Secret Places and Hidden Things

Chapter Ten

A strand of hair glimmered brightly in the sun. Marelle was sitting in the grass, trying to understand its actual shape. It looked like a broken place in the air. After the strange creature had left her behind, she'd felt her defeat again, but this time it didn't weigh her down. If anything, she was becoming more determined with every failure, her resentment driving her onward.

She took both ends of the hair and tied them together—as well as she could with something she couldn't see—and found the space within the circle stayed where it was, like a dimensional picture on a disk. She held it out in front of her and stuck her arm though. A few feet to her left, a hand appeared in the air, floating.

She withdrew her arm, her eyes narrowing, and twisted the disk around itself. She knew this was her key to finding the creature, but how? Sparks shot out as the edges rubbed against each other. When it was doubled up, the image refracted like water, colors and shapes moving over each other in abstract patterns. When she put her arm through again, she didn't see anything appear nearby. Pins and needles bloomed across her skin, and she pulled her hand out, shaking the life back into it.

For a moment she sat, looking at the disk. Then, throwing caution to the winds, she took a deep breath and pulled it down over her head. It was like being submerged in ice water, and she gasped involuntarily. Her eyes felt far too big and her head far too small—like space itself was bubbling around her. The images she saw were illogical and unsettling, and she felt sick. She thrust the disk from her head violently.

The air was fire, and her eyes were instantly sore. She waited for the dizziness to pass. The light was too bright, even with her hands pressed against her face. She stayed that way for several minutes, taking slow breaths and thinking of little but the pain. After a while, she tried moving her hands away, and found the light through her eyelids was tolerable. She blinked slowly, squinting as if she'd just woken up. Her brain was foggy but, in time, that passed as well. Soon, she didn't even feel sick.

She sat a while considering ideas, then looked back up at the trees. There was an abundance of hair dangling from the branches. They were floating, almost weightless, as the breeze moved by. It looked like the air itself had been outlined, each current and eddy illustrated by a shimmering, opalescent line. She got to her feet and reached up, plucking another hair out of the wind, and made a second disk. She set it on the grass beside the first and looked at them carefully. It seemed each hair made a window that led to the place it had been tied—as if tying them together was capturing a small piece of reality. On a whim, she picked up a disk and set it on top of the other. It was slightly smaller and fell through the bottom, rippling the surface as it disappeared. She looked around to see if it had popped out anywhere nearby, but there was nothing. When she examined the image, somehow it had become two places at the same time. It wasn't distorted or mixed like it had been, before. This time, her mind could see both places completely without any strain or confusion.

Curiosity overcame her once again, and she stuck her head through. Now she could see her own head floating in the air, and behind that, her body sitting placidly in the grass holding a disk around its neck. More than that, though, she could see this twice, from two different angles. A doubling of consciousness that felt clear even while she tried to understand it.

She pulled the disk back off of her head and set it down, blinking. "If I can be in two places at once, does that mean there was two of me?" she asked.

"We are not sure," the disk responded.

She jumped involuntarily, falling backwards. "You can speak," she said.

The disk didn't answer.

"Who's there?" she asked, looking around her wildly.

"We are not here. You are far away," the disk said.

"You," she said, looking down at the disk. "You're that creature."

The disk said nothing.

"Why are you hiding?"

"We do not need to hide. We are the still point," the disk said.

Marelle thought about this, slowly tracing the line of her jaw with a finger. A gust of wind plucked at her dress, setting the jewels glimmering in the sunlight. She stood up and gathered a few more strands of hair, being careful to tie them in separate places, then laid them onto the first disk as she had before. They disappeared the same way, and when she put her head through this time, she saw something entirely different.

Where, before, she had become two perspectives—each separate and unique—this time she found she was smeared out across a moving wave, like a shimmer of oil on the surface of a lake. She wasn't in many places at once, as she had expected, but everywhere and nowhere. She took the disk off of her head and looked around her, trying to make a comparison to what she'd seen. It wasn't entirely different from having one perspective, but it wasn't the same, either. She experimented with three layers, and four, gathering the hairs and making different versions of the disk to see how the experience would compare. It was a slow shift between ways of observing reality. She decided two perspectives was the strangest, even if the transition to an endless perspective was more jarring.

In a moment of madness, she gathered all the disks into one and jumped into it while it was laying on the ground. There was a sensation of falling endlessly, while her limbs fountained out into liquid color, and all feeling within her transformed into an endless open space. She found she was everything, all at once, even while she was just herself, as she'd always been. A coolness pervaded the experience. It was silent and gray and still, the admixture of all possible sensation melting and spreading into an infinite horizon without obstacles.

"What is this?" she asked without a mouth.

"We are not sure. Nothing appears to be different," a voice said.

"Where am I, though?"

The gray everything shrugged. "You are in the same place you have been for the last few hours."

Marelle blinked, then realized how strange it was that she could blink. She realized she was still standing in a clearing in a forest, and she could see grass and trees and a small disk laying in front of her. This grayness still wasn't any different from how things had been before, even while it was. She turned around—more of a mental act than a physical one—and found the singular perspective was still there.

"The still point wouldn't be everything, would it?"

"No, a single thing cannot be everything," the disk said.

Marelle grit her teeth. She grabbed a few handfuls of hair from the branches around her and tied them around her belt, then she bent down and pulled the single remaining disk over her head and around her torso, riding the endless waves of sensation. She sorted through the gray until she was able to find the origin of her body and turn it around. At the back of the disk, in the midst of everything, she found a black and empty void. She smiled with triumph.

"That must be it! I've found you!"

She plunged into the darkness—

—and lost all sensation. The black was not a color, but an un-color, a lack of everything. She couldn't even yell in fright, there was no air to breath and no sound existed. She had become nothing.

And yet...