[Original Novel] The Background of Your Memories, Part 7

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Previous parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6}

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I could hear them speaking in booming voices but not understand any of it. Before I learned to speak myself, no doubt. “Where are you now?” Travigan’s voice cut through the vision, the only intelligible English I could hear. It seemed to come from everywhere.

“I’m...at a party. I think. Or some other gathering. I’m just a baby crawling on the floor. The only other people I can see are just...shoes and pant legs. They’re standing around me talking to one another, but I don’t understand any of it.” It proved a challenge to string together sentences as I descended further and further into the trance.

“Hm, age regression. I see. Listen carefully. I want you to look up.” I scrunched up my face in confusion. “Wh...what? Why?” He only became more insistent. “You’ll resist it without realizing why. They see to that. But I implore you. Look up, right this instant. Look up!”

So I did. The adults all froze, though now I could see that’s never what they were. Suit pants from the knees down, and shoes to match. But above that…”WHAT ARE THOSE THINGS!?” I shouted, writhing feebly and beginning to sweat. “Those aren’t my parents! Those aren’t even people! What the fuck are they??”

The creatures standing around me began to back away, stepping out of the leggings they wore to deceive me a moment ago. They wore tattered black robes. Their feet were large, their toes crooked with thick, knobbly joints. Their skin was green, on their hands just as it was on their feet. The joints of their crooked fingers had the same distorted, malformed quality as their toes.

They shuffled out of the room as if it was painful to walk, their crooked, elongated fingers twitching subtly as they did so. On their heads they all wore what could only be oversized bird skulls. Bulbous bleached white craniums with huge empty eye sockets and long, narrow, pointed beaks.

“Those are the things from the videos!” I cried. “What are they doing here? How did they get inside? This isn’t how it’s supposed to happen! I was at a party! This isn’t how it’s supposed to be at all!” The room had no ceiling, instead opening up into an empty black expanse overhead.

The same black expanse could be seen through all the windows. They never bothered to cover them because I wasn’t supposed to look up. All of a sudden it all faded away and I found myself on the bed. Sweaty, heart racing, still wearing that damned helmet. I pulled it off and got up.

“Don’t be so hasty my boy!” the old man begged. “I’m sorry to throw you into the deep end right away, as it were, but I needed to be certain of what we’re dealing with.” I spun around and shouted at him. “WHAT WERE THOSE THINGS! You know, don’t you? I recognize you now. You’re that man I saw in the field by the playground, aren’t you?”

He looked away and pursed his lips. “How did they get into my memories?” I demanded. “How are they in my head? You know, don’t you? You know what they are. They were really in those tapes too, right? I’m not crazy. I’m not!” He exhaled.

“...No, you’re not crazy. How I wish that you were.” I told him he should tell Sarah that. He bridged his fingers. “...I would be all too willing. But only if you’ll press on with the experiment.” Experiment? He meant therapy, surely. Just who is this guy?

“Besides” he concluded, “your business there is unfinished, isn’t it? Wherever you were just now. They’re still in there, waiting for you. Do you really mean to leave before you’ve seen them?” It occurred to me that this might’ve been his plan all along. That my parents are just a hook to him, with which to draw me into this scheme.

Still, I badly wanted vindication. I couldn’t bear it if Sarah were to go on believing that I’m insane, and this man is the only other person so far who believes me. Whatever it is that’s been happening to me, he seems to know a lot more about it than I do.

“...Alright. But if I tell you to turn it off…” He swore up and down that he’d withdraw me immediately should I give any indication of distress. I eyeballed him warily, but he seemed sincere. That, plus the need to convince Sarah that I really saw something on those tapes, compelled me to once again don the helmet and lie down on the bed.

The comeup was slower this time, I assume because the old man was increasing the power more gradually. I watched formless colored blobs swirl about for what felt like an eternity before they coalesced into something recognizable.

I found myself in an office. Unusual only in that everything from the technology to the decor was archaic, I placed it sometime between the nineteen thirties and forties. The other oddity was that it all appeared to be monochrome.

Like an old black and white film. Only I wasn’t watching it through a television screen or in a theater, it was a real, tangible space I inhabited. When I reached out to touch the glossy black typewriter on the desk, I gasped. My hands were monochrome as well.

A banker’s lamp sat unused on the corner of the great mahogany desk. In the far corner of the room, by the door, there stood a coat rack with a grey hat and an umbrella hung from two of its hooks. Out the only window, I saw more office buildings.

When I craned my neck to the left or right, I could only see more office buildings in either direction, silhouettes moving about in the windows that were still lit up. Looking as far up or down as I could manage only revealed the same thing. More building. More windows. No street visible below me, and no sky above.

Where am I? I don’t remember this place. Did Dad take me to work once when I was small? But then, why is it all in black and white? My confusion only increased when I noticed the recessed rail in the ceiling. Like the tracks I’ve seen clothing move along at the dry cleaners.

It looped around the ceiling, then out the closed door through a narrow gap at the top. It piqued my curiosity, but I meant to finish searching the room before leaving it. The only other furniture was a pair of black filing cabinets...both locked.

Dejected, I turned towards the door. But as I did so, I took notice of a sheet of paper sticking out of the typewriter. I walked over, took hold of the knob I knew would advance the paper, and turned it until I could pull the sheet free from the ungainly machine. “Everything is normal” it read. Beneath that, “Don’t look at them, except in reflections. Don’t talk about them to anyone. Don’t say or do anything which gives away that you’re aware of their presence. Only writing is safe, they cannot read it.”

I turned the sheet over, but that really was everything written on it. Whoever wrote this didn’t even sign their name, and there was nothing in the way of a nameplate or business cards to give any indication of who worked here before I arrived. Who still works here, possibly?

With no more answers to be found in the musty little office, I took the hat off the rack and donned it before heading out into the hallway. The overhead metal rail continued here, as if some tiny monorail or gondola were meant to travel along, suspended from it.

As I stood there studying it, something whipped by behind me. So fast that I wouldn’t have realized if not for the sound, and the subtle gust of air. I turned this way and that looking for whatever it was, but the hallway was as empty as I’d found it moments earlier.

What the hell was that? I figured if I followed the rail far enough I might find out, so I began walking. The corridor stretched out before me to the point that however I squinted, I couldn’t make out the end. Just how big can this building be?

When I saw a distant figure approaching, at first I thought I must be seeing things. But he looked real enough close up, wearing the exact same outfit as mine. “A hat indoors? Why, who’s ever heard of such a thing? That’s hardly normal if you ask me” the stranger chuckled, snatching my hat off my head before handing it to me.

“Where am I? What is any of this?” I asked. He looked stunned. Then increasingly nervous. “What do you mean? This is where we all work. What else would it be?” I described how I got here from the point that I fell asleep with the helmet on.

He was now visibly sweating. “Listen fella that’s...I’ve never heard such a...no more of that, alright? None of that.” He brushed at my suit as if to clean away dust while furtively glancing around, though for what I could not yet say. “Looking sharp! You’ve got your tie on just right, that’s what I like to see. Exactly how it should be.”

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 8!}