Doctor Pamella Winter found the man in her office when she returned from lunch. This wasn't uncommon, Juliet often let her clients in to wait, but the man in cast off clothes who was sitting across from her desk wasn't one of Doctor Winter’s usual patients. He was young, twenty or twenty one, and had a vacant look about him that made her think he might have recently been in an accident. She expected him to be dim, his speech slurred or hurried, but as he explained himself she could almost hear the money that had gone into his education.
He may have looked like a bum but he spoke like a Harvard grad.
“I hope you’ll excuse me for barging in without an appointment but I really need your help.”
“I’d be glad to help you with whatever it is that's going on. If you’ll step back out into the waiting room and fill out a few forms we can…”
He cut her off with a look that made her rethink her earlier assessment.
That look had been cold, calculating, and was clearly something the now smiling youth was unaware he’d done.
“That may be difficult,” he said after a few confused seconds, “since I can't remember who I am.”
Doctor Winter blinked, confused as to what he thought she could do. She’d helped people with their problems, true, but how do you help someone who doesn't know what his problem is? Also, this was a clinic for forgetting, and Winter had never helped anyone try to remember.
“Interesting, you do realize this is the Forgetfulness Clinic?”
The man shrugged, “Well, if you can make me forget, then remembering shouldn’t be that hard, should it?”
Winter nodded, putting her back to the man as she fixed tea in the nearby alcove, “I hate to be that person, but this isn’t exactly a charity. Without insurance or even a name, how do you intend to pay for your session today?”
“Please,” he said, almost begging, “I have no memory before the day after yesterday when I woke up in a hospital bed. Someone had found me beside a road in the mountains with no identification. All I have are these...flashes of...something. Something dark, and I feel like if I don't find out what they are then something terrible may happen. When I saw you on television this morning I knew you could help me. You’ve helped so many and I just know that you can help me discover who I am and why I went to the mountains.”
Winter almost rolled her eyes. That damned television slot. She had fought against the idea for months before Jesse Parks, the host of “Celebrities in our Neighborhood” for the local 9, had finally convinced her to be on the show. What had followed was an hour of having her craft put on public display for every yahoo with a basic cable package. Winter told them about the work she’d done through regression, helping patients through their trauma through forgetfulness, about her practice, and where potential clients could find her. The conversation inevitably turned to Megan Burch, the amnesia victim whose identity was restored after three weeks of sessions with Winter, which was doubtless what had brought this fella in today.
Megan Burch had been good for business, but now it appeared that Winter would have to deal with these sorts of people now that she was “famous”. When her parents had brought her in, Winter hadn’t known what she could do for the girl. They had found her unconscious behind the house, and after taking her to the hospital, it was discovered that she had amnesia. They had brought her to Winter after a long string of doctors that could do little to help her memory loss, her mother having read about Doctor Winter's Forgetfulness Clinic in the paper and thought maybe she could do something.
Winter had, indeed, done something, and Matthew Burch, the Governers right hand man, had discovered that his brother had been using the shed on the edge of his property to hide drugs he intended to sell. Megan had seen him there, and he’d chased and caught her before slamming her head into a tree and knocking her unconscious. Winter had spent some time untangling the memories, and when Megan had told her father what she’d seen, he’d gone to the police and his brother had admitted to the whole thing. He had turned out to be running drugs for a motorcycle gang to pay off a gambling debt, since no one would expect the brother of such an important person to be on their payroll.
Now Winter was a local celebrity for helping the family and bringing the girl's uncle to justice.
Now Winter would have to deal with horse crap like this from everyone who thinks she can untangle their memories.
“I suppose we can try,” she said, passing him a cup of steaming tea, “take this, I find that it helps when remembering.”
The man looked at the tea and smirked, “Ginseng?” he asked, taking a tentative sip.
“Winter Cherry,” Winter corrected, “Among other things. Now, I want you to close your eyes and focus on something you can remember. It could be anything, a smell, a taste, a sound, a picture, just something to anchor you to your lost memories.”
The man closed his eyes and screwed up his face, trying to remember things that he had forgotten.
After a few minutes, he peeked a little, smiling mischievously.
“I’m not really coming up with anything.”
Winter signed, checking her watch before trying to think of a solution. She had an appointment in forty five minutes, a client that she couldn’t turn away. This guy's story was interesting, but these sessions could take hours and she just didn’t have the time to give. He closed his eyes again, almost straining as he tried to remember, but Winter had already decided to tell him to make an appointment with Juliet. He would make it, not show up, and then her time would stop being wasted.
“I remember…eyes.”
Winter looked back, her thoughts a little lost, “Eyes?”
His eyes were closed, his face slack and at ease, but beneath his eyelids, Winter thought she could see his eyes jittering frantically.
“They were round, like two moons, with a dark pit in their middle. They are staring up at me from a dark, dark place. As I watch, they get closer and closer, swimming up towards me, until I smell something burning and I blink.”
His face scrunched up in confusion, but when he took another sip of the tea, Winter knew he wasn’t completely gone. Drinking it was fine, but most of what she wanted was the steam. It would waft the scent into his face, forcing him to remember what he’d forgotten as it clouded his mind with the combination of Winter Cherry, Ginseng, and something else that might remind him of burning.
“I remember smelling something burning.”
He was young, he believed. He remembered chairs being below eye level and guessed he might have been four or five.
Something was burning, and he followed the smell into the kitchen. Dinner was burning, smoke billowing out of the oven, but that wasn’t the worst thing waiting in the kitchen. He could see the woman as she lay bleeding on the marble kitchen floor, dressed in a plain, gray servants uniform that was getting ruined by the blood leaking from her head. A small wire had been strung across the entrance, and from the stain on the edge of the island, it seemed that she had fallen and hit her head. As other servants came running in, he heard a snicker from the edge of the doorway, just out of sight as he peeked at the chaos. He turned to see a boy crouching there, a boy he recognized though it gave him an odd sense of vertigo to look at him.
When looked at him, the boy realized he knew the other, and as he blacked out, he took this realization with him.
“How do you know him?” Winter asked, “Is he a friend of yours?”
“He was me,” the man almost whispered, “but when he turned to look at me, he had yellow eyes, like the ones I saw looking out from the darkness. I blacked out after I saw him, and I can't remember anything after that.”
Doctor Winter drank her own tea, taken off guard by what she was hearing. Was he schizophrenic? Did he have a twin? Was this some sort of repression? An out of body experience? Winter really hoped he was just telling her about a dream he’d had or was maybe making things up and he’d slip at some point.
“What else do you remember?” Winter asked, watching him as his eyes jittered behind the lids.
She was a little afraid he might drop the cup in his theatrics before he took another small sip.
“There's a smokey smell. Somethings on fire.”
He was looking up at the tree house, the smoke billowing out in thick, black clouds. He was holding something in his hand, the plastic warm against his fingers, and he looked down to see a lighter held in his child's hand. Had he done this? Had he lit this treehouse on fire? He tossed the lighter away, not wanting to touch it. That's when he noticed the boy beside him, the boy he knew was him.
When the yellow eyed boy looked at him, he could see that he was holding something too.
It was a pen knife and the remains of a rope ladder.
“Harold!”
He looked up and could see three sooty faces looking down through the little square in the floor of the wooden house. Their eyes looked like horses eyes when they smelled a fire in the field. They were unsure, their mortality at hand before their time. They called to him, calling him Harold, and as they yelled down, he saw the yellow eyed boy grinning like a maniac. He reveled in their pain, wallowed in their fear, and he felt himself shaking in fear.
“Help us Harold! Go get help!”
Someone screamed then, and he looked up in time to see someone falling out of the square and hitting the ground. He could tell by the sound that they had broken something. They groaned as they lay there, the leg visibly broken as the bone jutted from the skin. They reached up for him, trying to get his help, but the hand came towards the yellow eyed boy instead. The boy grinned at him, drinking in his suffering before turning and stalking off into the woods.
They called after him, wanting his help, but he ignored them.
Winter didn’t get the cold chill that she often read about in stories like this. The man was admitting to murdering other children, but it was a little too theatrical for her. He opened his eyes, looking for all the world like a scared rabbit that's just discovered a fox den under his burrow.
“That's the first time I’ve heard any kind of name associated with me since I woke up. I’m a little scared though, Doc. Are these real memories? Did I…did I do these things?”
Doctor Winter shrugged, “Who's to say. Memories are never concrete, and many of them are tainted by the time in which we lived them. Does the name help your recollections?”
He closed his eyes, and Winter was a little put off by the way his eyes jittered again. It was unnatural. She’d seen people relive their memories before, but this was different. She felt as if she could almost see those eyes behind the lids. If she could see them, though, Winter wondered if it would be the same yellow eyes the man kept talking about?
“Each memory seems to start with the smell of something burning. Now that I’ve seen one, the things I remember all seem to have that in common.”
“Do you have another?” Winter asked, pursing her lips as she watched the cup in his hand.
Something wasn’t right.
This wasn’t how it usually worked.
“I remember smelling something burning just before a fire. Burning and the smell of gasoline.”
The scarf had gone up like a bonfire, catching the bookshelf with little effort.
The scarf had been soaked in gasoline and it had irritated his skin as he wore it.
Well, not Harold, Harold had never worn it.
It had been the other, the yellow eyed man.
No longer a boy, they both now sat on a couch in a cluttered apartment. The couch was squashy, the springs poking Harold as he sat next to her. She was the wall between the two, the things that separated them, though she wasn’t very good at it. She was laying against the back of the couch, her head pillowed against the cushion as her mouth hung open bonelessly. Her eyes stared endlessly up towards the popcorn ceiling, taking it all in without blinking as the two men watched her.
If there wasn’t a syringe sticking out of her chest, she could have almost been napping.
As the bonfire raged behind him, Harold got a good look at the man. He looked just like him, they could be twins, but those eyes seemed to bore into his soul. They stared into his, the grin on his face looking absolutely insidious. He wanted to leave, wanted to flee before the fire could consume them both, but he was utterly unable to move. The two stared at each other, his vision swimming as the smoke stung his eyes, and when he blinked, he passed out.
Winter sipped her tea, thinking over what he’d just told her. She thought she might remember that one. A college student who had burned to death in her dorm room. It had been very sad, but there were some who’d questioned it. The police had suspected that it might have been a murder, trace amounts of an accelerant found at the scene, but no one quite believed it. It was dropped after a few months and nothing ever came of it.
It seemed Harold here might know more about it than he was letting on.
“How old were you when that happened?” she asked, making notes so she’d have something to give to the police later.
Patient confidentiality only went so far.
“I believe I was in college. I remember her a little. I think we had classes together, but I’m not absolutely certain.”
He still had his eyes closed and as they jittered, Doctor Winters trying to ignore them. There was a lump forming in his throat as he spoke, his voice croaking as he tried to push it out. It bulged like a grotesque adams apple, rising and falling as he tried to get it out, and she knew that whatever was keeping his memories was coming to the surface.
“Tell me more about the Yellow Eyed Man.”
“He seems to revel in the fires. The more I smell the smoke, the more I remember the times he appeared to do something wrong. I’m not sure if he is me or just looks like me, but he’s doing these things in spite of my wishes, and I don’t know what it means.”
He snorted suddenly, swallowing whatever was in his throat, and Winter wrinkled her nose.
“What else do you remember?” Doctor Winter asked, getting up and crossing to the young man. His hair was greasy, but relatively clean, she reflected, as she rested her hand on it. He looked up at her as she began to work her fingers against his scalp, stroking the gray matter below as she tried to coax the memories out.
They say all that gray up there had no feeling, but as she stroked at the skin, she could swear the screams that vibrated through her finger tips were from that pulsing slush between his ears.
Harold was in trouble.
The Yellow Eyed Man, that leering boogeyman from his past, had killed another girl.
He had sliced her up and now Harold was running through the park, the police in hot pursuit.
He had woken up in the park, the smell of a fire bringing him around as the logs burned low. Harold wasn’t sure how he’d come to be here, he had fallen asleep in his dorm around noon so he’d be fresh for his evening classes, but now he was in the park, sitting around the remains of an evening picnic. The checkered blanket he always used was set up, as was the wicker basket he often filled with food. The remains of the food sat around him, ants already moving in on the crumbs, but the blanket was stained with blood, as was the young woman leaning half in the bush next to the basket. Harold looked at her, her head having painted the bush red after someone had smashed it with something. Harold had turned to throw up, not wanting to puke on the poor girl, and that was when the patrolman had come upon them.
He likely thought he had found a little love nest, but as his flashlight fell on Harold, he saw someone else standing in the bushes not too far away.
The flash light fell on the Yellow Eyed Man , the wine bottle in his hand still dripping blood, as he disappeared into the bushes.
Harold had run after him, ignoring the police as they yelled at him to stop.
He wanted to catch him, wanted to stop him, otherwise these officers would think he had been the one who’d perpetrated this crime.
He got closer as he ran, gaining on the man as he tried to outrun him. He got close enough to grab his waistband, and when he did, he yanked him sideways before jumping onto him and rolling into a nearby bush. The two lay amidst the scrub bushes, face to face, as the Yellow Eyed Man leered at him knowingly. His bottle was gone, but Harold knew that he was still very dangerous. He thought about hitting him, about pummeling him into pulp, but as he heard the policemen approaching, he closed his eyes and became very still instead. He could hold him, told himself, and if they found them then he could say he had caught the murderer.
If they didn’t…well then, Harold would still have him.
They looked around for a few minutes before heading off, and when Harold opened his eyes, the Yellow Eyed Man was gone.
“He disappeared, wiggled free as I lay there. I don’t know how he managed it but,” but his next words were a whispered cry of agony.
As he spoke, Winter had felt a twinge of something familiar beneath the surface, and so much of his story began to make sense. Her fingers flexed against his skull, her fingers feeling out the knots as she worked through his trauma, looking for something that could affirm her suspicions. He jittered a little, his eyes rolling up as they rumbled behind his eyelids.
The Yellow Eyed man grinned as he slunk out of Harold’s dorm room, leaving a woman in his bed with her throat cut, the candles burning out on his nightstand.
Harold Chased the Yellow Eyed Man as he left a jogger behind on the trail, a cigarette smoldering in the grass.
Harold was leaving his car in the middle of the road as he came to in the front seat, a dead body in the back, the smoke from the dented hood bringing him around.
Winter growled a little, wanting to skip ahead, but it seemed like the wiring was off in Harold’s head. He was a mess, his memory stumbling ahead from one moment to the next, and Winter became fairly certain his current state had something to do with this Yellow Eyed creature. She fumbled through the flashes, picking up very little other than Harolds torment at the hands of this person, until she came to the end.
Harold shuddered as her fingers stopped their riffling, and his body sagged backward in total relaxation. The girl, Megan Burch, had cried as she finally came to the heart of the problem, so Winter had expected some response. An almost orgasmic level of relaxation hadn’t been it, but Winter would take what she could get.
There was a real appointment sitting in the waiting room who would want to occupy that couch in fifteen minutes, and unlike Harold Fortre, their insurance was approved and their bill was paid.
“Tell me about the night your father called you to his office.” she commanded, no longer intrigued by the mystery.
“I was home on a break,” he intoned, his words sounding like a sleepwalker, “School was out for winter break, but I had been home for a few weeks before that.”
The paper had crumpled in his fathers hand, the flames licking at it as the zippo lit it aflame.
He dropped it into the metal garage can in his office, his eyes boring into Harold.
Harold couldn’t help but shudder as the smoke curled up from the can.
The paper had been his fathers will, the one that left everything to Harold when he died.
“Why would you do that?” Harold had asked, the smoke rising from the can to tickle against his nose.
“Because, Harold, I’m tired of cleaning up your messes. Ever since you were a boy, I’ve had to clean up after you. I told myself that this was just a misunderstanding, that this was something you would work out somehow, but I see now that isn't the case. After this girl they found in your dorm room, I can’t keep making excuses for you. I’m disowning you, Harold. You need help, but I’m not going to let you ruin me to get it.”
The smoke curled up around his nostrils as the bundle of paper burned and Harold felt himself sneeze.
If his father noticed the change in his eyes when he opened them again, he didn’t mention it.
“You have until morning to leave the estate. You may take your things and your car, but that's all. You will forfeit any company stocks you have and give up any claim to the Fortre name. From now on you’ll,” but he never finished.
As Harold wrapped his hands around his fathers throat, he found the words choked out.
He watched his fathers face turn ashen, and then blue, and then purple, and just as he was sure that the old man would stop thrashing and trying to pry his fingers off, something hit him in the back of the head and Harold fell down.
When he rolled his head around to look at the butler that had worked in the house since before he was born, and passed out as the man looked down at him with a mask of fear and accomplishment.
Winter released his head, letting it flop down as she took a few steps back.
“Cute, the butler did it.” she said, waiting for what she knew was coming next, “Then they dressed you in cast off clothes and dumped you somewhere, hoping you were dead or had a concussion and wouldn’t come back. The police would find you with no ID and it would take years to figure out who you were. I’m guessing when they bonked you, it screwed up your ability to get at this kid, too, didn’t it?”
The head came up slowly, like a puppet whose string have been pulled by a skilled hand, and when his eyes came open, Winter was unsurprised to see they were piss yellow. The veins in them stood out like accusations, the cornea all but gone amidst the wash of yellow, and he grinned as he watched her. When he didn’t receive the look of shock or horror he had been expecting, it seemed to confuse him, but he hid it well.
“Quite astute for one of your kind.” It rumbled, rising from the couch and taking a step towards her, “I suppose as thanks for helping me fix this problem, I’ll give you the honor of being another notch on my belt.”
He held the teacup like a club, but when he looked at Winter, he took a step back in surprise.
Winter didn’t know what he saw in her eyes as she smirked at him, but it had certainly put apprehension into his pissy orbs.
“Oh, sweety, you’re so far out of your element that it isn’t even funny. You’re late in learning one of the great cosmic truths, but you’ll have plenty of time to learn it when you return to whatever stinking pitt birthed you. There is always a bigger fish.”
* * * * *
“Good afternoon, Mr Fortre. This is Doctor Pamella Winter of Cashmere. I’m calling to let you know that I’ve found your son, Harold Fortre. He told me a very interesting story, and admitted to a lot of things. A lot of very interesting things that the police might very well be interested in.”
Winter smiled as the pompous jagoff started blustering, watching Harold snore as he lay on her couch. He looked so peaceful now, so weightless without all those secrets to weigh him down. He slept like a baby as his father blustered and rattled on the other end, but Winter had expected it.
“No sir, when I make a threat, you’ll know it. If you’ll let me continue, patient confidentiality finds me quite unable to tell the police anything we’ve discussed here. I’ve even fixed that troublesome little problem he’s had. How?” she smiled hugely, her white teeth gleaming in the harsh fluorescents of her office, “Mr. Fortre, making people forget is my job. He’s quite cured now, and if he isn’t, I’m sure you’ll tell everyone who will listen what a shyster I am and run me out of town. You can come pick him up, take your heir back, as bright and quick as he was before he went looking into the wrong holes as a child, but there is the matter of his bill.”
She listened a little more, nodding as Mr. Fortre’s tone changed from skeptical to something like disbelief.
They often thought it was too good to be true, and he would surely want to come look his gift horse in the mouth and inspect its teeth.
“Come have a look at him, take him home, and if he exhibits any strange behavior, I’ll give you my private cell so you can call me, day or night. I don’t believe that will be a problem though.”
She listened to him a while longer, smiling as she listened to the thing she had yanked out of Harold rattle in the cabinet.
“I’m very thorough and forgetting is what we do here at the clinic.”
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