19

A strange veil of light seemed to hang before Istvan’s eyes, tattered and inconsistent, like a curtain made from bits and scraps of rag. In it he could see figures moving, swaying back and forth, hiding and coming forth. They were there and not there at the same time. I’m dreaming, he thought.

But no, he wasn’t dreaming, his eyes were wide open. Through the veil of light, just on the other side of it, he could see the cell around him, and he could feel that he was lying on his cot. Someone was crouching over him, but the light was such it was impossible to see the man’s face. For a moment he thought it was the small gray man, but then the curtain swayed and he saw enough to know it wasn’t him. The man’s head was too large, but still spun over with light, its features difficult to make out. He tried to move his lips to talk but found his teeth clenched tightly shut, his breath hissing angrily through them.

“Just relax,” said the man obscured by light. “It’s all right. Calm down.”

He tried to calm down, but he couldn’t. He could feel the man shaking his shoulder, and then that slowly passed and was gone, as if he no longer had a body anymore. A roaring filled his ears and the veil of light grew brighter and brighter until he could see nothing behind it and there was a buzzing pain where his head used to be. All he could see was the light, featureless and bare, and stretching on forever.

And then, slowly, he began to make out a flexing and falling of different shapes, like water boiling, but still all the same light, barely distinguishable. At first the forms seemed to make no sense, seemed merely random patterns, but then they began to adapt, to adjust. He could feel his mind working with them, making them something different, something he could understand. How did his mind know how to do such a thing? Was this like the voices? But there were no voices, only shapes. It was the opposite of voices, but his mind could make something of it somehow, and he was helpless to do anything but watch.

At first the shapes were geometrical, simple straight lines and then simple forms, slowly becoming more and more complex, dissolving into one another phantasmagorically. But then they began to warp and bend, becoming a collapse of form and then slowly taking on the shapes of faces. They were simple at first, cartoonish and immobile, but gradually they became more and more articulated, more and more human. They were still obscured, nearly lost in the light that created them, but they were more and more convincing. Here a head shot forth, even whiter light pouring out of its eyes, and burst. Another white shape arose and turned toward him and seemed to notice him. It was just a head, without body, but able somehow to move nonetheless, its neck pulsing it forward. It came toward him, its eyes curious, growing larger as it came until it seemed to fill nearly all his vision, as if it were just inches from his own head. It was hard not to imagine that he could feel its breath against his face.

And then it smiled, its mouth opening up jaggedly and too far as if its cheeks had been shut and its jaw dislocated.

He screamed.

The white face screamed back, mimicking his scream exactly, though loudly, too loudly, and then capsized in on itself, dissolving back into the light. He tried to slow his breathing, tried to bring his body back, but it wouldn’t come, he couldn’t find his body nestled anywhere under the light. And then he realized that something was forming again, a head coming up again, the same head as before, but a little more distinct this time, the light shot through with strands that were less illuminated as the muscles and sinews and tendons began to form into a slablike and brutal face, which it took him some time to recognize as his own.

It was a shock to see himself like that, embodied in light. He felt his mind push out against it and the face suddenly began to reform, becoming not his face but that of his brother. No, that was too painful in a different way, and he felt his mind push again until there she was: his mother.

He hated her, but here he didn’t hate her exactly. No, here it was more like he was afraid of her. Seeing her like that, formed all out of light, was terrifying.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, and far away, down wherever his body currently resided, he felt someone squeeze his hand.

“Whatareyoudoinghere,” the mother face repeated, its mouth moving awkwardly, wrongly. It seemed unable to make sense of the gaps between words, just ran everything together and then waited, staring expectantly at him. Which was, he realized, how he must be staring at it.

When he said nothing, the face let out a stream of raw sound, ululations and yelps, clamors and groans, a strange unearthly combination of sounds that left him feeling raw and damaged. And then it stopped, waited.

“What do you want?” he asked, as much to keep the face from sounding off as anything else.

“Whatdoyouwant?” the mother voice responded.

“You first,” he said.

“Youfirst.”

And then, as suddenly as it had gone, the light began to fade again, becoming first that tattered veil that half obscured things and then going away altogether and he was thrown panting, teeth aching, back into the world.

*   *   *

Waldron was there beside him, gripping his hand. “That’s right,” he was saying. “Just relax. It’ll be okay.” Several of the other prisoners were there, too, gathered around him.

Slowly he disentangled his hand, pushed them away enough to sit up and hold his head in his hands. He closed his eyes and when he opened them again the first thing he saw, in the corner of his cell, was a creeping tendril. Some of that moss or corruption. It hadn’t been there before. But suddenly it was there. Was it real? Would the others see it, too?

“What happened?” asked Waldron.

He just shook his head helplessly, started at the tendril.

“Do you have fits like that a lot? You were shaking so hard it was all we could do to get you into the bed.”

He lifted his head. “It saw me,” he said.

“What?” said one of the other men. “What do you mean?”

“It was staring right at me,” he said. “And then it spoke. But it was saying the things I was saying, only wrong. And then it spoke in a way that I couldn’t understand.”

“Istvan,” said Waldron, shaking his head, “none of us know what you’re talking about.”

“It’s out there, you just can’t always see it.”

“You’re crazy,” said Bill.

“We already knew he was crazy,” said Michael.

“But this is a new type of crazy,” said Bill. “It’s worth noting.”

“What is it exactly?” asked Waldron, his eyes narrowing.

“White, all white,” said Istvan. “No, made of light. But maybe that’s not really it, but just what I could see. Changing faces. Hard to remember it wasn’t the person it looked like. For a while, it was me.”

“You’re babbling,” said one of the others.

“For a while, it was me,” said Istvan again.

Waldron patted him on the shoulder. “Well, if it comes back, ask it if it can help us get out of here,” he said. He turned to leave the cell, shooing the others in front of him out. “Come on, boys. Show’s over.”