Because her brother, Ian, is prone and crying, Millie feels cross; she’s already ten and super interested in castles. Mummy enters the living room, pivots over a yellow building block, like a chicken, and hoists him up by the armpits:

“Come on, you’re a big boy. There’ll be a maze and an adventure playground! You can watch television any day of the week–but can you see a castle?”

She carries him under one arm–a big bellied troll with a captured kid–and restrains him in the child-seat where he whimpers until the engine’s vibrations seem to hypnotize him.

The car flows into traffic, turns glacial and solidifies and the children both grow stolid in harmony. After the road has come to a standstill Millie watches Ian blink and nod.

Millie nods too, but, after a few seconds, she flinches awake with a sub-audible gasp. She’s certain she’s done a terrible thing: it was via a dream–but it’ll seem a child’s dream, a silly dream. Through the window: cars, lorries, and a cloud shaped like a hammer. Everything appears as it had a second before, but now she’s positive this is all a deception.

The castle itself is disappointing. It doesn’t look like a castle: no turrets, somewhat insipid crenellation. It looks more like a large mansion, or an enormous ape curled up in the sun, than a castle. There is, at least, a moat where they see black and white swans sloping back and forth in a coded draughts match beneath them as they queue on the drawbridge.

In the main hall they’re joined by four other families so there are now seven children and one of the mothers holds a fat infant. A man enters through a side door wearing a black fur coat and a collar decorated with roses. His voice is shrill and reedy; clearly some kind of courtier. At one point he brandishes a sword and asks Millie to hold it, so she can feel how heavy it is and know what kind of heft she’d need to stick any type of horned or fire-breathing predator with it. For a moment she’s visibly disappointed.

After the tour, they enter an outbuilding in search of a loo. The structure houses a cafeteria and Thy Giftshop which Mummy says they can explore–briefly–after the playground. To the left, opposite the shop, a door opens onto a flight of steps leading to a basement. There’s a sign above the door–“The Torture Museum”–written in big, dripping “monster” letters. To the right is an outrageous wax model fenestrated within a glass case. Millie understands this figure to be a kind of euphemism–not that she knows the word yet–for something un-presentable and, perhaps, too obscene to even imagine without irrevocably defiling some part of herself. She perceives it to be connected with her savior’s blood-striped brow, the iron through his wrists, and this vision flows neatly back to the dream in the car.

Ian appears puzzled by the figure while, for Mummy, the idea of such a place–for minors–is merely despicable. Yet she can’t unsee her daughter furtively eying the entrance. “Do you want to go in there?”–the whole question is netted in a sigh. Millie doesn’t, but nor does she want to show herself to be a coward, so she replies: “I’m not interested.” It’s the wrong excuse. Something is still implied. Mummy says, “Come on then.”

The playground’s center is a ship with a rope climbing frame representing sails. Millie clambers up quickly. She takes the crow’s nest and looks down at Ian who is hesitating at the bottom of the webbed chains that lead to the deck. Momentarily dormant, her thoughts return, again, to the dream in the car… She believes, although she’d never say so, that she’s “brilliant,” in some way or another. At times her thoughts are so vivid! Her parents have both said she has “promise.” Mummy has said her childhood is like a curtain that will one day draw back to reveal something truly grand. And yet sometimes, alone and unwatched, this optimism rolls over into dread: that, behind the curtain, there’ll be only a sad, crawling life awaiting her and it was this dread–so she begins to perceive–that had been the soil for her dream.

She recovers herself and climbs down to help her brother. Together they make the deck. It isn’t really such a hard climb for him. She reads, in his face, the satisfaction of one who first fears, then conquers, a height and she feels slightly proud of herself for her part. A little later he makes it down, unaided, and runs to Mummy who is waiting on a bench.  He’s thirsty and wants some juice. Mummy suggests Millie should try the maze by herself while Ian rests.

The walls are trimmed high enough that she can’t see over. Other children tear through, and in both directions, so it would be no use trailing them even if she wanted to cheat. Which she doesn’t. This is a maze for children, anyhow, so she’ll finish in…she’ll finish in under five minutes.

When she comes to her first dead end, a low voice huffs something in her ear like “HOY!” but, when she turns the corner, and looks left and right, she sees no adult. The forms of children running past her have become inscrutable even as they seem to have gained something in sheer physicality.

She tells herself she’ll be safe once she reaches the maze’s central goal, but there’s another dead end. She feels fingers around her heart, squeezing. Coldness seeps through her body along with an excruciating impression that the sky has risen higher above her and that the vacuum it leaves behind implies an oblique threat to her entire organism.

She returns to her mother, ghostly and near hyperventilating. Mummy looks aghast: Her daughter has never suffered a panic attack before.

“My goodness! What happened to you?”

“I think there’s something wrong with my heart.”

“Did you get lost?”

She takes Millie’s pulse. It’s racing. The girl realizes she has no way to recount what’s happened. As her mother leads her to the cafeteria for a hot chocolate and a “good sit down,” Millie is transfixed with shame and humiliation.

She recalls a time at the “Hope and Awakening”camp when the road was covered in rainwater and it was impossible to cross without stepping through a long, muddy puddle. The other campers had run through, laughing and splashing, but Millie had made the mistake of wearing her nice new trousers that day and she didn’t want to get them muddy. The other children mocked her for being scared of a puddle and somehow under the weight of her humiliation she found herself unable to say she wasn’t scared of the puddle; the problem was she didn’t want to ruin her nice new trousers. Now, in the cafeteria, the same censorship forestalls her explaining that the maze, for children, did not frighten her one bit.

During the drive home she sits in silence and reflects on her dream from the morning, replaying it again and again: A sheet of golden paper rose up to her then, with a silver quill that had appeared in her hand, she signed her name to the bottom. What did she sign for? It had all been so fast and she hadn’t been able to decipher the letters above her signature.

So, yes, it was a silly dream: the kind that might prod at the sleep of any preteen.

The following morning there’s a strange taste in her mouth. Objects in her room seem, at once, to loom at her, while at the same time they draw themselves away into abstraction. She heads downstairs in a mood of misery and inscrutable shame.

The next morning begins just the same but she feels cold at breakfast and, when she brushes her teeth, her whole skeleton shakes. There’s a tickling in her throat as if she’s swallowed a scrap of paper that won’t be dislodged no matter how rigorously she gulps. She drinks a tall glass of water but the obstruction remains. A dull ache makes itself apparent in her joints. She wonders if this is how arthritis feels in its early stages.

Mummy enters the girl’s room and beholds her daughter roseate with fever and shaking on the edge of the bed. The eyes are darker, tighter, and more staring than she’s seen them before and, sitting there, pressing her hands on her knees, her face gives the flinching impression of a fully adult madwoman. The dying mania of a syphilitic whore… that’s an image that slips into Mummy’s mind before being quickly banished into oblivion. Mummy tells her to get under the covers while she locates a thermometer. Later that morning the girl begins vomiting, followed by weak, sloppy diarrhea. As she’s lifted into the car, one thought consoles her: That her mother must now believe the panic attack, two days past, had been a prelude to this, a mere symptom, not a consequence of getting lost in a child’s maze.

She squints at a nurse’s silhouette, puzzled as to whether she’s hot or cold. There’s a confusion of mobile pains and momentary dreams and now a sensation of falling or collapsing. She’s lying somewhere dimly lit and implacable lights circle each other in the ceiling. She feels naked yet, when she looks down, she finds herself clothed. Then she realizes the skirt brushing against her thighs has been tailored from her own skin. It flows from her navel and frills at the hem. It tingles when she scratches it, as do her sleeves.

There’s a thud to her left and someone moans. When she turns, she sees the enormous, hairy back of a man, squatting. He’s attempting to hammer together strips of metal and wood, mechanically lifting and dropping his hammer. The contraption has no clear shape and the nails appear to be beaten in at random. As she rises, the figure circles round. His back is hunched and his head juts forward on a thick neck, like a cow’s or a horse’s. He bears expressionless goat eyes, a flat animal nose, and, on the sides of his skull, there are two small cavities in the place of ears. Below is a huge adipose torso, and a slim dog-like penis. The creature points with his hammer toward a bright space behind a curtain that is being drawn back at this moment, apparently under its own power, sparks flying out from behind it. He rears upright then struts to the clear space in clumsy, mincing steps that do not suit his ungainly form. Under the light, amid a shower of flickering stars, he squats again, and groans, and a bed appears from between his buttocks.

He gestures Millie towards it. She approaches–for she is indeed weary–and pulls back the heavy gray quilt. Beneath, she discovers that the bed is, after all, nothing but an agglomeration of corpses, each as naked as the creature itself. The figure nods and Millie climbs on. She lies on her back in the most comfortable position she can find–the hem of her skirt and her sleeves shocked by the leathery coldness of the bodies–and puts her hands on her chest lest she continue to touch any of these shapes with her fingertips. Her eyes fill with water and, in this posture, hundreds of years stream over her.

Early on, the bodies rot and suppurate and she sinks down gently among their bones. She sees undefinable plants with flower heads like beaks and trumpets spear upward through the rib cages and circle each other in the ceiling. Roach-like beetles that yap like hounds emerge and run up and down the stems. As the foliage grows denser, long armed and hairless grey apes swing between the branches; they examine the bones on the floor and gaze over Millie, but as she herself is only bones now they take little interest in her. Her skull is tossed back and forth a few times then they slink away through the leaves. Above, she sees hideous fruits, amassments of faces; some vague, some terrible. They shriek, chatter, squawk, trumpet, hum, groan, chirrup, and hiss. Eventually, one face appears at her side so close and offensive that, almost from indignation alone, she leans to it and hollers, causing one of the nurses to turn round in surprise.

Slowly objects come forward into familiarity; plastic curtain, pale green blanket… She feels a dull pain in her side. It was lucky she’d been outside. Had she been home who knows how long she would have had to wait for help. It was an ordinary fall but she’s always been fragile and now, at seventy six, her bones seem uncommonly brittle. A doctor comes over, briefly, and informs her she’s recovering nicely.

She takes a pod to her London flat and shuffles through the door to her bed. In this place long dead friends and relatives have started visiting her; sometimes she’s visited by unreal people too.

Millie, as her journals would confirm, studied history at the University of Canterbury. After graduating she moved to Brussels where she taught English for a little over a year. She dated a man who’d been her student but the relationship ended sourly and she returned to her parents’ house in the south of England.

She supported herself giving private English lessons for three years then moved to London where she taught English and History at a comprehensive school. She worked there for five years but made enemies with other members of staff. Finally, she quit and resumed teaching privately.

Over time, her teaching work became infrequent then disappeared. Translation devices and pedagogic technology had obviated the need for all but a handful of educators and she joined the tens of millions of the technologically redundant class. There was nothing special in this as automation and artificial intelligence had turned “having a job” into an elite boast, and not a boast an older woman, with unneeded experience, had much hope of making. She qualified for basic income payments and that has been enough to survive on.

The various cults that have sprung up are not a temptation. Millie can’t recall the moment she lost her faith except it happened during her mid-teens. She looked into herself and noticed, without any special feeling of upheaval, that she didn’t believe anymore and hadn’t, in earnest, for some time. What a lot of trouble had been caused, back then, for herself and her family, because an imaginative and impressionable girl had fallen for an over-literal dream. That golden paper! That stupid sparkly quill! She remembers them vividly–they now seem less the work of a devil than of Walt Disney (a subtle distinction, she’ll add). She wonders if her sickness had been brought on by mental distress, but she accepts this is unknowable. The deafness in her left ear, however, the memento of her childhood illness, that’s real enough. Perhaps the fear had expanded from nothing, but… anyway, the rest of her is trailing the ear into that oblivion now. She’s almost impatient for this process to reach its apotheosis; for the point at which every extraneous part of herself will have receded and just a few memories, her bright and immortal ones, will burn on: Among these, she’s certain her dream from in the car will remain, for all its foolishness, vivid enough to outlive her even. Such tenacity!

– Richard Alured