Part One “The Sad Man” | Part Two “Amelie” | Part Three “Horatio”
Part Three
I was told that when the police found me, or should I say arrested me, I was lying naked on my bed, passed out, body gleaming with sweat, power drill in my right hand, my left hand resting on a breast white as milk, a body in a pool of blood, a hole drilled into the skull.
Consciousness had become a concept foreign to me, as I had been drifting in and out of a world of my own making, a world where I was with Amelie, a happy world, a world I did not want to leave and having been ripped thus from it, I woke with the taste of ash in my mouth and the feeling of acid in my stomach.
My eyes were swollen, bags of tar beneath them, and for a while I could only see moving colours, shouting and screaming, pointing straight at me. I decided the colours were bad, they made me nauseous and I wished nothing more than for them to fade to grey.
I told them so, or so I thought. Later, when I was shown the footage of my arrest, I did not recognise myself, nor the language of that husk of a man shouting into the camera. I did not know the woman next to me, nor how she had gotten there, she was nothing like my Amelie and seeing that stranger’s naked body on my bed – our bed – stoked irrational anger inside me. Then I saw the mark on her temple, the same mark I now saw on all the people around me. It was a trap. I was too late, the Sad Man had gotten to them.
“Horatio Helfinger. Quite a chase you have given us. Not to mention the trail of bodies you left behind.” The detective looked at me from across the table, lips twisted into a smirk, a scar running along his chin, a schmiss, worn like a badge of honour.
“Chase? Bodies?” I stammered, still trying to recollect my thoughts from the last time I had been conscious, before the red room, before the Sad Man.
“Is that how you want to play it? Amnesia? Oh, please. No one’s going to buy that. Tell me, why did you do it?”
“Do what?” I stammered.
“Amelie told us about your obsession with this fictitious character, this Sad Man. No use denying it.”
“Amelie. Where is she? I must see her. Please, you don’t understand!” I tried to rise but found myself handcuffed to the table.
The more the detective spoke the more agitated I became, he was talking about Amelie, the grotesque lies she had told about me, about us, and Marcus, he seemed to know all about them and didn’t even ask about the dead woman, not that I could have told him anything, and seeing as the evidence was overwhelming, I was certain that I would be spending the rest of my miserable days behind bars.
Listening to him was like listening to the ever-increasing whistle of a boiling kettle, louder and louder until it became one constant whine that drowned all other sounds and my mind went blank. Someone had removed the kettle and I heard the slow and steady pour of hot water into a cup, the scraping of a spoon followed by the clinking of a saucer.
I was back in the red room, sitting in the wooden chair. I tried to raise my hands but they were tied to the armrests. I struggled and struggled, trying as I might to free myself but the more I strained the tighter the ropes cut into my flesh until I felt a hot burning sensation around my wrists.
A potent scent of herbs struck my senses and suddenly on the table before me, was a white cup of the finest china filled with golden liquid, steam rising from it. It was all I could see, smell, even hear, I heard the liquid swirling, faster and faster, a maelstrom of light, it made me dizzy and when I looked up, I saw Amelie, holding a silver spoon.
“Oh, Horatio, you sad little man. Still trying to control everything?” Amelie smiled, dipping her spoon into the tea. “Time for your medicine.”
I felt the spoon and the hot liquid on my lips, in my mouth, and little by little, spoon by spoon, she made me drink the whole cup. Tea that tasted like memories of another life long forgotten. I was a vessel, lost at sea, rudderless, flooded by strands of meaning like stowaways, discovering aspects of myself I never thought I had. One, in particular, was burning brighter than the rest, or darker, for I felt such terror as I have never felt before, another self, a new self within the old, my body the cocoon.
“There you are!” said Marcus, standing next to Amelie, leaning closer to her. “You increased the dosage?”
She nodded as I swallowed the last of what I now know to be a catalyst, designed to amplify the effects of my serum which they sought to harvest.
“Why?” I looked at them, the room spinning in and out of focus.
“Because you told us to. A cure for the world. Did you forget? Immortality, Horatio. You said it yourself. The old must make way for the new.” Marcus bared his white teeth in a wolfish grin.
“I am the Sad Man,” I realised, however illogical it appeared to me. I was in that chair, my bald head covered in silver, somehow spreading what was inside me, infecting everyone. I had become the man I was hunting.
“It was your idea. Tether yourself to reality through one traumatic peak-end experience,” Amelie said, her voice cold and distant. “I am the one thing no version of you can forget, your anchor, your last link to your old life, no matter how many times you regenerate.”
“The serum. It worked.” I said more to myself, my gaze distant.
“It worked a little too well,” added the detective and the interrogation room came back into focus. “Why don’t you tell us about that serum of yours?”
“You are one of them!” I shouted, my bloodshot eyes wide, my heart beating wild in my chest. I had to escape, find Amelie, she was the key.
“I ask again, Mr Helfinger, where is the serum?” The detective’s face was so close to mine I could smell the stink of fear on him and something else. He was infected. I could hear his cells scream as they ripped themselves apart, metamorphosis through mitosis. It was beautiful.
“It’s too late. You can’t stop it.” In a moment of clarity, I remembered emerging from my fever dream, looking down on myself in the lab, syringe still in hand. “I burned it all down. It’s all gone.”
***
For weeks they kept me in that white padded room. I told them nothing, a crimson mark on each and every one of them. Their medication did nothing, my body would shut down and regenerate and when I woke I felt there was a hole inside my brain, a blank space where time had been erased.
I know not how long I spent there, and all the while, my only thought was Amelie, I had to find her, only she could end this. So I waited. Weeks turned into months, years went by and still no Amelie. Then one day, while I was sitting in my wheelchair in the garden, my body ravaged by drugs, frail and on the threshold to the next world, something changed.
The leaves of the nearby oak tree whispered in the warm summer breeze. My chair moved by hands unseen, past shadows of people petrified, eyes grey and empty, waiting for their future. I tried to call out to them, but no sound crossed my lips. As I sank back into the chair, a familiar scent tingled my senses, and memories of the past washed over me. My mind was as clear as the sky that day.
Had she come at last? I looked up but could not see for the sun was blinding me. Then a shadow fell over me and I was plunged into darkness one moment and the next the light returned and there she stood, my Amelie, the same as I remembered her, all these years ago. She smiled and leaned closer, whispering into my ear, her warm breath infusing my veins with newfound life. I rose to embrace her, one last embrace that would last for all eternity.
As we stood thus, eyes closed, entranced by her embrace, her lightness, weightlessness, surrounded by pure nothingness, I finally woke, as someone wakes from a deep sleep, opening my eyes, gazing into the abyss of her eyes, eyes that pierce your very soul, eyes that haunt you forever. I longed to follow her, so I let go. Happy to shed my mortal shell, I gazed up into the blue sky.
Free at last.
Read Next
The Sad Man is a tale in three parts. Please find parts one and two linked below.
Linked to these are the Sensorama Smart Home Drama episodes.
TFTD Community
Thank you for reading, and to all new subscribers, welcome and thank you for joining! Please leave a comment and say Hi in the chat or on Discord, or drop me a line via DM or email. I am always happy to hear from you.
What an opener! 🤯 A good adventure. I liked considering the Hamlet intertext - was this desired?
Brilliantly done, Alexander. Like you say above, having Horatio as the narrator puts the world on an uneven keel as you try to navigate your way through the story not knowing what is the actual reality
It reminded me of a movie I watched years ago called Jacob’s Ladder which had that same liquidity of perception. I need to go back and watch that again. Anyway, great stuff 👍🏼