The Murderer's Memories

by T. S. Nichols

  “Then we’re both out of luck.” Cole was still staring at the liquid in the vial. He looked up at Fergus only to see honest disappointment in his face.

  “Well, at least we stopped the bomber, right?” Fergus said. Then he reached for the top of the vial.

  “Wait,” Cole said “Can you at least tell me what’s going to happen? What am I going to remember?”

  “It’s simple, Cole. You’re going to remember things that are going to make you wish you were dead. Though wish might be too soft a word.”

  “But what will I remember?”

  “I don’t know,” Fergus said. “We didn’t give you memories. The odor doesn’t make you remember something new. It changes how you recall the memories that you already have. It triggers an emotional reaction to what is already in your head. There’s no way to fight it.”

  “I don’t want to die like that,” Cole finally spoke out loud. “I don’t want to die hating life. Can’t you just shoot me instead?”

  Fergus shook his head. “You have to do it to yourself, Cole, after I leave. It has to be suicide. I can’t risk anything else. But before I go, I have to be certain that you’re going to do it.”

  “How will you know that it’s going to work?”

  “I’ll know by the look on your face,” Fergus said. “I know the look that people have when they no longer have any hope in the world. I’ve seen it before.”

  Fergus reached for the vial again. This time Cole didn’t try to stop him. He took a deep breath before Fergus uncorked the vial, the last pure breath that he would ever take. Fergus took the lid off the vial and, with perfect nonchalance, tossed the liquid onto Cole’s shirt. Cole looked down. He could see the small, dark spots where the liquid landed on him. It was barely anything, less than a teaspoon’s worth and already drying. Without even knowing it, Cole had been holding his breath. “You will have to breathe,” Fergus told him. “We all have to breathe. The longer you hold your breath, the more you will inhale when you do.”

  Cole knew that Fergus was right. So he took a small breath. He didn’t know if he recognized the scent already drying on the front of his shirt. He could barely smell anything. He knew that’s how it worked, though. Cole took an even deeper breath. Fergus watched him, waiting for the change.

  Cole began to sweat. He tried to empty his mind. He didn’t believe he would be able to control the oncoming madness, but he thought that maybe he could at least delay it. He tried to think of nothing so that Fergus’s mental poison would have no memories to twist. For as long as he could, he wanted to starve the poison in his brain. This attempt was short-lived, though, as the memories in his head, all of his own memories and all of the ones he had inherited from others over the years, seemed to sense that the end was near and began to jockey to be remembered one more time before it was all over. Cole couldn’t fight them anymore so he began to let them come, focusing on his fondest memories first: long walks at night under the stars along an empty country road, the taste of hot chocolate after sledding in the snow, waking up next to a new lover and taking her one more time before the day even began. He remembered and waited for the memories to turn.

  Fergus kept staring at Cole. “You’re a tough son of a bitch,” Fergus said under his breath, waiting for the scent to kick in, wondering if it maybe would simply take longer because of all the memories in Cole’s head. Cole flipped through more memories: riding a bike through cornfields, watching the sunrise over the Atlantic Ocean, listening to the crackle of a roaring campfire. That’s when he realized that the poison wasn’t coming. Something had gone wrong. The beautiful memories came, one after the other, and none were perverted into pain or horror or anything else. For some reason, Fergus’s poison wasn’t working. Cole almost laughed in Fergus’s face. He felt an unfathomable relief. He controlled himself, though. Confident that he had survived his greatest fear, now he wanted to just survive.

  Fergus was still staring at him. Cole knew that Fergus couldn’t afford to let him live, that he wouldn’t leave until he was certain Cole wasn’t going to just walk away. Cole had to fool him. He had to make Fergus believe that the scent had worked, but how? Cole had seen the look of terror and despair on Carter Green’s face before he shot the brains out of the back of his head. How could Cole possibly fake that? A suspicious look crossed Fergus’s face, as if he began to doubt whether this was going to work. He reached for his phone. “We should have inserted the synthetics directly,” he mumbled to himself. Cole didn’t understand what he meant. “We never should have tried to pass them through that redheaded kid’s memories.”

  Suddenly, Cole realized why Fergus’s plan wasn’t going to work: He had never had the memory poison in his brain to begin with. Instead of finding a doctor willing to plant the memory poison directly into Cole, Fergus had implanted it in the brain of a young man who was a key to Cole’s investigation of the Company, assuming that, once they slit the young man’s throat, Cole would volunteer to inherit his memories, and then the poison would pass from the kid to Cole. Cole had always wondered why Fergus had left the kid’s memories intact. Now he knew. It had been a trap. But Fergus believed Cole had taken the kid’s memories only because that’s what Cole had wanted him to believe. The truth was that the poison was in the head of a woman in Arizona. Cole had had every intention of taking the young man’s memories. The problem was that the young man’s sister wanted them. She wasn’t ready to let her brother go. So she had his memories implanted in her brain, including his murder and everything that came before it. To keep her safe from the Company, Cole had made sure everyone believed that he had inherited the memories. Only a handful of people knew differently. Fergus wasn’t one of them. Cole had been trying to protect the kid’s sister, but it turned out that he had really been protecting himself.

  Fergus hadn’t taken his eyes off Cole’s face. Cole had no time for intricate plans or strategies. He needed Fergus to think the poison was working. He needed Fergus to see the horror in Cole’s face, but to sell that type of despair, Cole needed to feel it. Not enough to drive himself mad, but enough to push him close. He realized that he had only one chance. He needed to free Faith’s memories, the sorrow and pain and hopelessness that had driven her to murder. He needed the memories that she’d had injected in India, the memories of the street orphan. He couldn’t let his brain protect himself from them anymore.

  Somehow, perhaps simply because of how much Cole needed them, the memories finally came. Or perhaps they came now because Cole understood that he’d been searching through two distinct memories all along. It didn’t really matter. The reason wasn’t important. What was important was that they came and they came quickly, in all their dark and hideous glory. It wasn’t merely the memories of loneliness and cruelty that began to push Cole toward the edge that Faith and April had reached. It was Faith’s good memories too. When faced with the horrors that were now in his head, he remembered Faith’s good memories the way she had, with guilt and regret. The better the memory, the crueler it felt. Cole could feel himself beginning to spiral down, badly enough that he wondered if Fergus’s scent was working after all. Maybe he hadn’t thwarted it, he’d just let it linger, waiting for the right trigger, and now Fergus had set it off.

  Cole looked up at Fergus. Without saying a word, he was begging Fergus. Help me, Cole begged with his eyes. I don’t want this. Help me. Fergus saw the unbearable pain in Cole’s face, saw the pleading in his eyes, and smiled. It wasn’t that Fergus liked seeing Cole suffer. Even after being betrayed by him, Fergus still admired Cole. He smiled because he liked seeing his plans go into action. He waited another moment, staring at Cole’s face. The memories kept attacking Cole like a swarm of locusts, eating everything in their path. Cole was caught between trying to stop the memories before they ruined him and trying to make sure they didn’t stop until Fergus left him there to die. With every moment, the memories became lonelier and more painful. There was no warmth, no hope. In all his memories of destitution and murder,
Cole had always found some warmth. Cole could find no harbor in these memories of the poor Indian child with no family, no one looking out for her, and only cruelty and abuse. It was as if warmth didn’t even exist. It was the loneliest feeling in the world. So the spiral kept descending and Cole kept going with it. Now he began to understand why Faith and April believed that murder might be a gift.

  Fergus stood up. “I’m sorry, Cole,” he said with genuine regret in his voice, though he didn’t expect Cole to be able to hear him. He’d had a problem to solve and he’d done his best to solve it. He wasn’t sure how Cole was going to kill himself, but that didn’t worry him. He knew that when the desire was strong enough, Cole would find a way. Finally Fergus left, and Cole was alone in his apartment, sinking into the pain inside his mind.

  If Fergus had waited another minute or two, it might have worked. When Cole heard the door click closed, he wasn’t completely lost yet. He was still treading water. He thought that he might still have a chance to make it before turning into what Faith and April had become, but he needed to do something now.

  Chapter 34

  SIX HOURS AFTER STOPPING THE SECOND BOMBING

  Cole ran, swerving around the other people on the sidewalk. As he passed them, they looked back to see if someone was chasing him. They couldn’t tell if Cole was a good guy or a bad guy. He could have been a mugger or a thief, running either from someone he’d just robbed or from the police. A few wondered if they should try to stop him, but thought he also could have been running from danger. Perhaps someone was chasing him, someone who wanted to hurt him. A few wondered if they should try to help him. When they looked back, however, they saw nothing. They couldn’t see who or what was chasing him. They couldn’t know that Cole was literally running away from bad memories.

  Cole could feel the memories trying to slip out from his subconscious, like cold fingers reaching out to try to grab his heart. He had to beat them back. He’d seen what these memories could do to people. He first saw it in Costa Rica almost a year ago when he watched a man blow his brains out just to get rid of them. Then he saw it again, more recently, doing even worse things, turning an idealistic young woman into a killer. He knew that if he let them take over his brain it wouldn’t be only for this moment but again and again for the rest of his life. Some memories didn’t go away. Some refused to even weaken. They would lie low like a fox in the grass, waiting to pounce. Cole knew that he would have to beat them back again and again, but they were coming on strong this time and he could think of only one way to stop them from taking him.

  He knew where he was going, and he was trying to get there as quickly as he could. Not far from his apartment there was a bar, the Arson’s Ashes, and in one corner of the bar stood an old piano, rarely used. He was running to that piano. Cole believed that if he could get there quickly, the piano might be able to save him. He just needed to still have some of Ivan’s memories in his brain.

  Cole managed to deftly sidestep most of the other people on the sidewalk as he ran, though he bumped into an elderly woman, walking slowly with the help of a cane. Cole almost knocked her over but managed to reach out and grab her before she fell to the ground. He could feel how fragile she was, how brittle the muscle and bone were, beneath her hardened skin. He pulled her closer, trying hard not to hurt her. He looked into her face just as he was able to help her find her balance again. She looked frightened, wincing with fear, the deep lines around her eyes growing even deeper. She didn’t say a word. She was too busy catching her breath. Cole could barely look at her. The pain and fear in her face were triggering too many memories, memories he didn’t even know he had, memories that he wished he didn’t have. “I’m sorry,” Cole said as soon as he was sure the old woman was steady on her feet again. Then he turned and kept on running.

  It was only another block and a half to the bar. Cole was there in a matter of minutes. He spent every second of those minutes trying to keep his mind empty, but the memories kept pushing. Cole tried to ignore them. He knew that they were memories of pain and sorrow without joy, and he refused to let them gain coherence in his mind. They were memories without hope, which only memories of hope could defeat. Cole reached the Arson’s Ashes and pushed his way inside. The bar, which wasn’t crowded even on its best days, was almost completely empty. Two people, a man and a woman, sat at opposite ends of the bar, drinking alone together. The bartender stood behind the bar, his head lifted toward the television in the corner of the room. Another couple sat at a booth near the door. Cole ignored them all. The piano, an old wooden upright, not so different from the one in Andy’s apartment except that this one was light brown, was pushed against the wall in the back. Cole was a regular at the Arson’s Ashes and he could only remember hearing anyone play the piano on two or three occasions. Once was near Christmas when somebody sat down to play a few Christmas carols that they’d learned as a child and clearly hadn’t practiced in a long time. The other time or two were men trying to impress their dates with mediocre renditions of American standards. Cole was pretty sure not all of the keys worked. He was hoping it wouldn’t matter. He only needed to not despair. A few moments without despair, and Cole believed that he would make it through the day.

  Cole sat down on the piano stool. He lifted the lid above the keys, smelling the old wood. The white keys were now more yellow than white, and every fourth or fifth one had a chip knocked out of it. Cole placed his fingers on the old, worn keys, trying to remember how Andy had shown him. He ran his fingers over them, hoping that they would stop when he got to the right place. He wasn’t sure if this would work. Ivan’s memories were supposed to have been erased. And if Ivan’s memories were truly gone, he feared that the despair would overtake him. What had those two young women remembered that sucked so much hope out of them that they became killers? Cole knew he would find out eventually, but if he could mete out the memories so that they were balanced with other new ones, he hoped he could weather them. That’s what the young women were missing. They remembered sorrow without hope, pain without pleasure, endless sadness. Cole felt those memories sneaking up on him again.

  Come on, Ivan, Cole thought. He knew that the memories of pain and sorrow and suffering were coming for him. He had to beat them back with memories of smaller but happier moments. Cole knew that Ivan’s memory was full of such moments. That’s why they had clung to him so hard. He pushed down on a single key with a finger on his right hand. The sound echoed out of the piano; he heard the sound and felt it beneath his finger at the same time. Then his left hand moved down the piano and pushed two other keys simultaneously. Even Cole, with no musical training whatsoever, could tell that those two keys were meant to be played together. Cole’s right foot began to move up and down, counting out a rhythm. Then, without thinking, without trying, Cole began to play.

  There may have been a time, decades earlier, when music like that had reverberated out of the piano, but it had been a long, long time ago. Cole didn’t know the piece he was playing, or its composer. It was a classical piece, up-tempo but without frills or flourishes, its depth and power all in the playing. Cole’s fingers danced across the keys. Whenever he hit a dead key, he improvised and played around it without a moment’s hesitation. As he played, he remembered. He didn’t remember how to play; that continued to come to him unconsciously. Instead, he remembered a small house. He was young, no more than a boy. It was sunny and hot. All the windows were open and Cole could feel the breeze blow by him, carrying with it the scents of cigar smoke, rotting fish, and salt water. He stared out the window, wishing for a moment that he could be outside playing baseball with his friends. Then, from the next room, he heard the older woman’s voice: “Play, Ivan! Play!” Cole looked down and saw the piano keys in front of him. They were aged like the keys on the piano in the bar, but they wore their age far better. Cole looked out the window again toward the alley separating his grandmother’s house from the other small houses. In the memory, as soon as his fingers touched the keys
, he lost the desire to do anything but play. Ivan’s grandmother came in through the door carrying a pitcher of limeade and two glasses. She was smiling broadly and nodding her head. “That’s very good, Ivan,” she said over the music. Soon the music in Cole’s memory was synced with the music echoing out of the old piano in the corner of the Arson’s Ashes. Cole could hear it in both places at once, like he was listening in stereo that crossed through time. Ivan’s grandmother placed one glass on the table next to the piano and filled it. Then she poured herself a glass, moved behind Ivan, and took a sip of her drink. “So beautiful, Ivan,” she said as she leaned down and gave the young Ivan a kiss on his cheek. Ivan never stopped playing. Cole wished that he never would, that the memory would go on and on forever even though he knew it couldn’t. When the piece ended, the memory ended. It had done its job, though. The bad memories kept their distance, for now.

  When Cole finally pulled his fingers away from the keys, everyone in the bar was staring at him. The bartender walked a drink over to him, his usual drink, a Bloody Bull. “This one’s on me, Cole,” he said. He walked away without asking why Cole had never bothered to play the piano before. He knew better than to ask Cole questions. Cole took a sip of his drink. He could feel sweat dripping down his forehead.

  Cole looked out across the bar. There were now seven people there, including him. While he had been playing, someone else had walked in. He had been too wrapped up in Ivan’s memories to notice. The new person was sitting at a table only a few feet from Cole.

  “That is some fine piano playing,” Bernard said as Cole’s eyes landed on him. “A song like that is way too pretty for a bar like this.”

  Cole shook his head. “You can find pretty in all sorts of places if you take the time to look. How the hell did you find me?”