Glass was all around her. She was in a room with reflective walls, a glass prism. Her clothes were different as well. Instead of her normal grubby walking clothes or her hospital gown, she wore night-black, cotton pyjamas. Well, this wasn’t either Miss Redd’s lair or St Anthony’s Hospital. So, where the flip was she?
“This is another version of reality?” she asked the empty air. There was no answer as her voice echoed off the polished reflective walls in a giant feedback loop of her own making.
“Hello?” she called out, “Anyone there? I asked if I’m in another reality, again?” Only her own voice came back.
She stood up, which was somewhat disconcerting. Because of the room’s reflective nature, she appeared to be standing on her own head. She raised her hands in front of her and walked forward gingerly. It was difficult to judge distances in the room because she couldn’t tell where the floor stopped and the walls began. Her reflection confronted her on all sides, a myriad of Lucys stretching to infinity. She couldn’t tell how large the room was; she couldn’t even be sure it was a room.
“Yes, it is a room, Lucybelle,” said a hauntingly familiar voice.
She froze—that voice—that name. It couldn’t be. It just couldn’t be. It was the one voice she most wanted to hear and the one voice she knew she could never hear again—the voice that had left—the voice that was gone.
“Dad?” she asked.
She turned and there he was standing before her, Ethan Gayle, her father.
His ocean blue eyes gazed at her with a mixture of pride, sadness and joy. His hair was the rich chestnut brown she remembered. It was swept in a side parting, so a hanging curtain covered half of his forehead. He wore the faded blue jeans he always wore in Lucy’s memories and a dark coal T-shirt which bore the legend There’s no place like 127.0.0.1. A half grin cracked across his thin face, wrinkling the corners of his eyes like river tracks in a delta.
“Oh Dad! Oh Dad! Oh Dad!” she almost screamed as she ran to him.
His gigantic bear hug encompassed her, and he swung her off her feet and spun her around.
“Oh, my little Lucybelle.” She heard the smile and warmth within his voice as he hugged her.
She tried to breathe him in, her face buried against his chest, her arms slung about him. She squeezed, and he squeezed back. She could hear his heart th-thump in his chest. Lucy was on the edge of crying. She had missed him so much. She wanted to hold him forever, to just stay locked in the embrace, but her mind drew her back, and she separated from him.
“You’re dead,” she said, flatly.
“Possibly,” he said.
“Am I dead?” she asked.
“Not yet.”
“I’m not dead. You’re possibly dead, and I’m talking to you?”
“I wouldn’t try asking those questions any further; it’ll get very confusing. Let’s see if I can explain it in the big print version,” said Ethan, with a smile.
“Hey, don’t patronise me,” she said, placing her hands on her hips. “I deserve the small print, complicated, leather-bound version.”
“Yes you do, but I’m afraid I don’t understand it either. The small print, leather-bound, complicated version, sort of, doesn’t fit into language very well. It requires more diagrams and arithmetic than I want to explain right now. Believe me, I’ve run through this conversation with you more than once, and if we’re not careful we’ll end up proving that we don’t know what the colour red looks like. Take it from me, the big print, cardboard page version is much easier and a lot less confusing.”
“All right, but this had better be good,” she said, hoping against all experience that her questions would be answered.
“Now, where to begin?”
His palm rubbed at his jaw line, and his index finger tapped three times on his chin. It was a motion which dragged her back to childhood memories, a pure, unalterable image of her father lost in concentration.
He sighed and looked at Lucy with his long-lost eyes. “We don’t have much time,” he began. “We never do. There is never enough time to say all the things we want to say. But, here and now, we really don’t have much time. Your consciousness will soon be going back to the body on the quest. You see, it is that body which is unstable, and your mind will want to return there in order to create stability. The other two bodies are fine as they are for the moment.”
She frowned in confusion.
“I went too fast, didn’t I?” said her father, looking crestfallen. “Damn, I honestly thought that would be the best way to tackle this. Argh, this is so complicated.” He threw his hands to his temples in frustration.
“Lucy, you understand that you may well be split in three? You could have three separate bodies into three different places?”
She nodded.
“Well, that could be the truth. That is the truth if there are multiple universes. If there are multiple universes, then everything you have seen, or will see, or are seeing is true. You have three separate bodies, fauns exist, and you are on a quest to restore magic. And, I would be an aspect of Ethan Gayle from another universe, one of the many possible Ethan Gayle’s out there. Does that make sense?” Ethan asked.
“Sort of,” she replied.
“Okay, possibility two. There is an author. If that is the case, you are a character in a book being written by an author, and so you don’t have an actual body. Nothing you see is real, or it’s as real as anything else. In that situation, I am simply another helper along the way, just like Conscience and Talbot, or the wizard Bechet. Does that make sense?”
“Again, sort of,” she said, nodding as her father rehashed what she and Conscience had already discussed.
“And the third option is that you are mad. You are in the hospital and are having a psychotic break from reality. Therefore, I am an aspect of your own subconscious.”
“Yes, I know all this. It’s just that it’s all ridiculous. No one seems to have the faintest idea what’s going on. Everyone seems to bimble about like lost sheep, and nobody seems to know what to do.”
“Welcome to being an adult,” said Ethan with a wide smile which lit up his eyes like Christmas tree lights. “As you get older you’ll find that is how it is all over the world. Nobody ever has the faintest idea what they’re doing. They just form routines and hope no one asks them complicated questions. But you are different; you always want to know why and how and who said so. You question everything and that’s a wonderful thing, but you now have this problem. All three answers you have are virtually equal in their evidence. And that’s only going to get worse.”
Lucy raised one eyebrow. “Things could get worse?”
“The three realities are going to try to converge—to become more stable. For example, feel under your right eye.”
Lucy’s questing fingers found a small patch of puckered flesh, dry and crispy like burnt blackberries under her eye. Her mind flashed. That was where the spider had bitten her. That was where its needle sharp mandibles had torn her cheek. She remembered seeing her own skin being chewed in the creature’s maw, but that had been in the other reality, hadn’t it?
Her father’s eyes read the confusion in her face. “I told you, the three realities are converging. In this reality, the torturer gave you that scar.”
The torturer. Her mind flashed back to that time when she’d seen the torturer. His glowing eyes, his fat hairy, sweaty belly and his harsh gravel voice saying, “I will burn you, and eat your eyes!”
She shuddered.
“Yes, you remember him,” said her father knowingly. “You always do remember him.”
“I always remember him?” she asked.
“Multiple universes, Lucy, they not only occur for all possible alternatives but all possible times. I’ve been through this with you a hundred times before, and I will do it again a hundred times to come. As I was saying, the three realities are going to try to converge.”
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
“Good and bad, Lucy. It’s all relative. At the moment, all three realities are unstable. They’re, sort of sloshing around and mixing together, and that’s not a wonderful idea. The three are being pulled, as one, towards a nexus point—a great conjunction.”
“The Falls of Wanda and the crystal?”
“No, sweetie, the nexus point is—you at the Falls of Wanda. You have to get there at the set time. You will be given a choice. A choice that will decide the fate of everything you know, and this is the good bit by the way, and for it to be a fair choice the worlds must be equal. You’re going to have to help them become alike at the right time.”
“How can I do that?”
“You have to go up.”
“What does that mean?” she asked, still baffled beyond belief.
“You’ll know what it means when the time comes.”
“What happens if the realities aren’t equal?”
“Then you will have no choice. It would mean that the choice is already made. Only when choices are equal are they, in fact, choices.”
“No,” she said, holding up her hands in surrender, “I don’t understand. Why me, why do I get this perfect choice?”
“There are three answers to that, and each depends on what is real,” said her father, the grin sliding across his face. She mentally prepared herself for the tri-istic answer.
“One: The Cheshire Cat prophesied it, and you are the reincarnation of a warrior named Alice. And, because of your past sins, you have to bring magic back to the world of Mieha. B: There is an author, and he says it is you who have to do this, because you are the protagonist in the story. Alternatively, your own brain is giving you a chance to come back to the reality of the hospital, and all this has been your subconscious’ way of dealing with whatever it was that made you have a psychotic break from reality. There, does that make you feel better?”
“No,” she said, still distraught by the complexity of it all.
“It’s all right to be baffled, Lucy. It almost doesn’t make any sense.”
A gong rang out, a great booming sound which clanged and reverberated off the glass prison making the walls shake and the floor vibrate.
“Ah,” said Ethan, straightening up, scanning the walls. “I wondered how long it would be until the Dimn noticed. This is his world after all—world and reflection of worlds. And, you’re fading now too—see?”
Lucy held up her hand and was alarmed that she could see right through it as if it were made of crystal.
“I told you,” continued Ethan, “you’ll be heading back to the quest body. So, let’s hurry this up. As the worlds start to converge, you should be able to shift between realities more easily. Make them alike, Lucy. They have to be equal.”
“But Dad, don’t go, I’ve so many other questions,” she pleaded.
“You don’t need to ask me, Lucybelle. You have all the information and helpers you need.”
“But I’ve broken the prophecy,” she wailed, “I rejected the last helper.”
“Of course you didn’t, silly. You can’t break a prophecy. No one can. You are stuck on the path of prophecy. That’s why it’s a prophecy.”
“But the tin woodsman, Intuition tricked me into rejecting him,” she said.
“Oh, fish!” exclaimed her father. “Intuition did nothing. He can’t. The tin woodsman wasn’t the third helper. Poppy is the last helper.”
“Poppy?”
“The one with no heart,” said her father. “Now, we really have run out of time.”
Ethan took his daughter and hugged her fiercely. “I love you little Lucybelle, so very, very much. I will always love you, every one of you.”
She snuggled her head against his shoulder and hugged back, squeezing every drop from the moment. She opened her eyes and saw the thousand Ethans and Lucys, embracing in the reflected surface of her mirror cell. The infinite small differences of each embrace was not lost to her eye.
“Remember, Lucy, you have to go up. Go up and choose. I am so proud of you.”
“Dad, Dad, don’t go!” She could already feel herself falling out of the world. “Dad, what about the spider-queen?”
“Moonshine, Lucy.”
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“Ask Intuition, he can sort it out. He has to. He has nowhere else to go,” came her father’s echoing voice.
“The riddles, I forgot. What about the riddles and the box?”
“Ask Poppy. That’s what she’s there for.”
Lucy clung on as she fell away like an ebb tide’s last grasp at the beach. She could feel the tearing loss of her father.
Tears and tears, tears and tears, but which is which?
And there was still that stupid rhyme again!
“Dad,” she cried, in one last effort, “what does the stupid rhyme mean?”
“Ask Poppy. I love you, Lucybelle,” was the final echoed whisper.
~
And Lucy was somewhere else. Dark, dry, musty air slid across her nose. She knew where she was. She was back in the spider-queen’s lair.
Her eyes acclimatised to the dingy surroundings, and a monochrome picture emerged. She was in a bulbous room as round as a stomach. Light entered in a shaft from a crack high up to her left, making a pool of pale blue light upon the floor. Around her, there were large, white sacks, all suspended or attached to the walls in some fashion, like a plague victim’s buboes.
She tried to move and discovered that she too was encased in a white sack—except it wasn’t a sack. It was made of hundreds of thousands of tiny, spider-silk threads. She was trapped in a spider-silk straitjacket.
Awake, are we, Gayle? said Intuition’s voice.
You’re still here then? she thought at her passenger.
Yes. I’m slightly confused by it too. I thought I would return to my master’s glorious consciousness—yet, I remain. And so, it seems, do you. You are not eaten.
Lucy tried, unsuccessfully, to break her bonds. She was stuck. She could barely move at all. The silk was so tight around her.
Don’t struggle, idiot. You’ll only make it worse.
Still contracting your words, aren’t you?
She felt the spell’s frustration in her head, like a little, white-hot ball.
Yes. I, apparently, am, Intuition said. However, soon it won’t…will not matter. I’ll be going back to rejoin the Dimn, once you perish.
I’ll—two-nil, she thought, and heard him huff.
However, there was something further. Her father had said Intuition had nowhere else to go. What did he mean by that?
She felt her brain making connections. Conscience and Intuition, Intuition and Conscience. They were similar if not the same. They both had developed personalities within her head.
Lucy thought back to Conscience, the silly spell that’d called her Mistress, that’d been her friend and guide. Conscience, the coward. He’d always been afraid of dying because he would have nowhere else to go.
Even so, Intuition did have somewhere else to go. He could go back to the Dimn. He was part of the Dimn, a tiny shard of the Dimn’s mind which had become lodged in her head. Intuition was a miniature Dimn, and he would go back to his master when she was dead. But that would have its own problems, wouldn’t it? Because…
You can’t go back, she realised. You can’t go back to the Dimn. If I die, so do you.
No, you fool, haven’t you been listening? he huffed. Shall I go over this again, very slowly? When you are dead: I, me, ich, je, return to the Dimn.
It’s the same thing, she thought, calmly. You return to the Dimn, but you will cease to exist—you die. You are now separate from the Dimn. You can’t see or tell what he’s doing, just as he can’t see or tell what you are doing. When you return you’ll give him all your memories, but you get absorbed. You will no longer be separate, and I doubt you’ll be the one in command. Your existence will have come to an end. You will, in effect, be dead.
What? No, that’s…that’s wrong.
I’ll be part of the Dimn—the Dimn is me, and I am the Dimn.
No, think about it, she pressed. You are not the Dimn. You are Intuition.
I am Intuition, repeated the spell, as if it were a mantra. If I am Intuition, then I can’t be the Dimn. If I go back…
You’ll die, she finished. So, help me. How can I get out of here?
But…but I can’t die. I’ll be part of the Dimn.
No, you’ll be some memories that the Dimn has. You won’t exist anymore. Do you want to live? she asked.
Yes, said the spell, and she heard the logical cogs working.
Then, you need to help me—I’m your only shot. How do I get out of this?
You can’t. We both can’t, apparently. It’s a trap, designed for you. You can’t use your magic-rage to get out, because Miss Redd uses up all the magic in the surrounding area with her illusions. It’s a perfect trap, said Intuition, with gloom in his voice.
There’s no such thing as a perfect trap, Lucy said. No one can predict everything—not even the Dimn. How do we get out of this? My dad said you could help.
Your dad?
Don’t worry about my dad. He said “moonshine.” What does that mean? He said you’d know.
There was a long pause. Then Intuition darkly said, Wake up the faun.
“Talbot!” she whispered. He didn’t stir. “Talbot!” she whispered again.
A fist-sized spiderling scuttled from a dark recess and disappeared down a tunnel.
“Talbot,” she whispered for a third time.
A light groan came from one of the larger bundles of filthy silk. It rustled and bulged as if someone were moving inside of it. Another fist-sized spider clambered over the surface of the bundle and disappeared into a dark corner of the room.
“Talbot?” Lucy asked the bundle.
A more definitive groan issued from the silk.
Tell him to let go, said Intuition.
“Talbot, let go,” Lucy said.
From the direction of the dark tunnel there came a chittering and the sound of movement. She guessed that one of the spiderlings had reported to its mother.
“Talbot, I think she is coming back,” Lucy said.
Ravens and Writing Desks: A Metaphysical Fantasy Page 33