10 Minute Tales

May 9th - Accident

"He's coming to...!"

"Sir, can you hear me?" a voice echoed in the back of his mind. He groaned, trying to sit up. Pain shot through his body and he yelled, flopping back down.

"No, don't move...!" a different voice objected. "You've just come out of a terrible accident. What do you remember of it?"

"What the hell... what's going on...?"

"Please, sir, try and focus. You're being guided to a hospital, we're going to look after you."

"Guh... my everything..." he groaned, the subtle rattling of the road beneath the ambulance's tires enough to cause small waves of agony.

"I'm going to ask a series of questions, okay?" the aide asked again. "Do you remember your name?" His mind darted around as he tried to remember. John came to mind first, so he repeated it. "Okay, John who?"

"Guh... Dunham...?" he mumbled. The aide frowned slightly. Was that wrong? "Gh... it's... no, it's... Dalby...?" the aide relaxed a little. That had to be it.

"Okay, good. Do you know what happened with the crash?"

"With the...?" he mumbled. His surroundings blurred into white, the roar of the engine becoming little more than a quiet hiss. This almost soothed him; with the pain of the ambulance ride gone, he had little to do but relax. The sound grew quieter still, now silent, as the white area faded again. This time, it showed a simple, quiet room. There was one other person sat in the room, holding a clipboard.

"Are you back with us, mister Dalby?"

"Back...?"

"Ah, you are, marvellous." the other man smiled. "Do you mind if we go over what we've covered today?"

"What we've... covered...?" John asked, looking around a little. The pain, at least, was all but gone. The other man raised his eyebrows in surprise. 

"Yes, we... we were attempting to help you remember what happened."

"I... I'm sorry, I don't remember any of that..."

"Truly?" the man wrote on his clipboard for a minute straight. John looked around, more confused than anything else. The room was dull, seemingly by design, with beige paint and a dull cream wallpaper. A painting of a flower hung in a oval frame dangled on the wall opposite him. Eventually, the other man spoke.

"What is your name, please?"

"John..." he repeated. "John Dalby."

"Hm..." he checked his notes. "Ah, I see."

"What's... what's happening?" John asked, frowning a little. He was nervous, and it must have shown.

"Mister Dalby, I'm afraid I must share some rather dire news with you."

"What's going on?"

"You remember that you were in an accident?"

"Yeah, the other guy mentioned, in the ambulance..."

"This explains a lot, actually..." he wrote a sentence or two. "The truth is, we believed you had awoken much sooner. However, if you do not recall the events between the ambulance and this meeting, it would seem that you have suffered worse mental damage than we initially anticipated."

"What's happened to me?"

"It seems that you had developed a second personality of sorts. He had been answering the questions my colleagues and I had been asking him; I'm currently assuming that he answered with your knowledge."

"What... what did he say?"

"That... is a very interesting question."