He took out his keycard, swiped it through the reader, and pressed the ground floor button. The doors shut in front of us.
Mr. Coronado refused to look at me. As we began to ascend, I saw the slightest smirk appear on his face. The smug expression—an underhanded shiv meant for me and me alone—hardened my shame into resentment and rage.
The doors opened. I looked down and saw he was still holding the keycard in his hand.
Time froze.
I never thought the insane little voice in the back of my head—the snickering teenager goading me to disregard all good sense and reason—would ever actually win the battle of control over my actions. But this time, with my pride injured and my judgment clouded, the reckless urge came on like the rush of a potent drug.
My body sprang forward, seemingly of its own volition. With both hands, I clawed the keycard from Mr. Coronado’s grip. He spun to face me, his eyes popping with astonishment.
Again my muscles acted on raw impulse. I charged ahead, plowing into him with my full weight, and he flew backward through the elevator doors. He crashed through the glass display case on the opposite side of the hall, miniature porcelain cats and other tchotchkes tumbling everywhere, and fell flat on his ass.
I looked at the keycard in my shaking hands, then up at Mr. Coronado. He rose to his feet, his face purple and clenched. I swiped the card through the reader and it gave me a red light indicating it hadn’t read the card properly.
Mr. Coronado took a step toward me but his leg buckled. He clutched it in pain and I noticed the glint of glass protruding from his thigh. I grit my teeth and swiped the card again—the light went green—and I feverishly pounded the “B1” button as he hobbled closer, his bloody hand outstretched. The doors began to close and he flailed his arm at the gap, but he was a fraction of a second too late. The doors shut, leaving him pounding his fist against the metal.
I heard him howling my name the whole way down.
The elevator reached B1. I stepped off, dizzy with the unreality of what I had just done.
No turning back now.
I sprinted past the Memory Center and came to the Special Therapy room. The tortured voice inside moaned openly now. Breathless, I slid Mr. Coronado’s keycard through the reader.
When I opened the door, my blood went cold.
In the center of the room, a decrepit man writhed in a dentist’s chair, his ankles and wrists secured to the metal frame with leather restraints. He stared straight up, aghast at the thing straddling him.
I blinked hard, thinking my eyes weren’t seeing right. But it was all too real.
A bald, marionette-thin figure hunched over the old man like a vulture over a corpse, its gray, naked legs squeezed around his waist. It wore a dog collar around its neck, the leash draped down its bony back.
At the other end of the nylon rope stood a man in a riot helmet, the leash wrapped around his left fist. In his right fist: an extendable police baton.
Behind the thing and its victim, a woman in a lab coat stood next to a stainless steel cart filled with white plastic vials. With a latex-gloved hand, she picked up one of the vials and held it out in front of the creature’s face.
When the woman saw me standing in the doorway, she nearly dropped the vial. The man in the helmet pulled the leash taut and my attention reflexively shot back to the ghoul. It spun its bald head toward me and hissed, beady, black eyes filled with ravenous hunger.
The creature lunged at me, swift and brutal as a striking snake, but the leash cut short its leap. It fell to the floor with a skin-and-bones clatter.
I never noticed whoever snuck up behind me. The unseen blow came so hard and fast, I was out before I hit the floor.
I slowly opened my eyes to the harsh glare of the medical lamp. Around me, half a dozen people murmured in an anxious hush. I tried to move but my limbs were secured to the dentist’s chair.
“Well, now look what you’ve done.”
The voice was Mr. Coronado’s. He limped to my side and I saw he had replaced his ripped, bloody suit with a new one.
He patted my forearm and sighed. “Really didn’t want to do this, Mr. Plummer. I actually kind of liked you, until you pulled that stupid stunt. Now I have no choice.”
He snapped his fingers. From behind him came a wet wheeze, the slap of hands and feet on tile. Mr. Coronado stepped aside and the creature emerged, tottering on all fours like a deformed chimpanzee.
“Wait—”
The thing bounded onto my torso, cutting my words short. I felt its spindly legs clamp around my hips in an urgent grip. It looked down, relishing me like a gift too good to be true, and reached out to stroke my hair. A sick, toothless smile crept across its gray lips and from under its rotten breath I heard it gasp with an almost sexual delight. When it slid its hand down to touch my cheek, a shudder of nausea rolled through me.
The ghoul leaned in closer. The thin skin on its face looked like the film that grows on the surface of boiled milk—smooth, colorless, and brittle—the tiny wrinkles flattening as the creature’s expression changed from deranged glee to grave seriousness.
I jerked my head away but a pair of hands grabbed my skull from behind and held it still. A spasm of mortal terror exploded through my body in a futile attempt to buck the vile creature, but it only squeezed its legs more tightly around my waist.
The ghoul held my face in its hands and opened its mouth, inches from mine. On instinct I pressed my lips shut, but it didn’t matter. A hot wave coursed through my body and sharpened into a thousand needles. The agony accumulated into a mass in my gut, then drifted up into my chest and ascended my neck.
I gagged as the burning sensation rose through my throat and into my nostrils. When I looked down, I saw a black mist funneling from my nose, toward the ghoul’s sucking mouth. I screamed, and the guttural sound of my suffering merged with the vapor into a single river of misery rushing into the creature’s maw.
The torment may have lasted only a few minutes, or it may have stretched for hours. All sense of time was lost to the canceling roar of the pain.
Finally, the ordeal ended. I opened my wet eyes and saw the woman in the lab coat hold one of her plastic vials in front of the creature’s face. It retched and expelled a string of black ooze into the vial.
The woman scraped the rim of the vial across its lower lip, collecting every last remnant of the substance. “I know you have more more. Come on.”
It hissed at her and wrapped my head in its arms like a mother protecting her infant. The man in the helmet stepped forward, baton raised, and the creature recoiled.
The woman put the vial under its nose again. It dutifully spat out more of the sludge.
“Good.” She backed away. “Continue.”
It continued. And continued. Drained me of whatever that substance was until I thought my bones would melt and my flesh would slough onto the floor.
But mercy was at hand. Everything went black.
“King me.”
It was a woman’s voice, scratchy and low. My vision slowly came into focus and I saw the snot dangling from my face, down to my shirt.
I gave the shirt a longer look. It wasn’t actually a shirt, but a hospital gown.
My gaze drifted down my arms, to my hands. Gnarled and liver-spotted. I felt a hazy pang of unease but couldn’t discern why.
On the small table in front of me lay a checker board, most of the pieces already moved from their starting positions. I must have drifted off in the middle of the game, but I couldn’t remember anything. Fragments of thoughts flitted in and out of my mind like skittish birds. My body ached with a cancer-heavy exhaustion.
“I said king me.”
I looked up at the source of the command and saw her, a woman with a face as withered as my hands, her head haloed by a cotton-candy shock of white hair.
She gestured to the board with her open palm. “Don’t you know how to play checkers?”
I blinked with bewilderment and looked
around at the spacious room, brightly lit under fluorescent lights. Other infirm men and women sat around me, some nodding off in their chairs, others mumbling to themselves. I couldn’t remember where I was or how I got there, or who the woman across from me was.
I couldn’t remember who I was.
Confusion and fear twisted my surroundings into a kaleidoscopic tangle. I cried out to no one in particular, “Where am I? What is this place?”
My checkers opponent leaned closer to me, her eyes darting left and right. “Shhh. They don’t like those kinds of questions.”
“What is this place?” The blankness of my amnesia crowded around me like an ominous silence. “How did I get here?”
A young man and woman in nurse’s scrubs hurried over to me from across the room.
The female nurse crouched in front of me, hands on her knees. “Now, sir, you can’t be yelling like that, okay? You’re disturbing the others’ peace and quiet. You don’t want to disturb their peace and quiet, do you?”
From beside me, I felt the male nurse put his hand on my shoulder. He held it there.
I turned and looked up at him. “C-can you just tell me where I am?”
He gave the female nurse a knowing look.
“You’re at the Oasis,” she said.
The words triggered a whisper of familiarity, like the faintest déjà vu, and then it was gone. “The what?”
“The Oasis.” She pointed to the words embroidered on her scrubs. “An assisted living facility.”
I gawked at her, my mind fumbling to pluck a memory from the murk. I looked down at the embroidered text again. Below “The Oasis at Palm Village,” in cursive it read, “Life starts anew at the Oasis.”
The image from the commercial—Mr. Coronado and his staff grinning together in the sun—flashed into my mind. In whirling fast-forward, the sequence of events from earlier that day hit me all at once: my arrival; meeting Mr. Coronado; the tour of the ground floor; the Memory Center; the fight on the elevator; the Special Therapy room; the—
“Sir? Are you okay?”
Instead of the nurse’s face, all I could see was the creature hanging over me, its eyes rolled back into its head, black mouth thrown open like a festering wound, leeching away my life into its trembling body.
“No!” I jumped from my chair. “I know what you did to me. I know what you did to all these people.”
The male nurse tried to force me back down, but my legs were stiff with panic. He pulled my wrists back. “Sir.”
The female nurse came to his aid, seized my left arm.
“I remember. That thing. That foul—”
The male nurse clamped his hand over my mouth. “His memory came back. They must not have done it long enough.”
The female nurse yanked my arm back and bent it inward, like a cop. “We need to take him back. Immediately.”
I kicked wildly as they dragged me away. The others just gaped, paralyzed and mute.
I tried to wrench my arms free but the nurses held firm. With all my strength, I yanked my head back and twisted away from the man’s silencing hand, just long enough to cry out, “Fight back! We can—”
This time the man didn’t use his hand to shut me up; he used his entire arm, curled it around my neck and choked me so hard I gagged.
They heaved me in lurches toward the exit. It’s over, I thought. I’m done. They’ll put the ghoul on me until I’m dead.
With this depleted body, I didn’t stand the slightest chance, no matter how hard I fought. I resigned myself to my fate, relaxed my burning muscles, and let them carry me away.
Then, a miracle.
Ten feet from the double doors, the female nurse tripped. She pulled me and the male nurse down with her in a flailing pile.
I looked up and saw an elderly woman sitting nearby, her cane extended low to the floor. She stood, raised the cane above her head, and brought it down on the female nurse’s head with a crack.
The male nurse jumped to his feet, grabbed the cane from the woman’s hands, and shoved her to the ground so hard her head bounced off the floor.
For the rest of my days, I don’t think I’ll ever hear anything more fantastic and surreal than the sound of three dozen old people bellowing with righteous fury. On walkers and canes, they rose up and closed in on my captors.
The male nurse stood over his colleague and pointed at the tightening circle, his eyes wild. “Get back! I’m warning you to—”
A tiny, gnomelike man plowed his mobility scooter into the back of the nurse’s legs and knocked him down before he could finish his threat. With both nurses on their backs, the horde descended in a hail of clumsy punches and kicks.
A minute later, a lusty cheer rose up from the scrum. A bald man emerged, laughing and holding a keycard aloft. He shuffled to the double doors as quickly as his skinny legs would allow.
The man passed the card through the reader, opened the doors, and stepped out into the hall, his hands raised in victory. The others followed him, dragging their hapless captives down the corridor as they made their way from room to room to release the people inside.
The sight of their growing fervor emboldened me. As they freed the last of their basement comrades, I got an aluminum chair from the Memory Center and carried it to the Special Therapy room door.
The crowd took notice. They coalesced around me and muttered with anticipation.
The man with the keycard came forward. “What’s in there?” he asked me.
“You don’t know?”
“I… I can’t remember.”
I looked at the others, all staring back at me. The trepidation and uncertainty in their faces filled me with deep sorrow. Locks and chains weren’t needed to keep these people under control. They were prisoners of their own minds, minds made too feeble to recall the unspeakable atrocities inflicted on them.
“Something terrible is on the other side of this door,” I said. “And we need to go in.”
The man with the card gave me a solemn nod. He unlocked the door.
I raised the chair, legs pointed forward. “Okay, open it. Everyone else, stand back.”
I took a breath and tightened my muscles. The man threw open the door.
The room was empty. Just the dentist’s chair, leather restraints hanging down.
I went inside and the others filed in after me. On the right side of the room stood an industrial refrigerator. On the left side, another closed door, this one metal. It had an iron-barred opening near the top.
My pulse quickened as I approached the door. When I looked through the opening into the small, unlit room, I caught a glimpse of the creature’s gray flesh as it slunk into the darkness of the far corner.
From behind me, I heard the refrigerator door open.
I turned around. It was the woman with the cane who had tripped the nurse in the Memory Center. In front of her, lined up in neat rows on the refrigerator shelf, were plastic vials filled with dark liquid.
She reached in, grabbed one, and removed the lid.
“Wait!” I shouted, but she had already taken a gulp.
Her face contorted like she had taken a shot of strong liquor. She staggered back.
I rushed to the woman’s side, caught her just as her legs gave out. Two other men helped me hold her up.
“What happened?” said one of the men.
“She drank some of that stuff.” I nodded toward the refrigerator.
The woman convulsed, made a vile gurgling sound. The three of us eased her down. The instant she touched the floor, her back arched and her arms went stiff.
I watched her stricken face as we struggled to hold her down. When I noticed the first change, I thought my mind was playing tricks on me. The heavy wrinkles around her mouth grew shallower, color flooded back to her cheeks, and her white hair darkened to a salt-and-pepper gray. I felt the flesh of her arm become fuller, suddenly warm in my hands.
We let go of her and joined the others in stunned silence. Finally, her
body slackened, the uncanny transformation complete. What had just seconds earlier been a woman in her last days now looked barely sixty.
She stood up and took in her surroundings. No one said a word. When she looked down at her hands, pink and plump, a jubilant smile spread across her face.
“I can’t believe this. It’s… it’s like some kind of…”
Her gaze drifted to the dentist’s chair and her expression stiffened. “They have been draining us, little by little. They put our… our life into those vials. They took us from upstairs, one at a time, brought us down to this room. Stole our life and erased our memories, then blamed it on natural decline.”
She looked at me and her eyes blazed like blue flames. “But I remember now. I remember everything.”
The woman turned to address the group. “My name is Judy Goulding. I’ve lived a full life, but my purpose on this Earth is not yet done. There will be justice today.”
Everyone looked at the refrigerator, still standing open. The calm broke and we stormed it all at once.
I pushed through the groaning pack and clawed blindly for a vial. My hand landed on one and I seized it. A strange urgency coursed through my veins in quicksilver pulses as I ripped off the lid and jammed the opening of the vial into my mouth. I sucked the bitter, syrupy liquid from the container with the wretchedness of a starving animal, unable to extract the precious substance fast enough.
The instant I swallowed, a flash of heat exploded throughout my body.
I awoke to the sight of a handful of men sitting in front of the refrigerator with their tongues thrust into empty vials. When I stood, I felt the renewed vigor in my legs and arms, the restored coherence in my thoughts.
All around me were younger versions of the people I had seen only moments before, their faces filled with wonder and the crushing weight of freshly remembered trauma.
Some wept. Some laughed. Most just stood with distant, unfocused eyes, like illiterates peering into the incomprehensible books of their lives.
A shout from the hall. “Hey, what’s going on down here?”
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