Previous: Interlude IV | Next: Chapter 19
Elsewhere.
…
I wasn’t angry anymore. All of that had gone out of me; the feeling was already distant, its object even moreso. Whatever happened after I gave in to the current drifted from my grasp, a greyscale blur, and when I searched for it again I didn’t find it.
No, none of that was left. I mostly just felt… soaked. Below me was mud, and all around was tall, damp grass rustling as I stirred, and across my hair and skin and clothes were glassy rivulets of water, seeping in to the bone.
The sky was grey and static, like a stretch of water beneath a thick pall of thunderclouds, my vision flipped on its axis– blurred into oblivion in a way that ached to stare too deeply into. The light that fell around me came from too many places at once and at the same time had no source at all, just as flat, just as strange.
I was definitely not awake.
I pressed my hands into the earth, ignoring the blades of grass cutting ethereally through my fingers as I sat up, looked around. I took a hollow breath of air into my lungs, which, I seemed to dimly recall, probably meant that nothing too bad had happened out there, when I… lost it. If I wasn’t fine I figured all this would have been much more terrifying. I also could have just been making up the rules as I went along, but when it came down to it either was fine by me.
The edges of my vision wavered and warped in the nonexistent wind; it was strange, but I caught the familiar scent of smoke, though against the sky I couldn’t make any out. Through the grass I couldn’t see train tracks, but the trees on the distant edges of the field were, I knew, by actual memory or by intuition, the same ones I’d passed a few hours ago.
There was no doubt that I was on the outskirts of Roan, again. Of course I was– given the circumstances anywhere else would’ve been quite a bit more jarring. I just wasn’t actually entirely sure… why.
As I tried to quell the vertigo and to will the silvery water out of my clothes and into the quiet, shallow pools around me, it caught my attention.
A barely-there buzz and thrum in the air. A tiny ladybug swept into my vision, the first thing I’d actually seen moving. It strafed my face and I turned to watch as it circled, for a few moments, before lightly touching down on a blade of grass, facing me. I leaned in close as its iridescent wings fluttered and closed, the spots on its faded crimson shell blinking at me. An antenna flicked, once.
Hello, then.
As quickly as it had arrived, my visitor took off, practically flying into my face (though, on reflection, I doubted it could have ever touched me). It drifted away in swoops and whorls across the plain, towards the treeline, beyond which I knew I’d find the houses of Roan. And one, of particular interest to me. To many others as well, now.
Maybe that figure, whoever, whatever they were, really was nothing more than me talking to myself, again. But again, either way, if I was dreaming and apparently not about to wake up any time soon, I could try what I knew I could.
And what I knew, then, was the Weavers. I’d seen Renee in two minds, now. Whether or not I could help her, in the states the both of us were in, the decision to try wasn’t anything like a choice at all.
Shaking the last of the silver from my fingertips, I started to move. It was slow, the horizon bending and receding under the weight of the sky, but just like before, when I knew my course and my destination the journey began to glide away.
I couldn’t count my steps, or measure the time that didn’t pass by the static sky, or even the distance I travelled– so I counted by spans of memory. I recalled the rail and suddenly its metal was cold and solid beneath my feet, as I crossed it into town. I recalled the grass growing between the wide street’s flagstones just as I felt myself step over them. I would have reached my destination eventually no matter which direction I’d gone; but I knew the way.
Things watched me from the dim, dusty windows of the low houses to either side. Vague shapes of people that I couldn’t quite see and that, like everything else here, I couldn’t feel. Moving shadows flickered in my vision where the walls and glass slipped from my mind, vanishing just as suddenly.
I’d seen so few people in Roan that the sudden shadowy assembly seemed very strange, in that deadened way that everything did. But I had to have an audience, of course I did. That made sense. For the moment, I didn’t care.
At some point, I must have reached the house, because in the end that’s where I found myself.
The statuesque stone snakes coiled around the doorframe, just like I’d been shown before. They slithered around one another with glacial momentum, their scales – etched more intricately, polished more cleanly than their mundane counterparts in the world outside possibly could have been – rippling down their interminable lengths. Their heads glittered, spotted with yet more silver raindrops.
One had its head raised to the hollow sky, its eyes softly closed; the other stared into me from aside the doorway. It blinked, just once.
When I went inside, the world seemed to resolve itself, if only slightly. The light found itself with more definition, the wood’s texture grew deeper, the colours of the wallpaper more vibrant than I remembered. The smell of paper wafted below the ceiling, strong enough that for the first time I found myself forced to stop. But I let the feelings drift away, willingly.
It took me longer than I might care to admit to decide exactly what was normal and what wasn’t. You never knew; things were weird. If the snakes and the shadows and all had some sort of provenance as to what this dream-vision wanted from me, or wanted to tell me, though, I didn’t know that either. Ultimately the decision was more to let go of those things, for now. To let it all be subsumed by my momentum and purpose and to focus on what was important.
In any case, though, I may later have considered that not all of it had been there for me and for me alone.
I only knocked on the cracked bedroom door once before it opened, and I entered. And Renee Weaver wasn’t asleep any longer (at least not in the sense that presently mattered). She wasn’t lying down in bed, either. She stood by the open window, looking out at the field behind the house and everything beyond, her curls falling down her back, the rise and fall of her shoulders even and measured.
I stopped just inside the doorway, but she didn’t seem to acknowledge my presence. It was the first time I’d even seen her conscious (again, not quite accurate, I thought, but I had to make the distinctions somehow), and she looked… fine. So much better than I remembered. It was just too bad I couldn’t feel her heart.
While she continued, apparently, to not notice me, or to do anything else in particular, I cautiously walked over to her side– the floor beneath my feet and the wood against my hand so shockingly real after so long pulling myself along and forward through this abstract sea. I almost reached out to touch her, to feel that she was there, but I didn’t. I just tried to follow her gaze out the window.
The wildflowers running through the street outside swayed in waves, even without a breeze. The deep, heavy clouds enveloping the world seemed to shimmer, too.
I hadn’t noticed it, before – or maybe it hadn’t even been there – but there was a haze over the trees in the distance. I had to tilt my head quite a bit before I could make out what it was. A sheet of rainfall on the horizon.
I turned, and once again her eyes met my own. And however half-hearted it appeared, she was actually smiling. I found I was holding my breath, afraid of breaking her reverie, her presence, though it couldn’t have mattered less.
She studied my face through heavy eyelids for a time I couldn’t measure before, her voice hoarse and dreamy, Renee said, “I’ve been seeing all this for a long time. My home–” she gestured, without looking. “Those clouds. I’ve had quiet dreams like this since even before I was really… swept away, here. This time I thought I was hallucinating, seeing my memories replayed and filling in the gaps…”
Her voice sounded like her wife’s; like they’d spent so long together that they had rubbed off the tiniest affectations on each other (unless it was just my imagination blurring the lines). She raised an eyebrow. “But I have no idea who you are, so clearly something else has happened. That’s strange, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” I said, barely above a whisper. “I’m not sure how real any of this is. If I could find you here… I don’t know how much of it is something… something either of us are dreaming. How much isn’t.”
“Yes,” she said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. She paused. “So who are you? And why have I met you, here?”
“I believe, one way or another,” I said, “that I’m here to help you. To try and heal you, to help you wake up. To… to save you.”
“From what?” she asked.
“...I still don’t know. Not everything, not how or why. But it was – it is – rooted all through your body. Your heart, your blood, your brain. I can’t feel it anymore, but out there I could. It felt like agony.”
“Not quite agony, but… well, maybe close.” Her smile was gone, her expression indistinct, and her eyes were drawn back to the window. But she raised a brow again. “I’m aware of what the skein is. There were just a few moments of lucidity I can recall from the last time I was awake, but I remember. I can’t say how either, but here we both are, right?”
“You know?”
“Mm. Please,” she said, “don’t try to tell me everything. It’s already so cloudy. It’s all over. It’s not like I didn’t care, but… I didn’t realize. It seems so far away until it hits this close to home.” She gestured, vaguely, at the whole space very much resembling her bedroom in which we stood. “I mean, really.”
She paused. Seemed to recompose her presence. “I… I would prefer, if you, whoever you are, have appeared to me as an aide, if we could focus on the present.”
“Yes. Sure,” I said, and nodded, mostly to myself. “I came to you because it reacts to me. We made progress, out there; I think I can fix it. I am going to fix it. I’ll wake you up. I’ll get you back to Beau.”
She inhaled, sharply. “Beau.”
“...I think she’s afraid,” I said. “Because she– well, because, you and her– she doesn’t know what to do.” I tried to put the thought into words.
“But s-she… she loves you.“
It felt weird to say. Even to think. But I’d felt how she’d felt, heard how she’d talked. And as much as I was able, I searched Renee’s face, too, and there again was that same deep, deep sorrow. Maybe some of the similarities were the details of reality being warped by this dream; but some of it was real, too. It was her.
Renee, through her painfully sad smile, laughed shortly, and then she seemed to drift again, staring through my shoulder with that expression on her face. “She asked me to marry her. I should hope I don’t need you to tell me so,” she said. “I don’t know how much you can do to help me, when it seems we’re both caught in the current like this. But thank you.”
I wanted to tell myself that no, I was alright, even if I couldn’t wake up, that I was there to help, but at this point literally and metaphorically I wasn’t sure how much of that I could say was true. For now, though, it was what we had.
“You still haven’t told me who you are,” she said. “And considering you seem to be an immortal the fact I don’t know you is very odd.” I stopped myself from being taken aback, again. Of course she could put the pieces together.
“I am… Adeline. Just Adeline.”
“And I am Renee Weaver,” said Renee. “Although given the apparent circumstances I’m sure you’re aware. I suppose it’s a pleasure to meet you– also despite the circumstances. I’m sorry to say, though, that I don’t think pulling the both of us out of this will be as simple as reminding me… reminding me of her.”
“Clearly not,” I sighed. I glanced out the window again, clouds swirling into each other overhead, the rainfall still there on the ever-more-smeared horizon. “I guess one of us is imagining all this. Or both of us. Or...”
“Or the skein is imagining for us,” she posited, and I hesitated. “I can’t say whether it’s truly conscious of anything, or alive any more than a tumour is, but I believe it’s safe to say that it’s more than just us, here.”
“You might be right,” I said, because now was hardly the time to elaborate on… everything else I’d seen. “But is there any difference to us right now?”
“In whose dream we’re dreaming?” she asked. “I don’t think I can say. At least not concisely. There’s a bit of a scholarly debate, you see, a philosophical one, and I may not be an expert but in recent days it has piqued my interest; that is to say the nature of experience, of qualia–”
“Stay with me, Renee. Please.”
She stopped herself, looking at me like she’d been shaken awake from half-consciousness. That did worry me. “Don’t get lost. I can still take care of this.”
“Yes, yes...” she said, softly. “Even when I’m lucid dreaming I guess I don’t know when to give it a rest. She’ll have something to tell me about that when I find her again, I’m sure.” I allowed myself a small chuckle, and she sighed. “Where shall we go, then?”
“...I’m not sure,” I admitted. “This is your home.”
“I suppose it is,” she said. In spite of that, as she looked past my shoulder again, away from the window and towards the door, she froze. A grip of panic started to bubble up through the dreamy haze I was still trying to clear, before I turned to see what had transfixed her.
There was someone else in the room with us, standing, hunched, by the empty bed. Not quite a person though.
It was an image of cold, silent lightning, the crackling shapes that arced together and forked out of its body arranged in the vague shape of a humanoid figure. It cast no light as the branch of numbingly-dead electric fire that must have been its hand raised to its chest, the core of it, where every other arc stemmed from, but against the now-distorted backdrop of the room it seemed to buzz and thrum all the same. Not like the skein in Renee, though. It was alone. Whispered to my other senses.
The ball of lightning that was its head was tilted down, leaning over the bed where, in the waking world, I knew Renee’s surely still-unconscious body lay.
Then, outside, there was a thunderclap, and without any fanfare at all the figure fizzled and seemed to collapse into the ground, its lightning-bolt body dissipating and the room around and behind it seeming to be pulled back by our shared memories into some semblance of stability. I knew.
“...That was Beau, wasn’t it?” I asked as I looked back to Renee, but I stopped. She stared at the place it had been, the silent grief etched into the lines of her face.
“Yes,” she said simply. “I saw her, at least. And I’d rather not discuss it further than that.” She took a deep, empty breath. “How long has it been since you fell asleep, I suppose, or however you ended up here?”
“I guess it feels like it’s been some time, but… I’m not sure.”
“So even you can’t be certain of what’s happening to her, and to anyone else out there, anymore. But if you were tangled up in the skein, if it’s been incited to consume more than just me, I don’t know that it will stop with only the two of us.”
If it was possible, that ever-present nauseous feeling in the abstract location of my gut might have peaked. “Yeah.”
Regardless of how steady I had been before, given what I’d done, what I’d talked to, the chaos enveloping us that seemed only to deepen, and despite how little I could afford to waste thought on things I could no longer control, I doubted any of this could have meant good news, out there. For Marcel, Beau, everyone.
She shook her head, clearing the lingering hum, and when she opened her eyes she seemed even more determined than I was. “You’re here to help? Because I have enough of an idea of what the skeins tend to do that I’d rather not let ourselves wither. And I know where we might be able to go.”
And that was that. She had the momentum, and I stayed close.
However strong our determination, though, however hard we could fight to get all of us through this, we were stopped the moment we crossed the threshold of the front door, below the serpentine arch, now still, by another thunderclap. In unison we turned our attention to the pregnant grey sky above, the clouds now so low that staring into them was enough to send the feeling of that oppressive weight through my chest.
The sky that enveloped us rumbled and rolled and cracked open, just like before. And like before from the night-dark void on the other side poured a rain of quicksilver, glittering in the pale light as drop by drop fell over us and began to pool beneath our feet.
Before I could blink the cracks in the flagstones were flooded with silver, and in moments more, however long a moment was, the tide rose and rose until it was a struggle even to wade through it. Metaphorically or literally probably didn’t make much of a difference by then.
Renee and I locked eyes, our faces lit from below as we moved as fast as we could through the torrent to wordlessly seek out higher ground, unsure of what would happen if we were separated by another flood but neither of us willing to find out. We crossed the flooded street with its windows now truly vacant, and through the noise of the storm, she guided me towards whatever her destination was, winding towards the edge of town.
She placed a hand on my shoulder to steady herself – to steady both of us, honestly – and without thinking I reached up and gripped it with my own. It was cold, and soaked, and only tangentially there on any rational level, I knew, but I clung to her. We managed to follow a low ridge and make it above the flood, before it pulled either of us away again; and the rain kept coming.
Through the sound of pounding rain on the road ahead of us, I heard the same faint, melodic screech I’d heard before, whatever it was. It was where she was leading us.
We started to run, staying ahead of the chaos. Because I wasn’t going to let her drown.
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