The tall man stopped, the smile falling off his face. “Where is it?” he hissed. He looked behind me, and then he looked at me again, sizing me up from head to toe.
“It?” said someone behind me.
"Gregor," the tall man said, addressing the person behind me, "I’m not in a mood to play. I told you to work on him. I wanted him sobbing and begging, ready to hand it over. So tell me, why is he sitting here in perfect condition, and it’s missing? I know you’re slow Gregor, but I’ll find where you put it.”
The Tall-man turned and looked up at a camera in the corner. I hadn’t noticed it before the gesture.
“It? I don’t know what it you speak,” said a Russian-accented voice. "Work on him… work on him! I worked on him! Two hours, trying to get him to break. He is not a normal child. Children break with a threat! I try harder.”
Gregor walked around to the front of my chair. It was not the same man that I had seen smashing my toes. He was wearing a plastic smock that looked like it belonged in the bowels of a funeral home. He had on long rubber chemical gloves, and underneath, a plain pair of jeans and a white t-shirt. He was clean-shaven and bald with a pasty complexion. He kept bending as if a weight was on his shoulders, pressing him forward, and he kept dipping as he walked forward, his gloved hands clasped in front of him.
“I take it too far. I'm fear I kill him. There was a lot of blood, so I decided to clean it up. I move him. Wash him. Put fresh clothes on him. I figured maybe you would forgive me for killing him when he is wearing nice clothes again. I know you like a pretty corpse. But then he forgets he is hurt.”
The tall man raised an eyebrow. "Forgets?"
Gregor stumbled over the terms. "To not be true… This is wrong saying. He heals. But not normal. Heals like nothing I've ever seen. New skin, like baby."
"Everything that I do to him goes away… But he still not wake up. I decided to text you when he is wake. Then you decide what to do with him."
The tall man's frown deepened. He studied Gregor and me, appearing to be trying to decide what to believe.
What Gregor said about me forgetting my wounds felt true. I didn't remember being tortured. What I did remember was my future self being tortured. The man who had ‘worked’ on my future self had not been Gregor. I shuddered. I tried to wiggle my toes. One after the other. They seemed to all be there. The pain I had been feeling faded into the background, suggesting it was a phantom ache.
“So he heals miraculously, without divine intervention, and the currency just magically disappears?” the Tall man said. I had heard this tone before, when a teacher was calling a student out on an obvious lie.
"If you'll please, Mr. Black," Gregor said. “There was no currency.” He did one of his dipping, bobbing bows as if a weight had been pressed on him, and then popped back up. "No currency here. The boy, he's only a boy. No currency. Look, look, see, almost gone." He pointed at my chest.
Compelled by the gesture, I looked down myself. Sure enough, I was almost dry. I had one strand of luck spinning lazily inside of my core. When I'd been tossed in the trunk, I was at plus 24, which was five full dharma knots, or 36 plus 24, which is 60 strands of luck. I had one. What had happened to all of my luck? And as soon as the question presented itself, it answered itself in my own memory. The words that Gregor had spoken echoed back in my head: he forgot he was hurt.
The tall man raised an eyebrow as Gregor did another dipping, bowing bob towards him. "It's so small, his aura." It was my turn to raise an eyebrow. He was mistaking what I was thinking of my core as my aura. It seemed that a little bit of my training was paying off.
"I didn't notice at first," Gregor said. "Not so obvious, not so obvious, but clear. I left all that I found. Besides," Gregor said, "when I work on him, he doesn't offer me any. He says nothing. He stares at me with those eyes." He pointed at me, gesturing at my face. I don't know what he meant, but he seemed insistent. "Just staring at me, just piercing through me. He looks at me all the while. It unnerved me."
Gregor began to wring his hands, the chemical gloves producing a strange squeak as he did. The tall man's frown deepened.
"Check the tapes if you don't believe me."
It happened lightning fast. I blinked, and Gregor was on the floor, and it took me a second to process what had happened. The tall man must have struck him. Maybe I had seen him move, but it wasn't clear in my memory.
The tall man spoke, his voice calm despite the recent violence. "Gregor, you work for me. You know the rules. Never touch me. Never tell me what to do. Your life is worth less than this mistake. Remember that."
Gregor groaned from his place on the floor, muttering to himself in Russian. I wasn't fluent in Russian, so I had no idea what he was saying. The tall man stepped over to me. He stayed out of arm's reach, even if I had not been tied up. He cocked his head, looking at me as if I were some curiosity.
The tall man's presence increased, exerting pressure, pushing me back down into the chair. I remembered this trick from before.
Gregor moaned from where he lay on the floor, uttering what had to be a curse. It broke the presence of the pressure the tall man was exerting, and he shot the prone figure a look of annoyance. Turning back to me, he sighed.
"It's so hard to find a good helper," he said. "How about you save us both the trouble and answer my questions? How did you come to have my currency in your possession? And where did it go?"
I shrugged.
The tall man's mouth firmed into a line. "I have your name now," he said, "so I can compel you," he shot another annoyed glance at Gregor, "but that would be painful. So tell me, Timothy Thompson, how do you have the currency?"
The words he spoke this time carried a reverberating air that seemed to bounce around inside my head, and while I processed the feeling of discomfort that was growing into a headache, I felt my mouth open and answer its own accord.
"I took it," I heard myself say.
The tall man's mouth twisted. "And where did it go?" he asked.
"I consumed it," I said.
The tall man's eyes widened at this statement. "Really?” he said.
He studied me for a long moment, seeming to come to a conclusion. When he spoke, his words again had the reverberating presence, this time the feeling descending from bouncing around in my head to vibrating my teeth in a painful way.
"Why did I wake up with a memory of something that never happened today?"
Thoughts raced through my mind. A memory. It seemed, perhaps, the tall man had not somehow been brought into the loop the way I had assumed. He had knowledge he shouldn't have outside of the loop, but the statement implied it was fragmented, partial. This hadn't happened before. No one else had been part of the loop, except me and my future self. So if the tall man had entered this loop with partial memories of a previous one, the question was, why?
I looked at him. "I don't know," I said.
The tall man studied me for a moment, then nodded. "Next question," he said. "How did you consume the currency?"
Thoughts again spun through my head. I thought about the statement that Gregor had made about how he had tortured me. What that must have meant.
"Pain," I said.
I wanted to stop answering him. I didn't like where this line of questioning was going. The tall man did not appear pleased by the statement.
"And where did it go when you consumed it?" he said.
"I don't know," I answered.
The tall man began increasing the tempo of the questions. With each question, the pain I felt grew. It spread down through my body.
"How did you take the currency?" the tall man asked.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
"Luck," I said.
"Are you human?"
"I don't know."
"Why is your aura so strange?"
"I don't know."
"Is Gregor lying to me about having tortured you?"
"I don't know."
"Are you under my compulsion or are you resisting?"
"I don't know."
The tall man took a step back. "Gregor? Quit cowering and go fetch Caroline."
***
“A change of scenery is in order, I think,” said the tall man. “We’ll take him and dump him at Caroline’s. He can be her problem. I have better things to do.”
Gregor managed to pull himself to his feet with a grunt and a whimper, and then again began bobbing, and bowing before the tall man. “I can take him, no need to trouble yourself.“
“Yes,” the Tall man sighed heavily, “there is. If you go without me, she will send you back to me with him. We’ll go together.“
We left the room, Gregor pushing me ahead of him with grunts and shoves to indicate which way to go. The Tall-man followed behind.
The apparent office space that I had been in gave way to narrow cement corridors with a heavy, lived-in feeling. I got the strong impression that I was underground. The interrogation room must have been set up to appear to be an office in order to mislead the occupant. It occurred to me that now being shown around the complex without a blindfold on was not a good sign of their intentions for me. I couldn't guess at how far underground we were, but there was no visible outside light making it into this gray, industrial, cement-themed complex.
The corridors we navigated were gray, drab, narrow, and winding. Sharp right turns, forking branches, and exposed conduits and wiring abounded. I had not thought the little town that my mom and I moved to was big enough to have any sort of place like this hidden away. It felt like the sort of space that would exist beneath the Hoover Dam or something like that. The sounds of dripping water, far away clanks and boom, accompanied by our own muted footsteps were the only sounds. An oppressive pressure came from somewhere high overhead, pressing in on me. The sheer cement walls should echo, they didn't. There were enough pipes and conduits and tubes and unknown industrial trappings snaking along the ceiling and in some cases occupying entire walls for several turns that I began to suspect, in the famous words of Dorothy, that I might not be in Kansas anymore.
I tried to remember the number of turns and switchbacks and to create a mental map, but after several dozen, I realized probably the best that I could hope to do by remembering this would be to find my way back into the pseudo-office holding room, which wouldn't help me at all. The tall man and Gregor were silent for the entire trip. The tall man seemed preoccupied with other things, where Gregor was entirely occupied with manhandling me into where he wanted me to be, which was never where I was at the moment. I figured making a break for it at this point was useless. I’d rather see, and bide my time, than be blindfolded, tied and carried.
When at last I was beginning to suspect that I really might be underneath the Hoover Dam, trying to calculate how long I would have had to be unconscious in that car trunk to get here, we at last reached our destination.
It was a house.
I had expected some sort of candlelit, vampiric, underground lair full of skulls and rats and cobwebs and malicious intent.
No.
This looked like a custom model home straight out of a magazine. It had a fake sod lawn, white picket fence, and everything. It was lit from what I could tell inside of a six or seven-story chamber from high overhead, which at first I thought I was getting a glimpse of daylight. And then stepping in, I realized that no, there were high overhead lights that were daylight imitation. I could tell because of the way the light was buzzing and vibrating.
I had noticed artificial lights ever since my onset of vampirism. It had been a background to everything else that had been bothering me. They buzzed. LEDs were the worst. Now didn't seem to be the time to be thinking about all this, but I couldn't stop my brain from trying to understand what frequency the LED overhead was set at.
The house was painted white with green trim and an attractive shake-shingle roof. It was two-story with windows, shutters, and all the trappings of modern affluent suburbia. I was so stunned at the first sight of the house that I stopped walking, at which point Gregor, cursing, picked me up by my cuffs, which were still behind my back.
I had to either let myself be picked up from my wrists or let my shoulders be pulled up and potentially out of joint, and I couldn't comply by getting my feet moving again because I had been hauled off the ground, so I opted for wrists instead of shoulders. I was carried along like a caught fish for a few feet before Gregor, visibly tired and still cursing, set me back down roughly with the clear desire that I walk faster, but no English instructions were spoken.
Standing in front of the house, carried through the white picket fence like a fish, set down on the path, I was then prodded sharply in the back to proceed up the steps. The tall man was following behind, staying a good distance away from everyone. Gregor bowed low and opened the door for the tall man, holding me to the side, and then roughly hauled me in backwards and slammed the door.
I found myself inside the home. The smell of baking gingerbread overwhelmed my senses as I took in my surroundings. The interior was lush without being extravagant, nice without being over the top.
Looking around the interior of the house, the normalcy of the place soon faded into the background. I realized it had been created by the contrast of the house's location. If this house had actually been in some sort of suburban neighborhood, and I had stepped inside, the oddness of the thing would have hit me immediately. But here, the oddity was how normal it was at first take.
What dawned on me belatedly, was that everything was oversized. The doors, instead of being their usual six-foot clearance, must be up near eight. And the ceilings, instead of being eight or nine, as was standard in most homes, were up somewhere near twelve or fourteen. Everything was that way.
The couches, the chairs, the stairs, the handrail, the floors were too big. There was a carpet runner that ran down the central hallway, and alongside the carpet runner were several nice pieces of furniture and everything you would expect to see in a classically furnished, older, upper to upper-middle-class, modern suburban home.
The tall man stood with his arms folded, nose up in the air, making no move to do anything at all. Gregor, meanwhile, as soon as he pushed the enormous front door shut, scuttled away down the hall and then around a corner. The size of everything really came into focus as I watched Gregor's retreating form. Was it getting bigger the further he got? I was desperately trying to recall my brief view of the outside of the house and figure out how big this place really was.
It was also not empty. I couldn't see any people. Off to my left, there was a living room with paisley-covered furniture, bookshelves, dinette cabinets, and a fireplace. To my right, there was a set of stairs that wound up towards the second story. Down the direction Gregor had gone, I could hear voices. They were too indistinct and too far away to make out, as if a small group of people were conversing behind a closed door. Upstairs, there was the occasional thump or scuff. Footsteps. No one trying to be quiet. A place that was lived in. I heard a page turn, and I realized somebody was sitting in the living room, but they must have their back towards the door, no doubt engulfed by one of the enormous chairs if they weren't a giant themselves.
As I stood taking all this in, it only then occurred to me I should probably bolt. I didn't know if the tall man could actually interact with me or not. So, I turned and made for the front door. I was only a couple of steps away, but with my hands handcuffed behind my back and the doorknob not at the standard three foot off the ground, closer to five, I found I couldn't reach the knob. The tall man deigned to glance my way, then snuffed out his nose and shook his head, then returned his gaze to the middle distance, completely unconcerned with my antics.
"Why have you disturbed my schedule?" A ringing woman's voice came from far down the hallway.
I saw there was a woman in an apron marching down the hall with Gregor in tow. Gregor was doing his usual low bowing hand-wringing act, and I could actually pick up the distinctive squeak of the chemical gloves he was still wearing for some reason. I couldn't imagine they were very comfortable.
The woman who was storming towards us was large—not how people typically mean that term. She was not fat. She was not butch. Nor was she what some people refer to as older ladies who have aged nicely after a hard farm life—a battle-axe. No, this woman was large in another sense. She loomed down that oversized hallway towards the tall man and me. She had wide-set features with a hooked nose and a wide mouth. Her eyes were a little bit too far apart, and her forehead was fully exposed by a severe bun tied behind her head. She had spectacles perched halfway down her hooked nose, and her features, as severe as they were, were nothing to the roar of authority that she had in her voice as she demanded of the tall man why he had dared to bother her schedule.
She was dressed in what appeared to be formal New England business attire, a business skirt and blouse that would simultaneously blend in as a woman in charge of a group of working girls or at a high-powered business function meeting at which you had to dress to impress. It made the red apron she wore seem out of place.
When the woman drew up to us, she got close to the tall man, but I noticed that the rules must apply to her too, because she kept a healthy foot-and-a-half distance, even though she held her finger up and jabbed it at his face.
"You can't just keep coming around here every time you have a problem that you want me to solve. You must make an appointment, like everyone else. I don't care that you had the initial investment in all this. You are now just part of the machine. You don't afford special exemptions. If you keep interrupting like this, it's going to begin affecting our bottom line." Her speech came out in a torrent, a flood of information that she gave nonstop without becoming breathless.
She was used to dressing people down and giving commands. I could tell. She almost had an accent. I would say that she had a foreign accent in her past, but long years of diction training seemed to have cured her of that. And now her tone and her accent were decidedly blank—not American, not European, not Russian, not German, not English.
The tall man seemed to deign to notice her for the first time, and he leveled a gaze at her.
"Caroline," he said, just that one word, and then he gestured towards me with his head.
She seemed to take me in for the first time, her eyes narrowing. She, in one quick motion, pushed her spectacles up her nose and snatched hold of my ear, pulling me close. She got uncomfortably close to my face, peering down her nose through her spectacles at me. She twisted my face this way and that, and then pushed me away from her so violently I banged my head on the door.
"Where did you find this one?" she said to the tall man.
"I didn't. He found me. And I want you to give me a full report. But," the tall man said, "if your bottom line is in so much danger that you can't spare me the time now, do it on your own schedule. Gregor, the door."
With that, Gregor practically fell over himself to yank open the door, knocking me on my ass, and the tall man and Gregor disappeared through it, the door slamming shut behind them. The woman, Caroline, apparently, looked down at me, her severe expression not softened in the least.
"Well, I suppose you are now my problem. Don't think that gets you off the hook," she spat. "You're going to wish you had told Gregor whatever it was he wanted to know. He's an amateur. Get up and follow me, or I'm going to make your journey so unpleasant you're going to beg me to go back in time and allow me to do you the favor of allowing you to get up and follow me."
She turned and strode off. I was half tempted to call her bluff just so I could see if she had the power to send me back in time and make me beg to get up and follow her. But it felt like a pointless battle. So I got up and I followed. She led me through the home at a brisk pace. And I could tell something was spatially wrong with my perceptions as I walked. Because though everything was obviously oversized, once I was down the hall and looked back over my shoulder, the door seemed much bigger than it had when I was beside it. Like everything was warped through a distortion of the air, and all distances made size appear to increase. She opened a side passage door, and there was a set of stairs that went down. She began to stomp down them, and sighing, I followed.
As I followed the woman down the concrete staircase, I was again put in mind of a missile silo, or some sort of industrial facility. It brought with it a memory:
I had been hiding, trying to stay out of sight of enemy combatants. I was unarmed and alone. Men with guns were marching a group of civilians into a square. The civilians all showed signs of starvation; their long captivity worn on their features and the frayed nature of their clothes. On the resigned looks on their faces and the fatigue displayed in their eyes.
Orders had been given to pull out. I didn't know it, but the enemy was just about to pull up tent pegs and move camp. Orders came down: execute the prisoners. It was cheaper and simpler to dispose of them than to try and move them and risk losing political currency. Better to make a statement with the loss than to risk being seen as weak. So these soldiers were marching these civilians, who had been held captive—some of them for the better part of months—out into the square to be shot.
I don't know if the prisoners knew where they were being marched to, but a series of staccato reports from the square answered the question. If they didn't before, they did now. The prisoners flinched, but remarkably, they kept walking. They were unrestrained; no rope bound them together, no manacles or cuffs kept them in place. Due to the technological collapse, there was no modern tech keeping them from running.
The soldiers were all wielding AK-47 rifles: simplicity reigned. I remember thinking to myself at that moment, why don't they fight? Why don't they just turn and fight? Maybe they could get a gun. Come on, I cheered for them like a coward, silently in my head. Come on, turn, fight, mob your captors, you could win. After all, they were being marched to their death; they had nothing left to lose.
Alas, I too was proven a coward. As I watched, they were all marched into the square, thankfully out of my sightline, and there was another series of staccato reports. I imagined that I could hear their bodies falling to the ground after they had gone—complacently, pliantly, obediently to their deaths…
The memory came flooding back to me as I followed the woman down the steps. It left me a little dizzy.
Why didn't they fight? Was I doing the same thing? We turned another corner, and Caroline opened a door for me. As I stepped inside, figuring it would be another hallway, she shut the door before I knew what was going on. Darkness engulfed me.
I was left alone, her footsteps receding back the way she had come. Had I too, marched to my doom? Was it the uncertainty that kept my feet moving, or something else?
I explored my room, lost in thought, discovering I was in approximately a ten by ten box, my hands still cuffed behind my back, the metal still burning my skin where it contacted. I found a metal pan on the floor that smelled of urine and vomit. With the blackness, I didn't dare test to see if there was any liquid in the bottom of it. Instead, I felt my way back around to the door and sat down, hoping my eyes would adjust to the gloom well enough that I could see something. I began to work my cuffed hands beneath me so I could get them around to the front.
Maybe up to this point, I had been those prisoners being led and not resisting, but that wasn't the sort of person I wanted to be. I resolved, sitting in that blackness, that I would not go quietly. When the time came I would resist. I would fight.
***
Edit: typos