by Ryan Casey
Ashley’s head spun. He’d stopped trying to understand. He clutched at the Pukka Pad. Held it as he lay on the floor.
Then, in a moment of inspiration, he thought of something.
The hexagon. The words. Maybe they’d help. Maybe they’d bring her back.
He fumbled through the Pukka Pad with his sweaty, shaking hands. Grace continued to gargle and shake opposite him, saliva pooling down her front and dripping to the floor. Ashley turned through the pages of the Pukka Pad. Flicked past the lakes and the gardens and the—
And then he realised she’d stopped. He saw the balls of Grace’s feet touch the light beige carpet. He hadn’t reached the page with the hexagon and the writing but it didn’t matter because she’d stopped.
He stared back at Grace. Watched as she stopped shaking. Watched as she stopped gargling.
Her eyes rolled back down. They were red and bloodshot, but they were there, the bright blueness somewhere in them.
“Grace?” Ashley said. He shuffled back slightly, the taste of metal in his own mouth getting stronger. “Are—are you with me? Are you back?”
She stared at Ashley. Stared at him, completely static, completely still.
“I’m sorry,” she whimpered in a soft voice.
A tear dripped down her cheek from her bloodshot eyes.
Then, she tumbled to the beige carpet like a rag doll, losing all strength in her limbs.
Ashley rushed over to her. Held her head in his hands. Scuttled around in his pocket for his iPhone. He needed the police. He needed Mr. Wisdom and Mrs. Wisdom.
No. He needed an ambulance. A doctor. Somebody.
As he keyed in 999 and held the phone to his ear, Grace’s boiling hot head on his lap, he stared over at the page that he’d turned to in the Pukka Pad when Grace had drifted out of her trance.
Staring back at him was a portrait of a creature with deep, reptilian eyes and a long, narrowing face.
Its skin was covered in scales.
SIXTEEN
Ashley spent the rest of the afternoon and that night at the hospital with Grace.
She’d been knocked out cold, the doctors said. Knocked out cold and hadn’t woken up. Her heart was beating, though, and she was breathing fine, so it looked like she was going to pull through. But the collapse, it was inexplicable. Some kind of seizure, the doctors said. But a seizure that hadn’t left any lasting impact on her brain from the looks of things.
It had been some kind of seizure, Ashley knew that. Only a kind of seizure the like of which they had never seen, and the like of which he hoped he’d never see again.
He shuffled around in the cushioned chair that he’d spent the best part of the last fifteen hours in. At first, it had been comfortable, but the longer he sat in it, the more the plastic underneath the cushion dug through into his backside. The striped green t-shirt he’d changed into yesterday was covered with dried sweat, which he got a whiff of every time he moved. So much for cleaning himself up. In the back of his mouth he could taste a lingering tang of eggs that he’d had on a sandwich a while earlier. How long ago even was that, anyway? Time flew by in this place. Time flew by, sitting and waiting for your girlfriend to recover.
Wondering whether the real Grace was even going to recover at all.
At the opposite side of Grace’s bed, where she was lying underneath a white sheet with all kinds of wires worming into her nostrils and her mouth, Mr. and Mrs. Wisdom sat. They’d been there just as long as Ashley, too. Mrs. Wisdom sniffed every few minutes. Mr. Wisdom, who had loosened his tie and even undone his top button, held onto his wife’s hand, giving it a little squeeze whenever she sniffed, as if it was her cue for him to give her some attention.
Ashley had tried to explain what had happened to Grace when they were on their way to hospital yesterday. She’d had a kind of seizure, muttering words like “Dalhar Tethys.” Said something about the year of the reptile. And…and the scales. The scales of flesh all over her back. He’d tried to explain that too.
Naturally, they gave him a funny look and told him to get some rest.
It was funny, really. For all the irrationality of this entire situation—Grace being fucking alive and well, for one—Mr. and Mrs. Wisdom found Ashley’s description of the seizure the most unbelievable thing of all.
“You want some breakfast?”
Ashley looked over at the other side of the room. It was Mr. Wisdom. He looked at Ashley in a way that Ashley didn’t think he’d ever recalled. A kind of “I don’t care what the hell went on in the past” detachment to his glassy eyes.
Then again, Ashley was pretty shit at reading people.
“I’ll, erm…I’m okay,” Ashley said. His stomach churned with hunger.
“Nonsense,” Mr. Wisdom said. He stood to his feet and straightened out his tie, not realising his top button was still undone. “You barely ate any of your sandwich last night. A cooked breakfast would do you good. It would do us all good.”
Ashley’s stomach churned some more. He was desperately hungry, the thought of the greasy cooked breakfast in his mouth growing more appealing by the second. But accepting it from Mr. Wisdom. There was something wrong about it. Like he felt guilty, in some way. Guilty for Grace being here. And yet he’d done nothing. Nothing at all.
“I’ll have an egg and bacon sandwich then,” Ashley said, half-smiling but keeping his eyes diverted from Mr. Wisdom. “Thanks.”
Mr. Wisdom rattled around some change in his hands. He looked at his wife, then back at Ashley. “Very well,” he said.
He walked over to the door, opened it up, the sounds of chattering and echoing footsteps joining the medicinal smell from outside the door, then he walked out and disappeared.
Mrs. Wisdom was smiling at Ashley when he looked back at her. She was picking at a bit of fluff on the sleeve of her blue cotton cardigan. Ashley felt his cheeks flush a little as he smiled back, the bleeping of Grace’s life support machine—or whatever the fuck it was—the only real sound in this private room right now.
He gulped as the silence went on. Figured he had to say something at some stage. “How are you—”
“He likes you, you know?” Mrs. Wisdom said. “Harold. He—he likes you. Might not show it sometimes. Might not—might not show it with any of us. But he likes you. Always has.” She held her smile. Kept picking at the fluff on her sleeve.
Ashley gulped again. He felt a lump in his chest. Mr. Wisdom liking him was hard to believe. Mr. Wisdom liking anybody was hard to believe. He’d have taken “He isn’t mortally offended by the sight of you.” This was quite a leap.
“He’s…He’s a good dad,” Ashley said, unsure of what to say. “Always looks out for his kids. Both—both of you do.”
“You know, you were the first of her boyfriends he actually said he didn’t mind.”
Again, Ashley was pretty stumped as to what to say. He cleared his throat. He looked over at Grace as she lay in that hospital bed, her neck upright, heavy eyelids hiding her beaming blue eyes.
“Funny, isn’t it?” Mrs. Wisdom said.
She didn’t elaborate. Ashley wasn’t sure whether to press her for more or to leave her to it.
Fortunately, a few seconds later, she continued.
“Funny how—how you can think you’ve lost the most important thing. Your—your daughter. Or your girlfriend. You can think you’ve lost it all and then…and then here they are, back with us. It…I hope she pulls through this. I don’t think I could lose her again. I don’t think any of us could.”
Mrs. Wisdom dabbed at the corners of her eyes with her plucked cardigan sleeve. Still, she held that shaky characteristic smile on her face, no matter what.
“She’s…She’s tough,” Ashley said, staring into space, listening to the murmurs of the voices outside and the steady bleeping of Grace’s machine. “Always remember first finding that out when we had a game of tennis with my parents.
Before they moved to Australia. And…I always remember seeing the look on her face when she kept on losing points. Her cheeks getting redder and redder. Her shots getting more wayward and…and then finally, when she blasted the ball into the net and handed me the match, she let her racket fly too. Let it fly right towards my head.” He touched the little dimpled scar on his forehead.
“Pretended it was an accident. Swore to God she hadn’t intended to throw it, while I was dripping with blood and having loads of stitches stuck into my head. But I knew. I’d seen her getting wound up. I’d seen the colour in her cheeks. She meant it. She so meant it. I think I just about fell in love with her that day.”
Mrs. Wisdom chuckled. Sniffed back some more tears. Her lips were fully wobbling now. “It’s…It’s lovely. To have you—to have you both back, Ashley. It’s lovely.”
Ashley tried his best to keep his focus on the white tiles of the floor. Just looking at Mrs. Wisdom getting all emotional was giving him a lump in the throat of his own.
“I know you weren’t involved. I don’t care what the papers say. I—I know there’s greater things at play. Things we don’t understand. About the universe. About—about everything.”
Ashley looked at her. Looked for that smile she always had when she was just saying something for somebody else’s benefit.
But no. She was staring right at him. Serious. Completely serious.
Ashley smiled and nodded. He sniffed up, forgetting about last night’s nosebleed, and got a metallic whiff right into his head. “Thanks, Mrs. Wisdom. I…I appreciate that.” He paused. Hesitated for a moment. Was now a good time to bring up what had actually happened to Grace again?
Fuck. Now was as good a time as any.
He cleared his throat. Tasted dried blood from the residue of the nosebleed. “What I said. About…about Grace’s seizure. About the things she—she said. I wasn’t—”
Ashley was cut off speaking by the increase in bleeps to his left. Mrs. Wisdom had seen it too, because she uncrossed her legs and her eyes widened as she made for the hospital bed.
“Get—get someone in here!” she shouted. The bleeps increased. Grace’s head wobbled from side to side, her face going gradually purple. Fuck. The seizure. She was having another. She was doing it again.
“Get somebody in here!” Mrs. Wisdom shouted, as Ashley stood there frozen.
But then the bleeping returned to normal.
Grace’s cheeks turned back to a normal pinkish colour.
And out of nowhere, cradled by her mother’s hands, Grace’s beaming blue eyes opened.
SEVENTEEN
Ashley and Mr. and Mrs. Wisdom were made to leave the private hospital room reserved for Grace almost immediately after she woke.
The doctors told them they had to do some rigorous studies. That her waking up as she had was completely unnatural and unlike anything they’d seen before. After all the things Ashley had seen over these last few days, he knew exactly where they were coming from.
He walked down the main corridor of the hospital with Mr. and Mrs. Wisdom before they went their individual ways. They had a couple of hours to kill, apparently, so Mrs. Wisdom was spending it in the hospital clothes shop while Mr. Wisdom leafed through a copy of the Daily Telegraph in WH Smith’s. Ashley just walked. Kept on walking past the patients pushing themselves along on Zimmer frames, past the people waiting anxiously in their grey plastic seats, fumes from the noisy cafe combining with the smells of smoke from outside the main doors, where the smokers all escaped to and congregated.
Beside the main door, just to the right, Ashley spotted a little white and blue sign above a door. iCafe, it said. His first feeling was one of sympathy for the place. No doubt Apple would trademark iCafe some day soon, if they hadn’t already, and the place would be bullied into a name change. Just like a sky-diving place called Sky Sports he remembered seeing in Olu Deniz, Turkey when he went there with Grace a couple of summers ago. Except they did things differently in Turkey. That place just dropped the “S” from the Sports and got away with it.
But this iCafe, Ashley figured it could be a good place to kill time. When he was on his lunch breaks at work—whom he’d let know he wouldn’t be going in again today—he killed enough time on the Internet playing some Flash game or another. Browsing on social media. That kind of thing.
Except he’d be able to kill his time differently now he knew exactly what he was going to search for. And it was far from procrastination.
He walked through the glass door, which took quite a push to move, and stepped into the little room hidden away in the front corner of the hospital. The carpet was grey. The room smelled of cigarettes and sweat. He’d expected the room to go right back, with loads of computers; however there were just two old CRT monitors to his left in this barely large-enough room.
“Y’alreet love?”
The voice made Ashley jump. He looked to his right. It was a rather large woman with greasy brown hair and big bushy eyebrows. She was sitting behind a tall desk that Ashley just hadn’t noticed at first.
He cleared his throat. “Yeah, I’m…Can I use a computer?”
The woman flicked her eyebrows up. She gestured over to one of the computers with the end of a pen that she’d clearly done a good job of chewing down. “Sure. Take yer pick.”
Ashley nodded and squeezed his way past a wastepaper basket that was cleverly placed in the centre of the room. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet.
“Uh-uh, it’s fine,” the woman said, waving at him. She’d been reading a copy of The Sun before Ashley entered, but now she looked at him like he was some sort of alien being.
“You…You’re sure?”
The woman shrugged. “They’re shuttin’ us down soon anyway. Figured there’s no point rippin’ you lot off. Well. The ones of you who even come in ‘ere, anyway.”
Ashley put his wallet back into the pocket of his green skinny jeans, which had loosened a little after having his legs crossed for what must have been a few hours last night.
“Thanks,” Ashley said.
The woman waved at him again with her dry-skinned hands and then looked back down at her copy of The Sun.
Ashley made himself comfortable at the old white CRT monitor on the left. The chair was like one of those plastic ones you’d sit on at primary school, and just as small too. Wow. For a hospital, Preston Royal could do a better job of chair selection, that was for sure.
He powered up the computer, wiping his finger on his jeans as he realised there was a sticky substance coating the power button. The computer was dusty too. Clearly hadn’t been attended to in years. Shit. Was this thing even going to have broadband? Apple would have no fight on their hands when it came to taking down this iCafe, that was for sure.
Eventually, after much waiting, the computer did boot up, and to Ashley’s relief, it seemed to be connected to a WiFi network. He double-clicked on Internet Explorer on the top left of the desktop, waited a bit longer, and finally—finally—was met with a Google search bar. Thank God this place didn’t charge. He’d probably spent a good fifteen minutes just waiting for this thing to boot up.
And now it had booted up, his mind went blank. He rubbed his tongue over his furry teeth, still unbrushed since yesterday. Imagined the taste of that bacon sandwich, which he’d only half-eaten because of the new developments with Grace. He heard a newspaper page turn over behind him, crumpling as it did. What should he search for? Where exactly was he supposed to start?
In the end, he started with the obvious.
“Dhalar Tethys,” he typed. Although he didn’t know whether he was spelling it right. He was just judging it based on the phonetics he remembered. He’d done an A-Level essay on phonology back in college, so he figured he was a better judge of phonetics than many. Then again, he was probably completely wrong.
“Dhalar Tethys” came back with no results. Literally no r
esults. Of all the millions and zillions of Google-linked pages, Dhalar Tethys wasn’t linked to any of them. He cursed under his breath. Heard another page of the iCafe’s host’s paper turned.
Then, he typed in “year of the reptile.”
The first few results were dead ends. The first few in particular were on about how 2012 was some lizard conservation year, or something like that. Another popular search item was a thirty-million-year-old lizard fossil that had been found. This was going nowhere. Absolutely nowhere.
He pressed his fingers against his tender temples. Listened as the fans of this ancient computer whirred away, the room smelling as musty as an old electronics shop. Think, Ashley, think. There has to be something else. There has to be.
And then he remembered. The hexagons. Of course. The pattern that Grace had drawn in her Pukka Pad, then started etching into the floor. It was a long shot. No doubt there’d be loads of conspiracy results about psychosis and that sort of thing.
He searched for “hexagon symbols” mainly because he was a little bit stuck about what else to search.
There, he was pleasantly surprised.
Or unpleasantly, perhaps.
There were loads of results about a supposed hexagon on Saturn.
“Strange Saturn Vortex Swirls in Amazing NASA Photo.”
“Saturn’s Hexagonal Storm Wows Sky-Watchers.”
Ashley deleted his Google search and typed in “Saturn.” He wanted to do some reading on Saturn. Look at some further research on these hexagons that weren’t from a news source. Wikipedia was a good bet, right?
He clicked on Saturn’s Wikipedia page. Hexagons on Saturn. He tutted to himself. Was he mad? Talk about clutching at straws. Grace starts drawing something hexagonal and all of a sudden she’s directly linked to Saturn. Get a grip, Ashley. Get a grip.
Before he could close the page and leave this musty-smelling room to the chatter of the outside corridor, he noticed something else.
It was a little image of Saturn and its moons. All sixty-two of them.
