Sarah reflected on her life as she sat under a discarded sheet of plastic in the rain. She could smell the stale odor of the alley mixed with the smell of fresh rain. She could remember a time when she loved rainstorms. A dim memory flashed through her mind of her, arms stretched out to the sky, reveling in the feel of raindrops splashing against her bare arms and soaking her hair. She threw her head back in exultation, opening her mouth in a silent tribute to the storm. The raindrops coming down at her seemed to slow in the air, standing out in stark relief to the inky gray-black clouds. One drop came down to meet the end of her nose, splattering right before her eyes. She could almost hear the collision as the drop broke into identical miniatures of itself.

A box truck brought her back to the real world, splashing through a puddle near her and puffing a cloud of black smoke in her face, before rumbling down the alleyway. Venomously, she let her gaze follow the truck down the narrow alleyway, as she drank in the sight left in the truck’s wake. Boxes and abandoned pieces of tarpaulin littered the little safe space abutting the walls on either side of the alley. Each box held an unfortunate man or woman, huddled under scratchy blankets or cuddling in rare pairs for warmth. Everything was wet and dirty, trash scattered here and there. The rain only exacerbated the refuse covering the pavement.

A couple days of steady rain and an absent cleaning crew resulted in an alley which mimicked its inhabitants in appearance. Rotting cardboard, dark brown and soaked in rainfall, stuck to the concrete, accompanied by food scraps decaying in open air. Sarah couldn’t decide which was worse, three straight days of rain, or the incessant buzzing of flies which the rain had muted.

She would like to believe you take the bad with the good, but bad didn’t have much company in her world. She reflected on the shit-stained gray walls in front of her, and the shit-stained gray people to either side of her. She couldn’t stand to look at any of it.

She stood up and folded the box back down to the ground, pulling the plastic sheet flat over it. She wrapped a coarse blanket, the only one she had, around her shoulders and started off down the alley. She passed people she knew and didn’t, raw, shameless men and women she had bartered, fought, and slept with in exchange for morsels of food they had found. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and the only two years of her life she could remember had been desperate indeed.

When she got into these moods, when depression or anxiety would sweep across her, she liked to walk. Her wandering would distract her from her contemplations, as her mind raced with a million fleeting thoughts. The regular cadence of her feet gave her something to focus on consciously, letting the thoughts flow through the back of her mind. Most days her brain would just conjure images of the outside world, things she had names for through experience. The majority of the images she had no name or explanation for, however, a fact she attributed to the Blankness in her mind.

The Blankness was a dramatic name she had come up with for fun, a macabre way to lessen the pain of her diseased memory. There was a point in her conscious mind where her memory began, shortly after a party of some kind. Anything before that was simply… Blank. She supposed she went to school, had friends, boyfriends, desires, favorites. She simply couldn’t remember them. She could recall the hospital, hazily, where she had woken up and the doctors had told her she was called Sarah. They had shown her the pendant that still spent its time anonymously on her chest, a simple gold heart with an inscription reading “Love, Tanner” on one side and her name on the other. She wanted nothing more than to remember who that was.

She continued to walk, absently turning and crossing streets, stopping to beg here and there when the crowd looked ripe. Her sojourn eventually led her to Central Park. The rain had cleared up, and the sun illuminated the sky through a veil of light grey clouds. Soggy brown leaves covered the ground, muting people’s footsteps across the grass, lending to the dreary mod of the day. Lone runners jogged the trails in misery. To her right, a young couple played in the light mist still enveloping the ground. She watched them as she walked by. A strand of scraggly auburn hair fell into her face. The split ends made her stomach turn, and she smartly pushed it back under her hood, looking past her hand at the young lovers. The pair kissed, and Sarah yanked her gaze away. They made her feel uneasy, for some reason. She couldn’t remember what jealousy, hate, despair, felt like, but she imagined they left one with a similar burn in their chest.

It was starting to get dark, so she directed her feet to the lit trails criss-crossing the grounds. The steady rhythm of her stride put her back in her trance, and she meditated up and down the asphalt paths.

She realized suddenly that there was no more light around her. She looked behind her at the orange pinprick in the distance, representing the nearest street lamp.

Just then, she heard a loud clap of thunder overhead, followed by a surprise drenching. She had just started to warm up, and a cold trickle down the back of her neck made her shiver. She pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders and a gleam in the distance caught her eye. She turned and looked at the last lamp in the distance behind her, then back to the much nearer light glowing through the trees ahead of her. The choice was easy, so she made it.

The path ahead of her curved to the right around a shallow rise leading into a hill, and through the bare autumn trees she could see light reflected off of clean white tile. The hill obstructing the trail curved up and to the left, while the trail turned into a tunnel through the heart of the incline. She shivered again and ran toward the underpass as the rain grew stronger, pounding on the thin hood covering her head.

The tunnel was about eight feet high at the apex, curving down to make a perfect semicircle, sixteen feet across. It rain straight, diagonally, about one hundred yards through the hill. Square boxes spilling bright white light jutted from both walls at ten feet intervals, leaving the tunnel clearly lit down its length to where she could see the other end, a maw of grey getting gradually darker. Closer than halfway down the left wall she could see a pile of grey and black huddled on the floor. She stared at it for a minute, deciphering. It looked like a person sitting with their back to the wall, arms wrapped around indrawn knees, sleeping on their forearms.

She decided there was no harm in passing through the tunnel and waiting out the rain on the far side. She could already hear it falling softer.

Sarah continued walking down the short tunnel, closing in on the gray mass huddled on the ground. As she got nearer she made out a door next to the shape, recessed into the wall of the tunnel. She tried to look away but found that she couldn’t. Her mind wouldn’t let her, giving her an uneasy feeling like there was something she should be seeing but wasn’t. She kept walking, intent.

Sarah walked on, head held high, dread slowly building up inside of her. She refused to look at the person crouched there, sleeping the day away like most of the shiftless people she knew, but she made sure to keep the figure in her periphery, watching for movement.

She was one step past the shaped mass when the hair on the back of her neck stood on end.

“Sarahh…” The voice whispered across the wind.

She stopped and turned in one movement, taking a step back as she faced the door. The bundle of rags on the floor hadn’t moved.

She was about to turn and continue walking, attributing the sound to a long day and no food, when it came again.

“Sarahhh…” The voice was quieter this time, more drawn out and vibrant, but she was sure it wasn’t her imagination.

The figure on the floor never moved.

“Do I know you?” It was the first time she had talked in days, and she was surprised at the crackle in her voice as she spoke.

“Hey! Do I know you or something?!” The rag-bundle hadn’t moved still, and she took a hesitant step toward it. She reached out her hand, leaning to touch it at the very edge of her reach. Her fingers reached the pile and brushed, ever so lightly…

The pile of fabric crumpled to the floor, deflating like a balloon. Sarah jumped back out of reflex, panting, as the odd scene slowly registered in her head.

She had just had time to turn and was about to storm off down the tunnel when she heard it again.

“Sssssarahh…” She couldn’t be sure but she swore she could hear two voices this time. The weaker by far sounded pleading, terrified and in pain. Something deep within her stirred and she was moved by this voice, love and pity and despair warring with her addled memory.

The other voice, a little louder, a little more insistently entrenching itself in her head, terrified her. It was laughing, and she was the joke.

Sarah turned and stared hard at the door as it gave a little jump. The bang echoed once and the voice returned, just a little louder than before.

She opened the door and walked in. The room behind it was dark, and smelled worse than anything she had ever smelled on the streets. The stench was old, stale sweat and body odor, food and refuse and feces all wrapped up into one. She almost retched but held herself in control.

A single lightbulb hung from the ceiling in the middle of the room, illuminating a small square area the size of a motel room. The corners were murky, and all were bare except for one, where a large dog cage sat on the floor, a man shoved up against the bars. He was dirty, his hair and beard tangled messes which ran down past his shoulders. A short chain was bolted to the floor in front of the cage, the other end lost in the darkness behind the cage. Sarah couldn’t think straight, and the whole tableau barely registered in the maelstrom raging inside her head.

The man seemed familiar to her, yet not at the same time. It was as though she was standing back and seeing this scene through frosted glass. She couldn’t make out details, but she had vague impressions, names and emotions flashing through her mind. She slowly became aware that this man was not the only other person in the room with her.

She turned and, in the opposite corner of the not-overly-large room, wearing a black bowler hat and business suit, was the same man as in the cage, this time clean-shaven and smiling. The darkness of the corner seemed to coalesce behind him and he blurred at the edges, like he was growing out of the darkness, rather than the darkness gathering about him.

“Sarahh.” The two voices returned, and this time she could attribute them to their owners. The laughing voice, so sibilant and quiet, whispered from the closed throat of the businessman, while the other, moaning, heart-wrenching voice, came from the open mouth of the man in the cage as he reached through the small gap in the wire frame. The sounds reached her simultaneously, and the resulting flood of emotions was so powerful it almost forced her to her knees. Her mind felt like a whirlpool, covered by a blanket of fog. The water roiled underneath, and the fog grew thicker in response.

Sarah stared into the eyes of the silent businessman as his voice, so quiet, echoed through the room. His face, so handsome, so smooth, felt like it was being pulled right from her memories, leaving a small hole through the shroud of fog covering her mind. Cold reality settled over her. She could feel it, actually feel the string drawn from memories she couldn’t access, leading directly into the heart of this mockery of a man. She grasped the string and, in her mind, pulled, tugging on the thread, distorting the fabric of the shroud. More memories came out as she pulled, and the thing in front of her hissed in response. The man flashed through her mind, laughing and tumbling through the grass, feeding her by hand on a small hill, a sunset spent in his arms.

She choked and fell, and the thread grew translucent. A different string was being pulled from her mind, and the form in front of her shifted, getting smaller, the darkness shaping it. A short woman in a blazer and pleated skirt appeared in front of her, and she felt the familiarity here too. It was her, auburn hair spilling in lazy waves down her shoulders. The apparition in front of her smiled, looking down at itself and then across the gulf between them to its dirty, ragged counterpart.

Sarah cried, and her doppelganger laughed, the same voice as before, spilling from the darkness surrounding her stolen body.

“Sssarahh… You taste… Sssso good…” The voice was singular this time, the dirty man behind her falling silent.

“I do not know how you defeated me lasst time, girl, but it will not happen again.”

Sarah shrieked as points of pure blackness speared through her mind, driving through the fog and striking home somewhere deep, deep inside her. The sound of her pain echoed through the room, just as it did within her own head, where she could feel the shafts of pure black pulling something into her head. No, she felt it as new emotions came pouring into her from outside. Pulling something into its new home.

“Sarah, Sarah don’t give into it! You’re the only hope I have, the only hope I’ve had for so long! Please, Sarah, I love you. Don’t give up!”

The man behind her talked on as she lay on the ground, weeping through her fingers. The darkness was too much, too heavy in her mind. She couldn’t do it, couldn’t push back.

“Sarahh.. Fight!”

Slowly, her conscious intruded on the fight raging within her. The figure had disappeared from the room she was standing in, leaving only a vague impression of her standing. She could feel the thing pulling, heaving, forcing its way inside of her mind. She was aware of something else, though.

The shafts of darkness she could feel piercing her mind had left gaps in the shroud of fog, holes through which beautiful, golden light was spilling. Memories drifted up through these gaps, as though they were lighter than air, each one forcing the hole just a little wider. She pulled on these memories, tracing back to where they came from.

She faded from consciousness, drifting down, floating on the radiance engulfing her. Tanner was there, his face flashing through her mind, smiles and laughter and warmth coming and going with each passing of beautiful, loving memory. She could feel his forehead pressed up against hers, in joy and dismay, holding her to stop crying, again as they laughed.

“Sarah, you have to fight. Fight for us.”

She was wrapped up in his arms, the two of them and nothing but shining golden light, coming from everywhere, embracing them both.

“I can’t Tanner. It’s too heavy, I’m being crushed.” She cried then, and he held her tighter, cooing into her hair.

“You can, and you know you can. I can help, but the thing wants you. You’re the one that has to fight it.”

She looked up at him as he brushed away her tears, and nodded. She drifted up then, letting the light carry her back up to where she could see the dark shafts piercing the wall of gray, high above her. She loved and cried as she finally understood, memories floating up past her face. She gained speed as she rose, rocketing through the golden light, pulling memories and emotions with her. She neared the shroud and was through it in an instant, a ball of pitch black now looming above her, sending needles down to steal her mind.

The shafts around her shuddered and she looked behind her. The memories floating up with her had turned into arrowheads, ripping thousands, then millions, of tiny holes in the fabric coating her mind. More light spilled through, and memories with it, all shining and razor-shard. Some pierced the shafts of pitch, staggering them, as others shot past her towards the ball of black threatening to invade her sanctity. Far, far in the distance below her she could see Tanner, standing in the light, looking back at her. She couldn’t pick out his features, but she knew he was smiling.

Sarah turned and followed the memories as they arrowed upward. The first few struck, then a hundred, then a thousand, as the light from below overcame the leaden cloud and surged up, speeding them on their way. With a small force of will Sarah was flying, catching up to her flashing memories, then passing them. She closed on the titanic orb where it was, being pushed back from her mind with every strike. Hands above her, she gathered memory after memory in her embrace, giving them shape and speed as they strengthened her on her way.

She struck, a hammer blow of love and light, strength and hope and failure. The orb cracked, serpentine twists radiating from where she had struck. Sarah brought her hands together above her head and, screaming out all of her rage and frustration and pain, knifed through the orb, straight to its heart.

The thing shattered.

The next thing she knew she was lying on the floor in a dark, smelly room with concrete walls. The light swung on its chain, illuminating every corner. Tanner was there, kneeling above her, her head cradled in his lap. He was laughing.

They got up, silent, and left the room, leaving behind unbelievable horror. Clutching each other, they watched as the door disappeared behind them, leaving nothing but blank, white tile.