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Do you Remember? by
The soft trill of his phone woke him up.
John rolled over with a disgruntled sigh. He slapped a hand on the night table, feeling around for his phone before he found it. The light from the screen made him squint. When he saw the time – 4:11 AM – he scowled.
Who would send a message so early in the morning? Part of him just wanted to ignore it and go back to sleep, but curiosity got the best of him. It came from an unfamiliar number, which meant it was probably spam, but John opened the message anyway.
A picture filled the screen. He looked at it, and for the longest time, he didn't understand what he was seeing. So he simply stared.
It was an image of a man sitting on a chair. He wore a bloodied T-shirt. Blue jeans. Socks, no shoes. Someone had split open his lip, blood dribbling down his chin. His expression twisted into a frozen scream, eyes wide and terrified. And his hand-
John flipped the phone over and slammed it down onto the mattress. His room went dark, the phone's light gone. He yanked his hand away from the phone as if it were a repulsive cockroach. In the silence of the bedroom, he heard his own breathing shake apart.
The picture sat firmly in his mind, still present although he'd put his phone down. The hand. The hand-!
John shuddered, and leaned forward, pressing his arms against his belly. He squeezed his eyes shut, but that didn't help. A low, wordless sound squeezed through gritted teeth.
What sort of twisted joke was this?
The man in the picture... looked exactly like him.
His skin prickled, and suddenly he felt his right hand itch. He grabbed it with his left, trembling. No. That wasn't him. That picture wasn't real.
He focused on that, on using reason and logic to hammer in the sheer impossibility. It couldn't have been him, because the man in the picture was missing two fingers. They'd been ripped right off. But John had all ten of his fingers.
He could feel them now, warm and solid beneath the grasp of his left hand. He even counted, just to be sure.
The phone chirped.
John stiffened. Another message?
He didn't want to look. He really, really didn't want to look. A minute passed. Then John sucked in a deep breath and picked up his phone.
It was the same number. No picture this time, but the words that sat on the screen were no less creepy.
Do you remember, John?
The breath froze in his lungs. While he stared in mute horror, a new picture came through.
A face screamed silently at him, blood oozing from an empty, reddened hole where the left eye had once been. Something pink and stringy was left in the empty socket.
John gagged and threw the phone away. He leapt from bed, stumbled, caught himself on the edge of the bed, and then rushed to the bathroom. He'd barely reached the toilet before he doubled over and vomited.
Bile filled his mouth, bitter and rancid, before it splashed into the toilet bowl. He shuddered and gasped. Just like in the first picture, the man had looked exactly like him. The one eye staring at him had been blue with flecks of brown near the center. It was his eye.
"Not real," he moaned.
His left eye itched. Just like his right hand.
"It's not real!"
Sweat dampened his brow, even as the blood drained from his face. It was impossible. Yet he found himself staggering to the sink. Fumbling fingers found the light, switched it on. He squinted against the brightness and gazed into the mirror.
Two eyes. Both blue.
Yet he didn't feel the slightest amount of relief. Something... something was off. He leaned in close, nose almost touching the mirror. Right eye. Blue with brown flecks. Same as in the picture.
He shivered, his breath fogging the mirror.
Left eye. Blue. No brown.
John reeled back, horror pounding in his chest. Where was the brown in his left eye? It'd been there, all his life, but now it was gone? What did this mean?
Instinctively, he looked down at his right hand, at his fingers. At first glance, they looked normal, but upon closer inspection, he saw the faint silvery scars at the base of two of them. Easy to miss unless one really looked. And John was really looking.
"Impossible!" He choked, fell back against the door frame. What was this?! How-?!
The doorbell rang.
John went still. Slowly, he turned his head, looking out the bathroom, down the short hall, towards the door of his apartment. He didn't breathe. Silence bore down on him, and the only thing he could hear was the blood pulsing in his ears.
Someone pounded on his door, hard and furious. The sound made him jump.
"I know you're there," called a muffled voice. "Let me in, John."
John hovered on the edge of panic. He didn't know that voice. It was male, cultured, with a slight English accent. Distinctive in a way that would make it hard to forget.
He didn't know what was going on. But he wasn't going to sit around and let this guy play some sick game with him. Moving quickly, he returned to his bedroom, where his phone lay on the floor.
He scooped it up, and began to dial: 9-1-
With a terrific boom, the door to his apartment burst open. John's head jerked up, eyes wide.
"Oh John," came the voice again. This time it was closer, much clearer, and sickeningly tender. "Where are you hiding?"
The person was inside his apartment. John's mind blanked as sheer terror took over. He took two quick steps out of his bedroom. A glance towards the door revealed a shadowy figure.
"There you are."
John bolted for the fire escape. He kept the window locked, but now he fumbled at the latches with clammy hands. He got one undone before a hand clamped down on his shoulder and yanked him back. John hit the ground, butt first, a startled grunt escaping him.
The intruder stepped over him, straddling him, and leaned down to curl gloved fingers around John's neck.
John grabbed the intruder's wrist, and when that didn't seem to do much, he twisted and rammed a knee into the attacker's crotch. The attacker made a pained sound and the hand loosened around John's throat.
John took that opportunity to wrench away. He scrambled to all fours, and was just getting up when something slammed into him from behind. It knocked him flat onto his belly. In the next instant, a knee pressed into the small of his back. The entire weight of the intruder bore down, pinning him in place.
Breath brushed against John's ear as a low voice whispered, "Don't be afraid, John. You've forgotten a lot of things, it seems, but it's okay. I'm here to help you remember."
