Memory Hole

by Douglas Jern

  atmosphere press

  © 2021 Douglas Jern

  Published by Atmosphere Press

  Cover design by Ronaldo Alves

  No part of this book may be reproduced without permission from the author except in brief quotations and in reviews. This is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to real places, persons, or events is entirely coincidental.

  atmospherepress.com

  My most sincere thanks to Sara and Jakob for showing me the world, and to Sawa for filling it with light.

  -D.J.

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE – DEATH

  AUGUST 7, NOW

  AUGUST 8, NOW

  PART TWO – BIRTH

  30 YEARS AGO

  25 YEARS AGO

  23 YEARS AGO

  12 YEARS AGO

  SIX MONTHS AGO

  MORNING, NOW

  MIDDAY, NOW

  EVENING, NOW

  PART THREE – REVENGE

  AUGUST 9, NOW

  EPILOGUE – REBIRTH

  ABOUT ATMOSPHERE PRESS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PART ONE

  DEATH

  AUGUST 7, NOW

  09:35 – Jeffrey

  When Jeffrey opened his front door and stepped out into the summer sun, he had a feeling it was going to be a good day. The sun was shining, and there was not a single cloud in the sky. It was one of those perfect summer days, like the ones you get when you’re a child, scented with lilac and honeysuckle, the world an open door to opportunity. Jeffrey breathed in the new day and smiled. Not for a moment did he imagine that he would soon beat a stranger to a bloody pulp.

  He set out at a leisurely pace, humming to himself as he went. Although he usually tried to be at the farmers’ market the moment it opened, today was the first sunny day after a week of rain and gloom. He might as well make a detour, enjoy the sunshine a little. There would be plenty of fruit and vegetables left for him, even if he missed out on the best deals.

  Shortly after he passed by Rivertree Park, his head began to hurt. His vision blurred for a moment. When it cleared, he saw a red sports car pull up ahead. The driver stepped out onto the sidewalk. He was a broad-shouldered man who looked to be in his early thirties wearing a red polo shirt with the collar popped up, a pair of chinos, and black loafers. A thin strip of beard drew an unbroken curve from one ear to the other, and his black hair was swept back from his forehead. Jeffrey had never seen him before in his life.

  His vision blurred again, and he saw the sports car from farther away, as if he had taken about fifty steps backwards. A long-haired man wearing a white t-shirt and a backpack was walking toward the driver of the car. Jeffrey’s headache was getting worse, and he was starting to see double. He blinked and shook his head, trying to clear his vision, but that only made his head hurt worse.

  Through the pain and the blur, Jeffrey saw his own hand lash out like a viper and strike the driver’s cheek, knocking him to the ground. Jeffrey followed, falling on top of the driver while throwing punch after punch at his unprotected face. Bone crunched as his fist slammed into the driver’s orbit, cracking it and mashing the eye within to jelly.

  At the same time, from afar, he saw the long-haired man knocking the driver down and pinning him to the ground. The man’s arms pumped like pistons as he beat the defenseless driver over and over. Jeffrey realized that the long-haired man wasn’t going to stop, that he was going to beat the driver to death. He started running and heard himself shout:

  “Stop it! For God’s sake, you’re killing him!”

  The image of the two men disappeared in a haze of static, and he was there, looking at the driver’s face, bloodied and battered beneath him. He felt the driver’s hair, thick and greasy between his fingers, as he yanked his head up to slam it into the ground. He heard the dull crack of skull against asphalt, saw the blood start flowing out of the man’s nostrils, his ears, his mouth, and even the corners of his eyes.

  More static. His feet pounded the ground as he dashed toward the long-haired man and his victim. Jeffrey was no fighter. The most violent people he had ever subdued were the wizened residents of the care home; the ones with dementia could sometimes lash out in their confusion. This, on the other hand, was a man in his physical prime, and Jeffrey didn’t think he would stand much of a chance in a fight. Nevertheless, he was compelled to put a stop to this brutality.

  When Jeffrey was mere steps away from the two men, close enough to smell blood in the air, the long-haired man raised his head and looked Jeffrey straight in the eyes. The dull pain in Jeffrey’s head exploded. His head felt like someone had stuffed it full of hot coals. For an agonizing, white-hot moment, he saw the eyes of the long-haired man bore into him, and he saw himself, standing as if paralyzed, through eyes that were not his own. At the same time, somewhere underneath the heat and the pain, he felt an oddly familiar sensation. A pattern of thought brushing against his brain that he hadn’t felt for many years. The feeling reminded him of…

  Laura…?

  The fire inside his skull grew even hotter and he lost track of the nostalgic feeling before he could identify it. The world began to twist itself around him. The long-haired man’s eyes glowed like suns, emanating a multicolor halo that seared itself into Jeffrey’s retinas. He tried to scream, but his mouth wouldn’t move. A word rang out like a gunshot.

  Switch

  In an instant, the pain was gone. So was the blinding light and the noise. Jeffrey blinked to clear his vision, trying to get his bearings straight.

  He was crouching on the sunlit sidewalk next to a red sports car. There was a man lying at his feet. His face was a mangled wreck. Blood flowed from a smashed nose and numerous cuts in the skin. One eye was a crater of gore. The upper lip was split apart above a broken jaw which dangled on torn ligaments like a rotten branch swaying in the wind. Little puddles of drying blood were scattered around him like rose petals.

  “Dear God, what happened to you?” Jeffrey cried out.

  But he already knew. He had seen it. He had done it. He could remember it all, the meaty crunches and stabs of pain in his knuckles. The coppery smell in the air. Despite the summer heat, Jeffrey’s body was shaking, soaked in a cold sweat. He felt sick to his stomach. For reasons he could not understand, he had interrupted his morning walk to brutally assault this man getting out of his car, a man he did not even know. Not only had he punched him; he had demolished him deliberately and methodically. As if he had planned it all out in advance.

  “No,” he muttered to himself, remembering the other side, the fuzzy double image in his brain. “I was trying to stop it. It wasn’t me. It was…”

  The long-haired man! Jeffrey looked up. A crowd had formed around the scene. The onlookers stared, some of them whispering excitedly to each other, as if the grisly spectacle before them was just an elaborate performance. Many of them had their phones out and were filming him.

  The long-haired man was among them. He too was holding his phone in front of him like a talisman, a gleeful expression on his face. Jeffrey felt a wave of hot rage surge through him at the sight of the man.

  “You!” he barked, jumping to his feet. The man’s grin froze into a mask of terror. Jeffrey raised his hand, pointing at the long-haired man. “You…”

  But the accusation got stuck somewhere in his throat. The hand he held up was covered in blood, the knuckles worn down to ragged lumps.

  The long-haired man’s hands were spotless.

  Jeffrey stared transfixed at his own sullied hands. The memory of the beating imposed itself upon his mind, blocking out the other one. It was him. He had done this. There could be no other explanation. His head began to hurt again, and he fell to his knees.

  Jeffrey was too distraught and confused to he
ar the sirens. Two police cruisers had stopped nearby, and before Jeffrey knew what hit him, the officers did. With rather more force than seemed necessary they wrenched his hands behind his back and cuffed him.

  His frantic thoughts drowned out the officers’ voices as they read him his rights and manhandled him into the cruiser. The headache wore off as the car sped off away from the scene, but Jeffrey still felt as if his brain was split down the middle.

  He couldn’t believe that he could ever inflict such horrible violence on another human being. But he also knew that he had. The memories, nightmarish though they seemed, must be real. How else could he explain his injured hands? And yet, some part of him deep inside screamed in protest.

  Things are not what they seem. Don’t lose sight of the truth!

  But he had no idea what the truth was. It was all mixed up in the haze. Plagued by guilt and confusion, Jeffrey started to weep as the police cruiser drove towards the station.

  11:03 – Zachary

  Detective Zachary Zimmerman—living proof that some parents have a cruel sense of humor—pulled over by the sidewalk a few feet behind the victim’s car, engaged the handbrake, took a deep breath, and turned to his partner.

  No, not partner, he corrected himself. Partnership had to be earned. What then, trainee? Intern? Fuck it, he might as well go with kid, seeing as his job lately amounted to little more than babysitting anyway. Let the kid get his feet wet, learn the ropes, and so on and so forth.

  All right then.

  A dark little cranny in his brain screamed for a drink, although it wasn’t even noon yet, but giving in to the urge would prove Ulrike right again, in which case he’d rather drink battery acid. Not to mention he would break his eight-month streak on the wagon. He’d been teetering over the edge for most of the ride, rolling down the road one grim day at a time. It never seemed to get any easier. Today was going to be another long one, all right. He cracked his knuckles to take his mind off the craving and nodded at the kid.

  “Well, here we are, kid. Welcome to the crime scene. Let’s do this by the book, okay?”

  “Roger that, sir!” replied Leo, the kid. He had been sitting at attention all the way here, like an excitable labrador looking forward to a special treat. Every other minute he’d asked a new question about the new case, even though he knew full well that Zachary was just as much in the dark as he was. Zachary had bitten his tongue to stop himself from sighing every time Leo came up with a new question, replied that they would find out more when they got there, and silently wondered if he himself had once been so damn enthusiastic.

  All Zachary knew so far was that just about an hour ago, some guy called Jeffrey Greenwood had taken it upon himself to beat ten kinds of shit out of a seemingly random passerby a mere stone’s throw from the nearest police station. Greenwood was now in custody. The victim had been hauled off to the hospital for intensive care. At least, that had been the plan before he shuffled off his mortal coil in the ambulance. Whatever Greenwood’s intentions had been, the case had been bumped up from battery to homicide.

  They got out of the car, and Zachary surveyed the scene. The victim’s car, a bright red Ferrari 488, was still parked by the sidewalk with the driver’s side door open. Yellow police tape formed a skewed rectangle around the car and the dried blotches of blood on the curb. A couple of uniformed officers were motioning pedestrians to cross over to the other side of the street.

  Zachary walked around the hood of his car, a gray Chevrolet Malibu that had seen better days, and joined Leo, who had already whipped out his notepad and was scribbling down the license number of the victim’s car. Zachary sighed before he could stop himself.

  “I’m pretty sure we’ve already got the number, kid. Not that it’ll do us any good.”

  “Fake plates. Yes, I remember, sir. Just trying to establish a good habit.” Leo flashed a nervous smile. Zachary forced himself to smile back.

  Strictly speaking, the plates weren’t fake. They had been registered, all right, to a blue Ford F-150 pickup truck owned by a crook Zachary knew worked for the mob. But now here they were, attached to a top-of-the-line sports car with a pair of stuffed dice in the mirror. Spot the difference.

  It was not an uncommon occurrence. High-ranking mobsters sometimes “borrowed” plates from their underlings for risky jobs to confuse the authorities. Zachary would have tracked down the owner of the pickup truck and questioned him, had he not been dead for two months, killed in a knife fight over a rigged game of poker. Such is life in the criminal underworld.

  The owner of the Ferrari was the real mystery here. His face had been savaged beyond recognition, and he hadn’t been carrying any identification at the time. It was a pretty safe bet that he was a gangster, and a big shot at that, but that didn’t narrow it down much; the city of Stonewell was crawling with mobsters and other scum. Drug barons cruising around in fancy rides were a dime a dozen. To top things off, they didn’t have the guy’s fingerprints on file; either he’d never been arrested, or he had a guardian angel somewhere. Zachary leaned toward the latter. Much as he hated to admit it, there was no shortage of crooked cops to go with the organized criminals. All they could hope for now was that forensics could identify the victim by his DNA. It would be a slow process.

  In the meantime, that left them with only one lead: Greenwood. Assuming he wasn’t just some lunatic who had suddenly snapped and jumped the first person he’d come across, there must be some connection between him and the victim. Zachary would much rather be in the interrogation room with Greenwood right now instead of poking around the crime scene. They already knew their who, when, where, and how. Why? That was a question only Greenwood could answer, but Zachary would not be the one asking it, oh no. He’d been relegated to second fiddle.

  He sighed again and shook his head. No point sulking about it now. He’d just have to do his best to make lemonade out of these lemons. Maybe he would find something he could use. He cracked his knuckles and said to Leo:

  “Better make this quick. Can’t keep blocking the sidewalk forever. Let’s get gloved up and check this baby out.”

  “On it, sir!”

  Leo pulled out a pair of rubber gloves from his chest pocket and snapped them on his hands as he marched toward the car. Zachary followed behind. As they ducked under the tape, Zachary heard a voice.

  “Top o’ the morning to you! How fares the Great Detective?”

  Zachary had to suppress a smile. Good old Maxwell.

  “Morning, sarge,” he said with a casual wave to the approaching figure of Sergeant Maxwell Brook, a man who never failed to lift his spirits. To Leo, he said: “Go check out the car. I’ll be with you in a minute.”

  “Okay, sir!” said Leo and walked off toward the victim’s car. Zachary watched him go, then turned to Maxwell, who winked at him.

  “That’s your new partner? Leo Hudson, was it? Come to give him some field experience?”

  “That’s the idea. Gotta get him off his training wheels sooner or later. Detective Zachary Zimmerman, professional babysitter.” He threw a salute.

  Maxwell chuckled. “Takes you back, doesn’t it? Roles reversed this time, eh?”

  “No kidding. I wish you’d told me how much of a pain it is. Was I really like that when I was new? All excited like a puppy and thinking I was going to save the world?”

  “Nothing wrong with wanting to save the world, Top,” said Maxwell, eliciting another smile from Zachary. “Top” was the sergeant’s nickname for him, derived from his initials, ZZ. Zachary would have resented it from anyone else, but Maxwell was okay. He had earned it.

  “He’s going to be disappointed when he realizes he can’t. I know I was.”

  “The job wears everyone down, Top.”

  “Don’t I know it,” said Zachary. He had never had much love for the office politics and other bullshit that came with the career. He been quick to realize that most of his superiors were incompetent and kept his contact with them to an absolute minim
um. This had given him plenty of time to devote himself to actual policing but deprived him of a lot of opportunities for networking. He’d tried to make up for it by being damn good at his job, but what did he have to show for it? The same position he’d held for twenty long years, working himself to the bone on some of the most gruesome cases in the city’s twisted history, for less than half the pay his brown-nosing superiors earned by sitting on their asses all day and occasionally mingling at charity events.

  “How do you stand it?” he asked Maxwell, surprising himself. He’d never been much for this kind of heart-to-heart talk. But now that he thought about it, Maxwell had been in the game even longer than he had, without ever advancing past the rank of sergeant, though he was no doubt overqualified. “We’ve all got ways to keep ourselves sane, more or less. What’s yours?”

  Maxwell peered at him with concern. “How you holding up, Top? Something we need to talk about?”

  “It’s not about me, Maxwell,” said Zachary a tad too quickly. His hands automatically came together, but he stopped himself from cracking his knuckles and shoved his hands in his pockets instead, hoping Maxwell wouldn’t notice and knowing that he would. “Really, I’m good,” he said.

  “If you say so, Top,” said Maxwell, his expression unreadable.

  “I’m just curious,” continued Zachary. “You’ve been a sergeant since God knows when. Haven’t you ever wanted to rise higher, get a position where you could make a real difference?”

  “I taught you everything I know, Top. Are you saying that didn’t make any difference to you?” Maxwell pouted.

  “Come on, Maxwell, you know what I mean.”

  “Relax, Top. I’m kidding!” Maxwell grinned and thumped him on the shoulder. “If you really want to know, it’s because I’m the man in the tower.”

  Zachary frowned. “Is that code for something?”

  “It’s about having a balanced perspective,” said Maxwell. “Take your average officer patrolling the streets. He’s down on the ground with all the little people. He knows their personal struggles and hardships because he sees them for himself every day. But he can’t see anything above his own head, and so has a hard time grasping the big picture. The captains and the chief, on the other hand, they’re up on the mountaintop. They have a great view of the big picture from up there, but they’re too high to see the details that make it up. They’re good at laying plans and crunching numbers but tend to forget about the faces behind the numbers. The people on the ground look like ants from up there, and who cares about an individual ant?”