I’ll tell you what happened. Not now. Never now. But I will tell you. That is one of my talents, and now my responsibility—to forever keep your story on the tip of my tongue.
The door dinged open as you stepped into my shop.
“Are you the psychic?” you asked, shivering, though it was now only late summer, eyes probing the corners of my small shop, taking in the talismans in the display case and strung up on the wall, incense fuming on the counter. Your gaze finally landed on me, an old woman with smoke-wrinkled lips and a blue wig.
I groped for the flowing crystal talisman around my neck and whispered my day’s memories into it—now forever gone from my mind—and the talisman’s invisible aegis bubbled past-ward. Nothing more than a faint breeze to us, yet the Mneme was shoved, screaming, from its hold on your short-term memory.
“What are you doing?” you asked. Your shiver had ceased.
“A spell,” I whispered, knees quavering, bracing myself against the counter.
You licked your lips and turned to go, doubt tearing at your heart.
“No!” I said. “Our time is short. We have an hour before the shield is broken. I cannot afford to spend more memories than that.”
“Spend what?”
“You’re in need of help. Come, child. The energy is better in the backroom.”
“This was a mistake.”
“Don’t go. Please. You’re in danger, but I can help you.”
You dithered a moment, but I could see in your eye that you sensed the subtle shift in your memory, the edges of all that expanse of snow begin to melt—the promise of my skill.
I guided you out of the shop room and down a narrow hallway lined with doors. One of them creaked open. Inside, a frail old woman faced away from us, gazing out of a tiny window overlooking alleyway dumpsters.
“My sister, Carlotta,” I said, pulling you on.
We proceeded into the dimly lit seeing chamber, the walls beaded with tetrahedral crystals, a single gas lamp sputtering on the table at the center of a circle of chairs. I sat you down beside me and took your right hand, cold and clammy, in both of mine.
“Something peculiar has been happening to me,” you said, eyes glistening in the gaslight. “To my memory. It started months ago, when I noticed something peculiar. All of these memories from summertime, any season at all, actually, they were of snow: blizzards at summer camp, eating ice cream at the beach in the snow, snow falling indoors at breakfast with my parents, during class at high school. It started with older memories—and at this point I’m hard-pressed to remember a day of my childhood when my nose wasn’t nipped red, my extremities numbed. But it hasn’t stopped there; it’s spreading into more recent memories and short-term memory. If I close my eyes now, try to remember this room, it will be swallowed up in a snowstorm.”
“I understand, child.”
“There’s something else. Faces. Every face of my past is the face of Victoria, my fiancée’s. You see, she—
“I’ve heard enough. A destructive force is spreading from memory to memory inside your mind: a Mneme, a memory demon. Even now we are forming memories and becoming linked together in the collective unconscious. Otto. Otto,” I said, suddenly catching a flicker of sunshine and the caress of sea breeze on my face. “That’s your name?”
You nodded.
“These Mnemes prowl the collective unconscious searching for fractured psyches—unfortified mind doors. Usually it takes them some time to break them down completely and pull you through, but in the process your memories surrounding the moment of fracture are transcribed onto the structure of other memories, similar to viral replication.”
You puzzled over this for a moment. I’ve seen many different reactions to these moments, when there is little time to adequately explain, and no time to ease the initiated into the waters. At last, I could see in your eyes that you accepted, or at least decided to humor me a little longer.
“Fortunately for you, my child, I have glimpsed the shores of the future. I have seen your Mneme vanquished. You see, I know their weakness: the Waters of Lethe.”
“Lethe? You mean that … that river from Greek mythology?”
“The same. If you drink from it, my child, you forget, or if you whisper it a memory, that specific memory will be destroyed. In either case, the memory destruction unleashes a powerful energy harmful to Mnemes, one that I can manipulate for my purposes. The Lethe is located in an ancient, labyrinthine sub-level of the collective unconscious—the Nether—from which Mnemes sprout into existence.”
“How do I get there?” you asked, sitting up, voice sobering.
“There is no way to travel to the collective unconscious, unless you’re born with the talent.”
“And you can?” you said.
I nodded.
“Then you’ll help me?”
“I can, but it’s costly.”
You withdrew suddenly, eyes flashing the ah-ha! of the dupe who’d at last grown wise to the game, tinged with disappointment in yourself and indignation towards the con artist who would prey on the bereaved.
But I held onto your hand. “I’m not selling anything, my child. The cost for you will be much dearer than money. For both of us, in fact.”
“Both of us? What do you mean?”
“I will have to face the Mneme myself, but you will sacrifice a memory. This will allow me to find your mind door in the collective unconscious. When I encounter the demon, I will banish it back to the Nether using this crystal.” I fingered the talisman drooping down over my paisley blouse.
“What kind of memory do you need?”
“Something as yet untainted by the Mneme. One related to your fiancée. A specific moment in your lives.”
You thought for a moment. “I couldn’t do that,” you said, lost perhaps in the one memory that popped into mind. “It’s too dear.”
“Well, there is another way to rid yourself of a Mneme, even less pleasant than sacrificing your most cherished memory,” I said, holding up the talisman for you to examine. “I’ve kept my own at bay for years with a daily ritual: drinking a drop of Lethe every morning with my tea, a practice that has made my own memories very murky, so much so that I cannot actually recall drinking, but rather infer that I have been doing so from the gaping holes in my recollection. It has kept my Mneme from being able to traverse the mind door. But yours is too close, too powerful. The only other alternative to sacrificing a specific memory would be for you to down the liquid in this talisman and eradicate every one of your memories. That would permanently seal your mind door and melt all the snow in your mind. Not only that, you would be untethered from the gift of memory, living only in a perpetually unfolding future. It is simply, child, another kind of death. Perhaps not as horrible as being consumed by the Mneme, but horrible nonetheless. Either way your cherished memory will be gone.”
You grew quiet, considering, and a whisper disturbed the silence, magnified and echoed by the crystals. “Otto. Otto.”
“Victoria?” you said, startling upright.
“No, not Victoria, child.” I pulled you back down. “The Mneme is closing in on the present. We don’t have much time. Whisper your memory into the crystal.”
I held it up to your lips, and you began to speak.
That is when I left the room. A tiny reflection of myself in the crystals grew and grew, myself facing towards the blurry darkness of the collective unconscious, a landscape spangled with shimmering diamonds of light, the reflections of other crystals, other mind doors, churning and bubbling between them a sea of mud, sculpted with whirlpools and hourglass columns that reached into the clouded heavens. On the horizon loomed fantastical stone structures, the representations of mental archetypes, around which many of these mind doors clustered. Strange creatures prowled in the darkness, things less predictable than Mnemes, howling and moaning and whispering. A musty smell filled my nostrils, that of old clothing and mold. I began to move, eager to distance myself from my own mind door.
It was a youthful version of me that moved. The ideal me. A person that never existed—endowed both with the beauty of youth and the wisdom of age.
Experience has taught me that your mind door will likely be close by, so I headed towards the nearest star. After trudging through the muck for several minutes, a hand clutched at my skirt, and I saw emerging from the mud at my feet my own Mneme, deflated and greyish, my sister, turned backwards, arms reaching behind her, elbows bent at unnatural angles.
“Josefa…” she croaked. “Josefa…help me. Help me forget.”
I stumbled away over the spongy, foot-sucking morass. Too slow. I could blast it with memories, but I needed to conserve my energy to battle your own Mneme. I would need dry ground to create distance between us, so I made a gamble and tapped the crystal. Immediately, the memory you had whispered into it unfurled—a panorama moving towards the star I had suspected to be your mind door.
Fortunately, my assumptions were correct. Your cherished memory involved dry ground. They typically do.
Dry heat washed over me, dispelling the fungal chill of the collective unconscious. I followed along a rocky path, lined with blooming cacti and glossy flowers, thick and resilient to the salty wind. As I progressed, the path began to ascend, switchbacking up a cliff face. A terrace jutted out at the top. I worked my way up the side, discovering at last an abandoned restaurant, the walls painted with cartoonish skeletons, costumed and dancing, once-brilliant colors sun-bleached to pastels. From up on the terrace, I glanced back down and spotted my Mneme shambling backwards up the footpath in my wake.
“Be gone, demon!” I shouted, raising the crystal and preparing to drink away more memories.
But the Mneme stopped and cowered against the cliff face. After encountering it in so many excursions into the collective unconscious, it had finally learned to respect my power.
I turned back to the restaurant, scanning the midday dark interior, listening. I could hear the crashing of waves behind me, seagulls squawking, the wind exploring and wearing down the hidden corners of this restaurant—no, a hotel, I realized, seeing the matrix of rooms looming above the open eating area.
Then I caught the sound of your voice—younger, livelier—followed by a woman’s laugh soon lost on the wind, and I scanned the structure and spotted the two of you emerging from the darkness of a room on the fourth floor, stepping onto the balcony together. You must have just come from the beach, you in board shorts and she in a bikini, both of you blonde and tan, wearing shades. You were directing her attention out towards the ocean, where a cruise ship drifted across the horizon.
I glanced one final time down the cliffside staircase. Satisfied my Mneme had vanished, I wandered through the restaurant, down a hallway and entering the low-ceilinged lobby with its dried-up fountain and dilapidated ‘70s décor. Despite the intensity of the sunlight, the angles of the hotel’s interior bred darkness, the stairwell by the elevators its black heart. I whispered a memory of me reading Aurelius several nights ago, not to the talisman, but simply to myself, evoking it, not sacrificing it. The scene was superimposed on the dark staircase, melding together, dark and light from the one cross-saturating each other, the text weaving into the concrete walls—”The time is at hand when you will have forgotten everything; and the time is at hand when all will have forgotten you.”
I crept up the stairs, vigilant for the flicker of shadows or the jabbering hiss of a Mneme. But there was only my shortening breath and the slopping of my wet slippers on the dust.
On the fourth floor, as I stepped into the tiled hallway, your voice rang out again. It led me to an open door, the room you two had passed through, for all other rooms in this memory would likely be empty voids if you had not explored them. There I watched as you proposed and she knelt down with you and you kissed and held each other.
“Josefa. Help us.”
The two of you looked towards the doorway, wide-eyed.
“Did you hear that?” you said.
Victoria nodded.
You approached the door while a single snowflake drifted down, stung Victoria’s shoulder, and melted. Shivering, she wrapped a light yellow shawl around her. I turned back to you, following you to the hallway door, and we looked together. You saw emptiness; I saw my Mneme crawling backwards out of the stairwell.
I retreated into the hotel room, and you turned around saying, “Just the wind—”
You didn’t finish, and when I turned back I saw that whatever sweet memory it was I had stepped into had been altered, for the Victoria of before was no more. What remained was the future version of her, the last you ever saw, neck broken, framed by a blizzard surging in through the balcony. I didn’t want to know more, but as we stood there, the salient memories of your future flooded into me: you, shocked into sobriety, stumbling away from the mangled plastic and metal of the car, your stomach bleeding where the seatbelt had sliced into you, crunching through the snow towards her broken, ice-laced corpse; the world was frigid, invisible beyond a few feet, everything absorbed into the hiemal white.
To my astonishment, you started towards her; we weren’t witnessing the same thing. You were approaching the Victoria of the engagement memory, the seductive girl ready to give her life to you. That was when the mind door began to open. It was inside you, splitting your body down the midline, unfolding your being and linking the collective unconscious to my shop, to the present. The Mneme lurched towards you, its hands stretching out, inches from reaching the glimmering door inside you.
I reached out, grabbed your memory hand, pressed the talisman to my lips, then tapped the mechanism on the side. A drop of coppery river water exploded onto my tongue.
The Victoria Mneme screamed and blurred, the snow dissipating, leaving your younger fiancée behind. Not gone, just weakened. The power of Lethe is much stronger inside the collective unconscious, but it would still take much more than that to destroy it.
I cannot now say which of my memories left me, a vast network of faces and events—integral parts of me. I was aware that I was no longer whole, but couldn’t say how I was no longer whole. I had done this before, of course, but each time is different, uniquely devastating. I probed my mind for what it lacked, counting my mnemonic fingers and toes.
Then it grabbed me.
My demon, the inverted form of my sister, had been waiting for its moment. The sustenance of this memory of yours must have strengthened it. I screamed out, yanked backwards into the hallway, while everything around us began to waver and melt away. Darkness swallowed the light, and within a minute the memory (of Mexico? Costa Rica? I still cannot say with certainty) had vanished, leaving me in the dismal palette of the collective unconscious, dragged through the olid muck. The Mneme, jabbering, pulled me to the edge of a whirlpool. I caught glimpses through the twisting drop of the world beyond—the hidden structure underlying everything, a shadowy architecture of crisscrossing passages and balconies, spurred with racks and cages, draped with the webs of the Mnemes that lurk within. I could hear the wailing of the souls that had been pulled inside.
My demon hugged me into its rotting flesh and prepared to leap down into the Nether…
Many years ago I would regularly witness my sister, a fellow psychic, enter the collective unconscious, so I understand the experience of the outside observer. The body goes slack. If you are attentive, you will see fleeting images of what the psychic traveler is experiencing on the crystal tapestry of the seeing room walls. During one of her excursions, a Mneme seized hold of her, and her form underwent a strange transformation: her eyes turned milky, the nose flattened, and the features of her face began to smooth out and vanish, long hair sprouting out; her limbs rotated with horrific popping, the joints seeming to bend the wrong way.
She turned backwards, or more properly inwards, for from every angle one could only see the back of her.
I tried to save her that day. Ripped the flowing crystal talisman from her neck and plunged in after her.
But my reaction was too slow.
You saw how she remains today, a ghost forever facing away from the present. That was the moment of my own psychic fracture, the memory that my own Mneme found and has sought to exploit.
And this is the same metamorphosis you began to witness. You saw the image of my Mneme in the crystals. Must have known that something was trying to take me, that something had gone horribly wrong.
My child, my poor child, your instincts were the same as mine. Except you didn’t travel into the collective unconscious and drink a nonlethal portion. You ripped the talisman from my neck and shot all of the river water into your mouth.
You saved me, child—and yourself—but at a cost.
Victoria no longer exists for you in any meaningful sense.
None of your past exists.
Instead, your whole being lays before you in a constantly shrinking mass of future, all of it hidden and yet unhidden from your attention, waiting to be accessed by your mind, or to slip by into the past, into a remoteness as obscure as seeing the future must have once been.
Your body is safe. I keep it in one of the small apartments in the back of my shop, alongside my sister and others that have come to me, others foolish enough to drink too much.
So I’ll tell you what happened. Not now. Never now. But I will tell you. That is one of my talents, and now my responsibility—to forever keep your story on the tip of my tongue.
| Tim Boiteau lives in Michigan with his wife and son. He has won a Writers of the Future award and Story of the Year at Fifty-Word Stories, and his short fiction has appeared in venues such as Daily Science Fiction and Deep Magic. His horror novel Iltday is coming out July 2023. |  |
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