Chapter 15: I Lived In A Imagination?

Lian’s eyelids felt lined with sand, the room swimming faintly at the edges every time he blinked. Not again,he thought. Fuck.

The woman behind the doctor was changing.

Her stomach swelled outward, fast, stretching the dead skin tight until it split, and a small hand pushed through the tear first, fingers spreading against the air like it was feeling for something to hold onto. Then the rest of it followed, too slow for how fast the skin had torn, an infant working its way out of a body that had been whole and standing a second ago.

Lian couldn’t look away. His whole body had locked in place, staring.

"Lian?"

He heard the doctor’s voice from somewhere very far off, a sound arriving late to a room he’d already half left.

Is this it. The next thing. His thoughts came out flat, circling the same spot without going anywhere. He reached for Wen Ruo the only way he knew how, pushing the thought at her like a word shouted down a hallway. Can you hear me? Wen Ruo, can you hear me right now?

He’d seen this exact thing work a hundred times, in a hundred stories. The protagonist thinks hard enough, and somewhere the familiar answers, and it always just works.

"Lian!"

Nothing answered him. No voice in his skull, no flicker of her presence, nothing but the woman’s ruined body still standing there and a doctor’s voice getting louder without actually getting through.

I’m not the protagonist of anything. The thought had teeth in it, closer to disgust than fear. This isn’t a webtoon. Nobody’s listening. Maybe none of this is real. Maybe I really did just get jumped by some guys and none of the rest of it happened at all.

A hand closed on his shoulder and shook, hard.

"Lian." The doctor’s face swam into focus, too close, brow pulled tight. "Where did you go? You weren’t hearing a word I said."

"Sorry." His voice came out cracked. "I zoned out. Sank into my own head for a second."

"It’s alright." The doctor sat back, glancing at the chart. "Your son has some degree of concussive trauma," he said, to the parents now, not to Lian. "Could be the fall, could be blood loss, I don’t know the exact mechanism. The concerning part is he may see things that aren’t there. A person standing in a room. A creature that isn’t real. Rare, but it happens."

He almost laughed saying the next part. "He could tell you there’s a ghost in this very room and mean it."

"Ghosts are real," Jun said immediately, dead serious.

"Jun." Both their parents at once.

The doctor looked at Jun like he was mildly fond of him and mildly done with him at the same time. "Everything has a scientific explanation, kid. There’s no such thing as ghosts."

There is. The thought answered before he could stop it. You have no idea how wrong you are.

Then a second thought landed on top of the first one, heavier. Unless I hit my head and made all of it up. Or none of it happened and I’ve just been imagining a dead woman following me around for a day.

His head had gone heavy in a way he couldn’t place, a weight sitting behind his eyes that hadn’t been there a minute ago. He let it go. Aftermath, probably. Everything today qualified as aftermath now.

"Is it possible," he asked, before he could talk himself out of it, "to imagine something that never happened, but it feels like it took days? Like I actually lived through it. Felt everything."

The doctor considered that for longer than Lian expected.

"There’s an old case in sleep research," he said. "A man dreamed an entire trial and execution, start to finish, years of it. He woke up because the headboard of his bed had fallen and struck the back of his neck, the whole thing compressed into the half-second it took him to wake. It’s debated how literally to take it, but yes. The brain can compress something that feels like a lifetime into seconds."

He looked back at Lian, something sharper in his eyes now. "Why do you ask? Did you see something like that?"

Lian hesitated. Then he told him most of it: the tunnel, the thing that attacked him, waking up somewhere that didn’t make sense. He left out the book. He left out Wen Ruo. If none of it was real, he didn’t want to hand a doctor the one detail that might make them believe he needed more than pills and a few sessions of talking.

"It can be treated," the doctor said gently, to the room now, to the fear sitting plainly on his mother’s face. "Medication, some counseling. Most patients improve significantly."

His mother’s hand found his again, tight. "He’ll be okay?"

"He’ll be okay."

Lian looked past them all, toward the dark window across the room, glass turned mirror by the hour and the light. His own reflection stared back at him, hollow-eyed, and on each shoulder crouched something the size of an infant, unmoving, its eyes open.

One of them he recognized. The one that had torn free of her.

She was still there too, standing behind the doctor exactly where she’d been the whole time, watching Lian over his shoulder like nothing in the room had happened at all.

He didn’t say anything. Even if they were right about the concussion, even if none of this was real, some part of him already knew it wouldn’t matter what he told them.

He couldn’t tell anymore which answer scared him more.

Where did you go, Wen Ruo? he thought, once the doctor had turned back to the chart and nobody was watching his face. I’m scared.

She came through the window like there was no glass there at all, stepping out of the dark reflection into the room, feet not touching the floor.

"I felt something cut," she said. "My tie to you, gone, all at once. Then dark. Not sleep-dark. Somewhere-dark. I didn’t get a single second to work out where."