Jeremy Finley - The Darkest Time of Night

The camera panned for a moment from the man to where my five-year-old self sat at the other end of the table.

Though the camera was on me, I heard the man whisper, his mic still picking up his words. “I’m not getting anything here. Get the Propofol ready.” The film stopped rolling.

My breath caught in my throat. Every card-carrying member of AARP knew that Propofol is used before major surgeries, but can also cause memory loss. My God—

I doubled clicked on the video labeled “combined cameras.” It began as the second video had—with the man in the horn-rimmed glasses and the fierce part in his hair.

“Are you comfortable?” the man asked.

The video then cut to show five-year-old me sitting at the table, looking out the window beside me. “Yes,” I said, squinting in the sunlight streaming through. When the camera adjusted to the lens flare from the sun, I could see endless waves of water stretching out from a long beach.

The edited video featuring both cameras continued with the man leaning forward. “Can you tell me about what you saw?”

“I saw the people. The people I told you about. The people in the sky change colors,” I heard myself reply.

“What do you remember about the ship in the sky?”

My little eyes looked back to him. It looked like I started trembling. “Mama and Daddy took me to St. Louis once, it was bigger than that. It changes colors too. Especially when they caused it to rain.”

“Rain?”

I watched myself nod. “When we came back down… everything was clear… then it got stormy. All around us. Bad clouds. Big winds. They did it. They brought the storm… when they came down.”

The man furiously scribbled and then tapped his forehead with his pencil.

“I know you’ve been through a lot. I need you to explain this to me. You told me before that you never actually talked to the… people in the sky. That you… understood them—like you spoke with your thoughts.”

“We shared.”

“You shared?”

I nodded. “Some of mine, some of theirs.”

“This is very, very important, Lynn. Is this how they communicated with you? Was it like a conversation?”

“Back and forth. Back and forth. I showed them the cornfield by my house, they showed me how they fly over cornfields. But then… it was not nice. They… wanted more. Like when they wanted to see if I get sick. I showed them when I got chicken pox that one time and Mama made me take a bath in all that white stuff. And then… I saw how they want to make other people get sick, and eat food that’s bad, and get hurt. In all kinds of ways.”

“How are they going to hurt people?”

I watched as my younger self reached up behind my head and winced. “There’s something… in me. And in the other people they bring back. They want to see… if everyone around us… gets hurt by what this does. I don’t want it in my head—”

“Get hurt by what?”

“What’s in here,” I saw myself motion to the base of my skull. “Can I see my mama and daddy now?”

“That’s all for now. Thank you, Lynn. I know it’s been difficult. You’re a strong, special girl—”

I stopped the video with a sharp tap.

Special ones, Verna had said. They don’t know why for sure. But unlike the adults, a few of the kids actually remember. I’ve heard the docs whisper—‘cause they don’t think I can hear—that it’s a genetic thing that their memories are stronger than whatever those bastards in the cosmos do to them. And if those kids come back, well, the Suits have all kinds of good drugs to make those memories, and everything else, go away—

No, no, no, I thought, exiting out of the folder and frantically scanning the others. A genetic thing…

The government gave me drugs—certainly the Propofol—and took everything I knew about my parents away.

WCTN11, WCTN11, WCTN11–

Oh, no.

The very last folder was WCTN11.

WC, William Chance. TN, Tennessee. 11. He was born in 2011. I clicked on it. Again, three movies. I frantically opened the third.

The video was incredibly clear, obviously recorded in high definition, and this time it was a younger man sitting in a stark white room. He adjusted his black tie and smiled with the warmth of an ice rink.

“Hello, William. Are you OK?”

My grandson sat in a chair, his short legs dangling. “I want to see my mommy and daddy.”

I blinked back angry tears. He remembered us.

“You will, son, but I need to ask you a few questions—”

“Want to see my mommy and daddy and my nanna.”

“Sure you do. But I need to talk to you first. About what you saw. And what you drew for us.”

“I already told the other man. They’re mad. I wanna go home.”

“They’re mad?”

“Really mad. I wanna go home. Don’t let them take me back up there.”

“You’re safe now, William. You told my colleague Dr. Cody that the people in the stars who took you—”

“They aren’t people. Please, can I call my mommy?”

“Why are they mad, William?”

“I already showed you.”

The man opened the folder in front of him and drew out a few pieces of paper. He looked directly into the camera and indicated to the photographer to zoom in. The lens focused, and the picture came into closer view.

“William, can you confirm that you drew these?” He slid the pictures over to William.

“Uh-huh.”

“Tell me what you’ve drawn. We know how they share memories, so you don’t have to explain that. All we need to know is what you saw from them.”

I heard William sigh. I leaned in closer to the screen, seeing on the top sheet several stick figures inside a building. “Those… are the people they sent back. But… you trapped them here.”

The man pointed to another group of stick figures walking on a hill. “Then who are these other people?”

“That’s what all the people they brought back are supposed to be doing. Moving around. Not stuck here and in the other places you keep them.”

“You mean everyone… with the bump like yours?”

William nodded. “Will it go away? It hurts.”

“In time, it goes away. Back to the people who are supposed to be walking around, why do you have those lines around their heads?”

As the camera zoomed in closer, I saw what appeared to be waves coming from the heads of the figures. “That’s what some of us are supposed to be doing.”

“Some of you? But not all of you? Why?”

“Because… they haven’t flipped the switch on everybody yet.”

“What does that mean?”

William waited a moment and then took the man’s pen from where it lay and added waves around all the heads. “They’re almost ready for everyone to start together. But they had to be spread out. So they went to see where everybody was, and found out… that you stopped them.”

“Stopped them from what?”

William reached over and touched the bottom of the picture, where a few stick figures lay on the ground, their eyes marked with X s instead of dots.

“William, listen to me. I know this is hard to understand. Do the people in the stars know why we’re containing the people they’ve returned—in hospitals?”

“Do I get to leave the hospital? I wanna go home.”

“Of course.”

“The monsters showed me how you trapped the people here and in all the other places like this. But the people they send back are not supposed to be trapped—they’re supposed to go everywhere and cause trouble, with what the monsters put in here,” William said, gently touching the back of his head and then reaching out for the rest of his drawings.

The camera moved in, showing more of William’s stick figures. People emitting the waves were standing under dark clouds from which tornadoes were descending.