It happened fast and without warning, and his disappearance never made national news. It tried. A few hopeful publications, mostly local, blew it over their front page spreads in hopes that it might gain feet. But it never caught fire; it simply fizzled out, withered, died.
Which might have been a tragedy had the six-year-old boy not been found. Or, rather, returned. He wandered out of the wood nearly two months after vanishing from thin air. His clothes torn, his hair scraggy, his ribs distending through his pale belly – but he was alive, and by all accounts, his story ends there.
It doesn’t.
And if you’re familiar with the disappearance of Jeremy Kent, I suggest you stop reading now. Take the wholesale happy ending and covet it, hold it dear, protect it like a flame on the brink. Happy endings are rare enough, and if you continue reading I can’t promise you won’t lose hope altogether.
But the truth is rarely a warm pat on the back – the truth ofttimes rips apart the soft, safe notion that the world is a decent place, shreds it to ribbons, which, I fear, is the case with this story.
Then again, what the hell do I know?
I guess nothing more than the story as it was told to me.
SEPTEMBER 29th, 1989.
You’ve never seen anything like Yellowstone in autumn. A world captured in amber, a vast theater alive with the changing of seasons. The trees, burnt orange, released their leaves in great trickles that blanketed the ground, crunching underfoot like the spines of dead insects. Halloween was just around the corner, and you could taste it on the wind – it rode the air like birdsong, sweet but imperceptibly ripe, like a candy apple gone to corruption.
It was a good taste though, even if an undercurrent of rot hid beneath the first, sweet bite – Jeremy was sure of that. It was a good taste. It meant everything was going to be alright.
Nothing could be perfect all the time, and he was proud he knew that – it was a “very mature notion” for a seven year old, according to Miz Calhoun, who despite his “very mature notions” still gave him a C+ on that Pop Quiz last year.
He sighed and his eyes roved, capturing the environment, peering into the shadows, the tangles of undergrowth that lined both sides of the trail – it was thin and winding, slicing around bends where the trees had been felled by The First Men.
To his left, a stream burbled, cutting over rocks as pink streaks of salmon fought the current. Wildlife shot through the brush, always just out of view. He tried to see a bird. Or a deer. Or a Sasquatch. All he saw was big fat nothing. He could hear the birds, protesting silence with their sharp cries, in the trees no doubt, in the air, and Jeremy wondered what they had to worry about. Couldn’t they just fly away?
He trudged along behind mom and dad, plunging his hiking stick (which was really just a branch he had collected up along the way) into the hard Earth. Driving himself forward, step, step, step, step. He slashed at the air. He was knight.
It was lovely, he thought. He wanted to say it aloud. He liked that word. Lovely. He’d heard Cagney say it once on an old gangster film, and it had stuck to his brain like, well, like nice words did.
“Lovely,” he said, voice hoarse with the cold.
“Wazzat?”
That was dad, glancing back.
“Nothing,” Jeremy said, suddenly embarrassed.
He looked up at the sky – gunmetal gray, choked with clouds, pregnant with snow. Just ahead, a great mountain rose above the canopy, its high peaks snow-capped, like the horn of some primitive creature that had fallen with the dinosaurs. Or could it be from before? Jeremy’s mind raced with the archeological implications of his discovery. He imagined a time, long ago – a time of knights and kings and queens and princesses, and the epic clash of steel on steel, the ogres beneath bridges and dragons belching flame, the great plated creature that now loomed before him, a rhinoceros of sorts, a Jeremy-oceros. He smiled. That sounded very good. A creature named after him. Imagine that! Kyle would shit bricks when he saw Jeremy on the six-o’clock–
And it was with this thought, a smile tugging at his lips, that the world stopped. It seemed to flicker, jarring off its axis for a hair of a second.
A thousand miles away, a woman in a supermarket forgot what she was looking for on aisle nine. Fifty miles away, a baby who had been wailing nonstop all morning fell quiet. And five feet away, Mr. Kent realized his watch had stopped.
He smacked it and the world was returned – the birdsong came, louder than before, the rustling of wildlife disturbed the brush, and Mr. Kent, seeing that his watch had frozen at 3:13 precisely, turned back to ask his son if he wanted to wind it.
It had always been their thing – Jeremy enjoyed the responsibility of controlling his father’s time, and Mr. Kent was more than happy to oblige him. Truth was, winding his watch was a pain in the keister. The crown stuck, and you really had to –
That was when the world stopped a second time. But just for him. The trail behind him and his wife was totally empty.
Jeremy had vanished.
No one saw the man in the suit, and if they had, they wouldn’t have considered it strange. A man in a suit standing in the woods, that was a strange thing – but when you saw him, and he saw you, your eyes had a way of skipping over him, assimilating him to the environment, a trick of the eyes, of light and shadow. He was watching Jeremy. He was listening to him. He saw it all unfold. He heard the father’s cry.
His parents spent the next hour screaming his name. And the next eight after that with a search party, combing the treeline in a grid, a helicopter chopping overhead as a spotlight blasted through the darkness of night. A dragnet fell and came up empty, again and again, day after day, week after week, as the birds flew north and the deer chartered a path toward the mountain, and all the while his parents lost hope, trying to hold on, unable.
The weather had turned; the nights were harsh, the land raw, the animals hungry… for winter was nearly here.
It was November 14th, 1989 when Jeremy Kent trudged out of the woods, eyes glazed, skin pale, his walking stick leading the way as he marched onward into the campsite like a little toy soldier.
A camper screamed when she saw him, trucking along with nowhere to go. The scream snapped him out of it. He froze like a deer in headlights and looked wildly around. Then his eyes swim. His legs wavered. And he collapsed. Folded like an old pair of pants with no one inside. Poof. Over-and-out.
He was airlifted to a hospital – severely dehydrated, malnourished, on the brink of death. When he awoke, they asked him what happened, asked him again and again, and I told them, I tried to tell them – but they didn’t believe me.
I didn’t remember. It was all empty, a void, and they thought I was lying because how was such a thing possible? And mom and dad tried to coax it out of me, asking if I’d been abused and I didn’t know what that meant and I JUST. COULDN’T. REMEMBER.
… … …
That much was true. I didn’t remember. But I lied about one part, because there was something I did remember – and I’ve carried it with me since the day I returned.
The hypnotist was staring at me. She was lovely. Maybe thirty with a good, firm face and eyes that could cut – twin blues staring out from beneath a tumble of auburn curls.
I didn’t blame her – it was a crazy thing, all of it, not that she seemed to be judging. She was considering, chewing through it in her head.
The silence was making my teeth scream. “Can I smoke?” Before she could object, I lit one. My eyes stopped tingling. My leg settled.
She slid a bowl across the coffee table for my ash. It an antique thing that had no right being soiled by cigarettes, but what the hell. She knew I needed it.
“So…” she began, then stopped, shook her head, and sat back to further ruminate on my request.
Claire Hoskins didn’t dress like a hypnotist, more like a lawyer who kills your wallet. A velvet switchblade. A boardroom shogunate. Suit, skirt, serious expression resting on her face. She was the best. And her by-the-hour rate reflected that.
As did her office. Tall, well lit, done up in inoffensive creams and soft, lived-in furniture.
The bookshelves betrayed her. Instead of leather-bound tombs on the virtues of psychotherapy, her shelves were crowded by a vast collection on the unorthodox. Astrology, horology – again, with the time – and the only sign that she had fancy ideas about the world was the crystal ball on her desk.
“So you want to forget,” she said finally. “You think I can hypnotize and make you forget.”
I drew, blew smoke, ashed.
“You can make people quit drinking, quit these –” drew, blew smoke, ashed.
“Right,” she said, “but habituation is different. I can take away the desire, but not the urge.”
“That’s a paradox.”
A trace of a smile. “The human mind is a paradox. It’s a puzzle without answer –”
“You think I’m crazy.”
She blinked. “No, Jeremy –”
“James.”
“No, James. I don’t think you’re crazy. I looked you up. After I got your email.”
I knew she would. I rolled my shoulders. And?
“And… you went through a terrible thing.”
“How do you know? For that matter, how do I know? I can’t remember, did ya miss that part? The part where it’s a great big fucking pit of static? All of it. Poof, here’s me, I pull a vanishing act and come back two months later with fuck-all for brains. How does that happen? Abracadabra??”
It tumbled out of me. I shut my mouth. Corking it off. But I saw it was too late – I was losing her. She thought I was a nut. A hypnotist thinking I was a nut. The hell is that?
“Okay, look, I’m sorry, I just… Claire, listen to me – can I call you Claire? What do you call a hypnotist?”
“Claire is fine.” But she was eager to get me out of her office.
A beat.
“I lied, okay? That’s why I came here – not because I lied, but because what I lied about.”
She looked at me, her eyes reading mine. “I have trouble sleeping. That’s why I… look, I’ve tried it all, pills, weed, booze, white noise, but it’s all the same, it’s the same thing every night, and I swear to God if I don’t get fixed I’m going to blow up, I swear, I’m going to pop like a goddamn zit. Probably on the underside of some bridge. But I’ve tried. I’ve fucking tried. And…”
I took a trembling breath. My lungs were getting tight. The crisp tick of a grandfather clock cut the silence. Pain hit my eyes. A face in the darkness. Smooth, smiling, hair drawn back in a black streak. The man in the suit.
“I lied. To all of them. Because there was one thing I did remember.”
This was hard. I hesitated. Looking at the curling stem of ash. Hesitation gluing my tongue to the roof of my mouth. I swallowed.
“I remember dying out there. And I want you to help me forget it.”
I almost wish I’d stopped there. Given up on the whole operation, and just bottled the dreams, maybe sent for a prescription whatever, drowned myself in whoever, any-fucking-thing but what came next.
But I didn’t leave. I sat there as she processed what she’d been told. I listened as she explained the only way it might work. And I bought it all, yes-please, medium well, no I don’t need that with salt.
There was still time to get out, but I didn’t, because I needed it to work. More than anything. More than anything ever.
She was going to hypnotize me. She was going to make me remember so that I could forget.