by Ilsa J. Bick
She began trudging against icy gusts through Battersea’s grounds, tossing a look back every few feet to make certain she didn’t lose sight of the retort. Her heavy boots stumped through calf-high drifts. After a minute, she was panting and fresh sweat lathered her neck. Already getting tired, too. Her heart thumped in her temples.
Have to do something about Tony. Pulling up, she stood, hugging herself and breathing hard. But other than trying to draw the sickness out, which he wouldn’t allow, what could she do? Maybe Bode will have an idea. Tomorrow, when she and Tony went to the asylum for bodies, she’d get Bode alone to talk. She wondered if he’d had the nightmare, too. Wager he has. But then what did that …
And that was when the wind suddenly died and the snow stopped.
What? Startled, Rima threw a look at the sky. No stray flakes. No icy wind. Nothing. But the air was trembling. It glimmered like water over black ice and then …
Oh God. Her throat tried to squeeze shut. No, you don’t belong here, not yet. Why should I see you in my dream, and now?
Of course, there was no answer, though she really did think that it was a thing, with a purpose. After all, it had just chased her and that boy with the stormy eyes through a nightmare, and then followed her here, into her waking life, ready or not.
Where there had been snow and gloom … now, there was only the fog.
RIMA
Imagine Her Surprise
1
NO. STAY BACK. She felt herself cringing. I’m not ready. Go back into my nightmare where you belong. I don’t want to die.
The Peculiar only hovered. This close—only feet away—she could see that it was solid, with straight, crisp edges, and motionless as a pristine curtain or blank piece of paper. She noticed, too, that this area had brightened, the air glowing with a milky glare. The Peculiar had an odor, too, one she recognized because she got a noseful every day from every corpse: old blood and rotting purge.
Odd sound trickling from the fog, though. Something fizzy, like bicarbonate. Despite her fear, she felt herself leaning forward, trying to parse it. Were those voices?
With no warning, the Peculiar dimpled, drawing in on itself as if a giant mouth were on the other side and had decided to inhale. Before she had time to react, something shot out.
Throwing up her arms, she floundered back a step and nearly came down on her rear, but then she got a good look and her mouth fell open.
“My God,” she said, dropping to her haunches. Purring, the large orange cat nuzzled her hands and began to weave back and forth across her knees. “Where did you come from?” She hadn’t seen a cat in ages. Other than London’s endless supply of rats (the eating kind, not Rima and Tony and their ilk) and assorted vermin (cockroaches, principally), there were no animals. Everything else had been eaten. But now here’s a cat, come from the fog. She ruffled the animal’s ears, felt its rumble deepen. Could she keep it? Hide it somehow? Considering the cat’s sudden appearance, it felt wrong to eat the animal. On the other hand, the cat would need food, and they weren’t catching enough rats to keep themselves going as it was.
Or have you sent this cat as a sign? She eyed the Peculiar. Maybe the cat’s from north London, the other side of the Thames? Are you trying to show me there’s something worth trying for?
Beneath her hands, the cat suddenly spat and arched. Flinching, Rima quickly clambered to her feet, worried the animal would bite, but it was prancing, its gaze riveted to the fog. Another animal? A person? Really, she was hoping for an animal, preferably one she wouldn’t feel bad about eating. Though she’d skin this cat, if she had to.
2
Imagine her surprise.
PART TWO
UNDER MY SKIN
ELIZABETH
London Falling
no not that way cut like this
God, couldn’t that nasty little voice shut it? “Under my skin, under my skin …” The words, those insane lyrics, skated on a breathy undertone, the tune tangling in her mind like a ball of yarn mauled by a lunatic kitten. Her mouth was foul as a sewer from that gutter swill Kramer called morning tea. Her head throbbed, the pounding worse than before. The voices were much louder, too, like squirmers teeming in her brain:
so never digging around a Goodwill ghost-bin
black echoes kill you nine ways to Sunday
you ever stop to think that maybe God’s just a kid
that’s not your father
a whisper, like blood, leaves a stain
can’t you see how sick she is
and we’re the dolls
Ever since that morning’s session, she’d felt this anvil of doom on her skull that matched the pressure in her chest. The voices were worse, even her mother’s popping up from memory, something overheard from a long-ago argument,
that’s not your father
which she never had understood. Why her mother
can’t you see how sick she is
should torment her—so odd.
Kramer’s mesmeric passes weren’t helping at all, though of course he blamed her: If you’d only take your medicine, Elizabeth. Kramer was a slithery spider with a ruined face and serpent’s hiss, who wanted nothing more than to scuttle through her brain and its dark, secret clefts, picking, probing, pickpickpick …
Well, not just yet. Squatting cross-legged on her filthy mattress, she grit her teeth and tried coring through a dull pink grin of scar tissue on her left forearm. Get out of this accursed asylum and find the Mirror, determine which symbols will build me the Now I need, and leave this wretched London behind. Yet no matter how hard she dug, there was no sparkle of pain, no
BLOOD OF MY BLOOD
blood. They kept her nails trimmed so short, she’d have better luck peeling a lemon with a thimble. She’d once considered using her teeth to gnaw through skin and down into muscle and through the stubborn fibrous tubes of arteries and veins, but she wasn’t insane; she didn’t want to die, no matter what Kramer said about those other slashes on her arms. (Those awful black stitches were the handiwork of the surgeon, Connell, the quack who’d mended her like a tatty piece of burlap.) Kramer insisted she must’ve made those cuts, and it was only luck that Constable Doyle happened by to save her from bleeding to death.
Luck? Oh yes, she was just sooo lucky to have landed in Bedlam with all these lunatics. And happened by? Happened by where? She couldn’t recall. All she could remember was that she’d been running, running, running from
the whisper-man
a monster? Or had it been—the image of a man, black hair, glasses, glimmered through her mind—had it been her father? Wishing to use her for something? Or perhaps—now this was a lunatic thought—put something vital in her, hide it away for safekeeping?
not doing it right
Will you plug your damn cakehole? Panting, a brackish taste on her tongue, she paused, finger cocked, nail over her skin. Her heart thudded against her ribs, and she heard the slight tick-tick-tick of glass against tin from the necklace Kramer let her keep. Now why Kramer didn’t take that away—a very pretty glass bauble strung with two squares of tin on a strange beaded chain—was a mystery, just as she was unsure how she’d come by it. The tin had a good edge. She could easily cut … and yet she never did. The necklace was special
no, not special yet
and had a strange name that boiled onto her tongue without her understanding what it meant or how the words came to be: Sign of Sure. What was that? The knowledge was there, but elusive. She had a sense it was like the Mirror: some kind of device, but one that needed … well, energy? Or perhaps the right wearer to make it work? Whatever the case, the glass was unique, and so was the tin. Not right to use them. Which probably proved just how mad she was.
So—she gnawed a loose bit of skin from dry lips—maybe pry up a scab instead? New skin under there, pink and tender. Cut that, squeeze out some nice fat drops.
PLIP-PLIP-PLIP
No. She winced against this one, a different and clearer voice tha
t rose above the swamp in her mind to bob at the surface. Please be quiet. Not you too.
SO DEEP IN MY HEART
Fresh cold sweat sprouted on her upper lip. Of all the many voices, this very strong Other, with its thoughts of UNDER MY SKIN and STARBUCKS and MATCHI-MANITOU, IN HIS DEEP DARK CAVE and PLIP-PLIP-PLIP, frightened her most. Sometimes she actually felt it rustle and then shift, the way a dog turned on a bit of rug. One day, perhaps soon, she would look in a mirror and the Other would peer back through the glassy portholes of her eyes and give her a tiny wave with one jointed leg: WHY, HELLO, I DON’t BELIEVE WE’VE BEEN PROPERLY INTRODUCED.
Come on. Attacking the scab with a will, she gave a little cry of triumph as a long, rust-colored strip peeled away. Yes. “Got you now,” she muttered.
“Miss.” A voice, not in her head but close to her ear, and about as real as things got these days. “Miss Elizabeth, you must stop.”
“Yes, thank you,” she said, then wanted to kick herself for replying at all. She didn’t mind talking to some attendants; she liked one boy, Bode, best. Which did not please that old crow, Nurse Graves, who’d probably whispered in Kramer’s ear, because, all of a sudden, here Elizabeth had herself a companion. To better anchor you in the here and now was what Kramer had said. Ha! Companion, my eye. This girl was a spy.
“It’s my body to harm.” She slipped her eyes up and to the right to find the girl’s impenetrable blue gaze. If it were possible for Babbage to build a difference person, a mechanized automaton that clicked and ticked through theorems and problem sets, that was this girl. She had all the heat and passion of a toad. “I didn’t ask for your opinion, and I don’t require your permission.”
“But you know that I will have to stop you one way or the other,” the girl said in that maddeningly reasonable tone of hers. (God, she was so rigid and proper, she must have a broomstick jammed up her bum.)
“Are you threatening me?” A dart of surprise. This was new. She gave the girl, clad in her assistant’s navy wool skirt, white blouse, and over-apron, a longer look. Elizabeth supposed the girl was pretty, though she was bigger boned and taller, with an angular face and luxuriant coils of copper hair that never seemed out of place. Physically, they weren’t at all alike except for their eyes, which were the same deep cobalt. If the girl had possessed a golden flaw in her right iris, their eyes would’ve been an exact match. In one of her father’s twisted fantasies, they might’ve been distant relations. “What, has meek little Meme found a speck of courage?”
“It is not courage.” Meme stood next to a rickety table upon which she’d squared a tray of toiletries and two basins: one of cold rinse water and the other hot enough to steam. “I do not enjoy being a watchdog any more than you like having me here.”
“You’re right; I don’t enjoy you. And see?” She showed a dazzling smile. “We agree on something. Who says I’m not making progress? Now why not leave and make your report of my miraculous breakthrough to your precious doctor?”
“You know I cannot, not the way you are now. Please”—crossing to stand over Elizabeth’s miserable cot, the girl reached a tentative hand—“you would feel so much better if you at least let me give you a good wash …”
All at once and out of nowhere, the air split with a harsh, shrill sound like nails dragging over a slate school board, sending shivers racing down Elizabeth’s spine and a gasp leaping for her tongue. An instant later, something pinged and then tick-tick-ticked off brick.
“Oh!” Meme sounded breathless—surprising for a girl who showed so little emotion—and Elizabeth thought, Good, she heard that, too. Her shoulders sagged with relief. That was the problem with this place. Sometimes she didn’t know which sounds were real and which were in her head.
But now she looked across her room. One of the few privates on this ward, hers was a long and deep brick throat bounded at one end by a high narrow sliver of a window fenced with iron bars. (If she wanted to see out, she had to jump and hang like a monkey at the zoo. Apt, considering.) Everything else—her rickety metal cot, a standing wardrobe with her very few changes of clothing, the stand upon which Meme had laid her tray—was either bolted to the floor or, as was the case with a high shelf, the wall. She now saw that the shelf’s right half dangled, held to the wall only by a single bolt, like a diseased tooth on a fleshy thread of rotted gum.
The other bolt snapped. Where had it gone? Her eyes swept the floor. Such breaks and cracks and spontaneous ruptures were common nowadays. As the fog advanced, this bizarre Peculiar no one understood, London was rotting away. Buildings slumped. Roads cracked. Wallpaper suddenly blistered and peeled, sloughing from the walls like flaps of dead skin. That very morning, the top rail of Kramer’s guest chair had split. London and this Now were falling down, falling down, falling down. But the bolt, that bolt … Her pulse gave a hard thump as her eyes fixed on a jagged metal nubbin. Excellent. That would be sharp enough to—
“No, Miss. Do not even think of it.” Meme clapped the sole of a boot on that bolt, then scooped up the broken bit of iron to drop into a pocket of her over-apron. “Now, please, let me help you wash. Your hair is positively crawling.”
“No!” Elizabeth batted the other girl’s hand away. God, she’d been so stupid, hadn’t moved fast enough, and now her chance was gone, and it was all this girl’s fault! “Don’t tell me what I need! Keep your filthy …” Her throat suddenly clutched, and she felt the old familiar tearing in her ribs as the coughing jag seized her.
“Miss, here. Let me …”
“N-no!” Choking, she backed away, doubled over, hand cupped to her mouth. Another spasm of coughing, and then a warm, slick splash on her palm. No, no. “K-keep … keep away!”
“Miss, you are working yourself to a frenzy. Calm yourself.”
Calm? Oh, that was brilliant. “I’m in a bloody …” Dragging in a gargled breath, she swallowed back a mouthful of wet rust. Getting worse. She grunted against a blade of pain knifing her right ribs. Die in here if I don’t get out soon.
“Miss Elizabeth?” Meme reached for her arm. “Would you like …”
“I said don’t touch me!” Elizabeth whipped her open palm in a slap. There was a sharp crack, followed by Meme’s pained gasp. “I don’t need your help! I don’t want it!” She spat a ruby-red gob that splatted onto Meme’s over-apron, then slowly slid, painting a slug’s trail of gore. “T-take your basins, your tr-tray …” She was racked with another coughing fit. “G-get out,” she managed. “Get out!”
Although, in her mind, she thought—in her own voice—My God, I am becoming a monster. She wasn’t like this; she never had been, although what could she really remember of herself? She didn’t know. Some days it felt as if all she’d ever known was this wretched place, this horrible, squalid little room; that this was the only moment, the span of her life. The voices were so bad, too, and she was alone, sick, more frightened than she’d ever been in her life. (Life: such a simple word, but what was that, exactly? What life had she led?) It was easier to be cruel. It helped her feel as if she wasn’t losing this battle.
“I am only trying to help.” A smear of blood showed on Meme’s left jaw and, beneath it, the purple splotch of a new bruise. “Do you not want to get better?”
“You hanging about only makes me sicker!” Stay angry; stay strong. She worked another bloody gobbet she let fly to a far corner, where it quivered like claret aspic. “G-get out!”
“No.” Pulling herself straighter, Meme turned to take up a cloth that she then swirled in a basin, releasing a scent of warm vinegar. “I cannot, Miss Elizabeth. I have my masters. I am their creature, and Mrs. Graves says I am to help you wash, put on some clean clothes, and make yourself presentable before Inspector Battle arrives for his interview. I do believe he’s bringing Constable Doyle as well.”
“Battle?” Scowling, she smeared blood from her mouth with a sleeve. A pity this blood wouldn’t do for what she wanted. It was polluted, full of sickness. What is wrong with me? Co
nsumption? Cancer? Her gums bled at a touch, and she was so weak. “What does Battle want now? I’ve told the inspector that I don’t remember where I was, who was doing what, or where my father is.”
“Nevertheless,” Meme said, picking up a boar bristle brush, “the inspector wants to see you. So come now. Let us go to work on those snarls—”
“No. For the last time, get out!” Cursing, Elizabeth upended the tray in a clash of brass. Meme let out a small shriek as water sloshed her blouse and face. By some miracle, none of the bottles shattered, which really was a shame. But a pot of bicarbonate of soda burst into jagged, toothy ceramic shards and white dust. A comb skittered and spun its way to lodge in the crack where the far brick wall met the floor. An obvious weapon, and one she’d never get past Meme. Then, to the far left, Elizabeth spied something wedged behind a leg of a wardrobe that made her heart leap: a bone-handled toothbrush, its head completely broken off. That shattered finger of bone pointed, as if it had singled her out of a crowd: Yes, that one there; that’s the girl for me.
Her mouth dried up. Yes! But she had to keep Meme from seeing it first.
“Didn’t I just tell you?” Jumping her gaze away, she moved swiftly to her right, interposing her body between the comb and Meme, who was busy chasing after bottles. Misdirect, misdirect. “Didn’t I say I want you gone?”
“Yes.” Dropping shards of ceramic into her over-apron, Meme dropped to her knees and reached beneath the cot for the brush. “I heard you.”