Amnesia

VIII.

Somehow, the sound of rain falling almost lulled Remy to sleep. She would have dozed off, had it not been for a loud crack of thunder that almost made her fall off the couch. In her life, she had used many guns, fired thousands of bullets, yet she never realized how much a gunshot could sound like thunder.

She sighed. She needed to do something to distract herself.

It had gotten dark quickly, as it tends to do in California, so she searched until she found a flashlight that needed to be hit every few seconds to keep itself going, and wandered around the unexplored part of the farmhouse. She came across a stairway leading up and tilted her head before she began climbing. The old wood stairs creaked ominously as she stepped on them, the illumination of the flashlight swinging around. Dark shadows danced on the wall.

She made it to the top of the stairs and swung the flashlight around. There was a room that appeared to be some sort of children's playroom. A small play tea set was set up on the floor and dolls stared blankly up at the ceiling. She kept walking and found a hallway. She shone the light down the hallway and saw there were a few rooms connected to it.

On the floor, there was a small toy. Remy leaned down to pick it up and saw that it was a carved duck, painted with vibrant colors. It was only then that Remy realized how wrong this all was. This was... weird. This had been someone's house. This had been someone's home. This had been someone's house. Someone had made this place where their heart and soul had been kept.

A sudden noise from down the hallway made Remy jump and almost drop the carved toy. As it turned out, there was a window at the end of the hallway and a tree was knocking the glass.

It looked like a long, spindly hand tapping its fingers on the glass. Like it wanted to be let in.

"Let me out, please!"

Remy put the toy back where she had found it and took a few steps forward, looking into the first room in the hallway. There was a bed, a child's bed.

But that's all that was there. No pictures, no posters. No dolls, or jump ropes, or lucky stones. Just a small twin bed.

"Why should we?"

When she went to the next room, her light swiveled and she saw the black silhouette of a person in the darkness.

Remy screamed and fell back, pointing her flashlight straight at the silhouette.

Four voices shouted "Remington!" at the same time from somewhere below her.

The light bounced back, blinding her momentarily. A mirror. It was a mirror. It was her own reflection she had seen.

"I'm okay!" she yelled, picking herself off the ground and moving around blindly for a light switch. Much to her relief and chagrin, she found a switch and the whole room filled with an ugly, sanitary white light. She could have been using lights this whole time? "I found another bathroom," she added.

"Where are you?" Hoseok called.

"Upstairs," she said as she walked to the remarkably huge bathtub. A bathtub would not be something she would expect to find in a desert.

"There's an upstairs?" someone asked.

"Mung-cheong-i, didn't you see the second floor as we were walking here?" someone else replied. Remy didn't know what that first word meant, but she could take a guess. And she guessed it was not a nice thing to call someone, judging by the offended squeak that came after.

"No, I was more focused on the fact that Taehyung had just been shot!"

Remy rolled her eyes and knelt down to open up the cabinet under the bathroom sink, hoping to find soap or something of the sort. Oddly enough, the creepy old house came through for her again, and she found a hairbrush and two chunks of homemade-looking soap. It had no scent, but that didn't surprise her. This house hadn't been a place where people really interacted much with society, even if they did have a mailbox. This was a place where people went to be isolated.