a misunderstanding, and I’ll prove it to you.” I stomped to my door, took the key in my hand and then slid it into the lock. It was hard to get in, even though it fitted perfectly, and that was because I was shaking. Shaking from a mixture of excitement and nerves. But also shaking from something else. A sense of foreboding, looming behind that door.
“Wait.” I turned.
“What?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t know, but I have this feeling that I can’t explain,” I said.
“Maybe it’s the start of a memory,” Noah offered.
I nodded. “Maybe. Maybe not.”
“You can do this.” But he didn’t sound entirely sure, and this unnerved me.
I went back to the door and turned the key. It clicked, I paused and then pushed . . .
CHAPTER 31
The door swung open, revealing a dark passage in front of me. It was so dark, it seemed abandoned and dead. I shivered as I took my first step inside. It was cold in here too. Instinctively, I reached for a spot on the wall and found the light switch. I flicked it on and the passage brightened, but it didn’t spring to life. Those were two very different things, as I quickly discovered.
The passage still looked dead; the only difference was that now that death was lit up. I walked down the dead passage and scanned the walls as I went. Their emptiness and starkness not only struck me as odd but left me feeling utterly cold. The walls lacked life, color, clutter or any mark that told you that a person lived here. I looked down at my feet. Two white envelopes with my name on the front lay there. I bent down and picked them up.
“Where are you? Get hold of me. Eugene,” the first one read. And the second: “Where are you? I can’t find you, I need to speak to you. Eugene.”
I looked up at Noah and waved the letters. “From Eugene, the guy that filed the missing person report.” I stood up and walked down the passage. It ended in a small living room. I reached up and laid my fingertips on the light switch. The act had a familiarity to it, as if my muscles remembered doing it, even if my head didn’t. But when the lights went on, when everything in front of me was illuminated, I took a step back in shock as I stared into the space in front of me.
Beige.
That was the only way to describe it. Not white, not brown, not even cream. But this strange in-between nothing color that covered absolutely everything. Covered the floor. The curtains, the furniture. Surely this wasn’t where I lived? I could not live here. There was no way I lived here. I liked pink and purple and shine and pattern, and everything about this place was the antithesis of that. It was cold, boring, clinical even. Which surprised me even more, because it had become clear to me that I hated hospitals.
“This can’t be where I live,” I said.
Noah shook his head in what could only be disbelief. He ran his eyes over me, looking at my clothes and then at the room. He glanced between me and the room and back again.
“The key fits in the lock, right?” I asked the question even though it was a stupid one and, clearly, I knew the answer to it already or else we wouldn’t be standing here inside the strange beige dead place. I took a few steps into the living room. I’d never seen anything so neat, so precise, so perfect, so surgical in my entire life. Even more so than the hospital. There was hardly any furniture in the room either. Other than the beige couch and a small coffee table. Oh look, a pop of color! A single brown scatter cushion on the couch. All the remote controls were lined up perfectly on the table, a couple of magazines, a book, all in a straight line. As if someone had taken a ruler and made sure everything was just so!
I couldn’t live here, could I?
I started scanning the walls again for pictures, photos to confirm that I was indeed the owner of this place, but again, nothing. No evidence pointing towards the fact that I was the person that lived here. Who didn’t have any photos on their walls? Any pictures?
I walked into the open plan kitchen area. White countertops sparkled and gleamed back at me, as if they had been