Blackwater Files: Compulsion

What would you do to get your family back?

This is my addition to the Blackwater Files lore! You can find the post that started it all here:

Project Blackwater

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Two more days. Penelope curled her fingers around the edge of the hospital bed, fighting the urge to tense her body. Loosen your muscles – it hurts so much worse if they’re tight.

“Here it comes,” Nurse Jenny said. She pulled a lever, and long, hair-thin needles stabbed between Penelope’s vertebrae.

Nurse Jenny didn’t even bother counting to three anymore before inserting the “life vest”. They’d been through this maneuver over three dozen times, enough to leave convenient, tiny wounds along Penelope’s spine to guide the device.

Two more days. Penelope straightened her back, stretching against the machinery now plugged into her nervous system. Two more days of this clinical trial. Two more days to ensure that she would never have to do anything like this again. Two more days, and she would leave here with $17,000 in her bank account.

Even in this economy, $17,000 was a lot of money. Enough to get her on her feet again, to give her a fighting chance at staying clean, at getting Bryan back. For $17,000 and six weeks of free room and board, she had lent Elysium her brain, so they could do their obscure tests while she muddled around in her subconscious.

But she had one more thing to do before her time with Elysium ran out. One more thing, the culmination of the cobbled plan that had been slowly nestling in her brain over the past few weeks.

“Go ahead and lie back.” Jenny laid a white pill and a glass of water on a tray beside the bed. During the weeks of the trial, Nurse Jenny had warmed to Penelope, occasionally bringing her extra Shrimp Crisps™ with her meals or tacking on a Ready for another round? after her pert Good morning; it’s a lovely day at Elysium. Jenny smiled, her lipstick the same blood red hue as her nails. “You know the drill. I’ll put on the video; you take the pill and relax. I’ll see you in eight hours.”

Penelope closed her eyes.

The butter-smooth voice of Dr. Karasevdas, the trial director who Penelope had seen only in these pre-submersion videos, floated toward her, but she let the familiar words drift by her, leaves on the wind.

“You will be going into your subconscious…”

“After you leave the shallows…”

“No real danger can befall you while you’re under Elysium’s care…”

Penelope turned her mind inward in her own pre-submersion ritual. Close your eyes. Turn to the right. Spade. Two feet deep. Blade.

For Bryan, for the roundness of his little cheeks. For the suddenness of his smile, for the tight clutch of his chubby arms around her neck.

Two more days.

Two more days to find the creature and kill it.

---

Penelope opened her eyes to the sweeping opulence of the Lobby. Gothic arches and glimmering chandeliers, all the intricate Old World beauty she adored.

The outside world was a place of new sleek bright, swimming in noise and pixelated color. The mesmerizing complexity of her Lobby, which required something more of its beholder than a swipe or tap of approval, was not in vogue. But Penelope loved it.

Penelope could stay, and had on other days, in this haven for hours, running her hands over the embroidered fabrics, paging through strange books infused with her memories, soaking in the beauty she so rarely found outside her own subconscious.

But not today.

Penelope strode past the empty concierge desk, her bare feet padding across the cold marble, and made straight for the elevator.

Like everything else in her Lobby, the elevator was not merely a device of utility. It was an arresting creation of gleaming wood, surrounded by a wrought iron gate swirling with leaves and flowers.

Penelope stepped inside and slid the gate shut behind her. There were no buttons, only a lever, which she grasped so hard her knuckles whitened.

She pulled the lever to Down, and, with the groaning of hundreds of gears, the elevator lurched into motion.

Penelope counted the floors as they ascended past her vision.

One – her grandparents’ home, her busy, noisy childhood haunt. The grandfather clock that chimed each hour, the rose garden blooming like a fairy world, the hollow where her grandfather had pointed out the hidden foxhole.

But here in her subconscious, the house was empty, its silence palpable and deep.

Penelope didn’t go there anymore, to that unnatural silence.

Her mind was a lonely place. Just her. And it.

Two – a squalid motel room, littered with tissues, dirty clothes, and needles. It was on this level that she had first found the creature, before she understood what it was. That day she had fled to the Lobby, then awoken in a cold sweat, screaming.

Now the creature, with its smoke and mirrors, was fleeing her.

Level two of her subconscious was an eerie, red-tinged echo of the real motel room. An almost-real reflection of that day, that place, when Bryan had been led away by a social worker and she by a police officer.

She would get Bryan back. And she would never endanger him again. This time she would not leave sobriety to chance, or to her own strength. She would bury that craving forever.

The motel room moved up and away from her, and she let out a breath.

Three – the dark and moody library, stuffed with roaring fireplaces and enveloping armchairs, each book home to a memory. She would miss the library, just as she would miss the gilded Lobby, after Elysium.

Floors flashed by, and Penelope ticked up the numbers in her head.

Eight, nine, ten.

Eleven – Penelope pulled the lever to Stop, and the elevator ground to a halt.

She slid open the grate and stepped into a mist-shrouded forest, pine needles whispering beneath her feet. The hair on the back of Penelope’s neck rose, and she paused, listening.

There had been times over the past six weeks that she’d had the sensation of being watched, though her subconscious was desolate, devoid of any life aside from herself and that which she hunted. And yet sometimes her skin would prickle. A shadow at the edge of her vision, a sound just beyond the reach of her hearing.

Her mind was playing tricks on her. In a vacuum, human brains create sounds to rebel against the silence. That’s all it was, her mind fighting the silence.

Penelope crept forward along a deer path. Thick trees blocked the wan light that came not from the sun, but from the very air around her, emanating a glow that was almost sunlight, but not quite.

Just as the forest grew so dense that it seemed to swallow the path, Penelope pushed through the gentle, poking needles and emerged into a clearing carpeted with flowers.

Running her hands along the downy buds of a patch of lavender, Penelope made her way through the clearing, then stopped and closed her eyes. She turned to the right.

Spade. Two feet deep. Blade.

It was a little trick she’d discovered about two weeks into the trial. It was her mind, and, with enough concentration, she could create.

She opened her eyes, and leaning against a tree beside her was a small spade.

Penelope grasped it and dug into the moist brown soil. It was wet, wetter than previous times. Her gaze swept over the lavender around her, the dianthus, chrysanthemums, African violets – yellowed, all of them. Their roots were starting to rot.

Penelope shook her head. It didn’t matter. Whatever subconscious root-rot meant, it didn’t matter. It’s not why she was here.

Casually now, Penelope reminded herself. You’re just gardening.

Dr. Karasevdas was watching, observing her subconscious travels from the comfort of his laboratory. Perhaps he wouldn’t care what she did, but he had the power to yank her from this dream world. She didn’t want to run the risk of him realizing what she was about to do.

Penelope set aside the spade and sifted with bare hands through the wet soil until her hands touched metal. Without changing her expression, she tucked the object into her sleeve. Then she replaced the dirt and stood. She circled the clearing again, caressing the flowers, forcing herself to walk slowly.

But what filled her mind was the object up her sleeve, cold against her skin. A knife, its handle gilt with flecks of gold and ocean-blue lapis lazuli, its blade black as smoke.

---

Seventeen – Penelope pulled the lever, and the elevator slowed to a stop.

The grate slid open onto a concrete city. Flat gray streets, unadorned gray buildings, sterile gray skies. Holographic ads buzzed and flickered.

Half off confidence if you order today! Be your best self!

Enhanced childhood memories; buy two, get your third half off!

Distraction! The cure for all those yucky feelings.

Her hands shaking, Penelope clutched the handle of the concealed knife and tried to numb her mind to the chatter. This level was too much like the outside world.

A shadow flickered in the corner of her vision.

Penelope started and nearly dropped the knife from her sweaty palm. With a slow breath, she inched forward, creeping around the corner where she’d seen the shadow.

There was nothing there but an empty, dead-end alleyway.

My mind fighting the silence, like in a vacuum, Penelope told herself, though the hair on her neck stood up.

A burning, acrid scent met her nose.

It was close. The creature was close.

From a window of the skyscraper beside her, Penelope glimpsed a curling wisp of smoke.

Her eyes traveled down the building to street level, and a door was there which had not been there before. Penelope pushed through it and made her way up a spiraling staircase.

The smell, a whiff of burning chemicals, grew stronger.

Smoke and mirrors, she thought. Smoke and mirrors.

She reached a landing, and black smoke poured out from the bottom of the door, pooling around her feet.

A cold sweat broke over her skin, but she clutched the knife tighter.

For Bryan. She would kill it, that parasite always waiting to spring at her. The urge in her blood demanding more, the whisper in her ear pleading Just this once. The rot that ate away at the dam of her sobriety, dissolving the mortar bit by bit until the dam crumbled in a deluge.

She would destroy it, this thing. It had tormented and hidden from her for the last time.

She would kill it, and she would never lose Bryan again.

Penelope opened the door to a wall of smoke that filled her lungs with soot, and she doubled over, coughing. She squinted through tears at the swirling black wisps in the air.

She pushed through the cloud, swatting the smoke away with her arm. Coughing again, she stumbled to one knee.

Then, with a hiss like a struck match, the smoke coalesced.

Before her formed a towering figure with eyes a piercing green. It reached a taunting, smoky hand toward her.

Somewhere deep within, Penelope’s icy fear hardened and turned hot.

Little round cheeks. Chubby arms around her neck.

She would get her son back, and this thing would never creep up in her mind again, begging her to dull the anxiety, the anger, the fear. She would carve out this part of herself, and it would die.

Today, before she ran out of time.

The pressure of the room seemed to shift, as though making room for something. The creature jerked back, its shadowy smoke suddenly roiling in the closed, windless room.

Penelope swiped the blade out from her sleeve. Then she surged forward, lunging with the jet-black knife. Its blade sliced through the smoke, leaving rents in the sooty air, and the creature shrieked, its wail like a swarm of bees.

Penelope shoved through the smoke, swinging and stabbing. Rage fed into her muscles, the same mother-rage that reared its head at the slightest hurt to Bryan.

She had hurt him more than anyone else. This part of her deserved to be carved out with a blade sharp enough to cut shadow and smoke.

Keening, the shadow lurched backward, its smoke assailing Penelope’s face, rolling over her skin in a tempest.

Penelope raised the knife, and for the briefest flash of a moment the air went cold. A burning cold around her wrist, and a whisper –

I am the Riptide.

With a roar, Penelope swung the knife downward into the shadow, and the creature screamed.

Penelope closed her eyes and pushed the knife further in.

A rush of wind, then a thick, heavy quiet.

When Penelope opened her eyes, the smoke was gone.

The room was silent save for the distant chatter of ads outside.

There was something on the ground in front of Penelope. A creature, naked and gray-skinned and small, with luminescent green eyes. A rivulet of scarlet ran from a wound in its side, and it whimpered, its smoke and mirrors gone.

Bile rose in Penelope’s throat, and she breathed in the stale air.

This thing, this part of her – it was a twisted mockery, like the disfigured reflection in a distorted mirror. But Penelope knew, though she didn’t know how, that this creature had once been beautiful.

Tentatively, Penelope stretched out her hand.

The creature flinched away.

The last time she’d seen him, Bryan had flinched from her. Just like that.

Because of this thing inside her, this grotesque creature.

But never again.

Penelope raised the jet-black blade.

At the edge of her vision, there was a shadow, a presence. Penelope ignored it and clutched the blade tighter.

She would get Bryan back. And she would never lose him again.

---

Penelope woke to the frantic beeping of a machine drowned out by screams.

Her screams.

The door banged open, and Nurse Jenny darted inside. “Easy there, hold still.” She hissed over her shoulder, “Sedative, now.”

“No,” Penelope gasped, choking on the screams still clawing at her throat. “I don’t need anything, I’m fine.”

Blood on her hands. Cold. The shadow, no longer at the corner of her vision, watching as she slashed the knife down at the green-eyed creature. The shadow’s voice an ocean rumble: I am the Riptide.

There was something else inside her, and it wanted out.

“I’m fine,” Penelope said again, her voice shaking.

“Just to help you rest,” Jenny said, her tone honey-thick and cold. “When you’ve calmed down, the doctor wants to talk with you.”

Penelope let her head fall back, and she stared at the ceiling. A few hours ago, those words would have frightened her, but not now.

It was gone. The creature, that part of her, it was gone.

But she didn’t feel free. She was empty, a slice gone from her, leaving a cold, black vacuum in its place.

Another nurse slipped into the room and handed Jenny a syringe. Jenny reached for Penelope’s arm, then frowned.

“Am I dreaming, or is this new?”

Penelope raised her head. Jenny held Penelope’s arm in her cold fingers and pointed to something on her wrist. She sat up to look closer.

On Penelope’s wrist was an image, deep and black as indelible ink. A curve like ocean waves, slashed and intercepted by a bold black line, a forceful current.

A riptide.