The Mirrorverse
Chapter 4

Maya

As Maya lay there in bed, the answer to the bizarre turn of events she had found herself in was simple. She was asleep in her bed, Paws the cat was snoozing on her pillow, and if she listened hard enough she thought she could hear his kitty snores.

Tentatively, she opened an eye just a crack to make sure she was at home. Not liking what she saw, she shut it again quickly. Maya just lay there wondering why she couldn’t wake up out of her nightmare. An indeterminable period of time later that was probably not long at all, she squizzed an eye open again, praying to see her bedroom ceiling. With a shock, she found herself staring into the bald, bespectacled doctor’s face, the same one who had been poking and prodding her earlier, and shining irritating lights into her eyes.

“Argh!” she half croaked, half yelped through semi-functional vocal chords. She closed her eyes again quickly, determined not to accept her surroundings.

“Maya, can you hear me?” the doctor’s voice called from her left.

“Yes,” she replied, trying to insert indignation into her gruff attempt at a voice.

“Can you open your eyes please?”

“Why?” she grunted morosely.

“Patient is confused, and refusing to open her eyes,” dictated the doc, either talking into a Dictaphone or dictating notes to someone.

“I not confused,” Maya grunted slowly, her eyes flicking open to glare at him as ferociously as she could muster. “I just want wake up home.”

“Maya”, he said, coming over all serious as he cleared his throat. “I am afraid to tell you that you have been in a coma for the best part of three months.”

“Bollocks,” she croaked without hesitation. Her dream was getting weirder, but since that was all it was, she felt there was no need to curb her language.

“I was just at home,” she qualified.

“Maya!” Her mother’s voice came from her right, and Maya looked to see her tear streaked face, realising that she was holding her hand. Her father, who was standing next to her mum, was pale and drawn. Ellie was stood to her left, giving the doctor room to poke and prod her. Ellie’s curly, golden hair was uncharacteristically tied back, another indicator that Maya was dreaming.

“What is the last thing you remember, Maya?” the doc continued in the same condescending tone of voice.

“This is so unfair!” moaned Maya, trying to piece it back together. “I had this horrid dream that I couldn’t move, then I woke up, all was well. All day I was fine, then I went to bed and had a nightmare about ogres and stuff, then woke up into this one. Here. Now can I please go back to sleep so I can wake up?” It seemed a reasonable argument to Maya, but the others appeared to have other ideas. It didn’t help that they all started talking at once, her mother begging her to stay awake while her father was going on about missing her. Ellie was saying something else, it was hard to tell with all the commotion.

“Ladies and gentlemen, could we please have a little decorum, this is a psychiatric hospital,” the doc called above the babble.

Ellie was just thinking about what a condescending pillock the doctor was when two words suddenly stuck in Maya’s mind.

“Psychiatric hospital?” asked Maya, as Ellie was shouting at the doctor, calling him a blundering idiot. “What? Psychiatric?” Maya followed that with language that would have turned her Spanish Catholic mother’s hair turn white on any other day.

That was it, Maya had had enough. It was time to wake up. Time to go back to Ka and Paws. Or at least get the hell out of that bed. She tried to raise her head but someone had filled it with bricks. She moved her left hand, wiggling my fingers, wondering if she could use it to pick her head up. Rationality left her behind as she struggled against her semi-paralysed form, clawing like an animal with her slowly returning hands.

“Stop, stop!” cried Ellie, trying to take hold of her hand. The other had broken free of her mother’s grip and was inspecting a tube that was coming out of her nose and stuck to her face. Maya had realised what the strange feeling was in the back of her throat, it was the tube, the evil tube had to go, it all had to go. She tried to pull the drip out her arm, while feeling a sharp pain in her bottom.

The urge to struggle drifted away as peace washed over her. She saw a shimmery iridescent shape in front of her face, like the one she had seen in the bathroom, and watched its beauty until she could keep her eyes open no more.

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