THE ELEVATOR - Short Story

Author's Note: Very very very old one. This is one of the first ones I wrote, and I ended up really digging it, but it's just languished on my hard drive since. Way longer than most of mine, but it's... I think it's a fun one. Reminder that if you dig my writing, I've got an Amazon author page for longer works and a ko-fi if you're just feeling like being nice. 

He was walking home when something inside of him snapped.

            It wasn’t the first time he’d felt this – but generally it happened on a much smaller scale. He’d flinch and forget someone’s birthday, or what he’d had for lunch the day before, but this time it was a current racing through his head, washing away anything and everything it could find. He couldn’t do much else than stand there and hope that it would leave him with his name when it was finished.

            After a few minutes, the rioting in his head quieted and he was able to escape the sidewalk to figure everything out. He sat down with his back to the town’s only real establishment – a fairly profitable bar and grill – and pressed the heel of his hand to his head. Name, his name came first – and it was there, Wesley Miller. He didn’t know if he didn’t have a middle name or if that had disappeared, but he could always check once he got home. Where was home? He had to remember that, didn’t he?

            Yes. Yes, he remembered how to get home. Age? That didn’t seem quite so important, but as his questions to ask himself when this sort of thing happened hadn’t vanished, so he would go through all of them. And, anyway, Wes remembered his age – nineteen – and his birthday – June 12^th – and why he wasn’t at college when he should be – a lack of funds and an even larger lack of motivation.

            He searched his mind for family next, and came up with a few names, but couldn’t think of the faces to match them. He’d hope that he would be able to recognize them when he (eventually) went home.

            Now, though, it was time to check on the elevator.

            The elevator was something that he never managed to forget, no matter how many times something snapped. Perhaps it was because the elevator was the source of his memory disappearances and the photographic memory that he possessed.

            The elevator was an ancient, out-of-normal-use grain elevator that sat on the edge of town – Wes couldn’t remember the name of the town, but he’d pass the sign to get to the elevator, anyway, so it didn’t matter much; he’d forgotten the name of the town too many times to count – and was slowly falling apart. It was owned by one of Wes’s distant relatives, due to some mix-up in inheritances, and Wes and his father were waiting for the day that it was torn down. Waiting for the day that it was torn down and everything in their memory just blanked.

            Wes didn’t know which asshole ancestor had decided to tie their memory to the grain elevator had been, but whoever it had been had not foreseen the elevator going out of use. It had been useful in school to have his photographic memory (albeit less useful when a piece of siding fell off and he forgot everything he’d read the day before), but Wes would have given anything to forego the photographic memory and not have to worry about waking up without a clue who he was. His father had tried to get the elevator back into his hands, but the land that it stood on was worth something, and the distant relative didn’t want to give it up, just in case there was a chance he could sell it for three times its worth some day.

            And once something fell off of the elevator, it didn’t matter if it was put back on – they were out of that knowledge or memory unless they re-read, re-saw, or re-learned it. So there was really no point in rebuilding, and maintenance was difficult enough between the two of them.

            The town was small, so a walk to the elevator took about ten minutes. As always, the front of the elevator looked fairly unharmed – the boards were gray and peeling, of course, and the few windows that stared out the front were dark and empty and broken, but the door was still on its hinges and shut tight, boards pinning it into its place, so he circled around to the back. Someone had to have either completely destroyed a floor on the inside or smashed open the back for Wes to have lost as much as he had.

            There was a young man standing behind the elevator. He didn’t look particularly incriminating; at least, he wasn’t driving a bulldozer or holding an axe. He was chewing on a piece of the tall grass that held ticks and grew everywhere it could manage, though, which made Wes wonder, because he didn’t look like the type of person who would be chewing on grass. He was average-sized, and of some sort of vague ethnicity that could have been anything from Mexican to Native American to South Asian. He was handsome in a way that Wes couldn’t really place; his face didn’t seem to be anything special, but one look at it and Wes didn’t want to look away. Or, really, do anything but tear this guy’s unnaturally non-North Dakotan clothes off and jump him.

            His eyes met Wes’ and he grinned. For a moment, Wes was sure that the man’s mouth was full of small, conical, incredibly sharp, teeth, but then the moment was over and they were omnivorous and normal. “So, are you really the one?”

            “The one?” Wes asked. He stopped a few feet away from him and crossed his arms, shivering. Had he forgotten a jacket this morning because he was an idiot, or because something had snapped and caused him to forget the weather forecast? “What’s that supposed to mean?”

            “The only who will cease to be himself if I tear this motherfucker to the ground,” the man said. He grinned again, and this time Wes was absolutely certain that he had dolphin teeth. “I heard about the deal your papa made-“

            “It wasn’t my father-“

            “It was someone’s father, wasn’t it? Either way, the deal was made, with one of my ancestors – and now he’s dead and I want to see what happens if this is destroyed. The inside’s gone now. Why don’t you crawl in so that you die when your memory’s wiped, too? It would be better than wandering around, trying to figure out how to get home, right?”

            Wes fumbled for his phone – he didn’t know who in the hell this person was, but it had occurred to him to copy down everything he remembered about himself onto a notes document. He already had an e-mail in his drafts that had the same thing, but he’d never copied it over onto notes, and cell reception was notoriously spotty.

            Faced with a four-digit unlock code, however, he realized that he didn’t know it. He stared at the video game image in the background, hoping that it would give him some sort of clue, but the only thing that he managed to come up with was the fact that he was completely, undeniably screwed.

            “What do you remember, by the way?” the man asked. At this point, Wes wasn’t completely sure that he was a man, but his mind shied away from thinking of him as any other thing. Even though his family’s memory was tied to an old grain elevator through some sort of magic that he didn’t understand, he didn’t want to think about the handsome, sharp-toothed being bent on destroying the very essence of him being anything other than human.

            It sounded stupid, if he really thought about it, but he didn’t think that he could take anything more. Human or not, though, Wes didn’t want to tell this maniac what he remembered. He tried to rationalize it – what if he ended up telling his address and the guy followed him home? Identity theft was still a thing, right? He remembered his social security number, and he didn’t know how a definitely-human would feel about getting his social security number but, hell, he already seemed bent on ruining Wes’s life.

            “I asked what you remember,” the man said. An accusatory tone had found its way into his voice, making its home there like he was destined to be a high school teacher. “I want to know how it works. I destroyed absolutely everything on the inside, and I want to know how it adds up.”

            When Wes still didn’t answer, the man began to pace, chewing furiously on the grass, his teeth switching back-and-forth between carnivorous and omnivorous every time he opened and closed his mouth. It took him a while before he spoke again, and Wes could take those minutes to pretend that he wasn’t a psychopath bent on destruction, and they were going out. To an…  abandoned grain elevator. Because in this fantasy, he’d apparently forgotten was a date was.

            Or he’d just wanted to get the guy alone.

            “I want to know about the content of your mind based on the content of this elevator,” the man said. He talked with his hands as if he were orchestrating an invisible performance, one hand darting down to pick another tall stalk of grass when his was gone. “Do you only remember shallow things now? Do you remember poetry you had to memorize in middle school? Do they still do that in middle schools? I remember once I met this girl who was angry because she didn’t want to memorize something that Frost wrote.”

            He flashed a grin – sans the sharp teeth – and there was something in it that was so human that Wes’s feelings on him wavered again. Maybe the destruction of the inside of the elevator had erased his common sense, too.

            “She’s not complaining about that anymore,” he said, and Wes hoped that he’d leave it at that. He was already imagining some poor middle school girl strung up by her wrists, blood matting her hair to her face, begging to be set free, and he didn’t want any details to solidify that image.

            “So, why does that matter?” Wes said, finally. The man perked up, like he’d been waiting for Wes to speak again, and Wes felt the weirdest mixture of ‘oh, wow, this is creepy’ and ‘oh no he’s hot’ he’d ever felt. The only thing about this situation that felt real and secure was the fact that the man obviously couldn’t read his mind, because he’d spent the entire time trying to get Wes to tell him what he remembered.

            And, hey, if the guy knocked down the elevator – well, then Wes would just forget about this, and that was something to look forward to.

            “Because, I want to know how to make my own enchantment like this,” the man said. He turned faster than Wes thought possible and grabbed him by the collar of his t-shirt, slamming him against the elevator. Wood behind him cracked and just like that he forgot the name of the town. Again. He was waiting for the day that he moved out (er, eventually) and someone asked where he was from and he just completely blanked. “And you look like you’ll be more fun than the old man. I was actually hoping that you’d show up, instead of him. You’re younger. Less likely to run as soon as you saw me.”

            This time, when the teeth flashed sharp, the man’s eyes flashed black. Wes shifted and tried to discreetly scrape a splinter off of the wood to maybe forget this encounter, or at least the man’s face when his eyes had turned black, but the man caught his wrist and held it away from the elevator. So much for that, then.

            “Young people are idiots,” the man said plainly, and Wes frowned.

            “You look young,” he objected, and then the man procured a frown to match his.

            “I said people, and I’m dozens of times your age,” the man said. Wes shifted, wondering if the man was going to let him go or if he was going to spend the rest of forever shoved up against this elevator.

            “Is there any way to get you to… not destroy this elevator and my life?” Wes asked, figuring that since he’d already started talking again, he might as well keep going. The man seemed to consider and, in fact, stepped back to stroke his chin, like he’d spent the entirety of his presumably immortal life watching bad movies with clichéd villains. As he did this, though, Wes wondered what it would be like to have the elevator destroyed. He’d have to re-learn… well, everything, but the constant fear of it happening wouldn’t be hanging over his head.

            It would already be done, and he wouldn’t even remember it.

            “We’ll have some fun together,” the man said finally. His hands twitched, like he wanted to pick another piece of grass, but he seemed too excited to go back to chewing on vegetation. “We’ll pick someone, and we’ll kill them together, and then I’ll leave you with what you have. Which isn’t much, mind you.”

            “I’m aware,” Wes said. He ran a hand through his hair and wondered why it was so long – he’d either forgotten to get a haircut at one point or forgotten that he liked it long recently, but either way, he made a (likely, soon destroyed) mental note to get it buzzed as soon as possible. The man watched him and smirked. “But… yeah. Fine. I’ll help you kill some helpless person, and then you’ll go on your merry way and I’ll hope that the next thing I forget is you.”

            “You don’t mean that,” the man said. Sensing that he was about to flash one of those smiles again, Wes averted his eyes. He didn’t need another urge to grope the guy. “You’re going to wake up from dreams about me, Wesley Miller – that is you, right? Not your father?”

            Wes nodded, just a little twitch of the chin. “Do I get a name for you? Or do I have to keep calling you ‘the man’ or ‘the guy’ or ‘the douche’ in my head?” he asked.

            “I am none of those things,” the douche said, and Wes rolled his eyes. “But I suppose you could call me… oh, Loki. Call me Loki.”

            It really took all of the self-control that Wes had in his body to not burst out laughing, but he managed it. He had a very clear picture in his head of himself laughing at the name and Loki’s sharp teeth staying sharp and then taking a very big bite out of him – an overactive imagination was another thing that seemed to come with the memory-connected-to-an-elevator thing, and in a lot of situations, it didn’t do Wes much good. Like now, when he pictured a chunk of his flesh lying in the dust, blood soaking the ground and framing Loki’s smile like he was a clown, or someone really bad at putting on makeup.

            “Okay,” Wes said. He shifted, rubbed his elbows, and wondered why he didn’t have a coat on, and if he’d wondered that before now. “So – what kind of person? A kid? An old dude? Rapist, pedophile, secretly evil schoolgirl?”

            “Oh, I think we’ll just do whatever person we happen upon first,” Loki said. He gave Wes a smile – closed-mouth this time, thank God – and offered his arm. “But I think it’ll be more fun if we play it up a little. Imagine if this was a regular thing! Gay couple murders several, motive unknown!”

            Wes didn’t want to touch the guy. He turned away, back toward town. “What makes you think I’m into that, anyway?”

            “Wes, even after learning that I want to destroy what’s left of your memory, you haven’t stopped checking me out,” Loki said. Wes ignored this and started walking, and in a second, Loki was in front of him, holding out his hand. “Now, are you going to play along or not? Damn, if I could pinpoint what I was erasing, it would be so much easier…”

            Wes took a step back. “I don’t care about that right now,” he said. “Maybe you’re right, but I’m just looking. It’s not like I want anything. I just want to get through this so that I can throw rocks at the stupid thing until I forget this encounter.”

            He didn’t remember if he’d ever done that before, but he did have a suspicious lack of embarrassing memories, so it was completely possible that a younger Wesley Miller had, after being rejected-outed-or-tripped-up, sat out behind the elevator and broken windows or siding until he forgot.

            Had he ever come out?

            Did he keep a journal? He grabbed a Sharpie out of his jean pocket and scribbled a note on his hand to do so if he hadn’t already. There was something else that he should probably write down, but he had no clue what it was, so he’d just pretend he hadn’t started thinking about that.

            “We’re doing it my way, or I’m bringing this thing down,” Loki said, and Wes sighed. Loki offered his arm again, and Wes took it.

            “I just look like I’m blind,” he said, and Loki looked at him, confused. Not wanting to elaborate unless Loki decided to do something more embarrassing-slash-reminiscent-of-the-nineteenth-century, Wes left it at that. The two of them headed back into town, and Wes wondered for a half a second if he’d be able to figure out if he’d come out by the looks that he got before remembering that the first person they saw, they’d kill.

            It did take them a while before they saw someone – and the first people they saw were in a group. Loki broke free of Wes and started toward them, completely oblivious to Wes’s lack of following him. Wes did still remember how to get home, and was almost tempted to just turn and leave, but if he did that, then Loki would probably go back and destroy the elevator.

            With Wes’ luck, he’d do that before Wes got home, and Wes’ only possible plan of action at that point would be to curl up on the sidewalk and die.

            So he just hung back, waiting for Loki to do his thing and kidnap a high schooler. It was a decently large group of kids, about six or seven of them, all of them looking the same. Had he grown out his hair so that he didn’t look the same as every other person in North Dakota? That was a decent reason.

            Loki weaved his way through the crowd and the teenagers separated for him. None of them looked straight at him, though, and Wes shifted. If they noticed him, then he’d be stuck in conversation and probably forced to pretend to remember some of their names – they looked older, seventeen, maybe, and he’d probably gone to school with them. Hell if he remembered them.

            Either way, he ducked back into a space between an abandoned gas station and a rarely-used town hall and waited, kicking at dirt and dead grass. He wondered idly what month it was; none of the grass was green, but that meant it could be midwinter or spring or even ‘fall, after snow came and then melted, only to show up again a week later.’ He couldn’t remember what green grass looked like, but that was the pro to forgetting half of your experiences and thoughts every once in a while – he got to experience everything for the first time again. He didn’t know what his favorite movie was, but he’d eventually find it again… and then he’d be able to watch it again for the first time.

            Also, Game of Thrones spoilers? Always the first thing he forgot.

            After a few moments, Loki came back with one of the kids. He was a short kid, not even six feet tall, with the North Dakota brown-hair-blue-eyes mix and too many freckles. There was a strange look on his face. He was talking to Loki; rambling, really, talking about cars and girls and football teams. Wes hunched his shoulders and hoped that the kid would stay in this weird trance and not recognize him, but Loki saw what he was doing and manually turned the kid’s head to Wes.

            “Wes?” the kid asked, and Wes waved. He had no clue who this was. It had used to be scary, especially when he was little, to go and realize that he didn’t know anyone – but he’d gotten used to it. He’d gotten used to a lot of things.

            Loki cracked his knuckles, and Wes winced – the way that Loki did it, it was a constant crack-crack-crack, and it sounded more like his knuckles were breaking than he was just cracking them, and the kid was obviously freaked out, too. He turned to face Loki again, and Loki hit him across the face with the flat of his palm. The kid staggered, eventually bumping into the sheet metal that the old gas station was made out of, and clutched his cheek. Wes glanced at Loki, who grinned cheerily.

            “I have several different ways we can do this,” Loki said. He clapped his hands together, and both the kid and Wes winced. “But in every way, you have to help Wes. Otherwise it’s just me making you watch, and that’s not as much fun as audience participation. So! Strangulation, brutalization, anything-in-between!”

            “Uh,” Wes said. He glanced at the kid, not wanting to do anything to hurt him, even if he had no clue who he was. He looked like a nice kid, as far as teenagers went. “What if someone sees?”

            “No-one will see,” Loki said. He didn’t elaborate. Wes glanced at him for half of a second, but that was enough for him to have had enough of the sight. “Pick. If you’re feeling some reservations about something really long, I can just give you a knife and you can stab him.”

            “Stab him?” Wes asked. His voice cracked, and he tried to force his heart to stop beating. The kid let out a low moan and slid down the wall until he was curled into a ball. “Y-you mean, just-“

            “Well, obviously, we’d have to pick him up a bit,” Loki said. “Can’t have him hiding his face from you. And I want you to see my handiwork.”

            “You just hit him across the face,” Wes said. “I’ve probably been hit across the face before. I feel like it sucks, but it’s not-“

            Loki grabbed the kid by the collar and dragged him back into a standing position. The kid’s hand dropped from his face, showing three long, deep cuts in his face. Blood leaked out of them and ran in rivulets to his chin, where they dripped down to spot his t-shirt red. He couldn’t see anything behind the red of the cuts, but from the way that Loki’s hands were twitching, he had a feeling that he was going to try and pull them open wider. The kid wasn’t doing anything but hanging there, his chest moving up and down erratically, and Wes closed his eyes for a second, rubbing his temples.

            “So just. Stab him. And then go to jail.”

            “Oh, no, you won’t go to jail,” Loki said, waving a hand. He tossed a pocketknife to Wes. “One of his friend’s pocketknife. He’s going to get blackout drunk tonight, too, so he won’t know if he did it or not. Isn’t it fun, being with me?”

            “No,” Wes said, after a brief pause. “It’s not fun at all.”

            Loki scowled, and the kid whimpered. “If you’re not having fun, why don’t you just stab him? Then you can go back to your boring life-“

            “-where I forget half of everything I know every other day-“

            “-and you won’t have to see me again-“

            “Really?” Wes asked, and Loki nodded.

            “Yes, really. Go.”

            Wes took a deep breath and flicked the blade out. He didn’t want to do this. He could see his reflection in the blade, and the reflection was pale and shaking and not wanting to go ahead with murder, even if he was going to get away with it. Especially if he was going to get away with it.

            But maybe he’d forget this, too, and in two weeks he’d end up completely baffled by the murder of Random High School Kid, sliced up and stabbed in a pale imitation of an alley. He’d been joking about throwing rocks at the elevator until he forgot Loki, but right about now that was looking like a damn good option.

            So he swallowed, and he closed his eyes, and he jabbed. He caught something – nothing lethal, judging by the scream and the twisting from the kid, so he jabbed again – and again – and again. He could hear Loki laughing; it was high, at around the same pitch as the kid’s screams, and by the time the screaming was done, Wes was kneeling in the alley with the kid in front of him, blood covering his hoodie and his hands, Loki nowhere in sight.

            He backed away on his hands and knees, his stomach clenching and then everything coming up. He coughed once, twice, and then something snapped.