Evee! Both of you, my gosh, stop it! Taika, the information isn’t dangerous or anything, I swear.”

Taika ran her tongue over her teeth, then knocked back the rest of her beer in one long, upturned gulp, her perfect white throat bobbing as she drank. She finished with a little burp, then crushed the empty can between her palms. She held up the flattened disc of aluminium between thumb and forefinger. The metal started to glow red-hot where she touched.

“Hit me,” she said.

We told Taika about the book from the Library of Carcosa: A full and true account of the disappearance and return of the twin sisters Jane Doe and Mary Doe, their subsequent alienation and alienism, their mathematical skills and strange habits, and their eventual transition into the weft between worlds. We told her a condensed version of the tale, of the vegetable twins who had endured a similar ordeal to Maisie and I, how they had come back from Outside, changed and different to the others of their strange alien race. We told Taika that this had happened before, somewhere far beyond human understanding in both space and time, probably somewhere Outside, far beyond even my comprehension.

But it had happened before, to another pair of twins. Maisie and I were not alone.

We did not tell Taika where we’d gotten the book, and she didn’t ask. We didn’t mention Heart, or the King in Yellow, or Carcosa. Neither did Evelyn or Raine, and even Lozzie just returned to her spot on the sofa and let us halt and stutter through our little story. We all silently agreed not to complicate this meeting any further by trying to explain The Yellow Court and the Library.

We also told Taika about the secrets which Mister Joking had gleaned from the Eye-ridden corpse of Alexander Lilburne, the cryptic words about two-in-one, about missing one’s other half, about twins, and the pain of being incomplete.

Taika relaxed as she listened, probably because she realised this wasn’t the sort of mind-searing mage secret which would require her to burn the knowledge out of her own mind to protect herself. Eventually she stopped making the crushed can glow with heat, then tossed it onto the sofa once it cooled down.

By the time I was finished, she was leaning forward, elbows propped on her knees, frowning in thought.

“Does that … does that make sense?” I asked.

“Mm,” Taika grunted. Her goatish, fire-lit eyes bored into me. She must have been thinking very hard indeed.

“Does it help you formulate any more detailed theories, when combined with the notes you found?”

“Nah.”

I blinked. “Oh. Um.”

Raine snorted. Lozzie giggled. At least somebody found this funny.

Taika straightened back up and smirked. “The less time you spend dwelling on the motivations of Beyonders, the better off you’ll be.” She glanced at Lozzie. “Present company excepted. You’re a real rarity, like me and the calamari here.”

Lozzie flashed her a toothy grin.

Evelyn said, “Hear hear. The less the better.”

Taika raised her eyebrows at Evee. “Good choice of friends, calamari. Even your mage has got her head on straight, whatever I did to piss her off.”

“Noooope,” Lozzie said. Taika frowned at her, missing the joke — but Evee didn’t. She blushed faintly, tutting and huffing.

Raine spoke into the increasingly silly moment, a voice of reason for once, cutting deeper than the rest of us could: “You did have theories though, didn’t you, Taika? Else we wouldn’t be here. Heather wouldn’t have followed any leads, ‘cos she wouldn’t have had any to follow, right?” Raine raised an item in one hand, an item she had taken from my tentacles — the business card Taika had left with my father, ten years ago.

Taika turned slow-burning eyes toward Raine, then winced at the sight of the business card.

“Ah,” she hummed. “A little token of my guilt. Right. Well. Yeah, I did have theories. The Eye, whatever it was, this thing that took Dole and piloted him like a parasitic fungus, I thought it might be trying to propagate itself. Or maybe it was making a gateway into our reality. Didn’t know why it needed twins, never guessed it might be trying to study them or something, never guessed it was missing another half, nothing like that. I lacked all that. I was on the lookout for more direct problems.”

My turn to let out a weak little laugh. “In a way it did propagate,” we said. “In a way, I’m its adopted daughter.”

“Mm,” Taika purred. “But not in the way I was worried about.”

“Is that why you contacted my parents?”

Taika leaned back again and puffed out a big sigh, rolling her head back on the sofa, her long body and longer hair gleaming in the sunlight which bathed the apartment. “Fuck, I could do with another beer. A whole fucking crate of beer. Pity I had to send my nice friends off earlier, Heather. I could use a cuddle buddy right about now.”

Raine grinned at me. “Heather, what’s this?”

“Um.” I cleared my throat and blushed a little. “When I arrived, Taika had several … ‘friends’, in her bed.”

“Guilty as charged,” Taika chuckled. “I like a bit of variety.”

Evelyn sighed a great big huff. “So you’re as bad as Heather. Is this a thing that abyssal returnees do?”

“E-Evee!” I squeaked.

Lozzie tilted her head sideways so Taika caught a hint of that wispy blonde hair. Taika looked up and squinted at her. Lozzie was smiling with obvious mischief, fluttering the edges of her poncho back and forth.

“Uhhh,” Taika said. “Lozzie, right? Right. No offense, but how old are you? And not in Beyonder terms, in human terms, like when were you born and that?”

“Nearly nineteen!” Lozzie chirped.

Taika pulled a pained grimace. “I’m flattered. And I know you’re technically not nineteen. But … ”

Lozzie let out a giggle-snort. “I’m just looking at you! Whaaaaat?”

Praem intoned: “Down, girls.”

Taika grimaced harder. Raine grinned, silently egging Lozzie on. Evelyn looked away, unimpressed, and said: “Now is not the time. Heather doesn’t need this rampancy right now.”

I cleared my throat: “Actually, that is helping to take the tension off. Thank you, Lozzie. I’m just … this a lot, for me.”

Lozzie nodded her head up and down. “Mmhmm, mmhmm!”

“But also yes,” I added. “Please, Taika, what happened next? Why did the Eye select Maisie and I?”

Taika let out a huge sigh, up at the ceiling, her breath carrying the sound of crackling wood and roiling flames. “There isn’t a great deal else to tell, sad to say, and most of it just my failures. I decided that this was my responsibility to follow up. I’d killed Dole, after all. I’d felt that presence watching me. And I was looking for something new to sink my teeth into.” She shook her head. “But I’m bad at that kind of work. Give me something to burn, and I’m golden. But this … ” She trailed off and sighed, then ran a hand over her face. “I went back to England, started watching all those pairs of twins, you and yours included. Thought maybe I could pre-empt whatever was going to happen. I kept going over all those equations, trying to figure out where and when the window would open.” Taika sat up again and pulled a grim smile. “But guess what happened, every time I spent too long thinking about the equations?”

“The Eye,” I said again.

Taika nodded. “Yeah. That crack in reality was still open, and I’d been under it long enough to get recognised. Trying to hold the mathematics in my mind, that was just inviting it to pay attention. That feeling from the cabin would creep over me again. But I kept trying. Started to gather intel on all fifty two pairs of twins, all those kids, but I couldn’t be everywhere at once. It was impossible.”

A lump formed in my throat. “Is that … is that when you … stole the photograph of Maisie and me?”

Taika smiled — not a smirk, but something warmer, a cosy fire in a brick hearth. “Yeah. I wanted physical, photographic proof of every kid, every pair of twins, just in case that thing looking through reality was going to use them for anything. And yeah, I know how fucked up that sounds, breaking into people’s houses to steal photos of their kids. But I can’t do remote viewing, I didn’t have any other way.”

We winced with sympathy, but also the ghost of discomfort. Had this goat-woman stalked through my childhood home one night to steal a photograph of me and my twin sister? Disquiet and violation stirred in my chest. Half of us — half us tentacles — tingled with suppressed offense.

“Did you actually break into houses?” we asked.

Taika shook her head. “No need to.” She waved a hand toward the big table, where her black iron blades were lined up on the tabletop, so still and silent compared to their earlier swift violence. “My girls over there have more talents than cutting up squid. They did the hard parts.”

I blinked. “Your … girls? I’m sorry, I must have missed something.”

“Bad girls,” Praem intoned.

Taika smirked. “They’re not so bad once you get to know ‘em. You and them might have gotten off on the wrong foot, though.”

Lozzie went up onto her knees on the sofa, peering across the wrecked apartment at the dozen big black knives, eyes widened with sudden interest. She made a little ‘oooh’ noise, clambered up, and padded over to examine them closer. “Ohhhhhh, right!” she whispered. “Hello! Hi!”

Everyone stared at her for a moment, even Taika — though Taika looked more pleased than confused.

“Taika,” I said, almost afraid to ask the question. “The … photograph, of me and Maisie. Do you still have it?”

Taika nodded. “You want it, right?”

My throat was so dry. My palms were clammy. My heart clenched inside my chest. Raine squeezed my shoulder.

“In a minute,” we managed to say. “Not right now. We need to hear the rest, first. We … might find it difficult, when we see … her.”

Taika nodded and carried on, talking right over my emotional distress; perhaps she was a little bit like Raine in that regard, knowing when to deflect and pretend.

“Like I said,” she carried on, “I tried to watch all fifty two pairs of kids, but it was impossible. I was running up and down the length of your rainy little island every day, trying to keep tabs on everybody. And that wasn’t the only thing I was dealing with at the time, I got pulled away for a few weeks by an incident in late 2007, something unrelated. But every interruption made me worry that I would miss the window. And then I really fucked up. Do you remember the Old Brown Road kidnapping case?”

We all glanced at each other. Evee shrugged. Lozzie looked up from the swords — she’d been whispering to them — and fluttered her poncho in a negative gesture. Raine said, “Can’t say I’ve heard of that one.”

Taika cleared her throat, oddly embarrassed. “Pair of twins went missing from their suburban home in North Yorkshire, January 6th, 2008. Oliver Pendown and Jace Pendown, pair of boys, nine years old. The reason you probably didn’t hear about it is ‘cos they were only missing for one day. Turned up on January 8th, alive and untouched, well-fed and gift-wrapped, hand-delivered to a police station in the city of York.”

Evelyn said, suddenly dark and hard: “And how did those boys fare?”

Taika smirked. “Confused, but perfectly fine. Hadn’t seen the face of their kidnapper, nor heard a voice. They’d been blindfolded for a bit, then kept in a big dog cage for a while, with a blanket over it. They’d had snacks, books, even a little video game console in there.”

I blinked several times. “ … you don’t mean … ”

Raine laughed. “You kidnapped a pair of kids?”

“Mmhmm,” Taika nodded. “I tried to cheat, you see. I held the maths in my head for too long.” Taika reached up and tapped her temple. “Until I felt that presence start to look at me. Then I tried to look back.”

“Oh,” I said. “You didn’t, how could you—”

“Wrapped myself in flame and took a dip in the pits to escape. Burned out the connection, burned everything that might lead it back to me.”

“You mean the abyss,” I said.

Taika shrugged. “Whatever you call it. But it worked — or I thought it worked. I got just enough information to finish the equation on my own. And I thought it pointed to those two boys, on that night. Even thought I had the hour right. So I broke into their home, kidnapped them, and then … ” Taika broke into a weird smile. “I put them in a cage of flame. Special flame. Not the kind you can see, not the kind that burns matter. Flame from the pits, from the molten places under our feet. The boys never saw any of it, under a blanket in the middle. And if that presence came round to look at those boys, I was going to burn out its sight. Or at least try. Only thing I could think of.”

Raine was nodding along to the story. I felt only a terrible sense of inevitability.

Evelyn grunted with odd respect: “The right thing.”

Taika laughed. The awe slid from her words again. “But the wrong sodding target. Nothing happened that night. Nor the next. I’d screwed up, gotten it wrong. Or more likely, the Eye got just as much from looking at me as I got from looking back at it.”

I hunched my shoulders. “So it was your fault.”

Taika stared at me. “I’m sorry, Heather.”

The others didn’t follow. Raine tilted her head and narrowed her eyes. Evelyn frowned and grunted: “Eh?” Lozzie looked up and bobbed from foot to foot in a curious little dance.

Praem intoned: “It was not.”

Taika shook her head. “It was my fault. When I tried to return that gaze, to figure out which pair of twins it had selected, I believe it read my intentions. Saw me, ‘observed’ me. So it changed targets. The specific target didn’t matter to it, there was no special reason it had selected those boys. Any other pair of twins would do just as well. I’m sorry, Heather. It was my fault that you got taken.”

I was shaking slightly. “I … I mean … if it wasn’t Maisie and I … ”

Raine squeezed my shoulder, then pulled one of my tentacles into her lap and hugged me. “Then it would have been some other kids, Heather. Hey, it’s alright, it’s alright. You can feel bad that it was you, you don’t have to feel guilty.”

I sniffed hard and scrubbed at my eyes; not yet, I could not collapse yet, I needed it all.

“Why did everyone forget my twin sister?” I demanded. “Why did everyone forget Maisie?”

Taika looked me dead in the eyes, and said: “I don’t know.”

“You have to know!”

I exploded with anger I had not expected. My tentacles bunched, flailed, and went stiff with frustration. Taika held up a hand. Raine held my shoulder and said my name; Evelyn cleared her throat, while Lozzie bobbed back over and hovered next to Praem, gesturing like she was going to catch my tentacles.

But something had snapped inside me.

“Taika, you still have that photo! And you remembered! You questioned my father about it. Why did everyone else forget, everyone except me, and apparently you?! You’re telling me you had nothing to do with that?”

Taika waited until I was just panting with frustrated fury, no longer shouting at her.

“I remember for the same reason you do, calamari,” she said slowly. “I wasn’t in reality when it happened.”

“ … p-pardon?”

“I ran away,” Taika said. She wasn’t smirking or smiling now, just sad and cold, like a fire in the rain. “I remember the night when it happened, the minute it happened, and exactly where I was sitting when I felt it start.”

“About four in the morning,” I stammered out. “T-that’s when my father heard me crying and screaming, that’s when I got back, that’s when it was.”

Taika shook her head. “Two fifty six. In the morning. I was in this shitty little bedsit in Croydon — London’s a hell-hole, by the way, but that’s beside the point. I had two girls in the bed behind me, asleep by then, all fucked out. I was sat at this tiny little desk with a glass of vodka, my third, I think. And that’s when I felt it — felt that presence, that watcher, that observer, staring through that crack written in the equations, with so much greater clarity than ever before.” Taika gulped with the weight of memory, breathing harder than I’d expected. “And I didn’t hang around to see what was going to happen. I dipped.”

“Into the abyss?”

Taika nodded. “Into the pits, down into the molten fires, where that gaze couldn’t see. Actually, I jumped off that chair and slammed into my coat and bag, then I dipped. Didn’t want those girls in my bed to go rifling through my stuff, you know?” She tried to smile. “Not that I cared, but I didn’t want a pair of uninvolved to hurt themselves with my shit. I think that’s why that photograph survived, it and all the others were in my bag. Anyway … ” Taika stared at the floor. “I stayed down there for hours, burning and burning and burning. Hours in reality, you mind. Felt like forty fucking years. But I wasn’t going back, not if that gaze might see me.”

“I … I don’t blame you,” I managed to say — but part of us did. Part of us wanted to hate Taika, for failing to rescue us, for failing not to make this happen to some other pair of twins instead. “Nobody deserves the Eye.”

Taika smiled, but there was no joy in it. “Yeah, whatever. I ran like a coward, instead of trying to save the kids like I’d told myself I would.” She cleared her throat. “Long story short, I came back to reality about six hours later. Took me another few weeks to track down which pair of twins the Eye had taken, made more difficult by all records of your sister vanishing.”

I shook my head. “You truly have no idea why that happened?”

Taika shrugged. “I wasn’t here. Neither were you, you were out there, Beyond. I think that’s why we were missed.”

We stared at each other for a long, long, long moment. I felt tears rising into my eyes, which we had not expected. Why this? Why was this so frustrating? Why after all this time did she not have the answers we needed?

“Heather, hey,” Raine said softly, rubbing my shoulders. “Hey, it’s okay, it’s gonna be okay.”

“We don’t understand,” we said between clenched teeth. “Why did I survive and come back, when Maisie got trapped out there for ten years? Why erase the fact she existed, but not me? Why? It doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t. Still! Even now, I don’t get it! If— if we could just understand, maybe we could use that somehow, maybe … maybe … ” I sighed a sigh I had kept in for ten years. Then I hiccuped, once, loudly and painfully. “Fuck.”

“Heathy!” Lozzie said.

“Oh, Heather,” Evelyn sighed.

“Fuck,” Praem echoed. “Yes.”

Raine hugged me. Lozzie hugged me too, a soft and warm weight on my back. Evelyn reached out and touched one of my tentacles. I believe Praem touched my shoulder, I could feel her hand there, and smell the gentle scent of lemons. I wondered if she still had any, kept in reserve for me.

When the hug disentangled, I was still wet in the eyes, but I felt a tiny bit better.

“Pardon,” I croaked. “Pardon my language. Sorry about that.”

Taika was staring at me, burning inside like the innards of a forge, fires contained and controlled. She said: “You alright to go on, calamari?”

We shrugged. “We … we suppose, but what’s more to say?”

Taika smirked. “Actually, I have a question for you, the very same question you just asked yourself. Couldn’t ask you when you were a kid, of course. How did you come back, when your sister didn’t?”

We shrugged again. “I don’t know. The memories are … confused and painful. They don’t make sense. All I remember is falling back down a well, but that was probably metaphor.”

Taika nodded slowly. “What was it like, when you and her were taken?”

We squeezed our eyes shut and tried not to think about the answer to that question. Even after all this time, all this strength and power, all these tentacles, all these trips to Outside, all these skipping skims across the surface of the abyss, that question still made us feel like we were nine years old again, screaming in madness on our bedroom floor, bleeding and frothing and losing everything.

“Like … like a rabbit hole,” we squeezed out. We squeezed ourselves too, tight with our tentacles. “Beneath the bed. A rabbit hole, to lead Alice to Wonderland. That’s what I call the dimension where the Eye lives. Wonderland.”

Raine was murmuring my name softly. Lozzie was rubbing my shoulders.

Evelyn said, “Let’s drop that question, goat.”

“Sure thing,” Taika replied.

Slowly, I came back, panting softly. I unclenched my eyes and my tentacles alike. Raine’s hand slipped into ours, interlocking our fingers. Taika was leaning back against her sofa again, looking relaxed but haunted, her fires conserved for now. Evelyn was watching me with frowning concern. Praem had walked over to the kitchen, apparently unable to resist the siren song of all the lightly damaged appliances.

“I’m sorry for what happened, Heather,” Taika said. “Sorry I didn’t fight harder.”

We nodded. “It wasn’t … really your responsibility. Not really.”

Taika shrugged. “Things like you and I, when we get big enough, it feels like everything is our responsibility. Takes a while to unlearn that. Or maybe that’s just something you and me got in common.”

We nodded along with that too, then glanced around the apartment, using the surroundings to drag our mind back out of a past we had never known. The blazing sunlight was pouring in through the wall of windows, drenching the city beyond in shafts of dawn — and probably ruining the circadian rhythms of myself, Raine, and Evelyn. I could see spirit life here too — clinging to the other skyscrapers, wandering along the little roads so far below, riding atop some of the tiny buses and cars down in the streets. We suddenly wanted to get a better look at the spirits here, and I almost got up from the sofa and wandered over to the windows, but that could wait for a moment.

Instead I cast my eyes across the wrecked apartment, across my friends, and Taika.

Speaking with my parents had given me real catharsis; that truth had mattered. But this truth? What was this? An explanation, but with little meaning to me; it all felt distant and alien. Raw information, from which we might extract useful details, useful things about the Eye, things we could use, if only we could piece it all together. 

Evelyn and I needed to talk about all this, in detail, as mage and abyssal squid-girl, to see if all this information would affect our plans. Maybe Taika could provide further insight if provoked; I was not sure how to go about that. But there was little true satisfaction here, thousands of miles from home, digging through ashes from a decade past. And more importantly than any of that, in order to do this, to come here, to meet Taika in the way I had, I had made stupid mistakes — I had hurt Seven-Shades-of-Sunlight very badly, by ignoring her, by treating her pleading and her advice as nothing. My tentacles quivered with urgent suggestions as soon as I thought about her; we needed to hurry home, we needed to speak with her, apologise — or more.

But we were not done here, not just yet.

There was a true catharsis, and we were going to break down the moment we touched it, the moment we saw that long-lost photograph.

“Taika,” we began to say — began to ask her for the photograph of Maisie and I — but then we veered away into a strange curiosity, stalling for emotional stability, to ask a question which we thought did not matter. All we wanted was a few more moments to steel our heart against the image of Maisie that would soon be in our hands. “Taika,” we started again. “Why were you keeping an eye on me, after I came back from Wonderland? I know you went to speak with my parents, my father recalled it, that’s how I got your business card. Was it guilt?”

“Oh, that.” Taika smirked, her inner fires flaring with sudden throbbing heat once more. She crossed her legs and leaned back, arms wide on her sofa. When she flexed her shoulders I felt a brief pulse of heat. “Come on, you can’t be that naive. Seriously? After our mutual lesson earlier? We gotta have another one? This one won’t be practical, won’t be no fight, and it’s gonna be a lot darker.”

Raine stiffened, Evelyn frowned, Lozzie bobbed up onto her feet. Even Praem turned from the kitchen and stared at Taika.

They sensed it too — not hostility, but dark and sardonic amusement. While speaking about the Eye, Taika had seemed almost vulnerable, her guilt and pain over old failures all too real. But all that vanished, vulnerability rolling off her like burning through a layer of shed skin.

“Um,” I said. “We don’t … we don’t follow, no. Why were you checking on me?”

“To see if I had to kill you, calamari.” Taika purred through a fire-glow in her throat, like she’d swallowed a slug of molten iron. “After all, it’s a lot easier to burn up the corpse of a nine year old girl than kill a fully grown squid-god.”