The convulsion that wracked Elijah's body in the dead wood was not just a neurological storm. It was a breach—a catastrophic failure of the levees he'd built inside his skull since adolescence. The carefully constructed dam shattered, and the memories did not flow—they flooded. They crashed through with the force of a burst pipe in winter, turning everything cold and sharp and inevitable.
These were not recollections viewed from a safe distance, not the faded photographs one might examine with detached curiosity over morning coffee. No. They were windows he fell through, glass and all, tumbling backward through time with no rope to catch him. He was no longer a man sprawled on cold earth, fingers digging into frost-hardened soil. He was a boy. A terrified, trembling boy in a sterile, silent place that had no business existing outside of nightmares.
The Chair.
The name was inadequate, almost laughably so. Calling it a chair was like calling a guillotine a hat rack. It was not a chair for sitting, not furniture in any recognizable sense. It was a device for exposure, for the methodical vulnerability of the human form. It cradled him in cold, padded contours—a reclining throne of white polymer that seemed to have been designed by something that understood human anatomy but not human dignity.
It held him at a precise, carefully calculated angle. His head tilted back, exposing the soft column of his throat to the empty, bright air above. The position made him think of sacrifice, of altar stones and ancient rituals performed under indifferent stars. His throat was offered up like a gift no one wanted but everyone demanded.
Restraints, wide and soft as the conscience of whoever designed them, secured his wrists and ankles. A band across his thighs. Another across his forehead, pressing with just enough force to make resistance impossible without being crude about it. There was an artistry to the cruelty, a refinement that made it worse somehow.
He could not turn his head. Could not look away. Could only look up.
At the ceiling. At the array.
A complex, geometric constellation of silvery instruments hung there like a chandelier of medical intent—or perhaps a mobile designed to soothe particularly sadistic infants. Fine, needle-like probes caught the light like icicles. Lenses irised open and shut with mechanical precision, unblinking eyes that saw everything and understood nothing about mercy. Delicate articulating arms moved with a soundless, insectile grace that would have been beautiful if it weren't so utterly wrong.
They were positioning themselves, aligning with points on his body he could not see, mapping coordinates on flesh that had not consented to cartography. Each adjustment was deliberate. Patient. The machines had all the time in the world. Elijah, strapped and splayed, did not.
And then, the Masks.
They entered his limited peripheral vision like specters materializing from laboratory fog. Moving into the space around the chair with practiced efficiency. They wore pristine, off-white lab coats that fell to their knees, the fabric so clean it seemed almost aggressive in its sterility. Professional. Respectable. The costume of healing worn by those who had forgotten—or never learned—what healing actually meant.
But above the starched collars were not faces. They were voids framed in dull, hypnotic red.
The masks were elongated, oval, seeming to absorb the room's flat fluorescent light rather than reflect it. They were hunger made visible, absence given shape. Centered on each was a sealed inverted triangle, a container of some deeper mystery. Within it, a slow, inward spiral turned endlessly—a pinwheel of hypnotic suggestion that promised to pull your thoughts out through your eyes if you stared too long.
At each of the triangle's three points rested a closed eye, rendered in shallow relief with unsettling anatomical accuracy. From the sealed seam of each eye, a single, viscous drop of what looked like dark ink-blood was suspended in eternal descent, forever on the verge of falling but never allowed the relief of release.
Overlapping and surrounding this central symbol was the faint, raised impression of a stamped, six-fingered handprint. As if the mask itself had been branded by something that had one too many digits and wanted you to know it.
But the true horror, the detail that Elijah's young mind kept returning to despite itself, was the spiral's center. It was not a pupil, not a mark or symbol. It was a blank void—a perfect circle of absence, a hole that promised nothing. Not even darkness. Just nothing at all, stretching forever.
On the left breast of their lab coats, a small emblem was stitched with meticulous care: a cuboid prism rendered in silver thread. Coiled around it was a slender, anatomically detailed serpent. A stylized figure was trapped inside the prism, its hands pressed desperately against the transparent walls in a gesture younger Elijah understood with terrible clarity. Another figure stood outside, positioned between the coiled serpent and the imprisoned one. This external figure held nothing in its hands, but from the jaws of the serpent, a single, perfect apple was offered, hovering just before the prism's surface like a promise or a lie.
The masked figures did not speak to him. They spoke around him, as if he were a coffee table or a potted plant. Their voices emerged filtered through their masks, genderless and light, clinical in their detachment. They discussed him the way one might discuss a mildly interesting lab specimen—a curious beetle pinned to velvet.
"Parameters are stable. Synaptic receptivity is optimal. Far superior to the last batch."
The casual mention of a "last batch" sent ice through Elijah's veins. How many? How many others had been here, in this chair, under these lights?
"The subject appears very fresh. Like a little squirrel caught in a cage. All wide eyes and frantic pulse."
A soft, chorused chuckle echoed in the sterile room, a sound without warmth. The kind of laughter that makes you understand why some cultures believed demons walked among men.
"Don't frighten the squirrel. We need him pliant, not broken."
"Pliant is a state of mind. The procedure will handle the rest. Look at him. Perfect raw material."
Raw material. As if he were lumber. Clay. Something to be shaped and used.
Elijah—little Elijah, sixteen in body but feeling like a terrified child much younger—tried to speak. A dry click rattled in his throat, pathetic and small. The restraint on his forehead pressed him deeper into the padding, making even this tiny rebellion impossible. He could only watch the needles above him gleam under the clinical lights, suspended like the sword of Damocles rendered in surgical steel.
A new figure entered his field of vision. Masked like the others but moving with a more deliberate authority. The way it carried itself suggested this one gave orders rather than followed them. It stepped to a console bristling with monitors and switches, fingers dancing across controls with practiced ease.
"Commencing phase one. Anesthesia delivery."
From a port in the chair's headrest came a soft hiss, almost gentle. Almost kind. A cool, citrus-and-chemical scent filled Elijah's nostrils—artificial orange mixed with something medicinal and wrong. He tried to hold his breath, some desperate animal instinct taking over. But the gas was insidious, patient, seeping in through his panic like water through cracks.
The edges of the room began to swim. The terrifying masks blurred at their boundaries. The gleaming array above seemed to multiply, becoming a forest of needles, a galaxy of lenses. The inward spirals on the masks seemed to spin faster, pulling his consciousness down into their vortex like water circling a drain.
The voices faded, becoming distant echoes down a long, white tunnel that stretched toward nowhere.
"Squirrel's going to sleep…"
"Begin the cortical mapping. Prime the vessel."
Darkness, thick and velvet and absolute, rushed up to meet him. It was not peace. It was not rest. It was an erasure—the deletion of self, the formatting of a hard drive that still contained everything worth keeping.
And somewhere, in that drowning dark, young Elijah understood with perfect clarity that when he woke—if he woke—he would not be entirely himself anymore.