Frost rimes her eyelashes. Her fingers and toes ache down to the bone. The surface of her skin stings, and her lip splits with a sudden smarting and the taste of blood.
She runs through the mutilated ghost, and is both exhilarated and a little surprised to find herself running right back out the other side again. The little book is still in her hand, though the knuckles are cold-chapped. Her feet slip on the icy floor, but she does not fall.
She fetches up against the other door with a thump and fumbles it open, yanking so hard her shoulder twinges warning. Then she’s outside, managing to get down a set of stairs without falling, to find herself standing on bluestone flags in the dooryard of a tall, narrow, rectangular castle, in what seems like a perfectly normal summer twilight.
It had been winter inside the castle.
She’s on a headland. The sea is below; she can hear and smell it, and a sea wind ruffles her hair. It’s not warm, but the chill is the chill of a high windy place, not of creeping winter. Compared with the inside of the castle, it feels positively balmy.
The yard is as deserted as the castle. She turns and looks around. There are walls—as always when confronted with a real medieval castle, she’s surprised at how small it is, and how small the grounds are (castles are not palaces, after all). Within the walls stand a number of buildings. A barracks, maybe, over there. A kitchen, well-separated from anything else that might burn. A low stone building that is, by its high windows and enormous doors, probably a stable.
It is from the presumed stable that the only light can be seen.
flash
Marie follows the whinny. She expects cold, and even wraps her arms around her shoulders in anticipation. But it grows warmer as she approaches the stable, which is blessedly unlike any sort of ghost lore she’s ever encountered. Maybe she’ll be able to go inside and find some nice warm hay to sit on, and a lamp by which to read.
Someone inside the stable can hear her coming, or possibly is just protesting confinement in a general sort of way. There’s a repetitive thump almost like rattling cannon fire, the sound of an eager horse kicking at a stall. Marie remembers it from when she was a girl in a much more rural part of Texas than Austin, where she now lives. Her parents had horses.
She likes horses.
She walks inside the stable.
flash
It’s not just warmer in here. It’s a lot warmer. Uncomfortably warmer, and a skin-drying heat, as if she stood too close to a fire. It’s a relief and then a discomfort, nearly as fast as it takes to realize so. A long row of standing stalls open onto a wide central corridor, well-lit by oil lamps suspended from the ceiling in heavy wrought-iron rings on chains. Each chain runs through a pulley back down to a hook on the floor where it’s secured, the excess coiled neatly. Marie sees at once that this is so they can be lowered for lighting and refilling.
They are carefully far from the ceiling, and she thinks if she had to light a stable with fire, she too would be cautious.
There are no loose boxes, so Marie can see clearly that there are no horses, either. The stable is as deserted as the castle. Whatever was thumping before is not thumping now.
“Okay,” she says. “You got my attention.”
Deserted, but warm. And well-lit. And those are resources that she needs right now.
If she were designing this simulation, that warmth would be a clue, or a warning. You must control this space to complete your mission.
The obvious next step is to find that pile of hay to sit on and read, or an equivalent.
There’s a section of log near the door which looks butt-polished and is close to the light. Marie plunks herself on it and cracks open the commonplace book.
Reading by lamplight is challenging enough under regular circumstances. Reading archaic handwriting by lamplight is an eyestrain headache waiting to happen. She pores over the little volume, cocking her head to the side and angling the book so she does not cast her shadow over it.
After a few minutes her neck begins to protest. What she’s finding—between the snatches of poetry and odd historical tidbits, mostly about Kings of England—is that there’s a fascinating train wreck of a story here, delineated in a series of … well, nothing so formal as journal entries. Cris de couer.
Her fingers leave a wet mark on the page. Her hair is stringy with sweat, and the air around her is not merely warm, but sweltering. She wipes perspiration onto her fingers and watches the beads slip down her skin.
An ear-splitting whinny shatters the air. Marie’s head jerks up. She jumps to her feet just as a massive horse, wreathed in flames, barrels down the stable aisle. His hooves thunder. He screams. A stable boy runs toward the horse, trying to head him off. The horse is making for the door to the outside, next to which Marie is sitting. The stable hand—who is dressed in a tunic and boots, and not modern clothing—grabs for the horse’s halter.
“Not that way!” he cries. His voice is strange, more like the memory of a voice than a voice she is hearing right now. “No!”
The horse shoulders him aside, knocking him sprawling. It careers at Marie. Run, she tells herself.
She is frozen. She cannot even make herself raise a hand to shield her face.
The horse charges into her.
And through her, the great red body no more substantial than the air around it. Less so. Air has displacement. Wind has force. This is nothing at all.
Marie is standing inside the body of the ghostly animal when it suddenly, and with a despairing scream, is driven to the floor. An immaterial roof beam crashes through Marie, and now she is freed from her paralysis. She flinches—cringes—and covers her face. The commonplace book falls.
But none of it touches her. Not the dying horse, kicking out its panic struggles on the floor. Not the collapsing stable. The real stable stands all around her still—the unreal real stable. Only the ghost stable fell. The only thing Marie feels is the heat, and even that, while painful, is not the brief agony she can imagine of actually standing in a roaring fire.
Her breath is hot enough to hurt her throat, though. After two sobbing gasps, that brings her back to herself. She closes her mouth. She closes her eyes. She crouches and feels around herself until she finds the book—she cannot see where she dropped it, in the phantasm of the burning stable and the dead horse and boy.
But she can feel it, and closing her eyes keeps the phantasm from distracting her.
Her fingers find the book. It does not feel warm. She tucks it under her shirt and stands again, backing toward the door.
Back into the cold again, but now it’s a relief after the scathing heat. From the outside, the stable looks deserted and still. Though the high windows are gold with light there is no sound. Marie clutches her book and watches her breath curl out in plumes, imagining how different this scene on cold cobbles under a pearling moon would have been on the night of the fire. She pictures a chaos of bodies, a bucket brigade, the screams of the dying horse and the dying boy—
Now it is calm and still and cold. She has the book.
She has a plan.
flash
She is assuming the journal writer is the poltergeist. She does not know for sure. What she does know, now, is that the journal writer and the mutilated woman were in love. That the journal writer was the child of the Duke who held this castle, that the murdered woman was a servant girl, and that their love was forbidden.
Our love is forbidden, the book actually says.
The Duke mutilated and murdered the servant girl, just exactly as one does in bloody old ballads, and caused a chair to be built from her bones, which he forced his own child to sit in. The commonplace book does not explain how the journal writer came to be a poltergeist after having, Marie presumes, died. A poltergeist probably has a time of it, when it comes to holding a pen. But Marie assumes that it might be difficult to eat while sitting in a chair made of your lover’s bones, and perhaps the child pined away, or just threw themselves off the castle parapet fro
m that conveniently located window/door.
Marie paces in the courtyard, hands thrust deep in her pockets, shoulders hunched against the chill. It’s colder inside the castle, what with all the ghosts. And she needs to think.
She prefers the kind of games where you can hit pause when you get to this part, and go get a snack.
“This,” Marie says out loud, “is about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
It’s pure melodrama, and she’s halfway offended that she’s expected to take it seriously. There ought to be somebody sitting across a campfire holding a flashlight under their chin telling this.
Being outraged and grumpy about how dumb the story you are stuck in is doesn’t help with getting you out of the story, unfortunately. Ask any genre-savvy character in a horror film.
Marie still has to figure out how to solve the riddle and—she presumes—release the ghosts.
So here she is, cleaning up somebody else’s messes just because she is the person stuck with them. Because if she doesn’t clean them up, she’ll be stuck living in them. It’s manifestly unfair, and it makes her manifestly angry.
Just like she’ll be stuck living in her own mess if she doesn’t complete this training and get reinstated at her job.
Just like ... everybody at work was stuck doing damage control for her.
“Oh,” she says out loud. Another epiphany.
This is not the kind of epiphany that comes with a rush of feel-good brain chemicals and self-satisfaction. Rather, it stings a little, like those moments when you catch sight of yourself in a mirror and realize you’re much older than you think you are.
She pushes that feeling away, and concentrates on the triumph. Because she understands—she thinks—how to beat the training.
And there it is, that rush of reward, that sense of everything falling together. She’s supposed to learn empathy. That’s it. She needs to deduce the ghost’s needs and fulfill them, thus freeing the ghost, and herself.
And learning something in the process.
How fucking heartwarming, Marie thinks, and manages just in time to stop herself from saying it out loud where the simulation can record it. One must fool the system in order to hack it. She also doesn’t say, I could have told you I was special. Your silly games won’t work on me!
She pets the book in her pocket. The poltergeist is horrified by the desecration of the beloved’s bones. So … Marie must give them a decent burial? That seems logical.
Communities have always seemed to Marie the sort of thing from which you derive power and the satisfaction of being a center of attention. She’s never really thought, before, about what communities do. But now she has to act like a community member, right? Not just somebody who reaps the benefits of those social connections, but somebody who provides those benefits for others, as well.
Somebody who wouldn’t, say, borrow a coworker’s development work to complete her own project without asking first.
So … what would a community-conscious person do?
Bury the body, and release the ghosts. Obviously. But the cobbled ground is too hard for burying. There’s the sea below, and perhaps a burial at sea would be enough to wash the bones clean.
Marie turns to frown at the castle, and sees the curl of smoke rising from its tall chimney.
Oh. Well, of course.
flash
It takes her a while to find the right chair, her whole body shivering and shuddering as the faceless ghost follows her around the room like a hungry puppy. Not the ornate chair up on the dais, obviously. But a smaller one, not much plainer, well-upholstered in green brocade, that sits against the wall where the disassembled trestle is hung. It’s too light for its size, which is the first thing that makes her suspicious. And it looks fitted for a Duke’s child.
When Marie smashes it, she sees that the legs and back and arms are all made of hollow cylinders, and inside each cylinder there are human bones.
It all burns surprisingly well in the big fireplace. She says some socially appropriate words, then rubs her freezing hands before the fire. It actually warms her a little now.
The faceless ghost bows deeply and dissipates. Marie waits for the simulation to end.
The simulation does not end.
But the ghost is gone.
“Oh, dammit,” Marie says. “The horse.”
flash
She’s been standing in the stable for subjective hours, watching the pattern of the haunting play out, leaving when the heat becomes intolerable and sucking in gasps of cool night air. She tries putting her body between the ghosts. She tries just walking away from the castle.
When she wakes up this time, at least she’s not being rewarmed. That’s as good as a cookie. She’s drowsy and warm and annoyed, because in the next room somebody—not Jeff, but another male voice, somebody she doesn’t think she knows—is talking arrogantly.
“We are still waiting for you to justify this use of funding, Dr. Schiller.”
The person who answers is Jeff. “It’s within the parameters of my mission statement, Mr. Cohn. Altruism and greed. And this part of the research is self-funding. People and institutions pay for the soft-skills training program—”
The first voice again. “The institute as a whole certainly is not self-funding, whatever this wild goose chase does or does not do. You work for us, Dr. Schiller.”
“I work for—”
“We pay for the institute. And I will tell you right now that we don’t want a program to make people less greedy, better citizens. More thoughtful about their decision-making. We don’t want them more empathic. How does empathy help you get ahead? How does good decision-making help us market to them?”
“My patient is awake,” Jeff says coldly. “We’ll have to continue this discussion on some other occasion.”
flash
By the third week, she’s gotten really good at getting herself to the stable as fast as possible. She doesn’t even bother with the book, just walks into the great hall, breaks up the chair, and tosses it on the fire. Then it’s off to the stable to run through the simulation there repeatedly, trying to find a solution to send the ghosts of horse and stable boy to rest. She tries assorted things—including burning the new stable down by hauling the oil lamps up to the ceiling.
It burns, all right. But that doesn’t lay the ghosts.
She stays there, going outside at intervals when she can no longer bear the heat, trying futile would-be solutions, until somebody outside takes pity on her.
flash
There’s no conversation in the next room when she wakes up this time. Just Jeff, sitting by the bed she’s on.
That hasn’t happened before.
“How are you feeling?” he asks her.
“Grumpy,” she says, because he knows that and part of beating the system is being as honest as you can until you know it’s the right time to be dishonest.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“There’s no right answer!” she says. “This stupid thing.”
The worst part is, she’s paying for these sessions. And she’s paying to fail them.
“You know you’re here voluntarily,” Jeff says. “Of course I want to keep you in the program. But you can walk at any time.”
“Voluntarily,” she says bitterly. “If I quit I lose my career.”
“And stay who you were.” The way he says it, she knows he thinks a changed her is a superior option. She is not so sure. She likes who she is.
She likes not giving a damn about anybody. They all just want to use you, anyway. Like that guy she’d overheard giving Jeff an earful the week before. That’s humanity, right there. At flower in that greedy sucker.
It obviously hasn’t hurt Mr. Cohn’s success to not give a rat’s ass about anyone or anything except his profit margin. Based on Jeff’s diffidence in opposing him, she’d guess it was, in fact, the exact opposite. His ruthlessness seems to have facilitated his success.
Jeff looks a
t his hands. She feels a flash of pity for him, an unfamiliar and uncomfortable sensation that she has to examine for a while to recognize it. Once she does, horrified, she shoves the feeling away.
Oh, damn it. Tell me this hocus-pocus isn’t actually working on me!
It is sinking in that if she keeps doing this, she might lose herself. Lose who she is. Give it up on purpose, in fact, to be somebody different. Somebody a little more socially acceptable. A little less … what was the word they used?
A little less antisocial.
She looks Jeff in the eye—she has to turn sideways to meet his gaze directly—and says, “Who’s the guy who wants to shut the program down?”
Jeff frowns at her.
“I overheard him yelling.”
He nods, the frown drawing his brows together. “He’s got more money than God and funds us as a tax write-off.” Which isn’t an answer, but isn’t as evasive as she expected.
“Sounds like you’re not as docile as he’d like. Couldn’t you just give him what he wants and get him off your back?”
“That would be even less ethical than discussing it with you.” He smiles. It’s wide enough to let her know that he’s not angry. She thinks.
She’s abruptly afraid that she isn’t any good at reading people. She always thought before that she was excellent at it. Excellent at manipulating them. Now, suddenly, she wonders. Suddenly, her confidence is shaken.
“Are we doing a therapy session today?” she asks.
“Do you want to unpack?”
“I want to go home,” she admits. “I have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing next, and I think I’m just going to get frustrated and angry if we try to talk about it.”
Jeff pats the edge of the bed, not quite touching her. “That’s a good bit of self-awareness,” he says, standing. “See you on Monday?”
“I … let me think about it.”
Crowd Futures: We Have Always Died in the Castle Page 3