“How bad is it?” Cal asks me.
I shake my head. “I don’t know. Things have been so weird, I haven’t had time to think about it.” Except at night, of course, when I lie awake thinking about it, running down behavioral checklists and probing my memory. Have I felt this before? What was that emotion? “I keep… waiting for signals, you know? Wondering if I’m going to slide. For a long time-for as long as we’ve been out here-I’ve had weird shit happen to me. Some of it in my head. But it wasn’t like either mania or depression. It was just weird. I wasn’t sure whether I was just having a normal episode or whether the Change had-” I catch myself. What can I possibly have imagined the Change had done?
“A normal episode?” repeats Colleen. “What the hell is that?”
Cal stops her with a glance. “What’s different now, Goldie? Why tonight?” he asks.
Well, now-that is the $64,000 question, isn’t it? I suppose I could blame it on our brush with the Shadows, but that would be cheap and predictable. I feel something dark and viscous and suffocating moving around in the long, dark, convoluted corridors of my brain. I find I want it to stay there, where it’s hidden itself.
“Insomnia,” I say. “Lack of appetite. Jitters. A return to journal-keeping. Scary thoughts.”
“What kind of scary thoughts?” asks Cal.
“Did I say ‘thoughts’? I meant ‘moments.’ Scary moments. Vertigo. That sort of thing. Nothing earth-shaking.” Just the usual sense of being dangled over the Grand Canyon by a hair. I tuck both hands under my arms.
“We all have vertigo in these times, Goldie,” Doc tells me. “I would like to reserve judgment about giving you carbamazepine-if indeed we have any.”
“Um, there’s some lithium and some valproate,” I say. “I don’t respond well to lithium. I’ve never had valproate. I didn’t find any carbamazepine.”
“Under the circumstances, Goldie, I think you will understand if I do not leap to medicate you. We live in a time of unknowns and we have all been subject to unnatural stresses. Are you willing to wait? To see what happens?”
To see if I go flat freakin’ crazy? Sure, why not? Panic flickers momentarily in my gut. But, no. He’s right. Based on what I’ve told him, any other course of action would be premature. And I am altogether unsure I want to tell more, so I leave the other half of the truth where it lies.
Doc gives me some valerian root tea-surely the most foul-tasting swamp water in creation-and sends me back to bed. He promises it will relax me. I actually drink the tea. It helps. But it doesn’t keep my masochistic mind from poking at itself.
I lie in the dark, wondering if I should have told whole truths and examining the experience-nightmare or hallucination or vision-that sent me to the pharmacy. I am in a dark tower-like a castle keep-full of dead-end corridors, subterranean passages, and moldering stone. This is blurry, indistinct. I know that outside is light and freshness and freedom, and inside is cold, dead murk.
Below, beneath the foundations of this ruin, is a cesspool of something black and oozing and malevolent. It boils there in relative silence, incongruously making a sound as benign as falling rain. But as I explore this dark place, looking for a way out, I feel it wake and begin to rise. With a dreamer’s omniscience, I know it is coming up to meet me, climbing stairways, drowning corridors, filling rooms.
I climb, of course. In horror films, they always climb, while the viewer is thinking, God, what a schlemazel! because the schlemazel always climbs his way into a dead-end corridor.
I’m no different. I climb a stairway that I somehow know leads to a room with only one way out-straight down.
At intervals, I turn back and catch a glimpse of what has oozed up out of the bowels of the Tower. It’s black and oily and gleams like liquid obsidian. And in the bulging tongue of stuff that licks up the stairwell after me, I see myriad almost-faces as if they were a swarm of insects in amber.
But it’s what I hear that really makes my skin crawl. There is a voice for every face, a whisper, a growl, a cry, a shout. It’s enough to make me rethink my certainty about multiple personality disorder. (Maybe Mother’s diagnoses weren’t sheer crap, after all, and I owe her an apology.) It also terrifies me, because in the same way that I can almost see the faces, I can almost hear the voices, almost understand what they’re saying. And the closer I strain toward understanding, the more thoroughly, soul-chillingly scared I get, because I know that this thing wants me to understand, and that if I understand, it will engulf me, and if it does this, I will go ape shit, stark-raving mad.
Or I’ll drown, which is pretty much the same thing.
The only out I see is off the top of the Tower into that cold blue sky, which-unless I should sprout wings and fly-would be fatal. Fall or drown-hell of a choice.
What’s most disturbing about the dream is that it’s progressive. Every time I have it, I’m a little farther up the stairs, and the voices are a little louder.
And this is why I wanted the Tegretol; I had a hope, however absurd, that it might deflate the nightmare/vision, because I suspect that I am not merely in the Tower, I am the Tower.
And the black ooze? I lie in the dark of my hospital room and hold my cupped hand before my face, concentrating on a spot in my palm. A flame sprouts there, cool, blue, and softly bright. It’s pleasant, soothing to the eye, and quite outside the realm of normal human ability. I did this for the first time less than a day after the Change. Not as easily, but I did it. A very handy thing in a world in which batteries are never included.
Back then, I found it exhilarating. Now, my exhilaration is tempered with a little old-fashioned fear.
When I finally drag myself out of bed the next morning, I’m surprised I’ve been allowed to sleep in. I expected we’d mount up and be on our way, but such is apparently not the case. We are not moving on today, Cal tells me. And maybe not tomorrow.
I hope you’re not doing this for me, I say, and teeter on the edge of guilt, an emotion I’ve worked hard to avoid. I don’t need guilt, thank you, I have manias.
Cal tells me that, of course, it’s not just for me, it’s for all of us and for the people here who could really use Doc Lysenko’s help setting up a real E.R. and an effective triage. Just a day or two, he says. No big deal.
Right.
Left to my own devices, I gather up a field kit-jerky, canteen, matches, a knife scavenged from the hospital kitchen-and follow inner promptings to the edge of town. It seems I have a Quest of my own.
From the city limits I can look down a long slope and see the swath of burned grass that marks last night’s adventure. Beyond it, the woods stretch north and west, a giant’s picnic blanket spread out along the Ohio River.
There is something peculiar in those woods, and I have, for some reason, fixated on it. It is a place where Shadows walk and Angels sing loudly enough for dogs to hear.
I look up at the sky, but it’s hard to tell what time it is through the overcast. Mechanical watches still function, but it’s been so long since I’ve worn one, it’s hard to get back into the habit. I figure it’s still fairly early, judging from the place where the clouds are brightest. Leaning against a convenient tree, I check my food stash, swish my canteen, and pat my knife.
“Going for a little stroll?”
Colleen is standing on the opposite side of the tree, looking nonchalant as hell. I suspect her presence is a function of Cal’s concern, and the poor girl was unlucky enough to draw the short straw.