It was dark. Cold too. The air was damp and he could feel the abandonment in his bones. He should not be here. Many people advised him not to go, but he didn’t need the advice. It was common sense to not go alone into an old building that had been isolated for over twenty years.
And yet, he was here, in the long forgotten sanctuary. He had to be here. There wasn’t an option. This was the only way he could figure out what had happened to his parents, why they had disappeared before he was even three, why they hadn’t left a note, said goodbye, or told anyone where they were going. His only clue was here.
Slowly, he walked up the aisle. The dust on the pews was thick. It seeped into his lungs. He coughed, which raised more dust. As he walked along the creaking floorboards, some rotted wood on the back of one of the benches snapped and an old hymn book fell to the ground. Its pages had yellowed, and most of them were falling out. But none of this deterred or slowed him in his trance-like pace to the pulpit at the front of the room. He saw nothing, noticed nothing but that pulpit, the answer to all his questions. The voicemail that had been sent to his phone from the private number had specified that the key to his parents’ disappearance was underneath the pulpit in a small white notebook.
After what seemed like an eternity but in reality was under thirty seconds, his tunnel-visioned walk ceased. He kneeled down and began to push on the pulpit’s base. Without much difficulty, the old decayed wood was detached from the ground. A quiet hissing sound commenced beneath him, but to him it was the loudest thing he had ever heard. He desperately waved his hand back and forth in the mist that was rising, groping for the notebook. But there wasn’t one. He had been fooled. Immediately the room started to swim. Mist continued to rise, and with it, a very sweet smell that made him feel happy. This wasn’t so bad, actually. He looked around and laughed. It looked just like one of those swirly camera effects. He broke out giggling. Who did those people think they were, telling him to not come here? He was having a blast! They were just jealous that they couldn’t come too. After all, the voicemail had said that he had to be alone.
He collapsed completely on the ground, his face pressing against the dusty floor. Then everything faded to black, and for a few seconds the only sense that he could still use was his hearing. He listened to himself laugh for those few more seconds, and then he fell asleep.
Slowly, the void disappeared. First, he felt his head, throbbing and sending waves of pain throughout his skull and face. Then he heard something. The soft sob of a woman. His eyelids slowly lifted and light rushed into his vision. He squeezed his eyes shut again. The throbbing continued. The sobbing, however, relented.
He heard a man’s voice whispering, “He’s awake. We have to be strong for him.” He quickly opened his eyes again. The light in the room was soft. All he could see was white. He moved his eyes to the side. Still, only white. Could he move? He hadn’t tried yet. He wiggled his toes. He lifted his arm. Slowly, he sat up. The soft, white light filled the entire room, yet when he slowly scanned the enclosure, he could find no source that it was emanating from. Directly in front of him, perhaps four feet away, sat two people, who looked vaguely familiar. One was male and one was female. They were wearing entirely white clothes, both shirt and pants. The outfits were loose, and he noticed that he was wearing one himself. The woman had dark brown hair, and soft green eyes. The man was almost completely different. He had short blond hair, and piercing blue eyes. Again, the boy quickly clamped his eyes shut and laid back. He heard a quick cry escape from the woman.
“James, sit up. Look at us,” he heard the man say.
“I don’t want to. The light hurts my eyes. It gives me a headache,” James said quietly, his voice cracking and squeaking with every syllable. How did this man know his name? Where was he?
“Can we get softer light in here?” the man said to no one in particular. No one answered.
With excruciating slowness, James got himself to a sitting position. In the room there were three white bed-like objects, large and white, soft as a marshmallow, but still firm enough to keep their rigidity; one that he was sitting on, one that the man and woman were sitting on, and a third one in the corner of the room. They were comfortable, but they had no mattresses, pillows, or blankets. They came straight up through the floor.
“Who are you?” James asked, “How do you know my name?”
“He doesn’t remember,” the woman said, “he doesn’t remember us.”
“Of course he doesn’t remember us,” said the man, “How could he remember us? We were taken before he was three.” The room fell silent for a short moment.
Then James managed a few more words, “I asked you a question. Who are you?” The woman sighed and looked at the man, who nodded.
Her voice cracking and breaking up, she said, “James. We’re your parents.” These were the only words she could manage before she broke into another fit of tears. The man, his father, put his arms around her shoulder.
“I don’t understand,” James said, bewildered and beginning to feel upset, “Where have you been all this time? Have you just been sitting around in here while I’ve been trying to live a normal life without an explanation of where my parents are?” He said that last comment a lot more harshly than he had intended to and it triggered a hurt expression on his father’s face.
“Please don’t jump to conclusions, James,” said his father. “We aren’t here because we want to be. We’re trapped. Your mother and I have spent these last thirteen years with nothing but the constant hope that they wouldn’t catch you.”
“Who are they? What is this place anyway?”
“Not so fast, James. You need to calm down. I can see a vein in your forehead pulsating. You’re making your headache worse by getting riled up.” Then, once again, to no one in particular, his father said, “Can we please get less light in here?”
At this, a voice spoke. James could not hear where it came from. Deeply, slowly and with a tone of annoyance it said, “No, Russell. We cannot have dimmer light in your room. If the light was any more dim, you wouldn’t be able to see your hand in front of your face. Or, worse yet, we couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.”
The voice stopped for a second, and then began to speak again, this time in a more lively tone. “Now James. I think this is a brilliant opportunity for us to answer some of the questions that your father refuses to. He won’t tell you because he loves you, but unfortunately, we don’t. The gruesome reality is, you and your lovely parents have been randomly selected by the United Nations Secret Human Experimentation Department, or U.N.S.H.E.D, for short. We took your parents from you when you were three, for the first leg of our little mental journey together. We needed to test the effects of losing a loved child by young parents, and being put in a situation where they have nothing to do but think about it. We don’t actually care about those particular effects, but it helps us advance our knowledge of the human brain, psychological patterns and such, and could potentially aid us in psychological strategizing during warfare. While at war, there are many ways that we can use emotions such as abandonment and neglect to our advantage. But now it’s part two of our test. We want to see how your mind works. How a mind with such emotional and mental trauma from such a young age will function, even after it’s been erased of what has happened.” These words made James wince. What kind of cruel people found it in themselves to do this? “Oh, did I forget to mention it earlier? How embarrassing,” the man said, “that’s right. Tomorrow, you won’t even know all this happened. You and your parents will be wiped clean and placed in the most realistic everyday life simulator ever. It will make you think that none of this ever happened. You’ll be a happy little boy living in his perfect home.” This didn’t sound too bad to James, but the more he thought about it, the more he wanted to have his parents back, even if their lives would never be normal again. The man continued, “We’ve decided to give you today, as a happy family reunion, out of the kindness of our hearts, but don’t think that it will last. Twenty-three hours from now all of you will be given an injection. Then you’ll wake up, and all your troubles will be over. You’ll be the normal American family that you’ve always wanted, James.” With this, voice ceased suddenly, leaving the room with James, his mother, and his father in complete silence.
Without a clock, it was difficult for James to know how much time had elapsed of the twenty-three hours that he and his family had left in reality. James’ headache had subsided and he paced the small white room nervously, desperately trying to come up with an escape plan. If only he could find the entrance to the room. But his long and tedious search spawned no results. He had never been in a situation even remotely like this before, and was not accustomed to critical thinking. For most of his life, his only goal was to find his parents. He had never thought of what he would do when he did finally find them. He definitely didn’t expect that this would happen. James’ parents remained on the same seat that they had been on the entire time he had been there. His mother wept softly and his father, sitting next to her, had a look on his face of defeat and despair. For the longest time none of them spoke. It seemed that there was nothing to say. They were being observed the entire time, anything they said would be heard by the U.N.S.H.E.D Officers from wherever they were watching his family.
By what he thought was nearing the end of the twenty-three hours, the only plan he had mustered was to put up the greatest struggle he possibly could. He decided not to tell his parents to do the same, because then his only spatter of a plan would be heard by the people constantly watching them, and they could take precautionary measures.
Finally, his father spoke. “I’m sorry about this, James. I’m sorry that this had to happen to us.”
James could not think of any reply, so he simply said, “I love you.” Then the room resumed its silence. Less than what James judged to be five minutes later, the voice spoke again.
“For a family that was just reunited after thirteen long years apart, you certainly didn’t have much to say. Especially a family that knew they were about to lose their only memories of each other,” it said. “But, it is not our concern whether or not you converse in your last few hours as yourselves. We will of course take note of these tendencies, and the next group of specimens we get for this particular experiment will not receive the full twenty-three hours. It has been a waste of our time and of yours.”
With this last sentence, James heard a sound. It was the first sound he heard in the room that was not made by himself or parents, or the voice. It resembled an engine, probably an electric one, and soon he saw why. The third bed, the one that no one had sat on since James had arrived had lowered into the ground. Through the hole in the ground came three men wearing blue clothes, and behind them three large tube-like machines rose from the ground. The tubes somewhat resembled MRI machines and James assumed them to be the simulators of the mundane environment that he and his parents were going to be put in. From a small compartment in the simulators each of the three men took a long needle. The smallest of the men began walking towards James.
“No! No! You’re not going to stick that thing in my arm!” said James as he backed into a wall.
“Calm down, it’s not going to hurt if you don’t struggle,” the man replied. His voice was fair, light, and he had a British accent. “If you put up a fight, then the injection won’t work like it’s supposed to, and you’re going to get permanently screwed up in your brain.”
“I’m not letting you do this!” James shouted as he inched along the wall, away from the man. Looking aside, he noticed that his parents had already been subdued and put in the simulators. The doors of the tubes were still open, so he did his best to hide behind one, but now the other two men were unoccupied and they surrounded him. Looking in the compartments where the men had gotten the needles, James noticed in one of them there were two large needles that were dark red and had labels on them that said, “To be used only in small amounts to subdue specimens with violent tempers, seizures, or are conveying difficulty to comply with the instructions of U.N.S.H.E.D Officers.” The largest of the three men grabbed James’ arm. Using all the strength he had, James took the needle from it holding compartment and shoved it as hard as he could into the officer’s arm. The man released James and screamed. James then discharged all of the crimson liquid into the man’s arm. Almost instantly, the large man sunk to the ground and started to display violent spasms and twitches. Then his face contorted, he blushed red and stopped breathing.
James’ actions caught the other two men totally off guard. For a few seconds, they just stood and stared at their dead colleague. Seeing this, James realized his chance. He grabbed the other unused needle and rushed for the exit. The officers responded, but not quickly enough. James had slid down the exit and was out of the room.
James landed on the ground and tried not to be distracted by the alarms, the bright flashing lights and the sound of people screaming instructions. What James saw was not nearly as glamorous and futuristic looking as the white room he had been in. Where he was now looked like a boiler room. There were pipes running along the ceiling, and two or three large tanks surrounded him. They each had a series of gauges and lights blinking on them. The rafters above the pipes were wooden, just like the ones that were in the basement of where James had lived with his foster parents. To his right, he saw a door, and his first instinct was to run through it, but he decided to wait for a minute and catch his breath. He hadn’t eaten anything since the afternoon before he had gone to the church, and that had been at least twenty-four hours ago. After searching the room for cameras, he couldn’t find any and decided that there were none, because the room he was in obviously hadn’t been updated when it came to technology, or anything else.
Not too long after, through the open door James heard footsteps and the voice of some very angry sounding officials. He quickly went out through the door and and surveyed the hallway to weigh his options. The hallway extended for about one hundred metres, with many doors in it. At the end of it, there were stairs leading up. None of the doors had signs on them, so James decided that one was as good as the other. He chose one in the middle and just as he closed the door out of the corner of his eyes he saw about fifteen armed officers coming down the stairs, each clad in tactical gear, and each carrying a large gun.
As he quickly shut the door behind him, James still heard the frantic voices of the officers. He ran his hand along the wall to try and find a light switch, but he had no luck. “It’s better this way,” he thought, “They would see that there is a light on in the room, and catch me.” Outside the room, he heard muffled footsteps coming closer and closer to the door that he had ducked into. He slowly took a step further into the darkness. Nothing. He softly kicked forward. There didn’t seem to be anything in his immediate pathway, so he took a long stride. Then another. He hadn’t bumped anything yet, but had a feeling like he was just centimetres from a wall, or something towering high up above him, but every time he moved forward, there was just more void and the feeling persisted.
“Where is he?” he heard an officer on the other side of the door yell.
“He’s got to be in one of these rooms!” another shouted, “Start searching them!” James began to feel panicked and moved more quickly to the back of the room, although he couldn’t find it. No matter how far he walked, there was nothing but more darkness. Then he started to hear breathing. It was soft at first, but the more he heard it, the more frightened he became, and the more loud it seemed.
“It’s you, dimwit,” James said to himself, but he wasn’t convinced. After walking a few more steps into the room, he decided to change directions. He turned ninety degrees to the left and strolled at a brisk pace, but still cautiously. The breathing got louder, but now it was behind him.
“We’ve never had this much trouble with a specimen before!” a voice outside said, “If you boneheads haven’t found him in the next five minutes, the experiment won’t work! We need him in that simulator! Make sure you didn’t miss any of those rooms!” The noise outside increased, and he could hear the soldiers moving faster.
“So I need to kill five more minutes,” James muttered to himself. He started off running in a random direction, but then decided he was being too loud so he slowed to a jog. “How can these rooms be so huge? The doors were only twenty-five feet apart in the hallway...” and then it dawned on him. If the doors were only twenty-five feet apart in the hallway, how could the room be any longer? So if he found his way back to the door, and then walked along the wall, about twenty-five steps later, he would have to hit either a wall or another door knob, then he could follow the doors down to the end of the hallway where he could try sneaking up the stairs. The footsteps outside got louder, and James could tell that they were closer to the door. His mind raced, trying to conceive a plan. To his dismay, he heard just a few feet away from him the door knob was turning. His first instinct was to run, but at this point, it was irrational, so he just fell to the ground and laid as flat as he could. The door opened and in it he saw a single soldier, with a flashlight on the barrel of his gun. He swept the room with the light and the beam fell and stayed on James.
“James?” said the soldier, “by order of the United Nations Secret Human Experimentation Department, I am placing you under arrest and you are to be set immediately in solitary confinement.” The soldier then turned to the hallway and yelled, “I found him. He’s here.” Two more soldiers appeared at the door and picked up James off the ground. It was over. They dragged him out of the room and down the hallway, where they were flocked by U.N.S.H.E.D officers wearing blue.
One of them said, “It’s been too long. The simulation probably won’t work, but we’ll try anyway. It’s either that, or we use him for another experiment. There’s no use in wasting a fine specimen, and such a feisty one at that.” The soldiers took him to another white room, a different one than before. It was bigger, and there was only one bed. They tied him with white restraints to the bed, and told him to wait until they had decided his fate.
James lay on the bed, fast asleep. His parents walked into the room, followed by a man wearing a white robe with a stethoscope hanging out of one of the pockets.
“How is he, Dr. Raymond?” asked James’ father.
“Not bad,” said the doctor, “He’s just a little tired from today’s episode. It shouldn’t happen again though. We’ve got nurses checking on him more often now.”
“What happened, exactly?” asked James’ mother.
“We’re not entirely sure. He was in his old room, and the patient neighboring him said that he was yelling things like ‘You won’t get me!’ and ‘Who are you people?’ and then when he ran out of the room, he said something like un- unsh- ‘unshack, or unshed or something like that. We don’t even know what it means. Anyway, he had run out of his room and down the hall. When we noticed him missing, we asked around. The patient next door said he had run down the hallway. We found him about fifteen minutes later, walking circles in the janitor’s closet just outside his room. We moved him here, to a more comfortable bed. For a minute we thought of restraining him, but we decided against it. He had calmed down pretty much entirely.”
“Well, that’s a lot of excitement for one day,” said James’ father, trying to sound friendly, but desperately wanting to go home. “I suppose we should go home, and leave you to your business.”
“Exciting indeed,” said the doctor, grasping behind his back a dark red needle, “Why is it that ones with hallucination problems always have the greatest imaginations?”