The Memory Agent

by Matthew B. J. Delaney

  I already knew of some of these dangers. The woman who screamed in Central Park. That creature that Nasir had shot at. And even worse, what had happened in the subway tunnel. “I was attacked by something,” I said. “I don’t know what it was. But it spoke to me. It said I shouldn’t be here.”

  Valenstein looked thoughtful. “That was Panopticon security most likely.”

  “It was a monster. Some kind of creature.” I thought of the weight pushing my cheek into the ground, the horrible twisted fingers.

  “It will be probing the city now, searching for you. And when it does, it will send something terrible after you. There will be more monsters.”

  “But I felt pain. If this is only in my head, how could it hurt?”

  “Pain is electrical impulses. The firing of nerves to alert the brain to danger. The brain makes what happens down here real. The pain you feel is real,” Valenstein said. “And there’s also leakage.”

  “Leakage?”

  “You are inside a system designed to contain the consciousness of criminals. Every once in a while, one of these memories breaks free. Gets lost in the system. You may find certain places in this city are, for lack of a better word, haunted. Some of the prisoners have done terrible things. Not all monsters live in fiction.”

  The scream we heard in Central Park had been like the reliving of a memory. But the pain in that woman’s voice was real, maybe one of these broken memories. The remembrance of some terrible crime that had happened and now lived in the mind of a prisoner.

  Valenstein checked his watch, then stood and extended his hand. “I’m afraid we’re out of time.”

  “So that’s it for now?” I asked.

  “That’s it for now.”

  I stood and shook his hand. I had no idea what I was shaking. Some vestige of an old memory I had dragged up? Or some fantasy I had concocted while sleeping? But the hand I shook felt real enough.

  “I cannot leave this room with you,” Dr. Valenstein said. “So here is where we say goodbye. But I’m here to help you.”

  “How do I find you again?”

  “Think of me like a concierge. Just ring and I’ll be there,” Dr. Valenstein said. “And when you leave, don’t forget to exit through the gift shop.”

  I walked down the path toward the metal door imbedded into the side of a grassy hill. I turned and looked back. Dr. Valenstein still stood at the edge of the pond. He raised his hand to wave. I waved back, then opened the door and stepped through.

  I found myself back in the dark theater. Behind me, the door was locked shut. I made my way up the empty aisle into the lobby. To the right of the concession stand was a small gift shop. Thinking of Dr. Valenstein’s parting words, I entered the shop and found an assortment of movie-related knickknacks. Sweatshirts and keychains. Near the register, a glass display case filled with snow globes. Inside each round ball of glass, miniature buildings, the base of the glass covered with white flakes. Something caught my eye.

  A purple Easter egg hand drawn on the base of one of the globes. I picked up the toy and the motion swirled the white flakes up from the bottom, filling the water with a miniature snowfall.

  Inside the glass was a building sculpted in ceramic miniature, roughly twenty floors in height with a colonnaded entrance. Each floor had rows of tiny windows made from little flecks of gray paint. The base of the snow globe was inscribed with hand-painted lettering: Historic Hotel Pennsylvania. I turned the globe over. On the bottom was a small music box crank handle and the words Room 1612.

  I wound the crank handle and tinny music began playing. Some kind of waltz. Inside the globe, the snow swirled in eddies around the building faster and faster until the building was completely obscured by a blizzard. The movement began to make me feel nauseated. My stomach turned and for a scattered moment, I had a vision of a long hotel hallway. Bloody handprints on the wall. A door slammed shut in my face. Someone cried out for help.

  I shut my eyes and the vision faded away.

  “We need a vantage point,” Clayton said. “Somewhere to look out over the entire city.”

  After the theater, I had returned to camp without incident. No one questioned my absence, and I mentioned nothing about what I had found.

  Charlotte had the rubbing spread out on her lap, studying it. She glanced up. “Where do you propose we go?”

  Clayton pointed to the south. Rising above the skyline was the iconic multi-tiered cap of the Empire State Building. “We should go there. It’s the middle of the island. We’d have a clear view of our entire surroundings.”

  We packed up our camp in twenty minutes and began heading south along the avenue. As we walked from the confines of the circle, I took a last look back. Already the light was fading, deep pockets of darkness spreading through the forest of Central Park. If there was something living in there, the darkness would conceal it perfectly. I had little doubt that it would have no trouble finding us, wherever we might make camp.

  Our small group formed a straggling line as we progressed down the middle of an abandoned Eighth Avenue. Clayton at the lead, I brought up the rear. Selberg was ahead of me, struggling under the weight of his pack.

  We walked along Thirty-Fourth Street until we found ourselves at the base of the Empire State Building. Each of the thousands of windows was dark, the glass exterior cloaked in shadow. I craned my neck back to take in the full scale of the building, but it was too large to comprehend from a single point on the sidewalk below.

  We pushed our way through the revolving doors of the front entrance. The main lobby was tiled in gold and sand and glimmered beautifully in the lantern light, like stepping inside a Faberge egg. At the end of the long hall was an aluminum relief of the building itself. Long rays of light were cast down from a halo over the central spire of the building. Just below the relief of the building, a fixed clock, hands paused at quarter past nine.

  We rode to the top in silence. Clayton had his rifle ready as the elevator doors opened, but we stepped out onto an empty observation deck. The view stretched out the length of Manhattan. The stillness was almost unbearable. There was no wind. No sound of sirens and traffic filtering up from below. No blanket of lights spreading out before us. Only darkness and silence and the black silhouettes of turned off buildings.

  “So empty,” Charlotte said.

  “No . . .” Clayton said, his eyes fixed forward. “There’s something out there.”

  I wandered to the southern edge of the deck and had a clear view all the way to Wall Street. Something flickered in the darkness.

  As I watched, a single window of light suddenly illuminated in a distant building overlooking the park. One apartment in the vast city and its light burned bright as a star in the darkness. Another light flashed on somewhere to the east. Then streetlamp turned on. Slowly a multitude of lights began to appear across the reaches of the city. Everywhere I looked, there they were. These were my memories. Places I had visited. People I had known. Each bit of light like slivers of quartz trapped inside granite, throwing out reflections of my mind.

  I still felt undone by everything I had seen. But the human brain was a marvelous device capable of great adaptability. Already, I was beginning to accept my changed circumstance. Manhattan was my palace of memory.

  “My God, get over here and look at this!” Charlotte’s voice sounded scared. I moved quickly to the north of the observation deck. She stood against the railing, her hands gripping the support, staring out toward the park.

  I joined her at the railing.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “Look.” She pointed north. In the distance I could see the thick foliage of Central Park. Something was moving through the trees, something massive. Even from thirty blocks away, I could hear the crack of timbers breaking. Fifty-foot-tall trees, bent forward like saplings in a storm. Whatever was out there was enormous, still concealed by the thick growth of leaves, but headed this way. I could see the giant rippling of water that swept across Centr
al Park Lake, five-foot-high waves that crashed against the boathouse, almost as if this entity had risen up from the lake’s depths.

  “My God,” Selberg said. “It’s huge. That must be twenty stories tall.”

  “We’ve got to move,” Clayton said. “Now.”

  From deep in the park, we heard a tremendous bellow, a deep booming sound that echoed like lightning down the avenues. A primordial, otherworldly scream. I froze and stared, my body going numb. Blocks away, the one-hundred-year-old trees parted, crushed to the side like blades of grass. Clayton pulled my arm and we all ran to the elevator.

  We piled inside the car and I jabbed my finger at the ground floor button. Quietly the machine began its descent down. Selberg was pressed against the wall, one hand on his chest. His cheeks puffed in and out. “What was that thing?”

  “I have no idea,” Clayton said. “But this city is a maze. We just need a place to hide.”

  Charlotte turned toward me. She snapped her finger. “Maze. Maze. What’s the Greek word for maze?”

  I looked at her, startled. “How would I know?”

  Excited, she dropped her backpack to the floor of the car and started rummaging through it. She pulled out her notebook and ran her finger down the lines of script. Outside, I heard another bellow. The deep bass carried through the building.

  “I know what’s out there,” Charlotte said. “The translation from the stone. I know what it means.” She pointed at a word in her notebook. “I didn’t know what this word was. But now it makes sense. Now I know.”

  She smoothed out the notes with her free hand. I could see scratched handwriting in several languages across the pages. She read the translation out loud. “Deep in the maze of horrors lies a perilous beast. It protects the secrets and slays any who find their way into his presence. It is the keeper of the maze, a creature half-man and half-bull.”

  Selberg shook his head. “What does that mean?”

  She looked up at us. “I think it’s a Minotaur out there. From Greek mythology. This giant creature with the head of a bull and the body of a man. It guarded the Cretan labyrinth.”

  “That doesn’t sound good,” Selberg said. “That actually sounds terrible.”

  And then I knew. The Minotaur was the security system for the Panopticon. The machine knew we were here.

  The elevator opened onto the lobby and we piled out.

  “The security doors!” Clayton pointed at two large metal doors that were open flat against the building. The doors were each two inches thick. “Close them both.”

  Together, Clayton and I put our weight against the heavy metal. The thick hinges shrieked in protest, but slowly the doors rotated closed. Nasir came running to help, and the three of us slammed shut the first door. The second door was even harder to close, and it took all of our strength to get it rotating on the two massive hinges.

  “Let’s go boys . . . push,” Clayton gasped.

  From outside we heard another tremendous roar. Whatever was out there was moving fast and getting close. I pushed with everything I had, my back and legs straining against the door. Slowly, it swung shut. The security door had large bolt locks, which we drew across. The metal locked into place with a satisfying clunk.

  Everyone except for Nasir turned off their lanterns and waited in silence. I could hear the thing coming from blocks away. Its stride was massive, each step a thunderous crack against the street. It roared again as it came, and I could hear the chuff of its breath, like a bull before the charge. The footsteps grew louder and louder. Above us, the chandelier shook, the hundreds of little crystals tinkling together. We backed slowly away from the door.

  The thing was right outside. I could smell it through the door. The thick odor of horseflesh and a slight rotten scent. Through a small crack in the door, I glimpsed a massive human-shaped foot covered in thick, black hair.

  Something snorted, then pushed tentatively against the door. There was a slight creak of metal. Then nothing.

  Nasir’s lantern began to flicker, then the bulb died. Even though it must have been tremendously hot, Nasir reached inside and pressed his fingers against the glass, trying to get the light to return. The room became incrementally darker. Eventually all our lamps would go out, the more nights we spent here. And then we would be trapped down in the blackness.

  The sudden impact on the doors was tremendous, like a bulldozer driving full speed. Charlotte screamed and the entire frame bent backward with a shriek of metal.

  Again, something slammed against the door. The security bolts twisted, but the metal continued to hold. We all waited, frozen, and again came another impact. The doors, several inches thick, were beginning to break.

  “Those doors can’t hold,” Selberg said. “We should move now.”

  “Move where?” Clayton asked.

  “Anywhere but here,” Selberg replied. “We’ve got to hide.”

  The doors groaned loudly as another impact fell against them.

  We scrambled to gather our stuff and ran down the hallway toward an exit sign near the elevator. I pushed through the door, and we passed through more hallways and down a flight of stairs. In the distance, muted by the building around us, came a terrific roar of frustration.

  We ran through underground corridors and an employee locker room before I pushed open a black metal door. We collapsed onto Thirty-Third Street, one block south of the main entrance.

  In the dark, I listened for the sound of feet, for the bellow of whatever great beast was after us. I heard nothing.

  “We should put distance between us and this building,” I whispered.

  “I agree with that,” Selberg said. “Let’s get the hell away from here.”

  I turned my lamp on to get our bearings. My first thought was the Hotel Pennsylvania. Room 1612. I knew the hotel was only a few blocks from here, due west. I started walking quickly in that direction. The rest of the group followed.

  “Where are we going?” Charlotte said.

  “West.”

  “What’s west?”

  “A hotel,” I said. “Someplace that might be safe for the night.”

  She met my eyes. “No place is safe.”

  We moved quickly. Every few minutes I flashed on my lantern to reorient myself. In those moments of light, I saw empty streets and vacant buildings. The Minotaur was out there somewhere. I could hear the deep boom of its footfalls sounding toward the park.

  We reached Seventh Avenue without incident and headed south. I turned my lantern on quickly and flashed it around the intersection. My single searchlight beam cut through the darkness. To our right, a book store and the entrance to Penn Station and Madison Square Garden. On our left, the marquee for the Hotel Pennsylvania.

  “Where to now?” Selberg asked.

  I nodded toward the hotel. “I vote we go in there. Plenty of rooms. We can hide out, find a room, maybe try to get some sleep.”

  “And what about this thing, this creature out there?”

  “Seventeen hundred rooms in this hotel,” I said. “Pretty good place to hide.”

  Selberg turned toward Clayton. “You’re the security guy, what do you think?”

  “I think standing out here on the street isn’t doing us any good. We should get inside, wait until daylight. Then we’ll have a better chance to figure things out.”

  Selberg tapped his fingers thoughtfully against the side of his hip. “Fine. Let’s go.”

  Together we crossed the street and entered the front door of the Hotel Pennsylvania. Inside, more darkness. My lantern illuminated a shining marble floor patterned with squares and circles. Pink granite columns were spaced evenly around the room near small groupings of overstuffed green chairs. The lobby doors were glass, but thick velvet curtains hung to the side.

  “Let’s close those curtains,” I said.

  Nasir and Selberg drew the curtains together and the rest of the team turned on their lanterns. Nasir stumbled forward, like a drunken man, and Selberg had to catch
him by the arm and hold him in place. His face looked waxen. His eyes rolled without focus.

  “You all right?” I asked.

  Nasir nodded. “Yes, sir. Just lost my balance.”

  He straightened himself and wiped a hand across his forehead.

  “Looks like we have the place to ourselves,” Selberg said.

  In truth, the place made me uncomfortable. This was one of the oldest hotels in Manhattan. So many thousands of people had passed through these doors that I couldn’t believe that only my memories were associated with this place. Every grand hotel had its share of scandals. Of murders and suicides. Of sleepless nights spent on lumpy hotel beds plotting evil. There must be others in this hotel with us. So many people had passed through the doors of this venue, there could be dark memories lurking down every hallway.

  And I wasn’t eager to run into a memory in one of these dark empty halls.

  I walked behind the great stone slab of a reception desk. Behind the desk was a long metal locker, which I easily opened. Inside were rows of keys, each carefully labeled by room.

  I pocketed the keys for rooms 1612 and 1712. I addressed my team. “We can each have our own room, all be on the same floor? I’ve got 1712.”

  “We should share rooms,” Selberg said.

  Charlotte joined me behind the counter. She surveyed the keys and took one for room 1714. She jingled the key between her fingers. “I, for one, am tired of group living. I’ll take my own room.”

  “I really don’t think that’s safe,” Selberg said. “We should stay together.”

  “You’re welcome to bunk up with whoever you want. I need some space.”

  Selberg had a slight look of panic on his face. “Clayton?”

  Clayton had closed the main lobby doors. “As long as we’re on the same floor.”

  I needed to be alone for my plan. “I agree,” I said. “Same floor.”

  Outnumbered, Selberg nodded in agreement. We filtered behind the desk, each member taking a key from the same floor, then we took the elevator up to the seventeenth. Clayton checked his watch. “We’ll meet in the hotel lobby at six a.m.”