Deathdream #10

"P... Purly?"


The girl sat very still, relaxed, and continued her calm scrutiny.

Marina was baffled. A million questions once again squirmed through her mind. But all she could say was, "You're here?"

"Yes. I have to be."

Marina looked around the room, taking in the fact that it was practically empty. Nothing sat on the bare, dusty floorboards save Purly's chair, and the only thing that adorned the walls was a stone mantelpiece. No hearth, no fireplace, just the mantelpiece. No window and, as she turned to look behind her, no door. Just another blank wall.

She turned back to look at the girl who's head was, once again, bent to her embroidery, her fingers flickering with blinding speed and agonising slowness as she worked each stitch into the circle of stretched linen she held.

"They're coming for you, you know," said Purly, in a conversational tone, without moving her head or, as far as Marina could see, her lips. "That's why you can't go back. Your mind's closing stuff off as you go. You can only go forward. If you go back, they'll have you. You shouldn't really look back, even. You're going to have to use it. Soon, too."

"They? Who are they? And use what?"

"Your courage. Your confidence. Your body. Your ability," said Purly, ignoring the first part of the question. "Anything you've got, really. Including your name." She paused. "If you remember it, that is."

"But I can't! I don't know what it is!" said Marina, almost in a wail.

"You'll have to work something out, then. Can't let them get you. If you're chased, you can't get caught, or it really is all over."

Marina shivered at the cold certainty radiating from this ten year old girl. Suddenly, her knees gave out, and she slumped to the floor, her monochrome clothes billowing around her in ripples and waves. Sitting cross-legged on the dusty floor, her hands in her lap, Marina stared at the patterns in the grain of the scuffed boards. They began to undulate before her eyes, but she paid this no heed.

She was thinking.

A person may have many names, throughout their life. Some given, some taken, some self-bestowed. Of these, any one of them may be their true name, but it was most likely to be a name one gives to oneself. Then she stopped this thought with another.

The veracity of a person's name depended on the knowledge and instinct of the person that had given it, surely? If a person gave themself a name, but had little self-knowledge, that could not possibly be their true name, since it did not reflect them truly. Likewise, if a stranger bestowed a name on a person, even if that stranger had no knowledge of the person they were naming, but still felt it instinctively, surely that could be a name as true as any other?

She searched around inside herself, and found little to examine. However she had got here, wherever here was, it seemed to have wiped her memory and knowledge of herself clean. But since there was little of her self or her memory to know in this place, surely any name she gave herself would, by default, be true? As far as it went, at least?

She decided that, at the moment, until she found out something more, this could only be the case, and she would just have to believe it as hard as she could.

"I am Marina." She whispered. Then, more loudly, "I am Marina. I came from the water, and I can sing them from the trees."

At this, Purly looked up, piercing Marina and pinning her to the wall with the sharpness of the look shot from her eye. "How did you know that?" she demanded.

"Because I do. Because I can," said Marina, sitting up a little straighter, and returning the sharp look with one of her own. "Right here, right now, I am Marina, and I sing them from the trees." Then she deflated a little, almost imperceptibly. "But I have no trees to sing them from."

"Better find some, then, before they find you," was the succinct reply.

Marina privately agreed with this, though she had absolutely no idea of how to go about finding trees in this small, square, shabby, windowless room.

There must be a way out. There had to be. She found it utterly impossible to believe that the cosmos had decreed she should spend eternity trapped in this small place.

Getting to her feet, Marina began to examine the walls, he floor, the ceiling. The walls were all apparently solid, constructed of plaster over bricks, or perhaps stone. The floor did not sound hollow when she banged it with her fists and heels. No echo or hollowness sounding there, at all. The ceiling, she could not reach, not even when she had borrowed Purly's chair and stood on it.

She did not, however, examine the wall that had so recently held the door she had entered by. She had taken Purly's warning to heart, and was not going to look back for anything. She could only look forward, and hope she chose the right path. And besides that, when she walked close to that wall, taking great pains not to touch it, look at it, or otherwise acknowledge its presence, she heard things. Growlings and slitherings. Grisly cracklings, and wet hissings and tearings. And, very far away, very hard to hear - but there to be heard, nonetheless - there were shrieking and wailings and moanings, as of the trapped and the despairing. She had no wish to become a member of that muted chorus. So she ignored that one wall, continuing her examination of the rest of the room with minute attention to detail, and systematic thoroughness.

Then, there came a small, slightly exasperated sigh. "Marina, you're looking in the wrong place."

Then Marina realised. Her eyes turned to the mantelpiece. Snatching a knife from her belt, she dove at the blank wall framed by the mantelpiece, and drove the knife in to it with all of her might. The wall transmuted to a black void, and she was sucked through.