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After that, all was silent again. The shock of that image of Izzy sent the consciousness scuttling back into the darkness like a frightened creature. The consciousness tried to hide, to exist no more. But it was an impossibility to exist without thought. Even to desire not to think was to think.

Thoughts formed unbidden, memories and emotions and images, all the things that form a human.

The consciousness turned away from these things but had nowhere to turn to and nothing to hide behind. It had only thought.

These thoughts that troubled it were distant things at first, like something on a faraway shore, something definitively there, but uncertain and indistinct. The consciousness ignored these things, but soon felt drawn to them. Over time it became less afraid. It reached out to these things—these memories and emotions—because thought needed something to think about.

There were sensations first, and the consciousness remembered sensations. A different type of thought, a thought with substance, a doorway to the external world.

Oil and wood, the dampness of a rainy day.

Then sounds, the buzz of machinery, the rhythmic scrape of sandpaper.

And then the light and texture of an image, a memory: a man at a workbench. A tall man, broad across the chest, his face focused on his work.

And the consciousness remembered the sensation of touch: the feel of the pages of a book between fingers. The luxurious flexibility of young muscles, strong limbs.

The man at the bench looked at the consciousness—at the thing that had been Cassie—and the consciousness felt something else then: a sudden blossoming, like a vast meadow of flowers springing into vibrant life all at once. This was beautiful and comforting, as colorful as the rainbow scream but not terrible and terrifying. This was joy, and the consciousness delighted in this.

The consciousness felt something then, something beyond thought. It felt herself, the personality that had been Cassie, the wants and desires, fears and delights. And the consciousness wanted more like the meadow of joy.

Another image appeared then: a warm day, sunlight on her face and a breeze tickling her cheeks. Her eyes were shaded by a hat, the brim flapping in the wind, and she could smell the rough salt of the sea in the air. She was a young woman again, facing the Mediterranean from a high cliff, a white cathedral behind her. Somewhere out on the breeze a seagull squawked into the sky, the noise carrying to Cassie—because that was her name, she knew, Cassie—where she stood on the cliff.

The colors came again, the weave of reality, the meadow blossoming, a rainbow across the sky in her vision, but this time the foghorn was a major chord, bright and lively, rather than a rattling scream of pain.

Cassie remembered the joy she had felt in that moment on the high cliff, the freedom and the opportunity, and the foghorn sounded its major chord again. This was not something to run from. This was the thrill of human emotion, of sensation, of life.

A darker memory erupted into her thoughts, a gate-crasher at a pleasant party: a gloomy room with the tortured figure of the man that had been her grandfather, now emaciated and weak, fading and fading. The house that she had grown up in, the only home she had ever known, transformed into a place she no longer wanted to be. What had once been cozy and homey was claustrophobic and suffocating, and the walls and bedclothes all reeked of sweat and blood and pain. It was a house of death, and it was here that her grandfather had died, alone, while Cassie had slept in a chair, exhausted by the care she had been giving.

Cassie, in the nowhere, remembered the quiet horror of what her house had become, and the foghorn sounded once again, an angry sound, atonal and brutal, and her consciousness trembled. The rainbow scream too came once again, more vivid and terrible, screeching the agony of this memory, and Cassie, the consciousness, scuttled away, curling into herself to forget and hide.

When she dared to emerge again, her consciousness unable to stop itself from floating to the surface, the memories and emotions came more quickly. Faster and faster, each one an eruption of light and noise, all human emotion and memory streaking out into the nothing and the nowhere behind reality. She was creating things, Cassie realized, creating by remembering and by being; all of reality was changing. Cassie’s memories and pain, her despair and her joy, her escape and her fear, made the unreality tremble and shake. All of these emotions, all of these memories, the building blocks of personality and humanity, were too much for Cassie’s consciousness to contain.

Out here in the nothing and nowhere, floating as thought, she was powerful. Cassie’s consciousness, in the nowhere and everywhere, used the rainbow scream, used that energy of creation, to hide away heremotions and memories, the fragments of her life that had destroyed and made her and destroyed her again. They were too much for her, so she would put them somewhere else.

Where else would she put all these things, but in books? Where else could she lock away all of her emotion, but in the place where all of life’s joy and delight were to be found? And as she created these books, these special books, born in the nowhere and everywhere, each one created from her memories and emotions, from the fragments of her reality, she threw them out into the world, propelling them away from her, scattering them throughout reality and time, their pages full of languages old and new, known and unknown, images and words, the language of everywhere.

This she did for an age, time having no meaning in the nowhere and everywhere, and only once she had exhausted of all of her agonies and delights, once all of her special books had been thrown out into reality, once she was empty, she rested, at peace.

The consciousness that had been Cassie and which was becoming Cassie again slept—or entered the state that was closest to sleep in the unreality. When she awoke—or entered that state closest to wakefulness in the nowhere and everywhere—there was more Cassie than consciousness. Cassie in the nowhere didn’t panic, she was just aware that she was somewhere else, somewhere that was nowhere.

She had come to this place through a doorway that she had opened, trying to flee reality and the awfulness of what she had done.

As she remembered her terrors now, there was no screaming rainbow or blossoming meadow; there was no foghorn. There was only memory.

She knew she had to go back. Her consciousness couldn’t exist in this place.

And just as some essence of the Book of Safety had remained and had kept her alive where no life should exist, some essence of the Book of Doors remained with her. And as Cassie thought about returning a doorway appeared, a featureless rectangle distinct from the nothingness by virtue of its somethingness.

The doorway was the only thing, and it drew her toward it, drew her toward something that Cassie realized was light.

Drew her back into reality and out of the nowhere and everywhere.

Part 6

A Plan in Five Parts

The Woman, After the Auction