Pythia background
The knocking at the door wouldn't go away. This didn't mean it was real. I'd been hallucinating for three days, after all, and it showed no signs of fading. When I went out in public, I heard voices. When I stayed in my flat I had flashbacks. It was a plague. No, a nightmare. Maybe a nightmare about a plague. Wasn't that a quote from a TV show?
I didn't know anymore.
I hadn't seen Andrew, which was a relief and agony all at the same time. I didn't know what the hell I could say to him. "Hi, I've gone crazy" or "can you explain why you were mucking around with dead bodies in the basement?" or even "were you mucking around with dead bodies in the basement or is that all the product of my rapidly disintegrating cerebral cortex?". Maybe "are you a serial killer?" or "I've gone so insane I think you're a serial killer,"
Jesus, the knocking was still there.
I kept going through the past three days in my mind. How the hell had this happened to me? I wasn't the kind of person who broke. I was strong. I coped. Everyone told me so, from the day mi madre died ("you're such a good girl, Sorrell. So strong,") through the day my father left ("you need to be strong again, Sorrell. But you can do that, can't you?") and the bullying at school ("you are so tough. You never let it bother you,") and even when I was playing up in my teens and taking off for days at a time ("you just don't care, do you, Sorrell?"). I was tough, I was resilient, I didn't collapse over....
...what had I collapsed over?
I considered answering the door, but decided against it, and pulled the giant teddy bear that Andrew had got me for Christmas into my body and buried my face in his head.
What had I collapsed over? Everything had been fine, surely?
OK, so I'd been having doubts about Andrew for a while. Andrew is...was...my boss. OK, and my boyfriend. Let's not talk about the boyfriend bit, because we've been keeping that quiet for years, for the sake of propriety in the office. We keep separate flats, although I'm over at his for five or six nights of the week, and we travel into work on our own; he gets chauffeur driven and I take the bus. And that's OK. I don't want to be seen as the CEO's bit of fluff anyway.
But anyway, I'd been having...doubts. I couldn't put my finger on what I was doubting, but I knew that something was wrong. Little things about Andrew didn't add up; his lack of family; his refusal to let me meet his friends; the late nights he didn't like to talk about; the times he got out of bed in the middle of the night to retreat into his study; the trips away from home that he wrote off as 'business' but had nothing to do with the company. I work as an investigator. I know that no one's life is actually filled with holes like that. There was something lurking in the spaces and I wanted to know what that was.
So, I started looking into him. Yeah, I know that isn't normal either. Normal girls ask questions and then trust their boyfriend when he gives them the answer, but I'm not a normal girl. I started with his background and found out he didn't have a birth certificate. He was older than he looked - much older - if the amount of time he'd been running the company was any kind of indicator and I couldn’t find any record of the time he'd spent in the army either, although he talked about it often enough. There was something up, and I wanted to know what it was.
OK, so maybe the knocking on the door was real.
"Go away!" I shouted. Whoever was there ignored me. I stood up, slowly and carefully. My legs felt wobbly beneath me. This was probably because I hadn't eaten in three days, which isn't good for the system, I'm told.
A lot of people would tell you that my running background checks on my boyfriend was a sign of paranoia, and maybe the beginnings of this breakdown. These are the same people who would say that my finding a boyfriend old enough to be my father and in a position of significant authority over me was a sign of my unresolved daddy issues. Abandoned little girl and all. Normally I'd say this was crap, but considering the week I'd had I was beginning to wonder. Those people would definitely say that telling him I was having going home for an early night and then hiding in the boot of his car for three hours was definitely a sign of something going wrong.
But it didn't seem like it at the time. I just really wanted to know.
I waited for a long time. It was probably one of the more tedious three hours of my life, but I had a iPod and a lot of music. So I sat there, and waited. And waited. And waited.
It was 11 pm before he moved. The iPod meant I didn't hear his footsteps; just felt the car shudder a little as the driver's door opened and shut. Then there was the hum of the engine, a judder beneath me and we were moving.
Can I just say that if you suffer from carsickness at all, or even if you don't, the boot of a car is a horrible way to travel.
Anyway, we drove for a while. Not long, maybe ten minutes or so. Long enough for me to feel sick, not long enough for me to throw up, and not long enough for me to build up any kind of decent doubts about what I was doing. I did wonder a little bit about what I was going to find. The best case scenario, as I saw it, was some kind of leggy blonde related incident. The worst case was involvement in something that normally carries significant punishment by the international community under the Geneva Convention. Or was that the other way around? I wasn't sure, but that was the spectrum my mind was running along as the car pulled up and came to a sudden halt.
He didn't look in the boot, but instead just shut the car door. There was the quick zap of the car locking and then he walked away. I lay there, very still, for a moment or two, and then I carefully unlocked the car with the duplicate keys I'd had for ages and, very slowly, pushed the boot up.
We were outside some kind of large building; a warehouse I think. It had that kind of drab grey cladding on the outside, and the doors were bigger than they needed to be for any kind of person. One of the doors sat ajar, where Andrew had gone through it and it was that door I headed for.
Inside everything was silent and cold. Andrew had, thankfully, left the lights on, and they shed a grim and unforgiving white light across the many crates that were stacked up against the walls. Everything was deathly quiet, and I almost wanted to hold my breath to stop it rasping out into the silent night air. My footsteps felt unpleasantly loud on the concrete floor and I half expected Andrew to appear at any moment to ask what the hell I was doing there. But he didn't, and after a few moments I began to move a little more confidently.
Where was he? I couldn't see him anywhere, but there was, at the back, a small staircase leading downwards, and it was from that area that I first heard the sound of chanting.
Yeah, you heard me right. Chanting. Like...like a monk or something. And it was Andrew's voice. I had no idea what he was chanting about; it was in a language I didn't recognise. It wasn't Italian, Russian or German which means we'd hit the limits of my linguistic competence. It might have been Latin, but I wasn't sure. I just knew that his voice sounded sonorous and the words felt ominous and suddenly I wasn't sure I wanted to be there any more.
Still, I kept moving towards the stairs. Be careful, Sorrell. Move quietly. Slow steps. Jesus, but I was scared now, although I didn't know why. I don't scare easily, but the air was thick with something I didn't recognise and I was beginning to feel the freakiest sensation; razorblades pressing against my skin.
Down the stairs I went. The metal beneath my feet was too sharp now to be comfortable. I don't know what Andrew had had them made of, but they fucking hurt. The chanting was continuing, and the air was thickening and the lights were flickering and I think my mind was beginning to fragment already because somehow I knew that what I was about to see.
Andrew was downstairs. He was standing in a circle of some kind, with his arms outstretched. His hands had some kind of dark stuff on them; I still don't know if it was mud, or blood, or something worse. Jesus, get a grip, Sorrell. What is there that is worse than blood?
Anyway, he was standing there and he was chanting, and opposite him there was a great big pile of death. I don't know how else to describe it. I mean, I sort of should describe it properly, because it was etched into my brain like nothing else had ever been. It was a pile of dead things, mostly human. It reminded me a little of the pictures I'd seen of Auschwitz or maybe Rwanda; all arms and legs everywhere, heads lolling, eyes still open. There was no dignity in this death; just the foetid stinking mess of it all. Some were clothed in a mixture of casual and uniform. There was a man in blue jeans lying draped across a woman who was dressed in some kind of combats. She was bottle blonde and why do I remember the colour of her hair? Why did I notice that?
I remember thinking that this was worse than anything I'd imagined. I thought my boyfriend might be selling illegal guns, or maybe having an affair. I didn't imagine he could be chanting incantations over the bodies of what looked like thirty or forty corpses in various states of decomposition. Had he killed them? How the hell else had he acquired them? I didn't know and I didn't want to know.
And then it happened.
I didn't like to think about what happened next. I think my mind shattered, you see, because whatever I had seen before the next bit made no sense at all.
Have you ever seen anyone playing with a marionette? First of all the arms and legs rise up. Then, if the person managing the marionette is any good, it'll be the head, but too often they forget, and instead it is the body which rises, dragged up by the arms and legs, with the head lolling uselessly behind. Then the head straightens, and the marionette can begin to walk; big clumsy steps, limbs bending the wrong way, the head hanging off a thin and rubber-bending neck.
That was what seemed to be happening.
First the dead things' arms rose, all at once, until they had formed some kind of horrific forest, hands waving like flowers in the breeze. Then Andrew seemed to make some kind of gesture with his hands and next they were standing, scrambling over each other to get to the floor, heads still lolling uselessly.
I didn't scream. I'm still quite proud of that. I didn't scream and I didn't throw up, although all my instincts told me that I should do. Maybe I was already too far gone for that, sinking into crazy as I sat there, hallucinating or witnessing or...
...I don't know what I was doing there. I do know that the razorblades and broken glass feeling was getting stronger, the longer I sat there, and I knew that I needed to get out. So I ran.
I still don't want to think about what came next. I don't want to remember the way the walls reached out to me as I ran. I don't want to talk about the cuts in my feet or the way I screamed in the street and pulled at my hair to rid myself of the bugs crawling through it. I don't want to think about the cold grey faces on every man and woman who stared at me as I ran or how their skin wrinkled up like corpses under water. I don't want to know anything that the voices whispered to me as I huddled in an alleyway, staring up at the bleak black tower that loomed above the city like a threat or a promise. I don't want to, but I can't stop myself from doing so.
Three days, I lost. Three days of running, of hiding, of screaming, of fighting. Three days and god I don't even know how I didn't get arrested. I didn't eat. I drank sparingly, once from a puddle in the street and once from an old coke can that someone had thrown away. I don't remember sleeping, although I guess I must have done. At times it seemed like an effort to remember to breathe, when my lungs hurt so much it felt like they would come tearing out of my chest.
Three days. Three days to make it through the city to that horrible razorblade tower. And then...nothing.
I woke up in an alleyway, with an aching sensation in my brain. The voices hadn't stopped entirely, but now they were less threatening. Instead of telling me that my father was dead or I was a monster they seemed to just fill my head up with the meaningless babble of everyone else's everyday lives. A teenage boy walked past me, with a head full of sexual fantasies aimed at the tall blonde walking just ahead of him. A thin and worried woman in a business suit recited the presentation she was about to give at work, without saying a word. As hallucinations go, they seemed pretty mild, and the bugs under my skin (which were really the worst part of the whole experience) had gone away.
I was also pretty hideously lost, but after an hour or so of wandering I found a street I recognised, and it turned out I had just enough change left in a pocket for me to get the bus home.
And that was how I got home. That was how I wound up back in my flat, surrounded by my collection of cuddly toys and the sparkly fairy figurines (that Andrew never did let me move into his place) and my favourite trashy fantasy novels that sat comfortably next to the radio bugging equipment and the night vision goggles. That was how I ended up sitting there, freaking out at a knock on the door, because I was pretty sure it wasn't real and I was about to go crazy again.
And that was the state I was in when I opened the door and almost overbalanced and fell into my bastard (and allegedly dead) ex-father's arms.
I didn't know anymore.
I hadn't seen Andrew, which was a relief and agony all at the same time. I didn't know what the hell I could say to him. "Hi, I've gone crazy" or "can you explain why you were mucking around with dead bodies in the basement?" or even "were you mucking around with dead bodies in the basement or is that all the product of my rapidly disintegrating cerebral cortex?". Maybe "are you a serial killer?" or "I've gone so insane I think you're a serial killer,"
Jesus, the knocking was still there.
I kept going through the past three days in my mind. How the hell had this happened to me? I wasn't the kind of person who broke. I was strong. I coped. Everyone told me so, from the day mi madre died ("you're such a good girl, Sorrell. So strong,") through the day my father left ("you need to be strong again, Sorrell. But you can do that, can't you?") and the bullying at school ("you are so tough. You never let it bother you,") and even when I was playing up in my teens and taking off for days at a time ("you just don't care, do you, Sorrell?"). I was tough, I was resilient, I didn't collapse over....
...what had I collapsed over?
I considered answering the door, but decided against it, and pulled the giant teddy bear that Andrew had got me for Christmas into my body and buried my face in his head.
What had I collapsed over? Everything had been fine, surely?
OK, so I'd been having doubts about Andrew for a while. Andrew is...was...my boss. OK, and my boyfriend. Let's not talk about the boyfriend bit, because we've been keeping that quiet for years, for the sake of propriety in the office. We keep separate flats, although I'm over at his for five or six nights of the week, and we travel into work on our own; he gets chauffeur driven and I take the bus. And that's OK. I don't want to be seen as the CEO's bit of fluff anyway.
But anyway, I'd been having...doubts. I couldn't put my finger on what I was doubting, but I knew that something was wrong. Little things about Andrew didn't add up; his lack of family; his refusal to let me meet his friends; the late nights he didn't like to talk about; the times he got out of bed in the middle of the night to retreat into his study; the trips away from home that he wrote off as 'business' but had nothing to do with the company. I work as an investigator. I know that no one's life is actually filled with holes like that. There was something lurking in the spaces and I wanted to know what that was.
So, I started looking into him. Yeah, I know that isn't normal either. Normal girls ask questions and then trust their boyfriend when he gives them the answer, but I'm not a normal girl. I started with his background and found out he didn't have a birth certificate. He was older than he looked - much older - if the amount of time he'd been running the company was any kind of indicator and I couldn’t find any record of the time he'd spent in the army either, although he talked about it often enough. There was something up, and I wanted to know what it was.
OK, so maybe the knocking on the door was real.
"Go away!" I shouted. Whoever was there ignored me. I stood up, slowly and carefully. My legs felt wobbly beneath me. This was probably because I hadn't eaten in three days, which isn't good for the system, I'm told.
A lot of people would tell you that my running background checks on my boyfriend was a sign of paranoia, and maybe the beginnings of this breakdown. These are the same people who would say that my finding a boyfriend old enough to be my father and in a position of significant authority over me was a sign of my unresolved daddy issues. Abandoned little girl and all. Normally I'd say this was crap, but considering the week I'd had I was beginning to wonder. Those people would definitely say that telling him I was having going home for an early night and then hiding in the boot of his car for three hours was definitely a sign of something going wrong.
But it didn't seem like it at the time. I just really wanted to know.
I waited for a long time. It was probably one of the more tedious three hours of my life, but I had a iPod and a lot of music. So I sat there, and waited. And waited. And waited.
It was 11 pm before he moved. The iPod meant I didn't hear his footsteps; just felt the car shudder a little as the driver's door opened and shut. Then there was the hum of the engine, a judder beneath me and we were moving.
Can I just say that if you suffer from carsickness at all, or even if you don't, the boot of a car is a horrible way to travel.
Anyway, we drove for a while. Not long, maybe ten minutes or so. Long enough for me to feel sick, not long enough for me to throw up, and not long enough for me to build up any kind of decent doubts about what I was doing. I did wonder a little bit about what I was going to find. The best case scenario, as I saw it, was some kind of leggy blonde related incident. The worst case was involvement in something that normally carries significant punishment by the international community under the Geneva Convention. Or was that the other way around? I wasn't sure, but that was the spectrum my mind was running along as the car pulled up and came to a sudden halt.
He didn't look in the boot, but instead just shut the car door. There was the quick zap of the car locking and then he walked away. I lay there, very still, for a moment or two, and then I carefully unlocked the car with the duplicate keys I'd had for ages and, very slowly, pushed the boot up.
We were outside some kind of large building; a warehouse I think. It had that kind of drab grey cladding on the outside, and the doors were bigger than they needed to be for any kind of person. One of the doors sat ajar, where Andrew had gone through it and it was that door I headed for.
Inside everything was silent and cold. Andrew had, thankfully, left the lights on, and they shed a grim and unforgiving white light across the many crates that were stacked up against the walls. Everything was deathly quiet, and I almost wanted to hold my breath to stop it rasping out into the silent night air. My footsteps felt unpleasantly loud on the concrete floor and I half expected Andrew to appear at any moment to ask what the hell I was doing there. But he didn't, and after a few moments I began to move a little more confidently.
Where was he? I couldn't see him anywhere, but there was, at the back, a small staircase leading downwards, and it was from that area that I first heard the sound of chanting.
Yeah, you heard me right. Chanting. Like...like a monk or something. And it was Andrew's voice. I had no idea what he was chanting about; it was in a language I didn't recognise. It wasn't Italian, Russian or German which means we'd hit the limits of my linguistic competence. It might have been Latin, but I wasn't sure. I just knew that his voice sounded sonorous and the words felt ominous and suddenly I wasn't sure I wanted to be there any more.
Still, I kept moving towards the stairs. Be careful, Sorrell. Move quietly. Slow steps. Jesus, but I was scared now, although I didn't know why. I don't scare easily, but the air was thick with something I didn't recognise and I was beginning to feel the freakiest sensation; razorblades pressing against my skin.
Down the stairs I went. The metal beneath my feet was too sharp now to be comfortable. I don't know what Andrew had had them made of, but they fucking hurt. The chanting was continuing, and the air was thickening and the lights were flickering and I think my mind was beginning to fragment already because somehow I knew that what I was about to see.
Andrew was downstairs. He was standing in a circle of some kind, with his arms outstretched. His hands had some kind of dark stuff on them; I still don't know if it was mud, or blood, or something worse. Jesus, get a grip, Sorrell. What is there that is worse than blood?
Anyway, he was standing there and he was chanting, and opposite him there was a great big pile of death. I don't know how else to describe it. I mean, I sort of should describe it properly, because it was etched into my brain like nothing else had ever been. It was a pile of dead things, mostly human. It reminded me a little of the pictures I'd seen of Auschwitz or maybe Rwanda; all arms and legs everywhere, heads lolling, eyes still open. There was no dignity in this death; just the foetid stinking mess of it all. Some were clothed in a mixture of casual and uniform. There was a man in blue jeans lying draped across a woman who was dressed in some kind of combats. She was bottle blonde and why do I remember the colour of her hair? Why did I notice that?
I remember thinking that this was worse than anything I'd imagined. I thought my boyfriend might be selling illegal guns, or maybe having an affair. I didn't imagine he could be chanting incantations over the bodies of what looked like thirty or forty corpses in various states of decomposition. Had he killed them? How the hell else had he acquired them? I didn't know and I didn't want to know.
And then it happened.
I didn't like to think about what happened next. I think my mind shattered, you see, because whatever I had seen before the next bit made no sense at all.
Have you ever seen anyone playing with a marionette? First of all the arms and legs rise up. Then, if the person managing the marionette is any good, it'll be the head, but too often they forget, and instead it is the body which rises, dragged up by the arms and legs, with the head lolling uselessly behind. Then the head straightens, and the marionette can begin to walk; big clumsy steps, limbs bending the wrong way, the head hanging off a thin and rubber-bending neck.
That was what seemed to be happening.
First the dead things' arms rose, all at once, until they had formed some kind of horrific forest, hands waving like flowers in the breeze. Then Andrew seemed to make some kind of gesture with his hands and next they were standing, scrambling over each other to get to the floor, heads still lolling uselessly.
I didn't scream. I'm still quite proud of that. I didn't scream and I didn't throw up, although all my instincts told me that I should do. Maybe I was already too far gone for that, sinking into crazy as I sat there, hallucinating or witnessing or...
...I don't know what I was doing there. I do know that the razorblades and broken glass feeling was getting stronger, the longer I sat there, and I knew that I needed to get out. So I ran.
I still don't want to think about what came next. I don't want to remember the way the walls reached out to me as I ran. I don't want to talk about the cuts in my feet or the way I screamed in the street and pulled at my hair to rid myself of the bugs crawling through it. I don't want to think about the cold grey faces on every man and woman who stared at me as I ran or how their skin wrinkled up like corpses under water. I don't want to know anything that the voices whispered to me as I huddled in an alleyway, staring up at the bleak black tower that loomed above the city like a threat or a promise. I don't want to, but I can't stop myself from doing so.
Three days, I lost. Three days of running, of hiding, of screaming, of fighting. Three days and god I don't even know how I didn't get arrested. I didn't eat. I drank sparingly, once from a puddle in the street and once from an old coke can that someone had thrown away. I don't remember sleeping, although I guess I must have done. At times it seemed like an effort to remember to breathe, when my lungs hurt so much it felt like they would come tearing out of my chest.
Three days. Three days to make it through the city to that horrible razorblade tower. And then...nothing.
I woke up in an alleyway, with an aching sensation in my brain. The voices hadn't stopped entirely, but now they were less threatening. Instead of telling me that my father was dead or I was a monster they seemed to just fill my head up with the meaningless babble of everyone else's everyday lives. A teenage boy walked past me, with a head full of sexual fantasies aimed at the tall blonde walking just ahead of him. A thin and worried woman in a business suit recited the presentation she was about to give at work, without saying a word. As hallucinations go, they seemed pretty mild, and the bugs under my skin (which were really the worst part of the whole experience) had gone away.
I was also pretty hideously lost, but after an hour or so of wandering I found a street I recognised, and it turned out I had just enough change left in a pocket for me to get the bus home.
And that was how I got home. That was how I wound up back in my flat, surrounded by my collection of cuddly toys and the sparkly fairy figurines (that Andrew never did let me move into his place) and my favourite trashy fantasy novels that sat comfortably next to the radio bugging equipment and the night vision goggles. That was how I ended up sitting there, freaking out at a knock on the door, because I was pretty sure it wasn't real and I was about to go crazy again.
And that was the state I was in when I opened the door and almost overbalanced and fell into my bastard (and allegedly dead) ex-father's arms.