“What is he? No, scratch that, dumb question. How do I fucking deal with him?”
“Most decide to run,” she said.
“I’m not most,” I said. “How do I bind him? Or seal him or banish him or whatever?”
“Ah, and I was starting to suspect you weren’t a real practitioner. Unfortunately, our like don’t have our true power down here, only our knowledge, and some tricks here and there.”
“Knowledge is power,” I said. “And it’s a huge freaking inconvenience sometimes, but you and I both know that Others can be countered if you have the right material, or the right circumstances…”
“You’re right in that, but you’re wrong in one element. He’s not Other. Not quite.”
It wasn’t hard to put two and two together. If he wasn’t Other, and he obviously wasn’t human, or animal, or plant, or mineral…
I groaned a bit. “No. That’s so cheesy.”
“It’s true.”
“He’s me?”
“A part of you. A reflection, twisted in a distorted mirror.”
“I’ve spent way, way, way too much time already dealing with a distorted reflection already,” I said.
Memories of the recent dreams hit me. The feeling of betrayal. There was that anger I’d just mentioned.
Fuck. I needed out of here. Rose was fucking it all up. I was at the point where I might do something reckless if I didn’t see a way through.
“The obvious answer is very simple,” the witch told me.
“What’s that?”
“You simply give him up. Abandon him, reject him, carve away that part of yourself. Some do it simply by attacking and killing their shadow.”
I swallowed. “Like I can give up my need to eat, or my need to sleep, or any of that. Except there’s a price, isn’t there?”
“Yes,” she said. “Tell me, did your shadow plague you in this vision you had, of yourself escaping?”
“No,” I said.
She spread her hands, as if that was my answer.
“…I was a monster,” I said. I wasn’t so hampered in my relationship with Green Eyes.
I only had to ask, and I could be rid of Carl, of those memories.
“Oh fuck,” I said, burying my face in my hands. “Don’t tell me that.”
“The spirits might not reach us or affect us with the same strength down here, but I believe in truth and honesty,” she said. “I believe in the bastardized notion of karma that suggests that if one is just and good, then justice and goodness will find them.”
“Telling me that isn’t just and good,” I said. “Fuck, that’s an easy out I’d totally take in the heat of the moment. Do you have any freaking idea how scary that is? I just said that knowledge can be a huge inconvenience. This is a freaking death sentence you just handed me.”
“I gave you truth,” she said. “If I started lying to people who come to me, I’d lose what little traction I enjoy, here.”
Fuck fuck fuck.
“Talk to me, stranger,” she said.
We hadn’t exchanged names.
“This isn’t even a slippery slope,” I said. “My humanity is one knee-jerk reaction away from utter ruin.”
“Humanity?” she asked. “Look at yourself. Your hands.”
I did.
I looked down at the feathers and branches, the cuts and scrapes, the wounds on my wrist.
“I guess I’m not so human anymore,” I said.
“I don’t think that’s the question,” she said. “The real question is, what are you?”
“That sounds an awful lot like the question I just got from my visitor.”
“It’s an important one,” she said.
“I’m… Other,” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
“And, what, that means I should keep going down that route? That there’s some weakness or strength I can derive from my status?”
She sighed a little.
“I don’t…” I started, but I couldn’t put thoughts into words. I was agitated, upset. “All I ever wanted was to wrap this stuff up. To go back to something resembling an ordinary life, to have my bike and my familiar back, and just, I dunno… wander?”
I felt like I was going to throw up. She wasn’t responding.
But she was listening, and that meant something. I spoke, just to fill the silence, to unload something more that I’d bottled up inside me. “I… every step of the way, I feel like I’m getting further and further away from that.”
“Hm,” she said.
“What?”
“I’m thinking, nothing more. When push comes to shove, do you think you’ll take the step that leads you down that path, or the step that leads you to where you need to be?”
“Away from here? I’ll take the step I need to take. That’s what’s driving me so insane about all this. I keep taking that damn step. Away from what I want. Why? Is that bad?”
“It’s what it is,” she said. “I’ve mused before on the paths some take to escape. That this place tells them. Perhaps this vision of your future is suggesting you need to let go of this dream of yours if you want to find a way out of here… except…”
“What?”
“You have a shadow as well. By my theory, you’d need to confront a reality about your past.”
“Confront the shadow?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said.
Okay, that sick feeling I had was getting worse at hearing that.
A thought struck me.
“And what does it mean if I have visions of the present? Of that screwed up reflection I mentioned in passing?”
“A doppleganger?”
Was Rose a doppleganger? “For the sake of argument.”
“It means there’s a present reality you need to confront or resolve. I’ll put it simply, stranger. These things are anchors, tying you down to keep you in place. This place is taking those anchors and using them, giving them form, to put you off balance. I’ve never run into someone with three, not that I’ve noticed.”