Tag: chapter eight

Ghosts in Quicksilver 2.8: Dreams of Falling

December 1st, 2019

tw: unreality, monsters, mental illness, referenced child abuse

I’m falling, and the world has gone all white and grey—like an old movie, or a washed out photograph. Like a ghost.

I’m falling.

Falling where? part of me asks. The other part of me is silent. The wind whipping through my hair is warmer than it should be. Then the white void around me starts to change. Tiles build themselves out of nothing, shimmering into existence.

Beige, white and blue. I’m in the Civic Hospital emergency room. Something’s wrong, though. Everything is sideways. I’m still falling, but the linoleum floor is skating past my boots, and the silhouettes of people I can’t quite see are walking around on a vertical surface that should never support them. They look like ghosts, too, blurry and silver and unclear.

“Wait—” I reach out for one of them, but my hands pass through them, streams of silver running out from my fingers. “Where am I?” I say quietly at first, the wind-that-isn’t-wind not ripping them from my throat but instead stealing them away like a thief in the night.

Kiera is gone. The park is gone. The sun is gone. I’m—

——-

—Dreaming.

We’re in a library. Both of us—Johara’s standing next to me, alive, her ringlets acting up in the humidity and brown skin clearer and cleaner than mine has ever been. She’s running her fingers over the spines of the books in their shelves, whispering their names to herself like she’s casting some spell that’ll tell her what to read next.

I’m holding a book. I know what it’s supposed to be. The Miseducation of Cameron Post. Jo had found it for me, and told me that it had a lesbian character in it. She isn’t wrong. I just wish—

The book reads something else on its creamy white pages.

You are a ghost.

I freeze up. I already knew I was dreaming. Except, I’m not sure I am. I don’t know where I am.

Wake up.

I would, if I could.

DO NOT STAND AT MY GRAVE AND WEEP—the book starts to proclaim in inky capitals, appearing on the pages bit by bit, word by word. I AM NOT THERE I DO NOT SLEEP—

I drop the book.

I need to—

——

The library vanishes. I’m standing… somewhere. Somewhere I almost recognize. The trees whistle at me, and I grab onto a branch that hangs over me, worried that the world will tilt again and I’ll fall.

I think I know where this is. I’m in the Greenbelt, or one of those other undeveloped pieces of land threading through Elmvale and Alta Vista. This is near my old high school. Too near. My friends and I came here to smoke our cigarettes and share music. Johara wasn’t in high school yet, but she’d come and meet us here anyway.

But even though it’s late autumn, the sun is bright, the grass is emerald-green, and there’s no hint of a breeze. In fact…

In fact, there’s no wind at all. The leaves aren’t moving, and the clouds hang suspended in the sky, decorations on some celestial mobile.

“Where am I?” I ask the empty air. I don’t really expect a response. I’m not dreaming, but I’m not awake either. If I was dreaming, the bark wouldn’t feel so real under my fingers. Think, Jamal. Think. You can figure this out. I don’t have my notebook, but my memory’s pretty good. Usually, anyway.

I’d been trying to get away from—

Kiera. Fucking Kiera. I…

I don’t know how I feel. That’s not unusual. Trying to actually explain how I felt about something beyond the obvious—“I’m angry,” “I’m sad,” etc. always ended up with a shrug. But here, I’m completely and utterly alone.

“I was—” I say to the empty air. “I was scared. I felt…” What had I felt? Being scared wasn’t it – or at least it wasn’t all of it.

Something lances through my chest, a shock of pain that’s gone as soon as it arrives. Kiera was… Familiar. Not because of the past life nonsense. I still don’t know if I believed that. It was the way she made me feel. Like I should run away, but it was easier to sit down, shut up, do what she wanted—

no no no don’t think about that—

Half-remembered, half-forgotten. Not the foster home with Bill and Alice. Not the one where Jo had died. Before that. Before—

Half-remembered, half-forgotten.

My head hurts.

I’m –

I’m sad. I’m sad, because I almost – almost felt like I could like her, for a moment. I almost do. She’ll terrify me, out on LeBreton flats, or in a restaurant over nachos of all things, and somewhere in her words and the way she talks, there’s someone interesting, and I almost forget to be scared. Some of it is the draw of the puzzle, the curiosity of it all. Some of it is that she’d be so much easier to hate if she wasn’t –

None of that makes any sense. What, I’m supposed to be shocked that a serial killer’s kind of charming? But serial killers are also supposed to be men, and you’d think that wouldn’t make any difference, and it shouldn’t. Figures that being a lesbian doesn’t insulate me from those kinds of bad choices.

It helps, actually, that there’s nobody here. Not even the risk of anybody. Nobody would ask me what was on my mind, or what I was thinking, or if I was okay. It means I can take a moment to shrug all of that away, and put it away in a box that I can deal with when it’s no longer relevant.

I don’t feel like I remember Kiera for the reasons she wants me to. But I do anyway. I don’t know what to do with that. Hell, I don’t even know where I am. I have a guess, though. I’m stupid when it comes to plenty of things, but I can connect the dots. Will had talked about elementals losing control of their powers.. And everybody had been fairly vague about what that entailed… in general, actually, but particularly when it came to Salts.

I press my fingers experimentally against the tree bark. It feels real, but it could still be the memory of a feeling. Maybe the queasiness I feel, the way the world seems to be very far away and too close at the same time, hazing at the edges, is just the memory of something too.

The more I question it, though, the less solid it gets, and then I’m falling again. No, not falling. Floating. Everything bursts into feathers, and I’m—

——

voidvoidvoid

everything is

empty

shard one/memory/runrunrun why does she hate you you haven’t done anything wrong
            shard two/are you SURE you forget everything ANYWAY

shard one/I don’t I don’t I don’t I don’t

if everything is black then the light won’t hurt my eyes

i don’t wanna see

STOP/STOP/STOP/TURN THEM BACK ON

(the lights are turning back on strip lights floating in the darkness hanging onto nothing)

—somebody is here somebody is here how can somebody else be here that’s not how it works—

I’m hanging in the darkness by a thread

I’m staring into—

Who are you who are you who are you

Eyes, they’re eyes, and I drop to—ground? floor? hardsmoothcold remember how it feels sense memory

head is full somebody’s screaming—

“Jaylie, dear, you should let her breathe.”

Jaylie Jaylie Jaylie that’s not my name that’s that’s that’s—

An unbearable pressure lifts off of me, and I stuff my knuckles against my mouth, tears of relief springing to my eyes. I’m still… not floating, exactly. I’m kneeling on something so black and shiny it looks like glass, or obsidian.

“You’re not supposed to be here.”

I can see her reflection in the floor, hazy as it is—purple and black and a touch of gold. My neck hurts, so I lift my head slowly. Combat boots tied with frayed ribbon, fishnet stockings, and the hem of a skirt that—

“Stop staring,” she orders, and I snap my eyes the rest of the way up. The Black girl staring down at me is—okay, age is impossible to guess at this point, but she’s definitely young, despite the fact that she’s dressed like an extra from a Victorian gothic romance.

“I’ll blink more next time,” I shoot back. Not my best retort ever, but I feel like I might be concussed.

“Who are you? And how’d you get here?”

“Well, first, I’d need to know where here is.” I debate the merits of getting up, then just roll over onto my back. The girl pulls her skirts away with a little huff. Man. I must really have hit my head hard.

“A lady can never be too careful.”

“…Uh huh.”

Wait.

I sit up so hard that I can feel my brains rattle around in my skull, and turn around. There’s… five? Five of them in total, four taller figures standing there behind her. “Did he call you Jaylie?”

“Yes.” She’s cautious now, backing up. “Why?”

“Where are you? Where are we? I—I—”

“You’re working for her, aren’t you?” Jaylie practically spits it out. Then, with a flash, one of the other figures is in front of me, hauling me up by my shirt collar like I weigh no more than a feather. He’s all legs and arms, so disproportionate I think I must be seeing something wrong, but no—his arms alone are almost half again the length of his torso, and he has extra fingers on each hand, knuckles spread as he holds me in mid-air.

“I can break her, if you need me to,” he says dispassionately, the white streaks on his face almost-but-not-quite a skull shape against dark skin.

“I don’t think that’s necessary,” I squeak instead—

Jaylie shakes her head, but then she makes a dismissive gesture with her hand. As she does, I see something shift in the background—something large, towering over all of them. The other three figures almost glow against it, and they’re all—not quite human. One of them looks like it might have the head of a jackal or a fox, and another doesn’t seem to have a face at all, just a mist filled with the glinting of knives.

The long-limbed man drops me, and the darkness leans forward, something coming out towards me. Then its eyes open. All of them. There

Its hand comes toward me, and I’m frozen stiff. I can’t even think about running.

Jaylie turns her back, then looks back over her shoulder at me. “Please just leave me alone,” she says quietly.

Then the monster’s hand covers me, blocking out every bit of light, every bit of sound—

——

voidvoidvoid
            mist

everything

            fog

I’m lost I’m lost I’m lost

I’m lost I’m lost I’m lost

            mouth of blood

SOMEBODY HELP ME—

——

I stumbled backwards, hitting the floor with a thud that my entire body could feel. I dug my hands into the floor. Carpet. I was on carpet.

“Jamal!”

I blinked blearily, trying to clear my vision. “Light,” I managed to croak.

The light switched off, and I wiped my eyes, body still shaking. Johara was sitting next to me, tears running down her face before dissipating into mist. She looked… I couldn’t decide whether she looked scared or relieved.

“Thank god,” she exhaled. “Thank god, thank god, thank god.”

I tried to sit up, then collapsed back onto the floor. “I don’t—” I croaked, “I can’t—”

“It’s okay,” came another voice. I vaguely recognized it, and then Isaiah came into view, his hand on my back as he helped me sit up. Isaiah, the only other Salt I knew. I was so glad it was him. He handed me a glass of water, and when I took it, I realized he was a little less together than I’d thought. It was a weird thing to notice, with my head spinning and the world trying to flip on me again. But there were beads of sweat at his temples, more soaking his curls, relief drowning his eyes-

“You’re dehydrated. That’s normal, especially your first time.”

I swallowed a mouthful of water. God. I didn’t know water could taste so good. “First time?”

“You were in the Medium.” Isaiah peered at my forehead. “And injured, which probably didn’t help.”

“What’s…” I took another drink of water as my voice gave out again. “What’s the Medium?”

Isaiah chewed on his lip thoughtfully. “It’s… limbo, basically. The in-between. World between worlds.”

None of that made sense to me. I’d been… somewhere else. I’d been—

“Where the hell is Kiera?” I hissed.

“What?” Jo was clearly confused, looking between me and Isaiah. “What do you mean? Was she in there with you?”

“No, but I was trying to get away, I—”

I hadn’t left. I’d fallen, through the Medium.

I started shaking again, and Isaiah bent over, picking me up as if I weighed no more than a feather. There was someone else in the room—

Chandra. It was Chandra, unveiled, dark hair loose over her shoulders, pressing the cold back of her hand to my cheek.

“You’re staying here tonight,” she said quietly. “As long as you need to. You need to recover.”

I wanted to insist, to say that I was fine. But my head wouldn’t stop spinning. I was shivering, even though I wasn’t cold. I could barely get my mouth to form the words.

“Where was I?” I asked again.

Isaiah put me down onto a clean bed, the sheets almost unbearably soft. When was the last time I’d been in a real bed? “The Medium. I can tell you more about it when you’re better.”

“I don’t understand.”

“That’s okay.”

He turned to leave, and I reached out and grabbed his wrist. “Jaylie,” I whispered. “I saw her.”

“In the Medium?”

“Yeah. I have to find her. Make sure she’s safe.”

Isaiah turned back to me, then sat on the edge of the bed. “And we will. I promise. You need sleep.”

It was only as I was drifting into sleep that I saw the snow outside the window. It’d been late October. It hadn’t occurred to me to ask how long I’d been gone.

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Ghosts in Quicksilver: Chapter 1.8: The Stranger

April 17th, 2018

TW: paranoia, unreality, manipulation

Whoever was standing in front of me, it wasn’t Mrs. Chaudhury. But as I looked at her, my mind struggling to erase the paradox and reassert some sort of reality, I couldn’t place exactly why I was so certain. Perhaps she had an earpiece in. Perhaps I’d hallucinated the phone call. Perhaps I’d just lost some time in there.

Or perhaps I just needed to accept what Will and Avery had been trying to tell me yesterday—that the world was darker and stranger and more uncertain than I knew. Not that it’d been particularly bright to begin with.

“Mrs. Chaudhury,” I said after a while, trying to sound normal.

“Miss Kaye,” she replied. I made a mental note of that. In the phone call, she’d called me Jamal. Even if I’d made up the phone call, I didn’t trust anybody who called me Miss. “I just wanted to stop by and thank you.” She was too calm—too put together. Even the sadness in her voice had a fake undertone to it.

On the other hand, I’ve been accused of being paranoid before. I tried to push my discomfort aside. “Don’t worry about it. A job’s a job.” The fact that it was my first actual PI gig didn’t matter, not when my heart was trying to crawl its way out of my throat.

“May I speak to you inside?”

Oh hell no. I didn’t know who—or what—was standing in front of me, but I didn’t want them in my space. I’d finally gotten a place of my own. I didn’t want them—her?—tainting it. I shrugged. “It’s nice out. Also it’s still a disaster in there.”

Was I imagining the flash of uncertainty crossing Mrs. Chaudhury’s face? I couldn’t shake the feeling that the person in front of me had never been inside my apartment before. But—I couldn’t trust my own mind. I couldn’t trust the impulses that told me that everybody was a danger, everybody was a threat, everybody was trying to hurt me. What I’d done to Avery still lingered on my conscience, even if they’d brushed it off as doing no lasting damage.

“Well, I suppose.” She sat down next to me on the steps, a little too close. “The police came and talked to me this morning.”

This morning? I checked my phone. It was nearly seven—so it probably wasn’t too early for the police to have visited this morning instead of last night, but I had my doubts. Besides—where were her kids? They couldn’t be at school yet.

And this was all assuming that I’d made up the phone call out of thin air.

Anyway—”I figured they had.” I tried to keep it as vague as possible, fishing for information. “What’d they say?”

She shrugged. It was an oddly young gesture on her—she wasn’t old by any means, but old enough not to have the body language of a gangly teenager. I briefly wondered if Willow was behind this, but my own feelings aside, from what I understood, Will’s power couldn’t let her do something like this.

You don’t know anything about it. Perhaps this is Mrs. Chaudhury, with Willow at the wheel. Perhaps it’s Willow sitting there next to you, and it’s only your mind that’s being controlled. You see what she wants you to see—

I dragged myself out of it, my heart racing. It was too easy to find possibilities branching off of possibilities. It never ended, unless you forced yourself to look away.

She was talking. “It looks like he was murdered,” she said with a sigh, and this time, the tear that fell down her cheek felt real. I wondered what the impostor next to me was really crying over—

—Jamal stop it she’s mourning her husband everybody mourns differently—-

—blue scrubs stained with red you bit them don’t you remember that—

“I—they told me there’s no way to know. That it could have been a random mugging—it could have been anything. There’s so few murders in Ottawa you think they would spare the time, but…” She shrugged. “Nobody cares about us.”

Nobody cares about us.

That part was real.

I was so sure, so sure she was a fake. Too many pieces didn’t add up. But—but—ugh, I couldn’t make myself be certain of anything. Every time I tried, scattered images from my dream flashed across the back of my mind—the weight of Johara in my arms, the sound of the black windbreaker fluttering in the breeze, wrapped tightly around somebody walking away.

Nobody cares about us.

I had the distinct sense that I was being manipulated. But I pulled out one of my three cigarettes and my lighter anyway. “What are you saying, then?” I asked, even though I knew exactly what she was asking of me.

“I want you to find his murderer.”

I flicked my lighter on and held it to the end of my cigarette, steadfastly refusing to look at her. “That all?” I couldn’t help the sarcasm. “I’m a teenager with computer skills and too much time on her hands.”

“You’re talented. And I don’t know how, but you found him. I trust you.”

“I’m still charging you even if you butter me up.”

She laughed at that. There was an edge to it, and it was both familiar and more than a little uncomfortable. “I brought plenty of money. Don’t worry.”

“I didn’t say yes, yet.”

“You’re going to. I can see it in your eyes.”

I gave in, and looked up at her, the smoke from my cigarette drifting uselessly into the air. Her eyes were a vivid green against her dark skin, and I couldn’t figure out why I was noticing. “Yeah, what the hell. I’ll give it a shot. But if I get stabbed, it’s officially your fault.”

She snorted at that, and smirked. Again, it looked out of place on Mrs. Chaudhury’s face, below the black headscarf. “Try not getting stabbed, then.” She pushed the canvas bag from her shoulder, then over to me. “That should be enough, if I remember your rates correctly.”

Shit. If she wasn’t Mrs. Chaudhury then how—Well, okay. I had a Facebook page. That one wasn’t exactly a challenge to figure out. I peered into the bag and tried not to choke. Okay. So that was rent taken care of, and money to actually buy food. The littlest things make you happy when you’re dirt poor.

“I should head off.” She got to her feet, again with that long-limbed gracefulness—

“Wait.”

“Yes?” She turned to look at me.

I took a long drag on my cigarette, then tapped the ash off on the banister. “What’s your name?” I asked.

“I don’t—”

I didn’t bother looking at her. “Out with it.”

“I hired you. That’s all you need to know.”

“Mmhm. Any chance you’ll tell me why?”

She just gave me another enigmatic smile, then walked off into the misty horizon, turning the corner on Wellington Street and vanishing from sight. I kept my eyes on her until she was out of view. Perhaps it was my stubbornness.

But the moment I could be sure she was gone, I dove back into the house, trying not to let the sudden panic in my chest speed up my pace. I locked the door behind me with an exaggerated slowness, and I couldn’t stop my hands from shaking.

Johara met me at the top of the stairs. “Gurjas came back! He wanted to—”

“Give me a moment,” I mumbled, ducking into the bathroom. I felt so nauseous, but as much as my stomach roiled, I managed to keep it together. Instead, I turned on the tap and stuck my head underneath it, cold water rushing over me and clearing my head. Mostly. Not really. I was here, and somewhere else, and deep in the past, a thousand places at once.

“Jamal?”

I took my time responding, wiping the water from my face. “Jo. Yeah. I’m—” How did I even begin to explain what had just happened? “I have a new case,” I settled on, with a breathlessness I couldn’t make go away. “Give me a minute.”

I ducked into my office, ignoring Gurjas’s ghost and mentally filing him away in ‘deal with later.’ Then I picked up my phone, sorting through the papers I’d left, then giving up and just staring at the faded numbers on my arm. It rang, and rang, and rang, until I was ready to throw it against the wall.

“…Willow Moray, who’s this?”

I took a deep breath. “…Will. I think I need your help.” I raised my eyes to Gurjas. He stared back at me in silence, and while I’d been pretty certain that I wasn’t making things up, the look in his eyes—the sad confusion hiding behind the cold mask he kept putting up—was what sold it for me.

Whoever had come to see me today, it had not been Chandra Chaudhury, because Chandra Chaudhury’s husband was dead, and her impostor didn’t know what grief looked like.

<– Chapter 1.7 Chapter 1.9 –>

Tag: chapter eight

Ghosts in Quicksilver 2.8: Dreams of Falling

Ghosts in Quicksilver: Chapter 1.8: The Stranger