Six
Terra sat on the sofa and wondered for the thousandth time where her missing time had gone. It sounded ridiculous to even think of it that way, but no matter how you looked at it there were ten days of her life she couldn't account for, time that had just vanished from her memory. But it was more than that, it was more than just a lapse of memory. Things didn't make sense, pieces didn't fit together. Mehmet seemed to think it was a simple case of temporary amnesia, but Terra knew it wasn't so easy to explain. Amnesia was one of those things that you saw a lot in the movies, but it almost never happened in real life. She'd read a lot about it on the internet over the past few days, and doctors all over the world seemed to agree on that point. Mehmet had wanted Terra to see a doctor anyway, but Terra thought it was unnecessary and refused to go.
Mehmet's next suggestion had been that there had been some weird hypnosis going on at the retreat and that she'd been a victim of mind control. Terra certainly didn't discount that possibility— she definitely thought something was wrong with those people, and definitely suspected that something was amiss with the situation in general. But she still didn't think she could have lost ten entire days due to hypnosis alone. She'd read up about hypnotic suggestion as well, and from what she could tell it wasn't as straightforward as just putting someone in a trance and then ordering them to forget ten days of their life. It didn't work like that.
So Mehmet in his frustration had asked Terra if she had any better ideas as to what happened to her and why she had come back from the missing retreat so profoundly changed. Since she had returned home Terra had been a different person— distant and cold, sometimes nervous, sometimes unresponsive. Mehmet was worried that something was seriously wrong, something that required the help of a doctor. Terra scoffed at that, but her other suggestions were so outlandish that she dared not even mention them to Mehmet. Maybe the old man did something to my brain, or maybe Rose did, she thought. Neither of those ideas made any sense, but it was better than thinking she'd just lost time for no reason. Rose and the old man seemed like distant memories now, and sometimes Terra wondered if they'd ever been real in the first place.
It had been over three weeks since Terra had originally gone away to the retreat, but it seemed like only half that time to her because ten of those days had seemingly vanished into thin air. It was now early November, and the weather even here on the south coast was starting to turn grey and chilly. Terra spent a lot of her time these days sitting right here on the sofa, staring out at the apartment buildings and the mountains. I guess it doesn't matter that I lost all that time if this is how I choose to spend it, she thought. She seemed full of self-loathing recently, and she certainly felt depressed.
Terra heard the front door open and close, and Mehmet came into the room, all cheerfulness and smiles. He handed Terra the newspaper she'd asked for, and in his other hand he had a bag full of things he'd picked up at the bakery for breakfast. "I thought we'd have breakfast on the sofa this morning," he said, "since it's the weekend and, well, you seem inclined to stay on the sofa all day anyway."
Terra rolled her eyes at his sarcasm and unfolded the paper. She couldn't even be bothered to form a response, especially since Mehmet was right. She stared at the date on the top of the front page. November already, she thought, and skimmed down today's top stories. War over there. Scandal over here. Natural disaster on the other side of the world. Wherever you looked, things were a mess. Terra sighed and put the paper down. "You think we should have coffee?" she asked. Mehmet grunted from behind his own newspaper. "Well, I'm going to have coffee," she answered herself. "I'll make you some, too."
The house had become kind of a mess over the past couple of weeks, what with Mehmet so busy all the time and Terra feeling apathetic about daily domestic things. When Terra got to the kitchen she had to shove some dishes aside on the counter to make way for two coffee cups, which she had to wash by hand because the cupboard was empty and all the cups were in the sink. As she waited for the water to boil, she stared at the mess around her and then out the window. I've got to pull myself out of this, she thought. I can't go on dwelling on it forever.
She paced slowly around the kitchen for a few minutes and then found herself in front of the sink. She couldn't see the bottom of it for all the dishes piled up in there. With a sigh, she picked up the sponge and the dishwashing liquid. Baby steps, she thought, and resolved to clean a couple of the plates before the coffee water started boiling.
As she scrubbed the crusted food off one of the plates, Terra noticed something odd on the counter, mixed in amongst the dishes. "What on earth is that doing there?" she mumbled as she put the sponge down and rinsed her hands. At first she thought she was mistaken, but when she moved the dishes aside, there it was— the key she'd discovered in her hotel room at the retreat. As soon as she saw it she remembered having put it there. She hadn't left it there on purpose, she'd just placed it on the counter temporarily, and as the dishes overwhelmed the kitchen the key got lost underneath. It really is a nice-looking old key, she thought, and picked it up and examined it. I must do something creative with it before I lose track of it again. Maybe I can clean it up and tie it with some ribbon and make a Christmas ornament out of it.
Just as Terra decided this might be the perfect project to pull her out of her slump, she heard the whistle of the coffee water boiling. She turned the gas off with her free hand and then reached out to retrieve the kettle. The warmth of it was inviting, but as her fingers wrapped around the handle, her muscles froze up and for a moment she became paralysed. Her heart raced and her breathing quickened. Was she having a seizure? The kettle in her hand bounced around as she lost control of her motor functions. Her legs were immobile, gluing her to her spot on the kitchen floor, and her upper body was trembling in small, jerking movements. Small splashes of boiling water escaped from the spout of the kettle and flew around her. The key in her other hand began to feel warm. In fact, there was a tingling sensation there, like the key was trying to burn through her hand. Terra opened her mouth and tried to call for Mehmet, but no sound escaped her lips. She tried to pry her fingers away from the key, but whatever was holding her hand around it was much stronger than she was. She hoped that her other hand would continue holding on to the kettle and that she wouldn't spill boiling water all over herself.
Terra closed her eyes to try to calm herself, and then in that darkness a sudden flash took over her attention. A picture formed in her mind, too close-up and fuzzy at first to see what it was, but slowly the image pulled away and became more and more focused. It was an image of a key, the same key she had in her hand, and it was being turned in the lock of a wooden door. As the image expanded, she saw that the hand turning the key belonged to a man trying to open the door, an athletic-looking man with sandy blond hair. But he looked young, even from the back— perhaps he was still a teenager. There was a cat scratching at the door, a fluffy white cat. Terra concentrated on the cat for a moment, and then somehow realised that he was not scratching to have the door opened, but rather he was reaching up the door trying to draw the man's attention to the key. Terra could hear someone breathing. Perhaps it's my own breath, she thought, but then the breath circled around her, inside her head, and formed itself into a voice. The voice sounded familiar, like a combination of every voice she had ever heard, and its presence was so demanding she couldn't imagine ever having paid attention to anything else. It chanted something she didn't understand in low, moaning tones, and then the syllables started to gather in her mind as the image she was seeing began to zoom in on the back of the man's head.
He will find you, the voice said as the man in the image slowly turned his head around to profile, and you must be ready to meet him. Terra got the feeling that the voice was benevolent, that it was trying to comfort and reassure her. But this was all too much, too intense for her to handle. Even from the side view, Terra could see that the man looked like he could have been her brother. The resemblance was difficult to accept. Terra was an only child.
The man in the image opened the door and disappeared into some unknown darkness. The voice melted back into chanting and the image started to spin, slowly accelerating around her in circles until Terra lost her balance and fell to the kitchen floor, both kettle and key clanging on the tiles as she released her grip on them.
"Cat, I'm serious, you are going to get stepped on and then you're going to cry about it," Lucas said as he walked over to the sink and placed his empty pancake plate into it. Casper was meowing and frantically circling Lucas's feet, which Lucas assumed had something to do with the cats out on the front lawn. "You're not going out to play, and that's the end of that," Lucas said. Cats were very sensitive to seasonal change, and Lucas assumed this sudden cold snap was making them all go a little crazy.
As Lucas rounded the corner toward the staircase, his mother, who was still clearing the table from breakfast, shouted, "darling, if you're passing by the cellar, could you pop down and bring some chicken up from the freezer for tonight? I should get it defrosting as soon as possible." Lucas wasn't particularly passing by the cellar, but he enjoyed helping his mother, and since he was feeling content after such a wonderful breakfast and today was apparently Saturday again, he had nowhere more important to go.
He passed the staircase with Casper nearly tripping him at every step, and kept walking to the end of the hall where the entrance to the cellar was. The key was already in the lock, where they always kept it. There was no particular need to keep the cellar secure, but the door was old and the wood had shrunken away from the frame somewhat, and thus the door had a bad habit of swinging open on its own when the weather was cold. This allowed Casper access to the cellar, and also allowed winter air access to the house. Neither was a good idea, though Casper seemed to think being in the cellar was a fantastic adventure. The first time he'd managed to sneak his way down there he was gone for three days, and when they finally found him he was filthy and hungry and covered in cobwebs. After that it became his mission in life to get back down there whenever possible, of course, and it was Lucas's job to make sure he didn't.
"Oh no you don't, I know what your game is," Lucas said as he got to the cellar door and Casper started scratching at it. The cat stretched himself up the door, making himself as tall as he could and reaching up toward the lock and the doorknob. Lucas laughed out loud and shouted to his mother, "Mom, Casper's actually trying to open the cellar door on his own!" Casper meowed insistently, pushing his paws up the door and staring at the key in the lock.
Lucas paused for a moment, squinted, and cocked his head. He thought he could hear those other cats outside meowing, as well. He listened intently, trying to distinguish between the sounds outside and Casper's incessant whining. No, that's probably just the wind howling through the trees, he finally decided, and tried to shake a growing sense of unease out of his head. He turned the key to the cellar door, and suddenly he found himself holding the key as the door flew away from him and banged against the wall of the cellar.
Lucas stared open-mouthed at the key in his hand and noticed that it felt warm and seemed to vibrate with some kind of energy. Casper was going crazy, meowing and stretching himself up Lucas's legs as if getting to the key was the most important thing in the world. Out of the corner of his eye Lucas saw some movement coming from the cellar, but when he looked up the cellar was gone, replaced with something that looked like a movie but that he knew must be in his own head. Casper's pleas faded into the background until Lucas was no longer aware of anything but the silent film playing in front of him.
What he was watching appeared to be a woman who might have been a younger version of his mother. Lucas noticed that the woman looked a lot like him, which he could tell even though in this film she was lying on a floor, apparently unconscious. Next to her head on the floor was, impossibly, the key to his own cellar door. The room she was lying in appeared to be a kitchen, though it wasn't the kitchen at any house Lucas had ever lived in, and there had clearly been an accident of some kind.
Suddenly a dark-haired man hurriedly entered the kitchen in the movie, and crouched over the woman's body. Lucas thought the man was trying to help her, but he never found out for sure. Suddenly the picture in the film started to flicker and pulsate, and the voice of a young woman penetrated Lucas's head. She is waiting, the woman's voice said. You must go.
The picture in the film first blurred and then exploded into shards of light that nearly blinded Lucas. The key burned in his hand, and its vibrations increased. Plans started forming in Lucas's head, not coming from his own thoughts but from some external source forcing its will on him. The stairs down to the cellar slowly came back into focus, and suddenly Lucas knew what he had to do.
Casper chose this moment to streak past Lucas down the cellar staircase. "Damn it," Lucas whispered, but what he was more concerned about was the face of the woman he'd seen in the film, a woman who looked so much like him he wondered if his mother had another sister she'd never told him about. In a daze, Lucas slowly descended the stairs to get the chicken from the freezer, but in his mind he was already thinking about the journey he was going to have to make.
"Seriously, I swear I don't need to see a doctor, please quit fussing," Terra said.
Mehmet had nearly panicked when he heard the crash of the kettle and had run into the kitchen to find Terra unconscious on the floor. He had tried to wake her for several minutes, and was starting to call an ambulance when Terra finally came to and asked what he was doing, and why she was wet. Mehmet was so thankful that she was awake and talking, he had tossed his phone on the counter and crouched down to speak to her, to see if she was ok.
"My hand hurts," she had said, flexing and releasing her fist and noticing that her palm was red and sore.
"You probably burned yourself on the kettle," Mehmet had told her.
Now, half an hour later, Terra was sitting on the sofa again, this time wrapped in her bathrobe. Mehmet had cleaned up the mess in the kitchen and had finally brought her the coffee she'd been trying to make. As she sipped the hot drink and tried to remember what happened, Mehmet kept pacing back and forth between the kitchen and the living room, cleaning things up for a few minutes and then coming back and trying to talk Terra into seeing a doctor. But Terra was feeling fine now, if a little confused. She was recalling the remnants of a strange dream she'd had while she was unconscious on the kitchen floor, something about a man, and a big house cat, and a... door? No, not the door itself, but rather—
"What's this?" Mehmet asked. He had just come back from the kitchen, and in his hand he was holding up a key. "I found it on the floor in the kitchen, do you have any idea what it's for?"
The colour drained from Terra's face as the pieces of her scattered memory suddenly wove themselves together. She remembered everything now, everything from the weird muscle paralysis straight through to the vision of the young man's face, a face that could have been her own twin in another life. "I, um, yeah, it's an old key I found when I was on retreat, I was going to make a Christmas ornament out of it," she replied. She glanced down at her hand, throbbing with heat and soreness and now an angry deep pink colour. She could hear the echoes of that strange voice in her head. He will find you, it had said. Terra was not afraid, and in fact she felt comforted.
"Well, it's a nice old key, that's for sure," Mehmet said, and tossed it onto the sofa beside Terra. She was a little nervous to pick it up, but somehow she sensed that now it was just a key, nothing special or powerful about it, and her suspicions were confirmed as she gingerly scooped it up from the sofa cushion and slipped it in the pocket of her bathrobe. She felt a certain energy there, something emanating from the key that reminded her of its nature, but nothing about it felt upsetting or disruptive. This young man was coming to find her, and that was just the way it was supposed to be. The situation had no quality of goodness or evil about it, and she made no judgement of it. I wonder if I'm supposed to get the spare bedroom ready, she thought, smiling to herself. Her smile faded, though, as a second thought popped into her head: how on earth am I going to explain this to Mehmet? He knows I don't have a brother.
Lucas wandered back into the kitchen with a frozen chicken tucked under his arm. He dropped it in the sink without looking down and kept walking, over to the windows that faced the backyard. He stared out across the lawn for several minutes, feeling pleasantly overwhelmed and anxious all at once. He could hear a voice somewhere in the background of his awareness, a woman's voice that became more and more insistent, until it finally broke through the barrier of his thoughts.
"Lucas!" his mother yelled. "Are you listening?"
He turned around and saw his mother standing at the kitchen counter, the red in her cheeks sharply punctuating her expression of deep annoyance. "Sorry Mom," he replied. "Did you say something?"
"I was just wondering if there was some reason you left the cellar door open and then walked through here like a zombie and dropped the chicken into the soapy dishwater as if it were a cannonball," Karen said. "Now there's soap suds and water all over the floor, and my guess would be that Casper is exploring the dirtiest, filthiest corners of the basement as we speak."
Lucas barely heard her, and he slowly turned back toward the windows. "Casper's not down there," he mumbled. He started to say something else, but his thoughts trailed off.
Karen tried to control her anger, but she at least expected her son to look at her when they were having a conversation. "And how do you know he's not down there?" she asked, walking over toward the windows to see what had Lucas so mesmerised.
"Because he's outside," Lucas replied without emotion, his voice even and steady.
Karen stopped walking and furrowed her brow. "Outside?" she asked in a shrill voice. "That's impossible. I mean, even if he did manage to get down in the basement, which is likely given the fact that you carelessly left the door open, there's no way out of there except to come back up the stairs into the—"
Lucas interrupted her, not with his voice, but by placing his index finger against the glass, pointing out the window to draw her attention to the backyard. Karen stopped talking and looked where her son was pointing. At first she didn't see anything, only the carpet of unraked leaves covering the yard and the rusted swing set that had been neglected ever since Lucas became too old to use it. But then there was a flicker of movement at the side of her vision, and Karen craned her neck and turned her head to the left to see one of the neighbourhood cats, an old tabby tom, making his way around from the side of the house into the backyard. He was followed by three other cats, and one of them was even white, but none of them was Casper.
Karen squinted at the oddness of what was happening, and then she detected some more movement from the other direction. She turned to the right and saw five or six more cats emerging from around that corner of the house, again following each other in something approximating single file. Karen inhaled sharply as she noticed a cat in the middle of the group that looked suspiciously like Casper. The two groups of cats walked toward each other until they finally met in the middle of the yard, right in front of where Lucas and his mother were standing. The cats sat down about twenty feet from the house, all of them facing the windows and staring at Lucas. He stared back, and Karen looked at her son with her mouth open, unsure what to say.
It was Lucas who broke the silence. "Mom, do you have another sister besides Aunt Mary?" he asked.
Karen recoiled, wondering what this line of questioning had to do with anything and where Lucas had come up with such a ridiculous idea. She decided to resist her urge to respond with another question, for the time being. "No, of course not," she replied, wondering several things at once— why her son had suddenly turned into something resembling a zombie, how Casper had managed to join the neighbourhood cats and why they were behaving in such a strange way, and what her sister had to do with any of it.
"Actually, I think I need to speak to Aunt Mary," Lucas mumbled after a long pause. He nodded his head as his thoughts picked up speed and he started formulating a plan. "Yeah, Aunt Mary will help," he said, and ran past his mother, through the house, and out the front door. Karen heard the door slamming before she even got a chance to think about inquiring into what was going on. When her delayed reaction finally prompted her to do something, she ran over to the front door and yanked it open, just it time to see Lucas on his bicycle, disappearing over the top of the hill at the end of their street.
