She said she remembered the beginning and the end and it was the memories in the middle that are missing, though obviously she doesn’t like to think about that night. She said “I remember this and this isn’t what happened.”
When I get to that part in my reread I’ll quote it exactly in this comment, what a pity that work gets in the way of my reading!
The first time we see her nightmare play out:
Siobhan found herself in a diaphanous nightgown, her small brown feet peeking out under the hem, her toes dirty and soles calloused. She looked at her hands, noting their equally small—childlike—size, and the fact that she was having trouble counting exactly how many fingers she had. “Oh no,” she muttered. Or maybe just thought. She couldn’t quite be sure because her lips hadn’t moved.
She was in her childhood house where she had stayed with Grandfather, in front of the tower room with the lead door. Her hand reached toward the doorknob and twisted, then pushed the heavy door open.
Siobhan kept her eyes down, her long dark hair falling forward to obscure her vision at the peripherals. Her bare feet passed over the sticky, red, fungus-like tendrils that had crept their way over the stone floor. They pulsed gently under her, warm and alive compared to the cool stone.
Though she tried to stop, or at least to slow herself, she walked to the center of the room, catching the edge of a mirror frame in her vision. She tried not to look, but she wasn’t in control. The mirror, a rectangle taller than it was wide, was framed in smoldering brimstone, carved in the shape of twisted and elongated limbs, with disjointed fingers poking out here, a knee bent backwards there at the corner, and horribly mangled human feet at the bottom, as if they had been crushed under the monstrous weight of the mirror.
Siobhan’s heart began to beat rapidly, dizzying her and leaving the edges of her vision blurry and dreamlike. Her eyes dragged themselves up to the reflection, which showed not her, but a window looking out over a surreal landscape that had been painted in muted earth tones and fog.
In the distance, hunched forms shuffled. As she stared, they became more defined.
“No, no,” she pleaded, trying to wrench her focus away.
As if in answer to her desperate prayer, her eyes began to move again. But not away. Up—toward the top of the frame—and she couldn’t stop them and she couldn’t look away, but she knew that whatever she saw was going to be horrible, going to break her heart and wrench open her mind. She tried to scream, but what came out were just muted whimpers and whines, like a wounded animal.
Finally, the smoldering brimstone face at the top of the mirror came into view, bound into the frame.
Siobhan tried not to recognize it.
She reached up, ready to claw at her own eyes to stop herself from seeing. Just as her fingertips dug into their slimy wetness, she woke.
A little bit about her antipathy to mirrors:
But that entry linked to a story in the illustrated book of stories, Enough Yarn to Last the Night: A Collection of Myths from the Life of a Man with Many Names. The illustration at the start of the tale was a rather horrifying image of a man standing in front of a large, gilded mirror. He had looked away, seemingly momentarily distracted, but his reflected image remained staring straight at him.
Something about the image made the hair on Sebastien’s arms and the back of her neck rise. She had skipped over reading this tale when the note in the other book had pointed her to it the first time. Sebastien had always had a somewhat instinctive distrust of mirrors. Like other children feared what their toys did in the dark with no one around to watch them move, Siobhan had feared what happened in the mirror world when she was not looking.
And this particular bit from the story of Myrddin:
Another illustration showed both sides of the world, one bright, and one shadowed. The reflection of a puddle was the fulcrum between light and dark. Myrddin’s back was to the puddle, while his reflection had jumped and dived toward the shallow liquid like someone diving off a cliff into the ocean.
If this hadn’t been a child’s tale, anyone doing that would have concussed themselves and maybe even broken their own neck. But in the story, Myrddin’s reflection splashed through the ephemeral barrier between them and rose up behind Myrddin. It had left the puddle empty, reflecting everything but Myrddin himself.
There are definite parallels here - Siobhan has also jumped through the barrier between worlds and now the real world is empty as she’s taken her entire self - shadow and all - into another place.
And now for the bit where she talks to the nightmare:
Siobhan stood in a place she remembered well from childhood. She was in Grandfather’s house, standing before a half-open door. Not the metal one, from the magical workshop in the tower, but the wooden door with the warped board that left a little crack just at eye height.
So this is a different memory to the previous nightmare which was the metal door to the tower.
When she was a child, she would peek through it into Grandfather’s room sometimes. But now, she was too tall and would have to crouch down to see through it. ‘At least I am not thirteen again,’ she thought, though the sheer relief of that confirmation seemed strangely powerful. ‘Am I often thirteen, in my dreams?’ She couldn’t remember.
Siobhan usually imagined her nightmares as a kind of physical mass locked away in her head. A slimy, putrid, hungry liquid. Normally, it was contained perfectly, but in sleep—in dreams—she was unguarded, the dream-space undefined enough that the box keeping it all sealed up tight became undefined, too. And so, the nightmare-stuff had a chance to leak out. If she could wake quickly enough, most of it would get sucked back into the box as reality reasserted itself, leaving only the lingering terror and flashes of strange imagery.
Now, though, without the anchoring of her physical body, things normally confined to dreams started to leak out. Siobhan had no need to peek through the door. She already knew what was on the other side. ‘My mind could have conjured almost any other scene to keep me from the insanity of sensory deprivation,’ she lamented. ‘But of course it always comes back to this.’
So this is a real scene from her memory that she’s repeated many times before.
Siobhan braced herself and opened the door. The warding medallion was there on the table, with all of Grandfather’s artificery gadgets and lights and lenses that helped him use tools sized for a little bug. His gift for her, not finished yet.
Grandfather’s corpse was there, too, half his head a hollow. Brain matter and blood—so much blood—pooled in front of the fireplace, its warm flames reflecting off the dark, placid surface. Just as she had in reality, Siobhan moved past the corpse to the table, picking up the medallion.
So we know this happened, she said this occurred in reality and this is how she got her medallion.
She examined it for a moment, feeling the weight of it in her hand, the moldings of glyphs and symbols on its surface, so vivid despite it all being a figment of memory and imagination. Something rustled behind her, and she spun around, heart leaping in her chest.
Grandfather’s corpse had sat up. One of his eyes was missing, blown away and leaving only an empty, ruined socket. The other watched her with a bright golden iris staring out from a blood-red sclera. “It’s not complete, you know. I never had the chance to finish it.”
This is the part where the nightmare interferes.
Siobhan’s knees trembled, and she clenched the medallion in one fist so hard her knuckles whitened, the other bracing against the desk to help support her weight. “This didn’t happen.”
Grandfather tilted his head to the side, letting her see the hollow, meaty cavern that made up the remaining half of his skull. “How would you know? You do not remember anything.”
Her voice cracked. “I remember this part.”
“You should remember more,” he said, his eye suddenly intense, almost glowing against the shadows of his face, the fireplace behind him giving him a halo of brightness. “If you just remembered, you could fix things, don’t you think? You would know why you have these nightmares, and maybe they would stop.”
“I know well enough why I have them.” She did, even if she tried never to think of it or the thoughts connected to it. She knew well enough, and could guess at the rest.
This is the bit that clues us in to the fact that Siobhan is burying things in her own mind. Part of her suppression survival tactic.
Grandfather’s expression drew together cruelly, his mouth twisting in a sneer. “Do you truly? Do you think I had your best interest at heart by this time? I’d already gone quite insane. I harmed you, and yet you cling to the wound like it is a gift.”
Siobhan shuddered. “You are not my grandfather. I remember this night, and this did not happen. You’re…the nightmare. Or a piece of it, trying to leak out of the box.”
His sneer slipped away too quickly to be natural, and he laughed lightly, almost seeming proud. “It seems he raised no imbecile. You are correct, more or less. He did not have enough time to do a perfect job, and he never expected his patchwork solution to have to last this long. He had planned for you to go to one of his acquaintances who would settle the matter for good. But you forgot about that part, and he was too incoherent to realize he needed to repeat it for you. So you let things stay like this, trying your little patchwork solutions that are about as effective as using your finger to plug a leak in a dam.”
From this you can see that the nightmare is not to be trusted. It lies easily and you can’t trust the next statement since the previous was full of lies and it only dropped it because it was challenged.
Grandfather—or rather the thing wearing his body—lurched forward, rising to his feet like a puppet on strings. “You can’t keep depending on the seal to hold. It’s cracking, my little hazelnut,” he said, using the term of endearment only her grandfather had called her. “And it’s going to fail soon. You need to take control. ‘You control your mind, it doesn’t control you.’ Remember?”
“You just want me to let you free,” she whispered. “But I won’t. I never will.”
He lurched forward a couple more steps, his face too hidden in shadows to make out the features except for that gold, glowing eye. “What do you think is in the box? Aren’t you curious? Aren’t you afraid? Don’t you hear me scratching from the inside?”
Menacing.
Then she reflects on her conversation with the nightmare:
Siobhan didn’t believe the things it had told her about Grandfather having gone insane by that time, wanting to hurt her. Grandfather had died to save her. And then the Red Guard had come in and razed the entire village to the ground. They had to, to destroy the infection. And Siobhan had spent the last seven years now doing her best not to think about it.
That still seemed safest, especially now that she had seen a glimpse of what lay beyond the seal. Siobhan had recognized that golden eye, and it had not belonged to Grandfather. His eyes had been a rather non-distinct blue. And she feared that pulling on the memory of where such an eye really came from would lead to other memories, ones that should stay gone.
She knew the beginning, and she knew the end. Only the middle was gone, and that did not feel safe enough.
When the nightmare takes over her shadow she has flashes of memory:
Except it wasn’t totally inconceivable. Those glowing amber eyes were familiar, and for a moment, a flash of blood and brain matter pooling out in front of the fire came to mind.
That was followed by a blink-fast vision of an egg with a yolk made of blood. And then, even faster and on the edge of passing too quickly for her mind to grasp, a doorway filled with hungry sky.
Blood and brains in front of a fire is memory. But I wonder if the blood yolked egg and the doorway to the sky are as well. Because it puts me in mind of how Siobhan used to dream of flying as a child and how she couldn’t remember that dream ending, just one day it wasn’t there. That could just be a normal thing with moving on from childhood fancies…or she was scared by what she saw in the sky in the mirror and it killed her desire to fly but she doesn’t remember so all she has is an end to the dream.
It makes me more inclined to believe these are things she actually saw rather than visions given by the nightmare which has already taken over her shadow.
A thought passes through my mind - how did the nightmare kill people? Did it frighten them to death? Did it make them live out horrifying situations and kill other people?
Could Siobhan, under the control of the nightmare, have killed her grandfather? Perhaps before the spell to lock it in took full effect? Or perhaps her horror at the situation made it take effect - after all, her mind is a steel trap which could make it very hard to remove all ties to a memory without her actively working to suppress it.
The conversation:
She could still sense something from it, the way it noted the jump of the muscles in her jaw and throat, tracking every involuntary movement with a mean amusement. It was enjoying this. A surge of hatred, sickly sweet and cold, swept through her.
“Raaz didn’t quite catch everything,” it said. “Don’t you remember when we met? Don’t you remember my name?”
Siobhan did remember, even if she desperately wished she didn’t, but she wouldn’t say it. “If you’re sealed, how are you doing this? Taking over my shadow?”
Its amusement grew. “Well, you so kindly swallowed a beast core for me.”
She gasped. “You absorbed the power from the beast core? How?”
It continued as if she had not spoken. “And then you detached a piece of your existence for me, one conveniently not bound by the seal.”
This lends a bit to my theory that it might be lying about the beast core. Possibly.
Siobhan, for some reason, wanted to laugh. She tasted blood in her mouth.
“With the little cracks in said seal, it only took some effort and a bit of power to slip into the empty spot. I have to admit, I had such fun.”
“What would have happened if you ran out of the power you absorbed from that beast core while detached from me, inhabiting my shadow?” she asked.
“I would have had to slip into someone else’s shadow,” it said, but Siobhan felt its uncertainty and fear.
“I believe I would have had to consume the original shadow to take over. Quite difficult to do with a powerful thaumaturge.”
Siobhan did her best to keep her face from reacting. This, she was sure, was a lie. It had made that up. It had no idea what would happen if it ran out of power away from her, but it didn’t believe it would be anything good.
“Can you take control of my shadow again?”
“Any. Time. I. Want,” it said drolly.
That was a lie, too. “Can you tell what I’m thinking?”
“Of course. I live in your head, darling. I ride around inside your thoughts.” It wavered, though neither the light nor Siobhan had moved. “I know how afraid you are right now,” it whispered. “But there’s no need to be quite that terrified. I was very helpful tonight, don’t you think? I protected you, at the cost of using up that meager bit of power. I was useful, and the borrowing of your shadow caused you no harm.”
But she could still feel the truth of the monster, and the way its rapacious feeling of starvation only heightened at the dilation in Siobhan’s pupils and the pulse in her throat. It didn’t want to eat her, literally. It just wanted to kill her and use her corpse for its own purposes. Metaphorically. Maybe not her physical corpse. But something like that. And it was true that she was afraid, but if it had really been able to feel her emotions, it would have picked up on the hatred that she was barely tamping down. Her eyes burned with tears, but not from fear or despair. She simply felt too much loathing for one body to contain.
It was because of this thing that Grandfather was dead. Because of it, she had lost everything.
Siobhan swallowed and firmed her voice. “What do you want?”
Its voice warbled a little more, growing faint. “I want you to remember me,” it said.
Siobhan could feel its presence receding, leaving her natural shadow behind. Its eyes were the last to go, staring at her until the glow finally disappeared.
And another point on seals and memories:
Sebastien closed her eyes and tried to search through her own mind. ‘Is the seal broken, then? Or just imperfect?’ Because Grandfather had missed one of her memories, the one he didn’t know she had. Sebastien shied away from touching it or thinking about it too directly.