Inkers

by Alex Rudall

  Annie came in to see her most days, bringing light, water, food. Lily had grown to detest her staying in the room to talk, but then missed it terribly when Annie didn’t stay: it was her only human contact. Annie refused to talk about what was happening on the island or what was happening to Lily. Instead she chattered about her work, Brian’s work, about the outside world, about anything far away, anything except the fact that they had imprisoned a pregnant seventeen–year old.

  Today, before Annie could get into her flow, Lily interrupted.

  “My clothes are falling apart.”

  “Oh,” Annie said, looking at the rags Lily was wearing as if noticing the state of them for the first time. Annie took them away and washed them each week, but there was just one pair of pyjamas and one set of day clothes, and they were disintegrating. “I’d better ask Brian.”

  “Please don’t,” Lily said. “Please just bring me some of my clothes, they’re all in my wardrobe. I’m so tired of wearing these every day. Please don’t ask Brian.”

  “Oh,” Annie said. “Well,” she said, “I could.”

  “Please,” Lily said, and the smile that lit up her face was genuine. It was so long since she had smiled. “Just something clean, something without holes.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Annie said, conspiratorially, winking glassily with her remaining eye. She left the room.

  She did not come back that night. Early the next morning she came in bearing the usual bucket of hot water with a plate of food on top, but on her back was a rucksack. She emptied it onto the bed – there were several pairs of underwear, socks, t–shirts and two pairs of baggy jogging bottoms. Lily was so grateful she cried.

  She let Annie chatter away while she washed and put the new clothes on. Then she sat down to listen. She wondered if she had somehow caught Annie at a weak point. If she could go further. Perhaps this would be her last chance.

  She waited for a pause in Annie’s stream of talk about Scotland’s lacklustre response to the impending return of the GSE. Finally, as Annie busied herself collecting up the rags of Lily’s old clothes, stuffing them in her rucksack, the moment came.

  “Annie,” Lily said softly, so that Annie had to lean closer to hear her. Lily was frightened but it was her only chance.

  “I want to see outside. I haven’t seen sunlight in – a long time. I can’t sleep. Please just take me out, just for a few minutes. Don’t tell anyone, nobody has to know, we could do it really early one morning, or, or whenever, I just want to see some light.”

  She became aware that she was shaking.

  “Lily,” Annie said, “I know it’s hard, but you have to trust Brian. We all have to trust him. People like us, we can’t see him for what he really is, but we have to trust him and do what he says, because he’s going to save the world. He’s going to save it from the GSE and make it a good place.”

  “No,” Lily said, putting her face in her hands. “No, no, no, he’s not…”

  “It’s like there’s nobody left in the whole world who actually cares about human values, compassion to strangers, that sort of thing,” continued Annie, her voice rising. “The religious ones have all turned into zealots or money–grubbers, the atheists are just interested in their own pleasure, where are the leaders? The good people who are actually good, don’t just look good?”

  Lily shook her head, tears starting to run down her face, but Annie carried on. Lily had never seen her like this. Annie looked half–mad.

  “No, everyone’s a critic, nobody dares to create anything. Nobody’s got the —the balls to try and make something new, something better. But Brian’s trying. What he’s trying to do, he’s trying to save us, save the world. And you’re the vessel, you’re the greatest hope at the moment, what’s inside you is.”

  “Please, you don’t know what it’s like, the pain in my back, I’m in the dark all the time…”

  “Pain?” Annie said, stepping towards Lily, into the light from her lamp, illuminating her ruined face, the dark hole where her left eye had been. “They gave me a lot of blue, but I made them stop once I woke up. I didn’t want to end up an addict like you. So I healed this without anaesthetic.”

  Lily just stared at her, the tears dripping off her chin.

  “You know,” Annie said, “The only thing that really makes us different to rocks is pain. We’re built to be in pain, we’ve evolved that way. If we were satisfied and happy, we wouldn’t do anything, we’d just sit there content until we died. So we’re all broken like that. Everyone alive is broken, and that’s why we’re alive. If we fixed ourselves we would die.”

  “I am going to die in here! The baby is going to die! Please help me! Where is Tom, why won’t he help me?”

  Annie shook her head.

  “Just be patient. And we’ll have you out quite soon, Brian’s just trying to – to figure out the logistics of it all.”

  Lily couldn’t speak any more: she was crying too much. After a while, Annie left.

  Sometime later, the door swung open again and Lily looked up and then shrank in fear. It was Brian. He had a grin on his face like a lunatic.

  “I’ve been listening to your little chats with Annie,” he said. Lily could not keep the horror from her face.

  “Yes,” he nodded. “Don’t think I’m stupid. I won’t let you jeopardise the baby again. I’ve got a couple of little drones in here. Listen to me. There is no way out. Annie won’t help you. And the baby will be ready soon. I’ll take it then, and you’ll be free of it. So just be patient. And don’t ask Annie to help you again.”

  He shut her in the darkness, alone, and for the first time Lily started to scream before she was even asleep. Nobody came: they were all used to her nightmares. What difference was a waking one?

  Once she had calmed herself down she just lay quietly on the bed. There was no point in screaming. There was no point in trying to sleep, although she was utterly exhausted and her body was crying out for it, because as soon as she dropped off she would be in the terrible nightmare of permanent imprisonment which only ever ended in screams of terror and pain. There was no point in trying to escape. Annie would not or could not help her. Tom was nowhere. He had given up on her. Maybe he was dead. The skylight was doubly closed to her now, not just by boards and nails, but by her body, which was now far too heavy and weak to climb. She was almost too weak to walk at all. And Brian and his drones would be watching all the time.

  She could not find Tia. At certain times Lily thought she could sense her there in the darkest corner of the room. Sometimes she put her hand on her belly, but there was no movement. Sometimes she wondered if the baby was dead.

  She was living in a nightmare from which she could not seem to wake.

  She thought about the singularity that Brian was trying to build, the core fact of their life here that she had always accepted without question. She realised that she had never believed he would succeed, had been content to eat the food and take the ink, thinking it basically an impossible task. But if he succeeded, if there was the seed of a singularity inside her, what was it capable of? She knew something of what humans did to their environment; she had seen it in the asylums as a child, and here on the island. The more control they had over nature, the more whatever they were was manifested and magnified in reality. Any character flaws took shape in the environment. Brian’s search towards complete sentient control of reality, his search for immortality, search for power, search for a weapon to defeat the GSE, it was like he was actively trying to build hell. And she realised that she now had no doubt that, if nobody stopped him, he would succeed.

  She wondered if she should die, find a way to kill herself, kill the baby if it still lived. She saw no other way out. She wondered vaguely if the universe would carry on without her. Would the sun really keep wheeling through the sky if she was no longer there? It was hard to believe.

  Then, several hours later, on the edge of sleep, she felt something that she had not felt before. Something
was moving inside her. She placed her hand on her bloated abdomen, and felt, for the first time, the kicking of her child, poking gently at her hand. Despite the darkness, despite the pain, she realised that she was not alone.

  She knew then that she could not die. She could not allow them to take Tia from her. She could not let the baby die. Whatever it was inside her, she already loved it.

  There was only one option. She would face her nightmare. She closed her exhausted eyes, felt sleep wash through her limbs and saw the pre–dream images of darkness and fear flicker behind her eyelids. She was immediately inside the room in her mind.

  She was trapped forever. She could never leave. She ran to the walls, began to scrape with fingernails that stabbed with pain as she touched the concrete. She felt the scream building inside her, welling up unstoppably. She clawed harder, but the walls would never give. The scream was coming, the complete terror, the end of her mind, it would burst out, now, now, now – but she saw its path and for the first time in her life she stopped. She stood there, shocked. She lowered her hands, looked at the bloody marks on the walls. She was aware suddenly of how real it all seemed. She wondered for a moment if she was even dreaming. She looked at her bloodied hands. Tried to poke her palm with her other forefinger – it passed through. In a rush she remembered what she was trying to do. She spun to look at the empty black room. Felt the fear rise again in her at its terrible lack of orifice, lack of entrance or exit, the perfect permanent prison.

  “It is just a dream,” she said, her voice sounding unreal, soundless, empty.

  Tia was standing in the centre of the room. Lily realised that she had always been in the room with her. She wondered why she had been so scared all that time, though she could still feel the fear boiling within her. Despite her great black eyes and her blank expression Tia looked like Lily. It was like looking at a mirror in the dark.

  “This is just a dream,” Lily said, and Tia’s mouth moved with hers.

  “I don’t understand,” Lily said. “Please, help me. We have to escape. Brian will take you, he’ll hurt me. I don’t know how we can escape. Please help me.”

  Tia watched her for a moment, then reached a long arm out towards Lily’s face, long fingers spreading.

  “No!” Lily shouted, stepping back, raising her dream–hands to protect herself.

  Tia paused, holding her hand poised.

  “No, please,” Lily said. “Last time, it was too much, it woke me. You have to go very slowly.”

  Tia reached out once more. This time Lily let Tia press her hand on her face, into her face.

  The first image was a grey woman, arm wrapped in bandages, walking slowly through a forest, glaring left and right. The trees burst into flames around her and she disappeared.

  The second was a white man with a dark face sat in a great black winged drone, rushing high through the atmosphere. The drone was covered in ghastly weaponry, all of which began to fire at once.

  Then Lily was back in the barn, Mark still alive, Annie’s face still whole, both rushing towards her, the red anger rising up again within Lily, and then Tia was there, floating demonic, and the flash of light and heat happened all over again, and Mark disintegrated, and Annie’s face was ruined forever. Lily did not scream this time. Then the bloodied barn was gone.

  The next vision was a bright globe rushing through space, blazing with light. Its forward surface was pockmarked with planet–sized craters and collision marks, but Lily could see the regularity of the geology beneath the surface where it had been cut away. It was all straight lines of light and darkness. It was an unnatural planet. She swung around and she could see a tiny bright blue dot, far far away. She knew that it was the earth.

  Then Lily was looking from a perspective she could not understand. It was as though she could see all depths at once. There was a honeycomb of black rooms with no doors and no connections, each with a human trapped inside, silent, aware, unmoving, undying. Some were bleeding, spraying infinite red ink into the weightless darkness.

  Last of all she saw a white flower, opening to reveal a flower within it, also opening. It continued, flowers within flowers, and Lily felt that she was falling into the opening flowers, and yet she was not moving at all.

  Lily was back in the nightmare room, looking at Tia.

  “I don’t understand,” Lily said.

  The arm flicked out again before Lily had a chance to stop it.

  The images were a rush this time, first the six colours of ink, green, yellow, red, blue, white, black, desire, excitement, anger, sadness, hate, love, swirling together in a great whirlpool. Then the farmhouse falling to the ground, masonry flying into the air, Leonard and Tom ruined beneath it. Then Brian standing on the top of the mountain, his pale skin flaying, his muscles and fat underneath completely white, hair white, eyes white, a long silver knife gripped in his hand, red ink dripping from it, plunging it towards Lily. Then he was gone and she saw people all over the world bursting into ink monsters, mutating, great jaws opening wide, humanity lost to emotion, demons of greed and hate destroying everything around them. The whole world disintegrated, the tectonic plates coming apart in chunks, the oceans slipping from the surface of the earth and freezing into space, the molten core spreading, every living thing in existence dying. Then a blur of faces, of explosions, of warped recursive images that she could not comprehend at all. She felt herself start to lose her grip on the dream, a scream building in her lungs.

  “Stop, please!” she shouted. “Stop!”

  She was back in the room with Tia. She fell to her knees. Tia crouched down to be at the same level as her.

  Then Lily was tiny, six years old, sucked backwards across her bedroom in a great blast of air to slam into the wall beneath her window, all wrapped in her duvet. She pushed herself to her feet, untangling herself, and turning stared out of the shattered ruin of the window at the great mass rising, the town lifting, eight miles of west Cheltenham, thirty metres deep of the concrete, roots, pipes, earth and stone beneath it all, lifted into the air like a cross–sectional diagram. All she could see was the nearest edge of it, a few houses perched on top. She could feel blood running out of her ears. She was screaming. As the wind rose to drown her out, she watched the dots rise against the clear morning sky, over forty thousand of them rising up from their houses, from the hospital, from GCHQ, out of doors and windows and roofs, some leaving a misty pink trail in the air behind them, dots just visible a mile away, and she knew what they were, and she knew her parents were among them.

  To her horror the raised earth and town, hovering clean above the great gaping hole in the earth that it had left, began to shrink and crush in, and a stream of crushed matter rushed from the floating mass into the air above to form a tiny grey orb. The orb grew rapidly, more and more black matter pouring up into it, and the dots began to disappear inside it too. She could see, and she knew, that it was a honeycomb, layers upon layers, sucking up the debris from below and changing it and sucking the dot–people in from all around, until all that was left was a great globe, the outside layer still visible, riddled with grey orifices, each hole containing a single flailing human like a maggot in rotting skin.

  Finally an outer layer of solid grey spread over the ball, covering the honeycomb, until the whole thing was an impossible solid grey orb. The sun was rising somewhere behind Lily’s house. The morning air smelled strangely fresh, despite the dust that was beginning to build.

  Lily picked her duvet up, heavy in her small arms, and pressed it over the shards of glass on the bottom of the windowsill. She pushed herself up and swung a leg over the windowsill, because she knew she had to save them, they were up there, alone, trapped in featureless grey rooms with no light and nobody else, forever, and she had to save them, but already the wind was beginning to rise again. It blew against her and before long she was pushing with all her strength not to fall back into the room, half in, half out, eyes never leaving the great grey orb, which was just hovering in the sk
y, dust billowing up below it, as if it were a huge grey eyeball watching her.

  She had almost gained the leverage to hurl herself out and down into the bushes below when the orb shot upwards, and she paused and watched it leave a twisting column of dust and white contrail in its wake, curving up into the blue sky, impossibly fast. Lily watched it until the wall of dust from its ascendance hit her house and blew her back across the room, hurling her against the hard edge of her bed.

  Then Lily was in the honeycomb in a dark cell with no doors or windows. She was floating. She could see two people, a man and woman in adjacent cells, eyes closed, and she realised she knew them well, and emotions that she had felt constantly for the past eleven years, for most of her life, so much there and part of her psyche that she was no longer conscious of them at all, the constant pain, suddenly burst out of her. The man and the woman were her parents, still alive, trapped in the GSE, trapped in hell, utterly alone, trapped forever. She cried out for them and sobbed, because she knew that they thought only of her, above everything, even now in their misery and madness.

  They disappeared. Tia was there in front of her again.

  “No!” Lily cried. “Help them, help them escape!”

  Then Tia spoke with Lily’s own voice, but a voice crackling like fire as well.

  “Reality buckles,” she said. She sat down, crossing her legs over one another.

  “What do you mean?” Lily said. “What does that mean?”

  “I am a knife–edge balance,” Tia said.

  Lily awoke at last, and she could hear birds crying distantly outside. It was dawn. She had slept the whole night. She felt rested for the first time in six months. Her mind milled. Her parents were still alive, or at least not yet fully dead. But Tia could not help them escape, not without risking destroying everything that existed. And Lily was still trapped, and the GSE was coming, and others, searching for her, wanting to control what was inside her. The grey woman and the man in the machine. They wanted to take Tia from her. And Brian wanted her most of all. And soon he would come with the long silver knife.