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It feels as if the air temperature has dropped below baseline, as if a chill has begun to permeate Grace Field House and its surroundings ever since Mama’s declaration of the next shipment. Norman has always been sensitive to the cold, and when he was younger he would get sick around winter. Winter hasn’t yet come, however – they’re on the cusp.
He won’t live to see it.
If he were being kind to himself, he would say he made that decision when he saw the monstrous cliff, the drop into a featureless abyss. He doesn’t make a habit of that, however, and so he has to admit that any ideas of escaping with the rest were only half-baked, and once he saw Minerva’s pen, gone forever. Like his nightmares of winter.
Norman slows his pace through the forest to a stop. It had been a gradual thing, since he saw the cliff--a desperate, lung-burning run that became a slowing jog that became a tired skulk. The meagre heat energy generated by the exertion is already leaving his body. He can feel it go now, by the moment, with the bone-rattling breeze that racks him. Norman gently turns back to see the low fence he had vaulted over not a minute prior. If he were to say he still had options, though, he would be lying to himself. He has to rely on the one thing left to trust: his reason.
Even as he stands alone, his lungs burn. Not from the running, but from the coursing of terror through his small form, from his shaky legs to his trembling fingertips. His heart beats as if it will pulse upwards through his body, choking up his oesophagus and into his dry mouth. There, he can’t help being pulled back to a time that feels so long ago.
The cold reminds him of a dark night, the evening air clinging to him, Emma with him as they ran up the hill, through the carefully cropped grass, Grace Field House growing farther behind them. The chill had bitten through his thin sleeves then as it does now, and they had wandered into the shade of the gate like the monster going past the threshold.
Seeing the drab clamminess of his sister’s dead skin--her limp, ragdoll-dream limbs and eyes like glass bulbs--had been the icicle through his heart, the damage that did its best to break apart this once-failing body from the inside.
For all his attempted empiricism, Norman discerned the existence of a soul that night. A corpse is infinitely more than a person unmoving. The difference can’t be justified. The loss can’t be understood simply by the bioelectricity fading into nothing, the neurons burning out, the beginnings of autolysis. He can’t comprehend the moment when a person could become a corpse .
That’s where the descent down the rabbit hole began, a stereotype of madness being the only way he can describe this world. An engine he has always been a cog in, unable to see the greater machinations surrounding him, the true purpose. Still incoherent in so many ways, this mechanical wonderland, and one which he can’t take apart to understand.
Now, another breeze rattles Norman and he takes a great breath, letting in the cold as if his insides will acclimate to it. Vaguely, his body moves down to sit on a tree stump, his eyes gazing out into the forest without seeing as his mind works through it all.
As he has descended further and further down, though, he has had companions that both helped achieve and detracted from his goals – helped him through the logic, the investigations, yet trying to pursue their own paths.
Ray was, and somewhat remains, a perfect card held to his chest. Six years of living in this world, beyond the smokescreen, is experience that Norman doesn’t take lightly. At the same time, however, the dread that had built in his gut before confronting Ray, alone in the early evening, had burst from a simple understanding of fear. The icicle that pierces your chest when you discover the truth, which has been embedded in the cracks of Ray’s sternum for six long years.
He often struggles with empathy. Even with Ray acting, however, he could see the fear that lurks within.
Most importantly, Norman loves . He loves his family, the people around the long-stretching dining tables at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, clamouring together in a chorus of voices he can’t tune out. The energy abuzz in the high-roofed hall, the clatter of knives and forks against plates.
And Emma and Ray – their contrasting strengths are dazzling in their own, different rights. The overwhelming warmth of the girl who refuses to let her family die and the time-altered steel of someone who has very little left to lose. Norman only lets himself be changed by the heat of Emma’s determination, lets himself become soft and bent into shape, to build a boat made out of mud, because it’s a heat he needs to grasp from outside and within himself. Because Norman loves, but not like Emma, and he only wishes he could even as he settles for an approximation.
He only hopes everything he has is enough to bring that impossible dream alive. He needs to utilise the melting heat and the cold steel and, most importantly, every aspect of himself.
Every aspect of himself. It’s what he decided, his small body sitting on his plush bed, legs curled up to his chest and trembling hands pulling at his hair, it will have to be enough .
Time passed in a way Norman had never experienced before, during those few weeks after he passed the threshold. The grounding of his life used to be the schedule, the focus that came with each regimented activity working wonders for his mind, being prepared to slip into whatever mindset when he had forewarning.
After the revelation, the clock ticked and stuttered, even winding backwards or jolting suddenly to different parts of the day, a new kind of timeframe imposed upon him that swam unpleasantly in his mind. The schedule was a distraction, the focus escape .
He could feel himself losing grip of the seconds, every time he wasn’t thinking of escape. Every moment his body trembled too viciously, enough for his throat to ache and his heart to beat hard enough to be spat out, he had to claw his way back into reasoning. A hair away from losing everything.
The icicle and the heat, the cold steel, soft and bent, frigid air, the clock, the rabbithole to the mechanical wonderland, and he loves . At that time, all of it ran through his mind like a razor with too many sides, tearing at the walls, images brought into and carved away from the tangled whole in the desperate attempt to find the true form. The trembling of his body threatened to shake it all apart, leaving him never able to make out the truth.
When Mama told him his shipment date had been set, the force of keeping it in nearly tore it all apart. The only thing that grounded him was the focus of Don and Gilda’s shock, Ray’s sharp denial, and the agony in Emma’s eyes he had tried to stamp out time and time again. The agony of a physical wound as well as an emotional one, something to focus on, a real problem to fix.
After Mama left the infirmary, Norman made sure Emma was comfortable even when incoherent from the pain, and when her sharp mind surfaced long enough to fully comprehend the situation, Norman went to fetch a glass of water.
Alone, the bonds that held him together snapped, and as a sharp rush of water filled the glass in his hand, Norman collapsed from the parallel force of his terror.
He said he would utilise himself. He would do anything. But.
I want to live.
For a second, that multi-faceted attempt at a reasonable solution was buried under the rubble. But the glass was overflowing, the water washing over his trembling hand. He couldn’t stay there forever.
He stood up, and started picking at the remnants to find the strength for a new plan.
At first, Norman continued to keep those disparate aspects of his harried mind together with denial. He accepted Emma and Ray’s refusal to let him die. He considered the hypothetical shape of a plan where they could all live without consequence. He let it circle his mind, entrap it, but in the back of his skull he knew that denying any possibilities was the worst thing he could do in this situation.
Still, he let himself be embraced for a little while longer, before being pulled out into the cold and the dark when he discovered a simple, checkerboard-patterned pen at the bottom of his bedside drawers.
Now, Norman sits alone in the bright, frigid air, nothing to hide from or to keep hidden, yet nothing to comfort. He has time, though. The clock has not yet run its final lap. Surrounded by the cold, Norman discovers a slow-burning warmth within, a flame to keep him going through the last stretch.
Enough, even, to melt the icicle enough for him to repair some of the damage it left, to examine each side and each interpretation of the problem tossed about his head, and set to work building.
He won’t live to see the winter. He places that thought at the centre of it.
Now, Norman’s hands are steady enough for him to call after Yvette and, with an unwavering voice, ask to borrow a piece of paper and a pen. Steady enough to write it all out. Sketch the shape of the plan with his death at the centre, which would leave the rest of his family safe and free.
He basks in the warmth alone.
‘My dearest Emma…’