The Sleepwalker

Episode Three

Seeing Red

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“Som, look at these reports”, said Bob, the social worker general. The reports were slid across a metal desk in the stark hospital interview room. “Apart from your lack of cooperation, we have here another count of violence against a member of the staff. Do you care to explain yourself?”
“He was pissing me off, Bob,” replied Som. His hands itched. “The shoes you give out here are too tight! My feet are in agony, so I ask for more, and they say they have no more. So I take them off, and I get goons forcing me to put them back on...”

Bob steepled his fingers and his closed mind regarded Som as one regards a child to be disciplined rather than as a client to be helped.

“We have taken you in to our care, but you just rebel more and more. You must understand that we want to release you, now that you’re old enough to live alone, but behaviour like this in society would put you in prison in a fortnight. We have failed out job if our charges just end up back in the system.”

“You mean, you fail to hit government targets. You no longer care about your job. You detest young people, you see no hope in anyone,” replied Som, looking at a point somewhere behind Bob’s eyes, which irritated him in a strange way. “Maybe it’s because your daughter is such a slut.” Bob recoiled and almost lunged across the desk, confused and angry. How had he known about his daughter? There was no way, not even the other staff new about his personal life.
“Listen you little shit!” Bob was spitting bile now, red faced and violated. “You’re going to be put away for a long time- I’m recommending you for full psychiatric evaluation at a safe facility-”
“No,” said Som, who was surprised at his own calmness in the face of Bob’s rage. For the first time, the curse, gift, whatever- it was working in focus and for his benefit. “I’m going to walk out of here, declared sane and safe, or I’ll start screaming about the man in the bar with the tight jeans and the rough hands, see if gets back to your wife...”

Som thought about his difficult past as he entered the Hampstead tube station, something he tried to avoid. The tubes felt wrong to him, the cloying oily air was hard to breathe, the unnatural winds were unpleasant on his skin and the floor felt strange under his bare feet. They were a necessity of city life though and they had a certain quality of urban gore that he liked. He met people like himself on the tube.
   That thought made him smile briefly until he realised that tonight of all nights, he wanted to meet nobody and see nothing. There were people milling about; a couple of men, a young Goth girl tribe fresh from some club or bar. One of them looked particularly drawn and pale and reminded him with a chill that Joanne was somewhere there too. She was sticking with Som while Fiona went ahead by a more direct route ‘which Som couldn’t follow’ to find the mysterious Colonel. He could hear Joanne in his head, faint but present, using his gift for a purpose instead of letting it pick up random static.
“I forgot to ask Fiona why I can stand on the floor, and why some walls are solid and some are not. I can put my hand through people and through these benches, but the tube walls are as hard as ever...” said Joanne, presumably walking beside him. She was nearby yet in another world- the ghost world that suicides and shades inhabited, which they called ‘The Fringe’. “Some things are just real” thought Som, wondering if she would hear him.
“Thanks for the vague answer smart guy... but yeah, I suppose walls are walls; so ingrained in the mind...” Som smiled to himself.
“Ingrained in thousands of minds, on a level below subconscious- gravity, walls, floors, light, sound- they are in your mind and part of your conscious makeup before the doctor slaps your ass, and you believe in them. So even when you’re dead, they are still solid. A new building or something might be a different story. I guess you can move through people because they are moving through space that is unoccupied in your world... maybe, who knows?”

Joanne seemed to go quiet and Som boarded the tube, taking a seat as far away from other people as possible. He watched the others carefully- the Goth girls, a drunk football fan keeping quiet, a hobo at the other end of the compartment lying on a bench. His imagination began to wander while the Goth girls whispered something to each other about his lack of footwear. The tunnels, the roaring of the train; what did it look like in the Fringe? He could ask Joanne if she was capable of pulling him through again... and he surprised himself with how readily he was accepting the notion of this whole other plane full of suicides and the unknown. Sometimes people seemed so fragile, sometimes they seemed so indomitable. He caught a snatch of music from a Goth’s personal music player, and was pleasantly surprised to hear an old rock song rather than the latest black clad marionettes of music to come off the industry’s production line...

... I know you’re out there...I know you’re gone...You can’t say that’s fair...Can’t you be wrong?...

He was pleasantly surprised to hear something fitting, and meditated on the synchronicity of it... as he did so, his vision began to blur. Something about the song, and the dim half light of the subway, the motion and the smell, blurred together until they slipped into a different kind of focus. He could sense, or see; he wasn’t sure, a dark red tendril tethered to the music player. The music player seemed to have a vague shape over it, a red symbol halfway between the modern and universal play button logo and a runic symbol for inspiration and fire. This merged with more faint symbols and cords that hung around the Goth girl like a web and strung her to her friends, himself and people far away. The cord went into his own web and he saw symbols there that represented what the girl meant to him; feminine symbols, signs of mystery and wariness, others to do with her culture choices. He knew that people touched each other in a thousand tiny ways, from direct contact to a glimpsed face reminding you of a love lost, or green eyes on a man at the bus stop making you decide to buy your girlfriend an emerald instead of a ruby, changing the whole night...

His thoughts began to run away and the symbols got stronger, more definite until he was surrounded. They were daubed on posters, on himself, on each other and so many cords tethered him, making him feel strangled and unable to stop reading it all, seeing Joanna in the mist of red with a strange look on her face and the vivid slashes on her wrists. He shook his head, feeling like it took great effort, not unlike the effort needed to put down a good book, but a thousand times stronger. With a rub of his eyes, he began to resurface, shutting the images out. He opened them again and gasped with shock at the sight of a great hulking shape made of red violence standing directly over him and Joanna, hunched to fit within the train. As he jerked, his head seemed to clear, leaving him with plain old tube train half light, a few glances from the other passengers and the knowledge that they were not alone- someone on Joanna’s side of the Fringe was with them!
“Jo! Move, there’s someone in here!” thought Som with all his might, scrabbling out of his chair. He spun, not knowing where to run or even if he was in danger. He tried to sense the fiend, the loping wraith that may be hurting Joanna right now. The other passengers looked at him while he felt impotent and confused...
“Som, next carriage!” fluttered into his mind like a weak radio signal, and he stumbled to the door, hammering it open and rushing into an empty carriage. He barely set foot in there before a wrenching churning sensation wracked his body, a familiar pain that seemed to originate from everywhere at once, a cold grip, and a sound like rushing wind.

He was back in the Fringe, grey walls blurred with the motion of the train, deep shadows holding traces of red light that refused to make sense. Joanna had pulled him through and was gripping him tightly with panic in her eyes, her red stained wrists close to his chest, her eyes wide and swivelling towards the end of the carriage, to the thing that Som had seen before. It tried to stand, bending it’s back almost at a right angle where the train ceiling stopped it. He tried to focus on it, but when Joanna had touched him, she left behind a flicker of wild visions that danced across his mind. Just like when she had first died, he saw glimpses of her pain and her life, a walk through Leicester square with a handsome man... he cleared his head and tried to concentrate on the thing that now lumbered towards them. Now that he was in the Fringe, he could see it clearly- but now it could hurt him. It loped and slunk, long arms that got thicker towards the end trailing across the seats, long legs bent to fit in the confined space, like some Nosferatu, covered in the vivid red gashes that show a suicide ghost’s method of demise. Still, he felt sure that it was not a human; it was something else, with a head like belly button and face that was just some kind of opening. It was hard to see clearly, it’s skin a dull grey flesh colour that was all wrong and was dripping with black oil, masked by shadow and the bright red cracks. It let out a call that sounded eerily like a dolphin or whale; a high pitched sonar keening. He looked to Joanne and they both turned to run, but the thing reached out an impossibly long arm and lazily dragged them back with no effort at all, one finger-like tool on each. They let out screams and Som was gifted with some violent visions by it’s touch- was that going to be another part of the Sleepwalker curse? He saw a landscape that was like nothing on earth, and the inside of a tight box, and a word... Nod. Joanna was cast against the train walls with a sigh as the wind was forced from her, and Som was crushed against the wall, some poster or switch digging into his ribs, the fat black and pale appendage crushing him with ease. The Nod’s face came closer and it groaned, loud and quite lonely, the orifice pulsing and letting out more red light from within. Som struggled and pushed as it shifted itself around the poles and chairs that inhibited it’s large form, moving like an animal. His chest was burning and with the prolonged contact more scrambled visions hit him that he was too scared to translate, as the world started to turn red.

Suddenly the pressure was released and with another sonar whine the Nod turned away. Som caught a glimpse of a tall, well built man with baggy white trousers, or at least light grey in the Fringe’s colourless world, topless and with very short hair. He worse an angry grimace and his suicide mark was a red ring around his neck. He stepped between the Nod and Joanne, and as it pitched towards him he leapt suddenly, one foot launching him off the Nod’s lumbering forelimb, both muscled arms gripping tight around the creature’s shoulder. It began keening again and throwing itself around; with a huge effort the stranger gripped the shoulder with all his strength, wrapping his legs around when possible, or using them to brace against the walls. It pushed him into the train poles and he grunted but refused to let go, climbing up to the Nod’s misshapen head. It tried to throw him off again but Som kicked himself into action and braced himself against the wall, kicking out with both legs to stop the creature bashing itself and it’s passenger. His bare feet hit flesh that felt soft but was underlined by a wall of muscle, and came back sticky with black oil. Joanne braced herself and did the same, while the stranger began to do something unexpected. Digging his fingers into the Nod’s back, he began to rip or trace a red line into it’s flesh, until there was a red ring similar to his own on the creature’s neck, if it could be called a neck. He seemed satisfied and let himself drop, slick with blackness, and stepped back.
   The creature began to rise and make more panicked warbles, but they were fainter and strangled. It’s opening seemed to shrink and swell reflexively as some force hoisted it upwards. It was too tall to be hung, and yet it seemed to be strangled, struggling and slowly going limp. With a lonely wail, it hung loose, definitely being held against the ceiling by the red noose mark on it’s neck.

It dropped to the floor, and Som whirled around at the sound of the carriage door opening. A living person walked through them all and sat in the corner, reading a book. The stranger was plunging his hands into the Nod’s flesh cracks, that no longer burned with inner red light. He had killed it using some kind of sympathetic magic based on his own method of death... Som wanted to ask a hundred questions.
   “Thanks for saving us,” said Som. The topless stranger glanced at him, wide angry eyes flashing a wink before going back to his grisly work. He began ripping flesh open and plunging his hands into the corpse.
   “Can’t just watch you get killed now, can I?” asked the man. “Or, killed again, in your case miss,” he said to Joanne.
   “What are you doing?” asked a breathless Joanne, who sat in one of the seats.
   “Looking for something,” replied the man. With a grunt of approval he lifted a chunk of twisted metal from the Nod’s corpse and inspected it. “Nobody knows why, but they all have something inside them- usually slag like this, sometimes something valuable, could be anything from a part of a picture frame to a bone.” He tossed the inert lump to Som. “Just being curious; some say if we gather enough bits, we will know where the Nods come from.” Som noted that he had guessed the creature’s name correctly.
   “Well, thanks again for your help, whatever they are. My name is Som, and this is Joanne.” The stranger wiped himself down and first turned to Joanne to kiss her hand, and then to Som, looking him intensely in the eyes and firmly gripping his arm.
   “Rifleman Valentine Bambrick, a pleasure to serve with you,” said the man in a voice that reminded Som of television shows about London in the last century. “So, a newlydead and the Sleepwalker, wandering around the tube on your own? To think they say nothing ever happens in the Fringe. Where are you headed, brothers?” Bambrick’s manner was coarse and direct but reassuring.
   “So this Pisces on my chest is a bit of a giveaway huh?” Som looked at the red symbol daubed on his chest that was similar to the red marks of death that the suicides carried. He only just realised that he could see his vortex too, or at least a few whispy tendrils of the swirling grey storm that hovered above him in the Fringe. It seemed he was unavoidably famous in this world- but he didn’t want anyone to know how naive he was about his supposedly important position. How many of these suicide ghosts blamed his existence for keeping them in limbo? What exactly was he anyway?
The train was almost at the monument station and they had to change to get to the Tower of London where Fiona was meeting them.
   “I’d better move back into the real world now while it’s quiet,” said Som, starting to ache and feel ill from prolonged exposure to the Fringe. “Thanks for coming when you did, Mr. Bambrick.” Joanne seconded the thanks, touching the soldier on his shoulder. Bambrick squirmed but smiled, and briefly shook Som’s hand.
   “It’s an honour, Som and Joanne. I’ll be around if you need any more help. Right now, I’m going to spend some time by the Thames. Keep safe.” With that, Valentine Bambrick left them alone, and Som slipped back into the real world, groaning at the sickly sensation of movement. After riding the next train without incident, they found themselves standing before the Tower of London, staring up at ancient walls and towers. Som took in the real thing, lit by small lights for the purpose of impressing tourists, while Joanne saw the Tower as it stood in the Fringe. It looked bigger than usual, and darker, and Fiona was there with her.
   “You weren’t far behind me,” she said both to Joanne beside her and Som in the real world via her mind. “I trust the tube was easy enough?” However, Joanne was dumbstruck at the sight of the things between them and the Tower.
   “What’s wrong?” asked Som, unable to see anything special from the real world. What Joanne and Fiona could see was twelve, maybe fifteen Nods, wailing and keening their sad whale song and loping around the entrance to the Tower.
   “Fiona,” asked Joanne. “Can we die twice?”