June the 28th, once again...

[fascinationex]

A possible beginning to my as yet untitled Cultist Sim fic

For days after, Cassandra didn't know herself. Her bones burned. Her breath came in gasps only. Her eyes leaked light, and when she opened them at all she cried out from the pain of its brightness.

She did not die. Somehow.

On the fourth day, she was... aware again. Although it didn't take her long to wish she was not.

Cassandra blinked her aching eyes open to regular morning sunlight. She stared, blearily, at the floor from where she was ensconced upon someone's couch. Most of her was covered by a thick blanket. Despite the heat of her bones, her skin felt cold. The light from a window lanced across the tiles with their old fashioned geometric patterns. The light did not hurt.

She thought, involuntarily, of writhing, of golden blood and the shattering, merciless light, behind her eyes and in her dreams. She flinched anyway.

Her bones still felt hot, under all their weight of tissue and fluid.

There was a large vase on a side table, tall and faceted and looking faintly like someone had lifted a wall lamp and repurposed it. From its mouth a profusion of greenery spilled. Cassandra stared at it for a long few minutes, and tried hard to stop thinking of anything at all.

She could hear footsteps approaching, but it took her long seconds to pull her numb gaze away from the plant.

A tall man with round eyeglasses and a dark, trimmed beard appeared in the doorway to the light-filled sun room. She had confused memories of the last few days, but she remembered this face, vaguely.

He had worn darker glasses then, a precaution in case she opened her eyes, she now realised. She clearly had, so—wise of him.

"Ah," he said, pausing to see her awake and lucid. "I thought I heard you. Or, rather, I did not hear you. I thought you must be either awake, or dead."

“Uh.” Dead? She wasn’t touching that. But her throat was scratchy. Who knew what she’d been yelling. Cassandra levered herself up upon one elbow. "Where am I?"

"London, in England," he said. His accent was definitely not English when he spoke. He sounded European, but Cassandra was rubbish at picking out the complexities of accents. German, maybe. Or Austrian. Or something else. "If this city still exists by that name where you come from."

"Huh?" Cassandra squinted. "London, yeah, I know London."

Why London was a place she was in, she couldn't say. But she was aware of London as a place. At least they spoke English. At least it wasn't a city full of knives in the floors, and there wouldn't be golden blood leaking across the confusing footpaths…

He nodded, apparently satisfied.

"Good. You will not be so lost, then, when I leave. Now," he pulled out a chair and sat down. The cushion on it was shot through with metallic thread. Little lines of gold, like they might be seeping from wounds.

Cassandra's stare was interrupted when the man took his seat. His clothes were plain but neat: dark trousers, white shirt.

"You must tell me what you have seen."

She blinked rapidly. "Seen?" But she knew, already, exactly what he meant—or she thought she did.

His mouth flattened into a sharp line behind his beard. For a second, he reminded her powerfully of the scarred man who drowned the creature in its own blood.

"Seen. In the glory. I took this from you," he said, and slipped a tiny phial from his pocket.

In its minute space was captured a single, golden drop. Cassandra cringed away from it, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away, fascinated and helpless. At length, he put it the hell away again.

"So you know it.”

“Ugh.” She felt sick and wobbly.

“This doesn't belong to any Hour that lives in this history," he said.

"No," she agreed, barely knowing what she was saying. The emphasis on 'this' history was baffling. And she could practically feel the proper noun in 'Hour', which seemed both right and wrong at the same time. But. But.

But she knew what that tiny bead of gold was. She’d dreamed about it, while she was sick. She licked her lips. She felt like she'd been thirsty for weeks. "I don't know what it was. It died. A man with his eyes all cut out drowned it."

"Ah," he breathed, leaning back in his seat. His gaze didn't get any less intent, but at least his eyes were further away.

"Come, tell me everything you remember. Before it fades."

Cassandra hoped it would fade.

But she told him everything anyway. The stair of sharp edges, the voice of knives, the stomach-turning sound of the sea, wine-dark, screaming as it was drunk and drunk and drunk—every scene was meaningless and frightening to her, but the man hmmed and nodded with every thing she said.

“What does it mean? Where am I?”

“London, as I said. Although perhaps not the London with which you’re familiar.”

“And who are you, anyway? Why am I here? What happened?”

There was a short, considering pause. In the end, only one question was answered: "My name is Gottlob Jannings," he introduced himself. "You knew, yesterday, but you have forgotten it.”

She opened her mouth. Closed it again. “I wasn’t myself.” She must have had a terrible fever.

He tilted his head. “If you’d been struck by more than a drop or two…”

Cassandra stared at him.

A drop or two…?

Her heart thumped in her chest, heavy and thunderous and persistent.

A moment later she wrenched the blanket away from her legs, and saw the scar. It glowed softly, a twisting line in the meat of her calf, the golden colour of honey held up to sunlight. Or of a particular kind of blood.

Her blood rushed in her ears. It took her long, long seconds to drag her eyes away from that glow.

“..ttably, it seems your blood is no different to anyone else’s,” Jannings was saying.

“You took my blood?”

His eyebrows rose. “I bring you in from the cold, I care for you, I listen to your ranting and screaming, on and on and on, like a madwoman—you would have refused me?”

She twitched. “That’s not really—no. No, of course not.” She wouldn’t have. But she’d have liked to have been asked. To have it acknowledged that it was in her power to refuse.

From the twist of his mouth, Jannings knew this, and was just as pleased not to have had the conversation.

There was silence for a long moment.

Cassandra wasn’t even sure which questions to ask. ‘Where am I’ had gotten her the useless and baffling answer of ‘London’; and ‘why am I here?’, and ‘what happened?’ had gotten her no answers at all.

Jannings clapped his hands, startling her.

“It is good you came around today,” he said, getting up from his seat at last. “I will be leaving on the evening train, and you can’t stay here.”

Jannings got her up with main strength. Her limbs were nearly too weak to keep her upright, so she had no chance of fighting his efforts at moving her. There was a mug of broth, a cup of strong sweet wine, and a quite ugly skirt which he’d got from god-knew-where—it was synthetic silk, long enough to cover her new scar, and arranged in tiny swishy pleats—and all throughout this business he went to and fro, arranging his own things.

She felt marginally better with the light meal and heavy wine, but she was still following him, aching and damn dazed and confused, when he put ten pounds in her hand and wrapped her in what must have been one of his own older coats.

“Off you go, now, Miss,” he said then.

“What,” said Cassandra.

Unfortunately, Jannings was not given to repeating himself, and he was also not a man to be gainsaid.

This was how Cassandra found herself bundled up and ejected into the chilly streets of London—although it didn’t bloody look like any London she’d ever envisioned.

Outside of what she now realised must have been a very expensive little series of apartments, Cassandra found the street crowded with a mix of fast-moving, fearless pedestrians and great, old-fashioned vehicles with enormous mud guards. There were no neon lights, but three bicycles whizzed by—ridden by young men in plus fours—and there was a pony across the street, dozing into its nose bag, one hoof cocked, while a grizzled old man unloaded its cargo.

Jannings seemed to take this in stride, as quite the regular experience.

He got into a car with a long nose and gigantic mud guards. The wheels, beneath the rubbery tyre exterior, were made with wooden spokes.

“What’s the date?” she cried, wild-eyed, as the driver helped with the luggage and then held the door for Jannings.

“The twenty-eighth of June,” said Jannings, without pause or hesitation. Then, “Good-bye.”

And the door shut with a click.

The driver spared one short, unhappy glance for her—undoubtedly he saw a bedraggled and confused woman, with no hat, in mismatched clothing, who apparently did not even know what day it was—and then he closed his door, too, and the car was gone, growling as it rolled.

“Alright there?” someone else asked, looking, when she turned, as though he already regretted the question. He was only a passerby, Cassandra thought, caught mid-step while she yelled about the date. He was clean shaven, fully dressed in a suit and a vest and a white shirt. He had a boater hat. Cassandra had never seen one in real life before.

She opened her mouth. Closed it again.

Shook her head. “I’m sorry, excuse me, what year is it?”

If anything he seemed less pleased to be talking to her.

But he told her.

Her stomach did a horrible flop.

“Do you need the police?” he wondered.

What on earth were the police going to do?

“Ah… no. Thank you,” she said, trying quite hard to remember her manners. “No.”

This seemed to be the extent of the kindness of strangers, because he touched one finger to his hat and walked around her, off about his business.