Tori slumped to the tiled floor, dry heaving. “It’s real. The Crawl’s real. It’s inside me.”
She had to tell Dr Tate.
I discovered the truth of reality and creation in the most unlikely of places, working in a lowly daycare centre in Ipswich. I do not like it here. The people are loud and obnoxious with no respect for their betters, so it was a complete surprise to find said truth residing in an unremarkable young woman who suffered a nervous breakdown that developed into episodes of schizophrenic behaviour. She worked at a supermarket checkout, no formal qualifications, no prospects to speak of. The one noteworthy thing about her was a capacity for story-telling that’d been recorded by her doctors since she was a small child. All of said stories focused around what might be called a sci-fi fantasy setting, the Crawl; a supposed future home for humanity, suspended above the surface of a rather clichéd post-apocalyptic planet Earth.
I thought nothing much of it when she was assigned to me. However, as her treatment has progressed, there have been several incidents that have made me question my own assumptions, until I reached the conclusion this young woman is the focus of something completely and utterly extraordinary.
Of course, it would be incredibly presumptuous of me to jump to the conclusion that her inner world was somehow ‘real’ without first testing this hypothesis. Something so ludicrous would require solid empirical data to even begin to support its veracity. So, I made an adjustment to her medication instead. Alongwith the usual pills I prescribe, I added an additional pill that was a capsule laced with a potent LSD mixture. It’s not very scientific but my gut told me this would be the drug to either unlock the potential within her mind, or ruin it forever. Whatever the end result, I was willing to take the risk.
The headache was building again into a dull roaring storm as Tori entered the day centre’s reception.
“Can I see Dr T, please? I have an appointment. Tori Walker.”
“You’re early for once,” said the sour-faced receptionist.
Tori made a face at her, “Let him know I’m here?”
“I will do – when it’s time for your appointment. Take a seat.”
Tori did so, staring at a bare patch of reception wall opposite, which had been inexpertly repaired with plaster. The streaks and angles of it brought the girder-like structure of the Crawl back into her mind and, with it, a steep increase in the severity of her headache.
“Aww, fuck!”
“Language, please.”
“It’s inside my head. It’s trying to get out.”
“Carry on like that, and I’ll be asking you to get out myself,” the receptionist replied.
Tori quieted, gritting her teeth against the pain. She had to try and think of something else to make the headache recede. But how could she hope to think of anything else? The Crawl was alive, it was spreading, and if she couldn’t find a way to stop it, her head would explode.
Long minutes passed until a voice rang out, “Miss Walker?”
Tori got to her feet and staggered into Dr Tate’s office. She accepted his cool handshake and immediately headed for the couch, where she laid herself down. She closed her eyes and tried to steady her breathing.
“So, how are we today, Miss Walker?”
“Bad. The Crawl’s bad.”
“I see. Are you pain?”
“Yeah. Headache.”
“Would you like a paracetamol?”
Tori nodded fervently.
Dr Tate stood over her as an angular blur in a dark suit. “You give your full and complete consent?”
For taking a paracetamol?
“I do.”
“Excellent. This won’t hurt a bit.”
Tori dry-swallowed the capsule. It tasted a bit funny, different to the usual ones. She saw Dr Tate taking one as well, which was strange. Then, the world began to spin – and everything began to hurt.
Tori was standing on a beach. It was no ordinary beach, the sand was black and white. The sea itself was clogged with corpses and refuse. The winged shapes that cried and shrieked in the grey sky overhead were not seagulls but tatters of lost, unrecovered memory. Bodies washed up the shore with a crash; the waves were not water but composed of broken glass shards and rusted twists of wire. Tori recognised the promenade and the beach huts that lined it. This had been her childhood, a family holiday at the seaside town of Walton-on-the-Naze.
“What the fuck’s going on?”
“You are what’s going on, Tori Walker.”
She turned around to face Dr Tate.
He was standing behind her, checking the cufflinks of his suit.
“What’ve you done to me?”
“Madness is like gravity. I’ve given you a little push to help you realise your full potential.”
“My what?”
“What I’m saying is I believe you, Tori. The Crawl is real. It’s inside you and wants to be born.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Dr Tate laughed, “What about the headaches and the pain? The intricate details of the lo-secs, mid-secs and hi-secs? The rich living out their lives on Anatara station? Or, the Roaches that feast on the bodies of the dead?”
He snapped his fingers. A click-click-clicking came from the dead sea. Out of its silica waves, Tori saw dozens of black shimmering forms scuttling over the shifting corpse-mounds. Red LED eyes flickering on and off. The Roaches were real – and they were coming towards her.
“Make them stop. Tate, make them stop.”
“Why would I do that?”
“I don’t want to die.”
“If you keep fighting the Crawl, refusing to let it emerge and be born, that will be what happens.”
A tremor shook through everything. The sea’s surface erupted, and the familiar angles of the Crawl’s structure began to rise out of, streaming with glass and the mutilated dead. Pain pierced Tori’s head, making her scream and collapse to the floor. She was prostrate before the oncoming tide of Roaches, tasting blood in her mouth as she watched the Crawl emerge.
Tate stood over her, “This can all be over if you let go of the Real. All it takes is this. No more, no less. Your full and complete consent.”
Tori looked up at Tate. The whites of his eyes were showing and spittle was collecting around his lips. Who was mad here? Her or him? Shaking, she got to her feet and, swaying unsteadily, jabbed a finger into his throat.
The chattering Roaches were almost upon her.
“Go on,” Tate whispered, “do what needs to be done.”
“Oh, I will,” she said. “Get him, boys.”
She took a step back.
The Roaches surged over Dr Tate, driving him to the ground. She thought that she heard him scream as he drowned under their black glass forms. Every inch of the doctor was flayed down to the bone, turning the sand around him into a pool of bloodied grease. The Roaches scattered when they were done. Tori imagined a knife into her hand and knelt at Tate’s side.
The world around them was shaking and shuddering. The Crawl cast a titanic shadow that had eclipsed the weak light of this sub-reality’s sun.
“Though I walk through the shadow of the valley of death I shall fear no evil,” Tori whispered.
She drew the knife across Tate’s throat. The wound opened wide, a secondary lipless mouth, and spoke a torrent of black fluid. His skinless head rolled over. He was smiling as the last of his life ran out of his body. “You shouldn’t have done that though I’m very glad you did,” he said, “now, I shall rise and become more powerful than you could ever hope to be. For its people, two thousand years of suffering and misery will be theirs. By slaying me here, you have made me one with this reality.”