by Iain Ryan
Black ash.
Ochre blood on the walls.
You are only a short way in when the smooth stone pedestal appears. This is the pedestal from which you woke.
You climb up onto it and lie down.
You close your eyes.
The pedestal shudders and descends down into the earth below.
44
You drop smoothly through a corridor of rock into a colossal underground cavern the length and height of the forest above. It is a grim place. Sharp coal stalactites and grey rock. You look over the edge of the pedestal and see that it sits aloft a tall column that steadily draws you down towards a black lake.
A gentle mist soaks your skin until you crash through the water’s surface wherein the pedestal continues to drop without you, leaving you suspended in the water, breathless and silent.
You search the void, hair swirling.
A long thin shape emerges from the darkness, moving like a snake. The shape is some distance away but as it draws near, you see it for what it is: a tentacle.
Another of these shapes appear.
Then another.
Then the whole beast comes into a view. A squid the size of a castle. An immense creature with mottled skin the colour and texture of manure and rotting fruit. Its tentacles swim past and the throbbing openings are like gaping mouths, opening and closing and trailing dark red ink.
Within seconds, the giant squid fills your vision, blocking the light from above. It envelops you. Its limbs close tight.
An eye peers out of the mess.
A mouth too. It gapes open, drawing water and shifting the current. As your body is sucked into the beast, you catch hold of one of its fangs, holding on. The water roars around you.
The creature emits a volcanic howl and shakes itself.
You lose your grip.
You disappear inside it.
45
Light sparks.
Red.
White.
Red.
White.
Red.
A room of red. A marbled floor. The walls and ceiling, bare. Bare and red, the red of innards and gore. Yet there is nothing organic about this room. There is a desk in one corner. The wall behind the desk glows, lighting the room, and you can see a woman sitting there, writing. She has long hair and wears a uniform of unfamiliar origin: the trousers of a man matched with a chest-covering that includes a druid’s hood. Her face remains obscured by the light.
‘What is this?’ you say.
The woman startles. ‘Holy shit.’
‘Who are you?’
‘Who am I?’ she says. ‘Who the fuck are you? How’d you get in here?’
‘A squid took me.’
‘A squid?’
‘A giant squid. Where is this?’
‘This is my home,’ says the woman. ‘It’s where I live.’
‘Are we inside the squid?’
‘No. No, we’re inside Erma now. That’s the name of this place.’ The woman stands from her desk. She moves closer, studying you. You recognise her.
The girl from your visions.
The girl glimpsed in the dungeon.
She spots the change in you. ‘Do you know me?’
‘Dora.’
‘That’s right,’ and she inspects you, her face close now.
You flash back to Rohank screaming:
Go under.
Dora. Dora. Dora.
This is your heart, barbarian! Inherit your life!
Dora. Dora. Dora
She says, ‘Who are you?’
‘I’m Sero.’
‘Never heard of you. But you look like something out of these books I read as a kid. Are you real?’
‘Yes. Are you real?’
‘Real enough,’ she says. ‘Do you have any idea why you’re here? I’ve never had a guest before.’
‘I’ve come for my memories. I’m without them.’
‘Are you now?’ she says. ‘Hmmm, I’m not really in the business of gifting memories. That’s not really my thing.’
‘What are you? A mystic?’
‘Near enough,’ she says. ‘Do you have gold on you?’
You nod.
‘Well, then I can write you some memories, I guess. What do you want to be? A business executive? A public intellectual? A cage fighter? An amateur detective? Name your poison.’
‘I want real memories. No more stories.’
The girl walks back to her desk. ‘You don’t scare me. You’ll get what you’re given. I think you should be a great hero. Violent but in aid of something noble and grandiose, someone likeable, relatable, friendly. Yes, that’ll suit you well, I—’
Enough.
You draw your sword and stick Dora with the blade, pushing it through her shoulder. As the sword enters, a cold chill runs up your arm bringing with it a murky vision:
A house. A set of gardens. A pool. All of it familiar from previous visions. This is the land of summer nights. There are two figures in a pool, lit from a submerged orb.
One called Erma.
One called Euan.
They’re apart but they’re talking.
Both smiling.
You hover in the air above them, the pool a broad white rectangle. Slowly you slide down to them and in through the top of Erma’s head, into her thoughts. You hear her and her voice says:
You ever meet someone and know they’ll change your life? I have. That was Euan. Right from the fucking start. The sensation didn’t have a name but, looking at him, I knew he was going to shake things up and I was right.
Looking back, Euan presented choices. He was a fork in the road where there was only one path before. His arrival sheared my singular, young-person life into two new realms and led me so far down one of those paths that I forgot – for a long time – that another branch existed. I forgot that an intersection sat way, way back in the rear-view. A point of departure.
In fiction, these intersections are the ‘inciting incidents’ of a story. They’re the situation that forces the protagonist into the plot. When executed in linear storytelling, the protagonist cannot return to how things were before the intersection, not once the inciting incident has happened. That incident is a portal. The writer pushes their character through it. The character is never supposed to have the agency to crawl back through, to go back up to the intersection and reconsider her options. To do this breaks the story and the story is the reality of fiction.
And so it is that Euan now swims across my mother’s pool in a line that feels locked and unavoidable. A red thread joining us. There is no shifting him from this trajectory. No changing my response to it.
Not now.
He whispers, ‘Marco?’
And I whisper ‘Polo’ and we both laugh as he slips his arms around me, pulling me into the kiss that opens up the other timeline.
46
‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ screams Dora. ‘What did you do that for? Ahhh, fuck, fuck.’ She grabs at the hole in her shoulder and writhes around in her chair, gasping. ‘Am I going to die? Jesus.’
You tell her she’ll live unless you stick her again. ‘I want what I came for.’
‘Yeah, yeah.’
‘Now!’
‘All right. Hold on.’ She picks up her pen and starts scratching out words on a piece of parchment. As she writes, she mutters to herself. ‘Oh, I guess. Yes, that’ll do it. OK, OK.’
You feel a slight tingling sensation in your hand and open your palm. A clear canister materialises, some textile you do not recognise. When it’s fully formed you hold it up to your face and say, ‘What is this?’
Dora grits her teeth through the pain. ‘I wrote you a potion. You drink that, it’ll give you whatever you’ve got locked inside you.’
‘I’ve had more than enough of these tricks,’ you say, remembering the journey and its various hallucinations and elixirs.
‘It’s all I can offer.’
You bring the canister to your mouth. You take a sip. It tastes like wa
ter.
The woman watches. ‘It’s what you want, isn’t it? It’s your choice. Look, just fucking swallow it and get out of here.’
You turn away from her.
You stare into the red walls.
No.
You spit the potion out and swing the blade at Dora’s neck, splashing her blood across the room in a gushing arc. As soon as the splatter hits the walls, it discolours the red there, stripping it away. As Dora gurgles in the background, clutching her throat, eyes wide, you inspect one particular splatter of blood on the wall. It glimmers like sunlight on water. You go in close and there in the blood is your reflection.
A mirror.
You look into it.
You recognise the face staring back.
ERMA
I’m gone, until someone asks me as much:
‘Are you there?’
I think it’s a hallucination. ‘Fuck off.’
‘Hey?’
‘What?’
‘The water is poison. You were right to stop drinking it.’
‘Oh, OK.’
‘You’re detoxing. That’s why you’re sick.’
And there it is.
A pinprick in the wall of my cell.
The first dot of light.
The voice has a name. Laura. At least, she tells me that’s her name. I can glimpse parts of her face through the small hole she’s carved in the wall. Ginger hair, pale skin, glasses. She’s one of the girls I saw in the corridor a few days or weeks ago. She visits me for ten seconds at a time.
‘Erma?’
‘Yeah?’
‘You’re not drinking the water, are you?’
A thin rubbery tube is pushed through the hole, blocking it momentarily. A muffled voice says, Put this in your mouth. I try it, some instinct kicking in. I sip on the tube and my mouth fills with cool liquid. I keep at it until I hear the sucking sound of the last drops being hoovered up from a plastic bottle.
‘More tomorrow,’ says Laura.
‘Wait.’
‘No. More tomorrow. They’re coming.’
‘Hey, Erma, are you awake?’
The tube comes through again and I drink. The tube disappears.
I ask her, ‘How long have you been in here?’
‘Two years.’
‘Can you get out?’
‘No. There’s cameras.’
‘Where?’
‘I’ve gotta go. Don’t drink the water.’
‘Are you living out there?’
‘Yes. There’s a flat. I’m in the bathroom. I’ve got to go. They can see me in here.’
‘Erma, drink this.’
‘Thanks. How did you make this hole?’
‘I used a butter knife.’
‘Is that the only sharp thing you have out there?’
‘It’s all we’re allowed.’
‘Do you have more than one?’
‘We have three.’
‘Can you push one through?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Erma?’
‘Where are the others?’
‘They’re scared. Here’s the knife.’
I don’t remember asking for this but I take it.
Laura says, ‘You need to hide it or they’ll hurt us if they find it in there with you. I mean it.’
‘OK.’
‘What are you going to do with it? Jimmy the lock?’
I say the first thing that comes into my head. ‘I’m going to sharpen it.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m going to kill one of them.’
‘OK. Be careful. If you can, kill the woman. The one in the dress. Her name is Sadie.’
‘Is that his wife?’
‘She pretends to be.’
‘Erma, are you there?’
‘I’m here.’
The tube comes through. I drink.
I ask the question I’ve been making myself sick over. ‘How long have I been in here?’
‘About a month.’
I do the maths, thinking about how much weight and power I’ve lost. ‘I need more water. I need a supply.’
‘I’ll try.’
I sharpen the butter knife.
Three days later, they come for me and they almost catch me mid-workout. I’m partially rehydrated by then. Laura has taken her life into her hands and made extra trips to the hole. After some goading on my part, she installs a three litre plastic bottle of water on the other side of the wall, hiding it as best she can. I have no idea what’s out there for her or how much immediate danger we’re in but I don’t need to know. I only have to elude detection for another week or two, another stretch of solitary darkness to get back into some kind of shape.
My cell is big enough. I can do a push-up in it.
I can do full squats.
Crunches.
I can run drills, lashing out at the darkness. I can work for hours.
Jab.
Cross.
Jab.
Kick low.
Jab.
Low cross.
Jab.
Kick.
And this is why I’m sweating when they open the door.
‘She still looks sick,’ says the thin woman in the black dress. Always the same dress. Sadie.
Harlan peers in. ‘You sick, bitch?’
I’ve got the knife stashed in the corner by their feet. If they ever step inside, they will see it.
But not today.
Drew and a man I don’t recognise drag me out of the hole and tighten the leather mask I have to wear when I’m going outside. Then they carry me upstairs in the wheelchair with Harlan meeting us halfway. They all want to stick around for my chat with Archibald – Harlan is worried: ‘She looks fucking crazy’ – but Archibald won’t have it. He has me in the room where we first met. It’s raining.
When we’re alone, Archibald says, ‘You look OK to me.’
I nod slowly, squinting around with veiled eyes.
‘I take it you’re drinking again,’ he says. ‘That’s good, Erma. Good for you. You really had me worried after our last appointment.’
I nod again. I let my head flop around loosely on my shoulders.
Archie seems to buy it. ‘Let’s get started, shall we? Today’s a big day. I’ve been studying your file and I’m happy to report that I’ve finalised your treatment plan. There’s nothing too badly broken in you, nothing a little bit of flooding won’t fix down the track. And Roberto’s been telling Harlan he’s keen to start helping out with that once he’s on the mend. Drew as well.’
‘I … I want to get better.’
I want to drive a knife into you, Archibald.
I want to live long enough to hurt you.
‘Excellent,’ he says. ‘OK, let’s start with some stories. I want you to tell me about your twin, this girl called Dora.’
‘She’s not my twin. I told you that.’
‘Oh yes, that’s right. She’s younger, yes?’
‘Eleven months.’
‘And she’s in Melbourne?’
‘I don’t know where she is.’
‘You know your parents are worried about you, yes? They needn’t be but they’ve been, well, visible.’ Archibald puts a hand on a manila envelope that sits on the coffee table between us. ‘We’ve had people out here looking for you, but we don’t like to interrupt a guest’s progress once they’ve started. Your mother, I must say, is an interesting woman. Very interesting.’
They’re just words. He’s just a man speaking. Stay calm.
‘I believe your parents were notified of your disappearance not long after you came here. The woman who works with you, the troubled one, I know all about her, she’s been raising hell down in the city. Your parents caught wind of it and came up from Melbourne. They aren’t far away, Erma. Not far at all.’
‘OK.’
Breathe.
‘It’s a funny story, actually. Your friend – what is her name? The Indian one – she’s been causing trouble for ye
ars now. Years. Always going on and on about a couple of our guests. Our guests who, well, they don’t want to leave and we don’t want them to leave, so it’s a load of bother. We’ve seen so much progress in Drew, in particular, since they came out here. If your Indian friend could see that, she might take a more constructive view of what we do out here. But no. That loudmouth keeps blabbering on, trying to ruin everything.’ He pauses there. ‘Is any of this registering? Am I making sense?’
‘No. You lost me.’
He looks out the window and sighs. ‘Your friend understood. The other one. Jenny. Lovely girl. An easy patient. Completely broken before she got here, of course. Addicted, thoroughly. But that helps sometimes. She had a sister too, didn’t she? What ended up happening with Jenny, that was a mistake, plain and simple. It should never have happened.
‘Sorry, I still don’t …’
‘You weren’t supposed to be there that night, if you remember. If you cast your mind back, you were supposed to be in Spain. Poor Drew watched the flat for a week, trailing …’ and he clicks his fingers.
‘Kanika.’
‘Yes, that’s it. Kanika. She was house-sitting, wasn’t she? Drew had her at your apartment every night right up until the night we sent Jenny in there for her. It was an exercise that would have really helped Jenny, I think. But it all went a bit pear-shaped.’
‘Why would Jenny want to hurt Kanika?’
‘Oh no. We told her she was going in there to shoot you. We just saw a convenient moment, so to speak. Jenny had all sorts of strange ideas about you. Those ideas really started to manifest during the early stages of her treatment. And shooting you, or a version of you – I mean, shooting Kanika believing it was you – it could have been such a win-win for her and us. And young Jenny really didn’t need much coaxing. A bit of medication. A bit of therapy. Some time to reflect. She hated you already and when we threatened to bring her sister out here for a visit, that’s about as much as it took to prepare her.’
‘I saw Drew that night.’
‘You did. And Harlan, in fact. They were both watching the sister, in case Jenny refused her treatment. I sometimes wonder what might have happened if either of them connected the dots and worked out who you were exactly. Harlan’s not the brightest boy, unfortunately. But still, you weren’t supposed to even be in the country, were you? No, poor Harlan had no idea. And yet he was quite smitten after seeing you that night. Quite smitten. Even more so after you fought off Jenny and he started looking into how you did that, your fighting and all that business.’
