2

“Oh?” Raine’s eyebrows went up. “You a first year?”

“Yes.”

She gave a low whistle. “And not on campus. Special circumstances? Living with friends? Rich parents?”

“My parents made it a condition of me attending university. They pay the rent, didn’t want me living on campus, with all the noise and drinking and stress, things which might set me off. Or people who might try to take advantage of me. Because I’m crazy.” I speared a fragment of bacon on my fork, then looked up and held Raine’s gaze best I could.

Raine narrowed her eyes and tapped two fingertips on the tabletop. “You don’t seem crazy to me.”

All my nervous reticence went out the window. What did I have to lose? She’d already seen me covered in sick and shaking with terror. I couldn’t go any lower.

“Appearances are always deceiving.” I managed to pull myself up straighter. “For example, I thought you looked like the sort of girl who would laugh at me being sick and then try to sell me cannabis.”

“Really? Shit,” Raine said. She laughed and ran a hand through her hair. “Definitely not the sort of look I’m going for.”

“And what look might that be?”

“Robin hood of the urban jungle,” she said, puffed out her chest a bit and hooked her thumbs into the pockets of her leather jacket. “Guess I better rethink if it’s making me too scary. I’d hate to have frightened you off, Heather.”

“Keep the jacket, it suits you,” I managed to say before my courage ran out.

“Really?” Raine cracked a grin.

I ate more. Raine gave me just enough silence to know the question was coming.

“I … “ A lump in my throat. Wanted to look away. Fought the desire to get up and leave. “I can’t have this conversation. I haven’t in … ever, really. Meds never really did anything and I never told anybody they didn’t work, so … ”

The silence stretched out enough to hurt. I felt myself shrinking.

“Lemme guess,” Raine clapped her hands together. “History, right?”

I blinked up at her. “What?”

“History student, am I right? You’ve got that sort of hunched-up-with-the-books look about you, too many long hours in the uni library, not enough sleep. But I guess that last part isn’t related. And you haven’t got the natural bearing of a STEM student, either.”

“ … no, you’re wrong. Literature.”

“Literature! Dang, you got a lot more guts than me. I could never do that.”

The littlest flush of pride. Enough to lead me on. “And you?”

“PPE,” Raine said, then rolled her eyes. “Though I sort of dropped the E and most of one P, so now it’s just Philosophy. Would be plain sailing, but I’m in a sort of an experimental degree program right now, all a bit hush-hush.”

“ … you lost me. You— you talk too fast for me,” I said. “It’s the sleep deprivation.”

Raine laughed and shook her head. “I’m sorry, Heather. PPE: Politics, Philosophy and Economics, it’s-”

“I know what PPE is,” I said. “You just don’t look like … well … “

“Like one of the wankers who studies PPE at Sharrowford? No kidding. They all want to be MPs and special advisers and think-tank suits. Boring, the lot of ‘em. But enough of that, I’m more curious about you. What’s your favourite book, miss literary scholar?”

“That’s an impossible question to answer, and I suspect you know so.” I sighed, but Raine grinned again and wiggled her eyebrows at me. “I guess … there’s too many. Um … ” I started slow, named a few titles I’d read as a teenager, then books my dad had given me, science fiction novels and fantasy worlds, my dad’s old stack of Interzone magazines and mum’s copy of Watership Down. I rattled and stuttered and picked up steam, began to re-walk my favourites in my head, told Raine about the summer I spent reading The Hobbit seven times. When I looked up at her again, she was beaming. I cut off mid-sentence, blushing terribly.

“Not such an impossible question,” she said. “Easier than talking about mental illness.”

“I can talk about books because I love them. I don’t love being crazy.”

“What’s it like?”

Her tone was so straightforward, not what I’d expected; no pity, no coaxing, no kid gloves for the crazy girl. Nothing like the doctors, the psychiatrists - nothing like my parents. A pressure valve popped in my subconscious, a breach in years of inhibition and shame. She’d already seen me at my worst, and when I called my mother later I’d be good as dead. Why lie? At least I could unburden myself once before I vanished into a hole for the rest of my life.

“Have you ever read Alice in Wonderland?” I asked.

Raine nodded, waited for me to continue.

“I went to Wonderland,” I said, and felt my throat try to close up. I fought it. “Not the place Alice went, that would have been fine and I wouldn’t be sitting here today. I call it Wonderland because that’s the only shared cultural reference point we have, but it was nothing like that. It was dark, vast, full of things that wanted to teach me impossible

lessons, impossible creatures, giants, watching me … ” I swallowed, my words ran out but I kept going, it poured and poured as I stared at the tabletop. “I was nine years old. You know how sometimes children can see things or experience things which would really mess them up but they just keep going because they don’t know any better? Because they’re children? That’s what it was like in Wonderland. A dream, and the payload of trauma only hit once I woke.”

“Yeah,” Raine said.

“And there was no rabbit hole or magic mirror to get there, we went through an abyss underneath my bed. A hole. A non-place. Me and my sister found it one night, as we were reading stories to each other in the dark, under the bed covers with a torch. She came back from the toilet and there it was, inviting us. And we just decided to go in, because that’s what you do when you’re kids and you’ve been reading fairy tales all your life and nobody tells you it’s possible to see things which aren’t real.” I took a shuddering breath, and forced myself on, to the hardest part.

“We were twins, my sister and I. We went in together, because we did everything together. But when Wonderland let me go, I was alone. Her bed was gone. Her clothes, her— everything. It was just me. And later on, after the screaming hysteria and the hospital and the tranquilisers, I tried to ask my parents ‘where’s my sister?’” I swallowed hard and bit back on the pain; the wound was still open, no matter how old.

“She never existed,” I whispered. “You can’t know what it’s like, to grow up with another half, a twin, who turns out to be a delusion. A hallucination. Just me in the family photos. Six months later I got an official diagnosis, from the child psychologists at Cygnet hospital in London.”

Raine waited for me to continue, head tilted slightly to one side.

“Ever since then, I’ve had nightmares. It’s like being back there, and I wake up screaming, my head full of … of- pressure in my head and- and-” I started to shake, had to back away from the idea. “Night terrors, they call them. They come and go, it’s not every week, or even every month. Sometimes I think it’s finally over, but the respite never lasts. I get daytime hallucinations too, monsters and things, and sometimes - rarely - I Slip. That’s what I call it, when reality spits me out to some other place for hours on end. That was happening to me just now, when you found me.”

“What happened to her?” Raine asked.

“Wonderland?”

I shook my head. “No, other places. I-I think I’d die if I had to go back to Wonderland again. It’s almost never the same. First time that happened I was ten, I went to this place full of giant worms and pyramids and … the doctors put me on medication.”

“Anti-psychotics?”

“Yes.”

“They work?”

“No. They didn’t do anything, but I pretended they did because I wanted the side effects to stop, and I learnt to live with seeing monsters everywhere.”

Raine’s eyes narrowed into a shrewd look. “What exactly did you see in Wonderland, Heather?”

I looked at her for a moment like she was one of my hallucinations.

“I-I can’t talk about it, it hurts to think-”

“Please, try,” Raine said, then reached across the table and took my hand. Her hand felt soft and warm. I tried to pull away but she held on. “You’ve never told anybody this, have you?”

“The doctors … “

“But you lied to them a lot, right?” she said. “You told them the drugs worked, and you never really told them the core of it, not at ten years old. What do you dream about, Heather?”

“Why are you even-”

“Because you need it, don’t you?”

I gulped, and screwed my eyes up, and for the first time in my life I told the truth.

“A … an Eye,” I said, and felt my stomach clench. Raine squeezed, I squeezed back. “A giant eye, the Great Eye, and it is all the sky, from horizon to horizon.” My voice dwindled and I tried not to shake, tried not to think about what I was saying. I squeezed Raine’s hand until my knuckles were white. “It has a million million servants in the ruins and dust below. And it watches me, and it thinks at me and sorts through the neurons in my brain and forces me to learn things- things- a-about reality, physics- no, I can’t, I can’t,” I shook my head.

Raine was up and into the seat next to me before I lost control. She put her arm around my shoulders. I sat and shook and she told me to take deep breaths, and I did, until I could think clearly without seeing the impossible equations and unreal physics the Eye had spent ten years force-feeding me. Nobody paid us the slightest bit of attention, two college girls having a moment of private drama.

“You okay?” she asked eventually.

“No, not really,” I said, and sighed. I turned away and wiped my eyes. She disentangled her arm from around me, and I was too much of a coward to ask her to keep it there. “But, um, thank you.”

“You really needed that, huh?”

“I guess so,” I muttered. I had never spelt it all out before, in such simple terms.

Raine studied me for a moment, then said, “What if I could prove you’re not crazy?”

And there was the catch, the other shoe dropping: Raine was a kook. A really good looking kook who gave me attention and comfort on one of the lowest mornings of my life. At least I could have an hour of companionship before I called my mother and tore everything down. I didn’t want Raine to leave.

act, but it was still very endearing.

“Really?” she asked.

“Mmhmm, really.”

“Can you describe it?” She squinted at the window.

“Just like I said, shape of a person, sort of like a scribble.”

“How tall?”

“I don’t know. Maybe ten feet? It’s pretty tall.”

“Eyes? Face? Hands?”

“No, it’s got a mass of black for a face, like a knot in a tree. And the limbs taper off into sharp points.”

Raine turned back to me with a wild look in her eyes. “Ever tried shouting at these things in Latin? Greek? You know any Latin?”

“What? No.”

“One sec,” Raine said. “I have to message a friend real quick.” She pulled out a chunky mobile phone and sent a text message, then placed it on the table and winked at me. “Can’t prove a negative, eh? Let’s do an experiment, Heather. You’re gonna love this one. If you’re not impressed, I’ll buy your breakfast. Hell, I’ll buy you breakfast anyway, and lunch and dinner, and another breakfast. Oh wow, you got no idea. This is not what I was expecting.”

The phone buzzed. Raine scooped it up off the table, grinned at whatever the message contained, and then took my hand.

Outside, in the weak morning sunlight, the Scribble turned to watch us as Raine led me out of the cafe.

“Uh, Raine?” I gulped and pulled my coat closer around myself.

“What? What’s it doing?” Raine looked up and down and everywhere. She figured out the right direction from the way I backed up, then put herself between me and the creature. It bent toward us, extending limbs like knives made of night.

“Following- um, it followed us when we left. Raine, I don’t like this, it’s not normal, this is my head reacting to-”

Raine opened the text message she’d received - I glimpsed a picture on the screen for a split-second, a jumble of lines. She grinned at me. Then she held the phone up and showed it to my hallucination.

A miracle happened.

The Scribble-thing screamed, a split-second tearing of rusty nails across the inside of my skull. I clamped my hands to my ears. As quick as it began the sound dissipated and lost all force. The creature unravelled, twisting and pulling at itself, scraps of darkness floating away on the wind until it vanished, the wounds in reality closing up and sliding shut with a papery rustling sound.

“What happened to it? Is it gone?” Raine asked, still holding up the phone, reluctant to look away. “It’s gone, right? No way that didn’t work. Come on, Heather, say something!”

I was speechless. Nobody else had ever touched my hallucinations. They interacted with me if I was careless enough, but never anybody else. And none of them had ever done anything like that.

“It’s … yes. Yes, it’s gone.”

Raine turned to me, smug all over. “Did it explode? Fireworks? Bada-boom! She shoots, she scores!” She threw her hands up and whooped and punched the air.

“I don’t— no, it sort of fell apart. I mean, that doesn’t prove anything, all you did … “ She’d used suggestion and trickery, I wasn’t well, I was sleep deprived. “How did you do that?”

“Oh, I have no idea.” Raine waggled her phone. “All I did is point this in the right direction.” The screen showed a picture of a symbol drawn on a regular piece of paper, a symbol like a blocky fractal representation of a tree. “But I can introduce you to the person who made it happen, a really good friend of mine. She’s … well, she’s kind of like you, a little bit. I think you’ll get on great with her.”

“Wait, wait, stop.” I held up a hand and noticed it was shaking. “That, that wasn’t real, that was one of my hallucinations. A hallucination, not real.”

“Sure it was,” Raine said, then rummaged in her jacket and pulled out a thick black marker pen. “And you’ve been kept up for two weeks by nightmares. First thing you’re gonna do is go home and get some sleep, because you’re totally shattered and it’s not helping you think straight. I’m not going to dump a load on you about the occult and invisible monsters and how I just banished a servitor with magic, not before you’ve got a few hours sleep in you, because then you’ll think I really am trying to exploit you, right?”

“What? No, I never said you were a nut-case or anything.”

“Yeah, but you thought it. No shame, I would too, in your place. When all you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like nails. Here, hold out your hand.”

I was helpless to resist, too confused and still in shock. Raine stuck her tongue out the corner of her mouth as she copied the symbol from her phone to the back of my left hand.

“There.” She slapped the cap back onto the marker pen. “Now, I got no idea if that will actually help you sleep or not, but it might, and might is better than more nightmares.” She grinned and pointed at me as I cradled my graffitied hand.

“I … I guess.”

“Now come on, I’ll walk you home. I’ll fend off the monsters with a sharp stick if I have to.” Before I could stop her she looped her arm through mine and led the way.

Even Raine wasn’t psychic, she did have to ask where I live, and my barriers were so weak by then that I just told her. All my caution, years of my parents acting like I was a disabled child, the lectures on staying safe, how easily I’d be hoodwinked because I was mentally ill, it all went out the window.

“So, what else do you see around here, Heather?”

“Excuse me?”

“What other monsters walk Sharrowford’s streets?” I caught that look on Raine’s face again, ***** fascination. Hunger.

“They’re not … they’re not real, Raine. They’re phantoms of my diseased brain, for God’s sake.” I had to take a deep breath and look away, a blush rising in my cheeks.

“Pretty please? I’m dying to know. Hey, come on, look at me. Heather?”

“I-I know what you did earlier wasn’t real, it was a confidence trick, and right now I don’t care. But my hallucinations are not real.”

“Sure they’re not, but tell me about them anyway.”

Slowly, the words sticking like dry toast in my throat, I told Raine about the thing with three legs that squatted at the end of Peasley Drive, and the hulk to the south, towering over the city in mute silence. I described a shambling ape with a sprouting mushroom for a head, and the humpbacked reptilian sloth which ambled across the road from us. Raine listened, nodded, asked questions like she was compiling a taxonomy. She only stopped when we reached the foot of my block of flats and we swapped mobile phone numbers, my fingers numb as I made absolutely sure I had hers correct.

Raine checked the time on her phone and puffed out a sigh. “I’d love to come up and make sure you actually get to sleep, but I’ve got class.”

“It’s okay, you’ve … I don’t understand why you’re being so friendly, doing all this. Being nice.”

Raine cocked an eyebrow. “You know this city isn’t safe for people like you? Ahh, who am I kidding, you haven’t the faintest idea.”

“What? Sharrowford?” I almost laughed, despite everything. “It’s hardly the crime capital of England. The worst things that happen here all seem to be the fault of students.” Raine gave me an odd look, the sort of look the doctors used to give me, an I-know-better look tainted with patronising compassion. I felt myself bristle. “Wait, you mean because I’m crazy?”

“No, Heather, I mean because you can see things you shouldn’t. You wanna know why I’m doing this? Because I don’t wanna let somebody like you get hurt. And I think you’re kinda sweet.”

I tried to form a reply, but found my mouth was made of useless flapping rubber. “Um … okay?”

“Do you know where the university’s Medieval Metaphysics department is? Well, it’s not really a department, there’s only two of us. Anyway, point is, I’ve got class until three, which means you’re gonna sleep for six-seven hours, then you’re gonna come up to the department and meet Evee. I think between us we might be able to shine a light on your head.”

“The-the what?”

“Medieval Metaphysics department. It’s in the top of Willow, technically just part of the Philosophy department. There’s only two doors, 117 and 118, one says- oh, wait, here!” She fished around in her jacket, pulled out a bunch of keys and slipped one off, then pressed it into my hand. “You’ll need this to get in, the key to 118. Just go on in if I’m not there, make yourself at home.”

“Why?” I asked.

Raine cracked another smile. “Because I’m Robin Hood.”

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