Chapter Forty-Four

What Have I Done To Deserve This?

Ever since the nurse had sedated her upon admission to the child psychiatric hospital, Kay had been experiencing changes to her vision. The most obvious symptom was a sensitivity to light that pained her eyes and seemed to clog her brain, so that she couldn't concentrate. Recently, shutting her eyes had failed to bring relief because the images remained; initially as sharply defined as when her eyes were open, only gradually blurring and reluctantly fading. It had got to the point that she only knew that she had closed her eyes by paying close attention to the muscles needed to draw together the lids; there was no change to her vision. This would make life rather difficult under normal circumstances, but Kay’s present circumstances were far from normal. She was detained in the hospital; kept under fairly heavy sedation and isolated. Her only human contact was with the three nurses who shared the 24 hours in shifts and the psychiatrist; Dr Corner.

There were other unusual optical experiences. In dim light, as she moved her head towards an object, it did not grow in her field of vision smoothly, but flicked from image to larger image like a sequence of still photographs shown too slowly to form an animation. Also, when reading she suffered from a strange form of double vision, as she received the words at slightly different times from each eye. This in turn produced an echo in the narrative which stopped her from immersing herself in the text. Overall she recognised that the changes were not solely in her eyes, but also in her brain and the nerves connecting the two.

And then there was the way this all related to her nightmares; which would now be tormenting her whilst both sleeping and waking were it not for the sedation. As if upon a second surface, mostly obscured by the insistent screen of reality, the old malign characters prowled about her, accompanying the nurses who attended her, and most tightly bound to the thin form of Dr Corner himself. The drugs kept her from a terrifying world, but she knew she could not remain in this somnolent suspended space forever. She needed help and she needed to fight for her own sanity, and the only help to hand was Dr Corner.

Except that Dr Corner was already known to her before he had manifested himself as her psychiatrist. For some years he had been one of the most evil of the creatures who moved through her broken nights. How could she trust him to cure her when he had spilt so much blood before her? He seemed to stand above her, as he had countless times before, holding the tiny golden cup of black blood, his lips smeared with it, already browning with oxygen. He pressed her back against the bed and anointed her forehead with the liquid. He whispered in a language which she did not know; but she felt the meaning and was afraid.

“Talk to me Kay”.

Why could she understand him? He always used the other language. She closed her eyes, but of course his image hardly flickered. If she could understand him now was she becoming one of them; losing her humanity?

“Talk to me. I can’t help you if you won’t talk to me”. Frank managed a slight encouraging smile. Behind him the diagonal lines, shadows of blinds, turned on the wall. She felt the breeze. With the breeze came the dark flapping wings, carrying the others: the black-haired, uniformed dwarves, the zombies, with transparent skins, and always, the wolf.

“You can’t help me. You can only harm me,” she muttered.

And with the extension of the sentence came the really important question, which she did not voice: “why have you not killed me?” And with this came the sensing of a protector. She was, for at least a while, safe here. As long as she did not give away some information which they needed, or as long as someone outside lived; she would be safe.

She opened her eyes and regarded the psychiatrist. She saw his bald head and thin features, and yet she also saw an older face, the cheeks red with consumed whisky, and another, like that of a clown, and more. She turned her head and the items in the room fractured and spun against the shifting origin. The bed upon which she lay seemed a dentist’s chair. The breeze that entered the room bore icy precipitate. Above was infinite space, and the greenish whorls of the Northern lights.

This wasn't an eye disease, it was a power of a greater vision, and she needed it in order to understand and survive.