John Wright - Orphans of Chaos

I admit I was feeling rather relaxed and pleased with myself. I was getting out of here tomorrow, right? I had squirreled away a disc of Miss Daw’s music, in a spot under the bushes around the Chapel. By tomorrow, if we held classes as normal, there would be some free time after Dr. Fell’s tutorial. What was Monday? Molecular biology. Of course, I hadn’t read the assignment, not since two Mondays ago. If only Miss Daw had let me get some books from the library…

I lay watching the chain spinning, spinning.

Back to the status quo, Dr. Fell had said. Special arrangements, Mulciber had said. Anything I learned I would have to learn over again, Miss Daw had said…

As certainly as if a soft, cold voice had whispered it in my ear, I knew. They are going to erase your memory.

Everything you now know will be gone.

How far back? Ten days, at least, maybe more. What we overheard at the meeting, Vanity’s secret passages, Quentin’s discovery that he could fly, all of it would be gone.

The you who existed as once you were ten days ago will still be alive. But the you who is here now, will be dead, dead, dead. And none of these thoughts you are thinking now will survive. These thoughts now in your head, this chain of thought and memory, will come to an end, and stop.

Phaethusa will be gone, and only Amelia will remain. Her memory will be amputated, and she will be bewildered if she notices a missing week, but she will never even know what was taken from her.

This thought shall perish with the others.

The morning when we made such a mess in the kitchen, making our own breakfasts for ourselves; that hour which, out of all the hours of all my life I could remember, was the brightest, that would be gone, too.

I watched the chain swinging out its smaller and smaller circles, describing a spindle, then a cone, then a swaying line. It swept out a decreasing volume, then nothing.

I thought of people who might help, like ap Cymru or Lelaps the dog. But I had no way to get out of the cell to find them.

My thoughts skittered in circles like mice, smaller and smaller, looking for some way out of the trap I was in. Some way out of the trap. Some way out. Some way.

But there was nothing more to think. The more I thought, the more I would have to lose.

That night I had a dream. A man stood by the head of my cot.

He wore a breastplate of bronze, set with figures of men and swine. His helmet was made of large square oblongs of white, as if the teeth of some animal had been sewn atop a cap of bronze. In his hand was a spear but, instead of a spearhead, the shaft was tipped with a thin spine, like the stinger of a stingray.

Beneath his helmet, he had neither eyes nor mouth. Dried blood ran down his cheeks and chin. His armor was streaked over with running brown stains, and the gore had rusted the metal in places.

He said, “In life, I was Telegonus, son of Odysseus and Circe. You are my aunt, for Circe is the daughter of Helion. I slew Odysseus and knew not whom I slew. In penance, Queen Arete sent me to guard Nausicaa, her daughter. Poseidon’s men overcame me, and at that task I failed. Erichtho trapped me in a box, as a toy for Boreas, and my spirit was tormented and would not rest; but I walked the world to and from my box, searching for the Lady Nausicaa again. My hate kept me awake, and I would not sleep. I watched and sought, watched and sought. I knew not then that the North Wind had other watchers watching me, unclean spirits as restless as myself, and when I scented some trace of the Lady Nausicaa, they fled to inform Boreas. Against my knowledge and against my will, my own loyalty to the Lady Nausicaa was used to snare her. I knew it not, but I was one of the watchmen of Boreas, and I kept the Lady imprisoned.”

In the dream, I could move and speak. I said, “What do you want with me?” And my fingers trembled and my limbs shook, because of a terrible cold which came from the man, and a smell of dried blood, spoiled meat, and putrefaction.

“Eidotheia, child of the Graeae, buried my bones, and paid the toll for the ferry man, Chiron. Your prayer reached me in Hell, where I walk in the bloody forest hanging with corpses, set aside for kin-slayers, and gave me wings. I sped by the fifty heads of Cerberus, his teeth like daggers and his slobber more venomous than any serpent’s and, though he howls and seeks me now, I am here. Once the cock crows, I am done for, and I return to double and triple punishments.”

Out from the stained and tattered cloak, now he spread white wings, like the wings of a dove. The wingtips to either side almost touched the opposite walls of the cell. The starlight from the window caught the edges of each feather, and traced them in silver.

“Can you help me?” I said.

“I am a shadow. I can touch nothing.”

“Why did you come to me?”

“Erichtho set wards around Eidotheia and Phoebetor; the Telchine boy, Damnameneus, has no soul. But the music which walled you in is silent now, and that silence allows my approach.”

“What can you do?”

“I can bring you in dream to one who dreams of you.”

“Will that help me?”

“No. But you will come, because you will hope that it will.”

He touched me with his spear, and I sat up. The collar and the chain melted away.

He pointed to the far wall. In the moonless dark, it receded from us, forming a long, dark corridor.

Down it I went, hugging myself in my white flannel nightgown, and the floorstones were cold on my bare feet.

In dream, time and distance were without meaning. It might have been minutes I walked that dark and unreal corridor, or hours, or years.

Or, I might have been in that corridor since the beginnings of forever and would always be there, a lonely girl in a white nightgown, stepping on silent, bare feet down a black corridor that led away from imprisonment and toward some uncertain goal; while behind me walks, and will always walk, a dead man who died in the line of duty, but who still seeks, somehow, without hope, without fear, without life, to carry it out.

At the end of the corridor was a square of reddish light. It hurried toward me like the light of an oncoming train in a tunnel, approaching far more quickly than my hesitant steps could account for, as if the corridor were collapsing like a folding telescope.

Then, with a motionless jolt, like the shock of waking instantly from a dream, I was there. Behind me there was no sign of the corridor through which I had come. I was backed up against the edge of a short desk or workbench. My hands were gripping the rough edge of the workbench to either side, and I could feel the wood pushed up against my bottom, through the flannel fabric of my nightie.

The fire in the stove was burning low, but its black iron door was open, and the dying embers still cast red shadows into the small interior of the hut or shed where I found myself. Wood was piled next to the stove, dingy with rodent droppings. There were holes gnawed in the baseboards, made by rats or mice.

There was a cot, smaller than my cot in my jail cell, on which a bundle of rags had been heaped. Beyond that was a refrigerator, two feet high. Half-empty cartons of take-away Chinese food lay on the floor before the refrigerator door. There was other litter here and there on the floor.

There was a cracked mirror above the stove to my left. In it, it looked as if I were half-sitting in the edge of the bench, about to rise.

Anyone who has had a normal life would not have understood what I felt then. I was entirely fascinated and entirely repelled. I had never seen mess before. I had lived in a manor house my whole life; servants kept the place clean, and I kept my things shipshape and tidy, or else was slapped on the knuckles by Mrs. Wren’s dread meter stick. (That meter stick and the welts it raised is one reason why I will always prefer the English system to the metric.) The grounds and gardens were orderly and trimmed; everything was put away at nights.