Amnesia

Content Warning: themes of trauma, brief descriptions of abuse.

    At first, there is only an empty room. Mahogany floorboards, brick walls, a ceiling shrouded in the illogical shadows of a dream. Between breaths, details unfold. A rug, brown – no, red – with gold tassels that flutter as it settles against the dusty floor. A rocking chair, simple, handmade. He materializes in front of it, and it creaks as he sits down.

    Days pass. Each time he visits, he conjures another piece of the room. A rickety, rusting chandelier, with candles that never go out. A brick fireplace. A broom, a poker, and firewood. A perpetual rain outside that patters gently against the roof. Some of it is by conscious choice. Some of it has always been here, waiting for his arrival.

    When he next rises from the rocking chair, he turns to find a window where there was nothing but a bare wall before. It’s boarded up hastily, messily, with four planks of wood and a few crooked nails driven into the sill. Through the cracks between the boards, the glass is grimy and opaque.

    He approaches for a closer look. A hundred whispered voices slither out from the spiderweb of hairline cracks across the windowpane. Ghosts rise up around him, and their presence is like a thick, cold fog.

    “Not yet,” they say, “not yet.”

    His curiosity is a hunger.

    To his right, between the fireplace and the window, a doorway appears. There is no door: only a tapestry hanging from the frame, tattered at the edges, shifting in an unseen breeze. It’s impossible to look at it long enough to decipher the scene playing out on its surface.

    He grabs the fire poker and pulls the tapestry aside.

    Beyond: the dream-shadows. An eternal expanse of darkness, falling away and closing in, paradoxical. He scrambles back to safety.

    The room is inside a cottage, he decides. At his command, the walls of the cottage construct themselves brick-by-brick. He pulls aside the tapestry once more, and a long hallway unrolls in front of him.

    He steps out. He can’t feel the floor beneath his feet. His surroundings elude perception, existing only at the edges of his vision. With every step, the hallway stretches longer, and the ghosts whisper louder.

    “Not yet. Not yet.”

    “You are not ready.”

    “Some secrets are best left alone.”

    But he needs to know. He’s spent twelve years in the dark; he can’t bear to see the light shift from beyond the broken window. Not anymore. Not now that he’s caught a glimpse of the truth.

    The ghosts curl around his ankles. They try to drag him back. He’s stronger than them, but not by much. As he pushes forward, the world tilts. A shiver of unease prickles up his spine. Shadows flicker and pulse at the end of the hallway ahead of him. They’re drawing closer. Unease melts into a cold stab of dread, and he turns to run.

    The hallway falls away, melting into nothingness. The ghosts bind his legs together and root him in place. In front of him stands a little girl, no older than six. Her dusty blonde hair is matted, unbrushed, unwashed. Her dress, once a pristine white, is tattered and stained. Her knees are bloody. When she raises her head to look at him, he sees her black eye and the purple-and-green bruise spreading across her cheek. Her gaze is empty, her mouth expressionless.

    “Who are you?” he asks, but he’s crying, because he already knows.

    “Help me,” she says.

Her brokenness cuts him. It rips him apart at the seams, and his raw sobs sound almost like laughter.

    There is only an empty room. Colorless floorboards, colorless brick walls, and a shattered window, boarded up carelessly. He sits in the center of the room and watches the light shift through the dirty glass. The little girl cries in the corner every Sunday morning, her arms wrapped around her head, rocking on her heels in her misery.

    The room begins to erode. Cracks form in the bricks, and pieces of the wall begin to crumble. The floorboards splinter and rot. Amorphous darkness creeps in through every open wound.

    “We tried to warn you,” the ghosts whisper.

    He conjures lamps and candles and fire, but each new light is swallowed by the aching darkness. The broken window disappears. The doorway is long gone. The fireplace is nowhere to be seen. It is only him and the child, and every time he tries to cover his ears and block out her grief, she cries louder.

    They’re backed into a corner now. The shadows are liquid fear, and every time the waves of darkness lap at his heels, his mind spasms. Emotions and sensations crash into him, each more intense than the last, until he is on his knees, breathless, clawing at his throat. The ghosts scream in unison, and their voices reach a crescendo. “You weren’t supposed to see her!”

    Silence falls.

    The girl climbs to her feet, slowly, laboriously. Her hair is the same endless black as the surrounding shadows. Her white dress shifts, transforms. The threads are spun from starlight and woven into a picture of infinity. She is impossible to look at, and impossible not to see.

    “I tried to keep you safe,” she says.

    “I’m sorry,” he chokes out.

    “No,” she says. “I am.”

    She reaches out and places three fingertips against his forehead. Pictures flash before his eyes: three scenes, three memories, each too horrific to comprehend. He slumps forward, nausea working its way up his throat.

    “I’m sorry,” she says again. “They were mine. But you found me. So now, they’re yours.”

    She pats his head awkwardly, like a child comforting a grieving parent in the only way they know. Then she walks past him into the darkness, and it envelops her.

    There is only an empty room. Mahogany floorboards, brick walls, a ceiling shrouded in the illogical shadows of a dream. He sits motionless in the hand-fashioned rocking chair. Hours pass, then days. Sometimes the shadows creep towards him; he fights them off with what little strength he has left.

    A window appears in the center of the blank wall, and though it was once boarded up, the wooden planks have since been removed. The cracked glass has been replaced with a new crystal-clear pane. Sunlight streams in at dawn, and in the evening, he catches a glimpse of the girl with the blonde pigtails playing in the grass just beyond the window.

    She lives out her childhood in his mind; he picks up the broken pieces of them both.