Katalepsis 1.5 (and now the conclusion)

Alright. There's not thaaaat much of this chapter left, but the exposition and character development have both been extremely dense, and the chapter is a pretty long one overall, so this could still turn out to be a lengthy post.

Anyway, where we left off Heather had come clean to Raine and Evelyn about exactly how her diagnosis, her learned helplessness, and her twin sister interact. It's...a rough life she's been having, to say the least, and her emotional problems are such that things pretty much have to get worse for Heather before they can get better. It's either later the same night that she and Evelyn had their continent-sized-dog-with-a-chryssalid-problem adventure, or the next morning.

““Here, Heather? Try to keep something down, yeah? You really need it.”

”I don’t feel like eating.”

I’d cried until empty but the wound still ached. Twin-shaped hole in my chest, ten years in the making.”

Raine still being Best Girl Besides Seaweed Monster (RIP). Heather just struggling to come to grips with the fact that yes, her twin sister really has been languishing in extradimensional eyeball jail for a decade while Heather desperately tried to convince herself that she doesn't exist and therefore doesn't need worrying about.

Not that there would have been anything she could do about it in those ten years, besides emotionally suffer even worse than she did anyway. But still.

“Evelyn had brooded in silence as Raine held me and hugged me and brought me tissues to blow my nose. Eventually I’d uncurled, sat up, and tried not to feel like the worst traitor and coward in the world. A glass of water and long minutes to calm down and think did help, but time fixed nothing.”

Traitor. Coward. But again, what action could she have even taken besides blindly experiment with the Eye's teachings and accidentally herself into the flesh-eating scorpionmaggot dimension or whatever?

I guess Heather would answer that that means she'd at least have died trying. But I'd argue that in that case, she wouldn't have lived long enough to meet an actual wizard who can maybe give her a way to try with some possibility of success. But this is the kind of thing you need a lot of retrospect and reflection in order to think about rationally.

““I’m sorry, I didn’t think I’d—“

”Heather,” Raine said before I could bury myself under a mountain of apologies. “It’s okay to cry. It’s okay to let it all out. That’s some serious burden, you don’t have to bear it alone.”

”Mm.”

” … so, are we real now? Gotta start somewhere.”

I shrugged. “What choice do I have? At least I’m not lonely. Imaginary friends are better than dying of a brain aneurysm.””

“Raine put her hand over mine and gave me an it’s-going-to-be-okay smile. “Real friends are even better. Promise you that.”

I shook my head. My throat tightened but I had no more tears to cry. “I left her behind.”

”It wasn’t your fault,” Raine said. “Right, Evee? Could that have been her fault?”

” … no, of course not,” Evelyn answered. “A child, Outside, in a face-to-face encounter with a … with something beyond our comprehension. No. Raine is correct.””

How does Evelyn know that whatever took Maisie is beyond their comprehension? Maybe comprehensible entities just don't have that kind of power, IDK.

Or perhaps Evelyn's comprehension is unusually limited and Raine just hasn't had the heart to tell her?

Also, I just realized that "Heather and Maisie" completes the Silent Hill allusion that the author told me about. Mason > Maisie. With the whole "forgotten other half" aspect obviously being reminiscent of Alessa like I joked way back at the beginning of this arc.

““Survivor’s guilt,” I said. “I know. A ten-year dose all at once. Knowing what I’m feeling doesn’t make it any easier.””

It probably does, actually. Not having a frame of reference makes it impossible for her to tell, but seriously, it probably does.

““Difficult, yes. I understand,” Evelyn said, with such conviction.

I looked up at Evelyn, this mage with her fluffy golden hair and missing fingers, her stolen limbs and spinal problems. I wondered what her history was. What could she do, what were her limits?

The seed of an idea took root in my mind. A seed only possible after a day like today. I didn’t dare feed it light or water. Not yet.”

The seed of the idea is probably something along the lines of "maybe if we go back to my house and try this spell in the children's bedroom, we can go to whatever plane Masie got left on." I'm guessing.

Alternatively, the seed is the literal zygote of an information-based life form that infected Heather when she looked at the swirling sky on dogworld, and any minute now her brain will sprout wings and rip itself free of her skull.

“But I started to ask the questions anyway.

”Why were you even over in … wherever that was?” I gestured at the air, at the Outside places. “You did a spell, took yourself there?”

Evelyn looked away, failing to conceal her discomfort. “In a manner of speaking. You saw the circle, the methods I used. Yes, that was magic. Of a kind.”

”Why go there?”

”She was jealous,” Raine said.”

Huh.

So that means Evelyn actually did believe her before now. Wonder what made her change her mind between chasing Heather off a couple weeks earlier and today?

Also, WAS it just coincidence that had Heather slip and Evelyn plane shift at the same time? And that, despite not having been in the same place earthside, they ended up clutching hands, and Heather then shifted back into a place associated with Evelyn? I could infer something about nearby interdimensional activity causing other stuff to happen near it, but this seems to be about the PEOPLE rather than the PLACES.

I joked earlier about Heather being infected by the larval meme-virus stage of the rare and majestic middle astral winged brainosaur, but now I actually do think that something might have taken control of Heather during that slip. Caused her to seek out Evelyn and try to pull her back to the Medieval Metaphysics office, but then its control ended and Heather found herself in that room with no idea how or why.

““Oh for pity’s sake, Raine, that is such an ugly word.” Evelyn turned back to me. “I was … intrigued by what Raine said about your ‘Slipping’ episodes. I didn’t believe it was possible. There were a few relevant passages I recalled from Unbekannte Orte, and an incantation in Stellhoff’s Unfinished Book, but I’d never risked the procedures before. And … well, as it turned out, there was no way to bring myself back again. That’s why nobody had written more about that particular method. Nobody who goes through with it comes back to record anything. I should have known. Too easy, too good to be true. Hubris and arrogance. Raine should have been here to stop me.””

Her ability to blame her own shortcomings on Raine is really impressive.

Also, I still want to know what made her decide Heather wasn't just crazy.

““There’s nothing about me to be jealous of,” I muttered.

”Heroism, perhaps.”

”That wasn’t heroism. I’m a coward. I just had to know if it was all real.””

Her internal narration from the previous chapter betrays her. I don't award killyreturnstothrone.jpg that lightly, you know.

“Raine opened her mouth, probably to stop me beating myself up, but Evelyn spoke first.

”Hardly the act of a coward, to voluntarily put oneself through such a test. I should know.””

Hmm, point. Even if her motivations hadn't been heroic, taking those kinds of personal risks just for the sake of knowledge and curiosity is not the act of a coward.

Heck, Heather has plenty of personal flaws, but cowardice is probably the furthest thing from any of her characterization so far.

“I said nothing, took up my food again, just to fill the roaring silence inside my head, but it tasted bland and chewy now. Raine kept trying to catch my eye with another smile, and after a few moments I allowed her to find me.

At least I had that. At least Raine was real.

If a bit weird.

Raine was busy saying something about a permanent solution to my nightmares—but I paid another sliver of attention to the dangerous seed in my mind.”

““Evelyn,” I said. “Tell me about magic, please.””

...oh, that. Right. Of course.

“Evelyn started to speak, but Raine raised her voice and took my hand.

”Look, Heather, you’ve been through a lot today. You can worry about all that tomorrow.”

”No,” I said, and pulled my hand away. Raine was pretty and Raine was dashing, and the memory of her earlier violence still sent a thrill through me at the sight of her, but not like this. “I won’t be treated like a child. If you’re going to treat me like that, I’m going to just go home and … and forget about both of you.”

It was an obvious bluff, but I kept my poker face. Raine smiled all the same. Evelyn let out a dark laugh.

”Perhaps you were right, Raine,” she said. “Heather and I are a little alike.””

Hmm. Wonder what past interaction between herself and Raine Evelyn is alluding to, with that last bit. Also, when is Evelyn going to apologize to Heather?

Speaking of Heather and Raine though...I made light of it before, but Heather's fixation on Raine's fighting ability is starting to strike me as weird. Attraction to wo/men of action is nothing out of the ordinary as I noted at the time, but Heather is clearly fixating on the act of killing specifically. Not on the confidence, or capability, or protectiveness, or other associated traits that are usually what get people hot about fighty types.

It could be that Heather is just negging herself about this and making her own attraction out to be something worse than it is. But it could also be something actually weird and fucked up.

“For the next hour, with the wind picking up outside, my new friends told me truths.

Magic, according to Evelyn, was not throwing fireballs or waving wands, it was not casting the runes or reading the future in tea leaves. It was blood and bone and the application of human willpower to the secret workings of the cosmos. It was half-remembered scraps of stolen Latin and Greek and older inhuman languages from a time best left forgotten. It was to scream the names of alien gods and their unseen workings in the hope that a fragment of knowledge would yield a result. It was frequently unclean and often dangerous and potentially obscene.

As I would come to learn, her words did not do it justice. No words can.”

Ehhhhhhhhhhhhh. Color me unimpressed with this passage.

First, on a somewhat pedantic note, I'm not especially seeing the contrast between "casting runes and reading tea leaves" and "blood and bone and applying human willpower to the secret workings of the cosmos and babbling in Greek." Either way, you're playing around with dead body parts of something and making words in old languages. So, this really seems like a shallow, superficial aesthetic distinction that Heather is making, and it kind of makes me a little annoyed with her.

Second, and much more importantly, the story is telling us to just take the character at her word that this stuff is really, super, mega fucked up. I know Lovecraft and his peers did this a lot, but Lovecraft and his peers also get made fun of for doing this a lot, and rightly so. Hell, Lovecraft even made fun of himself for leaning so hard on that crutch.

The root of the problem with this cosmic horror trope is that it means a character is telling us how to feel about something. It's not only a failure of "show don't tell," but also a failure of TELLING, because we're not even told what exactly we're supposed to be scared and horrified of. It's just empty words.

I suspect that the author decided that continuing the conversation and having a massive infodump here would ruin the pacing, and I think that was the right call. But I also think it would have been much better if the scene just ended with "For the next hour, with the wind picking up outside, my new friends told me truths." Heather can then fill us in on what those truths are as they become relevant to the story, and we can decide for ourselves how to feel about them.

“Raine and Evelyn had known each other for years. Evelyn became terse and evasive over the details, but I gathered that she’d had problems with her family’s expectations of her, and Raine had stepped in to help. I found out later what exactly those expectations were, but at the time I left Evelyn to her privacy.”

This also feels very "tell rather than show."

“Raine convinced me to eat again as we talked, and this time I kept it all down. She fixed me a mug of hot chocolate and offered to add a slug of vodka from the fridge.

”No, thank you.”

”It’ll help, promise. It’s hardly the devil’s juice, it’s not even Tesco Value, and I’m only gonna give you a little drop. You’re not allergic or anything?”

”No, no, I’m not.” I sighed. Why not abandon another foundation? “Oh, why not? Go ahead.””

The alcohol aversion makes sense. The mentally ill are strongly encouraged not to drink, even when they aren't taking meds that react badly with alcohol. And a lot of psychiatric medications DO react badly with alcohol. It's another little social barrier that separates you from "normal" people.

“Peer pressure. Not something I ever experienced back in school. Never went to parties, never had any real close friends, never got offered a cigarette or stolen alcohol. That had always been for bad girls, people going off the rails, and I hardly needed any extra help to do that.”

Hah! Well, like I said.~

“The hot chocolate went down smooth, chased with a sharp aftertaste and a slow warmth radiating out from my chest. I drank more, sighed, and realised I’d never done this either—sat in a cosy, comfy room with people my age. Friends? My soul was weak and sputtering, but I felt almost good. I wanted more.

”Where do I fit in to all this? What happened to me? To Maisie and I?”

My throat caught when I said her name, but I had to say it now.”

Even saying her name is difficult and painful. Almost physically so. Fuck.

““I don’t know,” Evelyn said, shaking her head. “I could make an educated guess, but I don’t know what it was that took you, or what it wanted, anything about it. This ‘Eye,’ hmm, I guarantee we’re all much happier in ignorance of the motivations of such a being.””

I'm still not sure at all that the Eye is actually what did the abducting. The Eye was visible at the time and place where it occurred, and it somehow ended up linked to Heather's mind, but that could have been orthogonal to the doings of other beings the twins met in that trip.

It kind of goes back to the ambiguity of the Eye's relationship with Heather. From what we've seen so far, it could be trying to abduct her as well, but it could also be trying to help her. It also could have not even noticed that she and it are linked, and it's just doing its math homework without realizing a little ape brain is being fried by it.

This is the opposite kind of vagueness that occurs in cosmic horror stories. The GOOD kind. We know as much as the character knows, but their knowledge is so incomplete that the reader's guess about what it means is as good as their own.

“Raine got up and crossed behind my chair as Evelyn spoke. She went in for a shoulder rub again. This time I let her touch me, stiff and tense at first, wincing as she melted the knots out of my muscles. Evelyn looked on with barely concealed distaste. I wondered if it was jealousy, but I didn’t have the extra mental bandwidth for that right now.

”Why do I see the things I do?” I asked. “If they’re not hallucinations, then … “

Evelyn studied me for a quiet moment. “I have a theory.”

”Our Evee’s got theories for everything,” Raine said. “One for every day of the year.”

Evelyn fixed Raine with a dagger-stare. “Will you stop that? And I am usually correct.” Raine held up one hand in surrender and Evelyn continued. “I suspect your waking visions are an ability to see pneuma-somatic fauna, without aid of any trance state or device, likely an intention or perhaps a side-effect of the Eye’s changes to your mind. I’ve never heard of it before, I have no idea if it’s possible, but it’s the only thing that makes sense.””

From Beyond vision is a very rare power, it seems.

Or, no, actually, this is another facet of something we already learned! Evelyn didn't say that the ability to see PSF was super rare. She said that the ability to see them without spells or devices was. Just like the plane-shifting. Plenty of wizards can do it, but Heather is uniquely able to do it using only her mind.

So, yeah. You see the Eye of Truth, you can do alchemy without an array. Heather's abilities all stem from the same rule being applied consistently.

““Pneuma-somatic fauna,” I echoed, deadpan. “That means what, exactly?””

The things you're going to be speaking over footage of on the BBC in a few years. Obviously.

““Well … a less technical term … that is—“

”Say iiiiiiit,” Raine said, lighting up with a grin. “You know you want to.”

Evelyn rolled her eyes and huffed. “Spirits. You can see spirits, anima, kami, whatever you want to call them. Though I suspect you of all people don’t need to be told that doesn’t mean bedsheet ghosts and headless ladies.”

My menagerie of horrors? I nodded.

”And there was that servitor following me, don’t forget,” Raine said, a hint of smug pride in her voice.

”Yes, yes, we’ll have to look into that.” Evelyn waved her down and fixed me with a penetrating gaze.”

"Spirits," ay? I guess that word is broad enough to encompass just about anything. From gods, to ghosts, to sympathetic incarnations of a given location, to weird animals that happen to be invisible.

How many of the above categories are represented in Heather's From Beyond vision, I couldn't say. Most of them look like animals, and most of them at least seem to act like animals complete with life cycles and a food web, but appearances can be deceiving. Maybe they really are acting out an interpretive dance version of Heather's emotions in reaction to her presence, as opposed to her just reading meaning into wild animal behavior like I assumed. Maybe they're the forms taken by dead people in the next world, and it only looks to us like they're preying on each other, matine, photosynthesizing, etc because that's the closest thing we can relate to their behavior. Maybe anything.

Plus the Servitors, who seem to be something a little different from the more common PSF/spirits/etc.

Part of the connotation that the word "spirit" has in modern parlance is something immortal, but that may or may not apply to some or all of these things.

““More importantly, Heather, as Raine has made abundantly clear to me, you want the nightmares and the visions to stop, to go away. Correct?”

Yes died on my lips. Evelyn saw more than she let on.

She saw the seed, growing.”

Contagious brain-basilisk jokes aside, I would honestly give up a lot to get Heather's vision. The brain-melting Eye stuff that comes with it might sour the deal, but if I could just have the From Beyond sight, god. The only downside for me would be that I'd be too blissed out watching the PNF all day to get any work done.

I'd also be kind of frustrated about not being able to pet them, but I could get over that. Probably.

Obviously, that's not going to be Heather's motive though. She's going to attempt a rescue mission. Or at least, a recover-whatever-is-left-of-her-for-burial-or-at-least-memorial mission. It's been a decade, and some of these other dimensions have chryssalids in them.

““Heather?” Raine prompted.

”Because that is not the only option,” Evelyn continued. “You deserve to know that. You did things today, with nothing but your mind, and that—“

”I think now’s a little too late at night, Evee,” Raine said. “And, uh, practical issues first, right?”

”You see?” Evelyn asked me. “Raine would have me coddle you.”

”Evee, come on, you promised,” Raine said.

”I did no such thing.”

”You did! And hey, she saved your life today, don’t be a shit about this. You’re not the only one who can sulk.”

”Stop it. Both of you,” I hissed, and shrugged Raine’s hands off my shoulders. “Stop talking past me and over me like I’m not here. Promised what?””

Evelyn definitely has some kind of personality disorder.

Heather...I can understand her frustration with Raine, but I can also see Raine's side of things.

““I’m gonna put the warding sign back on your hand,” Raine said. “And under your pillow, and on your door. And Evelyn here, my lifelong friend and ally,” she said with an unexpected twist to her tone, “is going to help look into a more permanent solution. Aren’t you?””

Not the best wording you could have used, Raine.

...it probably turned Heather on though.

“Evelyn looked unimpressed, arms folded.

”If you can make the nightmares stop, then … “ I swallowed hard.

It had been ten years. One night in Wonderland had ruined me and torn out half my soul.

Not the only option?

Revenge?

Rescue?

I dared not touch the idea too closely. White-hot and impossible. Ten years? I couldn’t think that way, I’d drive myself over the edge. My resolution must have shown on my face, though, because Evelyn took a deep breath and answered me.

”Yes, yes, I do believe we can stop the nightmares. Using the warding sign will buy us time for a more permanent solution. We’ll have to see.”

”There you go, wasn’t so hard, was it?” Raine asked. Evelyn huffed.

”This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” I muttered. “In more ways than one.”

”It’ll be okay, I promise,” Raine said, and squeezed my shoulders.

”Says you.”

”Yeah, damn right, says me. Welcome to the real world, Heather.”

And then there were three.”

Heather wants to rescue her sister, or at least find out what happened to her. Evelyn wants to study Heather's abilities. Raine wants to protect hot girls from monsters. An understanding has been reached.

Then, there's this afterlude:

“I suppose you want to hear about the rest of it, don’t you? About the events in Sharrowford the following year, the ones which made the national news, the ones you don’t know half the truth about. And after, about how we turned back the clawing at the rim of reality.

But first, about those in Sharrowford my new friends were so eager to avoid.

And about my twin sister. About Maisie.

Don’t come here.”

Unless there's a story-within-a-story thing being built up to here, with Future Heather speaking to an in-universe interviewer, this blurb feels unnecessary and heavyhanded. In a similar way to the earlier passages I criticized in this chapter.

But, while we didn't close on the highest note, I'm still grateful to have been given this project.


That's "Mind; Correlating," the first arc of Katalepsis. A hell of a strong start! Like I said in previous installments, I admire the way that this story is able to wed some kind of cheesy urban fantasy conventions with really dark and - most importantly - realistic depictions of emotional pain, trauma, and despair. Web serials starring tortured young adult souls are a dime a dozen, but I think Katalepsis is the only one I've read so far where the pain felt REAL. The causes of it might be fantastical, but the depiction itself is the opposite of that.

I've said this before, but it really does work for me in a similar way to how (early) Serial Experiments Lain worked for me. The loneliness, frustration, and hopelessness of longterm psychosis, and how that changes the way you think about yourself and the people around you.
In addition to that, there's *something* about the whole Maisie backstory - the focus on children playing under a bed, lifelong mental scarring that no one will believe the cause or even existence of, the reality of everyone just deciding that a kid not only no longer exists but *never* existed in the first place. I don't know. Maybe I'm only reading this into the story because I was raised in a place where things happened to children a lot. But the suggestion did jump out at me more than once.

Regardless of that last bit, the story also couples the mental illness theme with the Lovecraftian cosmicism thing, and really conveys the sense that maybe the "crazy" people are right; what we think "reality" is might just be a comforting mass-delusion. Better to think you're insane than accept that you might be seeing the real world.*

Hmm. Come to think of it, "it's better to believe you're delusional than to accept the truth of what you experienced" also kind of points back to things that happened around me when I was growing up.

On a technical level...well, things are mostly very good, especially those enchantingly detailed metaphors Heather uses. Really, there were only a few short passages of actually bad writing in these five chapters, and they wouldn't have called so much of my attention to themselves if they weren't such a big departure from the norm. The characters still seemed to be finding their footing by the end of Arc 1, with Heather's voice in particular kind of having some fluctuations during the longer dialogue sequences, but they're getting there. Raine's characterization was the most consistent and compelling; I get the impression that the author had a strong mental image of her from very early in the creative process. For the most part though, it's just a really atmospheric, really well-paced prose story.

I'm tempted to make Katalepsis my next main project after K6BD, but at this point I have too many other things I've wanted to get back to for that. I also really want to keep reading this story, and unless someone commissions more of it that would mean putting it off for a very long time. So, we'll see. For now, that's that.


*Aside from the parts of the real world that involve lovable critters swimming through the air all around us. That revelation isn't gonna bother anyone whose opinions matter