Brian Stableford: Inside Out

Illustration by John Stevens

“I’m slightly disturbed by these dreams you’ve been having,” the doctor said, in the solicitous manner he adopted for all his consultations.

“You shouldn’t be,” Margaret told him. “They frightened me, at first, but they don’t any longer.”

Doctor Huxley frowned at that. Perhaps he thought that it was impolite of her to stop being frightened of the dreams even though he hadn’t yet contrived to explain them. He seemed to have put away his textbook Freud for the time being. Perhaps it would have been kinder had she managed to summon up some forgotten memory of unexpectedly coming across her parents engaged in the sweaty commerce of love, so that he could seize upon it as the commonplace root of her trouble. She had read enough of the great psychotherapist’s works to make the fiction convincing, but she didn’t want to descend to dishonesty.

“I’m not at all sure that the drug is having the desired effect,” the doctor told her. “I’m not sure the Ministry knows what they’re doing. I think the experiment ought to be stopped, before it does someone harm.”

“It’s not doing me harm,” Margaret assured him. “I thought it might be, at first, but I don’t think so now. I think the dreams are helping me, just as you hoped they would. You shouldn’t give up the experiment yet.”

“ How do you think the dreams are helping you?” he wanted to know. Unfortunately, she couldn’t tell him. A patient couldn’t tell her doctor that what he took for dreams were actually real; she had, after all, been judged at least half-mad, else she wouldn’t be here. There were some things that simply couldn’t be said, lest they be taken as final proof that her madness was absolute. And yet, she thought, she had the right of it. The dreams were not such stuff as dreams were ordinarily made of, and if she had to rebuild her idea of the world in order to accommodate them, that was what she must do, albeit in secret. Why should she not seek a new reality, after all, given that the one she had inherited had failed her so badly, and wounded her so deeply?

“They’re helping me to get out of myself ” was all she dared say aloud. “They’re helping me to see that the frightened creature I’d become, all knotted up and self-enclosed, isn’t really me… not the whole me, at any rate. It really was a trauma response —something that the war did to me. The dreams are telling me —showing me—that there are other ways to be.”

“I wish I could agree with you,” the doctor said, although Margaret couldn’t for the life of her see why he couldn’t. “Unfortunately, it seems to me that the dreams are symptoms of trauma response, transfiguring your problems without diminishing them at all. I’m worried that they might actually be making the grip of the trauma more secure. If only we could decode them we might be able to get at the root of the problem, but while we can’t…”

“They were distressing at first,” Margaret was quick to put in, “and I suppose they’re still disturbing —but I don’t feel that the disturbance is destructive. Sometimes, surely, it’s good to be disturbed, if things have become too tightly bound, too fixed. ”

“Sometimes,” he conceded—although she knew that it was only a doctor’s concession, by way of humoring the patient. “In your case, though, I’m not so sure. Distress can be a warning, you know, and it’s possible that the easing of your distress is actually a sign that your condition is getting worse.”

“I don’t think so, doctor,” she told him, as patiently as she could. “I think you’ve got things inside out. I’m feeling better because I’m getting better, beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel.” She turned her head briefly as she heard a sound that might be the drone of a distant aircraft engine, but it was only a housefly that had somehow eased its way into the room and was now intent on finding a way out into the afternoon sunlight.

“I’m glad that you feel that way,” Doctor Huxley replied, bringing the full weight of his professional insincerity to bear. “It’s good that you’re feeling better, but however inside out it seems, there’s a world of difference between feeling better for a little while and getting better for good. If we’ve learned anything during the last seventeen years, it’s that winning a battle isn’t the same as winning a war.”

If we’ve learned anything during the last seventeen years, Margaret thought, it’s that no possible end, no possible victory, no possible settlement, can ever justify the fighting of a war like this one. She didn’t say so out loud, not because it mightn’t sound sufficiently sane but because it mightn’t sound sufficiently patriotic. Doctor Huxley was, after all, an employee of the Ministry of War. She resorted, instead, to a direct approach.

“Please don’t discontinue the treatment, doctor,” she said. “I really do think that I’m making progress.”

“I wish I could see it,” he answered, mournfully. Now he, too, was following the fly’s wayward trajectory with his speculative eye.

Perhaps you could, Margaret thought, if only you weren’t so dutifully blind.

She is walking through a wood in late spring. The trees are discarding their roseate blossom; their vivid crowns are full of birdsong. The grass is moist with the legacy of recent rain. Her feet leave prints in the soft soil whenever she crosses bare ground.

The prints are those of cloven hooves, although she walks erect as befits a sentient being. Even centaurs hold their true selves erect, although they go on four legs instead of on two.

She pauses in the bushes on the edge of a sunlit glade, peeping through a narrow gap so that she may see without being seen.

What she sees is betrayal.

On a bed of moss in the shadow of a gnarled oak a male faun is lying beside a shy nymph. The nymph averts her face from the tentative caress of his hairy hand, although the glint in her green eyes reveals to the watcher that the touch is not unwelcome. One of the faun’s shaggy legs reaches out so that the hoof may tease and tickle the back of the nymph’s calf; she quivers slightly, but not in anguish, and makes no attempt to rise to her feet.

Why, the watcher wonders, is it always thus? Why do fauns prefer such creatures to their own kind? It makes no sense; it is a jarring note in the great litany of Harmony.

As her jealous heart beats faster, the watcher feels a sudden unease. She looks to the side, where she has seen some movement from the corner of her eye. There, emerging from a thicket not unlike the one in which she herself is hiding, is a creature born of nightmares. It walks erect like any sentient being but its face is utterly brutal, worse than the face of the hoariest of the sileni. Its hide is dark and its joints glint metallically. Its heavy clothing is coarse. Upon its back it carries a curious cylinder from which extends a flexible hose connected to the tub it bears in its horrid hands.

For a single fleeting second, the watcher thinks: It is justice, after all. Do they not deserve it?

She has no time to repent the flash of wrath before the monster changes course, abruptly turning its attention to her. She sees the mouth of the tube pointed directly at her, and she sees the great gout of flame that vomits out of it, hurtling to engulf her.

She never feels the heat, let alone the pain, of her own conflagration—but she knows how terrible it must be to melt and to burn, to be utterly consumed by fire and fury.