Blind the Eyes

Chapter 5: Susannah

Chapter 5: SusannahTHERE’S A FLARE of piercing light, and everything changes. I’m . . . somewhere else. Sound comes back first: a delicate, distant melody. I’ve never heard anything like it.

I haven’t heard music like that in years, the child thinks.

I peer past an improbably frilly and beribboned skirt. Shiny white shoes swing in time to the gentle tune. I’m sitting at a table set with china and silver amidst a lavish expanse of gently waving greenery, polished wood, and marble pillars.

And here’s the strangest, most impossible part of it. I’m not me; I’m her. A small girl in an extravagant, inappropriate dress. I see what she sees, feel what she feels, and, increasingly, think what she thinks.

A shadow hovers over our hands, curdling our stomach: a faded silhouette of withered fingers clawed against white sheets. We gasp at the sudden ache of arthritis. Mama reaches over to press our smooth, childish hand and the vision passes.

The warmth of her touch is alarming and unexpected somehow. We look up into her smiling face, smooth and unblemished—so young, why does that seem odd?—and across at Father, frowning nearsightedly at his menu, although of course he’ll order the usual.

My— our— sight blurs at the edges. Everything beyond the glittering expanse of our table is out of focus. I try to pull away from the girl and the air thickens. I look closer. Skeins of translucent, threadlike fibres clog the air, creating a fog-like effect.

Everything about this is wrong. This can’t be happening. I can’t be here. I can’t be imagining this. I’d never.

There has to be some sort of explanation. How did I get here? What’s happening?

But I slip deeper into the girl’s mind with every one of our shared breaths.

Our heart aches, looking at Mama and Father. We are so happy to be here. But something’s wrong, or about to go wrong. We can’t remember, and brush away the unease.

Mouthwatering breakfast aromas mingle with the lavish perfume of artfully arranged flowers. We prop a menu against the table edge to scan its decadent offerings. Crisp waffles with cream and fruit. Golden stacks of pancakes, or French toast drizzled with maple syrup. Bacon and eggs.

Eggs. The word tears my consciousness up and out of hers. Cadence has told me about eggs before. Where is she? Where am I? I shouldn’t be here.

I can’t quite catch hold of why.

There’s a distant sense of panic, just on the other side of a heavy curtain. It’s pushing toward me, trying to reach me. It thins to only the barest whisper of a passing thought. I drift under again.

The music shifts, the gentle strains now jumbled and jarring, shuddering from distractingly loud and harsh to creeping near-silence. Frowning, we close the menu. A small, ribbon­bound box perches behind it. “To Miss Suzannah Bell” says the cream-coloured tag, in elegant cursive.

Mama speaks, but her voice is lost under a violent crescendo of discordant music. Father, his arm draped casually over her shoulder, twinkles at us above his carefully oiled moustache. He does so enjoy finding the best presents.

We feel surprise. It’s Suzannah’s birthday?

The question is mine. I surface muzzily from the girl’s consciousness.

Suzie, she thinks to me, but they call me Bell now.

Suzie seems unfazed at the presence of a second consciousness drifting in and out of her. I squint through the shifting filaments that cloud the air. I’d lost track of them until the girl’s name jostled me back into my own head. Suzannah Bell. Bell. It’s familiar.

The ID beside the door on Floor 20. The room with the corpse.

Corpse? She wonders.

I shutter the memory. Impossible as it seems—impossible as this whole experience is—I can’t very well be exposing a child to the horrors of . . . the horrors of . . .

What was it again? Somewhere else. I’m supposed to be somewhere else. I’m supposed to be someone else. The memories drift away with my consciousness.

We tug the satin ribbon. The box drops open to reveal the most lovely, delicate little doll. It’s flawless, dressed to the finest detail in precisely the outfit we have on, down to the spotless white shoes. Mama and Father had to have planned this all out far in advance. Our eyes prick with tears.

The hair and face are not quite an honest copy, though. The doll’s tiny curls are much tidier, shinier, and in all ways more appealing; her face is an absolute delight, with sweet porcelain features and the most gleamingest black eyes, not like our muddy hazel ones at all. A whiff of decay drifts through the air, distracting us. Something’s wrong—and if we stop and think a moment, if we just concentrate, we’ll remember—

But here’s our meal now, sweet and savoury scents drowning out that faint swampiness in a wash of fragrant steam. We sit the doll up against a saltcellar and stroke its curls as we eat.

Click.

Something shifts under our finger. Several faint lines angle across the doll’s face. We press. The lines darken.

A grating whisper. The head of the doll splits. It fans open in delicate, sharp slices.

Our fork clangs against our plate. We pull the doll to us, anticipating wonders painted on each slice, or perhaps a hollow compartment hiding another gift. But there’s only an empty cavity inside, a flat, unbroken darkness that the chandeliers fail to illuminate.

Our hands shake. There’s something here we shouldn’t see. We peer down anyway.

A sudden wave of dizziness. The reek of decay is stronger now. The doll slips from our fingers. It drops toward the carpet with slow inevitability. We lunge for it. Then we’re falling, everything’s falling. The world spins out in a dizzy whirl.

My view shifts as she falls away from me. The threads choking the air tangle around her.

I know what this is now. It has to be a dream, a nightmare, a Mara attack. There’s no other explanation that makes sense. This world no longer exists. Maybe it never did. The corpse sprawled beside her cot on Floor 20 and this impossibly young child, Suzie, they share more than an ID. But I don’t know how she can be dead in Refuge and alive to be dreaming this now. Unless…

Unless none of this is about her at all. Unless this is my dream. My death.

I stare at Suzie in horror. She sprawls on the floor beside her chair, shrunken and stiff as if she’s become the doll that fell. Her mother rises in the distance, elegance itself trailing away toward the ceiling, giant-like. A moment later, her father looms up alongside. Their apparent lack of concern cuts at Suzie’s heart. She struggles to understand. She doesn’t see through my eyes. She doesn’t know what’s coming.

The crash of the piano has subsided into ringing silence. The hall feels cavernous and empty. The ghost or memory of Suzannah Bell can still taste decay in the air, and I through her. Her parents hold out their hands as if to take hers, but the angle is too high. She doesn’t understand why, not at first. Translucent threads drape from their arms, snarled and heavy. They’re unevenly wound ropes by the time they reach Suzie, binding her in place.

The warm, late-morning sun shifts, a flash of stark, blinding light. The long bones beneath Suzie’s parents’ skin are darkly skeletal silhouettes. Her heart stutters and seizes, her breath caught in her throat. I hold my breath as well, caught in the moment, in her panic and my own horror. The end must be coming soon. Hers, or mine.

A pair of flawless arms reaches past Suzie in stiff, unbending unison. They slip through threads now milky in their thickness as if they’re not there at all. A rigid figure with bright curls stalks past Suzie. It takes her parents’ outstretched hands. The doll takes Suzie’s place without her parents noticing a thing, and that’s how I know this nightmare really is almost at an end.

The Mara have come.

The creature holds Suzie’s parents’ hands as they turn to leave. She calls to them soundlessly from behind a tiny painted rosebud of a mouth, panicked now. What dream, what nightmare is this? Her thoughts snag. Dream. It’s just a dream. But instead of relief, terror wells in instinctive response.

Her horror makes it harder to keep mine at bay. We both know now there will be no waking, no escape. They’re coming for us, have already come, are here now. The only question is, have they already come for Suzie—come and gone and left this echo for me to stumble into? Or has their devouring somehow carried on all this time, past the ending of Suzie’s physical form? Or is it not Suzie they’re here for at all?

I would run, but like her, I can’t move. I’m as formless as a ghost.

She struggles against leaden arms, unable to see the weight of coiled, knotted threads pinning her to the ground. She longs to pinch herself, shock herself awake, close her eyes and open them to her own, real life. She’d even welcome back the endless decades of mindless drudgery, the pains of the years burdening her aged frame. Her longing tugs at me, casting shadows of an aged corpse in my mind.

But her eyes are frozen in place, wide and staring. Her outflung limbs are a dead, cold weight dragging her down. She can’t open her lips to form the words of submission, to release her dreams to the Mara and save herself. She’s trapped, as immobile and helpless as the doll that has taken her place. Left behind. Abandoned.

The Mara in their cruel mimicry of Suzie let go of her parents’ hands. Suzie can’t look away from the sight of them again after all this time, so young, so healthy and unaware in their short-lived happiness, even if it is an illusion. The ghost of the years between them creeps back into her mind and memory. They’d never been this happy. This paradise had never truly existed in their lifetime. So much loss. So much pain. She wants to forget. She wants to go back to being a child, protected. She wants them to look again at her, to see her and love her.

I choke on the sensation of her loss, heart racing in time with hers, gaze darting as hers cannot. It’s not just the doll that’s the Mara, but everything around us. This alien place and these unlikely people are all a part of some elaborate, soul-sucking nightmare. These things Suzie has shown me, they’re not real. They were never real. Family. Music. Food. They have to be the product of the Mara, luring her—us? me?—deeper, strengthening our attachment before devouring us whole.

The creature turns and stalks back toward us, glittering eyes malevolent in that expressionless porcelain perfection of a face, a cruel replacement for Suzie’s—Bell’s—broken, aged weakness. Its doll eyes are clouded with a faint impression of grey and green and blue – the child’s hazel eyes, painted over her replacement’s bottomless black ones. Suzie’s memories roll back over her, the weight of years and so many deaths crashing back into her mind and body all at once.

I’m shocked to realize at least some of what I’ve seen is from her memories and not entirely a fabrication of the Mara. Shocked and relieved. Unless this is just another dimension of deception, it’s possible this isn’t my dream after all. But I’m not sure what’s more improbable; that the Mara could have spun all of this out of my imagination in the first place or that Bell could really have been that old. I mean, a family? An actual childhood spent outside of Refuge’s walls? Could she really have been produced—born—before the floods?

The porcelain mockery of a face leers, glass eyes full of bottomless, eerie knowing. Black leaches through the hazel paint. The delicately fanned segments of the creature’s head, grown so large now, have slipped back together with only the barest hint of their former, grotesque separation. A thin dark line shows just at its hairline; a narrow but seemingly bottomless gap where the skull curves to the perfectly arched spill of its hair.

Something squirms within. It trickles down the porcelain forehead and oozes along the angled line of that painted brow, a gathering oil slick of midnight tears pooling in the socket of one glittering eye. They overflow, streaking over the smooth cheek, spattering with acid heat across Suzie as the Mara loom over her in that flawless replica of her own beribboned dress.

She surges against the burning, struggling to move the dead weight of arms and legs turned to cold, immobile porcelain. I want to cover my eyes, but I can’t move, can’t escape any more than she can.

The sole of the Mara-doll’s pristine white shoe grown to gigantic proportions rises to blot out the light. And falls.

Everything washes away in a wave of shattering pain as the Mara end the nightmare the way I knew they would, in horror and agony and death.

——————

FOR A LONG moment, there’s nothing else. Then I’m alone in the dark, whole, my thoughts, my senses entirely my own once more. The ineffable awareness of Suzie’s existence that pervaded the dream is gone. There’s nothing left but sick, quivering fear. Am I dead too this time? Is it over?

In the darkness, the figure of an old woman coalesces. Her face is bare and exposed, her edges frayed and wispy. It’s the broken body of the corpse I reached out to, Bell. The fraying along her edges grows, threads of silver unravelling until she’s the girl with the golden curls and hazel eyes.

“Suzie,” I say into the darkness.

She stares back at me, her young face etched with sadness. A whispering, rushing sound surrounds us, filling the empty spaces.

“Suzie,” I say again, wishing I could reach out to her, reaching for the edges of my own boundaries to try to draw them together and touch the broken child. I feel as shattered as if I’d been crushed alongside her, but the dream was hers, not mine. She was the victim of the Mara, not me. So why do I hurt?

Shadows darken across her face. I recognize the scored lines etched across the corpse of her future-past self. Her eyes cloud over. I need to make it stop, to shelter her, to turn back time to when she was whole and happy and seen. But even as I find my hands and gather my voice, the rushing sound rises and fragments into thousands of shouting, shrieking voices.

She speaks. I can’t hear her past the cacophony. The shadows across her darken and split her skin. She throws her head back. Her face contorts in a scream. I can’t quite pick it out among the host of howling voices. It breaks me nonetheless, as if the gashes across her flesh are mirrored inside me.

I struggle harder to reach her. Countless invisible hands seem to shove against me, hauling me back and away.

Her mouth slackens; her chin tips down. She stares at me with milky eyes and shattered skin. The edges of her are short-cropped threads drifting in an intangible breeze. Darkness wells up in the corners of her eyes and overflows. It runs down her cheeks in a continuous stream. She smiles, slow and empty.

A wash of light carries it all away.

——————

I’M KNEELING IN a tiny, brightly lit room, reaching out to a corpse once more. I blink. For a moment, it seems as if the tips of my gloves are tangled in silver threads.