“Mum’s birthday’s later this week but since I haven’t been up to see her for a while then I thought I’d go down early and stay with them for a week or so. I know you’re really busy with work at the moment so I’m not expecting you to suddenly be able to take time off, I’m just going to go down myself and either you can join me for the party or if you’re really swamped then I’ll meet you when I come back up.”
After what I’d read on Robin’s phone last night I knew I couldn’t stay in the house. Nothing I’d told her had been a lie exactly, my mum’s birthday really was at the end of the week and whilst spending a week with my parents for a birthday was unusual I did usually see her on her birthday, just not for quite that long. Robin had always encouraged me to see or talk to my parents more often, perhaps due to the fact she had no contact with her own. I was really hoping that fact would make this story slip down more smoothly. I silently begged my wife to accept my excuse to leave as she frowned in thought.
“I could probably see about getting stuff moved around at work so I can come down with you instead.” she said after a while.
No.
“Honestly, if there’s a chance you could rearrange things so that you have a little time off work then I’d prefer you to do it after we’re back. I think spending so much time here by myself is getting to me a bit so if I could have time being around my parents alone and then come back to the house for time with you then that’d be better for me than if you came with me but then I had to be completely by myself.”
The lies fell out of me with such astounding ease that I was almost alarmed. I’ve never really been much of a liar but I’d snared Robin quite well here – in order to follow me now she’d have to admit she was fine with me spending time alone or that her work wasn’t as busy as she’d said.
“If you’re sure.” she said eventually and I smiled.
“I think I’ll head off later today. Let me know if you’re coming to the party or not, they’re always happy to see you but I’m sure they’ll understand if you can’t make it.”
“Wouldn’t miss it.” Robin replied and I went upstairs to pack.
_____
When I finally pulled into the town I’d grown up in, my parents’ house wasn’t my first stop. I tried to collect my thoughts briefly as I sat in my car and then with a quick whisper of ‘fuck it’ gave up trying to plan the conversation and just knocked on his door.
“Amy?” Sam asked but then quickly swept me up into a hug. “Amy! I didn’t realise you were about!”
Once my feet had returned to the floor I smiled back at him and we went inside. He made me tea but instead of drinking it I found myself tapping the side of the mug anxiously whilst we made small talk.
“Still too hot?” he asked after a while and I realised that I’d be lucky if the tea was even warm at this point.
I stared at the faded cartoon character on the side of the blue mug and tried to figure out how to broach the subject.
“Hey, are you okay?” Sam asked and for some reason that was enough to get me to talk.
“I think I might be going crazy.” I said all at once.
Sam didn’t react beyond switching his smile to a thoughtful expression.
“Robin isn’t going into work. I thought she was cheating on me and I checked her phone and, god that makes me sound like such an insecure bitch, but the messages were really strange. They weren’t sexy or anything – it was like she was on some sort of weird spy assignment keeping tabs on me. They sounded really, really stalkerish. But I haven’t done anything weird or exciting or important. And I feel like I’ve been forgetting things and I keep having all of these weird nightmares.”
I stopped as abruptly as I’d started and picked up the tea in front of me. I tried to drink some but my throat wouldn’t cooperate and though I wasn’t looking up I could feel Sam’s eyes on me.
“That sounds like a lot,” he said after some time, “and yeah, it doesn’t make a huge amount of sense. So let’s start with Robin – what made you think she doesn’t go to work anymore?”
“I saw her.” I said then added, “Oh, I actually might be able to prove that. I put a tracker on her car.”
“Seriously?” Sam asked with raised eyebrows.
“I mean, she’s texting with someone about keeping an eye on me and eliminating me if I remember too much. I just haven’t checked on it yet.”
I pulled the leaflet out of my bag and started to type in in my phone when Sam stopped me.
“Don’t.” he said. “If something weird is going on then she’d be stupid not to be tracking what you’re doing on your phone. Use mine.”
He pulled his phone out of his pocket and I looked at him carefully before taking it.
“You believe me?”
Sam shrugged and pulled my mug away to clean it.
“I don’t necessarily think you’re being stalked by spies so committed that they’d actually marry you so they can keep a closer watch, no. And a lot of things you’ve said aren’t making much sense. But there are other reasons someone would put software like that on their wife’s phone and if you actually have gone a little crazy then, well you don’t seem like somebody who’d snap for no reason.”
I looked up my wife’s car and showed Sam the screen. She hadn’t used it all day.
“Okay. And she was definitely meant to be going to work today?”
I nodded vehemently and suddenly felt so dizzy I had to grab onto the counter beside me.
“Whoa!” Sam said as he grabbed me. “You okay?”
It took me a moment before my dizziness subsided enough for me to even nod.
“I haven’t been sleeping well.” I said.
My phone buzzed and I expected it to be from Robin but to my surprise it was a text from my mum asking if I was okay and saying she thought I’d be there by now.
“I didn’t tell her I was coming…” I said quietly.
Sam looked at me and then the text and sighed.
“Right, okay. Where are your car keys? I’ll drive. I don’t want your mum worrying but if you drive like this then I’ll worry and you don’t want that, right?”
I handed the keys over wordlessly and away we went.
“Hi!” Sam yelled as he walked me into my parents’ house.
“Is she okay?” I heard my mum ask before I’d even walked through the door and I knew something was wrong.
It wasn’t even slightly unusual for me to see Sam whilst I was in the area. It also wasn’t that odd for me to stretch the drive up to my parents out for longer than it needed to be if I stopped for food or decided to see a friend first or even once got distracted by signs for a car boot sale. It made no sense for her first reaction upon seeing me a little late with a friend to be concern.
“I have to take my things upstairs.” I mumbled.
Sam and my mum talked in hushed voices behind me as I headed upstairs. I almost fell onto my bed and realised how exhausted I was, only to be disturbed by a knock on the bedroom door.
“I brought your things up.” Sam said after I’d told him to come in. “Your mum said that Robin had messaged her and told her to let her know if you were behaving oddly at all. Said she was worried about you. Does she have a reason to be worried?”
I shook my head.
“All she knows is that I had nightmares and couldn’t remember being in a band when I was younger.”
The bed was so soft and I could feel myself sinking away. I knew this conversation was important and yet I didn’t care about it at all. I felt the mattress sink slightly as Sam sat down next to me.
“If there is extra stuff but you don’t want to tell me then you can just say so, that’s fine. Or you can tel someone else, want me to see if Cass is free to come and chat with you tonight?”
Sam loved me and loved solving puzzles, and here I was presenting him with a mystery that was holding my entire wellbeing in the balance. How could he resist?
“I don’t mind. Tell whoever.”
The mattress shifted again as Sam stood back up to leave.
“Sam?” I asked before he could leave, “Is she really going to kill me?”
There was a pause.
“How can she?” he said finally. “She isn’t here. And if she comes for you then she’d have to get through me first.”
I assume he left after saying that but my eyes had been closing even as he spoke and I found myself falling asleep as soon as he’d finished speaking.
And with sleep came a dream.
-—–
It was Anna again because of course it was. She was playing the cello with frantic passion in a dark room but it was just the same three notes over and over again. There were tiny, almost inaudible changes between each repetition but it wasn’t a song I recognised. It wasn’t really a song at all.
I moved closer towards her and only then did I get a chance to see the expression in her face. She wasn’t passionate, she was terrified. But something about what she was doing made it so important that she wasn’t going to stop. I didn’t understand and in this dream Anna seemed completely unable to see me.
“Anna?” I asked but a loud bang cut me off.
There was a window behind me like in a recording studio and it was beginning to crack. It looked like it’d been shot. Anna had been unable to see me but she could see this and she continued her mission of repeating the sequence of notes over and over whilst more gunshots on the other side of the window decorated it with spiderwebs of weaknesses.
This didn’t happen, but something almost like it did, I realised, with no idea what had drawn me to that conclusion.
The glass shattered spectacularly and I heard Anna cry out. I wanted and needed to know who was terrifying her so much but before I could do anything Anna moved her bow away from her instrument and drew it sharply across her throat. Bows aren’t sharp but dreams don’t care so the cut she made was deep and fatal. I ran to help her before realising it was futile and then turned to see who was coming in through the window.
But before I could, I woke up.
-—-
My parents were both being far too cautiously nice to me when I woke up. It’s not that they aren’t usually nice people – they are. They let Sam stay here for an entire month when his parents kicked him out and helped me navigate dealing with Cass in the dramatic year after her bipolar had developed but before she’d even entertained the idea of seeking treatment. I didn’t spend as much time with them as I should out of a strong desire to appear more independent but for large sections of my life I’d felt like I could tell them almost anything and they’d be able to take it in their stride.
It was the cautiousness rather than the niceness that let me know something was up. I don’t know what Robin had told them but it was enough that I didn’t feel I could even begin to talk to either of them about my recent concerns about how weird my life had suddenly got without them reporting it back. And why wouldn’t they? I’d been nothing but positive about Robin to them ever since I’d met her and whenever they’d met Robin had always represented herself flawlessly. So instead of discussing my concerns about Robin to my worried parents I acted as happy and normal as I could manage and then used them to investigate the other area of my life’s recent strangeness.
“Weird question – my friend was complaining to me that her daughter’s barely talked to her since she started uni even though they haven’t fallen out. But isn’t that kind of normal? I honestly can’t remember how much we talked once I started my course, did I go quiet?”
There was no such friend but I was hoping that by talking about how much or little I’d been in contact with them during university I could segue the conversation over towards exactly what it was I’d told them about. My dad thought about it.
“You were actually pretty chatty during your first year. You were quieter after that though, you said your workload had gone up. We only really got the occasional email from you then, and most of those were song recommendations. I think it’s pretty normal though, yeah.”
I moved the conversation onto other things to project my alarmingly false appearance of sanity but after ten minutes of chatting asked if I could borrow dad’s laptop for a bit. My phone might be being tracked but Robin hadn’t even seen the laptop dad bought last month, there is no way she could be tracking anything on it.
I found emails from the years I’d been at uni. Dad was right, they were mostly song recommendations. Not just to him either, I’d emailed them to Mum, Sam and Cass as well. Some looked normal and it wasn’t as though recommending songs to people was something I hadn’t done before or since but some of them didn’t quite fit. Recommending a dance track to Cass was so out of place it was almost hilarious and sending Sam a link to a classical instrumental piece was just as unlikely to be appreciated. The text of the email itself was strange too – recommending which bar and even notes they listen out for.
“Hey, check this song out!” one of these emails said with a youtube link to the song in question, “I’m really loving it recently, honestly the piano notes on the third bar alone were enough to make me realise why it was at number one.”
That didn’t make sense. The song in question was indeed one I loved but the notes in question weren’t necessarily my favourite and far more glaringly obvious was the fact that that song had never been at number one. Not here, not anywhere. It’d been popular, sure, but it just hadn’t done quite well enough. And if I knew that now then I’d certainly known it back then when it’d only been out two or three weeks.
I opened up the email to Sam titled “Classical piece you might like” and read the body text of that. Just like the other I suggested he listen to specific notes by a specific instrument but I also said the song was “kind of like Beethoven’s Fifth” I listened to it and I didn’t understand why I would’ve said that. Not only did it not really have many similarities with Beethoven’s Fifth at all but to compare a single five minute song to entire symphony to someone who didn’t even listen to classical music at all was ludicrous. Then I finally got to the bar I’d told Sam to listen out for the start of.
It was a cello solo. And it started with the same notes that Anna had played in my dream.
I’d been leaving myself clues, or possibly Anna had from my account and they were so cryptic that one or both of us must have been convinced that our emails were being watched. But why just random snippets of music? And why couldn’t I remember any of it?
I read every email but it was only after reading six of them that I noticed a pattern. Each one not only had references to a specific section of a song, it also had another cardinal or ordinal number elsewhere. “Beethoven’s Fifth,” “Number One” or even slightly more hidden ones like “The second I heard it I wanted to talk to someone about it.” The emails were telling me how to arrange a song. A fairly short one and a chaotically discordant one, particularly if I was supposed to keep the notes attached to their assigned instruments, but a song nonetheless. I still had no idea why I’d sent myself instructions for a song but I pirated some software that would allow me to stitch all this music into my frankensong and hopefully isolate instruments when required, then plugged in my headphones and got to work.
It took hours and every time I listened to a slightly more complete version of the song my chest got tighter. A large part of me felt that hearing that song in full would explain everything and yet a tiny part of me truly didn’t want to know. Every single note made me more convinced that Anna and I had been involved in something terrible and had done something we could never take back. Warm tears seeped down my face as I continued to work until finally I was done.
I almost didn’t press play. But in the end I needed to know.
Memories flooded over me – incomplete and out of order. I realised that I knew the woman that Robin had been texting. I realised that the reason Anna and I had taken such bizarre precautions was that we’d known that our lives and minds were in danger. Perhaps most importantly, I realised why a song had been enough to bring all of these memories back to me.
It was because once upon a time Anna and I had helped our psychology professor create a song that could delete memories even more thoroughly than this song had managed to return them.
That someone smart enough to create a song that could delete memories would also be smart enough to delete the memories of the people who’d worked for her wasn’t surprising. It wasn’t even all that surprising that she’d be willing to kill us if our memories came back. Even though I had nearly all of the information I’d been searching for I didn’t know where the Hell I was supposed to go from here but a buzzing sensation in my hoodie’s pocket alerted me to a far more pressing problem.
“They’ve accidentally overstaffed this week so it looks like I can come see you earlier after all,” the text said, “I’ll be there tomorrow evening.”
Robin had never before for in our entire relationship said that her company had too much staff in. Too little, frequently, but too many was unprecedented. Maybe my parents had said something that had made her see me as more as a threat or maybe she’d just decided that letting me stay out of her supervision was too risky but either way I had to figure out what the hell I was supposed to do about the woman who was willing to kill me.
And I had under 24 hours to decide.