Cyberwitch Academy: Learn or Burn

Chapter 68

I'm in a white room.

Outside there is a storm howling.

I walk over to the window and throw it open.

It is not a storm.

Shivers.

Millions of them.

They are swarming the tower in which I stand. Climbing over one another to get to me. Smashing at the doors, ripping at the windows, great open maws, coming to devour me.

Sadie's death has ripped me open, I'm connected to everything, a great web of open doors, security risks, vulnerabilities.

They're coming to flood me, to take over my node, local host.

Now I'm in agony. My whole body is a fury of prickling heat, pinches and scratches and skin turning to hot rashes. I can feel every millimetre of my own nervous system.

The scene changes.

It's so dark I cannot see and I'm drowning in a giant cooking pot, a black cauldron, drowning in hot filth. Hubble bubble.

Then the world turns upside down, and the cauldron falls over and I tumble out, tumbling like a body hit by a ten-foot wave, tumbling, choking, drowning until my eyes are filled with light, so nasty this light it hurts, a thousand migraines, I smell sour milk, and four figures come into view, murderous looking creatures, standing around me as I lay on a what is this?

And the room comes into focus.

Stinks this place, smells of decay, musty and damp. And it's cold here.

And the man in front of me has blood on his apron and all kinds of shiny cyber implants in his arms, his fingers sport retractable knives and drills, he wears a headset flipped up with all kinds of data displays.

"She's glitching out hard." He speaks.

Is that Mel with him? Sort of looks like Mel. But no.

These are shivers, screwing with me.

Must summon up the power to regain control. Dispel the illusions, Get Ursula back in the driving seat. Kill all these evil things. Kill them all.

"She's going into a fight or flight state."

"Maybe we should sedate her?"

"No give her time."

"Ursula it's me."

And the false room with false Mel fades away, and the real scene comes into view, I'm surrounded by three witches and some kind of torturer, and they're all casting evil magics on me, reprogramming me, feeding off of me, using me for their own ends.

"Get away from me!" I scream. "I'll hex you all! I am Arachne! I am APPLETHORN! I'll destroy the whole world. Just to stop you from getting what you want out of me."

And one of the witches comes up to me and grabs my arms, I see her fingers digging into my flesh, I hear her voice but I don't understand the words, because there are too many voices, and in any case, I don't speak human language anymore because my body is sprouting hair from every patch of skin.

Now I'm a hare, and I'm running terrified through the long grass as a pack of hounds chases me, and the man with the chrome is a farmer, a country squire and the dogs are dogs with the faces of hags, hags that look like Mel and Vash and Ty, but it's another lie, lies within lies, still trapped on Sadie's web, the other web.

And the dogs are on me ripping at me, and I'm human again, but the wounds are still there, and I rub at them, crying and cursing to myself. And then I'm back in the room, the medical room, but it can't be a hospital because it stinks and it's falling apart, rubbish everywhere, iron bars on the windows and this bed I'm on must be a thousand years old, rusted bed frame, ancient springs and improvised rags for a mattress, but they're holding me down, god knows what they're using me for, trying to turn me into a bomb, trying to turn me into a bucket for other people's souls to collect in.

I don't want to be connected anymore, I hate the rhizome, I hate being a witch.

And I'm begging them to make the pain stop, the pinches and the itching and the prickles, the witches must be sending it, this is what being cursed feels like, and the witch leans into me and I'm in the dark forest, and I've been captured by an evil coven, and they want to sacrifice me to the man in the black hat with the chrome fingers.

And they say I've been cursing horses, stopping carriages, they say I've been drinking the cows dry, guzzling their milk at midnight in the shape of a hare, they say I've been cursing children, making them sick, they say I've been pretending to be a young girl to turn the farmers heads, but I look down and my body is old, my skin paper thin my veins enlarged, my ankles as thin as twigs, my hands twisted with arthritis, and I scream and it comes out like a witches cackle.

And I fight for control, summon up the deepest strength that I have, and the words come to me, and I cast a binding spell, and the shivers try to run, but it's too late, I harness a great bunch of them and ride their strength like Boudica in her chariot, and I reach out along the vectors of my rhizomatic connections seeking to connect with the other witches in my torture chamber and send forth a nasty shock, a surge of pain, hopping along the nodes that connect me to the others and I hear them screaming and it's beautiful.

And I'm sitting up in the bed, in the hospital room that is not a hospital, and I see Mel and Vash and Ty writhing in pain on the floor, and the doc takes me in a firm lock and I feel the bite of a needle enter my neck and then, as the clouds of black fill my mind, I realise that I have cursed my own coven sisters, because the hospital was real.

And I wonder as I drift away, if they will just put me down now like a horse with a broken leg, and part of me is still a hare running desperately through the forest, still a frightened child trying to survive in a world full of hunting dogs.

And then Sadie is there, cuddling a sick girl, singing to her, the songs that her best friend used to sing to her daughter.

And the kicker is, I'm not really sure if I'm the one singing... or the one being sung to.