Remember

Chapter Three (edited)

It was exactly like the morning before, only she had no nightmare. It had not come to rob her feeling of safety and security away from her like it had every other night. She still heard the voice when she woke up, as clear as if someone had whispered into her waking ear but it was not a whisper rather an echoing yell that bounced off every corner and space in her mind. It increased until her name was being screamed inside her own mind. And then it quieted and the words from the nightmare came back:

Break the barrier.

She still had no earthly idea what that was supposed to mean. What barrier? Despite having this nightmare for months now she never understood what it meant. At first, it terrified her and all she wanted to do was scream and cry when she woke up. The mere idea of darkness feeling welcoming to her was a sick feeling but after a few months she was no longer scared, rather curious. Colette thought that if she could finally find out what the nightmare meant that the nightmare would finally stop.

Colette spent days upon days writing down and drawing everything she could remember to the best of her abilities. She had never been the artist type, no one in her family was. She spent hours on her laptop trying to match the field in her mind with one somewhere in Paradisium but she had no luck. As far as she knew there were no prairies of any type that existed. That was a landform that had disappeared long ago now taken over by luscious green forests. The leaders of the Paradisium Federation, the ones who controlled the government and made all the rules, thought that the more trees they planted, the healthier the planet would become, but in doing so they destroyed other vital landmasses.

After a while, she gave up on trying to decipher her dream. Colette had no leads, nothing to prove that it was something real or meaningful. There was nothing to convince her that it was something other than her overactive imagination replaying a stupid dream. She would have to live with the nightmare forever.

Her covers fell to the floor with a thump as she went through her normal morning routine. Tame the straight hair, put on the ugly scrubs, pick at her breakfast, and start walking to her dreaded work.

"You're late." Nurse Garner stood outside the double glass doors, staring Colette down with her arms crossed over her chest. "We still have a few more patients to scan. We need to start now." Colette stopped dead in her tracks.

"A few more patients? Didn't we finish everyone yesterday?" She couldn't remember for sure, in fact, she could hardly remember anything from work yesterday. A look of pure confusion and frustration washed over her features as her emerald eyes focused on the Nurse. Once again she felt like Nurse Garner was keeping something from her.

"If I didn't know you I'd think you'd gone insane," she chuckled, shaking her head. "You come in late everyday, can't even remember what you did the day before. And you never eat breakfast." How did she know Colette never ate breakfast? She had never bothered to tell her that before.

"How did you...?" Colette stopped mid-sentence. Nurse Garner didn't exactly answer her first question, she didn't expect her to answer the next one. "Never mind, let's just get started." She didn't want to be there any longer than she had to.

As Colette continued to scan the patients brains with Nurse Garner, she had completely forgotten that she was being watched. Not even the suspicious feeling of being watched was present in the back of her mind as she worked slowly but surely through the rest of the patients. Again, never knowing what Nurse Garner was looking for nor understanding the words she wrote down about each patient.

They arrived at the last room. Her mind was still weary, trying to figure out why she had thought they went through the patient's already and how Nurse Garner had known she never ate breakfast. Maybe it was obvious that she didn't eat by the way she looked at the patient's food trays but still never took a bite.

At last, she looked at the patient's monitor. Something flickered inside her mind but she still couldn't pinpoint what it was. "This was the last one." The nurse's voice ripped her out of her thoughts. "This was the last one." Nurse Garner started to pack up the supplies. "Just help me get this back to my office and you are free to do whatever until your shift is over.."

Didn't she say that yesterday?

"Come on, stop looking like a lost puppy who forgot where they buried their bone." But she didn't help Nurse Garner. Instead, she ran out of the room. Her face was pale, her palms sweaty, and her breath was completely ragged. She heard Nurse Garner call after her but it only bounced of the walls as she ran down the halls. Something wasn't right.

Then it hit her. She remembered. She remembered the man in the suit watching her and then making her follow him to the alley so he could... well that part was still a mystery. Colette remembered the threat or warning or whatever it was. She was getting close to answers, at least she knew that much. The man was foolish to let her know that.

His face was all she could remember after she opened the doors that exited the hospital. An older man, probably mid forties, with greying brown hair and a short, clean cut beard. And surprisingly, despite the almost pitch dark night she remembered, she knew the color of his eyes. Blue, so bright that they lit up the darkness that surrounded him. So inhumanly and unearthly blue. Like the color that shown off melting glaciers when the sun hit them in just the right angle.

"You are such a difficult person to get rid of." Colette jumped and whirled around to find the man only inches from where she had just exited the hospital. He stood in front of the door in the same suit as yesterday.

"What did you do to me?" She tried her best to sound demanding and sure of herself but they shake in her voice, in every part of her body, gave away her facade of fearlessness. In reality, the man scared her as much as her dreams of darkness used to. "Why couldn't I remember anything from yesterday?" She demanded once again, nearly tripping over a garbage can as she slowly backed away.

The man stared at her for a moment, his blue eyes nearly cutting into her head and prying it open and laying bare every single one of her private thoughts. "A curious one aren't you. So very curious." He clicked his tongue on the roof of his mouth, rolling up the sleeves of his white button up. His suit jacket was nowhere to be found. Perhaps he wanted her blood to stain the white shirt as a trophy of some sort. "You are too curious for your own good. I had to take away your memories. You were seeing too much. Let's just say today and yesterday are one and the same."

That would explain why she didn't have the nightmare last night, perhaps something in that nightmare was exposing whatever this man was trying to hide. Perhaps he was the darkness that felt so welcoming to her, the one that kept a blanket on her mind that shielded her from the truth. The truth that the voice on the wind was trying to get her to see as it cracked the dome the darkness tried to hold her in. He had made her replay the entire day but took away the nightmare. She should be grateful to of had a night of peace but the silence in her mind was all the more haunting.

"I see your mind working, even as you don't speak I know that every second that passes by a new puzzle piece clicks in place. Soon you will see all. Everything that has been kept from you. The secrets this place you call home holds." There was almost a hint of disgust in his voice. As if the world they lived in sickened him -- the secrets sickened him. At least they agreed on one thing. "Too bad I can't let that happen."

He took a step towards her and she swore she felt her heart stop in that second. He was going to kill her. She thought about running, but she was afraid she would not be fast enough and she refused to go out like a coward who ran from her fears. "Why do you care what I see?" She dared let the question slip out between her trembling lips, her eyes narrowing in on the man as she continued to walk backwards.

"Because you are the key to breaking the barrier." And there were those words again, the ones that echoed in her mind night after night. He knew what they meant and she had a feeling he would not be the one to give her the answers she sought.

As if on cue the wind around her picked up and whipped her midnight hair around her body, just like had in her nightmare. The man let out a blood curdling scream as the wind lashed out towards him and swept him off his own two feet. "I won't hurt her! Please!" The man screamed and begged and tried to bargain with her protector but the wind did not listen. Soon the man and then wind were gone and Colette was left alone underneath the star riddled sky.

The stars almost seemed dimmer that night as she walked home.