Steph Bennion - Paw-Prints of the Gods

She paused and bit her lip, deep in thought. It had been the kidnap of Raja Surya, the heir to the Yuanshi throne who had been living in exile on the Dandridge Cole , that had set off the chain of events that had taken the Platypus to Epsilon Eridani. Bits of disjointed memories were falling together, yet she still could not see the connection between the Raja’s kidnap and her dream. Simha leaned forward and she could almost feel the grey monk’s hidden gaze boring into her skull like a dentist’s drill.

“zz-yyoouu-diid-noot-reescuuee-yyoouur-faatheer-zz!” he told her. His cold tones did little to take away her thoughts of whirring machinery. “zz-iit-waas-juust-aa-dreeaam-zz. zz-aa-faantaasyy-zz!” He paused. “zz-yyoouur-miind-iis-veeryy-troouubleed-zz.”

Doubts crept once more into Ravana’s mind. Her dream had seemed so vivid, yet also featured a superhero emerging from the smoke to lead the escape, which on reflection did suggest it was more wishful thinking than anything real. As she stared at the hooded figure, a new fear took hold of her; the dreadful dawning realisation that maybe she was losing her mind and that the real reason she was here was to recover from a mental breakdown. It would explain why she had been packed off to a hospice on a tranquil stretch of Pampa Bay, if only to divorce her from whatever it was that had ruptured her mind. Now trembling, she looked into the monk’s dark hood and asked the one question she did not want answered.

“I don’t know what’s real anymore,” she whispered. “Am I going mad?”

In bed that night, Ravana’s dreams came back with a vengeance. This time there was a jumble of images to contend with; one moment she was on the flight deck of the Platypus seeing a spinning asteroid loom ever closer on a collision course, then suddenly she was tearing through the darkness in an open-roofed hovertruck, furiously trying to make her way to somewhere always just out of reach. A frightening recurring picture was of twelve shadowy figures reaching out to grab her with the same spindly fingers of the grey monks, at which she would jerk awake and stifle a scream.

She had once again feigned taking the offered pills upon her return to her room, but in the hours of wakefulness between uneasy slumbers there were moments when she wondered if this had been wise. Brother Simha had filled her mind with a bundle of fresh doubts, her grip on reality was slipping and she could not decide whether the tablets were helping or hindering, her belief switching between the two extremes in the blink of an eye. She had not waited until morning to move the latest discarded tablets from their hiding place under her pillow to an unmarked grave in the plant pot. She figured the tooth fairy would not take kindly to finding medication instead of molars two nights running.

Her aches and pains had not improved, but she no longer felt chronically tired and spent much of the night pacing restlessly around her darkened room. In a moment of bravado, she tried the door but as expected found it locked. Her ongoing headache was not helping, nor were the indistinct shapes that popped into her thoughts every time she closed her eyes; different to those of her dreams in that she felt as if she could almost reach out with a mental finger and give them a prod. During her nocturnal pacing she noticed the blurriness of these mental images varied according to how far she was from her bed and at their most indistinct when she lay upon the mattress. After a while it occurred to her to look under the bed, whereupon she found a large metal box linked via wires to a wall outlet, bolted beneath the headboard. Her suspicions grew after giving the box an experimental thump with her fist, for this had the unexpected effect of making the shapes in her mind quiver in unison.

It was during a period when Ravana lay awake upon her bed, gazing into the dark, that she heard a noise from the room next door. The sound was muffled, but unmistakeable as the sobs of a crying child and she suddenly remembered the blond-haired boy she had seen yesterday in the corridor. With a mixture of curiosity and concern, she quietly slipped off the bed, crouched next to the table and put an ear to the wall. What she heard was not tears of pain, but the muted whimpering of loneliness and despair. The boy sounded like he needed a friend. It occurred to Ravana they at least had that much in common.

“Hello?” she whispered. “Can you hear me?”

The crying abruptly stopped and she heard a squelching sniff as an unseen hand wiped snot from a nose. Moments later there was a soft thud against the wall on the other side.

“Who’s there?” The boy’s voice trembled on the edge of tears.

“A friend,” Ravana replied, then realised the boy probably needed a little more to go on. “The girl from the hollow moon. My name is Ravana.”

“I saw you yesterday. You walk funny.”

“I can’t help it. My legs ache.”

“You have scary black hair and a yucky scar on your face.”

“Now you’re getting personal!”

“You smiled,” the boy said, sounding sad. “No one smiles anymore.”

Ravana let his words drift into a poignant silence, wondering whether she should laugh or cry at the pitiful situation they were both in. She resisted the urge to do either.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Artorius,” the voice replied. “The fat nurse calls me Arty-Farty.”

“That’s very grown-up of her.”

She paused to listen for any sound from the nurses, for something told her that they would not be pleased to find their patients out of bed and chatting at this time of night. Hearing nothing, she wondered what a young child might know about the place they were in. She decided Artorius had probably seen a lot more than anyone suspected.

“Why are you here?” she asked. “Are you poorly?”

“I help look after the aliens. They make me talk to them.”

“You talk to… what?” murmured Ravana. She lowered her voice. “Greys?”

“They have scaly skin and big eyes and funny hands and feet. I like them but the nurses keep them in cages and do nasty things to them and hurt them.”

Ravana did not like the sound of that. “Do the nurses hurt you?” she asked.

“No,” Artorius replied, after an endless pause. Ravana smiled at the thought of him shaking his head at her from the other side of the wall. “They get angry and shout a lot.”

“That’s good,” she replied. “I mean, it’s good they don’t hurt you. Shouting and being angry isn’t good at all. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“My head hurts sometimes when they make me use my implant.”

“Implant?”

Ravana muttered a curse. On cue, a twinge of pain shot through her skull. Incredibly, she had somehow managed to forget that she herself had a cranium implant, a tiny chip in her brain. She’d had it from an early age, but her father in his infinite wisdom decided not to tell her until it caused her virtual-reality nightmare at the Pampa Palace hotel. This was the revelation hidden at the edge of the black hole in her mind, the dreadful secret her father had confessed whilst she lay traumatised in her hotel room. Yet there was more, for in her mind it led to another memory, one of a dreadful encounter in a hidden corner of the Dandridge Cole . With a shudder, she decided that was something she was not yet ready to face.

“My implant,” she murmured grimly. “They must have really screwed with my mind to make me to forget a thing like that.”

There was silence from beyond the wall. Listening closely, Ravana heard the faint rustling of sheets as a tired young boy climbed back into bed. He had the right idea.

“Good night Artorius,” she whispered.