Community Property

Chapter 3
Chapter Two: The Nothingness Beneath

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Chapter Description: Seemingly clutched in the whim of the supernatural, Jack is given a quest. But when the balance of power shifts yet again, our hero must struggle to keep up... or fall behind forever. Chapter Three will be posted on Tuesday, 29 April 2014.

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“Mind explaining to me what’s going on?” asked Jack. He felt minute droplets of sweat liberate themselves from the pores on his neck. He had pretty much been on board with everything up until his smart phone, his lone connection to the outside world, fell through Eve’s ethereal hand and was destroyed on impact with the ground. The hollow, echoing sound of a lock falling into place behind him simply clinched it.

“There’s so much to explain,” said Eve, pacing slowly around the room, “and so little time to do it. This is not the last time we will meet, Jack Brite, but it is very important that I give you the information that’s immediately relevant to you. Do allow me. You must trust in me that the answers that will guide you will be made available to you when the time comes.

“Outside this building, the sun is setting. When it falls beneath the horizon, you will be spirited away from here.”

“I just got here. I have a half an hour at least.”

“Time moves more quickly here. Please, do not interrupt again.” Eve paused in her pacing and turned to Jack, her face expressionless. “The reason you were able to find this building, to come to it in your present state, is because you know it exists. You’ve seen it before. So that means you can go to it again.

“Do that, Jack. Return here in the waking world.”

“The waking world?” asked Jack. “Where the hell have I been all this time?”

A chill swept through the windowless room. Eve’s hair was caught in the gust and the wavy motion it made impressed Jack with its elegance.

“There’s no more time,” said Eve. “At least, not this time.”

The walls began to melt. Jack’s heart rate increased.

“Return to me.”

“When?” Jack began to feel very drowsy, very quickly—as though he’d been shot up with a tranquilizer.

“Whenever you want. You know where to find me.”

The walls melted into puddles on the floor, which had turned coal black; behind the fallen walls, an ebony of equal perfection.

Eve burst into flames. Jack tried to scream, but he was too tired.

He was asleep before his knees reached the nothingness beneath him.

-=--=-

Jack woke up and blinked his eyes until the bleariness fell away from him. In a matter of moments that seemed to stretch into days, reality returned to the high school senior.

“Welcome back to waking life, Johnathan,” said Dr. Chris Conrad from behind his mahogany desk. The smile on his face indicated he was quite pleased with himself. Seldom were his new patients – Jack was only in his second week of treatment – so immediately receptive to the Memory Palace meditation. This boded well, the psychiatrist considered, for the efficacy of the session’s next activity.

Jack turned his head on the couch, but he didn’t move his body, which had quite comfortably settled into the soft cushions of the furniture. For the first time, he made the connection that Chris’s desk was the same one from his dream. And Jack had done enough reading in his day to figure that all the other objects that decorated his meditation session had come from his memory, as well.

“How do you feel?”

“That was incredible, Doc,” said Jack. “It was all… so real. I sort of ‘blacked in’ on the bus ride, just as you said I would, and the rest of the illusion was so—so strong. I didn’t doubt it for a second until towards the very end.”

“That’s excellent,” Chris smiled. He was typing notes into his computer at a seemingly incalculable rate of speed. Jack figured him for 150 WPM, at least. “Where did you go?”

It took a few seconds for Jack to realize that, though he had placed a call to Chris during the meditation and described his situation in reasonable detail, that didn’t mean a damn for the waking world. It’s not as though Chris had actually been on the phone with him.

“A building downtown. It looked abandoned, inside and out. Except for one room that looked so pristine from the outside, it seemed as though it’d been cut-and-pasted into the corridor.”

“Meet anyone special?”

Jack crooked an eyebrow. He may have just woken up from a trance, but even he was alert enough to find Chris’s choice of follow-up question a little suspect. Why not “What was inside?” Or “Did you use the ‘phone’ I gave you?” Dr. Conrad had explained, as part of his narration while Jack was counting backwards, that he would be “connected” to the psychiatrist’s office through that small totem just in case he started to panic.

“…No,” Jack replied.

Dr. Conrad frowned. It was the kind of change in expression that made Jack feel slightly more comfortable that he’d elected to modify the truth.

“The room was empty. Except, you know, for a desk… some fidgety objects on top of it. Nothing looked particularly valuable. There was a book on top of the desk. Looked pretty heavy.”

Chris looked disappointed, but he pressed on with a half-smile. “Did you get to read it?”

Jack Brite was not a good liar. He sucked at poker and he never got away with anything. So he figured he’d pushed his luck about as far as it was going to go when it came to reporting a fiction to the good doctor.

“No,” said Jack, feigning disappointment. “The world melted before I could.”

“Well, that won’t be your last trip to the Memory Palace. Perhaps you’ll get to open that book next time.”

“Maybe,” Jack smiled. He felt in the clear.

“Well, Mr. Brite, for the last 15 minutes of our session, I’d like to do another meditation. This one’s called Regression Meditation. It’s a little less intense. I don’t want to, say, ‘overwork’ you during your first full session.”

“Regression therapy—”—Jack said—“—isn’t that where I’m brought back to memories of my growing up to work on some problems, some ‘blocks….’ get to know myself better that way?”

“That’s not exactly what I do,” said Dr. Conrad, ever continuing to clack away at his keyboard. “My version is quite different. I consider it more… well, ‘volatile’ makes it sound bad. But it is convincing, it is challenging, and your results with the Memory Palace were promising enough that I’m fairly confident you’ll rise to meet it.”

Jack thought for a moment, and nodded. He figured that, the more cooperative he was with Dr. Conrad, the more mercy his probation officer was likely to show him.

“Alright, Johnathan,” Chris began, finally giving his cacophonous note-taking a rest. “Tilt your head back, interlace your fingers on your stomach, and begin counting backwards from one hundred.”

The young man did as he was told. As the doctor’s soothing voice washed over him, Jack once again felt as though he were falling into another realm. The feeling was so heavy that he couldn’t remember making it past ninety-three.

-=--=-

When Jack next awoke, he wasn’t on a school bus. He wasn’t in a Memory Palace—or any other illusory building for that matter. He wasn’t talking to Eve or translating Italian or watching the room turn into fondue.

He was lying down on the couch in Dr. Chris Conrad’s office, staring at the ceiling, listening to the psychiatrist click-clack away.

“How do you feel now, Johnathan?” asked Chris. “I’m dying to know.”

The young man was disappointed. Whatever journey he had just been on, he came home without any recollection of it.

“It didn’t work,” said Jack.

His eyes grew wide. He was shocked to hear his own voice. If he didn’t know any better, he’d swear that it had actually… cracked.

“Hey, uh… Doc?” asked Jack. His heart rate increased when he realized that he was, in fact, speaking with the ego-crushing timbre of an awkward pubescent boy. “What the hell did you do to me?”

Dr. Conrad looked at Jack and smiled.

Is that… malice?

“There’s a mirror right there,” said Chris, gesturing to the full-length he had standing in the corner of the office. “Why don’t you go over and see for yourself?”

Jack got to his feet. Something wasn’t right. He felt weak. Light. Though he was too hazy at the moment to be totally certain, he was pretty sure he was wearing entirely different clothes than the ones he had donned prior to driving out to the clinic.

He arrived at the mirror and took a look at himself. It was a moment Jack Brite would carry with him for the rest of his life.

---===== to be continued =====---

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