Translucent (19 page)

“Shawn!” Karena cried.
She ran right up to the rock he was sitting on, and pulled him into an embrace.

“Hey, Karena,” he said. Karena had expected his voice to be weak and faint, but instead he sounded strong, stronger than ever before. Pulling back, she could see that he even looked fine, and from his facial expression it was clear that nothing bad had been done to him. But Karena couldn’t believe that.

“What did they do to you?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “They didn’t kill
me
; they didn’t even hurt me.”

Karena looked around at all the Sandmen, who were standing as motionless and ramrod straight as ever before. “Then what’s this all about?” she asked.
She wasn’t going to just accept that this wasn’t actually an attempt to murder them both. After all this, it had been made fairly obvious.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But Karena, I want to ask you something. We’ve known each other for a long time. We’ve always talked to each other and relied on each other for support in these terrible times. But I want to know, did I really give you hope? Did I really help give you the courage to go on?”

“Yes,” Karena said, incredulous at why he was asking such a question now. Was it because he thought they were about to die?

Shawn smiled. “Good, that’s what I wanted to hear.”

Karena smiled too, weakly. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

For a moment, Karena seemed to forget about all the trouble around them and all the skeletal figures standing there, motionless. It was a happy moment, a moment full of hope. It was also a short moment.

Shawn stood up, brushed himself off, and hopped down from the rock.
He appeared to be quite content, a reaction Karena wouldn’t expect one to have in a situation such as this.

“We need to get out of here,” Karena said.
She hadn’t cared about surviving this before, but now that she knew that Shawn was alive, she had a whole new reason to continue.

At this, Shawn laughed. “Look around you,” he said. “There are billions and billions of Sandmen. We aren’t going anywhere.”

That was Shawn, always being rational. Karena was overjoyed to see that it was really him, that this wasn’t some sort of a ruse. But she
did have a look around her, and she knew that Shawn was right. There was no way they could get out of here with all of them covering every available surface in sight. They were to be killed after all. Looking back at Shawn, he still looked calm, as if nothing alarming was going on.

“Why aren’t you worried?” Karena asked.

“Why should I be?”

“What do you mean why should you be? We’re about to be killed by a bunch of Sandmen. You always panicked when you saw him before. You always were unable to remain calm, and now that we’re surrounded by 7 billion of them you aren’t worried at all!”

“We’re not about to be killed.” Shawn looked confident as he said this.

Karena looked around and then leaned in close. “Why? Do you have a plan?”

Shawn laughed
again
at this. “A plan? Technically, yes, I have a plan. But not the sort of plan you’re thinking of.”

“As long as it gets us out of here I’m fine. Or as long as it had the tiniest infinitesimal chance of us getting out of here it’s fine.”

“It doesn’t.”

“Well then how is it a plan that will benefit us?”

Shawn’s smile grew. Karena was beginning to feel
confused
. What was this plan of Shawn’s? Why was he seemingly so happy with it?
She had to admit that Shawn was acting a little strange. But then again, perhaps he just really knew what he was doing, and decided that it would be better not to tell her just then.

“You know that everyone on earth is the Sandman,” he said.

“Yes,” Karena replied. “We’ve been through this already.”

“And you know that you can’t trust anybody.”

“Yes, I know. That’s why I’ve always been wary of people, because I knew they weren’t real. Sure, I tried to save my parents one time, but that was mostly because I wanted to change the course of events in my personal timeline, like you suggested I do.”

“And you were very good at not trust
ing anyone, except for one mistake you made
. You trusted me.”

Karena was silent. What had Shawn just said? “Why is it a mistake to trust you, Shawn? What are you talking about?”

“Everyone on the earth is the Sandman. Well, I’m sorry to say Karena, that I was never real either. Well, I was, but Shawn wasn’t. I was the Sandman the whole time, just like everyone else.”

When one just finds out a piece of information that it both disturbing and shocking, and that will change the course of their lives even, it is usually described as being similar to being hit by a brick in the head, or having a bomb explode in you. But those are not accurate analogies at all. Actually, it is more like having a terrible infection grow inside you very slowly, and by the time you are actually willing to believe that you have it, it is too late, and the damage has been done. That was what Karena felt like hearing what Shawn was saying. She couldn’t believe him, and yet it was somehow true. The damage had been done.

She
shook her head slowly as she began to understand what Shawn was saying. “No,” she said, almost a whisper. “No, I don’t believe it. It’s not possible.”

“But of course it’s possible. You know that anything is possible for the Sandman. And now I should explain what I said about my plan. We aren’t going to be killed. We aren’t going to escape. You are going to be killed. And you won’t escape.”

Karena’s mind reeled faster than a gyroscope, and far more painfully.
She wasn’t going to believe what Shawn had just said. He was still
Shawn;
the same Shawn she’d known all her life. They’d…they’d tortured him, that was it. They’d forced him to say all this just to make her anxiety greater.
It wasn’t true, it couldn’t be true. There was no way. She filled her mind with reasons why is couldn’t be true.

“Think deeply, Karena,” said Shawn. “You know that it’s true. You’ve known it all along, in your subconscious. Only now is it being revealed to you and only now are you consciously aware of it.”

Karena wanted to ignore him, to block out all that he was saying, but she found that she could not help doing what he’d said, thinking deeply into her past. And she knew that it was true. Shawn had never been real. Shawn had been the Sandman all along, just like the rest of them.

“
No!
”
she screamed inside her mind, cutting off what she’d been thinking. She wasn’t going to accept what he was saying. Never in a million years. They could torture her forever and she still wouldn’t believe it.

And yet the voice that told her it was true continued to grow stronger and stronger until it was nearly overpowering. The other voice was losing its
power;
it didn’t have as much ground to stand on. Weakly, it tried to make comebacks, but it was failing. It was a tremendous battle in her brain, and the voice that said it was true won in the end. Karena fell on the ground, clutching her head as if the truth were physically hurting it.
And mentally it was tortuous, like her head had become a dead weight that was pulling her to the ground. Emotions filled her head to the point that it was impossible to think, impossible to even see through her eyes, which she realized were filled with tears. Shawn was alive, and now Shawn had betrayed her.

Shawn, though he was really the Sandman, watched all this, smiling. “And that’s not half of it,” he said. “I’m not just one of the Sandman’s many clones. I am the original, the one who you always saw in your dreams. I am the one who all these clones were made from. I am the master Sandman.”

“No!” Karena screamed, raising her head of the floor desperately.

“Yes. But I think you’ve had enough o
f this, would you not agree?
Tell me, should I go ahead and kill you now, or shall I wait until your mind fully comes to terms with what has just happened?”

Karena did not reply. She was
back on the floor,
clutching her head, trying to press into her ears so that she couldn’t hear what he was saying. But no matter how hard she pressed, his voice was always louder.
She didn’t want to talk to him, or answer his question, or ever see any sign of him ever again.

“You didn’t answer,” he pressed on. “Tell
me your answer.”

Karena let go of her ears, finding that it was pointless.
And she raised her head and glared straight into his young, toddler eyes. Eyes that would look innocent on anyone else in that body. “I hate you,” she spat.

“Good, that’s just the result I had hoped for. Now, will you please answer my question?”

“Just go ahead and do it,” she said.
She looked away from Shawn, and so she couldn’t see his facial expression
, but she was sure that
he
was smiling.

“Great,” he said. “And don’t worry. This will be entirely painless and once it is over you will find yourself in a better place than this one.”

Karena continued to look away
. “
Never will I talk to you.”

“Well, it’s a good thing you don’t have to.”

And suddenly, Shawn was right in front of her.
Shawn suddenly had a burst in size, and his limbs and torso stretched out right before Karena’s eyes. His face deformed, as did the rest of his body, and in seconds it was the Sandman standing before her. Shawn was gone forever. The last memory of him, the last hope that maybe he’d been there all along, that maybe he was lying when he’d said he was the Sandman, was vanquished. All that remained now was the Sandman standing before her.

“I said go ahead, already,” Karena said, looking away.

Nothing was said. Karena expected to feel something happen, to have herself killed in some way, but nothing happened. There was no change in anything. Karena waited for a while,
but still she was not killed. Time seemed to drag on, taking longer than it ever had before to pass.

Finally, she glanced up at him. He was still standing there, motionless.
And then, as if he
had been waiting for her
to look at him, he reached into the pocket of his practically see-through clothes and pulled
out the hourglass. Simultaneously, all the other Sandmen mimicked his movements.
They reached their long, bony fingers up to the glasses. Karena shut her eyes again, knowing what was coming, what sound she would be hearing next.

Clink. Clink. Clink.

Violet swirled around her. She hadn’t opened her eyes, and yet somehow they were open and she could see the vortex swirling around her. The destroyed city had disappeared, and so had all the Sandmen. Was this how they were going to kill her? This was exactly like what had happened all those times before. What was going on?

And then, darkness.

Karena expected to find that she was dead and thus couldn’t move any of her limbs. Yet somehow
she could. And somehow she appeared to be
lying on something soft. Wa
s she really dead? Was this what
death felt like?

But she knew she couldn’t be. Taking breath into her lungs, she felt far too alive for that. And it was then she realized that she’d been here before, to this very place before. Multiple times. This was the room where she woke up every time she started over. This was the nursery of her nightmares.

She cried out. She didn’t know why, it was just that it was so surprising to her to find that she was not really dead, that she was merely starting her life over again. It was surprising, but more
than anything it was terrifying
.
To think that she would have to go through everything, her whole life, another time, and now without Shawn. With her last hope destroyed. She had hoped so desperately that she would be killed then and there. But now she realized
that it would never end.
He’d said that he would kill her, but perhaps killing just meant making her start over again.
Even though this was far worse than death.

Her parents came rushing into her room. Karena normally was annoyed with them when they did this, but this time, she let her father pick her up and comfort her. She allowed her crying to be soothed to the point where she could con
trol it.
She allowed herself to become a baby again. After all, what else was there to do?
She had hardly had any comfort in any of her lives, and now she realized that she needed it.

Everything disappeared again. The nursery that had been around her vanished in the same swirling vortex that
had been enveloping her before, along with her father who’d been holding her.
Looking down, she saw that her limbs had all vanished and that she could feel nothing as she floated through the oblivion.
All her emotions, all the pain of what had just happened, seemed to be suddenly gone for a moment, as if it had been swept away in the violet along with her body. She felt no pain, but she felt nothing pleasant either.
She could still remember Shawn, but for some inexplicable reason she didn’t care.
For just a short period of time she was surrounded by the strange shapes of purple and there was nothing at all that she could feel. It was somehow different than the other times this had happened. She knew that when this was over, she wouldn’t be a baby. Would she be dead? Probably. But there was no telling yet.

And then something came into focus. At first, nothing was clearly visible. But then, as she felt the violet fading away, things were still not clearly visible. She could see, that was for certain, but she couldn’t see very well. Everything around her seemed to be obscured by some sort of fog. It wasn’t like any sort of fog she’d encountered before, however. It was like it made everything blurry and confusing rather than entirely blocking it.
And as soon as this blurry vision came back, the pain came back too. It hadn’t gone away, much to her dismay. She didn’t think it would ever go away.

But where on earth was she? She wasn’t in the bed, because she had grown used to waking up with the feel of soft sheets beneath her
and wooden bars surrounding her
. That much was for certain. But she couldn’t’ imagine where else she could wake up. Was she in the ruined city? Looking around once again, all she could see were vague outlines without recognizing anything.

She decided to try moving. Her limbs, however, did not seem to be connected to her in any way that was familiar. When she tried to raise her leg, she found that she had no real leg, but could feel several different tendrils rising from the area where her leg should be before she found that they were restrained.
She tried to move all different parts of her body, and she found that she could move limbs that hadn’t existed before, such as arms on top of her head and arms coming down from her stomach. It was most peculiar, but Karena had soon realized that all these limbs were restrained in some way, bound in the position they were in save for slight movements she was able to make.

Karena had no idea for the life of her what was going on, and she felt the first pangs of panic. Was she dead? Had the Sandman killed her after all? Desperately, she tried to thrash about wildly, like when she had been taken by all the Sandmen and had tried to escape. Except this time, it wasn’t as easy. No matter how much she tried to get her strange new body free, there was no way she could do it. She was completely and utterly trapped.

Karena bit her lip. Or at least she tried to bite her lip, only to find that she had no lip, or indeed no mouth. This whole thing
was ridiculous. So instead of trying to do anything that seemed familiar to her, as it seemed that nothing was familiar to her any more, she decided to just wait this out and see if something happened. She was in no way uncomfortable, she was just
infuriated
with the situation she was in.

Karena stood still, looking around her and, once more, trying to make ou
t any recognizable shapes in this
bizarreness. There were none. She could feel something pulsing inside of her, but it didn’t feel like a heart. This was the Sandman’s doing. There was no one else who would have any reason to do something like this to her.
Indeed, she had never even known anyone else.
She realized then that this must be some other trick of his, and probably the strangest one yet. He had put her into a new body. It seemed impossible, but she had no other explanation. Shawn had done this to her. The thought made her want to gag, even though she realized that she couldn’t do that without a mouth. Instead, she went back to looking around her and standing still.

I
t seemed that waiting it out was the right thing to do, in fact, the only thing to do, because some minutes later she heard a strange sound like a hissing. It sounded mechanical, as if it were some sort of pipe letting out steam, except that this sounded cleaner somehow. The sound continued, and Karena began to see that the fog that had been surrounding her was slowly beginning to fade, allowing her to begin to be able t
o see more clearly. And she could see
that she was in a very small enclosed space.

It appeared to be a sort of glass chamber, except that the glass was very
blurry and translucent
,
much like the material that had made the Sandman’s hourglass
. All around her there was
an assortment of wires that were attached to the wall of the chamber, and she appeared to be crammed right in the middle of all this.

The hissing sound stopped, and now the fog was completely gone.
Another sound started, and this sound didn’t sound like anything she’d ever heard before. It was rather quiet, and above all is sounded sleek and clean. Karena was soon able to see that the sound was coming from in front of her as she saw the wall in front of her slide out and open, revealing the space beyond it.

There wasn’t much really to say about the space. It was a long hallway that was lit, though Karena could not tell
where the light was coming from, as there didn’t appear to be any light strips on the ceiling or elsewhere.
All that appeared to be in the hallway were more and more containers like the one she was in, identical in every way. She could not see inside the containers, but she assumed there must be other people inside them. What was this place?

All of a sudden, the wires all around her detached themselves from the walls of the container and she felt herself falling forwards, out of the cubicle.
All the wires that had been inside it tumbled out after her so that she was caught in a giant web or them. Karena tried to stand up, but that proved to be harder than it normally would be. As she’d discovered before, she couldn’t manipulate her movements in any way that seemed normal to her, and so she found herself flopping around on the floor rather than successfully standing up.
Terrified, Karena’s movements became frantic and hurried as she tried in vain to untangle herself.

Then, she had a thought. In horror, Karena looked down at the cords around her. She tried to raise her legs in the air, but instead of a leg, a
n ugly
bundle of cords
and wires
rose into the air. Somehow she had control of them. Which meant that somehow, she
herself
had
literally
become a bundle of cords.