“Are you ready to begin?”
I flinched at the words as I looked up at the man seated across from me. He wore a brown suit that looked a little large for him, the coat sleeves trailing past his wrists to lap against his hands as he settled back into his chair. Despite his formal dress, he seemed relaxed. Pleasant. And entirely focused on me. I found the intensity of his gaze unsettling, but I was more troubled by my own confusion. I wasn’t sure where I was or what was going on. And I wasn’t entirely clear on what we were supposed to be starting.
The man seemed to pick up on my confusion. Giving me a congenial smile, he began on his own.
“Daniel, I can sense that you are out-of-sorts. That is understandable. For a number of years you have, among other issues, been prone to periodically entering fugue states that typically include temporary retrograde amnesia. It is my belief that you are in one of those fugues now.”
I frowned. “So what, you’re saying I’m crazy or something?”
The man’s lips twitched slightly, though I wasn’t sure if his expression had become more of a smirk or a grimace. “Or something, I suppose. We don’t use the term ‘crazy’, and in any case, you have a multitude of facets to your condition. Frankly, the periods of confusion and memory loss may be the least interesting.”
“Who are you? Some kind of psychologist?”
The man in the brown suit stared at me for several seconds before giving a slight nod. “A fair question. No, I’m not a doctor. My name is Burke. I’ve been associated with your case for quite some time now, and I’m here to help you understand.” He raised an eyebrow. “But the first thing you need to understand is that this will not be a pleasant experience. I deal in harsh truths, and it is only by facing those truths that you can hope to see improvement. Much of what I tell you will be hard to believe at first. Things you don’t want to accept as true. But if you work with me, I’ll do my…”
“What? What are you telling me? Not trying to be shitty, but spit it out, man. Then I’ll tell you if I’m buying it or not.”
This time, there was little question that the man grimaced for a moment before smiling again. “Always to the point with you. Very well.” He leaned forward, his eyes growing harder as he continued to smile at me. “Do you remember your little sister? Kennedy?”
I nodded, my own frown deepening. “Yeah. Of course I do.”
“What do you think happened to her?”
I felt anger welling up as I shifted uncomfortably in my chair and looked around. What was this place? It didn’t look like a doctor’s office, or even what I’d imagine a therapist’s office would look like. It was more like an old, creepy library some rich family always had in the movies. And why the hell should I answer this guy’s questions? None of this smelled right.
But then again, he was right about one thing. I didn’t know what was going on. How I’d gotten here or where I’d been. It’s like everything was still in my head, but I could only see parts of it, and while I didn’t trust this man, I couldn’t trust anything yet, including myself.
“She…She was snatched at a grocery story when she was little. They never found her.”
The man smiled and gave a slight nod. “And your father? Something happened to him too, right?”
I didn’t like this, any of this. Not having to talk about these painful, private things, nor the pleasure the man seemed to get out of watching me squirm. “What is this about? I want to know what’s going on.”
Burke chuckled softly. “That’s exactly what I’m trying to do. Help you understand what’s going on.” He raised his eyebrows. “Your father? Please?” I thought I heard slight mockery in that last word, but I ignored it. If I was going to get information from him, I needed to play along. Anyway, fuck him. I wasn’t afraid to talk about my past.
“He was killed. Ran over by a hit-and-run driver.”
Another satisfied smile. “Good. And your friend? Andy Murphy? Didn’t he suffer misfortune when you were young as well?”
“Yes. He died during surgery. While we’re at it, my mother was murdered and burned too. Is that next? Does that complete your little line of questions designed to…what? See if I remember the worst moments of my life?” I stood up. “Now I’ve answered your questions. Answer mine. Why am I here? What is this place? And what, exactly, is going the fuck on?”
Burke looked up at me unperturbed. “I understand this is frustrating. It may seem mean-spirited that I’d ask you these things, but I assure you it’s a necessary evil. Your memory and understanding of certain things tends to…fluctuate, so I need to know what you think is the truth at the moment.” I opened my mouth to argue, but he was already gesturing to the chair behind me as he continued on. “Please Daniel. Sit back down. It’ll all make more sense in a moment.”
I took my seat reluctantly, my body tense with fear and anger as I stared at the man. “Well? Explain.”
The man nodded. “The short, less nuanced version is this. Your sister wasn’t abducted at a store. By all accounts, she drowned in an inch of bathwater at your home when you were five years old. It’s generally accepted that you were the one that was the cause of her drowning, though it was officially determined to be an accident. Accidental or not, the pliability of your memory, even back then, meant that your parents had the option to lie to you. Convince you that she was abducted rather than have their only remaining child feel responsible for his sister’s death. They were successful, though whether it was truly a success by any reasonable metric remains open to debate.”
Burke sighed as he went on. “As for your father? He didn’t die in a hit-and-run. He died in your living room from a severe allergic reaction. As you may or may not recall, he had a congenital nut allergy that was quite dangerous. Investigation after the fact found large quantities of ground nut in milk he’d been drinking before his anaphylaxis. The epinephrine pens he kept around the house were all in their normal places, yet he’d not tried to use them. When they questioned the only family member home at the time, the man’s eleven year-old son, you told them you’d been in your room all afternoon, unaware that your father was dying just a few yards away.”
I felt something crawling into my brain as the man spoke. Snatches of conversation, images, feelings that matched what he was telling me. Except it didn’t feel like recollection. It felt like poison being pumped into my mind. Poison and lies. I felt a thrill of fear as some deep instinct within me sounded an alarm. Taking a deep breath, I tried to imagine my mind as a green field. There were patches I could see clearly, and parts, the things being kept from me, that were covered over in a gray fog that obscured all but the vaguest of shapes.
But below that fog was something else. Something low, yellow and creeping that was trying to create false memories. Change me. Trick me. I concentrated, picturing a strong, cleansing wind blowing across that green field, wiping out the poison and the fog, leaving only what was true and real behind. When it was done, there was a delicate, crystalline moment of still clarity where I understood everything, and in the wake of that knowledge, a fiery rage began burning throughout my body. I glared at the man, speaking through jaws clenched so hard I thought they might break.
“You.” The word came out rough and deep, laced with more venom than I’d thought I was capable of. “It’s you, isn’t it? You’re the one that’s been fucking with me my entire life. The one from the house. The one from earlier today. Fucking with me, with Andy, and with whoever…”
Burke gave a short laugh. “Oh yes. ‘Andy’. Let’s talk about that. You just so happen to have a roommate with the same name as your dead childhood best friend?”
I felt my fists balling up on my lap. I was trying to maintain control, but between my anger and that other still trying to push its way into my mind, it was hard. “It’s called coincidence.”
The man snorted. “Coincidence. Coincidence is what a fool calls that which he doesn’t understand. What a liar hides behind when he’s been found out. Is it coincidence, or another convenient delusion? Like the thing that got you fired from the HVAC job so many years ago? You didn’t burn that house down, right? And there was some mysterious woman named Marisol that gave you the work order, isn’t that correct?”
My head was pounding now—I was either going to explode from the inside or be crushed under the weight of the thing trying to get in. “N-No. I mean…that’s not right…”
Burke stood up, his voice getting louder. “In fact, the whole world is against you, aren’t they, Daniel? You certainly didn’t burn your mother to death in her own home, did you? You didn’t construct this elaborate persecution fantasy just to excuse the fact that you are a murder and a psychopath, did you Daniel?” He paused, taking a breath. “I told you these are going to be hard truths. I’m here to help, not to trick you, but you…”
Closing my eyes, I focused on the field again. Tried to ignore the pain and the pressure.
I know who I am. And I know what this is even if I don’t know what to call it. I’m at the sleep study. Except I’m not, not really. Not right now. Because this isn’t a dream. This is some other place. A place where this man or whatever it is can touch me. Can try to complete whatever it started all those years ago. Take me over, drive me crazy, kill me, whatever it wants, it’s hounded me my entire life. Has hurt everyone I’ve ever been close to. Taken away almost everything that matters. And now it wants to finish the job.
Trying to stand felt like someone had dialed up the gravity by a thousand percent. Maybe they had. I had the feeling the rules of this place were a lot closer to a dream. As if to confirm this, I felt something reaching out, grasping at my arms and legs. Opening my eyes, I looked down to see the chair I’d been sitting in flowing out like taffy, wrapping tendrils around me as it tried to pull me back down.
“No.”
“…they would say if you hadn’t killed them? They’d tell you that…”
“No.”
“…aren’t well. And if you don’t accept the truth, if you don’t let me…”
“No.”
Burke staggered back, a crack as loud as a gunshot echoing across the room. When he looked up again, I saw that part of his cheek was missing, cracked away like a piece of broken china. There was no blood or bone underneath, just a small window into the utter dark that lay inside. The thing’s eyes blazed with pain and anger.
“You’ve always been stubborn. Strong. It’s what made you such a good offering and candidate when you were young. Now? Now it just makes you tedious.” It took a staggering step forward. “And you’re right. This isn’t a dream. If you die here, you’re really dead. And even then, there’s no escape from the storm.” It smirked. “But I know how loathe you are to trust me. So how about I just show you instead.”
I could still feel something scrabbling across the surface of my mind, but the pressure was gone now. The chair beneath me was still squirming and flailing, but when I yanked at my arm, I pulled free easily. The Burke-thing was almost to me, leering with an awful, broken grin, but it was moving slower too, like a clockwork beginning to wind down. I thought about attacking it, but I was afraid. I thought about running, but I didn’t want to turn my back on it, and I still wasn’t sure how I could escape. So instead I backed up, keeping distance between us until I reached the far wall of the office. It bought me a few seconds, but I still needed to find a way to make Burke stop.
As I had the thought, I noticed the thing jerked and slowed down further. Almost out of instinct, I had the thought again that it needed to stop. Stop for good and forever like the dead thing it was. It staggered again, its speed now more like watching something moving through water or quicksand. The next moment it seemed frozen in place like a statue, but then it gave a final, lurching shudder forward and fell over, shattering on the floor into dozens of bloodless pieces.
The sight of this man’s transformation into some kind of broken doll should have broken me in turn, but it didn’t. Instead, I immediately began looking for a way out. At first, there seemed like there was none. The walls and windows and door all felt real enough, but none of them opened or took any kind of damage. I spent what felt like the better part of an hour prying and hitting different potential weak points only to find that there were none. When I finally collapsed onto the floor, sweaty and exhausted, I found myself wondering if I would die there after all.
This immediately led me to thinking about my roommate Andy. I felt more certain than ever that this was all my fault—that I’d dragged him into this nightmare and now he might be trapped like I was…or have it even worse. I wished I could find him and at least get him out of this. If only I…
Suddenly the old library was gone. I was in a field of what looked like blackened sunflowers beneath an orange sky. Up the hill, the towering figure of the black house sat silent and brooding like an old dragon waiting for its next meal.
That meal might be coming soon. Because closer in the field, there was a struggle going on. I saw the woman we’d just met, Connie, trying to help Andy fend of his attacker. It only took a momentary savage grin from his assailant for me to recognize it as the man in the brown suit, Burke. Somehow another version of him, or perhaps the real him, had been here while I was trapped in the library. Distracting me while he hunted down Andy.
And now the man was killing him.
---
Credits
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