No! Alex’s tone was amused. You can go back any time you want.
Jess looked down at her hands. Her torso. Her legs. She was wearing the rudimentary body that she’d made for herself down in the abyss. It felt a lot more comfortable this time – which maybe wasn’t surprising considering what a desperate wreck her real body was right then. But it had gone back to the way it had been when she first made it, rather than the way it was after she hauled herself up over the pit’s rim. It was no more than a sketch waiting to be filled in.
Is this my soul? she wondered. But why should my soul look like a badly drawn stick figure?
Because that’s how you’re thinking about it, Alex told her.
Jess wasn’t religious. Not even a little bit. She thought all gods were basically big bully-boy cops dreamed up by people who wanted the laws they liked on Earth to be true everywhere else. So she didn’t want to think of this pathetic drinking-straw doll as her soul. This is the ghost part of me, she thought. The part that stays when everything else falls away. It’s just… coming out early.
She knew now that she could improve it by concentrating on it. She stared hard at her withered, wilting arm, willing it to fill out into something more nearly human. Almost immediately it began to respond. As she watched, her silly-string fingers thickened, and at their tips an area became faintly shinier and smoother: the beginnings of nails.
Shall we go for a walk? Alex asked. I can show you where I live.
Jess raised her head again. And immediately she realised what was missing from the scene. “Oh my God!” she whispered.
Everything. What was missing was everything.
When she’d first stepped out of her flesh, she was still in the cell. Now she was… somewhere else. There were no walls, or floor, or ceiling. No bunk or table. Or rather, she could still make out those things, just about, but they were tiny and faint. All around them, above and below and woven through them was something else that was much harder to define – a churning, changing mass like a stormy sea somehow tilted so that it stood upright. Colours and shapes moved there, abstract but teasingly familiar, as though they were only out of focus and might resolve at any moment into things she knew. And what was truly terrifying was that it was two things at once: vast and measureless, and yet right there in front of her and close enough to touch.
She didn’t touch it. She backed away quickly and raised her arm as though to ward it off. “Alex!” she blurted. “What is this?”
The boy looked where she was looking. He hadn’t been paying the churning mass any particular attention until then. The other one, he said. You know. The woman who sleeps up on top of you.
“That’s Lorraine Buller?”
Yes.
“Then… why don’t I look like that?”
The boy gave her a puzzled, pitying look. You do when you’re asleep.
“What? But—”
Everybody does, Jess. You saw what it was like down in the hole. You weren’t anything until you thought about it. And then you got to be a bit more like a person. But when you’re asleep, you’re all kinds of things at once. You’re everything you ever thought about. And there are hundreds and hundreds of people here all asleep and dreaming at the same time. Everything inside them is just all mixed up.
“And this is where you live?” Her voice was strained. If she was seeing the world the way he saw it – seeing with ghost eyes rather than eyes made out of flesh – then how did he even manage to find her each night? Fellside had thousands of inmates. Wasn’t his world just… oceans made out of other oceans, more and more of this chaos, going on for ever?
It is to start with. But you get used to it. And it starts to be different when you get closer.
“Different how?”
I’ll show you, he said, and took her hand again.
And he led her through the chaos and the silence, along roads she couldn’t see, through territories she didn’t understand.
Fellside at night, through the eyes of the dead, was like the first day of creation. The waters had been divided but darkness still lay on them. Some were puddles you could skirt around or splash through, but some were oceans that took you whole.
After a little while, it was impossible to say what was wet and what was dry. There was no shore, and one stream let into another stream, a river poured out of another river.
But this wasn’t water she was walking through. It was lives. And Alex was right when he said that distance mattered. From far away, the waves were made of millions of scattered droplets. Close up, each droplet was another wave, each wave another world that you could step right into and then right on through.
She was circumnavigating the dreams of the women of Goodall wing. She saw what they saw on the inside of their closed eyelids, except that each of them only saw their own dreams, while Jess saw them all, was drenched and deluged by them. One moment she was crossing a busy street, crowds pressing in on her from all sides. Then the wave collapsed and she was somewhere else, standing in a narrow room that smelled of sweat and cinnamon, watching a naked man bowing over a basin as he shaved himself with a straight razor.
You see?
Yes, Alex. I see. And she did.
She saw too much. Fellside’s inmates were a skewed sample. Every single one of them had a life that ended in the utter disaster of prison. Relationships sheared off. Jobs and reputations lost. Kids left with overburdened partners, thrown on the winds to relatives who didn’t really want them or (dear Christ Jesus!) taken into care. She saw the women of Goodall from the inside, and from the inside they were all of them bowed down by the weight of what had befallen them. They were all on a catastrophe curve, sailing frictionlessly towards this precipice or that. It was little wonder that they were capable of brutality. What was amazing was that they ever managed to be kind to one another.
Jess was overwhelmed by these visions, and she struggled to understand them. The last time she’d walked here with Alex, she’d kept her eyes shut and gone where he had led her. All the same, she felt she knew this place from somewhere. Its contours were terrifying and alien but they were also familiar. That dissonance was the scariest thing of all.
These were other people’s memories and dreams she was walking through, that much was clear. But what did her being here mean? She remembered a story she’d read in school when she was about fourteen, where a man stepping on a butterfly had changed the whole history of the world. What damage could a careless footfall do in this place, where the butterflies were pieces of people’s minds?
Suddenly and deeply afraid, she turned to the boy. Take me back, she told him.
It will still hurt, Jess.
I know, but I don’t like it here. It’s too big. Too… shapeless.
You can make it be any shape you want, Alex said with sublime unconcern. And that struck Jess as the scariest thought of all. That without even knowing what this stuff was, she could run through it and kick it into spray.
Take me back, she begged. And Alex did. He led her through the endless, unspeakable chaos to her own small self, and helped her back inside.
Her battered body creaked and yawed like a house in a hurricane, but it didn’t fall down. And the pain held her close until the morning came.
In the still, pregnant minutes before the rising bell, the blocked memory finally came free. She knew Alex’s night world because it had once been her own. She’d called it the Other Place. She’d told her mother it was like the seaside except that it was all on fire. And as a six-year-old, she’d gone there every night until Dr Carter, with her well-intentioned rummaging, had forced her to beat a tactical retreat.