The man exhaled in relief. “Thank you, God.”
“But that still don’t change the fact you owed me money,” Selberg said. He swung the crowbar hard and fast. The man let out a squeak, then his skull was crushed by the hard iron. Selberg continued to swing the crowbar again and again, red, wet sap spraying everything.
When he was done, Selberg dropped the crowbar to the ground.
I tumbled backward. The stench of blood was foul and thick in the room. I fell out through the door and into the dark hallway beyond. The memory was over, and I was left in the blackness.
I returned to my room, turned the dead bolt, and pressed my forehead against the thick wood. I breathed deeply. The thwack of the crowbar against bone was still in my head. Selberg had been some kind of enforcer. I must have been inside his memory because Selberg was here in the machine with me. What did that mean?
I had no idea. I needed to find another memory. I needed to move forward. I needed to know more. There were so many gaps in the story . . . I needed help.
There was a knock on the door.
My heart jumped. We never should have come to this hotel. There were too many rooms. Too many memories. Outside, I heard a shuffle of feet on carpet. Just beyond the wood of the door. Something was out there waiting for me. I thought back to the subway tunnel. To that creature that lurked beneath the earth. What if it had returned?
The knock came again.
Slowly I crept across the room, my feet silent on the carpet floor. I put my eye to the peephole and looked. Outside was black, too dark to see what stood before my door.
“Who’s there?” I yelled.
Suddenly the hallway lights flickered to life.
And I could see Charlotte.
Somehow, she had changed her clothes and now wore a light blue dress that reached almost to her ankles. Her hair was different too, longer. And there was a strangeness to her. Her face had a vacant expression, her eyes blank and staring, her mouth almost slack-jawed, like she was high on something.
And then I noticed the smell.
A rotting scent of death. I knew something was wrong. I opened the door a crack, the chain still on, my pistol in hand hidden behind my back.
“Charlotte? You okay?”
Nothing moved on her face. Like her skin was made of wax. She didn’t even seem to know I was there. Then, slowly, she turned away from the door and began to walk down the hall. I followed. Stepping into a hallway that I immediately knew was from a different time. This was not real. This was memory. Charlotte’s memory. And like what had happened with Selberg, somehow I was trapped inside.
I walked twenty feet behind her. The scent of rot was strong now. It was more than just a smell, it was a feeling. A memory of something terrible that had happened. Of something so thick with disgust and despair that it reeked of death. As I followed Charlotte, I began to feel terrified of our destination, of what we were going to see.
She entered the stairwell and I followed, gliding as quietly as a ghost. Or a memory. Below me, the stairs revolved downward like the whorls of a shell. My lantern in hand, I followed Charlotte to the floor below. Faintly, from somewhere inside a room, I heard a baby begin to cry, a long, drawn-out wail of loneliness and fear.
Rows of doors stretched down the length of the hotel. Behind each room was a hidden story, a thousand moments lost in time, but now captured in this machine, destined to be repeated over and over again. Saved on some of kind of memory hard drive that could never be erased, only hidden from view. And maybe some things were better hidden from view.
I could never forget what I had seen Selberg do.
And now, if I followed, I felt certain I was going to see something else I could never forget. There was no reset on this moment. No delete.
Charlotte had a set of keys in her hand and entered one of the rooms. I followed, drawn forward, my feet seeming to move on their own. The door to the room had been left ajar and I was able to slide through the opening.
The room was the same as all the others, only this one was filled with someone else’s stuff. A suitcase half-open on the bed, clothes spilled out onto the floor. A ceramic ashtray on a cheap dresser, stubbed-out cigarette butts forming a shotgun blast pattern on the base. The room was shadowy save for the flashing glow of a television set. The sound was muted. A cartoon cat chased a cartoon mouse in an endless loop around a living room, casting flickering shadows across the wall.
The bathroom door was open slightly, yellow light spilling onto the carpet.
I knew it was there. Whatever I was meant to see was beyond that door. Somewhere in that room. I stood fixed by the doorway. From the bathroom, I heard running water. A woman began to sing a lullaby, her voice no louder than a whisper. There was a slight splash of water. The baby no longer cried. The water turned off, but the woman continued to sing.
The door to the bathroom opened and Charlotte came out. Her arms glistened with water, her dress wet and clinging to her body. She walked past me and went to the open suitcase. She removed a baby blue blanket and laid it carefully down on the bed, folding it over into a neat square. She hummed to herself.
I walked forward, moved through the opening of the door, and looked in.
The bathroom was small and perfectly square. Black and white tiles lined the floor. A large, white vanity was littered with toothbrushes and a hair dryer and bunched up towels. A mirror reflected the room, but I was invisible.
Opposite the mirror was a bathtub. From the faucet, a single droplet, fat and round, hung suspended for an instant before it kerplunked into the bath water.
Inside the tub, something soft and pale lay beneath the water.
It was a child of about five. A boy, in trousers and a sweatshirt with small cartoon dinosaurs on it. His eyes were open. His hair floated around his head in the bathwater like seaweed. Drowned. I fell back against the wall. My hand covered my mouth.
Charlotte returned to the bathroom. She lifted the boy from the tub, water cascading off his little body, and carried him into the bedroom. She laid him down on the blue blanket, carefully wrapping the edges around his body.
Anger and disgust rose up inside me at the futility of all of this. Of seeing these things and not being able to make a difference. On the bed stand was a letter, half-finished.
I picked it up and read the scripted handwriting.
My Dearest John,
By the time you read this, it will be done. I once told you that with family, one could never be lonely, for with children you would always be surrounded by friends. Where I go, I cannot bear to be alone. Either of us. I know what I have done is terrible, but please find it in your heart to understand.
I hope you are happy now in the new life you have chosen. I cannot fault you. I know how hard these things have been. You are a good man, and I know our death will pain you greatly. I live, but do not live. One must make a choice. And so I do. And begin a new chapter with my only friend. Forgive me.
“Oh no,” I whispered. “No, no, no . . .”
I fell on my knees in front of Charlotte. I begged her, tried to shake her, slap her. But there was nothing. I was in another world in another time. My body was immaterial, as if I didn’t exist. Charlotte slowly turned her head, reached into a bag at her feet, and pulled out a revolver.
No . . .
She held the revolver first to the side of her head. Then changing her mind, she opened her mouth and placed the barrel between her teeth.
All I could do was close my eyes.
In the blackness I heard the gunshot.
I stood, eyes closed, in the darkness, my entire body trembling. I knew these things had been real. As surely as I knew my own memory. This had happened to Charlotte. She had done this. Her child hadn’t drowned in an accident. She had drowned him in a bathtub in a hotel room, and then she had put a bullet in her head.
Someone banged on the door. My eyes flicked open. Expecting to see the dead little boy, Charlotte on the ground, her head blown o
ff, a pool of blood soaked into the carpet. But I was alone in the room. The television was turned off, the bed carefully made, the closets empty. In the bathroom, the tub was dry.
Someone banged on the door again.
I went to the door and opened it.
Charlotte stood outside.
I pulled back in shock. Her face was as I remembered, healthy, alive, not a blank shell. She no longer wore the blue dress but instead wore denim pants and a button-down shirt. A rifle was slung across her shoulder. She looked at me with concern.
“Where’ve you been?” Charlotte said. She pushed past me into the room and slammed shut the door behind her.
My tongue was sluggish, my brain barely responding. “What?”
“I was looking for you. Are you okay?”
I felt such an enormous relief to see her that without thinking I reached out and hugged her. I felt her startled body push back against mine, then slowly yield. “What’s wrong?”
I couldn’t even begin to explain what I knew. How I knew it. Or what she was capable of. This was a Charlotte freed of these memories, memories that had been erased from her mind and stored here in this hotel.
I wiped my eyes with the palm of my hand.
“Nothing. Nothing. I’m fine.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. I’m sure.”
She nodded uncertainly, then for the first time glanced around the room. She froze, her eyes suddenly wary. Her jaw tightened, her head cocked thoughtfully. She walked toward the bed, then stepped into the bathroom. “It’s the strangest thing,” she said. “I feel like I’ve been here before.”
You have.
You drowned your son and blew the back of your head off right there on that bed.
But that couldn’t have been right. Charlotte must have lived. She must be in the machine with me. That’s where the memory came from. She had pulled the trigger, but somehow she hadn’t died. She had lived and been arrested for the murder of her own child.
“All these rooms look the same,” I mumbled.
“I guess so,” she replied doubtfully. “But still. I wonder.” After a long moment, she snapped her attention back to me. “I don’t think we should stay here. I don’t have a good feeling about this room. Something feels . . . off.”
The ring of a telephone cut through my thoughts.
On the bedside table was the source, a single hotel phone. The phone rang again, piercing the room’s silence. Charlotte looked at me and nodded her head. I answered the phone.
There was a long crackle of static. Then the line went dead.
Next to the phone, the radio alarm clock turned on. Some kind of 1950s doo-wop song filled the room. I jumped back. This wasn’t a memory. This was happening live. Some invisible force was in here with us.
I turned to scan the room and stopped to gaze at the nearby window. I hadn’t noticed before, but the view through the glass was strangely flat. Outside, I could see the silhouettes of buildings in the darkness, but they had no dimensionality, almost as if they were hand drawn. I reached out to touch the window, but instead of the smooth, coolness of glass, I felt a papery, coarse surface.
The window wasn’t real.
I wasn’t looking at a city through glass, I was looking at a painting set inside a window frame. I tightened my fingers and slowly pushed forward against the paper. There was a tearing sound, and the paper gave way, ripping open with a gust of warm air and exposing a long corridor beyond.
The corridor was shiny and metallic, like a ventilation duct, and stretched out of sight, beyond the reach of the light from my lantern. A breeze came from the duct, the air warm and odorless. Whatever lay beyond here, whatever memory or experience, wasn’t terrible. It had no scent. Wasn’t saturated with the odor of rot like the others.
Charlotte watched me from the doorway.
I wasn’t sure if I could bring her with me, but I didn’t want to bear this burden of knowledge alone anymore. I reached out my hand to her. Tentatively she approached. “What is that?”
“It think it’s a backdoor to somewhere else,” I said.
“Where?”
“I’m not sure.”
I climbed up through the window and into the duct. If I stayed bent over slightly, I could stand inside. I took my first step forward. The floor was solid. I held my lantern aloft. The duct continued forward, the walls clean and smooth.
“If we get separated,” I said, “I will meet you back here.”
Charlotte nodded. “This is crazy.”
“You have no idea.”
I moved slowly forward. Deeper into the duct. Behind me the hotel receded, falling farther and farther away, ultimately vanishing in a single pinpoint of light.
6
Roosevelt Island was a thin strip of land that lay in the East River between Manhattan and Queens. For years it had been known as Blackwell’s Island and operated as a home for New York City’s various unwanted. Over the years, the locale had hosted a prison, an almshouse, and a typhoid hospital. The island was perhaps most famous for its treatment of the insane, and several large facilities had been constructed over the years to facilitate the care and treatment of mentally disturbed patients. Unfortunately, since this had been during the late 1800s, the care and treatment had been barbaric, so much so that an exposé was written in the early 1890s by an author who had secretly posed as a patient. The book detailed the brutal treatment of the persons in the care of Blackwell’s Island Lunatic Asylum and led to a period of reform.
Eventually the asylum was abandoned, though it still stood near the East River. Like most New Yorkers, Parker had forgotten the place even existed; one of the many buildings left over from a bygone era, all but lost to the passage of time. Which is why he found it strange that Selberg had wanted to meet here.
The building was a ghost.
Parker pulled in along the dirt road that circled the front of the old asylum. It was after ten p.m., a cloudy night. High above, the moon slipped in and out of cover. Parker’s headlights illuminated the overgrown vegetation that curled up over the road. A stand of oaks covered in vines crowded in over the road, their greenery so dense that the ground would be shadowed even on sunny days. Scattered among the thick trunks were the castoff refuse of a city: plastic bags, a rusted shopping cart half buried in mud, a truck tire. The sweep of Parker’s headlights flashed over everything before they settled on the main building.
In its day, the structure must have been glorious, but now what was left of the old asylum was a frightening wreck out of someone’s nightmare. The main building was octagonal, made of solid granite blocks covered with graffiti and the ever-present choke of vines. Most of the windows were broken, jagged shards of glass jutting out like teeth from rotted wooden frames. A cupola topped the rising building, the night sky visible through a roof that looked torn apart by a giant hand. The long hospital wing was crumbling, most of the vacant windows boarded up by listing pieces of plywood. It was a sad, lonely place, a feeling made stronger by the waters of the East River glittering in the moonlight, and past that, the spread of the Manhattan skyline.
A few cars parked out front indicated the rest of the team had arrived. Parker pulled in next to Clayton’s sedan and cut off the engine. Insects buzzed in the night. Clayton stepped out from the open doorway. The lantern in his hand cast his shadow, stretched and distorted, across the entire face of the old asylum.
“Cozy place to meet,” Parker said.
“Lots of charm.” Clayton turned and walked back through the open doorway. Parker followed. Inside, Charlotte and Selberg stood huddled near each other. A handful of lanterns were spaced along the floor, illuminating the interior lobby of the asylum. A circular staircase rose up through the central octagon, rotting bannisters slowly receding into blackness as they stretched away from the lanterns.
Parker turned toward Selberg. “Why are we meeting here?”
Selberg looked exhausted and worn, dark bruises from the beating still patterned
on his face, while his lips were a chapped mess. “There’s something I have to show you here. But first, the job. I can’t get it done. The problem is with the new system,” Selberg said. “I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to get us in.”
“What’s the problem?”
Selberg began pacing back and forth in the abandoned lobby, the lanterns casting weird shadows of his movement across the peeling paint of the walls. “As part of prisoner processing, right before they put you into the mind machines, they wipe your memory clean of your past life. If you remember who you were before, then you know you’re not really a carriage driver in 1880 New York City. There’s too much cognitive dissonance. You never accept your new environment.”
Parker nodded. That was how the whole system worked. But sometimes people slipped through the cracks.
“They take all your memories and download them out of your brain, put them in a storage facility. You go into the system with no memories of your past. Then when your sentence is done, they give you back your memory and you can reenter the world. But this wasn’t a hundred percent foolproof,” Selberg said.
“You’re talking about a glitch,” Charlotte said.
Selberg snapped his finger. “Exactly.”
Clayton looked at each of them. He scratched the back of his head, then sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m a little new at this. What’s a glitch?”
“Every once in a while, a prisoner is introduced to the system who hasn’t had a full memory erase,” Parker said. “So he knows he’s a prisoner. He remembers. Sometimes he’ll have a freakout and the guards will catch him, kill him, wipe his memory clean, and reintroduce him. Or sometimes he’ll pretend. He’ll live his life in the system, pretending he has no memory of his past, but knowing full well he’s a prisoner.”
“And you guys use this glitch to get in?” Clayton asked.
“Sort of,” Parker said. “The only way we can do what we do is because we know the real world from the system and the system allows us entry without a full memory wipe. So we can enter the prison world knowing we’re not really in New York City of 1880. That’s what differentiates us from the prisoners.”
The Memory Agent Page 20