The Memory Agent

by Matthew B. J. Delaney

  My eyes began to adjust quickly to the loss of light. The blackness faded to a dim gray in which I could see silhouetted shapes of buildings in the distance. Clayton’s voice sounded from behind me. “It’s time.”

  In the distance, set high in the shadowed silhouette of the building, the apartment light sparked on again. Clayton and I cut across Columbus Circle. My eyes had adjusted completely to the darkness and I found I could navigate easily. The remainder of our group stayed behind in camp. Charlotte sketched the skyline in her journal by lantern light, while Nasir and Selberg talked quietly around a small fire built inside a metal mesh trash can.

  As we crossed the circle, Clayton looked back at the fire. Embers caught in the updraft of heated air rose in spirals before blinking out.

  “That fire is the brightest thing in the city right now,” Clayton said.

  “Doesn’t make us hard to find.”

  We reached the lobby and pushed open the front doors. I carried a lantern, and as we entered the building, I pulled back the tin cover. Wild shadows were thrown across the marble walls. In an old gilt mirror, I saw our reflections, two pale faces lit from beneath by lantern light, our skin pocked with shadows.

  The elevator ride was short and the doors opened again onto the familiar hallway. Everything was the same as before, only this time we had a key.

  A seam of light was visible beneath the closed apartment door. As we approached, a shadow passed across the seam, as if something moved on the other side. The thought fluttered my stomach, and next to me, Clayton raised his rifle and buttressed it against his shoulder.

  I paused and listened. On the other side I heard a faint rustle. Barely audible. The sound of feet on carpet perhaps. Clayton nodded, raised his rifle, and stepped back from the door. Slowly I fitted the key in the lock.

  The knob turned easily. I pushed the door open and flooded the hallway with light.

  My first impression beyond the door was of a large, loft-style apartment. Hardwood parquet floors. Neatly painted white walls. A kitchen off to our right with shining appliances. A rug covered a portion of the floor, stretching back toward a bedroom and a series of windows that looked out across the park. I noticed a stain on the edge of the rug, light pink in color. An innocuous splatter mark that looked to me like blood.

  In the bedroom area, the mattress was centered by a dark mahogany frame and topped by a thick, white comforter. The comforter was pulled carelessly away, and the sheets were marked by the shallow indentions of a human body. This was a recently slept-in bed. Slowly, I moved through the room, remembering the shadow that passed along the seam of light beneath the closed door. On either side of the bed were two tables, one with glass jars containing candles and the other with a single photograph inside of a silver frame. Over the bed, a painting. Something vaguely familiar to me. Splatter marks of paint across a white canvas.

  My attention turned to the bookshelf. Rows of books neatly lined the shelf. I studied the bindings. All of the titles were in English. Some familiar: Three Musketeers, A Tale of Two Cities. Others I couldn’t place. Catcher in the Rye. A weathered copy of something called The Godfather.

  And then I saw the frame and time seemed to slow.

  Inside the frame was a photograph of a couple at the beach. The image was of such vivid color, so real that it felt alive in my hand. I had never seen a color photograph, yet this did not seem strange to me. Like the faint remembering of a dream. The beach had white sand, while an almost translucent ocean shimmered in the background.

  The couple sat on wood slat chairs in the sand beneath the shade of a large umbrella. The woman had black hair pulled straight back into a ponytail, dark eyes flecked with green. Her face had the slightly weathered look of time spent outdoors. The beginnings of lines formed around her mouth and at the corners of her eyes.

  The man next to her in the photo had dark hair turned messy and wet by the ocean. He had a half-crooked smile that warmed a face shadowed by stubble. Everything about this man was familiar. As it should be.

  The man was me.

  I returned the photograph to the table. I had no recollection of ever being at this beach, and the woman held no familiarity for me either. And I would have remembered a woman like that. But there was nothing. Yet the man was clearly me. The image itself was so true to life. So filled with color. Beyond anything I had ever experienced. Again, the idea of time travel occurred to me. Yet this man was not my future son. He was me. Of this I felt sure.

  Clayton studied me from across the room. He stood in the kitchen, drawers open behind him. “Everything all right?”

  “Yeah. Fine.” I put the framed photograph face down on the night table. There was something so oddly personal in that photo, something that connected me to this environment, that it seemed strange . . . almost dangerous . . . to share with someone else just yet.

  Clayton held up a stack of mail. “Got a name. Looks like a Roger Parker lived here.” He squatted down over the pinkish stains on the carpet. “Bloodstains. Washed out. Something bad happened.” There were more stains on the wall. A splatter mark that stained the white paint over the radiator.

  I studied the marks. “What do you make of these?”

  “I’d say a blood spatter.” Clayton stood on the rug, formed his hand into a gun, held it to his temple. Pulled the trigger. “Gun goes off, enters the brain, splatter mark to the wall, body falls here. Someone comes in later, cleans most of it up.”

  “So we’re looking at a murder scene?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Whatever is out there wanted us to see this. Why?”

  “You’re the academic. You tell me.” Clayton had moved toward the window. He nodded toward the outside. “There’s another light.”

  I saw only my own reflection in the glass. Roger Parker. I rolled the name around in my brain. Tested it out. Tried to get the feel for it, see if there was any faint memory. And there was something, buried deep. We wear our names like skin. They become such a part of us, almost impossible to truly erase. But if this Roger Parker was me, and I was him, and I was the man in the photograph, and this was my apartment, then what was happening here?

  I switched off the bedside lamp, the room went black, and I could see out across the dark city. The outlines of buildings were vague shadows. Along the edge of Columbus Circle, our tents were pitched in a jagged line illuminated by lanterns inside, the fabric glowing a faded yellow. A shadow moved inside, distorted and grotesquely huge by lantern light. I couldn’t tell who it was. Farther to the east was the dark expanse of Central Park.

  And deep in the middle of the park, a single light cut through the darkness.

  A cabin in the woods. And a lantern hung from the front porch.

  We took the elevator back down.

  The building lobby should have been as quiet and dark as when we left. It wasn’t. Something was waiting for us. A figure moved across the marbled floor, a shadow silhouetted against the lights of the camp visible through the open window. With one hand, Clayton raised the lantern. With the other, he raised the rifle. The shadow figure paused, turned toward us. Then a familiar voice spoke out.

  “Hello?”

  Clayton exhaled and lowered the rifle. The figure stepped forward and I saw Nasir’s face illuminated in lantern light.

  “What are you doing here?” Clayton asked sharply. “I almost shot you.”

  “I came out to see if I could help.” Nasir fidgeted with something in his hand. “I found this on this floor.”

  He held out a brightly colored glossy paper and I took it from his hand, holding it close to the lantern. It was a travel brochure, a montage of rolling orange groves and beaches, Escape Your World written in sunshine-yellow letters across the top.

  On the back was the address of a travel agency on Doyers Street.

  I remembered the same words from the subway station and the train we had boarded. There was something hazy about the brochure. The writing faded somehow. Like a pen running low on i
nk. I looked for some clue of understanding. Nothing came. I folded up the brochure and stuffed it into my pocket.

  “What’d you find up there?” Nasir asked.

  “Nothing,” Clayton said. “Empty room.”

  The camp was quiet when we returned. I walked to the edge of Central Park, held up my lantern like some character from The Hound of the Baskervilles, and tried to peer through the dense black of foliage. The trees were too thick, and the light we had seen from above wasn’t visible from the ground. The park itself was dark and shadowed, incredibly still, but I knew something was out there.

  Clayton joined me. “You want to go out there?”

  “Of course,” I said. “Don’t you?”

  Clayton shifted his weight. “Don’t know. I’m not here to explore this place. I’m here to protect your team.”

  “Maybe the best way to protect us is to find a way out. We both know about sixteen tons of rock separate us from the world. And nobody even knows we’re in trouble. So unless we find food and water soon . . .”

  “All right.”

  “Why did you tell Nasir that room was empty?”

  “We don’t need panic and fear right now. Everyone is wired tight enough as it is.”

  “So you lied to him?”

  “Yes,” Clayton said. “Still want to go out there with me?”

  We all had our own secrets and lies. I knew I should tell Clayton the truth of what I saw in the apartment. If he was going to risk his life with me, or for me, he should know at least what he was getting into. But I wasn’t sure what I could tell him. I didn’t know where to start and I didn’t know what the truth was. For now, we had to press forward. Clayton was right, we didn’t need panic and fear.

  We headed north along Central Park West. To our left, block after block of darkened buildings, each a perfect replica of the original. I wondered how deep the fabrication went. Were these buildings only facades? Movie sets with empty interiors propped up by wooden scaffolds and plasterboard? Or did the replication run deep, to individual apartments filled with the furniture and belongings of real people? And if that were true, who were these people? How had they created this careful mimic of our world, as if this metropolis were one giant mirror of a real city, and Clayton and I now walked on its glass surface.

  The street itself was empty of cars and completely quiet. This was the total silence I had only experienced deep inside the ruins of antiquity. I held my lantern aloft. The small gaslight barely pushed back the darkness. The yellow glow of my face floated in the black window glass of a solid granite building. The image was incredibly eerie. I held the lantern down and looked away.

  Clayton walked with alertness, his Winchester repeating rifle carried waist high. His head swiveled, his eyes flicked back and forth from the edge of the park to the line of the buildings. From somewhere across the street came the shrill ring of a telephone. The same style of ring that had beckoned Selberg and me earlier in the day.

  We stood near the entrance of the Dakota apartment building. The Dakota was famous even in my time, one of the beautiful structures that had been constructed in the late 1800s when the area was mostly farmland. I was pleasantly surprised to see the familiar building. Like running into an old friend on the street. Slender gables rose into the darkness along with a multitude of dormers and balconies, all of which added interesting layers and dimensions to a terra-cotta face.

  The ring was muted slightly, as if it came from inside the building. As Clayton and I stood there trying to figure out what to do, an overhead light in the building lobby flickered to life. The light spilled out through the glass front window and onto the dark street, like an illuminated display case.

  We crossed the street and pulled open the building’s front door. Inside, the lobby had a black and white checkered floor. Gold ornate scrollwork of angels and cherubs lined the edges of the ceiling. Sitting on the doorman’s desk, a hospital blue telephone rang incessantly.

  I lifted the one-piece handset from the cradle and held the phone to my ear. I heard the faint buzz of static and then a slight electric hiccup, like a needle falling into the groove of a phonograph. Music began to play. The sound was distant and wavering through the small telephone receiver. Chopin. I was reminded of my wife. She had always loved classical music.

  As the song played, I looked around the vacant building lobby.

  Through the glass, Central Park lay in shadows.

  Static cut through the music, then a voice came on the line, sounding distant and muffled. “So you lied to him?”

  It was my own voice. The conversation I had with Clayton played back over the phone. Someone was out there listening to us.

  “Yes,” Clayton’s voice on the phone replied. “Still want to go out there with me?”

  The static burst again, painfully loud in my ear. Then the background noise cleared, like clouds parting before the sun, and in that moment of clarity I heard another voice. A conversation happening in another place. Somewhere out beyond the walls of this place.

  It was a man’s voice, speaking to someone else. “I don’t know . . . I’m getting feedback . . .”

  My fingers tightened on the phone. “Hello?”

  The sound of my voice traveled into nothingness. There was no response.

  “. . . yeah, I tried that. Nothing . . . I’ll keep trying . . .”

  Then the phone went dead. When I was sure there was nothing else, I hung up.

  “What was it?” Clayton asked.

  “Music.”

  “That’s it?”

  “No,” I said. “There was something else. There was someone there. I don’t know what it was.”

  Back on the street, we continued to walk north until we saw a yellow glow through the trees. In a land of universal darkness, the light stood in singular illuminated isolation. A gravel path cut off from the sidewalk and led into the trees. The park was especially dense with foliage here, like a forest from an old Grimm’s fairytale, thick with creeping vines and twisted elms.

  Cautiously, we moved into the cover of the forest. The trees rose up above us, blocking out the darker silhouettes of buildings. The path was knotted with roots, and I could see with horrid fascination the clear scuff marks in the dirt of layers of footprints. This area appeared to be well traveled. The marks all headed deeper into the park.

  Something about being in a forest at night brought on a primal fear. Whoever had left those tracks could be out there somewhere, moving silently from trunk to trunk, watching us from a distance, luring us deeper into the park and the unknown.

  Our boots crunched lightly on the gravel beneath us, and somewhere through the trees I heard a woman sobbing, a sound made more from fear than sadness. The desperate tears of someone in mortal dread. My heart quickened. Someone was out here with us. Someone in danger. But with a thin stab of guilt, a great part of me wanted to retreat back to the street. The intensity of what was happening almost overloaded my senses, paralyzing me with terror.

  Then came a single, long shriek.

  It was a chilling sound. A primal cry of pain. Clayton lowered himself slowly, prepping for his attack. I pulled the Colt from my waistband. My doubts broke, and without thinking I ran along the path into the darkness of the park. Clayton followed me, my lantern casting wild shadows across the branches that crowded in on us. The scream came from the direction of the light in the woods, and we headed fast toward the sound. A branch slapped me across the face, momentarily blinding me.

  The woman screamed again.

  The path turned north. The slope of a rocky hill blocked the light, and Clayton grabbed my shoulder hard. He held a finger to his lip, then slowly moved forward, rifle raised and pressed to his shoulder. The cry had come from the other side of the hill, and we carefully made our way around the path.

  As we rounded the curve, I could see a lantern placed in the window of a two-story gingerbread cottage set deep in the woods. The cottage was sided with Baltic fir so dark, it appeared black i
n the light, with long gables that hung from the roof. Ornate wooden shutters had fantastic, hand-carved scrollwork and large, rounded windows. It was a beautiful cottage, like an illustration from a children’s book, but there was something forbidding in this anachronism. The structure didn’t belong here.

  And neither did we.

  The lantern cast a yellow flickering light that created shadows across the bare branches of the dogwood trees along the front. I could see the front door was ajar.

  Clayton and I both paused and waited. We heard nothing. The frantic sobs were gone.

  In life, I had been here before.

  I remembered coming here as a child for a marionette performance of Hansel and Gretel. Even holding my father’s hand during a beautiful Saturday afternoon in April, I felt a chill of fear in this place.

  The imagination of a child can quickly turn the wooden features of puppets, with their limbs artificially jerking and lurching pulled by the strings of invisible hands, into something terrible. A childhood fear is held the longest and the strongest, and standing now in darkness, again before the gingerbread-style cottage, I felt that same fear return, just as strong. I hesitated, and to my shame, I whispered to Clayton, “Should we get the others?”

  Clayton surveyed the woods around us, impenetrably dark. “No time,” he replied.

  I nodded. Clayton was of course right. The woman had screamed in mortal terror. And now the silence weighed more heavily on me than any scream could have. We were here, now, the only ones able to help. And to delay to go back for the others would have been cowardice.

  Lantern in one hand, Colt in the other, I slowly advanced. A dogwood tree hung heavy with large purple flowers, many of which had fallen along the path. They crushed easily beneath my feet, leaving broken petals everywhere the color of blood spatters.

  The murmur of the voice died off as we approached, my footfalls loud on the spread of gravel before the entrance. I reached the doorway and pushed back on the solid oak door with my gun hand, extending the lantern deeper into the dark recess of the entrance. Two heavy iron hinges shrieked in protest as the door swung slowly inward.