The Return

There was a house near the edge of the woods. Though the wooden perimeter fence had long since succumbed to the natural world, the house remained. Its squat, boxy walls were paneled with hardwood and the composite roof had been prefabricated decades prior. The silent years had not been kind to the structure, and that composite roof was collapsing inwards in sections, allowing shafts of midmorning light to strike through the crevices and corners in the wood, shattering the invisible relationship set between inside and outside. The paneled plywood floorings inside the walls were sick with rot, curling and peeling and molding as nature continued its time-redundant onslaught on this aging marker of human presence.

A limp remnant of a kitchen took up much of the central space of the house. What once might have been a stovetop sat next to the boxy form of a long-dead refrigerator. Beyond the kitchen, a spartan living room held the skeleton of a couch, reduced to no more than a series of framed splinters and degenerating cushions. A metal lamp stood bravely in the corner of the room, still plugged into the wall outlet that had not spit out a spark of electricity for years. Verdant vines had begun to tendril their way in through the cracks and holes in the structure, penetrating and caressing the floor and walls into a living mass of green and brown and grey.

A house implies a home. And though this house could only be called such with both eyes cast firmly to the past, it did share one element in common with a home.

There was a man in the house. He laid in the basement, tucked beneath desiccated floorboards and distanced from the light of the sun. Underground, he was ensconced in a protective shield, closed off from the elements by the translucent metal and glass box he lay within. He was of middling height, with a beard sharp and wiry and ragingly untended. There was a sallow quality to his skin, a dimmed, muted grey-green pervading the tan of his natural complexion. His limbs were thin and lank with disuse, and he was clad in nothing but a loincloth. His eyes were firmly shut, deeply sunken and etched like stone into the marble of his face. Attached to his right arm was a metal band that blinked slowly with the eternal light of a medical sensor. The inside cuff of the band housed a complex series of needles which were penetrated deeply into the meat of the man’s forearm. A cuff with similar wires and tubes was wrapped around his neck. Sitting heavily on his birdcage chest was a small heart-shaped locket, emblazoned with the initials “LS”. The locket was attached to an ancient beaded chain that traced its way behind the curve of the man’s neck.

But atop the man’s head, covering his skull from the cheekbones up, was a device that held his mind at bay. On one side of the device, an ancient label bore a name and a designation: RAMPART REALITY SYSTEMS, BRAINTREE ACCESS HUB. The dark plastic and metal of the device glowed with subtle sensor lights, with glints and winks of sharp-flashed hues catching the glassy periphery of the curved box. Centered on the temple, there was a single LED with the label “Power”. It had remained a steady, gentle green for all the decades that had passed since it had first come online.

It changed in an instant. With a tempo entirely unlike the sedimentary decay of the house, the green light began to pulse. It blinked once more. And once again. There was a soft mechanical whine, like the sound of a miniature Atlas dropping to his knees, weight sliding away with the gravity of the world. And then, the green light faded. The device stopped emitting light. The box cooled slightly.

Two sounds cracked through the dry air of the basement. The box snapped and wheezed, ancient mechanisms thrusting plastic-lidded doors open, swinging wide like the wings of a butterfly. In that same moment, there was a gasp, throaty and cracked and rasped as the man in the box took in his first natural breath in decades.

A moment passed. His chest rose and fell, rose and fell, rose and fell, and then his eyes crept open. The man looked up at the ceiling of the basement, smelling the vegetative, musted scent of the underground and feeling the cool plastic on his back. After another moment, he screamed.

It was a dry, brackish sound, inhuman in its tenor. It was the sound of an animal on a wintered night as it turns heel to face the predator on its tail. It was the sound of a glass shattering on a stone floor and the sound of a torch catching fire.

The man’s eyes were wide, dilated with nausea and fear as he reached his hand up to his neck and yanked the needles out of him. There was a sickening sliding and popping sound as the steel-tipped edges retracted from his skin, but this gave him no pause as he began to tug on his shackled right arm. With another slide and pop, the needles left his body altogether. The man slid to the side of the opened box, and thrust one of his dangling feet out over the edge. Lowering it slowly, he made contact with the ground, mulched and dirt-stained. He rotated into a seating position and, bracing one arm against the box, tried to rise.

Immediately, muscles long-dormant shrieked in protest. Atrophied and skeletal, his legs gave out and he collapsed back into the box with a dusty thud. The force of the collision proved just enough to fritter away whatever forces had held together the chain of the locket around his neck, and it dropped to the floor.

Tangled in his own limbs and smarting from the fall, the man lay incoherent in the box. His fevered mind was not yet ready to produce a coherent stream of consciousness, but he was sure he had been somewhere else only a moment ago. He tried to remember, desperately, hungrily, the vague memory tugging on the corner of his brain, the memory of somewhere else, maybe someone else? Who? Who was he? Where was he? The base inquiries began to line up as the animal side of him retreated.

He made another attempt at standing. This time, the man was able to cajole his withered form into an upright position, though one only sustained by the precarious grasp he maintained on the sides of the box. He scanned the basement, head slowly pivoting as he took in his surroundings. It was a dank and modest room, walls framed with aged wooden planks that held together despite their obvious age. There were crates strewn around stacked across the floor. Diagrams he did not recognize were scratched onto all manners of parchment all across the walls. On the far side of the room sat a rickety staircase leading out of the basement. A thin bar of yellow-hot light shafted its way down the stairs and projected onto the far wall, the remnant of a sun almost set.

It took him the better part of two days to find the strength to walk across the room. The only way the man could gauge the passage of time was by that glowing rectangle of sunlight projected onto the corner of the far wall. Given its size and color, he could approximate a rough idea of where the sun was in the sky.

The man spent much of the time resting. When he was not staring across the expanse of the room, or trying to take tottering steps around the box, he was asleep, thin frame laid back against the plush of the box. And when he was asleep, he would dream.

They were floating back to him now. The memories.

Mainly, they were tidbits. His favorite breakfast. The color of his mother’s hair. A coastline he had once seen. But every so often, something big would crawl its way back. The outline of a face that might have been his brother’s. A lingering, troubling feeling that would creep up his spine whenever he’d look, really look, at the box. And then there was the abandoned nature of his surroundings. Where was he? Where were the others? The questions remained vacuous in his head.

But late on the second day, he managed to limp over to a stack of crates near the far wall. That morning, he had been unsure if he could summon the strength to do it, but as the hours grew longer, a new issue had reared its head. The man was hungry. He feared that if he were to wait much longer, he might never find the energy to leave the box, let alone the basement. And though there were no mirrors in the confined space, the man knew he was not in good shape. His skin was drawn tight as a band across his birdlike bones, and when he turned his head too quickly, spots flashed in his eyes. The punctures from the needles had begun to scab over, but they were not healing nearly as quickly as it seemed they should.

The man searched the crates for hours. In his weakened state, it had been exceptionally slow going. Each crate was at least as tall as his knees and the energy it had taken to slide them to the floor and pry open the lids had left him nearly delirious. But in the third to last crate on the pile, he found his reprieve. Heaving with all his might, he had pried off its splintery lid and found it nearly half-full with rows and rows of canned beans. The tin-plated cylinders still had labels attached, though they were stained beyond the point of comprehension. The man whooped for a moment, a halted staccato sound of celebration. He reached into the box with a trembling hand and seized a can. It had a small pull-tab on the top and seemed completely sealed on all faces. The idea of food was growing nearly overwhelming as his stomach moved from a growl to a roar. The man scrabbled his fingernail under the tab and pulled. With a sharp snap, the tap rolled back the thin steel and exposed the small brown and black beans to the man’s line of sight. He brought the can up to his lips, tilted his head back, and the salty-sweet taste of the beans met his tongue as they slid into his mouth. Time ceased as he sat there eating. Sound and sensation and everything else stopped and it was just him and the can and its contents as the man ate for the first time in what could have been weeks or years or decades or more.

He fell asleep nearly immediately afterwards, can empty on the floor, head lolling on his neck.

And this time, he dreamed of Lara and the kids. He dreamed of their life together in a world far, far from here. In the phantasmal cityscape of his slumbering mind, the man remembered his family. But he also remembered the Braintree.

When the man awoke, a few more hours had passed and the basement had grown chilly with the evening drafts. His earlier dream remained deeply fogged in recollection, but that one word was lodged in his head: Braintree. He had seen that somewhere before. The man stood on sturdier legs and stretched his aching joints with a slow stroll across the basement.

The man bumped his knee on the box. In his haze, he had strode directly into the metal frame of his onetime tomb. But as he looked down, he saw it. On the side of the box, there was an ancient label. It bore a name and a designation. RAMPART REALITY SYSTEMS. BRAINTREE ACCESS HUB. He dropped to his knees, neck craning as he examined the faded label. As he kneeled down, a metallic glint caught his peripheral vision. Sitting gently atop the dusty floorboards underneath the box, there was the heart-shaped locket. The man pulled it slowly out from under the box and sat down to examine his prize. Those wrought-iron initial stared back at him. LS. He depressed the tiny clasp at the base of the locket and its front sprung open with the barely audible gasp of ancient hinges.

Inside were two miniscule folded pieces of long-yellowed paper. One was folded into a little rectangle but the other lay half-open. It was a picture of a woman’s face. She was dark-haired and laughing, surely no older than thirty. The man pulled the photo out of the locket with trembling fingers. Before he turned over the printed paper, before he saw the single word scrawled on the backside, he knew. Lara.

But there was still the matter of the other piece of paper. As the man unfolded the second piece, he found it was covered edge to edge in a minute handwriting, front and back. He recognized the writing instinctively. It was his handwriting. And if that were true, then this was his locket too. The man felt sure of that now. He turned over the note and began to read.

Later, hours later, once he had read through the note for the hundredth time, the man rose and without so much as a pause, began to make the preparations. The locket, restrung onto a piece of twine, hung stolidly around his neck once more.

On the morning of the third day, the man left the basement.