by Platt, Sean
He wondered again what the hell happened. More importantly, how? He couldn’t get his brain to embrace the arctic truth scattered in ash before him.
In a vain desire to resolve the enigma of his identity and too many numbing questions, the amnesiac slipped into a downstairs bathroom and finally came eye to eye with his own jarring reflection.
The face staring back was young, with only two tiny wrinkles flirting with the corners of a full mouth. His dark hair and indigo eyes were no more recognizable than a stranger off the street. He leaned in close, examining his features as though they were behind glass in a museum. The image blurred like a breaking wave, causing him to lean closer for a better look, as if distance was the issue and not his eyes playing tricks.
Then the hair on his neck rose to the sound of water running from a faucet he hadn’t turned on.
What the?
Suddenly, the mirror image was gone, replaced by a mug he’d seen just minutes earlier — the bald man’s raging face.
He fell back against the wall, then panting, realized his reflection hadn’t changed. The amnesiac wasn’t looking through his own eyes; he was peering through the eyes of a dead man, images caught in a previously lived moment when the man had been shaving his head.
The image shimmered again, and the false reflection was gone, replaced with the wide-eyed stare coming from the amnesiac’s hollow eyes.
Without warning, the bathroom disappeared, and the amnesiac found himself staring into the bald man’s wildly swinging fist. He felt the bald man’s blow like a phantom pain in an absent limb. He screamed in a voice that wasn’t his, but that of the woman who had suffered the beating he was now experiencing.
Reality returned, and the man fell to the ground, shaking with vertigo.
Then the roller coaster kicked back into motion, and the man felt his body thrusting forward into a deep descent.
A flood of memories rushed through his skull. A chaotic burst of flashing images. An unholy cacophony. Voices yelling, children crying, sirens, maybe every sound the bald man and the woman had ever heard. It was too much; the man’s head was splitting, alien thoughts about to spill from the seams to swallow him whole. He reached up as if squeezing tightly might keep his skull intact and maybe quell the thoughts.
More images swam through the amnesiac’s mind. A dizzying current that threatened to drown him with the sick realization that he was somehow infected with the memories of people he’d murdered.
Sounds grew louder — snippets of conversation, music, stolen thoughts, louder and faster, cold and sharp like daggers, each digging into some deep part of the man’s brain, a worm burrowing to an apple’s rotten core. And should those worms reach the center, the man knew with certainty he would be plunged deep into an insanity that held no ascent.
Traces of his previous life were smothered in chaos.
The whirling world flickered, one second displaying the reality before him, followed by the unnerving world behind the eyes of the dead.
The amnesiac could no longer fight.
So he let go and slipped into the darkness.
The amnesiac woke to the sound of pounding.
His eyes shot open, and he leaped to his feet in a single fluid movement. His fists were clenched tightly at his sides. Thick waves of electric currents arced around them.
The man stood ready for whatever was coming.
But nothing came.
It was still dark outside. He ran to the blinds and closed them against unwelcome eyes. He wondered if the person who had buried him in the woods was now outside, waiting to finish the job.
He listened.
The pounding returned.
A soft tempo drifting from upstairs.
Another memory flashed — a closet door — unlike the barrage of visions that had nearly driven him mad, this one flared and faded, just long enough to send him up the stairs, hurried but uncertain.
He hit the landing, and the pounding grew louder, bleeding from one of the two dark bedrooms at the end of the hall, both doors open.
“Hello?” the amnesiac’s voice wavered through the quiet.
The shrill scream of a young girl. “Help!”
The man raced into the master bedroom and saw the closet door from his stolen memory. The pounding grew louder. He opened the door and flicked on a light. Boxes and clothes, but no child.
“There’s a lock!” The child pounded by the lock so that it bounced against the false wall. “Open it!”
He tossed boxes aside, saw a lock with a key, and turned it. He threw the lock to the ground and pressed against the wall that was, in fact, a secret door.
Then he saw her. A girl no older than twelve, dark hair hanging over her large dark eyes, her mouth wrenched open in an agonized wail mingled with relief.
Abigail, a memory whispered as the girl reached out for him, perhaps to thank him with a hug for saving her.
A spark shot from her skin to his, along with a barrage of images pierced his mind — the horror of what the bald man had done to the girl over and over again.
Oh, God!
Memories flared in a bright light, replaced by reality as he saw their arms locked, her body convulsing, pupils rolling back into her skull.
It was starting.
The murderous energy of his touch would feed on her just as it had with the two downstairs. A terrified scream fled his throat, and he pulled back with every ounce of strength to break the connection. They stumbled backward, she against the closet door and he to the bedroom floor.
She scurried backward on all fours into her dungeon. A wounded animal, trembling as she put distance between them.
Their eyes locked. The girl looked confused.
The amnesiac felt terror and shock.
She wasn’t dead.
He broke the death grasp in time.
“Don’t … touch me.” Fear choked his voice. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
She continued to stare at the man with her large dark eyes.
He tried not to think of those eyes staring blankly at the fat bald man as he abused her, though that monster’s memory was now his own. He felt a flush of guilt, followed by revulsion.
She looked down at her arms, bright red where they’d touched. She looked as if she were trying to find the right words. The amnesiac wasn’t sure what he expected, but certainly not the words that came from the child’s mouth.
“Did you kill them?” A chill ran through him at her utter lack of emotion.
“Yes,” he said, about to explain the accident.
“Good.”
Three
A Boy Long Ago
The boy’s bedroom was impossibly dark. Even the moon hanging fat in his window held no reign here. Downstairs, his father raged. But it wasn’t the boy’s angry father holding his attention or commanding fear.
It was the visitor in his room.
The shadow that was not a shadow, but not quite a man.
The boy thought he might be dreaming. He rubbed his eyes and opened them again, attempting to define the shape, or shapes, moving through his room.
“Hello?” the boy said.
“Hello,” a voice whispered back. “Sorry it took so long.”
Four
The Amnesiac
“Wow.” Abigail leaned in close to study the ashen corpses with the sort of cool curiosity normally accompanied by a fossil brush.
He had tried to keep her from looking, begging without touch, but the girl insisted, sprinting down the stairs without timidity, demanding to see for herself, to know with certainty that her tormentors were dead and the breath of freedom was hers to inhale.
“How did you do this?” The answer dawned on her face. She raised a wavering finger and pointed upstairs toward the makeshift dungeon where she’d accidentally touched him and nearly suffered the same fate. “Oh,” she whispered. “Like that.”
“Yeah, but I don’t really know how it happened. It … just did.”
“You’
re him, aren’t you?” The same understanding that had lit her face when he’d entered the small unspeakable chamber blossomed again in her eyes. He gazed at the girl for a long moment, wondering if maybe she could color his missing memory.
“You know me?”
“I’ve been waiting for you.” Her large dark eyes swam with awe, which both confused and unsettled him further.
“How,” he tried to swallow his disbelief, “do you know me?”
“Wait here.” Abigail turned and headed upstairs.
The amnesiac waited through an excruciating minute before Abigail returned with a folded slip of paper. She held it out then seemingly thought better of handing him anything and let the paper waft to the ground.
He reached down, retrieved the paper, and unfolded the crayon drawing of a man with dark hair, blazing blue eyes, and the wings of an angel. The man in her drawing had large overlapping ringlets of red circles — undulating waves of fire as expressed by the quickly waning innocence of a child — circling his hands. He was ascending toward the heavens, hovering above a burned body, clearly the bald man. Below the corpse were thick, dark black lines, caked as if the crayon had been pressed repeatedly to its breaking point against the paper.
“I dreamed about you. Two nights ago. You saved me.”
He stared at the paper, trying to make sense of what he couldn’t understand, feeling as if his head was about to split open.
“That’s not possible,” he said, trying to deny a prophecy fulfilled and drawn by the child.
Before Abigail could respond, an alarm screamed inside his mind.
Someone is coming!
He wasn’t sure how he knew what felt suddenly certain, or if simple fear was driving his flight, but without memory, the amnesiac had to trust his instincts.
“I have to leave.” He approached the sliding glass door, a fresh battery of foreign memories raining through his mind.
The old gas hog.
Keys dangling from the hook by the kitchen.
Garage door opener in the glove box. Three hundred-dollar bills clipped inside a fold-out map beneath the seat.
He spun toward the kitchen and spied the dead man’s keys. “Give me ten minutes, then dial 911. You’ll be safe.”
Abigail didn’t cry. Instead, she threw him a look that made him wish she had.
“No. You can’t leave me here. I have nobody.” Her voice was so tiny it could have perished in the faintest of winds. “My family’s been gone almost as long as I can remember. Most of my memories are … I have no one else.”
The amnesiac fell to one knee and put his hands behind his back to keep himself from touching her. He desperately wanted to take Abigail’s hand in his, wipe the tear-veined grime from her cheek, and promise his undying protection. Instead, he locked his eyes on hers.
“You can’t come with me.” He met her wounded eyes. “The police can keep you safe.”
The amnesiac stood and found himself unable to look away from her hurt. He opened his mouth for a final apology but fell to the ground, howling as a sudden, splintering agony shot like lightning through his head.
He teetered back, the protest “Not again” barely leaving his lips before he fell into yet another alien memory — this time of the bald man, just as the stranger laid his death touch upon him. The amnesiac fell backward, crashing through the glass and descending into another void.
His mind’s eye flickered on the girl walking a surreal landscape alone, surrounded by decaying urban streets and crumbling buildings. Corpses, human and otherwise, littered the street, torn to jagged pieces by blurred creatures he couldn’t quite see. A red sky swirled in chaos of storm clouds — a deep black, chewing the world.
What the?
The amnesiac tried to make sense of the vision, dream, whatever it was, as a dull light brightened and pulled him back toward reality.
An angel floated above him, blurred against harsh ceiling lights. The image sharpened, and the amnesiac was met with Abigail’s almost maternal smile, sitting over him, waiting for him to recover.
She was crying.
And so was he.
The amnesiac slowly sat up, ignoring his body’s piercing pain. “How long was I out?”
“Twenty minutes.” She pointed to a pair of suitcases, packed and waiting.
“You won’t be safe with me,” he said, knowing she didn’t care.
He caught a glimpse of the clock on the wall: 5:02 a.m.
His gnawing certainty returned, warning the amnesiac that someone was coming. Maybe his gravedigger, surely the authorities. Either way, he needed a place to hide.
He thought of the note in his pocket, the one that forbade his touch and warned him against the sunlight. Given what he’d already done, the amnesiac could afford no chances.
He had to go, as the scant moments of available darkness were quickly surrendering to morning light.
Five
The Amnesiac
Street lights blurred by the car window as the man without a name and the child with no family raced the retreating moon.
He was in frantic search for a motel far enough from the murder scene to make the mallet in his mind soften its pounding. He’d driven about forty frenzied miles north before finally spotting an aging Motel Eight, squat and half-forgotten off the highway. A flickering neon light announced, VA_ANCY.
Shrubbery surrounding the motel looked as though it had enjoyed unfettered jurisdiction for a half year at least, the kind of place where attention to detail wasn’t a priority — the perfect spot for a man with no legal identification to lie low until nightfall.
Abigail had fallen asleep in the backseat, covered by a tattered pink blanket she’d brought along with her. He thought how normal she appeared, curled up in slumber as though she hadn’t been damaged by tragedy beyond reason.
The fat man at the desk barely glanced over the sports page long enough to take the amnesiac’s $40 in exchange for a sticky key ring, its faded blue label peeling with the number 7.
“Thanks.”
“Yeah,” the fat man said, “the pleasure was all mine,” in a tone either soaked in sarcasm or crippled warmth.
The room was exactly as squalid as he expected, though given their circumstances and the motel’s provided sanctuary, the door may as well have been opened by his personal butler.
Abigail plopped onto one of the beds, grabbed the TV remote, and pressed the on button.
The man half expected to see a news report of the murder, but as Abigail flipped channels, he saw nothing beyond bad early morning programming. Maybe fortune had decided to throw him a bone, and the bodies had yet to be found.
“Stacy used to let me watch TV sometimes while the monster was out,” Abigail said. “She liked this show.”
A glance at the sitcom. He recognized the characters, but not the show’s title, or their names.
He peered outside a final time at the nearly vacant lot then closed the curtains — the standard thick variety typical of a roadside rat hole. Funny, the man mused, how he knew such trivial things as the thickness of motel curtains but couldn’t recall the essential details of his life.
He wasn’t sure how amnesia worked, though he seemed to recall in old movies, perhaps cartoons or fables, the cure was often found in a bonk on the head. Maybe he’d look for a rubber mallet when things settled down.
He turned back to the curtains, wondering if they were thick enough to keep the room dark, and just how much sunlight was too much. Instincts, or maybe some buried memory, indicated the drapes would be enough — he’d only to avoid direct sunlight.
Vampire.
He felt the word like an old nickname, though he didn’t seem to have a lust for blood or the fangs typically associated with the legends. There again, that trivia — or experience that stayed in his memory, though his name remained a mystery.
He thought about how he’d sucked the lives from Randy and Stacy, and his subsequent flight into the sky. None of it made sense. Vampi
re seemed somewhat incorrect, but not altogether wrong.
Whatever he was, the amnesiac didn’t think he was human — at least not all of him.
No windows in the bathroom. Bad, if he needed to make a quick exit with the girl, but maybe a good place to go if the sunlight managed to seep through the curtains.
He stepped from the bathroom and saw that Abigail’s eyes were already closed as she lay on top of the comforter.
He longed for sleep, but his racing mind wasn’t in the mood to comply. There were too many questions and uncertainties. He had murdered two people and fled with a child. Certainly, someone would come looking for them, sooner rather than later.
He was also eager to unravel his tangled identity, and to do that he needed rest, a clear mind, and some way to remember something of his life.
He lay on the other bed, fully dressed in the oversized clothes of a dead man, and closed his eyes.
“Do you believe in God?” Abigail asked.
Her eyes were still closed, but it seemed that she, too, wasn’t yet ready to sleep.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think I do. But I don’t know anything before a few hours ago.”
When Abigail failed to ask what he meant, it occurred to him for the first time that she hadn’t raised a single question about his past, or lack thereof, though he’d mentioned his missing memory at least twice. He considered asking her why, but she opened her mouth before he could open his.
“I don’t think there’s a God. I mean, if there was, why would he allow my parents to die? Or send me to an uncle who sold me to those … people? I don’t believe God would allow such things.”
They sat in silence, the amnesiac’s mind flashing on memories witnessed during their brief embrace. She’d been through sheer hell in her short life. Even if he believed, how the hell could he argue the existence of God with a child who’d gone through what she did?