Excerpt: Twisted

The human voices died down and left her behind several closed doors, but there was no sense of relief, no blessed notion of letting go, because those other voices took their place, closing in on her with avarice, malice, and rows of teeth.
Needles dived beneath veins, found the spot where the pain hit.
The cannulae were adjusted, probed, invaded.
And then they took a bite from her own mind.
Hannah Greene found she had eyes she could open, and she did.
She stared up into a flickering, buzzing rectangle of pale light, then suddenly an orb of much more intense, luminous green shone right in front of her face.
Beneath that – two dark green voids.
Many more of those dark green voids, but then they shrank down to two again.
Eyes.
She found her mouth, but there was a strange, fuzzy mold put over it that prevented her from making the smallest noise.
She could breathe – but nothing beyond that.
In her mind, Hannah screamed, screamed louder than any of the voices had done; a scream that, had it found its way out of her body, would have broken the universe apart, the shards of it dropping, crinkling to the ground.
The girl who remembered herself to be Hannah Greene breathed hard, hearing the air pass through her lungs. The sound was hollowed and muted, though, more inward than outward. She wanted to sit up – did she really? – but her hands were strapped tightly to whatever she was lying on. Looking sideways – yes, she wanted to look sideways, she wanted anything but look upwards again – she saw they were bound by strings of…pearls?
Look at me, specimen. The command wasn’t spoken out loud, had no discernible voice, not even real words; nevertheless it was unmistakable and impossible to refuse. She found her head – the neck also painfully strapped down – inexorably moved in the direction she definitely did not want to look.
The face she was forced to look into was oddly rectangular in shape and an even deeper shade of green than the huge, pupil-less, slanted orbs of eyes. The skin did not seem to be entirely of one smooth piece, instead, it was pockmarked with dull scales, bits of loose, translucent skin like the webbing between a frog’s fingers, barely healed gashes and leathery wrinkles. Hannah heard her own breath again as she looked past the eyes – there were only two slits for a nose, the bottom of the face was entirely taken up by a lipless jaw. What she didn’t want to look at was that wall of disjointed teeth, like hundreds of thick sabres slammed down into the ground, at such odd angles that the creature would not be able to close his mouth completely. The head was flattened, with no hair on it but a few sporadic rubbery strands, twisting this way and that even when the creature held its head perfectly still. Across the skull a thick, spiked crown, like the dorsal fins of the large fish Hannah had seen in the sitting room of a wealthy professor. The words “sitting room” and “professor escaped her mental grasp, tumbled down to the ground, and as her hands were shackled, she could not hold onto them. They were words from another time, another life, beyond the mirror, before the fall.
The term “dorsal fin” managed to stay, though, and it lingered and swam. The strands of ropy skin – tentacles? Another word that lingered – wavered and danced before her, curling in and out of the light, as though they were shy animals themselves.
A few small bubbles emerged from between the bone white teeth as the creature exhaled.
How is this possible?
And then it came to her, poured into her with a clammy coldness of the skin, the impeccable sensation of being surrounded by something thicker, more tangible than air.
I’m underwater, Hannah thought, the notion numb, but clear. We are underwater. But there is a lamp there, and I’m also… I’m also with Christopher, in the park, and his hands are around my shoulder. It’s odd how I can almost feel them... He is anxious. I can feel that too.
More coldness.
What is this place?
Hannah would have shuddered, but the sharp white strips around her wrists and also, it appeared, around her chest, prevented any movement that was not somehow permitted by the creature. A small, translucent orb hung from a wiry limb between its eyes, above an excrecent, triangular white scar. This luminous little speck provided the only light in the vicinity apart from the flickering rectangle The being leaned closer again, bending its head inches away from her so the green light shone straight into her eyes.
Hannah could not speak, could not find words to think, did not even dare breathe. The light made her dizzy.
When she felt certain her entire world consisted of blinding, luminescent green and there would never be another color for as long as she lived, it abruptly withdrew the orb, but she felt another chill run down her spine as the following words were quite plainly inserted into her mind:
Transfer complete. Calling for cross-examination. The orb dangling from the forehead glowed even brighter.
Inserted. There was no other word for what had happened just then. The words came from the creature, that much Hannah knew, but there was no voice, no distinct tone she could discern from her own. The closest comparison she could find was the voice she heard in her mind when she was reading, but that could not be called a real voice either, could it? The words – or maybe even just the meanings that transcended the words – were simply there, behind her forehead, to be picked up.
The drugged state of mind that had made her scrutinize the creature across her began to lift. She kicked and yanked against her tight shackles, opened her mouth to shout at this hideous, ungodly thing that was scrutinizing her like an object, bit into the soft, rubbery material covering her face.
No use. No need, came the words, the meanings in those words, in a rather staccato manner. Do not need voice to communicate. Once more, it was less words than meanings, transcending the language of thought. Hannah did not want to know what kind of abominable language these beasts spoke. She looked at the jutting, terrifying rows of teeth again and reconsidered within another moment that they probably could not form words.
Christopher would know things like this. He read too many books.
Christopher!
Another life, another world, before the fall…
When she thought she had a clear mental grasp of it, she spat the question at the creature. Who are you? More questions came rushing in instantly, like the tide at the seaside. How did I get here? Did you bring me here? Her breathing became audible again. Where is here?
The creature did not even so much as flinch, merely cocked its head this way and that. Hannah suddenly noticed the creature’s torso, though from her restrained lying position she could not see any further than where in a respectable human being there would have been the waist. The monster was so haggardly, excruciatingly thin that even in the ghostly illumination Hannah could make out rips and a weirdly triangular breastbone – everything about it seemed somehow angular and sinewy. And whatever it was, it was starving.
Not yet. It leaned closer again, poured the merciless light of that green orb down irises Hannah could not shield. There lay severity in the movement. Not ever. Must remain empty. There was a hesitant and incomplete quality to the inserted words whenever it spoke straight to Hannah. Must still adjust. Assimilate. Wait. At least until cross-examination.
Those are not my words. Whatever you are, you are manipulating my head. What are you?
We—and then she saw the teeth press together in a guttural hiss. For once there was a word, or at least a clump of language, in her mind, but it would not reveal its meaning. The closest approximation to meaning was “people”.
That is what we call us. Ourselves.
You are not people. You cannot be.
It raised its shoulders to point at her, almost accusingly, and for the first time Hannah could see the ghostly being’s hand: Vaguely like a human hand, but broader, the skin flattened out, forming webbing between the fingers. Looking closer, Hannah saw that some large scales at the top and at the edges of the hand had grown and pullulated into barbs, like the gnarled liver spots of old women with gout. But she did not want to imagine how sharp those barbs could be.
You. May call us “Nere”. Some do. Mouth can do it. In time. Not important.
She was strapped onto a metal stretcher, telepathically speaking to a creature with green slanted voids for eyes and barbed hands, and it was assailing her with words. Am I dreaming?
Not dreaming now. Still strong.