1

On the day I met Raine, the first thing I did was jerk awake in bed and vomit nightmares into my lap.

That’s not quite accurate. If I could purge the nightmares like a bad meal then life would be a lot easier. No, I brought up bile and what little I’d managed to keep down over the last couple of days, then dry heaved through the aftershocks, shaking and coated in cold sweat; the nightmares had lashed at me for two weeks, and last night broke the record.

For a long moment I screwed my eyes shut and struggled to forget the nightmare. The endless dark plain, the Watchers, the Great Eye which had crammed my head full to bursting with things I didn’t want to know, night after night, until I’d clawed my way out through the bedsheets and back into the sick prison of my nausea-wracked body.

I mumbled some poetry to drown out the Eye, a few lines of Coleridge through the taste of sick in my mouth.

“And now there came both m-mist and snow, and it grew wondrous cold … a-and ice …”

Poor old Coleridge and the rapture of the Arctic wasn’t strong enough, not when scratched out through my throat, raw from the bile and acid. Pressure spiked inside my head. I felt a nosebleed start and watched fat bloody droplets join the reeking puddle on my bedsheets. The Eye’s lessons filled my mind, a jumble of painful geometry and impossible equations quivering and bleeding on the rim of reality.

I dry heaved again.

Predawn grey crept around the edges of the sheet I used as a curtain, and the green numbers on my bedside clock told me I’d been asleep for less than three hours. Not even two full REM cycles. My room stank of vomit and fear-sweat, cut through by the iron tang of blood. I pinched my nose to stop the bleeding.

I said some unflattering things to myself and finally accepted I was suffering the worst schizophrenic relapse of my life. Wonderland was calling me back. Once or twice a month I could handle, I had coping strategies; two weeks without respite and I felt fragile, brittle, spent.

It was time to call my mother and go back on the crazy pills.

‘Crazy’ is a safety blanket word for me. It defines a neat boundary in which I can exist without screaming at the walls or talking to people who aren’t there. A safe zone to keep me from being locked in a padded cell. I don’t like ‘insane’ because the word itself requires a ‘sane’ with which to define against. Crazy has no opposite.

Raine was about to take away my safety blanket; if I’d known, would I still have gone out that morning? For Raine, probably yes.

I’d constructed a routine the last couple of weeks. Strip my bed and my sweat-stained clothes, shove it all into the ancient washing machine in the corner of my one-room bedsit flat, clean myself up best I could, down three cups of coffee, and drag myself to morning classes.

And try to ignore the hallucinations.

A spindly figure by the back wall watched me with holes instead of eyes, with too many fingers pressed to its face, too many joints, skin made of mushroom flesh and marble.

A vast shadow outside drifted across the window, trailing ropey tentacles, a gasbag jellyfish humming whalesong.

I finally got the washing machine going, on my feet by willpower alone, when a ball of spines and black chitin sniffed at my foot. I scooted it away. Of course, I felt nothing. It wasn’t really there.

I put the kettle on while I shuffled into the tiny bathroom to wash out the taste of stomach acid and blood. I spat tainted saliva into the sink over and over again until I felt a little less defiled, then scrubbed the dried blood off my face and lips and blew my nose. The water ran pink. Even when clean I didn’t relish the sight of myself in the mirror, my eyes ringed with dark exhaustion. Sallow and slack and sick. I dragged my hair into a semblance of order.

My stomach clenched with exhaustion-hunger at the smell of instant coffee. I rummaged for food but instead found another hallucination, huge and covered in wire-coarse hair, shifting in the back of the cupboard. I waited for that one to pass, afraid it would look at me if I reached inside.

I needed real food if I was going to have that fatal conversation with my mother, so I made a deal with myself. A last meal.

“Have to go outside, outside we go. You can do it, Heather, you escaped once before, you can do it again. It’s easy, it’s just a bedsit room and all you’re going to do is walk down the street and get bacon and eggs. That sounds good, yes. Bacon with the fat still on, just how you like it. Come on, out we go. You can do it.”

I kept up the one-woman pep talk to coax myself into real clothes, dragged a thick jumper over my head, found an almost-clean pair of jeans and pulled my coat around my shoulders. I loved that coat, thick and padded like armour to keep the world out. It was the most expensive thing I owned after my laptop.

That thick security held back the crush of defeat. My parents had never believed I’d make it through university, and here I was two months into my first year ready to throw in the towel, ready to admit the stress of writing a few essays about Shakespeare and Byron had caused a relapse, that I was never going to be normal, that I was never going to have any friends, that I was meant to spend the rest of my life in a drugged stupor.

I was too exhausted to care.

I was also wrong.

My name is Heather Lavinia Morell and I’m not crazy. On the bad days, I wish I was, because then none of this would be real.

\=\=

Seven minutes walk from my flat would bring me to the front gates of the university campus, but it was half past five in the morning and the canteen was closed. Chill autumn air nipped at my neck and hands, welcome relief from the unclean feeling of sticky sweat. I had no energy to shower. At the end of the cul-de-sac I turned and walked deeper into the tangle of Sharrowford’s student quarter.

I kept my head down.

Outside, in the street, the visions were always worse. Sharrowford’s open skies and public squares gave my hallucinations space to blossom.

A hunched hulk wreathed in black haze drooled molten saliva on a suburban corner, rooted into the ground with questing barbs of knotty red flesh. I passed a tree half-dead from the late autumn weather, wrapped in a layer of pale worms thick as my arm. A cluster of ***** bone white figures in a front garden turned to watch me as I passed, and none of them had faces. A giant shape strode overhead, blotting out the early dawn sky, six pillar-like insect legs towering over the city. I heard a distant boom each time it took another step.

A thousand delusions skittered and crawled and writhed at the end of every road. The few real humans out at this hour weren’t worth acknowledging - in the monochrome pre-dawn static of Sharrowford in November, I could be wrong, I could nod a friendly greeting to a figment of my fevered brain. Can’t afford that.

If you’ve never been to Sharrowford, then you’ve probably at least heard of the university. The city doesn’t have much else going for it, just another post-industrial hulk on the edge of the North of England. The centre dresses itself up as trendy and hip, but it’s old, ossified, trailing edges of decay wrapped around a core of ancient stone and a million hidden secrets.

If you’re anything like me, don’t come here.

I reached Abbots Lane, clustered with takeaway joints and a shuttered video store and my destination - Aardvark, a twenty-four hour breakfast cafe with greasy tables and dirty floors and incredible food. Other students didn’t go here much, my kind of place.

Another monster lurked in the middle of the road, twitching and shaking, twelve feet of scribbles on the air like rents torn in paper over an abyss. I stopped, reluctant to pass too close. My skin crawled at the way it moved, like seaweed in an invisible current. I tore my eyes away and put it from my mind, ready to focus on the very important business of my last meal.

Then, I saw her.

A girl stood by the cafe, peering through the front window.

She glanced my way and our gazes touched. She smiled, a rakish flash of her teeth with a little upward twitch of her eyebrows, as if we were sharing some silent joke. I had to look away. Even at my worst I could never have mistaken her for a hallucination.

A leather jacket sat loose on her shoulders. She held her head high, her eyes up, taking the world full in front. Rich chestnut hair swept back loose and lazy from her forehead, shorter than mine but with that special illusion of never having felt the hairdresser’s scissors. A pair of well-worn boots showed off a faded rose design up the sides. Her eyes were sharp and warm in the cold grey morning.

Her smile cut right through me.

Not the sort of girl who’d ever be interested in me. I knew I was clutching at straws, so alone and exhausted that even a hint of sympathetic human contact had me ready to beg like a dog.

She forgot me, looked back at The Aardvark, ambled up to the door and went inside. I was about to turn around and start the long walk back to campus, to wait outside the canteen, because I couldn’t follow her in there now. What if she tried to talk to me? She’d work out I was crazy, I’d wither up and die under that smile. I could imagine the disgusted look on her face when she realised what I was.

But then the scribble monster jerked toward the cafe on flickering legs. It bent, folded itself at the waist like a contracting length of intestine, and pressed what passed for a face up against the glass. I fumed for a moment and then forced myself to step past it and into the cafe. I wasn’t about to be upstaged by my own subconscious. If one of my hallucinations could ogle a pretty girl I didn’t have the courage to speak with, then at least I could prove I wasn’t afraid.

Truth was, I barely paid attention to her once inside The Aardvark. The smell of frying food all but demolished me. She was already lounging in a corner booth, a book in both hands and coffee before her. A few other insomniacs and a couple of night shift lorry drivers didn’t spare me a look as I shuffled to the counter at the back to order bacon and eggs.

I took an empty booth diagonally across from the girl, safely hidden from the risk of further eye contact, but close enough that I could tilt my head a few degrees to catch sight of her boots crossed at the ankles, the book in her hand - a battered copy of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason - and a feathery lock of stray chestnut hair.

I contented myself with those scraps. I’d been doing so all my life. Half-glances at people I liked. Contact was too much of a risk, to both parties.

After a few seconds of waiting my body decided it was time to cash in all my sleep debt. I struggled to keep my eyes open, sat up straight, pinched the back of my hand under the table. I tried not to look at the shifting nightmare face pressing up against the glass at the front of the cafe. I wished I’d had the coherence of mind to bring a book too; I was supposed to be reading Pilgrim’s Progress for class, but over the last two weeks I’d managed all of five pages. Couldn’t even do the things I loved.

The fry cook called out my order. My mouth watered when I carried my plate back to the table. I swallowed one bite and felt wrong.

My vision swam. Vertigo tugged at the pit of my stomach.

Not sleepy anymore.

I was Slipping.

“No, not now, not now,” I hissed through my teeth, a familiar prayer when I felt a Slip rushing toward me. My heart pounded and I started to shake. I bit back a whine of fear and frustration. I was so tired, I was so tired, all I wanted to do was eat, please God let me at least get some food in my belly before it happens. Not now, not after two weeks of hell, not ever again. Please.

Slip vertigo yanked me sideways. My vision fogged, a ghost of elsewhere overlaid on the cafe, dark and windswept and ashen. I skidded to my feet and banged my shin on the edge of the booth, then lurched for the toilet.

I slammed into a toilet stall in the cafe’s bathroom just before another wave of vertigo rolled over me. Bracing my feet against the floor and my hands against the stall walls, I pushed, I held on, I anchored myself as hard as I could and squeezed my eyes shut and whined and prayed under my breath. I could have done this in the booth and saved seconds, might make all the difference between staying here and Slipping over, but the pathetic thought in my head was that I couldn’t look like a crazy person in public, not in front of a pretty girl who’d smiled at me.

Bracing myself didn’t always work; maybe it didn’t work at all, maybe it was pure delusion. I’m supposed to have those. Delusions.

I smelled bone ash and the spice of chemical fire. Heard howling wind, and felt the bite of alien air on the skin of my face. How’s that for a delusion?

My hands jerked, as if the walls weren’t there anymore.

Slipping.

“Hey, you okay in there?”

My eyes snapped open. The walls were back, solid, here. The air was filled with the smell of cheap toilet cleaner and greasy food. I spluttered and gulped.

“Yo, you can hear me, right?” The voice spoke again, drifting up and over the stalls, female and concerned. She knocked on the stall door. “I hope you’re not deaf, ‘cos then I’m just talking to myself and that’s never a good look. Seriously, you okay?”

I froze up. I could lie, or I could say no, I’m not okay because I just fought off a portion of my own diseased mind which wanted to make me spend several hours lost in another world. Safest thing was to stay quiet, pretend I wasn’t there. She’d shrug and give up and go away.

“I know you’re in there,” she said. “I can see your shoes under the door. Too much to drink last night? It’s no shame to ask somebody to hold your hair back for you, you know?”

How had I fought off the Slip? My mind betrayed me. Before I could shy away, my thoughts alighted on a fragment of knowledge imparted from the Eye, some equation which governed what just happened to me. My head throbbed with sudden pressure, I choked and doubled up and vomited a string of bile into the toilet bowl. I whined with pain and felt a nosebleed start.

“Yeah, you are two hundred percent not okay, girl,” she said. “Right, executive decision time.”

She stepped into the next open stall, clambered up on the toilet and peered down at me over the dividing wall. I yanked myself as upright as I could manage and stared back at her, feeling like a plague victim in the bottom of a pit.

It was the girl in the leather jacket with the rakish smile and the pretty eyes.

“W-what on earth are you do- “ I tried to say, but it came out in a croak and another nauseous spasm gripped my stomach. I doubled up and heaved bile into the toilet bowl, spat and jerked upright again and felt blood running from my nose. I clamped a hand to my face.

“Ahhh, jeeze, look at you”, she said, not unkindly. “For starters I’m helping you get cleaned up.”

With a little ‘hup’ she vaulted the top of the stall and climbed down in front of me.

“I’m not — I don’t need — I-I don’t even know you.” I backed away and fumbled with the latch, burst out into the bathroom and clutched my coat around myself, dripping nosebleed onto the floor tiles.

“We can change that part easy enough,” she said. She held up her hands and flashed the same smile she’d given me outside, beaming endless confidence straight into my brain. That’s the only thing which stopped me running. “Hey, look, I’m not gonna bite, ‘less you ask me to. I saw you come in here and thought, ‘Heeeey, that girl looks a bit messed up, maybe she needs a hand, maybe she needs some help.’ And, yeah, you are a bit messed up, let’s be honest. If you don’t need help then I’m Johnny Cash. I’m not being catty or weird. Solidarity, you know? Gotta look out for each other,” she thumbed over her shoulder. “One of those guys out there coulda’ followed you in here instead, found you passed out on the toilet. Here, lemme help.”

I wiped at my nosebleed, then pinched it off, breathing through my mouth.

“I’m not-”

“You’re not hungover. I know, I can tell.”

“ … how can you tell that?”

“Seen that sorta look in your eyes before. I don’t know what your deal is, but, hey.”

She held out a hand.

The smile, the knowing look in her eyes, or just the fact she was stunning; I took her hand.

I’m so easy.

“I’m Raine,” Raine said.

“Heather,” I muttered.

Raine was true to her word. She steered my exhausted body over to the sinks and helped me wipe the drying blood from under my nose and the vomit from my lips. She waited with me for the bleeding to stop, handed me paper towels and made sure I lent forward so the blood didn’t drain down my throat, then got me to wash my mouth out. She filled a glass with water and made me drink it all, slowly. Her hand on my back helped, a gentle, unfamiliar pressure. She wet another paper towel and suggested I wipe my face, just to help me feel better.

I couldn’t speak, too mortified to even mumble a thank you.

“There, feeling a little more human now, eh?” Raine smiled at me in the mirror. I managed to shake my head. “So, you’re not hungover, you don’t look like a druggie, but hey, you never know. You haven’t greened out, and I’m gonna presume you don’t do molly?”

I frowned. “Who’s Molly?”

“Ecstasy. E. Party drugs. You don’t really look like a party girl, but I don’t want to assume and be an arsehole about it.”

“No, I don’t take things like that. I don’t do drugs. I don’t smoke or drink, at all.”

I expected a return of the rakish smile and a familiar refrain: ‘how do you have fun then?’ She looked the type to say that.

Instead, Raine put her palm on my forehead. It was so soft, so surprising, and so brief. “Yeah, not clammy enough to be food poisoning.” She took a step back and chewed on her lower lip, spread her hands in a speculative shrug.

She was a couple of inches taller than me, more athletic - though that’s not difficult - and she looked healthy. Strong. Much more alive than my face in the mirror. She was about my age but she seemed so much more mature, a real adult rather than a floundering child.

“Thank you,” I said. “But I’m … I can’t explain what I was doing. You don’t want to know. Thank you for helping, but … I should go finish my food. I’m sorry, I probably stink, I know.”

Raine pointed a finger gun at me and nodded, solemn and serious. “Pregnant, right?”

“What? No! No, I’m not even strai— no, it’s not morning sickness. I’m crazy. I’m a crazy person and I was being sick because I thought I was being pulled into another dimension, and a giant Eyeball in the sky was teaching me impossible physics which make me ill, and I’m at the end of my rope because I’ve been going mad and not sleeping and barely eating for two weeks.”

I averted my eyes as I spoke, couldn’t meet Raine’s gaze. A long silence followed. I wanted to curl up and die. I prayed she wasn’t a student at the university because there was no way I could ever bump into her without crawling into a hole in the ground. But that wasn’t going to be a problem anymore, was it? Because I was going to call mum and drop out, take my medication again and be a zombie.

Raine grabbed my hand. I looked up and saw raw, ***** fascination.

“We should get some food in you,” she said. “It’ll be getting cold. Nobody likes to waste a whole fry up, and you paid good money for that.”

\=\=

Raine joined me back in the booth with my rapidly cooling breakfast.

“This place is top notch, you know, but it’s always pretty quiet,” she was saying. “A lot of the snooty-trouser types on campus won’t come to places like this. Sure, they do one of those drinking tours of the city a couple of times a year, but they’re all Oxford and Cambridge rejects, all think they’re too good for Sharrowford really.”

I ate a mouthful of bacon and had to stop myself shovelling it in, to avoid overloading my tender stomach. My puzzlement at Raine helped. When I looked up she met my eyes and smiled.

“Good stuff, yeah?” she said. “I come here like once, twice a week. Nice quiet place to think in the wee hours of the morning. All the regulars, the lorry drivers and whatnot, they’re actually alright guys. Never bothered me nothing.”

I nodded and felt awkward. She was so obvious, the way she was avoiding asking.

“You’re a student, right?” Raine said. “I know I’ve seen you in the university canteen once or twice. I never forget a face like yours, Heather.”

“ … what, what does that mean?” A blush rose in my cheeks.

Raine grinned and shrugged. I tried to hold her gaze but I faltered, focused hard on the next two mouthfuls of scrambled egg.

“So I assume your lack of food for the last two weeks had nothing to do with the crappy canteen fare?”

“I don’t go there much. I don’t live on campus.”

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