The roof at Thornfield vanished and was replaced by the interior of the abandoned church where Spike and I were about to do battle with the Supreme Evil Being that was stuck in his head. It had happened for real a few weeks ago; the memories were still fresh – it was all chillingly lifelike.
'I am the curator in this museum,' said Aornis as we moved again to the dining room at home when I was eight, a small girl with pigtails and as precocious as they come. My father – before his eradication, of course – was carving the roast and telling me that if I kept on being a nuisance I would be made to go to my room.
'Familiar to you?' asked Aornis. 'I can call on any of the exhibits I want. Do you remember this?'
And we were back on the banks of the Thames, during my father's abortive attempt to rescue the two-year-old Landen. I felt the fear, the hopelessness squeezing my chest so tight I could barely breathe. I sobbed.
'I can run it again if you want to. I can run it for you every night for ever. Or I can delete it completely. How about this one?'
Night came on and we were in the area of Swindon where young couples go with their cars to get a bit of privacy. I had come here with Darren, a highly unlikely infatuation. He loomed close to me in an amorous embrace in the back of his Morris 8. I was seventeen and impulsive – Darren was eighteen and repulsive. I could smell his beery breath and a post-adolescent odour that was so strong you could have grabbed the air and wrung the stench from it with your bare hands. I could see Aornis outside the car, grinning at me, and through the laboured panting of Darren, I screamed.
'But this isn't the worst place we could go.' Aornis grinned through the window. 'We can go back to the Crimea and unlock memories that have been too terrifying even for you. The suppressed memories, the ones you block out to let you carry on during the day.'
'No,' I said. 'Aornis, not the charge—!'
But there we were, in the last place I wanted to be, driving my APC into the massed field artillery of the Russian army that August afternoon in 1973. Of the eighty-four APCs and light tanks that advanced into the Russian guns, only two vehicles returned. Out of the five hundred and thirty-four soldiers involved, fifty-one survived.
It was the moment before the barrage began. My CO, Major Phelps, was riding on the outside as he liked to do, foolhardy idiot that he was, and to my left and right I could see the other armoured vehicles throwing up large swathes of summer dust from the parched land. We could be seen for miles. The first salvo was so unexpected that I thought the munitions in a light tank had simply ignited by accident; the whine of a near-miss made me realise that it hadn't. I changed direction instantly and started to zigzag. I looked to Phelps for orders but he was slumped in the hatch; he had lost the lower part of his arm and was unconscious. The barrage was so intense that it became a single rumbling growl, the pressure waves thumping the APC so hard that it was all I could do to keep my hands on the controls.
I read the official report two years later; there had been forty-two guns trained on us from a thousand yards and they had expended three hundred and eighty-seven rounds of high-explosive shells – about four to each vehicle. It had been like shooting fish in a barrel.
Sergeant Tozer took command and ordered me to an APC that had lost its tracks and been thrown upside down. I parked behind the wrecked carrier as Tozer and the squad jumped out to retrieve the wounded.
'But what were you really thinking about?' asked Aornis, who was beside me in the carrier, looking disdainfully at the dust and oil.
'Escape,' I said. 'I was terrified. We all were.'
'Next!' yelled Tozer. 'Stop talking to Aornis and take us to the next APC!'
I pulled away as another explosion went off. I saw a turret whirling through the air, a pair of legs dangling from beneath it.
I drove to the next APC, the shrapnel hitting our carrier almost continuously like hail on a tin roof. The survivors were firing impotently back with their rifles; it wasn't looking good. The APC was filled with the wounded and as I turned round something hit the carrier a glancing blow. It was a dud; it had struck us obliquely and bounced off – I would see the yard-long gouge in the armour plate the following day. Within a hundred yards we were in relative safety as the dust and smoke screened our retreat; pretty soon we had passed the forward command post where all the officers were shouting into their field telephones, and on to the dressing areas beyond. Even though I knew this was a dream, the fear felt as real as it had on the day, and tears of frustration welled up inside me. I thought Aornis would carry on with this memory for the return run to the barrage, but there was clearly a technique behind her barbaric game; in a blink we were back on the roof at Thornfield Hall.
Acheron carried on where he had left off; he was looking at me with a triumphant expression.
'It may come as some consolation,' he carried on, 'that I planned to bestow upon you the honour of becoming Felix9— Who are you?'
He was looking at Aornis.
'Aornis,' she said shyly.
Acheron gave a rare smile and lowered his gun.
'Aornis?' he echoed. 'Little Aornis?' She nodded and ran across to give him a hug.
'My goodness!' he said, looking her over carefully. 'How you have grown! Last time I saw you you were this high and had barely even started torturing animals. Tell me: did you follow us into the family business or did you flunk out like that loser Styx?'
'I'm a mnemonomorph!' she said proudly, eager for her sibling's approval.
'Of course!' he said. 'I should have guessed. We're in that Next woman's memories right now, aren't we?'
She nodded enthusiastically.
'Attagirl! Tell me, did she actually kill me? I'm only here as the memory of me in her mind, after all.'
'I'm afraid not,' said Aornis glumly, 'she killed you well and good.'
'By using treachery? Did I die a Hades?'