Touchstone 1 - Stray

all surprised or worried during my exam.
    I’m going to have to lie down.
    Tuesday, December 18
    Skullburster?
    I spent the day curled in the bed, being a complete sook about this headache, and not at all friendly when the greysuits came to check on me. I totally feel like a lab rat. I’m sure they’ve got cameras in here. I can’t even turn out the lights. No switches.
    It feels like the front-left of my head is pushing out from the inside. Having showers helps a little, or maybe I’m just feeling the need to make up for lost time. The soap is liquid and very spicy-scented. When I’m not showering I’m peering in the mirror in the bathroom. My left eye looks really bloodshot, but not swollen. And I look horrible. I always thought it would be nice to be really thin, but I’m haggard. I had no idea I looked this bad. It’s only been a month.
    Outside is all storms, the lightning strange and unreal because the thunder is blocked out. The water looks very black and mountainous and I’m glad I’m not in it, but I’m starting to wish I wasn’t here. I just can’t figure these people out. They weren’t at all surprised to find me in that town, though it’s obvious none of them recognised my English. One of the shots they gave me seems to have helped bunches in clearing the last of that super-cold away, and they’ve fed and clothed me and put me in a room. And injected me with something which I can’t believe was just an immunisation. Do they find so many random people from other planets that it’s normal to use them as test subjects? They’re not even trying to figure out a way to communicate with me.
    If my head hurt less I’d have the energy to be scared.
    Wednesday, December 19
    A Vision of Walls
    My eyes are going strange again. Not blurriness on random objects this time, but lines. Symbols. It’s like I’m seeing an outline of this room overlaid over the room itself, with squiggles in odd spots. I don’t know whether to be worried about seeing things, or if there might be some kind of hologram being projected into the room.
    My head no longer feels like it’s going to explode, though it still aches a fair bit.
    Dotty
    My headache is more or less gone, but now I have a dot. A green dot.
    As hallucinations go, this is an unwavering one. It looks like a piece from a game of checkers, floating at eye height. I can’t touch it, and it doesn’t seem to cast a shadow. It’s been there at least ten minutes.
    I’ve heard of people who see sounds as colours. And of brain tumours pressing in places they shouldn’t be and causing problems. The question of what that injection did to me has gone beyond scary now.
    The other thing I’ve noticed is that it’s still night-time. It was day before the storm, but I haven’t seen the sun since. Possibly I’m on a different world again, maybe. Is the gravity less, or do I just feel more energetic than before? Has it been night for a day straight, or did I just sleep when it was light?
    Thursday, December 20
    A shot of words
    Escorted again to the greysuits, and OW! They had me lie down on another dentist-style chair, this one with its own little helmet. I can’t say I was keen, but the greensuits were waiting just outside. Is it better to be a dignified test subject, or a defiant but battered one?
    I was just noticing that there was a green dot in the centre of that room too when they turned their evil torture machine on and all these words began to squiggle across the back of my eyes. If I’d thought my head was going to explode before, that was nothing to having a dictionary injected into my skull.
    Someone really has to explain the concept of painkillers to these people.
    I think I had convulsions. It was a bit hard to tell, but I remember them holding my arms. There was some blacking out going on as well, and a long hazy time after where they were talking about my heart rate and stuff. After a while I must have passed out properly, and now I’m back in my box.
    There’s a thousand thousand words sitting in my skull. They murmur at me whenever I look at anything. As I’m writing this there’s an awkward echo giving me a different set of sounds, and an image of strange squiggles which I presume mean what I’m writing. I don’t think I ‘know’ this language, but sounds are suggesting themselves to me in response to things I look at and even things I think. So I could on one level understand what the greysuits were saying, in the way you half