Paw-Prints Of The Gods Read online

  “Hey janitor, you’re a robot!” Ravana joked weakly, then saw the nurse’s expression and decided it was not the time for silly quips. “Sorry for being clumsy. I just feel so weak and heavy, like something’s weighing me down.”

  The nurses gave her an odd look and helped her into bed without another word. While Ravana busily rearranged her pillows in a half-hearted attempt to get comfortable, Lilith disappeared briefly from the room and then returned with a canister of protein drink and Ravana’s usual second dose of pills for the day. Behind the nurse trundled a squat and very battered janitor robot, which after bouncing off the wall several times extended a brush on a spindly arm and started to sweep the mess from the floor.

  “Drink this,” said Lilith, handing her the canister.

  “We’ll get you on proper food in a day or too if all goes well,” Jizo reassured her. “We don’t want you getting so hungry you start eating rats!”

  “Jizo likes to keep the vermin for herself,” Lilith murmured icily.

  Ravana frowned, but took the drink and idly sipped at the straw. She watched the industrious robot retrieve the last of the broken pieces of pot, which had hit the floor with some force. The aged robot was not doing a very good job and kept halting with a faint electronic murmur of ‘Reboot me!’, prompting Jizo to give it an over-zealous kick to start it moving again. Ravana’s thoughts however dwelled upon the brief meeting with the little boy who had asked her what planet she was from. Oddly enough, it was word-for-word what she used to ask people in far-flung spaceports on early trips with her father, especially when she saw someone struggling to cope with the local gravity.

  “Your medication?” reminded Lilith, interrupting her thoughts.

  Ravana scooped the pills into her hand, aware that both nurses watched her closely. The notion of gravity stuck in her mind. She had lived the last nine years on the Dandridge Cole, an abandoned asteroid colony ship in the Barnard’s Star system, which spun on its axis to create pseudo-gravity roughly twice that felt on the moons of Yuanshi and Daode. Upon their arrival in Hemakuta, she remembered being pleasantly surprised at how light she felt. She certainly did not feel as she did now, where every clumsy movement of her aching bones was like trying to wade through custard with a sack of bricks on her back.

  “Is everything okay?” asked Lilith, eyeing her curiously.

  Ravana gave her a puzzled stare, then looked at the pills in her hand.

  “I’m fine,” she said. She gave a weak smile and popped the tablets into her mouth.

  The nurse nodded, satisfied. Ravana leaned back into her pillows, sucked thoughtfully on her drink and watched as the nurses left the room and locked the door behind them. It was only when she could no longer hear the footsteps in the corridor outside did she put her hand back to her lips and gently spit the tablets out of her mouth. Placing the tablets under her pillow, she settled back into bed and tried to get some sleep.

  * * *

  The grey shapes at the end of the bed were not as blurry as the previous morning, but that was not what held Ravana’s attention. She had awoken with a terrible headache, one that gripped her head like a vice and when she closed her eyes again caused dancing shapes to jump gaily across the back of her eyelids. What was more, she was so hungry it hurt and her stomach was rumbling in a most undignified manner. Yet though still groggy, she felt more alert than she had in days and was shuffling into a sitting position even before Jizo had time to offer her the usual tablets and glass of water.

  “Did you sleep well?” the nurse asked.

  There was something in Jizo’s tone that suggested the nurse already knew the answer to her question. A pot of fresh blooms had appeared to replace the one that had smashed, which meant someone had returned to the room whilst Ravana was asleep.

  “I think so,” Ravana replied. The response came easy and her words did not sound so slurred. She relieved the nurse of the pills and water, then winced as another roll of pain crashed through her skull. “I had some very strange dreams.”

  “Dreams?” asked Lilith, far too quickly for Ravana’s liking. “You’ve not mentioned having dreams before.”

  “No,” Ravana mused. “I don’t remember dreaming before. Not here.”

  The nurses waited for her to take her morning tablets. Ravana fumbled with her pillow with the air of someone ready to lie back down, changed her mind and slid out of bed. Still holding the pills and water, she stumbled across the floor to the mirror. Her reflection gazed unblinking back, slightly sharper than normal and she was struck by how thin she looked, but not in a good way. The hole in her mind seemed to taunt her from behind her reflected gaze, a blackness now haunted by the ghosts of her dreams.

  “Mirror, mirror, on the wall,” murmured Ravana. “What is it I can’t recall?”

  Despite her headache, she decided she looked slightly less worse than yesterday. Behind her, Lilith noisily cleared her throat.

  “Have you taken your medication?”

  Ravana put the pills to her mouth, then paused. “What will these do to me?”

  “Restore your vitality!” declared Jizo.

  “They help you sleep,” said Lilith, glaring at her colleague.

  “Vitality and sleep?” asked Ravana. “Is that possible?”

  “I must apologise for my fat friend, for she is an idiot,” Lilith replied tartly. “What she should have said, if she knew her arse from her elbow, is that it’s vitally important you get plenty of sleep. You can’t expect to run before you can walk.”

  “But I can walk,” Ravana pointed out.

  Keeping her back to the nurses, she raised a hand and then the glass to her mouth and swallowed. As she turned, her aching legs wavered and she grabbed hold of the table to steady herself. Her elbow brushed against the replacement plant pot.

  “Sorry,” she murmured and caught the hard stares of the nurses as she quickly put a hand to the pot to stop it falling. “Maybe I do need to work on my walking, after all.”

  “Has she been at your flask?” asked Lilith, glaring at Jizo. “She looks drunk.”

  “Don’t blame the demon drink,” Jizo said cryptically. “Blame the demon king.”

  Puzzled, Ravana handed back the empty glass to Lilith, who gave a satisfied nod. There was something in the air that made them dispense with any further barbed banter and she allowed herself to be led away to the washroom without another word.

  Neither nurse gave the plant pot a second look, otherwise they may have noticed the fresh indentations in the soil where a finger had pushed two sets of tablets deep out of sight.

  * * *

  There was only one monk in the interview room that morning. His red sash was decorated with lions and it took her a while to recall this meant it was Brother Simha.

  “zz-raavaanaa-zz,” rasped the hooded figure. “zz-hoow-iis-yyoouur-meemooryy-zz?”

  The momentary jolt of panic that greeted her every time she was in the presence of the monks this time failed to ebb away. Ravana sat nervously before the desk and tried hard to remember where she had seen the figures before. The seaside scene through the window had lost its calming influence upon the strange fears building up within her. The dreadful inhuman screech of Brother Simha invoked an image of spindly grey fingers reaching out to suffocate consciousness at the merest touch. Ravana gave an involuntary shiver and dropped her gaze to the monk’s own hands resting upon the desk before her.

  Startled, she froze. Emerging from the sleeves of the monk’s robe, clear as day, were twelve skinny digits, six to each hand. She was so surprised she had to count them twice. It seemed incredible she had never noticed it before, but after missing two doses of medication her mind was becoming clearer by the hour. Simha still awaited an answer and she forced her stare away from the monk’s strange hands.

  “My memory is no better,” Ravana replied, but even as she spoke she realised there were bits and pieces lurking in her mind that were no longer forgotten. “I think...?”

  The monk lean
ed forward. “zz-whaat-doo-yyoouu-thiink-zz?”

  “Last night I had a dream,” she said carefully. “I was in a grand palace, trying to rescue my father. There was smoke everywhere, Que Qiao agents firing guns, but we escaped and flew off in the Platypus, my father’s ship.” A face popped into her mind of the chirpy young Chinese women who had become a good friend and confident on the Dandridge Cole and Ravana smiled. “Ostara helped me rescue him. She’s head of security at the hollow moon and the Raja’s kidnap was her first real case.”

  She paused and bit her lip, deep in thought. It had been the kidnap of Raja Surya, the heir to the Yuanshi throne who had been living in exile on the Dandridge Cole, that had set off the chain of events that had taken the Platypus to Epsilon Eridani. Bits of disjointed memories were falling together, yet she still could not see the connection between the Raja’s kidnap and her dream. Simha leaned forward and she could almost feel the grey monk’s hidden gaze boring into her skull like a dentist’s drill.

  “zz-yyoouu-diid-noot-reescuuee-yyoouur-faatheer-zz!” he told her. His cold tones did little to take away her thoughts of whirring machinery. “zz-iit-waas-juust-aa-dreeaam-zz. zz-aa-faantaasyy-zz!” He paused. “zz-yyoouur-miind-iis-veeryy-troouubleed-zz.”

  Doubts crept once more into Ravana’s mind. Her dream had seemed so vivid, yet also featured a superhero emerging from the smoke to lead the escape, which on reflection did suggest it was more wishful thinking than anything real. As she stared at the hooded figure, a new fear took hold of her; the dreadful dawning realisation that maybe she was losing her mind and that the real reason she was here was to recover from a mental breakdown. It would explain why she had been packed off to a hospice on a tranquil stretch of Pampa Bay, if only to divorce her from whatever it was that had ruptured her mind. Now trembling, she looked into the monk’s dark hood and asked the one question she did not want answered.

  “I don’t know what’s real anymore,” she whispered. “Am I going mad?”

  * * *

  In bed that night, Ravana’s dreams came back with a vengeance. This time there was a jumble of images to contend with; one moment she was on the flight deck of the Platypus seeing a spinning asteroid loom ever closer on a collision course, then suddenly she was tearing through the darkness in an open-roofed hovertruck, furiously trying to make her way to somewhere always just out of reach. A frightening recurring picture was of twelve shadowy figures reaching out to grab her with the same spindly fingers of the grey monks, at which she would jerk awake and stifle a scream.

  She had once again feigned taking the offered pills upon her return to her room, but in the hours of wakefulness between uneasy slumbers there were moments when she wondered if this had been wise. Brother Simha had filled her mind with a bundle of fresh doubts, her grip on reality was slipping and she could not decide whether the tablets were helping or hindering, her belief switching between the two extremes in the blink of an eye. She had not waited until morning to move the latest discarded tablets from their hiding place under her pillow to an unmarked grave in the plant pot. She figured the tooth fairy would not take kindly to finding medication instead of molars two nights running.

  Her aches and pains had not improved, but she no longer felt chronically tired and spent much of the night pacing restlessly around her darkened room. In a moment of bravado, she tried the door but as expected found it locked. Her ongoing headache was not helping, nor were the indistinct shapes that popped into her thoughts every time she closed her eyes; different to those of her dreams in that she felt as if she could almost reach out with a mental finger and give them a prod. During her nocturnal pacing she noticed the blurriness of these mental images varied according to how far she was from her bed and at their most indistinct when she lay upon the mattress. After a while it occurred to her to look under the bed, whereupon she found a large metal box linked via wires to a wall outlet, bolted beneath the headboard. Her suspicions grew after giving the box an experimental thump with her fist, for this had the unexpected effect of making the shapes in her mind quiver in unison.

  It was during a period when Ravana lay awake upon her bed, gazing into the dark, that she heard a noise from the room next door. The sound was muffled, but unmistakeable as the sobs of a crying child and she suddenly remembered the blond-haired boy she had seen yesterday in the corridor. With a mixture of curiosity and concern, she quietly slipped off the bed, crouched next to the table and put an ear to the wall. What she heard was not tears of pain, but the muted whimpering of loneliness and despair. The boy sounded like he needed a friend. It occurred to Ravana they at least had that much in common.

  “Hello?” she whispered. “Can you hear me?”

  The crying abruptly stopped and she heard a squelching sniff as an unseen hand wiped snot from a nose. Moments later there was a soft thud against the wall on the other side.

  “Who’s there?” The boy’s voice trembled on the edge of tears.

  “A friend,” Ravana replied, then realised the boy probably needed a little more to go on. “The girl from the hollow moon. My name is Ravana.”

  “I saw you yesterday. You walk funny.”

  “I can’t help it. My legs ache.”

  “You have scary black hair and a yucky scar on your face.”

  “Now you’re getting personal!”

  “You smiled,” the boy said, sounding sad. “No one smiles anymore.”

  Ravana let his words drift into a poignant silence, wondering whether she should laugh or cry at the pitiful situation they were both in. She resisted the urge to do either.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Artorius,” the voice replied. “The fat nurse calls me Arty-Farty.”

  “That’s very grown-up of her.”

  She paused to listen for any sound from the nurses, for something told her that they would not be pleased to find their patients out of bed and chatting at this time of night. Hearing nothing, she wondered what a young child might know about the place they were in. She decided Artorius had probably seen a lot more than anyone suspected.

  “Why are you here?” she asked. “Are you poorly?”

  “I help look after the aliens. They make me talk to them.”

  “You talk to... what?” murmured Ravana. She lowered her voice. “Greys?”

  “They have scaly skin and big eyes and funny hands and feet. I like them but the nurses keep them in cages and do nasty things to them and hurt them.”

  Ravana did not like the sound of that. “Do the nurses hurt you?” she asked.

  “No,” Artorius replied, after an endless pause. Ravana smiled at the thought of him shaking his head at her from the other side of the wall. “They get angry and shout a lot.”

  “That’s good,” she replied. “I mean, it’s good they don’t hurt you. Shouting and being angry isn’t good at all. Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “My head hurts sometimes when they make me use my implant.”

  “Implant?”

  Ravana muttered a curse. On cue, a twinge of pain shot through her skull. Incredibly, she had somehow managed to forget that she herself had a cranium implant, a tiny chip in her brain. She’d had it from an early age, but her father in his infinite wisdom decided not to tell her until it caused her virtual-reality nightmare at the Pampa Palace hotel. This was the revelation hidden at the edge of the black hole in her mind, the dreadful secret her father had confessed whilst she lay traumatised in her hotel room. Yet there was more, for in her mind it led to another memory, one of a dreadful encounter in a hidden corner of the Dandridge Cole. With a shudder, she decided that was something she was not yet ready to face.

  “My implant,” she murmured grimly. “They must have really screwed with my mind to make me to forget a thing like that.”

  There was silence from beyond the wall. Listening closely, Ravana heard the faint rustling of sheets as a tired young boy climbed back into bed. He had the right idea.

  “Good night Artorius,” sh
e whispered.

  The sound of footsteps in the corridor outside sent her scurrying back to her own bed. Her mind was in no mood for sleep and there she lay, frantically contemplating the myriad of thoughts buzzing around her head in the darkness of her room.

  * * *

  Ravana was out of bed and standing by the mirror when the nurses came to wake her. She still felt very tired, but this time it was a weariness through being awake all night, her head full of unquiet thoughts, rather than the dull drowsiness of what she now accepted were tranquiliser tablets. In a way she was more alert than ever and this morning had noticed for the first time just how grubby her white room actually was, with peeling paint and mouldy cracks wherever she looked. Her headache remained, but the brief conversation with Artorius last night left her strangely elated, for now she knew she was not alone.

  The nurses were both visibly disconcerted by their patient’s apparent cheerfulness. Ravana’s first words that morning threw them completely.

  “Who was the little boy I saw a couple of days ago?”

  Her question distracted the nurses long enough for her to slip the latest dose of pills out of harm’s way and bury them in the plant pot with all the others. The tablets had reacted badly with the soil and the potted blooms were shedding petals fast.

  “What boy?” the portly Jizo said automatically. “There’s no boy here.”

  “He is no concern of yours!” Lilith snapped. “Why do you ask?”

  “Just curious,” replied Ravana, noting their wary reaction.

  Her own suspicions were aroused when in a break from the usual routine, both nurses decided to accompany her to the bathroom and on to the waiting grey monks in the interview room. More unusual still, today they were greeted by the distant sound of singing relayed through crackling loudspeakers. A small choir were putting their heart and soul into what sounded like a church hymn, though the words were strange: