Part 19 (1/2)
”I can't make them happen,” Mouse objects. ”I wish I could sometimes, but I don't control --”
”Oh, I don't think that'll be a problem,” says the doctor. ”But this time, I'd like to see if we can get you to remain conscious while the blackout is happening.”
”Remain conscious. . . ?” Mouse shakes her head at the contradiction. ”How?”
”Well answer me this,” says the doctor, ”and try not to think too hard about it before you do.
Let's a.s.sume, for the sake of argument, that your blackouts involve more than you simply pa.s.sing out.
Let's suppose that they actually involve you being transported somewhere. What do you imagine that place is like?”
”I don't. . . I can't. . .”
”Don't think about it, just answer: where do you go when you're missing time?”
”Into the dark,” Mouse says.
The doctor nods approvingly. ”Good safe place, the dark. But what we've got to do is shed some light on it. Could you get that box over there, please?”
She points to a small white box on the mantel above the parlor fireplace. Mouse picks it up and attempts to hand it to the doctor, but the doctor says, ”No, it's for you.”
Mouse sits back down on the sofa with the box in her lap. She lifts the lid, and sees a gleaming hemisphere of yellow plastic. It's a safety helmet. A plastic hardhat, with a miner's light attached to the front. ”You want me to wear this?”
”If you would,” says the doctor. ”It may be a little big on you, but the inside headband is adjustable.”
Mouse lifts up the helmet, and gently places it on top of her head. It is too big on her, and it's heavy. It hurts her neck. After a moment she takes it off again.
”No good?” says the doctor.
”It hurts my neck,” Mouse says.
”That's all right,” the doctor says. ”Just hold onto it for now. It'll fit you better presently. And don't worry about the lamp -- that'll come on by itself when you need it.”
The doctor is leaning forward in her wheelchair, setting up another sort of lamp on top of the coffee table: a small strobe-light. She angles the strobe's reflector so that it is aimed at Mouse's face, and switches it on. ”Focus on this, please, Penny,” she says.
Mouse doesn't want to look in the light -- its brilliance dazzles her, and it emits an ugly tweet with each flash -- but she can't help herself; her eyes move of their own accord. As her gaze fixes on the center of the strobe's reflector, the quality of the light changes, cohering into waves, moving walls of luminance that slide over and through her. The tweets draw out, dropping into a lower register, ba.s.s tremors synchronized to the waves of light.
The doctor speaks again, and her voice is changed, too, having become broader, all-encompa.s.sing, the voice of a preacher or a burning bush. ”I want you to relax now, Penny,” she says.
”Relax, and stare at the light, and try not to be afraid. In a moment I'm going to ask a member of your Society to come forward and speak with me. Normally when this happens you go down deep inside yourself, into the dark place, and sleep until you're called out again. This time I want you to remain close to the surface, and awake -- to make a place for yourself to stand, if you need to. The helmet you are holding in your hands will come inside with you; it will fit you properly there, and comfortably, and it will keep you safe from all harm. The headlamp will come on automatically in the dark, so that you'll be able to look around and see the place that you've made. Do you understand?”
”Yes,” says Mouse, not sure whether she does.
”Good. I'm going to count to three, and then I'd like to speak to the person called Thread. One. .
. two. . . th -- -- ree.”
The room telescopes, with the doctor, the coffee table, and the strobe-light going one way, and Mouse and the sofa flying back the other way.
No, that's not it. The sofa isn't moving; nothing is moving, except Mouse herself, being yanked back into. . . into. . .
Into where?
She is standing now, on a hard -- or at least solid -- surface. Looking straight ahead she can still see the sitting room, but smaller, and framed in jagged darkness, as if she were peering out through a hole in a wall, or the mouth of an unlit cave.
From just outside the cave mouth Mouse hears a voice -- her own voice, but with a new cadence -- echoing back to her: ”h.e.l.lo, Dr. Grey. ”
A hand comes into view from below the cave mouth. It's her hand; Penny Driver's hand. It reaches out, across the coffee table -- dipping, briefly, to switch off the strobe -- and shakes with the doctor.
”Nice to meet you, ” the doctor says. ”Are you Thread?”
The sitting room bobs up and down in a way that ought to make Mouse seasick, but doesn't.
”Like Ariadne's thread,” the voice, Penny Driver's voice, says. ”Do you know that story?”
Mouse, unwilling to listen to this -- someone else having a conversation using her voice -- turns around. Behind her is only darkness. It frightens her, but she is still holding the helmet that the doctor gave her, and she remembers what the doctor said about the helmet's protective powers. She sets the helmet on her head again. This time it fits perfectly, with no discomfort. The pain in her neck is all gone.
The miner's light comes on, and she can see that she is in a tunnel, a cave tunnel. The tunnel narrows as it proceeds away from the cave mouth, becoming a single-file pa.s.sage that slopes downwards. Even with the miner's light, Mouse cannot see far down this pa.s.sageway, but she somehow senses that before long it widens out again, into a much larger s.p.a.ce. A warm draft of air blows past her, up from the depths, and she has a sudden impression of a huge crowd of people asleep on the floor of a cavern, the sleepers arranged in rows and exhaling in unison.
”Hey, Mouse,” a new voice hisses, somewhere very near. Mouse turns towards the sound; her miner's light illuminates a woman in a black leather jacket leaning against what was, just a moment ago, a blank section of tunnel wall. The woman is about Mouse's height, although the steel-toed boots she's wearing -- black leather like her jacket, laced up to just below the knee -- make her seem taller than she is. Her face, framed in an unkempt medusa tangle of raven locks, is badly scarred: her cheeks and forehead are covered with pockmarks, and even the unpitted portions of her skin are rough and chapped. Her eyes are a mean icy blue, frozen chips of disdain, and her cracked lips are drawn out in a permanent sneer.
”So,” she says, ”you finally decided to come inside with your f.u.c.king eyes open, eh?”
Mouse lowers her gaze and sees a second woman, crouched on the cave floor in a gargoyle posture. This woman is a twin of the first, with the same clothes and the same features, only even more hideous, if that is possible: her pockmarks deeper, her hair more tangled, her eyes colder.
Mouse, not saying a word, begins to back away from the evil-looking pair. Amazingly, she's not scared; just. . . repulsed.
”Little f.u.c.king Mouse,” the first woman snarls. ”What, you think we're here to f.u.c.king hurt you?
Or are you just too f.u.c.king good for us? c.u.n.t. ”
Ugly and Uglier, Mouse thinks, trying to come up with names for the women. Trashy, and Tras.h.i.+er. Mouse doesn't know what their intentions are, but she wants nothing to do with them.
”f.u.c.king Mouse,” Ugly/Trashy repeats, actually sounding offended. ”Fine then, c.u.n.t, you go f.u.c.k yourself. . .” She makes an obscene gesture, and she and her twin both vanish.
The doctor's voice echoes back from the cave mouth: ”-- memory trace?”
”Well, I know a lot of what goes on,” Penny Driver's voice says. ”I keep a journal -- two of them. One is just a diary of day-to-day events, things that happen to us. The other is a historical record, things I know or suspect were done to us by Penny's mother. It's to help Mouse, when she's ready to start putting her life back in order. ”
”Mouse is Penny?”
”Mouse was Penny. ”
Mouse enters the narrow pa.s.sageway, descending. The voices from the cave mouth fade as she goes down; soon the only sound is the warm breath-wind, blowing past at regular intervals.
Then, right where she is expecting it to, the pa.s.sage opens up again, into a s.p.a.ce so large that its dimensions cannot even be guessed at. The miner's light is powerful, but as Mouse sweeps her head back and forth like a searchlamp, she sees only a rough stone floor stretching away into the gloom, perhaps to infinity. And yet despite its enormity, the s.p.a.ce is somehow intimate, too; the draft has resolved itself into individual breath sounds, a harmony of snores. Mouse still can't see the sleepers, but -- peering straight ahead into the darkness, now -- she knows that they are close.
She takes a few steps forward and then stops, curious but nervous. What if she gets lost down here? Mouse looks for something to mark a path with, so that she will be able to find her way back to the exit pa.s.sage. A pile of distinctive white pebbles -- exactly the sort of thing she is looking for -- appears in the lamplight as she swings her head around. She stoops, and begins to gather up the stones.
As she is doing this, she hears a new sound below the breathing: footsteps. Mouse looks up, expecting to see one or both of the Ugly twins coming back to hara.s.s her some more, but it isn't them.