by Неизвестный
It was coming from Alice’s room.
This had to be a dream. Everything felt hazy and unreal anyway. My whole body seemed light and insubstantial.
I crept across the hall, trying not to hit the creaky floorboard in front of the living room and pushed the door open slowly. The ache in my head had gone and it felt like a deflated balloon.
Flickering light from the TV in the centre of the room played across the walls and momentarily dazzled me after all the darkness.
In a large armchair, surrounded by pots and pans, paper bags, vegetables and the large bottles that are used for water coolers, sat Mum transfixed by the images on the screen. At her feet was an old camping stove with a battered little milk pan spewing out steam and bubbling over. It rattled against the gas burner, spitting and whistling.
Over in the corner, in the shadows behind her, a pile of blankets undulated and whimpered.
She turned around so quickly that I almost cried out. Her eyes were as big as golf balls and she fixed me with a terrible stare. I had never seen her look so hollow and fearful.
“What are you doing out of your room!” She hissed at me, “Alice will hear you! Are you mad?”
The drumming from next door grew louder, followed by a long, doleful groan that made Mum’s pots and pans clank together. Could that terrible noise really be Alice? Had she heard her name?
“She’s awake!” Mum jumped out of her chair, shuffling backwards like a small cornered animal.
“It’s not even my turn to feed her!”
She turned and sunk her arms into the pile of blankets, pulling out a wriggling cloth package that she cradled and hushed like a new born baby. The package made a gurgling sound and Mum rushed to the door, looking at me incredulously.
“What are you still doing here? Get back in your room. Unless you want her to see you.”
I remembered Alice, enthroned in her armchair, knitting an endless supply of baby clothes for Oxfam. She would stare at me sometimes, with a vacuous expression on her face. Her eyes were always sad, quivering little buttons, filled with a desperate longing.
She used to call me a ‘beautiful boy’.
I followed Mum out into the hallway and stood in front of my bedroom door, watching her brace herself, as though a storm were about to bellow forth from Alice’s room.
The package in her arms squealed. It bulged and writhed as she pushed Alice’s door open.
My stomach shrank into a fleshy knot of terror and I stumbled backwards. A typical reaction when confronted with a monstrous predator.
There was as little light in Alice’s room as anywhere else in the flat, but there was enough to glimpse the suggestion of what resided in that room. The reptilian sheen of skin, stretched across a bulk so enormous that it disappeared into the depths of the room; a fringe of what could only be tentacles, battering the floor and making that drumming noise.
The thing that really sucked the life out of me was the gelatinous dripping eye that peered around the edge of the door.
It was definitely Alice. Now the desperate longing in her eye was something altogether more malevolent.
I saw Mum heave the living package into the room, heard Alice roar, and then I slammed my door shut and slumped to the floor in the unrelenting dark.
Doctor Bell had told me that migraines usually have a catalyst, like stress.
This situation was more than stressful enough to start a whole new one.
I hadn’t been sitting there for long. Long enough to hear the moaning and thundering of Alice as she consumed whatever poor morsel Mum had tossed her.
I prayed she was too enormous to get out of that room.
The shimmering point of light bloomed on my vision like a tiny flower and I curled up next to the door, shaking like a frightened rabbit and let the pain of the headache take me.
***
I drifted in and out of consciousness over the next few hours, unsure of where I really was. Despite the solidity of the floor numbing my side, I felt that I was spinning around in space, with no clue which way was up.
I surrendered myself to the ravages of the migraine, unable to separate it from the one I had just been through. I even began to assume that I had dreamt the midnight flat with the Alice-thing.
My eyes cracked open and were blinded by a severe glare. Surely the shimmer would have faded by now.
It had. The light was simply the harsh blaze of the sun through my window. My curtains were open and the musty fungus smell had gone.
Everything was covered in a dense layer of dust. My bed was there, desk, bookshelves, but they were all empty.
Then I felt the breeze on my cheek and realised that there was no glass in the windows. I could see the ragged edges of where it had been smashed in.
I walked over to the window and had to support myself against the frame or I would have surely dropped to my knees.
Beneath a perfect blue sky, a vast graveyard of crumbled buildings stretched to the horizon. There were teetering piles of rock and deep pools of dark water. In the distance I was sure I could see the glittering reflections of the sun on an immense lake.
Everything was quiet and still. No cars or people, no screech of seagulls, no drumming or grunting.
I ran to the other side of the flat, feeling a pressure on my head, as though the air itself was shrinking around me. Where the living room and Alice’s room had been there was only a blackened abscess in the side of the building, exposed to the elements. Below, the street was a canyon of shattered stone.
I was able to clamber down a sloping pile of rubble from the remains of the living room doorway to the street. The west side of the city was more intact as far as I could see, but only just. The buildings were devastated husks. Some half crumbled like kicked sandcastles, others still standing resolute. Although, even the intact buildings were as hollow as skeletons with their dark, smashed windows like empty eye sockets.
I wandered for hours, my mind blank with shock, and soon became completely lost amongst identical streets of ruin and desolation. I had given up any notion of trying to understand what was going on. Part of me still clung on to the idea that it was all a terribly vivid dream, but the last headache had been real. Of that there was no question.
Pain was solid and tangible inside my head, but the scenes witnessed all around me - cars crushed like cans of beer, lamp-posts bent over like snapped flower stems - they were images from a nightmare.
They were images from my nightmare. One I’d had a few years back when I was going through a phase of nuclear Armageddon fear, but this didn’t have the liquid quality of a dream. It was very real, from the pit of hunger in my belly to the rough blocks of sandstone that scraped at my ankles.
I suppose survival instincts took over in the end. Bereft of the trappings of a normal life I sought out whatever sustenance I could find. Walking through the blasted landscape I managed to live on tins found in the remains of kitchen cupboards. The sorts of things people hoard but never use, like tins of chickpeas, red kidney beans and pilchards.
Most ground floor shops were burnt out caverns filled with the odour of wet ash. Some had been shuttered off with large plates of corrugated iron that were now brittle with rust. It was possible to scavenge supplies of dried food from these places, musty sacks of rice, lentils, bags of pasta.
It took many attempts to create a fire, but once I got the knack I cooked myself basic meals using water from the many large pools that had formed in craters.
I was a lonely refugee of some forgotten apocalypse. What had happened to everyone? I couldn’t find any clues amongst the ashes of newspapers and books. They just told the same old stories, nothing to explain this dead city.
Survival took priority over investigation, with resources at a minimum I wasn’t able to eat every day.
I spent months scraping a living amongst the shells of civilisation. Living out the last of my teenage years in total solitude I became a nomadic animal, kept going by pure instinct to not s
imply lie down and die, in the hope that the shimmering point of light would reappear and carry me somewhere else.
***
What I miss most of all about those months in the wilderness is the peace.
The shimmering light came eventually, and with it the third headache. The dead city dissolved around me into the crystalline structure expanding over my eyes. I floated in the void, seeing images from my memories, or where they daydreams? They were splitting and rearranging, bleeding into each other like a watercolour painting.
I emerged from the spinning darkness onto the streets of a city that was whole again, with familiar sandstone buildings that almost tricked me into believing I was back to the real world.
It was a city at dusk, the dying sunlight casting an ethereal glow. There was something peculiar about the sky, a filmy quality, like the surface of a soap bubble.
I wept openly as I saw the people scurrying along the streets. They just ignored me, all in a hurry to get somewhere. Not just a hurry though, they seemed in a panic, glancing over their shoulders and some breaking into a run.
A woman stopped in front of me, sheer terror in her wide, darting eyes.
“Get off the streets! What are you doing just standing there? It’s almost dark!”
She started to run, then tripped, sprawling across the pavement. Someone further down the street screamed.
“It’s here already! It’s here!”
I could feel that something was coming. It was as though the air pressure was changing as it arrived, whatever it was.
So I ran.
I ran as fast as I could, seeing the streets entirely empty of people, a sight I had become very familiar with. Except this time I wasn’t alone. This time something was out there.
The streets were deserted now and I was heaving for breath, feeling completely unfit and malnourished from my months in the dead city.
I could hear it. A low roar, like the jet engines of a 747 passing overhead, but this was at ground level, down on the streets.
It was then that I recognised my surroundings. Buildings were subtly different, with extra storeys and smaller windows that I noticed were shuttered with steel plates. Roads went off at different angles and I knew that Queens Park should have been behind me instead of the three metre high concrete wall covered in graffiti that was there, but it was still Glasgow somehow and I was at the top of Victoria Road. Langside Road was normally a couple of streets to the east. For a second I was filled with the sort of happiness you only get when returning home after a long time away. I clung on to the vain hope that my flat was still here in this version of Glasgow.
The low roar grew in intensity, to the point where I could distinguish other sounds. Sounds of screaming like the shattering of glass, and I saw something now. Far away at the bottom of the road, coming from the direction of the city centre.
A silvery cloud, too dense and fast moving to be fog. Somewhere in there I was sure I saw teeth, a thousand glistening fangs.
I ran faster than I had ever run in my life, almost flying. Only blind fear kept me going, and the thought of the next headache that might lift me out of here. I had to find safe shelter first.
My flat was still there, but the front door was like some kind of medieval fortress gate, cast from solid steel and locked from the inside.
I battered it with all my strength, sending clanging echoes around the buildings. I shouted and screamed for Mum. If only she still lived here.
The shattering roar was getting closer and closer. It was surely the end. My stomach was a roll of tangled rope. Sweat ran freely down my face and neck. My entire body shook like a crate full of broken bottles.
The door swung open and a hand grabbed me by the sleeve, yanking me into the darkness of the stairway.
It was Mum. She looked so much older. All withered and pale as though she had been immersed in vinegar. She was staring at me with bulging bloodshot eyes and furrowed brow. She looked like she was trying to decipher some hieroglyphics on my face.
“Mum? It’s Andy!” I said, tears spilling down my cheeks, ‘It’s me, Mum. Don’t you recognise me?’
“Andrew?”
The violent roar from outside was moving closer. High pitched glassy screams ululated up the street. Mum slammed a series of huge bolts in the door and pulled me up the stairs to our flat.
“We have to get inside! It’s coming!”
We passed through an inner door on the first landing which she also bolted. She was still dragging me by the sleeve, making me trip up the stairs.
Inside the flat it was pitch dark and I flinched away from Alice’s room. The door was shut, but there was no noise from inside.
“In here!” she pulled me into the living room and slammed the door.
The room was sparsely furnished with a dirty wooden table and chair, and a sunken threadbare sofa. Mouldy wallpaper peeled like dead bark. I recognised nothing from my old life. The only light came from an old oil lamp on the table.
“You went away, Andrew...” Mum was standing with her back to me, ‘Years ago. I thought the cloud had taken you.’
“The cloud?”
“I thought it had taken you the same way it took Alice. You must remember that, you were still here then.”
I dropped onto the sofa, my head swimming and my vision greying over. I felt the little grain deep inside, noticing it for the first time since the second headache. It seemed bigger, about the size of a pea, and then the shimmering pinprick of light was there again.
I buried my head in my hands, exhausted, starving. I could feel my skin just hanging on my bones like wet rags.
“I don’t know what’s happening to me, Mum. I’m lost.”
“Stay here with me, Andrew. You’re home now.”
She came and sat with me on the sofa, the springs creaked in complaint, unused to the weight of two people. She put her arms around me and we rocked back and forth as the roar outside reached a crescendo.
The glassy screeching and deep thundering broke like a wave against the steel-plated windows. It felt like the sound was crawling across the walls, seeping in like poisonous gas.
The crystal patterns expanded over my vision. I buried my head in the crook of Mum’s neck and sobbed.
“I want to stay, Mum. I don’t want to go anywhere else.”
The sounds became deafening, my vision pulsated, pain split my mind apart and I could no longer feel the bony arms of Mum around me anymore. The lights had covered my vision and I could feel the pea-sized thing in my head expand.
I floated in space. Held aloft by the pain radiating from my head.
***
The headaches kept coming. More and more frequently.
I struggle to remember even half of the places I found myself. They all just merge into each other. From a gleaming white city where the sun shone twenty four hours a day; to a green swamp at the base of a river valley surrounded by mud huts and populated with lizard-faced people; to a place where Queens park was a mountain in the centre of the city and the dead walked in confusion, gathering on the slopes of the mountain to sit, contemplate and finally become dust.
I remember finding Alice again, in a forest full of murderous babies. She had to knit to survive, spewing out clothes for the sadistic little bastards to keep them at bay. That one really sticks in my memory.
So many worlds and still the headaches came, one after another, faster and faster until there was no definition between them. The pain was constant. The shimmering lights would be the only signal of a shift to a new place, and the thing in my head swelling out slowly.
A bubble of pain.
With every new migraine, I felt layers peeling away. The bubble in my head was growing but the worlds around me were shrinking. They became thinner and more insubstantial with every change.
I was also beginning to fade.
I was less and less aware of my limbs, my ribs, my stomach. My body began to feel like a husk that I would eventually shed. I was retreating i
nside my head, being swallowed by the pain. No more could I see my memories and dreams shifting around in the void, they had become formless, primal shapes. Blocks of colour and fractal patterns.
I began to forget who I was.
The sky closed in, a thin oily film shrinking around me. Every new landscape was smaller and less defined - patches of broken ground encased in swirling mist, a lump of sandstone at my feet, a battered metal pot rocking in a hollow in the ground.
The changes started to come at blinding speed, building the pressure inside my head to an unbearable level.
God my head hurts.
It feels like it’s going to just pop from the end of my neck like a firework.
I’ve had this bubble of pain growing deep inside my skull for so long, it feels like an eternity.
There is no world to speak of now. Just my field of vision, which has become like a fish eye lens and I am floating in a swirling vortex; inside the bubble now. This is my universe.
I am a singularity. A hot, dense concentration of pain that wants so much to burst.
There’s a place beyond the skin of the bubble.
It’s raining there. Huge, fat drops smacking into tarmac. School children are running for shelter and I feel myself pulled along in their wake.
The infinite vacuum of space in their heads sucks me in. They are island universes, each and every one of them, waiting to be filled.
I can see myself standing there, next to my old mate Robert.
Not long now. The pain is going to burst in an explosion of light and it will all be over.
I remember my first migraine headache.
I was only fifteen.
The Cave Of Cruachan
By Nolene-Patricia Dougan
“Why, Neasán? Why did you do it?”
Neasán looked over at his former wife and smiled. “I knew you would be here. You still look the same.”
“I was sent back as I was, so that you would recognise me?” Alana answered.
“The final wish of a condemned man has been granted; all I wanted to do was see you again,” Neasán replied.