Out of the Blue, and Into the Black

[walk_ins]

What does it mean to say a place is haunted?


Does someone have to die there? In 2470 almost the entire party of colonists--more than one thousand souls--on the frontier planet Illyria died, mostly of coal gas poisoning; the discount rebreathers supplied by the colony's financial backers failed, and the miners all died. The food was bad, too; squirming with maggots and running with flour-beetles. The nineteen colonists who survived until a passing Alliance picket came to their rescue had long since resorted to cannibalism.

Since then Illyria has been unsettled, but the space station orbiting has seen its share of deaths. And I wish I could tell you all of the dead could be accounted for. I very much wish I could.



Some people say haunting has nothing to do with death, and everything to do with strong emotions, beaten into the walls and furniture and leaking out when presented with a pliable mind. Adolescents, they say, are especially susceptible, to both sending and receiving these impressions.

And when the student body of the Alliance Academy is agitated--as they periodically are, en masse, chanting and hiding from "the eye, the eye, the eye"--it can be very hard to tell which way is up, in there. The texture of ordinary things can be confusing. Things change. You can lose your way, if you aren't careful.

We'll be careful indeed, but we need to get closer.



Is it a place where an evil spirit walks? Where the walls between worlds are thin? Where sick men do dirty deeds?



This is a haunted place. This is a big wheel turning, dark and terrible. This is a shadow place, a darkling place, a place that tincts. Dim. It's hard to find if you aren't looking for it, but we are. And it's a terribly hard place to leave once you get there. But we're going in. We're meeting someone. She's never been here before (even if they think she has) but she's been someplace very like it.



Here's a room. It's a big cheery room, with watercolors on the wall, and big solid furniture. There's a bowl of fruit on the table, comforting although plastic; supply lines are tricky out here. The chairs are soft, and there's no clock, and no visible lights.

No visible windows.

No visible doors.

The students call it The Big Room. You don't want to be here.



There's a girl here, with long dark hair. She's waiting.

Her name is not River Tam.

Comments

[anthy-rosebride.livejournal.com]

The chairs are soft indeed, and upholstered in a suitably bright and cheery shade of sunset gold. Her hand brushes it once; she's careful not to let her bare skin touch it again.

She's been waiting for a while. She hasn't moved, except to carefully fold her hands in her lap, away from the sick clinging softness of the upholstery, and she hasn't made a sound.

It's familiar, this room. It should, perhaps, feel like home.

Her chest is rising and falling more quickly, now. She thinks she might be suffocating.

[walk_ins]

A door opens behind her, and quick footsteps move towards the table, indistinct and echoing, making distance hard to judge.

A genial old man in a lab coat is there, with a nurse. They're carrying folders. An old family doctor-type, incredibly prosaic. They seat themselves, without seeming to notice anything about the chairs.

Dr. Lin smiles. "Welcome home, River."

[anthy-rosebride.livejournal.com]

The girl who is not River Tam looks up through River Tam's large dark eyes. They're dull, the eyes, near-glazed, but the moment they land on Dr. Lin they flinch away.

She doesn't say anything.

[walk_ins]

"I know you've been away a while," Dr Lin says gently.

Over his shoulder is a watercolor painting. A sporting print. Hunters in red jackets and hounds, pursuing a fox.

"You've been out of our care a long time, and there are things we need to know if we're going to make you better."

[anthy-rosebride.livejournal.com]

Her hands are still folded in her lap; they haven't moved. The knuckles are beginning to whiten.

"Yes."

She could be mimicking River Tam's tendency to state questions; she could be agreeing with Dr. Lin's comment about her absence. She could have forgotten how to say anything else.

She doesn't like this room.

[walk_ins]

Dr. Lin sighs and glances at the nurse. "Nurse Juri--"

"Yes, Doctor," she murmurs, and then she leans over and injects something into River's hand from a pressure-injector that looked for all the world like a pen.

Randinol is an inhibitor, when acting on someone with a stripped amygdala. It cannot replace the damaged sections of the brain--nothing can do that, once a thing is broken sometimes you just can't fix it--but it suppresses many of the hallucinations and distorted perceptions of such a person.

On a person with a healthy amygdala, the effect is just the opposite.

[anthy-rosebride.livejournal.com]

Nurse Juri gets a startled look.

(believe in miracles)

The girl who isn't River is dimly aware of the pressure-injector, but it's not a sharp glinting needle, so she pays it no mind. Something's happened; she doesn't care what.

[walk_ins]

Nurse Juri's eyes look dead. If she ever believed in miracles, she stopped a long time ago, it's clear. She stares down at her short, sensible, nurse's fingernails while Dr. Lin continues.

"That should help clear things, eh, my dear?"

"Now, we know you were with your brother Simon. Were the two of you staying on Ariel permanently? With friends of his from college, perhaps?"

[anthy-rosebride.livejournal.com]

Anthy wonders, dreamily, what would happen if she offered Nurse Juri an orange

(sunset gold)

rose.

She rakes back River Tam's tangled dark hair, and mutters, "She doesn't know."

[walk_ins]

Nurse Juri looks up and looks RiverAnthyRiver in the eye. "It was the opportunity of a lifetime." She laughs once, short, sharp and not remotely sane.

"No. I understand. Don't worry about it, dear." He changes tacks. "Do you remember how you came to be on Praxed? Did a ship bring you there?"

[anthy-rosebride.livejournal.com]

They've seen this look before -- a shifting focus, a flash of something like horror: Why are you telling me this; I don't want to know, she doesn't want to comprehend. Anthy remembers the sickening crash of an elevator hitting rock bottom.

She tears her gaze back to her hands, and whispers,

"Time to go to sleep. She doesn't."

[walk_ins]

Dr. Lin's expression is troubled; the drug should be taking effect by now. "River. Please, you have to understand." He sighs. "We need you to help us understand where you've been."

Then he adds, in a low, pitying voice, "They want to know. I'd so much rather you tell me before they come to ask you."

[anthy-rosebride.livejournal.com]

She tenses. Visibly.

"She said, she told, she doesn't know. Didn't know. Everything's hidden."

Low: "Can't tell what you don't know."

[walk_ins]

Dr. Lin covers his face with his hands.

A door opens.

"Time's up, doctor. What does she have to say?" The voice is dry, flat and unimpressed. Lin hasn't opened his mouth yet and it's unimpressed.

"This isn't necessary. She's a child--"

"Nothing. Well, at least you tried, Doctor Lin." You couldn't explain sympathy to this voice with three hours and a diagram. "You can return to your work now." Lin and Juri rise, and move behind her, but the nurse pauses and lays a hand on Anthy's shoulder.

[anthy-rosebride.livejournal.com]

River's hands don't tighten. Don't move at all, in fact, and the rest of her has gone perfectly still. Not the stillness of a deer in headlights; not tense. The stillness of the deer after the car's left it flattened and bleeding out in the dark rain-washed street.

She doesn't really notice the hand on her shoulder.

And she doesn't look up, but her eyes shift sideways.

[walk_ins]

If Anthy could see Nurse Juri's face, she'd see that her lips don't move in sync with what she hears.

She can't; her eyes are fixated on the false bowl of fruit.
Answer them, River. Don't make them angry.
"That isn't a real plum. That's a plastic plum."

Mingled, confused footsteps, and now dark suits fill the far horizon of the table. And pressing lightly on the table, long-finger hands in blue gloves. "River Tam."

[anthy-rosebride.livejournal.com]

It's not real. It's not growing.
ring around the rosey
(you're like the roses, aren't you)
pocket full of posies
Just like home.
ashes, ashes
She whispers,
we all fall down
"Yes."

[walk_ins]

There are two of them. Always two of them. A different two than the ones who brought her here.

They sit, moving in a swift eerie harmony that is only worse because they aren't twins, aren't moving in perfect unison. They just move alike, and unlike anyone else moves.

"We almost had you on Ariel," says the one on the left. His voice is like a caress from a bloody hand. "With the help of your 'friend'." The apostrophes drop into place neatly, like pawns moving.

"Very helpful," agrees the one on the right. His voice is exactly the same, but lower in pitch. "Then and now."

[anthy-rosebride.livejournal.com]

Anthy shrinks away, until her thin arms brush the fabric of the chair, and she freezes.

Her head's still bowed; she doesn't lift it. Knees together, feet splayed. Every line of River Tam's body says, You win, you win, don't hurt me too much.

"Can't hide. They come out of --"

What had River said? The greenhouse seems an age ago, an eon, though there's something in the air here that's kin to the still breezeless air there.

"-- the black two by two. It's all, all blue --"

[walk_ins]

"Your brother," says the one on the right, "wasn't nearly as entertaining as we'd hoped."

The one of the left picks up a plastic orange from the bowl, and rolls it one the table under his palm.

The noise it makes against the blue glove is obscene.

[anthy-rosebride.livejournal.com]

She looks up. River's face is chalk-white.

(somewhere your hands can never reach)

Your brother, and Dios's strained breathing in the hazy sunlight of a timeless afternoon, and Simon Tam's voice when he's trying to be comforting, and River's face when she speaks of him. There's barely time for her to remember that she's River, and she starts to shake her head, back and forth.

[walk_ins]

"By the end he was cursing your name." The one on the right--his name is Nero Poirot, if you care--sounds both charmed and disgusted, like a man whose cat has given him a rotting mouse.

Creak creak creak. The orange rolls on the table. The one on the left (Unity Calvin)looks up, disinterest in every line of his smooth, plastic face. "We don't care about finding your friends, because they're all dead. Do you understand?"

Poirot folds his hands and leans officiously over the table towards her. "Have you ever given serious thought to what you might taste like?"

[anthy-rosebride.livejournal.com]

"She understands," Anthy whispers, and closes her eyes. "She comprehends."

"Doesn't have to. He knows."

[walk_ins]

They exchange a look, and although their faces are immobile, amusement passes between them clear as day.

Anthy hears:

"You were really, at base, a terrible sister."

"We eat people, you know. Don't tell the doctors."

"You ruined his life, when you think about it. Even before he died for you."

"It'll be our secret."

"You're never going to leave this place again, do you understand?"

"There's going to be a new world. And we will become something... glorious."

"Everyone who might've saved you, is dead because of you."

"And then we'll eat you."

"Every friend is now dead."

"You had a lucky break once--"

"You had something shining once, didn't you? Something eternal. But it's gone now."

"And it will never come again."

"Do you understand?"

Reality and hallucination interweave; believe whatever makes it easier to sleep.

[anthy-rosebride.livejournal.com]

Open again, staring and horrified.

(there are no miracles)

She's never been able to fake crying.

(it's all gone to seed)

They'll see her eyes fill with tears; she sees the world fracture, swim together, and clear again.

(there's no such thing as something eternal)

"She understands. She understands. She understands --" Voice rising.

[walk_ins]

The eyes of Poirot and Calvin gleam, showing true animation for the first time, and counterpointed by their calm and motionless faces. Their lips move out of the way of their teeth; nothing in the world can persuade me to call it a smile. They lean...

"Good." The voice that cuts her--and them--off is round and growling, although the actual tone is pleasant, with a faint accent. Not French, not American, not Japanese, not British. "Very good. She understands. I think that will be all, for now."

[anthy-rosebride.livejournal.com]

Anthy freezes again, for a moment, and then the animation drains out of her.

Limp again, eyes on her hands, she waits. She doesn't turn around.

[walk_ins]

The two Blue Hands instantly pull back, their mouths tightly closed. "Lord."

"Lord."

"Go." Contempt. And almost Kho. A strange accent.

A hand touches her shoulder; the hand seems normal (five fingers, no blue glove) but the touch is like an animated tree branch.

"Miss Tam can go and rest in her room, and join the others for lunch. When she has had time to recover, then she and I may have a conversation. Escort her."

[anthy-rosebride.livejournal.com]

The trick is not to feel it when they touch you.

She feels it.

Tears stick her lashes together for a moment, and then she looks at the blue hands. Not at their faces.

[walk_ins]

The hand moves and away, behind her head, grazing her cheek as it passes. The sensation isn't the same as before; instead, the skin feels like skin, but impossibly ancient. It feels like silk just before it begins to rot.

There are no footsteps. There is no door opening, nor closing. But when Poirot and Calvin finally drag her from her chair, there is no one but the three of them in the Big Room.