by Alana Melos
“You could have warned me,” I said, looking up at him.
His reaction when I did wasn’t at all what I expected. Surprise and shock flitted across his face, followed by another emotion which was more indefinable… longing, maybe. Or sadness. Yet even that wasn’t straight forward, as nothing was with him, and it was mixed with something else. He schooled his face back to his normal grin a second later, but that I’d seen it at all was something remarkable. He was never surprised. Ever. Every emotion he displayed on his face or in his mind was carefully crafted.
“What is it? And what’s with the young… young you?” I asked. Other movement caught my eye. I looked down. His shadow moved. It didn’t writhe or look like it was in pain or anything, but it moved independently of him. And it had eyes. It saw me.
“Your face,” he said, chuckling. “I didn’t expect it, that’s all.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, hypnotized by his shadow.
He snapped his fingers in front of my eyes to grab my attention. “Here, look for yourself,” he said, chipper and bright, much like his daughter. He made a gesture with his hands and there was a large mirror held in between them, appearing out of nowhere. Letting his hands drop, the mirror stayed where it was, floating in the air like… well, like magic.
I looked into the mirror and stared at myself. My face wasn’t there. Instead, I wore a blank porcelain mask as if I were working. It had been painted to simulate make up around the eyes with smudges of coal, and a bright red cupid’s bow of lipstick over the lips. It wasn’t perfect though, not by a long shot. Cracked and damaged, it looked like it was falling apart. Where there were cracks, raw flesh showed through and blood seeped from the painless wounds. My eyes were different colors. The left one was vibrant green and the right my regular blue. When I blinked, they were both blue. I opened my mouth to say something, and the mask opened its mouth as well. It wasn’t just a mask… it was my face. I put a hand up to it to feel the hard, cool exterior marred by the myriad of cracks.
“What is this?” I asked as I shoved the fear away under my blanket of not-feeling-much. “I don’t understand.”
“It’s how you see yourself,” Gerard explained. “Combination of the ego, id, and superego all wrapped up into one if you must have a definition. When you project yourself into another’s mind, in order to keep hold of your self and not get lost in them, your mind protects you by showing you what you really are… how you see yourself.” He looked around disdainfully at the forest, “Else, who knows what you’d look like here.”
“This isn’t how I see myself,” I objected, tearing my gaze away from the mirror to look at the rest of my self. The clothing I wore was much like when I did when working, sans armor: black leather pants with leather stiletto boots. I had on a leather vest like Michael’s over a dark red tank top, with my sword strapped across my back. My eyes jerked up to look at Gerard once more, taking in his casual teen look in a tee shirt and jeans, so much like when we’d first met. “And that’s how you see yourself?”
“If I want to,” he replied. As I watched, he matured. His face grew lines, his hair ruffled and colored grey in spots, and he grew a couple inches. “But I have perfect control of myself. It’s just easier to let it be what my mind wants it to be.” He shrugged, but I noticed his shadow still had eyes and moved independently of him. I didn’t think he was as in control as he thought himself to be.
“How did you do that?” I asked.
“Control and will,” he replied. When he shook himself, he reverted back to the younger form and gave me a cheeky grin. “It’s one of the things we’re going to go over.” He looked me over and tsked while shaking his head. “We have to start with the basics for you. But, for now, are you ready to get started?”
I took a deep breath and nodded. The mirror disappeared without a sound. “Alright, lead the way.”
Gerard nodded, and, after a moment, his clothing changed from his regular wear to military BDU’s, complete with a cap. I smirked a little at that, but he’d also imagined himself a machete. “This is the first layer of his defenses… but it’s not him. I don’t think so anyway. You’d know better than I would.”
I looked around and stretched my mental senses out. It didn’t feel like Rory. I shook my head. “No, I don’t think so. It’s… whatever it is holding him.” The plants pressed around us, making me feel as if I were suffocating under all the dark yet somehow still vibrant green. I was really starting to hate that color.
“Right, so in we go, once more into the breach!” he said, affectating a British accent for the line. Without much further ado, he began hacking away at the layers of vegetation. Around me, pain vibrated. Whatever he did to the plants hurt the mind we were in, yet it wasn’t Rory’s mind… whatever had possessed him had control. I saw immediately what Gerard was doing. Instead of the ethereal telepathic fights I’d been in before where it was simply a matter of overpowering the person, this was more literal and symbolic all in one. The plants were the mind’s defenses and Gerard was hacking through them.
I unsheathed my sword and joined him. The plants didn’t part ways easily, and some shoots came to attack us, but they were nothing. A quick swipe and the tentacles were cut. We hacked in this way for some time… I think. Time had no weight here, no meaning. It could have been a few seconds, five minutes, ten hours, a thousand days. As we moved, the foliage grew denser and thicker. Thorns erupted from the plants. Each slash with my sword cut down the branches and leaves, but more popped up in their place. Gerard didn’t give up. He kept going with icy determination, knowing he’d get through eventually.
When we did, I stopped in shock. I knew we were in Rory’s mind, but the whole idea of a living, breathing mindscape like this had always been a bit beyond my grasp. I knew what they were. I’d been in Ger’s head and my own, but someone else’s… it was alien. The trees gave way to a dark cave, lit in eerie shadows by torch light. I knew this place: this had been the central lair for the pack in Axis, underneath the streets of Berlin.
In the center of the stone auditorium, Rory stood naked, surrounded by wolves. “What is this?” I asked Ger.
“A pocket, a memory, I think…” he said, watching the scene intently. “It’s something important to him, else it’d probably be gone.”
As we watched, the dark figures around him flickered in and out of the shadows as if they weren’t real. Rory remained solid, the central figure in this little personal play. As the figures surrounded him, they began to scratch him with their talons. Pain flared from him, but it was a good pain, one he welcomed. They began tearing the skin from his body, flaying him slowly, by inches. My lips parted as I watched, my arousal at the violence thick and heady. I wanted to do that, to feel what he felt, to slowly take him apart. He turned and looked directly at me.
“He sees me,” I said as I backed up a step.
“Maybe,” Gerard said. “We should keep going. This is a good sign, but this isn’t where we need to be.”
“No, I think we should stay here,” I said. “This is Rory’s memory. Wouldn’t it be attached to his psyche? His core self?” I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the carnage. Even as they flayed him, the wolves surrounding him were careful with the skin, peeling it away with great care as they stripped him down to the muscle.
“It doesn’t feel connected to anything,” Gerard said as he looked around. “I don’t see any obvious exits going deeper.”
“There’s got to be,” I replied. “I refuse to believe he’s gone. Adira says he’s not and that’s a mystical whatever… bond.” When Rory was stripped down to his muscle, the wolves around him crooned and howled while he twisted and writhed. It wasn’t in agony, though it was painful. It was ecstatic. As far as I knew, the wolf had never been a masochist, though he’d never shied away from pain. This was different. They called out the wolf in him, bringing it forth with their howls and cries after stripping away his humanity.
Fur burst from the muscle as his bones and joints crea
ked, changing slightly as they did to better accommodate his animal half. His human teeth fell out, and the other werewolves caught them, putting them with the skin they kept for him. Sharp, long ones grew in their place as his face distended, growing into a muzzle. His ears moved further back on his head and sharpened into points. Soon, he was the black furred wolf I knew so well, ripping himself free of his bonds and howling with his pain.
His savage joy ran through me. This memory was so strong, so vivid, and so real that I longed to rush into it, throw myself into the scene and howl with them. My foot scraped forward as I started to do just that, but Gerard grabbed my wrist and yanked me back.
“Don’t,” he said, his tone low. “You have to stay an observer, not a participant. Not only will you change the memory by accident, but it’s hard to get yourself free again. You’ll be a figment of his imagination, living in his head.”
“What?” I asked, blinking in surprise. “That’s possible?”
“More or less,” he replied, squinting his eyes at the scene. “If you can’t free yourself, your body will never wake up. You’ll just keep living in his memories, not remembering what you came here to do. Worse, you’ll be at his mercy. If he decides you don’t exist then, or aren’t real, then you’ll just… wither away.”
I made a face, still wanting to go into the barbaric scene and revel in it. “That’s… faintly disturbing,” I said, properly chastened by the warning. The wolves around Rory offered him up his skin, and he scarfed it down, chewing noisily. “What about altering memories here? You can, right?”
“Of course you can,” Ger scoffed. “But not that way. You still have to be the observer… but from out here, we can do anything. Change it, remove it, insert a new one… like directing a play, I guess. Or painting a new work over an existing canvas.”
I looked back to Ger. “Can we at least look for a link to Rory here? I … I don’t know. It feels important here. This is…” I stopped and thought about how to explain it. It just felt like him, like the happy, violent wolf I knew. “It’s important,” I finished lamely.
“You know him better than I,” my partner said with a shrug. “Let’s have a peek.” He paused and surveyed the scene, “Most memories are self-contained sound bites, really. They flow into one another, but this memory here is confined to the cave. In such a physical representation, we want to look for a door or a window which will link to another one, one closer to his psyche… perhaps parents? Or another turning point in his life.”
I looked at the wolves once more, shaking my head, “Are you sure this isn’t close to him? This… he loves being a werewolf.”
Gerard shook his head, “This close to the surface? No. I think it’s just a pocket, but let’s have a look.” He gestured with a hand for me to walk ahead of him. I steeled myself, willing myself not to feel their terrible and wonderful joy, but it was hard. It reverberated around me, sinking into my skin, beckoning me to come, to come and run with them under the light of the moon.
Instead, I turned my attention to one of the entrances to the arena here. There were several scattered around, and I examined the closest one. When I touched it, the black felt solid, almost velvety. “It’s not going to be someplace obvious, is it?” I asked.
“Sometimes they are, and sometimes not,” my partner replied. “In a case like this, with a foreign entity… I think it’ll be hidden. Whatever this plant freak is, it wants to keep us away, and it knows we’re here.”
“Why isn’t it attacking us then?” I asked, moving along the cavern wall, feeling my way around.
“You know,” Gerard said softly, “that’s a good question.”
I smirked to myself. I thought I was right. This event was just too important to Rory. Maybe it was his psyche helping us find the way. We circled around the arena and went up into the stone benches, but found nothing out of place. When I looked at the scene again, it had reset itself, playing out the flaying with exquisite detail. Something niggled me, and I put a hand to my head when a vein throbbed in my forehead painfully.
“Mouths are openings,” I said, then looked to Gerard. “Aren’t they?”
He gave me a dark look. “You want us to get eaten by that freak?”
“He’s not a freak,” I said. “And if you don’t like him so much, why are you here anyway?”
“To help you,” he supplied. He smiled at me, his eyes crinkling at the corners when he did.
I rolled my eyes. “Ok, so… mouths are openings. I mean, cave entrances are called mouths. What could it hurt to try?”
“If you interfere in the memory too much, you could destroy it,” he said, then pointed to the bloody scene. “I think that’s gross as hell, but you seem to think it’s important to him. Do you want to take the chance?”
Looking at the howling wolves, I considered. If I was right, we could always backtrack here after coming to a dead end. If Gerard was right, and we messed up trying to transition, then I’d be destroying what I was trying to save. “No,” I replied. “I don’t. Where to?”
“Tunnel entrances,” he said, nodding to the velvety darkness we stood next to. “It’s pretty common for people to imagine doors going to their next memory or next level of psyche. It’ll lead somewhere. Whether it’s where we need to go or not, that’s what we’ll find out.”
“I don’t think that’s right,” I said, tapping a finger against my porcelain face absently. “You said any obvious exits would be hidden.”
“You really want us to be swallowed, don’t you?” he groaned. “It feels dangerous to me. It’s interfering with a memory, and--”
“You could change yourself,” I pointed out. “Couldn’t we just make ourselves smaller, then go? He wouldn’t notice swallowing something during the transformation, even if it did make an imprint on the memory.” I thought it over and nodded. It seemed sound to me. “We’re doing it.”
He gave me a sharp look, then nodded with great reluctance. “Fine,” he said, the word forced out between clenched teeth.
“How do you change yourself then?” I asked.
“It’s just exerting your will over your own mind,” he said, that harder tone still in his voice. “Surely you can manage that much, can’t you, Reece?”
It was my turn to give him a sharp, nasty look. “Look, if you don’t want to do this, then just say so.”
“I don’t want to do this,” he said immediately.
“Suffer, we’re doing it,” I replied. “Now let me concentrate.”
He groaned and pinched the bridge of his nose with his free hand. The machete he’d held before disappeared, and a second later so did he, at least from my sight. He’d done what I asked. Now it was my turn. Concentrating, I will my form to shrink, like so many movies made over the years. When I realized if I shrank, I wouldn’t be able to get up to Rory’s mouth, I quickly added in a pair of wings. They burst from my shoulder blades, and I heard Gerard laughing. When I opened my eyes, he hovered in front of me in mid air. Everything else was enormous. We were but specks of dust in the area.
“Wings?” he asked, his voice heavy with amusement. “You can fly naturally, unless you’ve forgotten. Or you have an angel fetish I don’t know anything about.”
Embarrassment flooded me. I shunted it away as I willed away the black feathered wings. “Let’s get going,” I said, keeping my voice level. He continued to chuckle as we flew into the scene. He thrashed about a lot when he shifted for the first time, so I waited for the scene to repeat itself again, when he was standing mostly still. When the opportunity came up, I gestured, “Let’s go.”
We flew into the dark gaping maw to be swallowed by blackness. A sensation of being squeezed enveloped me, and I pushed back against it. Suffocating… trapped… I scrabbled in the darkness with my fingers, losing my sword in the process. I was trapped, caught, I needed to flee, I needed to find a way out! I wouldn’t be caged again!
A sharp slap brought me back to myself and I blinked. Gerard’s youthful features swum
into focus, and he snapped his fingers in front of me, trying to get me to focus. “Look at me,” he said, the tone of his voice brooking no disobedience. “Look at me! That’s it… focus. Focus on your self, your psyche.”
Reaching down, I felt the blanket of not-feeling-much and ran my mental fingers over it, then plunged into it with my hand. There… there I was. Those feelings, those unwanted feelings washed over me and I breathed easier. Damn them for being useful, but they were here. I needed them. I needed a rock to wind my string around.
No, I needed an anchor. Yes, an anchor. I blinked a few times and nodded to Gerard, keeping the anchor image in my mind firmly. I would not break. When I looked around, I lay in a glass cage, with Gerard kneeling by me. The lights flickered on and off, and the whole building shook as if there were an earthquake happening. Alarms blared silently, and red light splashed over the featureless walls. Shadows of dark lettering spilled over the back cell wall, and I took a step forward, examining the reversed letters on the upper right corner of the glass. They read ‘Project 46-T: Pangea’.
“Where are we?” I asked, my voice shakier than I wanted it to be. I gathered my legs under me and rose, with Ger helping me with a steadying hand.
Gerard pressed his lips together and nodded inside the cage. My gaze fell upon an animal, a pathetic looking thing… a dog or a coyote. A wolf. Some sort of canine. With all the scars done to it, the lack of fur, and darkened skin, it was impossible to tell one hundred percent what it was. It opened its mouth and whined, but the inside of the mouth was wrong. The teeth had all been plucked out and the tongue looked bloated. It took me a moment to realize it was infected with some kind of moss which grew in spotty patches over its body.
“Its memory,” he said. “Or part of it.”
“I don’t under--” I started to say, but a wave of force knocked me off my feet before I had a chance to finish. Looking out at the cage, I saw two people fighting. One was dressed in black and purple, a mask over her eyes. The other looked to be a scientist with long dark hair which flowed around her under some unseen force as she laughed crazily.