In Which Dee Diverts
“What do you mean, destroyed?” Rowan said.
It was weird. As much as I had quietly freaked out over the ongoing realization that my memories were not necessarily reliable… not all present, not all real, not all my own… it wasn’t real to me in the gut-punching way that the idea of Rowan’s missing memory was.
When Dee said that his memories had been destroyed, I had this image in my head… well, less an image and more an impression, since I didn’t know what memories looked like, in the raw. But just the idea of craters, ragged holes, tears… wounds.
Presumably, given the fact that he hadn’t gone through his life recoiling in pain, the wounds were invisible to him. Maybe that’s why it was easier for me to freak out about his memory loss than my own.
I knew mine felt like nothing. I felt the nothing. There was nothing to feel.
I was on the wrong side of his skull to get that same reassuring lack of feedback about the information Dee had just shared. I could see his freak out, I could hear his worry. I didn’t know what it was like in his head. The overall effect was like hearing somebody screaming from the other side of a closed door.
“I meant what I said,” Dee said. “Your memory has been… to say it was altered both does not begin to cover it, and yet insinuates that more was done. I can see no false memories. To detect more subtle changes would require a more thorough search, but it seems unlikely anyone would have done anything so deft while leaving such ragged edges and gaping holes.”
“But… I don’t have any holes in my memory!” Rowan said. “There’s a few things I can’t remember right this second, but I… I’d know if they’d been missing.”
“Believe me, Rowan, I’ve been going through this myself,” I said. “Would you really notice?”
“Of course!”
“Do you remember every moment of your childhood in equal clarity, Rowan Hartley?” Dee asked.
“Well… no… some of it runs together, and I guess a lot of it just wasn’t significant at the time,” he said. “But I remember what was important.”
“It would perhaps be more accurate to say that you ascribe importance to what you remember,” Dee said, “for you cannot see the significance of anything you have forgotten.”
“Rowan, trust me,” I said. “Iit gets easier if you just accept it that you don’t remember what you don’t remember.”
“But… why?” Rowan said.
“Because such discrepancies are not an unusual occurrence from the mind’s point of view, and it must find a way to function regardless,” Dee said.
“I mean, not why don’t I remember that I forgot,” Rowan said. “I meant why would somebody do that to me? Is there something we both knew, that someone had to hide?”
“…it may be useless to speculate based upon the very limited information we have available to us now,” Dee said, “but nonetheless, an idea does present itself. However, I would not like to voice it prematurely.”
She did not glance in my direction when she said that, did not even shift in the slightest, but I could almost feel the awkwardness of that omission.
“Me,” I said. “I could have done it… if I was telepathic, I mean.”
“Mackenzie, you weren’t… we sometimes thought you could read my mind, or send your thoughts to my head,” Rowan said. “Don’t get me wrong, it was enough to make a believer out of me, but I know damned well you didn’t have it in you, at the age of nine, to obliterate memories.”
“I’m not talking about skill, or even maybe raw power in the sense that a normal telepath has,” I said. “But remember? My mind… a demon’s mind… is dangerous to contact. Things get weird when minds from different planes come into contact with each other. With demons, that’s bad-weird… actively malignant weird. The last person who tried to directly read my mind reacted like I was clawing around inside her brain.”
“Indeed,” Dee said. “But I do not propose that you are responsible for the destruction of Rowan’s memories. Do you recall what the remedy for Hissy’s condition was?”
“Hissy?” Rowan repeated.
“It’s a nickname,” I said.
“What for?”
“Something highly metaphorical, multi-layered, and unpronounceable even to elven tongues,” Dee said.
“Okay, so what kind of treatment did they give Hissy?”
“They had to excise her recent memories,” Dee said. “I have had enough mental communion with her to know that the work was done with a more even hand than the destruction I witnessed in your mind, Rowan, but the scope of the removal was similarly broad.”
“But the way you describe the damage, it sounds savage… not at all clinical,” I said. “Maybe if they hadn’t contained the wound in Hissy’s mind, it would have been the same?”
“I would hasten to point out that in Hissy’s case, the care was administered by trained mental healers working under clinical conditions,” Dee said. “Rowan’s mind might have been purged of infernal touches quickly, by someone without the necessary experience to do so cleanly. It may even have been the first time the individual in question had to remove memories on a large scale.”
“…which would make Rowan the test case for what was done to me, I guess,” I said. “If we’re assuming the same person… or group, or entity, or whatever… did him as did me.”
“I would not become too fixated on any single possibility, given how little we truly know,” Dee said. “But telepathy is a rare and precious gift, among the mortal and mammalian races of the surface. It would seem unwise to postulate the existence of another where one alone would suffice as explanation.”
I nodded… there was a kind of sense there. There was just one problem, though.
“Okay, but… if we proceed with the idea that I am a telepath… was a telepath, however that works… then aren’t we already assuming the existence of two?” I said. “That’s a hell of a coincidence.” Then it hit me. “It’s not coincidence. My father… he’s telepathic, isn’t he? This whole time I’ve been thinking of his nightmare schtick as a demon thing, like a form of possession. He sure let me think so.”
“It need not be him,” Dee said.
“No, I’ve been so stupid,” I said. “My grandmother was an exorcist… and before that, a demon hunter. But the whole time I lived with her, she only fought non-corporeal demons, the ones who couldn’t get their bodies out of hell.”
“Maybe he’s lost his body?” Rowan said.
“The imperial agent who told me about him didn’t think so. He said the man has been hanging around the material world for ages. Whatever his ultimate plan is, it’s got to do with keeping his feet out of the fire. I can’t imagine he’d trade his physical form just for the ability to visit me at night.”
“Mackenzie, do you know for a fact that a corporeal demon cannot impose its mind or mental presence on another?” Dee said.
“My grandmother only ever dealt with non-corporeal ones, that I heard of,” I said, though I realized as I said this that she’d never actually discussed her work with me. In fact, she’d kept it as far away from me as she could. I had never known that she’d been a paladin who hunted living, breathing demons until after I left her house. “That is… I never heard anything about a corporeal demon being around when she had to deal with a possession.”
“But the existence of corporeal demons on this plane is rare and brief,” Dee said. “Whereas slivers of their souls pass through the void on a regular enough basis for the position of ‘exorcist’ to be a necessary one in outlying villages. I do not feel that we know enough about the natural abilities of demons to hazard a guess as to what they can or cannot do. If anything, I would say that the fact that your father could visit you in your dreams in the manner you’ve described would suggest that he is not a telepath in the conventional sense.”
“But that’s got to be it!” I said. “What else could it be?”
“Mackenzie, if the abilities you evinced in this area were a result of your demonic parentage, would not they have been dormant until you turned?” Dee said. “Instead we seem to have the opposite situation. You appear, according to the testimony and recollections of this boy, to have been born with some telepathic gift which you have shown no evidence of since you turned.”
“Also… if demonic possession tore people’s brains… minds, I mean… apart, wouldn’t you know that?” Rowan said. “If your grandmother dealt with possessed people?”
“Well… it wasn’t safe or pleasant,” I said, though it didn’t seem like any of my grandmother’s surviving patients had needed to have their minds wiped. “Okay, I just… I can’t figure out what else it would be.”
Rowan looked at Dee, who, after a brief pause, nodded.
“What?” I said.
“Mackenzie… I think you’re doing it again,” he said.
“Doing what?”
A look passed between them, and the way that Rowan’s face changed made me suspect that it was more than a look.
“Guys, please don’t start keeping secrets on me now,” I said.
“I do not believe it would be safe or fruitful to pursue certain lines of inquiry at this time,” Dee said. “There may be a danger we did not anticipate.”
“Well, that statement is pretty much always true,” I said.
“Allow me to clarify: I am becoming aware of a potential danger I did not previously anticipate,” she said.
“And can you tell me what that danger is?” I said.
“Not at…”
“…this time,” I finished. “Right. So… it’s something that would upset me. Well, knowing you’re keeping it from me is just going to make me more upset, so you might as well just fucking come out with it.”
“No, the danger is not precisely emotional,” Dee said. “I would enjoin you from speculating, for your own safety, but I cannot imagine that instruction would prove beneficial. Very well… let me see if I can devise a way to describe the nature of the danger in a way that is itself safe.”
“You’ve got rubble!” Rowan said.
“What?”
“Like… when a building collapses?” Rowan said, looking at Dee with a mix of desperation and the need for approval.
“…yes, that may do,” Dee said. “Rubble, as when a building, or perhaps more particularly, a tunnel has collapsed. There was a bulwark in your mind which gave way, resulting in your ability to consider possibilities that were previously barred to you. Heretofore, we have been operating under the assumption that ‘the’ block in your mind was removed. What if it’s not gone completely, but buckled or shifted? What if there are more blocks waiting to come down?”
“Then let’s bring them down!” I said. “It’s annoying to think you’re keeping something from me, but it’s downright horrifying to think that I’m keeping things from myself. Thoughts I’m not allowed to think, things I’m not allowed to notice… be honest, Dee. Could someone do that to me long term and not have there be side effects?”
“…it is not an area where I have had much reason to inquire.”
“But it could be harmful? It could be harming right now?”
“If so, then most of the damage caused by the blocks would have been done long ago,” Dee said. “Change is not always to be feared, but a sudden, precipitous change in status is more often disastrous than a period of uninterrupted stability.”
“That’s basically the philosophy your society runs on,” I said.
“Because it tends to serve us well,” she said.
“But it doesn’t make for a really compelling argument,” I said. “So… you think I still have mental blocks. You think shifting them could, what… bring down the house? Cave my mind in on itself?”
“That seems… unlikely, but not so far beyond the realm of possibility,” Dee said. “I am more concerned with what might be unleashed, if the constructs placed in your mind were to come crashing down.”
“You think I’ll… go bad,” I said. My mouth had gone very dry. “Let my demon side out. You’re saying that all this time, I haven’t really been… not evil. I’ve just been… caged?”
“I… Mackenzie, I do not think that is likely, or even possible,” Dee said. “I would not for anything have you believe so poorly of yourself. But I think it is so important for your safety and the safety of those around you that we do not pursue this line of inquiry further that for a moment, I considered lying to you.” She bowed low, with a stance I recognized as apologetic. “I am sorry, I am ashamed to say it. I very nearly told you the worst thing you could imagine was true, in the belief that it and only it would dissuade you. I hope you will forgive me, but even if you do not, I hope even more fervently that knowing I considered this shameful alternative will convince you how serious I am.”
“Dee… get up,” I said. “You didn’t… you didn’t do anything. You were smart enough to realize something was a viable alternative, but too moral to take it. Okay. Is there really a danger in me knowing specifically what the danger is?”
“I cannot say,” Dee said. “If I tell you, I believe it will be your inclination to reject it out of hand, but the idea will be in your head, nonetheless. You may circle back around to it, and in an unguarded moment, even come to believe it. Given your previous experience, that may be all it takes.”
“So… we just have to give up?”
“I am in no greater hurry to abandon this mystery than you are,” Dee said. “It is not safe to directly pursue one line of inquiry, but there remains another. As dubious as I am about the possibility that your nascent telepathic ability was a gift from the demon, being able to rule this out would be a piece of evidence in support of the other possibility.”
I almost asked her what possibility, but that would only frustrate me since she wouldn’t tell me.
“Okay,” I said. “So… we hit the library? We should get Amaranth in on this, then.”
“Actually, I was going to suggest we defer to an expert.”
“Uh uh, no way,” I said. “I don’t know if you mean a Khersian priest or a diabolist, but I’m not getting near either one of those. There’s no reason not to just get what we need from the library… demon lore might be kind of obscure, but it’s not actually forbidden.”
“In the interest of time, though, I thought we might consult with someone who already knows everything the library has to say on the subject,” Dee said. “She is in our room right now, repairing her work clothes. Shall I summon her?”