The Thousand-Eyed Crow (#Wattys2020)

Chapter 8 (Hell is No One)

Sighing, Caoimhe leaned their head back and stared at the ceiling, their eyelid heavy on their one remaining eye, where their other eyelid hung, solemn and alone, over where another eye could have been if they were someone else. There was no way of knowing how much time had passed, as the light outside had not changed in all the time they had sat inside their living room. Upon their attempt to open the door to go outside, the wind had picked up sand and it had become so powerful that it had slammed the door shut, and not before tossing sand all over the inside of the flat, as well as all over Caoimhe. They had shaken off as much of the sand as they could, but each stray movement would yield a lone granule of it at random intervals.

The silence that shrouded them was tiring and felt as if it drained the energy from their body. There was no activity around them and there was not much they could do to entertain themselves. Trying to change the environment by imagining things did not work. Somehow, the only things Caoimhe could cause to appear were things that were already in the flat, which were not many things. They had managed to find an old hologram device but, unsurprisingly, there was no internet access, most likely because there was no connection to anything in the outside world from inside of their mind.

Caoimhe opened their eye and turned on the screen of the hologram device, pressing on one of the game applications and playing another round of solitaire before closing the application again. They groaned and tried fruitlessly to open the browser, and was surprised to see that this actually worked after all their previous attempts.

"It took you long enough..." Caoimhe muttered to themselves as they rolled their eyes and lay down on the cool floor.

At first, the browser page looked normal, nothing flashy: it was just the simple news website with headlines and images, as was usual for this sort of website. But upon closer inspection of the images, Caoimhe noticed a trend: they were all images of them, in various scenarios and environments – there was an image of Caoimhe walking out of a prison with a crowd of prisoners with them; there was another image of them on a bridge crossing the Thames, and many other images. The headlines ranged from "You have liberated the prison" and "You are leading the believers to take back the capital".

Looking up from the screen and staring at the wall ahead of them, Caoimhe went pale. They hoped this was not what they thought it was. Slowly, Caoimhe's gaze returned to the screen and they checked the most recent timestamp. 16:24 Friday, 26 February 2147.

Days had passed, and yet Caoimhe had not had the chance to sleep in all of this time, yet they felt no tiredness aside from the mental kind that weighed upon their back like the load of a mule. It had been bright in all the time they had been in their mind, and that lack of evidence of the passage of time was part of the torture itself. Caiomhe scrolled through the news website once more and was not surprised when every single entry was about them and their activities. They covered their mouth with the back of their hand, eyebrows knitting together in concern.

With each headline Caoimhe read, they felt progressively more sick to their stomach. It had been violating enough to have their body taken over and to be relegated to the dark recesses of their mind in a place they could not leave; it had been almost worse to know that whatever it was that was wearing their body as a meat suit was also going about committing crimes and causing complete chaos.

The news page refreshed itself and as soon as Caoimhe saw the image of themselves staring back at them, smiling widely with their one eye almost bulging from its socket, they flung the hologram device at the wall as hard as they could, as if instinctively. It clattered to the floor in several pieces.

Shrieking loudly into the air, knowing no one would hear them, Caoimhe banged their hand against the table in front of them and momentarily could not feel the result of the impact. They shoved the table aside and tossed the cushions from the floor in every direction. If they had to sit there for another moment and see the person who was not them continue to do these things, they would not be able to handle it. And if they had to sit there alone for one more second, they had half a mind to blow their brains out.