Katalepsis VI: "And Less Pleasant Places" (part 2)

A few days after the Carcosa jaunt, still tormented by the possibility that Lozzie might be under alien control and in need of rescue just like Maisie no matter how many times Evelyn assures her that that sounded like bait, Heather is visited by Twil.

We haven't heard from Twil since the resolution of the "Other Side of Nowhere" arc, but it seems like things have mostly been alright for her. Knowing that her clan are all partially possessed by Heddfjekjgenq and that anything or everything they say might be shaped by their god's influence has driven a wedge between her and them. But, things are cordial. No fights. No silent treatment. No trying to sneak brain-controlling alien worms into each others' ears or anything. Twil came by now to give Heather a late birthday present (just a scarf, nothing weird at least as far as it's been revealed so far), and also to talk to Raine about some recent events.

Heather seems to have gotten it into her head that she needs to take an active role in shipping Evelyn and Twil, and her attempts are hilariously awkward and bad. Also, Twil's introduction to this arc has her walking in on Heather and Praem, while the former is wearing the cat costume that Evelyn got her on account of the lost bet in arc 4, and the latter is wearing her new acquisition from arc 5. She draws conclusions that Heather unsuccessfully tries to dissuade her of.

Heh. Predictable, but I still chuckled.

As for the next plot point. It initially seems like an unrelated incident that the author just flung Heather's way, but it's not long before we learn that it's a consequence of Heather's previous actions.

At the end of "Other Side of Nowhere," the gang returned to Sharrowford with a captive New Sun initiate named Kimberly Kemp. She seemed to have already grown disillusioned with the cult even before it got its shit rekt, and didn't seem to have been involved in any of the murders or human experimentation. At Heather's insistence, they allowed Kim to go free, and Raine has been occasionally checking up on her since then to make sure she doesn't do anything stupid. Well, she's vanished. Not answering her door. Not answering phone calls. Raine checked at her workplace, and Kim's boss said that she called in sick a few days ago and hasn't been seen or heard from since. Most ominously, the sick call-in that preceded her disappearance happened on the same day that Heather took her experimental jaunt to Carcosa. Suggesting that New Sun might have detected dimensional activity in Sharrowford and been spurred into action.

What really has them scared is that if this is what happened, then they're probably dealing with big boss Edward Lilliburne himself. He has a history of detecting interdimensional travel in the area and reacting opportunistically. Why he'd only start tying up loose ends like Kimberly now is unclear at this juncture, but Edward is enough of an unknown in general that it might well make sense to him.

So, Raine invited Twil to help her break into Kim's apartment. I'm a little sceptical of this sequence of events, tbh. Like, why would Raine invite Twil over in person before asking her to help with this, apart from "to provide a good, dynamic vehicle for exposition in a scene that lets Heather get involved to?" Still, this bit of contrivance aside, the plotting of this arc ends up being surprisingly tight.

Evelyn volunteers to send Praem with them, but Raine wisely opts to have at least one fighty type stay home with Evelyn in case the New Suns do some sort of immediate retaliation when the investigation team runs into them. Heather insists on going with Raine and Twil, on account of feeling responsible for Kimberly's vulnerable situation. If I recall correctly, Heather was the one who pushed to not kill the cultist in cold blood, so...I guess she's technically correct lol.

...

Subtextually, I think that with Maisie still unrescued and now new concerns about what may be going on with Lozzie, Heather is just sort of desperate to rescue someone from something.

Or, more specifically, to feel like taking out Alexander's operation improved somebody's life. If it did indeed cause Lozzie to go get herself zombified in a matter of weeks after gaining her freedom, then there needs to be some kind of good to balance that.

Heather developing something of a complex about wanting to be a hero is a low-key, but unmistakably present, little thread throughout this arc. It has the potential to go to dangerous places in later ones, depending. It somewhat interacts with the weird take-charge moments where I wonder if Heather's brain really is infected with Carcosan malware, but not entirely. It feels much more organic than those.

...

So, Heather, Raine, and Twil head out to break into Kimberly's apartment to look for clues. Kimberly apparently lives in an extremely bad neighborhood in Sharrowford. The kind of place that gets mentioned on national news every now and then. Which definitely supports Kim's presentation of herself as a down-on-her-luck loser who joined New Sun out of desperation.

By the way, we cut straight to them arriving at Kimberley's apartment building after this:

Katalepsis 6.3:
"Uh, you are gonna change out of that cat onesie, right? That might scare our Poundland Necromancer for a whole different reason."

I huffed out a sigh and put my hands on my hips. Raine started laughing.

"Yes, Twil, I thought I'd wander down there in the onesie, really get the locals' attention. What do you think?"

And, the opening paragraphs of the next scene do not specify what Heather changed into. I think it gets clarified eventually, but by then my mental image of the scene had already been solidified and nothing and no one will ever be able to change it now.

Tenny is noted to be tagging along behind them.

Honestly? Three attractive girls strolling through one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the country, with one of them wearing a goddamned fursuit, is just the biggest power-move ever. I condone this wholeheartedly.

Said neighborhood is indeed a depressing one. Kim's apartment is in one of a pair of high-rise towers across the street from one another. The one she lives in is run-down, malodorous, and battered. The other one is totally abandoned, a condemned building with boarded-up windows, overgrown with moss and climbing plants.

Lovely description of the towers here, by the way.

Katalepsis 6.3:
Twinned concrete monoliths, the Headly towers – Gleaston and Glasswick – sat at the point the low rise flats stuttered out onto open ground. Thirty floors each of thick concrete slab, once-fashionable apartments, dingy windows and cacophonous graffiti, they tore at the sky's underbelly over Sharrowford's west end.

They could be worse, at least to my sensibilities. Better the texture of aged concrete than the too-clean surfaces of steel and glass such things would be built from these days. At least these had life, of a kind. Some of the higher flats in Gleaston tower sported window boxes, sadly empty this time of year, or big houseplants visible behind the glass, a pleasing counterpoint to the grey exterior. One flat near the summit flew the Cross of St George from their window, and another two the ram's head colours of Sharrowford Football Club.

Glasswick – the condemned tower – looked awful. Every window up to the tenth story had been boarded, the wood damp and rotting from weather damage. The glass higher up had been smashed. Weeds sprouted in the cracks and lichen had colonised big patches of concrete, a building with a skin disease.

The police had nailed a man-sized plastic notice in big bold letters to the boarding over the entranceway. Keep out, building condemned by order of Sharrowford council, entry punishable by £500 fine, so on and so forth.

The notice was caked with graffiti, and a board had been kicked in next to it, an entrance to the lightless interior.

At least the local spirit life seemed unruffled by the state of the place. Pneuma-somatic creatures treated Headly much the same as the rest of Sharrowford. A beefy thing like a gorilla made out of charred meat was busy climbing down the side of one of the towers, and a pack of wolfish ghoul-faced monsters lurked around the connecting alleyways, chased by and sometimes chasing a tentacled lurker with a trio of huge stalked eyes, which occasionally waved over the buildings.

Notably, Tenny follows the gang into Kimberly's high rise, but she gives the abandoned one a wide berth and appears to be genuinely frightened of it. Heather registers this for now, and it ends up becoming relevant (albeit somewhat coincidentally) very soon.

For now, they enter the inhabited building and break into Kim's apartment. The contents of which are...god, it's simultaneously exactly what you'd expect, and a painful revelation.

Kimberly had spent a lot of effort making her little flat comfy and welcoming, though I was less sure about her taste. Besides a beanbag chair and a small television with a battered video game console plugged into it, the place was done up like a new age grotto. The walls sported hanging posters of majestic looking wolves in suitably fantastical forests and mountains, and a few fancy coloured crystals decorated a bookshelf, accompanied by a tacky statue of a rearing dragon.

Of the books themselves, I recognised a few titles from the fake collection of occult junk in the Medieval Metaphysics room — volumes with silver pentagrams on the front, written by people with pen names like 'Sky Raven' and 'Coven Mistress Dahlia'. Through Kimberly's open bedroom door I spied a huge poster of a rainbow-clad unicorn, in pride of place above her bed.

It would almost be sweet – if I hadn't seen her commanding those zombies for the cult. I had to remind myself of what she'd been involved in.

A smoky, musky scent seemed baked into the air. I wrinkled my nose, sniffing.

"You smell that too, huh?" Twil asked with a wry smirk.

"What it is? I think I recognise it, but I'm not sure."

"Weed, lots of it," Raine announced.

Crystal unicorn Enya decor, bookshelves full of self-published Amazon esotericism, and weed.

It's almost too perfect. The environmental storytelling here is just...*chef's kiss.* Financially downtrodden, alienated from family and the cultural mainstream that they represent, spending her limited resources on New Age bullshit and weed as an escape from the poverty and loneliness. Easily taken in by anyone in Sharrowford who has interests even superficially similar to her own. A perfect dupe for an organization like the Brotherhood of the New Sun.

It turns out that Kim isn't dead or kidnapped. She's actually been laying low, hiding in her apartment and not making a sound for days, and jumps out at them with a knife when they're about to find her hiding place. Twil actually has to use her healing factor to tank a stab from her before Raine can subdue her and Heather can calm her down.

This actually ends up being a watershed moment for Heather, in terms of *how* she calms Kim down. Heather thinks about everything she's seen, directly and indirectly, of Kimberly's personality. How Kim reacted when Heather convinced the others to spare her in the first place. Etc. She realizes that Kimberly Kemp is a cult follower by disposition, so Heather plays the part of cult leader. She takes on an authority and grandiosity that she knows she doesn't actually possess, acts like she owns Twil and Raine (and the two of them are sharp enough to play along), regards Kim as if she regards her as kinda sorta her property due to having killed her old master in a wizard duel, etc. And it works.

It's one of those moments that's really, REALLY hard to tell if it's Heather growing into her power and learning how to exercise her emotional intelligence and empathy more tactically, or Heather being corrupted by the things she's been exposing her central nervous system to.

Granted, while Raine and Twil are playing bad cop, Heather has this thought too just to remind us that some things haven't and will not change:

Katalepsis 6.3:
Raine and Twil were positively intimidating.

None of it directed my way, of course. If they ganged up on me like this, I would probably pass out in mortified arousal.

Oh, Heather. 

Once she's been sufficiently cowed, calmed, and comforted, Kim gives them a surprising and distressing timeline of events. On the morning that (unbeknownst to Kim) Heather was doing her Carcosa experiment, Kim received a visit from her old boss' estranged little sister. She describes Lozzie as moving and emoting unnaturally, in much the same state as Heather saw her in Carcosa, which is an "oh shit" moment for the reader just as much as it is for Heather.

...

See, up until this point, it's very natural for the reader to accept Evelyn's explanation of the "Lozzie" Heather saw in the Library of Carcosa. IE, that it's some kind of resident guardian that reads your memories and uses them to lure or disorient you. Heather's anxiety over whether or not that's really the case, if it's possible that Lozzie actually has stumbled into a zombifying force as a result of Heather freeing her from her brother, comes across as Heather having understandable-but-misguided doubts.

The instant we learn that zombie-Lozzie has appeared outside of Carcosa, to people other than Heather, the entire calculus changes. Now, it seems like Heather was actually right all along. That this really is Lozzie under painful-looking alien control, in a similar condition to Maisie's by accursed coincidence.

It's a real rugpull. You feel yourself falling into a blind, spinning abyss from this moment onward for the next several chapters.

If I was doing a blind react, I'd be able to convey the impact of this so much more strongly. While thinking about how to do this review, I actually went back and forth on whether or not to reveal the truth about "Lozzie" in the first post versus dancing around it to mirror the experience of actually reading the story. I ultimately decided it wasn't worth the trouble of doing in a review of this format, but it was a hard choice to make.

Anyway, it ends up being a double subversion. Perhaps even a triple subversion. Was it just some Carcosan entity's bait? Oh shit, no it wasn't! It's not bait then, it's actually Lozzie? Oh shit, no, it IS bait! Lozzie is being used as bait? Oh shit, no, it was never actually Lozzie after all, it just wasn't Carcosan either! Reading it for the first time, the stress and fear for both Heather and Lozzie are real all the way up to the final reveal, and that really provides the emotional momentum for "And Less Pleasant Places."

...

Not long after the visit from Fake Lozzie, Kimberly got another unwanted visitor in Amy Stack, the Brotherhood of the New Sun's thuggish (but charmingly irreverent) enforcer. Apparently, Fake Lozzie made a bunch of surprise appearances in front of various New Sun cultists and hangers-on at around the same time. Kimberley was only one of those visited. Lozzie's uncle Edward was another. Since Kim had left the leviathan in the company of Lozzie and her rescuers, and nobody had seen Lozzie since then, Edward send Amy to go see if Kim knew anything about why she was showing up again now and looking all fucked up and zombie-puppet-y.

Amy, being herself, basically beat all the information that Kim had out of her, and threatened to kill her if she breathed a word about anything to anyone or tried to skip town. Kim, already freaked out by the visit from Fake Lozzie, had a full out nervous breakdown after this and has been hiding in her apartment with a knife at the ready ever since.

Well, there's more to Kim's breakdown than just that. She was already traumatized by being captured by the gang and threatened by Raine. And she was already traumatized before that by being strongarmed into animating zombies out of the corpses of New Sun victims in a psychedelic green hellscape all day after being drawn into a cult and terrorized into compliance. So, yeah. Her sanity was running on empty by the time Raine, Twil, and Heather broke in.

The fact that she thought zombie-Lozzie might have been a warning sent to her from Evelyn and Heather to show her what they do to former New Sun affiliates who betray their rescuers also didn't help.

While Raine and Twil are getting the last of this information out of Kim (and making hasty plans to relocate her to Evelyn's house until they can be sure she's not going to get merc'd by Amy), Heather has a silent little emotional spiral. Barely hearing what else is being discussed, so preoccupied is she by confirmation that Zombie Lozzie wasn't just a Carcosan illusion. She makes a decision to use another hypermath spell that the Eye taught her, one that she hasn't exercised in the story until now, this one for tracking the movements of objects through space and time. Giving herself another headache and nosebleed, she looks back through time to the date and time that Kim provided for Lozzie's visit to this apartment, locks onto the moving object as it passes through dimensional barriers, and then tracks it to the present.

...

On one hand, this is a pretty blatant case of "powers as the plot demands." We've never seen Heather do anything like this, or mention that she CAN do anything like this. However, as I've talked about at length before, we DO know that Heather is sitting on a big pile of magic that she's been too afraid to use, and we've seen her break out some surprising bits of it before. So, it's justified within the world of the story.

Whether that helps it as far as preservation of dramatic tension is concerned is up to the reader, of course. I rolled with it, personally, but it did give me pause for a moment. It helps that Heather herself doesn't know what all of her magic does, and that experimenting with it has a cost in her physical health, but even so, it gave me pause.

...

Speaking of costs to experimenting with Heather's abilities, as soon as she mentally tracks the object to its current location, it notices her scrying on it and launches a telepathic attack. An attack that reveals the Lozzie-thing to be an avatar of Heather's old pal, the Eye.

During this mental connection, the Eye gets its first actual dialogue in the story. And it is perfectly Lynchian.

Katalepsis 6.5:
I see you, it said.

Not in words, but via that unspeakable feeling crawling inside my skull – the feeling of being caught looking.

I felt like a mouse, wedged inside a rotting tree trunk on the forest floor, peeping out through a crack in the wood at the undergrowth and damp leaves, as something huge and reptilian slithered along the ground outside and put a great, unblinking eye to the window in my hidey-hole.

Such sensations were sadly – and fortunately – not alien to me. The Eye's attention, in my horrid memories and the old dreams, had felt much the same way, except magnified a thousand times more than this, a scrutiny that peeled away one's skin and bone and neurons and atoms. I was perhaps the one person in the world who could endure this attention without losing my mind, because I'd had worse before.

How it saw me, I had no idea, but I knew what to do: I let go of the equation, let it unravel, like cutting a fishing net loose when you've accidentally caught a shark.

Then I felt the rest, the trailing sensations behind 'I see you': recognition, familiarity, knowledge.

I see you, Heather.

And I can dance like that too! Watch!

The Lozzie-thing, the Outsider in her head, whatever in God's name it was, it came scuttling up through the equation I'd built, using the collapsing strands of my own work as a ladder to reach into my mind, spanning the gaps with its own hyperdimensional mathematics. Like a spider spinning webs to mend the holes in a rickety scaffold, it scurried across the fabric of reality, toward me.

A trap.

This whole thing was a trap, aimed at me.

I can just imagine Heather's mental image of Fake Lozzie moving its lips while a reversed-backward enunciation of those lines comes through in a clipped version of her voice.

As Twil and Raine notice Heather screaming and bleeding out the face and hastily shake her out of it, Heather realizes the significance of a detail Kim mentioned earlier. When "Lozzie" visited her apartment, she had kept repeating the words "Back to school."

A message that the Eye was hoping would find its way to Heather sooner or later.

And now, Heather believes that Lozzie has been targeted and infected by the Eye *because* of her friendship with Heather. Making it Heather's responsibility. Perfectly aimed at emotional weak points of Heather's that only the Eye would have a good understanding of.

The Eye is unambiguously manipulative, malevolent, and cruel. No more benefit of the doubt can be extended to it after this point.

Next time, we learn how the Eye learned about Lozzie, why it was limited to having its fake Lozzie puppet appear to New Sun members specifically, and how to deal with Sharrowford's infestation of New Age Tories.