Katalepsis 1.4

Thank you once again [USER=937]@skaianDestiny[/USER] for this ongoing fast lane commission.

This month, I'll be reading through the next two chapters of Katalepsis. Where we left off previously, Evelyn had rescued Heather from the ziggurats-covered-in-eyeballs dimension and deposited her safely back in the Medieval Metaphysics office, where Raine then found her. They have no idea what happened to Evelyn though, so Raine is taking Heather and a nightstick to go check her apartment and make sure she's not having her face eaten off or anything. Heather is overly impressed and intimidated by Raine having a nightstick, which is kind of adorable.

But first, on a pair of minor notes:

• I just realized that the university Medieval Metaphysics department is another Lovecraft reference, this time to "The Thing On the Doorstep," a story that *also* features a college's queer occultist subculture (albeit portrayed a whole hell of a lot more negatively).

• Remember when I tacked "Mason" to the end of my ridiculous joke-surname for Heather? I asked the author, and the character ACTUALLY IS named after Heather Mason from the Silent Hill games. I can't believe I noscoped that lol.

Anyway, enough preamble. Let's read some lesbian scene girls vs. eldritch abominations!

“I halted at the front gate to Evelyn’s house as Raine stepped onto the garden path. When she realised I wasn’t following, she turned and raised her eyebrows at me.

”You have got to be joking,” I said. “Evelyn lives here? Alone?”

”Her family owns the house. It’s complicated. Come on, it’ll be fine, she won’t bite, not this time.””

Right. It was a house, not just an apartment. I don't remember exactly what was implied about Evelyn's family situation in the previous chapter, but I recall it being a tense and somewhat sordid one. Still, at least she's getting a house out of it. Almost makes you wonder why she and Raine don't have their base here instead of the school.

...also, where does Raine live, I wonder? If she's here to protect Evelyn, and Evelyn has a house to herself, why isn't Raine living in it with her? I guess we'll probably find out in this chapter.

“We’d left campus about twenty minutes ago, skirted the northern side of the student quarter, and crossed over into Sharrowford’s frayed eastern edge. Overlarge houses from another era squatted between weed-choked empty lots.”

Do they have....g A m b R E l      r O o F s ?

:V

“Further west, toward the city’s core, these sorts of hulks got redeveloped, but out here they were home to the occasional student squat, older people unable to move away, and those poor fools hanging on to second homes in the vain hope of selling them one day. It wasn’t unsafe, but it wasn’t pretty either.”

Ah. I'm guessing Evelyn's family fall into that last group. And just letting her use it while she's going to school in town, because you might as well get *some* use out of the damned place.

“My hallucinations loved this place. Shaggy mammoths of hide and scale strode across the horizon, ghoulish forms watched us from dark corners but whipped away as we approached, and prowling canine shapes flowed back into the streets behind us as we passed, padding after me with pack curiosity.

I tried to ignore the itch between my shoulder blades, the feeling of being cut off, my retreat blocked.

Raine held my hand nearly the whole way. I hadn’t known what to do about that, hadn’t wanted to risk commenting on it in case she stopped. At first I was self-conscious. What if somebody saw us? But as we settled into a rhythm of walking, I allowed myself to enjoy the moments of peace and quiet, alongside a person I wanted to trust so badly.

When we stopped in front of Number 12 Barnslow Drive, I wondered for an abstracted moment if Raine was a serial killer, and if this was where she hid the bodies.”

Yeah, that is a concern. Next time you should bring a nightstick of your own along, Heather. This is why people carry those. In fact, you should carry two. Learn to dual wield.

Some interesting wildlife around these parts, if nothing else. None of these critters sound similar to the ones wandering around the university area. Different habitats, or is it a matter of different creatures being attracted to Heather's emotional states or whatever? Too early to tell.

The fact that some of these creatures - like the doglike things here and the skelebirds in chapter one - seem able to see humans and consider them worth paying attention to has implications. Not sure which implications, but a nonzero quantity of them.

“Evelyn’s house was a late Victorian red-brick monster draped with a mantle of overgrown ivy. A few tiny sash windows peered out into the street, all of them with curtains drawn. Blue tarpaulin patches peeked out from the damaged slate roof. The garden had gone to seed, grass matted and crowded out by moss, one huge tree in the back rustling in the wind. The garden path was at least clear of debris, but the paving stones were cracked and weathered. Framed by the overcast sky above Sharrowford that afternoon, this house was the last place I wanted to be.”

Evelyn either doesn't bother taking care of the lawn and garden, or she digs the abandoned ruin aesthetic, or she's afraid of pissing off the evil lawn spirit that she shares the property with.

The correct answer is option C, of course.

“Raine’s own obvious trepidation didn’t help. She wore her usual encouraging smile as she squeezed my hand and coaxed me over the garden threshold, but a tightness had seized her eyes, a thrumming expectation in her movements.

She’d tried to call Evelyn three more times on the way here. Straight to voice mail. Text messages too, no response.

She finally let go of my hand once we reached the front door, and shot me an attempt at a reassuring look. “Seriously, Heather, take a deep breath, it’s gonna be fine this time, I swear.””

Yeah, but it's not Evelyn's bitchiness that Raine is trepidatious about. It's whatever she brought the nightstick as a precaution against. I believe her when she says that things will be fine socially as long as they do, in fact, meet Evelyn, but she fears they might not get to. That lawn spirit has been really aggressive lately.

“I nodded and reminded myself that I wasn’t doing anything that crazy. A girl I sort of liked was trying to get me to be friends with her best friend, that was all. A little social effort and risk. They also both believed in the occult. Oh well.

What was the alternative? I glanced down the street at the swarm of hallucinations blocking my way out. Didn’t fancy walking back alone, shouldering my way through the claws and reeking fur and alien drool. I guessed that was my subconscious telling me I wanted this.

Raine pulled out her bunch of keys and fitted one into the lock.

”You have her door key?” I asked.

”Yeah. Like I said, she’s kinda the whole reason I’m here in Sharrowford. You know, look after her, keep certain kinds of people away from her, make sure she doesn’t hurt herself.” Raine tensed up as she swung the door inward, then relaxed when nothing jumped out at us. She took a step inside and called out. “Evee! Evee, s’me.””

So, why doesn't she just live with her then?

“I crossed the threshold. Raine closed the door behind us.

I don’t believe in love at first sight, but I was smitten with that house’s interior from the first step.”

Oh god Heather please don't tell me you want to fuck the creepy old manor house too...

“The large, open entrance hall probably used to be grand and fancy, a place to impress social callers. But it had since been hollowed out, re-filled and reused, like a hermit crab’s shell. Bare floorboards, cracked plaster, exposed ceiling beams. Less-faded rectangles of cream paint showed where paintings had once hung. Boxes were piled up against one wall, some of them crammed with stacks of paperback books, others filled with odd bric-a-brac, little pewter statues, painted wooden masks, all sorts of strange things I could have spent hours wondering at.

A grandfather clock stood opposite, ticking away the seconds, a beautiful oak and brass relic of the nineteenth century. I’d never seen a real grandfather clock; they were for haunted houses in old movies. I found the sound calming and unwavering. Several thick rugs covered the floor and the heating was turned up against the gathering cold, pumping from a wall-mounted iron radiator, another real relic. I could see the kitchen through one open doorway. A set of creaky-looking stairs vanished up into the darkness of the second floor. Half the room was cast into shadows by the soft ceiling light.

It was so cosy. No manufactured anonymity in sight. The sort of place I wish I dreamed about. I had to remind myself this house belonged to Evelyn, who had been very rude to me. Perhaps we had some taste in common, at least.”

I doubt Evelyn had all that much of a hand in how the place is decorated. Though I could be wrong on that; the attention being called to the hasty-looking remodeling might suggest that Evelyn had it modified for whacky magical purposes.

The line comparing the house to a snailshell used by hermit crab after hermit crab was excellent. Really captures a tone and feeling without being too complicated of a simile.

“Raine cupped her hands to her mouth. “Evee!”

Silence.

”Hmm, well, all her shoes are here, so she must be in.” Raine puffed out a long breath. “Evelyn!””

Unless something dragged her out of the house, but I feel like there'd be signs of that if so.

I also doubt she'd have gone dimension-hopping barefoot, so she definitely came back here at some point after rescuing Heather.

“I noticed the shoes scattered by the doorway—old trainers, some big weatherproof boots, a pair of fluffy uggs—along with a coat and an anorak hung up on hooks nearby. A wooden walking stick was propped next to the door. Then I noticed two of the rugs had been rolled up and pushed against the walls to clear a space.

”Are the carpets meant to be like that? … Raine, what is that?”

We hadn’t seen it at first, in the gloom. Raine quickly kicked her shoes off and went for a better look. I slipped my shoes off too and followed her.

It was a magic circle.

Exactly like you might see in those silly books about pagan rituals and summoning demons, all multiple interlocking rings and esoteric symbols, with a few words written in Greek around the edges.”

I still want to know why the demons can speak Greek and Latin, but not modern languages. Or other archaic languages, for that matter. Going by the folklore this genre typically draws from, Aramaic should be another big one.

...well, to be fair, a British undergrad student is much more likely to speak Greek or Latin than Aramaic or Old Hebrew, so I guess Raine might not have bothered to ask about that lol.

“It was drawn with a mixture of chalk and dry-erase marker, straight onto the bare floorboards. The chalk and pens lay nearby, along with a sports bottle full of water and a bag of cheese snacks. A big leather-bound book was open on the floor, showing a diagram which looked very much like the magic circle, next to a smaller modern notebook with additions and redesigns of the symbols.

One of my hallucinations brooded in the darkest corner, a hunched, emaciated thing with tiny pinpoint black eyes and thin bones, skin stretched over bulging ribs, twitching to itself and plucking at the ground with blunt claws. A product of my private tension. I did my best not to look.”

These repeated insistences that the arcanofauna are manifestations of Heather's emotions are starting to feel intrusive. I get that she's clinging onto her belief that she's hallucinating them, but it's become pretty repetitive.

““Ahh jeez, Evee, what the hell have you been doing without me?” Raine muttered as she looked down at the circle.

Bile rose in my throat. I had to avert my eyes. The symbols around the edge of the magic circle gave me a terrible sense of déjà vu, as if I’d seen them in a nightmare. Great, now new-agey nonsense had become a brand new schizophrenic trigger. Just what I wanted, thank you, Raine.

”This isn’t exactly helping my scepticism,” I said.

Raine looked up and cracked a grin for me. She gestured at the circle. “I don’t even know what this is for. I wish Evee had let me know what she was up to. Could be anything.”

”Such as pulling a prank on a mentally ill girl she doesn’t like much?” I gave a sad little smile and shook my head to let Raine know I wasn’t entirely serious. Wouldn’t surprise me, though.”

Raine doesn't know what the circle is all about. So it's not just something that Evelyn keeps scrawled on her floor for periodic use; she specifically drew this sometime in the recent past. Looking in the book she seems to have copied it from ought to tell them what it does, but it might be in a language Evelyn can read and Raine can't.

Did what happened with Heather somehow send out a signal that Evelyn could detect, prompting her to do this spell? Or is it something she hurried back here and set up after rescuing Heather, as a precaution against being followed by something from the ziggurat-covered-in-eyeballs dimension? You'd think she'd have left Raine a note in the department office, or sent her a text, or something, if she had the time to do that and knew there was a danger. Puzzling.

It could be a coincidence, but that seems unlikely. If nothing else, the fact that the glyph feels uncomfortably familiar to Heather suggests that it's something the Eye has been trying to teach her, so it's at least *related* to what Heather's been dealing with even if Evelyn's usage of it is coincidental. Which, again, I don't think is the case.

““She’d never do that. I mean it, she’s really not that bad if you get to know—“

The bone-thing in the corner stood up and stretched itself as Raine spoke, slow and sinuous, like a cat, clicking and grinding its joints. I couldn’t help but glance at it for a moment. Raine followed my gaze.

Her grin died. Her eyes went wide.

”R-Raine?”

”Heather, you see that, right?”

Raine didn’t wait for an answer. She grabbed my arm and pulled me away, hard enough to make me stumble, and put herself between me and the creature.”

Oh hello there.~

This particular eldritch fluffy puffy is in realspace, then? Or else under some effect that makes it visible (and possibly interactable) to people who can't normally see Beyond?

I guess the question then is whether Evelyn's spell summoned this thing, or is warding against it. It's not *inside* of the circle, so if the former then she's either given it freedom of movement or lost control of it. Assuming that summoning circles work the same way here that they do in most fantasy stories.

Now, Raine's reaction. Is she just scared because its a creature she doesn't recognize, or is she scared because it’s a creature she knows to be dangerous?

“The bone-thing stared at us, flexing its claws and unfurling another pair of limbs from its back, delicate arched blade structures tipped with razor-sharp hooks. It clicked and clacked as it whirred its head back and forth, dark grey skin bunching and stretching. The air filled with the scent of acid-etched metal, iron filings, and blood. All in my head.”

Gee, it sure is xenomorph around here...

““Raine, there’s n-nothing there.”

Raine bit the tip of her tongue in concentration. She stared it down. A bullfighter ready for the charge.

The bone-thing swayed one way, then the other, testing its own weight. I tried to slow my breathing.”

Oh.

If it's "testing its own weight," and Raine didn't see it until a second ago while Heather saw it before, that suggests that it just..."slipped." Whatever Heather would call it. It was keeping watch here in Beyondspace, and shifted into the human plane when they came near it.

So, this thing isn't just an animal. And it's here for a reason. From her continuing reaction, I get the impression that Raine has not only seen one of these things before, but had to fight or escape from one.

It's probably an agent of whatever antagonistic force sent that seaweedy spy-drone to tail Raine in chapter one. Perhaps this is another type of "servitor?" An attack unit, to supplement the surveillance model?

Or else the evil lawn spirit finally managed to manifest a body for itself. Darkest timeline.

““Y-you can’t see that,” I stammered. “You’re f-faking it, you just followed the direction of my eyes. Raine, stop—“

The bone-monster screamed and leapt.

It sprang toward us on kangaroo legs, claw-tipped arms hissing through the air, screeching through a lamprey mouth of ringed teeth. The sound felt like blades rubbing together inside my head, the too-thin bones of its face and naked chest vibrating under pressure.”

Yuuuup. Time to start the boss music. Now, for an eldritch biodrone with a leech mouth, boney armor, double-jointed legs, and a bunch of off-angled claws...

Metroid: Samus Returns Music - Omega Metroid Boss Theme - YouTube

Close enough, I think.~

“I’d like to think that under other circumstances I could have ignored it. I’d ignored hallucinations doing much worse before. Instead I squealed and flinched and fell down on my arse with a thump.

In that moment I hated Raine. I hated her for making me suspect a figment of my diseased mind was real, for exploiting my illness, for humiliating me, for terrifying me with my own brain-ghosts.

Raine was ready for it.

That’s kind of what Raine does; she takes the impossible in her stride.”

Future Heather, you should stop asserting these things about Raine at us when she's doing a perfectly good job characterizing herself for us in the narrative.

...also, if Raine has seen these things before, she's not taking "the impossible" in her stride. Creatures like this are part of her known and familiar reality at this point, and she's already dealt with any uncertainty and disbelief issues she had about them before you met her.

So, Heather's statement here not only isn't necessary, but also calls her judgement of this sort of thing into question. Not sure if this is a deliberate piece of characterization for Heather, or just an author flub.

“She yanked the nightstick out of her jacket, flipped it in her hand, wound up—and smashed the bone-thing’s charge to a dead stop.

I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing. I sat there like a lemon, unable to process my own sensory data. To be fair, Raine hardly needed any help.

Her first strike caught the bone-thing across the chest. Apparently those thin ribs weren’t very robust, because they shattered under the stainless steel club, along with my sense of reality. Raine followed through as the monster’s screech warbled out and it crumpled up around its ruined chest, spurs of grey rib poking from ragged holes. One bone-tipped limb groped for Raine as she ducked out of the way. She whacked it in the back of the head and it flopped down in a heap, twitching and jerking on the floorboards. She aimed a good hard kick at the thing’s neck, connected with a wet crunch, then hopped back a couple of steps.”

...well, not much of a boss fight after all then. Either that's a +4 nightstick of xenomorph smashing Raine was using, or else these things really aren't as dangerous as they look.

On a more character-focused note, this dimensional shambler type thing isn't the only monster that Raine's just defeated. It's also Heather's belief that she's a helpless, hopeless victim of mental illness that's been beaten to chitinous chunks on the floor.

““Wooo!” Raine let out a victory whoop and shook herself all over, heaving deep shuddering breaths in and out.

When she turned to me, she was grinning. She’d been grinning the whole time.

My hallucination was real and my cute new friend was high on violence. A small, dutiful, still-functioning part of my mind managed to file these facts away for later before the rest of me succumbed to numb panic.

”Don’t look at me,” I said. “Make sure it’s dead first!”

”What? Oh, yeah.” Raine laughed and turned back to the bone-thing. She flipped the nightstick over in one hand and broke the monster’s fragile spine. At least, I assumed it had a spine. It stopped twitching a few moments later. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.”

Alyx Vance vibes intensifying. Just, if she borrowed her colleague's crowbar and welded a handle to it.

Heather also demonstrating a lot more practicality and present-mindedness in this situation than I'd have expected from someone who's never been in it before. I foresee quite an action heroine future for her as well!

“Raine ran her free hand through her hair and blew out a long, slow breath. She forced herself down from whatever psychological precipice she was flirting with.”

Raine is on a "psychological precipice?" Methinks Heather is projecting a tad.

“I tried to get up but found my legs were made of jelly.

”Hey, hey, lemme help.” Raine took my hand, pulled me to my feet, and braced me against her side until we were both sure I could stand unaided. She squeezed my shoulder. “I remember the way it felt, my first time seeing weird shit. Take a moment, okay? Take your time.”

”I’m fine, I’m okay … Thank you.” All I could do was stare at the dead monster on the floor. Raine frowned in my peripheral vision.

”Sure about that, Heather?”

The world seemed very far away. The dead monster on the floor expanded to fill all my senses—the grainy, pitted texture of the grey skin, the smell of acid and metal in the air, the folded and crimped flesh around the claws, the spurs of bone poking through the ripped meat of the ruined ribcage, the pooling blood leaving awful stains on the floorboards.

”Heather? Hey, Heather, look at me.” I ignored Raine and gently pushed away from her, then stepped forward and poked the dead monster with my shoe.

It was solid enough. Weighty. It had mass. I pushed harder, felt the flesh yield and the bones resist.

Then, I gave it a little kick.

”How is this real?” I asked, and the hysteria gripped me at last. “How is this real, Raine?” I turned on her and spread my arms in a shrug, as if this was all her fault. “This thing even looks stupid, it looks like a rubber-suit monster from a horror film. And it’s real. It’s real. I can touch it. How can this be a real thing?””

I can think of several possible explanations for that.

1. The horror movie millieu has had most of a century to come up with monsters of all descriptions. Maybe it's inevitable that someone in Hollywood would happen to design something similar to a real monster by sheer law of averages.

2. Humans have clearly interacted with these creatures before. Either this influenced the folklore and mythology that horror movie creators draw on, or there's a Dreamlands style noosphere thing where artists have always glimpsed the creatures in their dreams or visions or whatever. Either way, humanity's fictional monsters could have been directly inspired by these real ones.

3. The whole "servitor" designation still has me thinking that some of these creatures are artificial. If their creator is a human, or even just an entity that's been exposed to human cultures, then the influence might be going the other direction.

There could be any number of other reasons; those are just the three that come to mind. In any case, I don't think the author would be lampshading this if she didn't have a good explanation for it in mind. :P

“I was breathing too hard, my chest tight and my throat constricted.

”This is nonsense,” I said.

Raine laughed. “You’re gonna be fine, Heather. You know, I thought you’d go into a full-on crying jag. This is pretty much the last way I wanted to introduce you to the real world, but you’re taking this great. Good on you.”

I shot her a dark look. This was, in a way, still her fault. Ignorance was not bliss, but it was better than this.”

Most merciful thing in the world, island of ignorance, etc. The arc one title, "Mind; Correlating," doing something adjacent to an in-text drop.

“Raine smiled at me, and I almost couldn’t deal with that. She still held the nightstick, smeared with the creature’s oily black blood. It was right there, dead on the floor a few feet from the magic circle, and she’d killed it. Ten seconds ago she’d committed the most brutal act of physical violence I’d ever witnessed. Wasn’t anything like reading about it. I felt shaky and numb.”

Yes, and......? ;P

“And I found her irresistible.”

...there we go!~

You don't need to apologize for this, Heather. Have you seriously never wondered why the princess always marries the prince after he slays the dragon? It's because seeing someone kill monsters makes you want to fuck them. Obviously. Is your college education really doing this little for you?

“My brain didn’t have any spare bandwidth to deal with the implications of Raine’s violence high or my gut response. I quietly filed away a question—Am I attracted to dangerous people, or just likely psychopaths? How did I not know this before?—then crashed back to reality as the adrenaline drained away.”

...okay, I'm not being snarky now. Heather's aversion to violence is actually weird.

Even if she's never been in a fight, or known anyone whose been in a fight, did she really think the "thrill of combat" that books always talk about was a total invention?

And...it's not even like Raine demonstrated a lack of human empathy or anything, considering what she was fighting. Heather MUST know that humans have seen the killing of dangerous, nonhuman creatures as an exciting and actualizing experience since literally prehistoric times, right? We have cave paintings about this shit!

Now, the fact that she's also turned on by seeing Raine like this could just be the common "bad boy/girl" appeal without much more to it. But I think there's more to it than that, and that it's very much tied to her violence-aversion. What does being "mentally ill" mean for someone in Heather's society? What was she on the brink of accepting before Raine showed up and dangled the possibility of maybe her NOT being mentally ill in front of her?

If you've read my Utena reviews, you know where I'm going with this.

Heather is afraid that believing the monsters are real is tantamount to letting herself slip into madness. The life she foresees for herself, and is trying to cling to in defence of her "sanity," is one of disempowerment and dependency. Raine says that the monsters ARE real, and also here, have a lead pipe.

““Quick and really important question,” Raine was saying. “I’m guessing you don’t see any other hallucinations in here, right?””

I figure she's doing the finger air quotes for "hallucinations."

““No, no, I haven’t done. I mean I don’t. And I better not do.”

”And you didn’t in Willow House, either?”

”How do you know that?” I frowned at her.

”Sneaking suspicion. We’ve got both here and Willow warded against intrusion by various things, and I think it’s dampening whatever causes your visions. So, if you see anything, it’s probably really here. Shout if you see something, yeah?””

So it's not just that the glyphs keep creatures away. Or even mostly that, necessarily. Heather's connection with the Eye is constantly bombarding her with Tillinghast rays and activating these preternatural senses. So, bring her into a signal deadzone, the From Beyond rays can't reach her, her magic vision shuts down again. Some specific creatures actually ARE repelled by the glyphs as well, but that's only the "servitor" ones who are dependent on remote control by their masters; the natural, animal-ish ones probably aren't directly effected.

She didn't stop seeing the creatures when Raine wrote the glyph on her arm, though. Maybe there are different degrees of warding? Or else I'm just totally off in my understanding of how this works, that could also be.

“I raised both hands in surrender, still teetering on the edge of hysteria. A strange laugh entered my voice. “I can’t— Raine, I can’t— I can’t process this. Okay? I can’t process this. What does this mean?”

”I’ve been trying to tell you. It means you’re not crazy.”

”Yes, I am. One monster—which, okay, I’ll admit it’s probably not made of paper-mache and chicken wire—does not explain a lifetime of hallucinations and blackouts. One dead freakshow does not negate schizophrenia.”

”You’re not schizophrenic. I mean, you’re probably not. You might have a touch of it anyway, I don’t know for sure, but that’s not the point. You ain’t crazy, Heather. You’re touched, you’re haunted, and it’s not your fault.”

”What even is this thing?” I gestured down at the monster. “Where did it come from? What’s it doing here? These are basic things that make no sense, Raine!”

”Oh, I have no idea.” Raine laughed. “Evelyn, she … uh.” Raine’s smile died as realisation returned. “Evelyn might. Ahh, fuck.” She turned and raised her voice, calling to the empty spaces of the cavernous old house. “Evelyn! Evee!”

”Maybe she’s hiding?”

”Maybe.” Raine glanced down at the monster’s corpse. “No red blood on it, that’s a good sign. Right.”

” … right, yes.” I swallowed, hard and involuntary.”

So Raine hasn't seen these xenomorph-ish things before after all, then? Or maybe she has, but doesn't know quite what they are?

That does help justify the "Raine takes the impossible in stride" line a little bit, possibly. Or...then again, Raine has almost definitely seen (and fought) other types of normally-invisible monster before, so...yeah, never mind. It does make her even braver than she already seemed, though, if she had no way of knowing if her baton would actually be able to break the thing's armor.

...unless it actually IS a +4 nightstick of bashing, of course. In that case, she might have just been acting on reasonable confidence that her weapon is effective against just about anything she can hit with it.

“Raine grabbed my hand. “Come on, stick with me, in case there’s more of them.”

The frantic search for Evelyn acted as a firebreak on my mounting hysteria, gave me a task to focus on, even if I was just tagging along. Raine’s panic helped as well, raw and real and turned to practical ends. She checked corners and slammed doors open and shouted for Evelyn.

Half the light switches in the place didn’t work. The floorboards creaked and the windows let in precious little light. The rooms were a jumble of old, stately furniture and junk piled up in crates and under sheets, except for Evelyn’s comfy, pastel-filled bedroom, where the bed was piled with layers and a laptop lay abandoned in the middle of a huge slab desk. Raine darted into a study packed with books, then took the stairs back to the ground floor three at a time. She leapt the last half dozen. I struggled to keep up.”

Yeah, most of the house's aesthetic has little to do with Evelyn. She's only bothered refurnishing a few key parts.

“I wish my first impression of Evelyn’s house had been less tainted by the circumstances. I could have spent days going through those books and peering at the mysterious contents of all those crates. So many nooks and crannies, hidden secrets, rooms full of surprises.

Evelyn wasn’t there.

Back in the front room Raine seemed lost. We’d covered the whole house. She looked at the nightstick in her hands and stared at the bone-thing’s corpse for a moment. Then she started toward the front door before thinking better of it. I struggled not to look at either the dead body or the magic circle on the floor. The circle tickled at the edge of my mind, taunting me to pay attention.

”Maybe she went outside?” I tried.

”Nah, not without her cane.” Raine jerked a thumb at the wooden walking stick propped up against the wall. “She wouldn’t get very far.”

”She needs a cane?””

It's actually a +3 staff of Cthulhu poking.

““Fuck, why can’t I find her mobile phone anywhere?”

”She must … must be here somewhere,” I said. Which was a lie. I did not believe I was correct.

Because Evelyn wasn’t here, was she? She was wherever those ethereal winds had taken her. That unmistakable disfigured hand clutching at my wrist, desperate to hold on.

In a dream, in a hallucination.

In a place only I could go.”

I would assume Evelyn knows what she's doing in there, but the fact that she didn't let Raine know or even leave a note in the Medieval Metaphysics lab when she dropped Heather off suggest otherwise.

Maybe that xenomorph-thing's packmates are chasing her through the astral plane, and it was just standing watch here at her entry/exit point in case she tries to flee back to it.

Or, if the monster really was another type of servitor, replace "packmates" with "master."

“Raine’s panic, the distraught look on her face, allowed me to entertain a line of thought I had kept locked and bottled and shuttered for a decade, since I was a scared little girl crying for a twin sister who had never existed.

What if all this was real?

Evelyn had insulted and humiliated me. She was a clear competitor for Raine’s attention. I owed her nothing. What sense was there in risking myself for her? That’s what a sane person would have thought, a self-interested rational actor with a healthy sense of caution.

You know what I thought?

Nobody deserves Wonderland.”

“I forced my eyes down to the magic circle on the floor. The interlocking design and the symbols meant nothing to me, but my subconscious understood. All those buried lessons from the Eye. The magic circle described more than words; it was a species of mathematics.

The inside of my skull tingled with pressure pain and my stomach clenched with tension.

I squinted and concentrated. The pain climbed as I dredged my memory, trying to connect the circle to the underlying principles I’d been taught over and over again. I hunched up around my chest, my mouth bone-dry, back drenched with sudden cold sweat.

Raine stared at me. “ … Heather?”

My eyes teared up, stinging and aching as a great wave built behind them. I hiccuped and tasted bile in my throat, acid reflux as my body rebelled. I wrapped my arms around myself to control the shaking.

”Heather? What’s wrong?”

The relevant lesson burst into my conscious mind, a nightmare-ghost, a present from the Eye.

It was the mental equivalent of plunging my hand into boiling water; I whipped my mind back and howled in pain, gritting my teeth and squeezing my eyes shut as the pressure in my head slammed to a blinding spike.”

The party fighter and the party sorcerer taking turns freaking each other out. Super kawaii.

Anyway, time to do some Dreams In the Bitch's House dimensional travel using that circle. See if you can bring Raine with you, Heather; you might need her nightstick skills.

“I made it into Evelyn’s kitchen and got my face over the sink before I vomited, once, twice, three times, until my stomach muscles clenched shut on nothing. My vision blurred and a high-pitched whine invaded my hearing as a nosebleed started. I coughed and snorted out blood and pinched the bridge of my nose.

Raine joined me at the sink, hands on my back. “Heather! Shit, what happened?”

”I can do this,” I said between heaving breaths, and wiped my mouth on my hand. I turned the tap on and splashed my face with water. It ran pink with blood. “I can do it.”

”Do what? What? What are you talking about?”

”I can— I can— don’t— don’t touch me, it might not work.” I pushed Raine away and stumbled back into the front room as fast as I could. Raine grabbed my arm.

”Heather, hey, whoa, come—“

”Don’t!” I yanked my arm out of her grip and almost fell over as I lurched back toward the magic circle.

”Heather, now is not— I need to find Evelyn, please.”

”I’m trying! I know where she went!”

I forced myself to stare at the circle. For a moment I shied away from both the pain and the implication of what I was trying to do.”

And she's still recovering from her previous slip. At this point Heather is going to start running into blood loss issues unless they do something about it.

Is Raine not used to Evelyn taking strolls through the warp? Maybe it's just a matter of her being used to Evelyn telling her beforehand.

“I owed Raine. She’d saved me, in a way, that morning in a sad little Sharrowford cafe. She’d given me a sliver of hope and kept me from giving up on life, made me try for one more day, then one more week, and here she was with her best friend—her girlfriend? I didn’t care anymore—lost and gone like I had been. On the other side of nowhere. Elsewhere. Outside.”

If not for Evelyn, then at least for Raine. Fair enough.

“I plunged my mind back into the boiling water, back into the Eye’s lesson.

My nose streamed with blood and my head pounded as my mind ran impossible pathways. I curled up as my body tried to vomit again, but my stomach was empty. Each piece of the equation burned like molten metal, but I forced myself to picture every one with perfect clarity. I was shaking all over, my knees felt ready to collapse, my fingers and toes were numb with pins and needles.

Raine stood at arm’s length, one hand outstretched as she hesitated to touch me.

The pain in my head rose to a crescendo as I slotted the last number into place.

Reality collapsed.

I screwed my eyes shut as the angles of the world twisted and inverted and Raine’s face ran into a kaleidoscope of colours, certain that I’d be rendered truly, irreversibly insane if I watched the process happen.

A whisper of alien wind brushed my face and left the taste of iron and ozone on my tongue. Grit and stone shifted under my feet. I opened my eyes and saw sky like rotten apricot. The Stone-world from this morning.

I’d Slipped, on purpose. I’d made it happen. It worked.

At least it wasn’t Wonderland.”

"Sky like rotten apricot." These lines, man, these lines!

So, back in the same realm that Evelyn dragged her from. Did she come back here deliberately by entering the right numbers into the brain-burning plane shift equation, or is this just the realm that happens to be "near" Sharrowford today? If the former, then Heather can theoretically choose between any number of worlds to travel to as long as she learns their serial numbers and hasn't run out of neurons.

If the latter, then there's an element of waiting, and perhaps of prediction, involved if you want to get somewhere specific. Maybe this is why wizards are always watching stellar conjunctions? The position of the earth at any given time puts it adjacent to different alternate dimensions, and you need to wait for the one you want to visit to come close?

“Every muscle ached like I’d been worked over by a gorilla with a rolling pin. My head pounded with an expanding band of red-hot steel inside my skull, and there was a razor-sharp stabbing behind my eyes. I had to lean forward to stop the nosebleed draining down my throat. I’d also drained myself in some other way, some less easily definable way. I was trembling all over, felt weak and bruised inside, in a core place I’d never felt before. A phantom organ.”

Casting from hit points? Between that and the brain problems, magic in this world really takes a toll on you. There's got to be ways of making this easier on the body!

"Gorilla with a rolling pin" is another great line, though it feels like it would fit in better in a pulp detective story or something.~

“I squinted through blurred vision across the bleak grey rock of this Outside place. It was so ugly, barren and broken, with towers of stone like arthritic fingers reaching upward. I stood in a natural dip in the landscape, filled with foul-smelling ground fog and surrounded by a jagged ridge.

Shapes prowled that ridge, jerky things with knife-bodies and thin bones, hidden in the mist.”

Thin, bony creatures. More xenomorphs?

““Evelyn?” I tried to call out, but had to hack and cough and spit to clear my throat. “Evelyn?”

And there she was.

Evelyn sat with her back against the base of a stone pillar, her knees drawn up to her chest, small and shaking. She gaped at me, speechless, a lump of white quartz held in one hand. Her loose bun of blonde hair was lank and damp from the soaking, sucking fog, and her palms were scuffed, clothes dusted with gravel, eyes red-rimmed from crying.

” … You? H-how … ?” she managed to ask, then glanced up at the figures on the ridge. They’d heard our voices, peering and clicking and creeping down into the dip to find us.

”I felt your hand, this morning,” I said. I struggled to stay standing, hands on my knees to hold myself steady.

Evelyn frowned at me. “What? That was you?”

We stared at each other, the magician and the schizophrenic.

Except I wasn’t, was I? I wasn’t crazy.

No more safety blanket.”

Huhhhhhh. Not what I was expecting.

Not sure what the story here might have been. How did she not only grab onto Heather's hand, but also move her from the library to the MM office, without knowing it? Whatever happened is a lot more complicated than it seemed like it was going to be, and Evelyn is clearly much less in control of it than even my lowest estimations. And it seems like getting herself into these situations is NOT a regular occurrence, or Raine would know what had happened. Is it just coincidence that this happened within a couple weeks after them meeting Heather? Maybe destroying that servitor at the coffee shop pissed someone off more than they expected it to?

Anyway, it's not magician and schizophrenic now. It's wizard and apprentice. Well, probably; wizard needs to give prospective understudy one hell of an apology. Preferably an expensive one, like involving restaurants and such.


That's a chapter. This story is escalating quite a bit faster than I expected it to. Some clumsy writing moments here and there throughout, but overall this chapter was at least as enjoyable as the previous three.

I'll be doing one more chapter this month, finishing the initial "Mind; Correlating" arc of Katalepsis.