Arla's Memory

The hollow sound of the late November wind blew through the wide brick alleyway. Standing around the factories had become quite a depressing pastime for Arla, although she found in it a certain discrete imagination; creativity; memory. As she strolled through the cold wind that wished for summer, she could easily imagine it being hot and dry desert sand blowing against her face, for it was just as bitter.

The intermittent torrents of wispier and more liberated streams of sand shut Arla’s eyes, and the howling wind that barreled down the alleyway as though it were a wind tunnel made her finally look away. She had recalled this place many times. The alleyway always helped her see it: a desert place in the far reaches of her imagination – or someone else’s. The factories that surrounded her transformed into small ruins of concrete. The sickly white calm lake of clouds in the sky dissipated to reveal a huge golden sun high above the horizon.

She was marching through the desert. She suddenly felt pangs of mortal fear thudding in her chest. She felt like she was nearly going to faint from dehydration. She saw the ruins getting closer. She was marching toward them. They looked like small rectangular monuments. Their shadows stretched across the desert, elongated by the gradually setting sun.

Off to the right was a doorway. It opened up into the sand. What could that be? Against her will, she found herself rising from the ground and being rocketed toward it. She was being held – someone had picked her up and was carrying her. She squirmed. She felt a man’s arms, and she could not escape from their grip. The doorway rapidly came closer. It led into pitch darkness.

Arla tried to scream but her mouth was muffled. Time began to feel much slower as her mind flipped into fight or flight and she flailed her arms and punched the man wherever she could. All was inevitable. The slow approaching doorway into total darkness was a new memory that would forever haunt Arla.

Arla felt a hand rubbing against her shoulder, and she slowly opened her eyes. She saw the large brick mill building on one side of the street and the towering metal factories on the other. A man stared down at her. He had a long grey beard and a faded, dusty face. He wore several tattered coats in layers: some were leather, others denim, others cloth.

“Are you alright, you… girl?” he said raspily before retreating into a coughing fit. “You been lyin’ here thirty minutes.”

Arla gasped and sat up, crawling backward into some bags. She looked around and slowly sighed, realizing where she was. “Yeah.” she grunted, shaking her head. She then focused her eyes on the man intently, attempting to discern whether or not he was a threat.

The man seemed to march in circles as he mumbled, “Ye shouldn’t – young teenager bein’ out here, see. That’s dangerous. For you it is. I saw a woman get robbed 10… 10 months? Years.” he chuckled strangely. “You should get out. It’s no safe place y’see. Not so many people to help.”

Arla nodded slowly as she gaped at the man cautiously. She then scrambled to her feet and turned around to see the man’s encampment: a small sleeping bag and a pack of beer, and about five stuffed bags. She pulled the hood of her grey hoodie over her semi-long black hair and walked off in slight embarrassment, realizing that she must have been intruding in his space when she’d passed out.

Arla had experienced the memory of the desert since she was a child, but the man carrying her through the strange doorway was new. She wondered woefully why this was happening to her now as she made her way home across the City of Elizabeth, New Jersey.

She made her way from the factories to the river. She walked along the path past the drab city buildings. She began to hurry, as the sun was nearing the horizon in the cloudy sky, and it was getting chilly.

She reached her home after about 40 minutes. It was a large, nearly-dilapidated house in a small lot with stalky grass. She stepped up to the large porch and opened the creaky screen door before removing her boots as she stepped up the step in front of the main door. She shoved it open, as it often got stuck. She turned left to the kitchen, where some dish with beans and rice was cooking.

“Honey, where have you been? You need to take the trash out, and have you been taking your meds?”

“Yes, momma.” said Arla sullenly, brushing off her mom’s interrogation. Her mom was a tall woman in her forties who would wear tight dark-colored skirts in an attempt to appear somewhat more affluent than she was. This contrasted with the fact that she sometimes had to sacrifice ingredients when putting food on the table.

“Tch. You need some friends, Arla. You gotta stop walking out there on your own. It’s not safe!”

“What’s the point in making friends if I’m getting out of here soon?”

“If they accept you. I have good faith in you Arla, but you should work on your social skills to prepare for college!”

“I know how to make friends, mom.” Arla muttered, leaving the house with the trash bag.

She ate half her dinner and went to bed early, finding herself exhausted from the stress her daydream had brought. The next day, she would go to San Bernardino for an open house at the university there. She had been anxious about the trip, but she was particularly anxious now, as San Benardino was near a desert. She kept trying to rationalize away any possibility of a connection between where she was going and her dreams. “Memories” she called them. She didn’t quite know why, but she’d always seen them as memories. Some part of her was determined to believe they had been real once. She eventually managed to force herself to sleep, despite still being somewhat nervous that she would experience the memory again.

She dreamed she saw a car on the side of the street by the desert. The car was a Rolls-Royce, and it was parking. She tried to look away from the car, but only saw a blur on either side in her vision.

A man in a black suit emerged from the front of the car, and opened the passenger door. He beckoned her in. Something compelled her to obey, and she moved forward, unable to stop herself. She saw only a black void inside the car door as she leaned forward into it.

Arla awoke in a sweat. She saw the alarm said it was 3 A.M. and she put her head in her hands and started crying.

“I can’t take it!” she screamed. “I can’t take it! Take me away from it!”

Her mom rushed into the room to see what was the matter, flicking the light on on her way in. She comforted Arla as she curled up and cried.

At around noon, Arla’s plane took off into the clear, sunny sky. She stared out the window at farms organized into rectangles that seemed to repeat forever. Her parents had often not been present when she was a child, as her father was often gone on business meetings. Both of her parents had been quite distant. Then Arla began developing her dissociations.

Whenever she gathered enough mental clarity to reflect on them, she would trace them back to one experience: a car accident. She had hit her head, and so could not remember most of it, but apparently, her parents had been driving past those factories. The one memory she had of it was in the aftermath: a strange tall man in a black suit walked by the wreck and had grazed her shoulder with his hand. And ever since, she had experienced these strange dreams.

Arla found the dreams were stronger when she was wandering around that place, and she was drawn to it. She would stroll around there at least twice a week after school. When her parents caught her wandering and discovered that was why she was often late returning from school, they got her a psychiatrist who put her on antipsychotic medications. These medications gave her a slew of other symptoms, and only seemed to make it somewhat harder to access her dream-memories, but the strange thing was that they also attenuated her memory of normal events. Given that none of these medications worked well, she would often dread taking them and neglected to do it consistently.

In part out of a desire to unravel the meaning of her own dreams, Arla aspired to study psychology. California State University San Bernardino was one of several schools she was looking at, but it would possibly be one of the easier ones to enroll in.

She sighed as she stared out the window, and eventually dozed off.

Arla exited the airport and awaited an Uber that would take her to the university’s campus. She stepped out of the airport lobby to see the white sun blazing overhead in the clear sky. She shivered in the hot air. Despite the heat, she was still wearing her grey hoodie. She pulled it over her head.

She waited a while outside the airport as cars went by in the curbside lanes. She periodically kept checking her phone. Her Uber appeared to be stuck in traffic.

After about thirty minutes of waiting, she looked up from a game she was playing on her phone and gasped with shock. A black Rolls-Royce had pulled up directly in front of her. The front door opened and a tall man in a black suit emerged. He had a gaunt, bony face and sleek, combed-back black hair. He smiled pleasantly at Arla as though he’d been expecting her. She shivered with fear. He stepped over to the passenger door and opened it. He beckoned her over. Her breath rattled with apprehension.

She looked back at her Uber app and found that it her ride had arrived. She anxiously looked at the driver’s description. To her shock, it showed a headshot of the man with the combed-back hair, and the car was listed as a Rolls-Royce. She swore it had previously shown a Mazda driven by a shorter man. She began to think the worst, but went through her breathing exercises, and counted five things she could see aside from the man and the car: the sidewalk, people darting to and fro, palm trees lining the streets, the roof hanging over the platform, and the mountains in the distance. She felt the ridges in the metal bench on which she sat, the slight breeze around her, the heat in the air, and her hand on her black jeans. She listened to the sounds around her: people chattering loudly, the engines of cars and the squeaking of bus brakes, and the sound of reggaeton thumping from someone’s car speakers. She smelled cigarettes on the air and someone’s cologne. She tasted the bubblegum she had been chewing. She looked once again at the man. He was standing patiently with the door still open, and his pleasant smile was frozen in place. She began to consider that perhaps her Uber driver had changed at some point when she hadn’t been looking at the app. Nevertheless, she decided to cancel the trip.

“I can wait for another one, just to be safe.” she thought. After canceling the trip, she stood up and tried to walk away from the strange car. She tried to remain calm, keeping her breathing deep and slow, and focusing on the things she’d identified around her…

She found herself staring into the man’s eyes. His gaze was somehow too powerful for her to resist, and she found herself hypnotized. She was walking toward the car. She was overcome with fear and dread as the car door came closer to her, and everything she had noticed about her surroundings vanished. The doorway of the car got larger and larger until the tan interior of the car wrapped around her, and she found herself sitting down on the soft leather seat. The door was shut and the car was moving.

Her mouth was dry and she found it difficult to speak. For a while, she couldn’t bring herself to say anything at all, as she saw towns outside the window give way to plains and eventually, to desert.

She stared intently at the tall man in the driver’s seat, and finally mustered the courage to speak. “M-mister, this doesn’t look like it’s the way t-to the university.”

“Why, of course not.” the man spoke smoothly. “You canceled the trip.”

Arla’s heart sank. “O-ok yeah so can you please… let me out?”

“No, no.” he chuckled grimly. “Now we go where I want to go.”

Arla sat in the tense silence that followed, as the car continued on down a highway. She could see nothing around but desert at this point.

“Besides, there’s nowhere you could go out here, and no service.” the man continued. “No, you’d best stay with me.”

Arla urgently checked her phone and saw there was indeed no service. She pressed “emergency call” on her lock screen, and it attempted to dial. To her dismay, a message appeared stating: “No service.”

“W-where are you taking me?” she cried out, beginning to panic.

“You know where we’re going, Arla.” the man said calmly.

Arla recalled the ruins from her dream. She couldn’t believe this was happening, and that she would be stupid enough to get into this car. She leaned against the window and tried breathing deeply, slowly calming her thumping heart. “It must be a dream.” she thought. By repeating that enough times, she eventually managed to convince herself it was, and she dozed off.

To her horror, Arla awoke to find she was still in the car. It had stopped. She looked out the window. The sun was beginning to get low in the sky, and there was still only desert in all directions, save for some distant mountains.

The man opened the door. “This is it. Now get out.” he ordered sternly.

She sat there, frozen in place, and unable to look at him. Soon she found herself being pulled out of the car and carried across the desert. To her dread, she saw the rectangular ruins up ahead. They looked somewhat like the base of a building that had burned down long ago. The sunbeams caused them to cast long shadows on the desert floor, just like in her dream.

“No!” she screamed, then found her scream cut short by the dryness in her throat. She kicked and tried to hit the man as he turned slightly, and her eyes widened at what she saw: the doorway in the desert. She felt helpless in the man’s strong grip as the doorway came closer: a doorway into a pitch black void. As it came even closer, she discerned what it was: the entrance to a mine shaft. Slowly, she found herself focusing on the void intently, and the sun around her began to dim. Everything got darker… darker… until the doorway finally engulfed her.

She fell. She thought she would fall for an eternity, to her death, or to Hell, but she landed on her side on solid ground.

“I’m gonna be back, real soon. And don’t go anywhere. Your Power – to see the outcome – I have the Power too, you know. I gave it to you.” the man shouted down at her. He then dropped something heavy on the ground above. Arla surmised it was some object to block the entrance.

She heard the man’s feet faintly stomping across the ground and becoming more distant, until she could hear them no more. Her body ached. She groaned in pain. Her voice echoed in a way that suggested narrow, uneven walls surrounded her somewhere.

After a while, she heard a faint, raspy voice; a girl’s voice. “Looks like you’re caught too.” the girl said solemnly. “You probably don’t even realize, poor thing. But you’re going to die now. He stabbed ya. I am so sorry – you will never be the same, but I have to do this, now.”

Arla felt a cold breath on her neck, and then two sharp pinpricks. She slipped into unconsciousness.

When Arla awoke, she could see. She saw a carved out tunnel around her with wooden supports along its length. Everything was shaded with a dark blue. She then flinched at the sight of a girl about her own age but unbelievably pale and skinny. The girl wore tattered clothing.

“You can see in the dark.” the girl informed her. “I’m so sorry. If I hadn’t done that, you’d have died. I couldn’t let you die – I couldn’t. I know I probably should have given you the choice to but I – there was no time and you see… you have the Power.”

Arla was perplexed and terrified. “W-what have you done to my vision? Did you do this?”

“Yes. I found ways to keep time. It happened to me about fifty years ago. I do not age, you see. But, we need to feed. He lets me feed at night. But he sees whatever I will do, so I cannot escape. But with the two of us, there’s some chance…”

Arla was aghast at what she was hearing. She had heard of vampires, but this all felt so strangely different. It felt real. “I’m not dreaming.” she asserted.

“He’s out feeding. He will be preoccupied. Do it now.” the girl said. “Dream!”

Arla then began to dream, and when she awoke, she looked at the girl.

“What did you see?” the girl asked.

For the first time in many years, Arla smiled. The girl smiled back.