Katalepsis VI: "And Less Pleasant Places" (part 3)

As Heather painfully shakes off the Eye's attempt at possession (or whatever it was trying to do by turning her scrying attempt back at her), Kimberley brightens the mood by being adorably cringe.

Katalepsis 5.5
I jerked forward, an involuntary spasm, banged my face into the table, then reared back up with a ragged choking gasp, and noticed I'd left a bloody smear on the cheap wood.

"Holy shit," said Twil.

"Oh Goddess, oh, what, oh-" Kimberly stammered, scrambling to her feet.

With the equation dead, that scuttling awareness finally receded into the abyss.

You know, for all the reflexive wincing that I do when a white British girl with a crystal collection and dragon-and-unicorn themed interior decorating swears by a nonspecific "goddess," there's something here that demands respect. In this couple of chapters, Kim goes into detail about how she got sucked into the Brotherhood of the New Sun, how she tried to wriggle her way back out of it but was prevented by a combination of social control mechanisms and outright implied threats. How she only realized in the weeks following Alexander's death how much freer she felt without the cult than she felt with it, even with multiple threats from multiple directions hanging over her head. How she had to choke down her revulsion at being made to work animated corpses into zombies, and tortured herself for her self-acknowledged moral cowardice for not demanding answers from the higher-ups about where those bodies came from. Etc. I'm not sure if I completely believe everything she says in these sections. She has every reason to twist things to make herself look like more of an innocent victim (and she may be wilfully misremembering some parts of it herself), but still, her time in the New Sun was pretty clearly traumatic.

And yet, after all that, after being shown real magic and learning that it's much more about shoving alien spirits into the corpses of murder victims than it is about rainbow moonbeams and sex with anthropomorphic dolphins, Kim still believes in "goddess." That's downright Job-like, as far as faith goes. I might not have much respect for granola esotericism, and from the narration it's clear that Heather doesn't either, but the story gives you absolutely zero choice in respecting the strength of Kimberly's resolve.

The group is taking the possibility of Lozzie having fallen prey to the Eye much more seriously now. The fact that she's apparently (according to the things Amy Stack mentioned when she grilled Kim) been appearing to her old family members and associates suggests that she might still have some amount of agency, though. It seems like getting in touch with New Suns might be the best way to get more information, but Kim was never given the contact information for anyone important and/or still alive at this point. So, after relocating Kim to Evelyn's house to keep her safe from Stack and giving Heather a couple days to recover from her latest brain haemorrhage, they come up with a plan to get ahold of the cult via the new age occultist circle that Kim first got referred to them from.

...

Evelyn's house lmao.

The first arc emphasized how big and eerily empty it was, and at the time it was just spooky flavor and indirect characterization for Evelyn and her relationship with her family. It's now clear that this was ALSO in there to establish that they have room to stash this ever-growing collection of magic-adjacent lesbians. It's like the Normandy at the beginning of Mass Effect 2, all these empty rooms you need to work on filling.

Kim has reason to insist that she's straight in this couple of chapters, but, ah, I have a feeling she's going to end up changing her mind sooner or later. Heather has experienced so much perverse sexual lust for that house that it's gained the ability to gayify any woman who lives in it.

...

Raine actually shows some impressive initiative here, in a way that she normally doesn't when there's anyone else who can do it. With Heather taking the role of the authority figure to appeal to, and Twil more inclined to play bad cop due to her hand still hurting from the stab wound Kim gave her, Raine changes her persona to be Kim's advocate in the conversation. It's very obvious manipulation/interrogation tactics, seen from the outside, but if I were in as stressed and desperate a situation as Kim's I would probably fall for it too.

Katalepsis 6.5
"Hey, hey, Kim," Raine murmured, low and soft, the same voice she used with me sometimes. She crossed over toward Kimberly, knelt down, and reached out slowly. "I'm gonna touch your shoulder, okay? Don't jump, it's only me."

Kimberly flinched anyway, hard, the precursor to fleeing, but Raine quickly took her by both shoulders, gently rubbing her upper arms. I clamped down on a bizarre spark of jealousy, hardly appropriate right now.

"Kim, it's okay, it's alright," Raine purred. "None of us think you're a criminal, none of us think you killed anybody."

"Yeah," Twil said. "Me neither. Right."

Raine gave Twil a slyly unimpressed look. Twil shut her mouth and cringed.

"Surviving alone was hard enough," Raine continued, her soft tone more important than the words themselves. "And you managed that, you don't have to feel guilty. Heather's just very cautious. She saw more than us, most of the same things you probably did. We're not gonna use you up and then decide to get rid of you for something that wasn't your fault. That's something I can promise, at the very least."

Kimberly managed a jerky nod, still hiding her face. Her crying had dried up, except for the occasional sniff.

Apparently, some readers really don't like Raine, exactly because of how manipulative she can be and how naturally deceit and emotional control come to her. Personally, I don't think I'm ever going to stop being a Raine apologist, but scenes like this do force me to admit that she's scary even if it's in the good way.

Unsurprisingly in light of the role she's playing here, it's Raine who comes up with the idea of having Kim return to the Wicca circle with Heather at her side, tell all her old friends there that she's coming out as bisexual, and introduce her new girlfriend who's expressed an interest in the occult. Raine just knows that she needs to get Kim to start faking it, and before long the house will have her making it. I give it two arcs maximum lol.

Heather and Kim are both nervous about this, for some of the same reasons and some different ones. Neither of them have ever done an infiltration op before. Heather isn't used to going to this kind of social event at all. Kim is terrified of also attracting more attention than her new patrons can protect her from, and also has no idea how to pretend to be gay. She's only been in Evelyn's house for a couple of nights, it takes time for the effect to work. But, they don't have any better ideas than this one. Kim does know about the specific person who funneled her into the cult - a sort-of leadership figure within the local neopagan scene named Catherine Gillespie - but she doesn't know where she lives or how to contact her outside of these meetings at a local maegjyck shop.

...

Also, "Gillespie."

In the same chapter where Gillespie first gets namedropped, one of the random fake magic books that Heather spots in Kim's apartment (many of the same books that Evelyn was noted to use to camouflage her real magic books in the Medieval Metaphysics office back in arc one, amusingly enough) is authored by someone called "Covenmistress Dahlia."

A Dahlia and a Gillespie in the same scene lmao. Looks like our protagonist's name was only the first of multiple Silent Hill shoutouts in Katalepsis, heh

...

Gillespie isn't the owner of the shop, to be clear. She just leads the Wicca circle that meets there twice a week. Hence, they don't have any way to track her down other than the meetings.

So, two days later, Kim takes her "girlfriend" Heather to meet the coven, with Raine and Praem (with Evelyn remotely watching through the latter) lurking in the background ready to drop in to the rescue if needed, and Twil keeping Evelyn safe back at the house. For the infiltration team, it's an interesting inversion of the dynamic we've seen so far, the way that Heather and Kimberly are described. Heather being the one in-control, with a mission in mind, and resources and powers at her back, while for once someone else is the terrified almost-mundane in over her head doing something uncomfortable and terrifying.

On the way inside, seeing Kim get ever more uncomfortable as they approach, Heather gives her a little pep talk of her own. Probably a bit more genuine than Raine's from a couple days ago, but also...stranger. It's inclusion at this juncture feels just *slightly* out of place, in a way that makes me suspect it's there to foreshadow something. Either a specific in-story event, or else a theme that the serial is going to start tackling after this point.

Katalepsis 6.6
She nodded. Her eyes were unreadable dead pools of sterile blue ice. "I won't let you down. I promise."

I did have some inkling of what she was bottling up, didn't I?

I nodded toward Grey Magicks, at the faux-rustic building, and completely failed to make my point properly when I opened my stupid mouth. "You know, I'm pretty sure Evelyn Saye believes in God."

" … I … o-okay."

I sighed, both at myself, and at Kimberly's meek acceptance of my non-sequitur. "That didn't come out right. And it's not entirely accurate, either. I think Evelyn believes in God, on some level. She told me this complex metaphor once, for reality, about a castle, and how, well, a castle has to have a builder. I'm not saying she's Christian, that would be absurd, but she believes in something." Kimberly eyed me warily, so I forged on, trying to explain myself. "I'd never really thought about it before, but considering everything people like us have seen, perhaps it's difficult to not believe in something, at least. What I'm trying to say is … all that stuff, in there," I nodded toward Grey Magicks. "It's as valid as anything else. Perhaps you don't have to give up on it."

Kimberly blinked several times and looked away. "I don't know … "

"I'm sorry. This probably isn't the best time to discuss that."

"No. No, it's okay. Maybe you're right. I don't know anymore. I wish I'd never found religion."

I squeezed her hand again, and this time she squeezed back, no longer so limp.

For all its dealings with godlike entities and inclusions of cults as players in the story, Katalepsis hasn't really engaged with the subject of religion itself until now. At least, not directly. This is the first overt change to that equilibrium, and I don't think it's going to be the last.

Well, anyway.

The meeting itself is...pretty much exactly what you'd expect. A bunch of self-absorbed boomers and a small handful of college kids. Mostly women, a handful of men who are falling over themselves to prove how nontoxic their kind of masculinity is, and a smaller handful of men who actually act like they belong here. Heather finds the building itself moderately fuckable if it were to just lose the tacky signage, so that's nice at least. Kim seems to actually enjoy spending time with some of the other youngish types; she may have been kept from this social group by a combination of fear and shame until now, but she's clearly starved for social interaction with people who she doesn't half-expect to kill her as soon as she's no longer useful.

Heather is half-afraid that Catherine Gillespie will recognize her. She doesn't know exactly how closely connected to New Sun she is, and it's theoretically possible that she was one of the cultists who have been seen running around in the various action scenes in arcs 3-4. Fortunately, she either wasn't, or she just forgot Heather's face. Everything goes pretty smoothly, and it's not until the meeting is winding down and almost everyone has left that Kim and Heather have opportunity to get Gillespie alone-ish for a sensitive conversation.

...

At least until this point, Catherine Gillespie has been written as exactly what you'd expect a fifty-something upper middle class woman who runs a Wicca group at the local magicke shop to be, in both appearance and behavior. But...I can't put my finger on it, but somehow, for some reason, I can only imagine her as this outlandish-looking ONE cartoon creation. Like one of the really bizarre one-off characters from Mob Psycho 100 or something.

I really don't know why. She's literally the only character in Katalepsis that my imagination is doing this for, and there's no particular detail I can identify that would have pushed it in that direction.

...

Kimberly tells Gillespie that her new gf is interested in some of the deeper mysteries that she'd earlier helped Kim herself learn about. The fact that Gillespie doesn't seem alarmed yet suggests that either New Sun hasn't been keeping Gillespie informed about who is and isn't still okay to talk to about these things, which...well, that's one of the vulnerabilities of clandestine organizations like this. When information is all kept need-to-know, your agents become individually very vulnerable.

And, very early in the conversation, Heather just feels something come over her. Moreso than in any of her previous out-of-character, possibly-possessed-by-Hastur moments, this time Heather *herself* seems to be aware of this not being like her even as she does it.

Katalepsis 6.6
"T-thank you, Cathy," Kimberly said, and half sat down before she realised I wasn't moving a muscle. She straightened back up, eyes glued on me, going white in the face.

"Kimberly, dear, whatever's the matter?" Catherine asked, frowning gently. "Now, I thought you were-"

"Do you know a man named Alexander Lilburne?" I asked.

The words came out low and easy. Not part of the plan, not at all.

Gillespie blinked in polite surprise. So measured, so reasonable, so kind.

She disgusted me on a level I hadn't time to process. She'd all but confessed her involvement with the Cult already, and I seethed inside with a cold certainty I hadn't felt since I'd faced Alexander. No more delay, no more waiting, no more pretending.

"Yes," she said at length, then drew herself up straighter, gathering her confidence again. "Yes, that name belongs to an old friend of mine, in fact, if you're referring to the same person. Do you happen to know-"

"When's the last time you saw him?" I said.

She frowned, and her mask finally began slipping, that slow motherly benevolence falling away. " … who are you, exactly?"

"The woman who killed him."

Gillespie's face froze, but only for a second. She rose to her feet in a rush, thundering at us with an outraged frown. "Who on earth are you? Kimberly, who is this girl? And don't be so absurd. Lilburne, killed by some- some- whatever you are?"

Behind her, a shadow detached itself from the doorway into the darkened storage area, rippling into the light with razor-sharp precision, every muscle held tight.

Raine slipped toward Gillespie's back on silent feet, eyes glued to her target, matte black handgun held casually at her side.

Raine (and Praem, a moment later) were creeping their way into the building while this was going on, so the trap was about to be sprung anyway. But, Heather's unplanned actions there move up the timetable sharply, and also bypass the diplomatic angle and bring this straight to the violent interrogation.

The very next line reassures us that Heather is at least partly still herself, but still.

Katalepsis 6.6
If I hadn't been so focused, that sight would have given me the shivers, and not in a bad way.

Of course lol.

Gillespie makes the worst mistake of her life and thinks that these are Edward's henchmen, and insists she's been serving the sect loyally. In detail.

Katalepsis 6.6
"I'm no apostate!" she cried out. "I've not breathed a word to anybody, I've kept every secret, I swear! I've not spoken to the police, my husband, anybody. Nobody knows. Nobody."

"Knows about what?" Raine asked, grinning.

"The … the … "

"Answer her," I hissed.

"The supply agreement. The scum. Is it not enough? I can always find more, there's always more out there. Don't, please don't!"

Apparently, aside from scouting for potential new initiates at her New Age group, Gillespie also directs people toward a homeless shelter that doesn't exist.

When Heather demands a clarification, we get one of the more unique villain speeches I've encountered in recent times.

Katalepsis 6.6
"Answer the question, or I will do to you what I did to Alexander." My voice emerged with a shake, a strange, cold anger. It rushed through me, almost beyond my control.

"Don't be so sanctimonious, you know exactly what I mean. The Brotherhood does good work, necessary work. Have you seen the filth-filled tent villages growing like mushrooms by the motorway? There's no helping those people. They're all drug addicts and illegal immigrants. You saw my coven, this night, you saw the sorts of decent, vulnerable girls those animals prey on, and now you're blaming me for helping clear them off the streets?"

"You funnelled the homeless people to the cult." Raine nodded slowly. "Makes sense. You look pretty non-threatening."

Gillespie raised her chin. "As I said, necessary work. Don't you dare look at me like that, none of you have the courage."

I took another step toward her. "I saw dead children. In a cage."

She rolled her eyes and huffed. "Don't be so absurd, you saw nothing of the sort. And where? Where exactly did you see this? You, you are play-acting. Virtue signalling. Who do you expect to convince, here?"

When this chapter was published, the idea of someone unironically using the term "virtue signaling" to deflect accusations of murder, after they've already confessed to murder, would have been some amusing cartoonish exaggeration. Reading this in the late spring of 2025, it just reads like an average conversation with an average conservative voter.

I guess it's not just in America that the "new age crystal-humper" types and the "literally Adolph Hitler" types have fused into a single type. I don't follow English news, but I trust the author when she implies that wicca tories are indeed a thing.

Well. In response to this...remember when I said Heather was having one of her possibly-natural-character-growth-but-probably-alien-meme-infection moments in this scene? Well, it ends up being a long moment. And an escalating one.

Katalepsis 6.6
"I've changed my mind. You don't get to live."

I moved before the others could react, before Raine could stop me, before the cold certainty abandoned me to doubt. It took only a split-second, clarity and speed born of indignant rage.

I reached out and grabbed Gillespie's wrist.

Out.

The equation, the one I knew so well, spun into place with a wrenching of my skull and a heaving in my guts. I grasped the dripping black levers of reality, and pulled hard.

Gillespie vanished.

Heather's done this before. She's also killed outright before. But in all previous cases, it was either immediate self-defence, or a pre-emptive strike against a dangerous opponent in a position to threaten her. She's never even come close to doing it in cold blood before.

But, now she has. Not out of urgency. Not out of need. Just out of sheer, irrepressible contempt for the person in front of her.

I don't know if Raine, who Heather describes lovingly as a "sociopath" at least once every other chapter, would have done that.

...Evelyn would have, to be fair. But. Looking at who Heather was in the first few chapters of Katalepsis, and at who she *thought* she was just a couple pages ago, it's pretty shocking.

Heather does actually end up bringing Catherine back to Earth after a few minutes. When she does so, though, Catherine is a coughing, half-unconscious wreck in soiled clothes and covered in alien slime. Clearly, something happened to her in the realm Heather sent her to, and I don't think Heather had any assurances that she would still be alive by the time she brought her back. It's lucky for their interrogation that she was.


I think I'll split it here.