He waited for more phantom footsteps, more chatter, but nothing came. Because nothing would.

  He continued climbing, ignoring the way his heart pounded.

  * * *

  Now–

  “Goddammit!” Gregor yelled, and threw the old, cracked wedding photo. It hit the cubby's back wall and the glass shattered.

  He stared at it, a dull headache throbbing in the center of his skull. His eyes dropped to the MR and he read the screen: NO RECORDING MADE.

  Of course not. Any residual psychic memory had long since faded away. The people behind the photo were long gone, with no one left to notice.

  What was the point if no one remembered or cared? No one looked at the memory cores. Why not just incinerate the belongings like their owners? It was all awful and, what was somehow worse, he hadn't even been aware of it until recently.

  And look at the reward for my enlightenment.

  On impulse, he reached into the container and pulled out the red sunglasses. He cupped them and closed his eyes, striving to open the mental doorway.

  He remembered the last memory, but got nothing. He had the memory of the memory.

  The flash was gone. He'd caught the bare residuals just before—pardon the pun—it had given up the ghost. There was no set length of time for how long an artifact's psychic energy would remain; it mostly depended on how traumatic the death was.

  Two centuries was a long time.

  Like vultures, his thoughts circled Amelia.

  Gregor had no idea who Amelia was when he'd picked up her barrettes; he'd been thinking of upgrading his vidcom plan.

  But all thoughts were wiped away when he'd closed his hands over her barrettes. He hadn't even had to open his mind. The psychic energy was right there, and—

  —he feels the slick condensation on the concrete floor. The air is moist, and each hot exhale beads before him. It smells like a monkey house in here. He looks into the corner and there's Amelia, cowering and shaking. She's been crying ever since the BADMAN—as she thinks of him, and Gregor knows automatically—took her and she can't seem to stop. The heavy steel door opens and he and Amelia flinch as one as an oblong rectangle of dirty yellow light falls on the floor. The BADMAN comes in, his work boots clumping, his huge fists swinging at his sides and Gregor, he, he tries—

  Gregor closed his eyes as they grew wet.

  And was she still there, in those barrettes? He thought so; her death was too brutal, too fresh. Locked in a container in a busier Hall, Amelia's last moments continued on, ever so slowly eroding away.

  And no one would notice. Since Gregor had pulled the psychic energy, there was no reason for any other MC to touch it.

  He covered his face while the rows of artifacts looked on.

  * * *

  Then–

  The voices began as a groundswell, rising up along the twists and turns behind him and, before he could stop himself, he was turning, ready to yell—at the phantom voices, at himself. As he did, his right foot plunged into a hole in the rubble.

  Time seemed to hang for just an instant, and a single thought shot across his mind—I can't believe I just did that—before his ankle snapped. A hot, galvanizing pain seized his leg. He screamed and fell.

  He landed hard, bounced, landed again, and it felt like his ribs exploded. His air mask was torn away and the wind promptly knocked out of him. He heard his ribs break like kindling. His temple hit a rock and black stars exploded across his vision.

  He came back slowly, feeling the rough surface of concrete, the cool touch of steel. He raised his head and a sledgehammer of vertigo smashed his skull. His mouth was full of blood.

  He began the slow process of turning himself onto his back, a part of him knowing that was a bad idea and the rest not caring. His helmet was still on, thanks to the chin-strap, but the light was cracked and flickering. He was coated in grit and blood, and his right leg looked like it'd grown two extra joints. Shock was already settling in, taking away the brunt of the pain, leaving instead a jabbing, burning sensation. He would've preferred the pain; it would've sharpened his mind, which wanted to fog over.

  He groped for his walkie-talkie, but found only the clip on his belt. It'd been smashed.

  “Fuck,” he said through gritted teeth. He coughed out blood.

  He rested his head back and tried to calm himself. It wouldn't help to panic. Not at all.

  And that was when he heard approaching footsteps.

  * * *

  Now–

  “C'mon,” Gregor whispered, “c'mon.”

  He hunched forward, holding a set of keys. Sweat coated his face. Veins throbbed at his temples. Other objects—wallets, money clips and hunks of plastic with words like “Verizon” or “iPhone” imprinted on them—lay scattered around him, their energy gone.

  He opened his mind and focused all his mental faculties at the artifact. There had to be something.

  The bright doorway in the darkness opened slowly, and Gregor launched his mental assault at it, pulling and wrenching and clawing and—

  —he's watching a man—Roger Herring, forty-three, a little portly—running down an office hallway filled with black smoke. His shirt was charred, his face burned red, his eyes as empty and terrified as a hunted animal. Gregor can smell his sweat and fear, hear his panting, the slap of his shoes on the tile—

  —the doorway in Gregor's mind slammed closed. Vertigo spun through him, rocketing him back into his chair.

  He slumped, panting. His migraine felt like a caged bull slamming its meaty shoulders against the sides of his skull.

  I had it, he thought.

  And look what it did to you, the interior voice said.

  Gregor raised a hand to his upper lip and his fingers came away bloody. His nose was bleeding. Not a lot, but enough that if things were normal he'd go to the clinic. If he had a mirror right now, he thought his eyes would appear bloodshot.

  Hemorrhage. The word floated up from his years of training in the Academy.

  “Does it matter?” he said. His words were slightly slurred.

  He set the keys down. Roger Herring. Killed during the Hathaway Bombing, August 6th, 2018.

  I remember you. How long had it been since anyone had done that for Roger Herring?

  He pulled the final object from the container—a palm-sized metal rectangle with ZIPPO faintly etched on the side. There was nothing immediately there, no easy flash. This was either almost dead or damn near it.

  I don't care, Gregor thought, mentally pressing down on the object. Lightheadedness smacked him. Someone needs to see these people.

  Even if it kills you? the interior voice asked.

  He ignored the voice and pushed at the artifact, willing it to give up its residual energy. Fresh blood flowed from his nose, leaving its hot, salty taste on his lips.

  * * *

  Then–

  Davis tried sitting up and his chest burst into fiery agony as his broken ribs moved. He spasmed and retched, spewing blood. His head was full of angry wasps.

  He collapsed, breathing shallowly.

  He couldn't hear footsteps any longer.

  There weren't any.

  He tried looking up the path. It was like looking through a window smeared with Vaseline, bordered with black.

  Wonder if Jerzyck will find me, he thought. Where the hell is that superstitious son of a bitch? It's all his fault, saying this place is haunted.

  He shook his head, or thought he did. Jerzyck didn't matter. He was alone and dying.

  The longer he laid still, the more the agony faded. A great lethargy stole over him. His eyelids begged to close, just for a moment.

  I'm dying where a few hundred people did. But those people had done it together. He was alone. He—

  Some remnant of his consciousness rose suddenly and he forced himself to scream. All he managed was a wet gargle, but it awoke the pain in his chest, which made it easier to think.

  Is this how it is? Just confused and stupid and fading away?

  Yes, it is, the interior voice said, somewhat sadly. It was what he'd always thought, he realized, without ever really thinking it. It was how his parents had died, his mother from cancer and, not long after, his father from Alzheimer's. His sister had said neither knew who she was at the end. They hadn't known each other.

  He saw movement and he strained to see it. They appeared to be people walking, but he couldn't tell gender or age, just shapes.

  “Ya…” he said with his numb mouth. “Ya…rescue?”

  The walkers paid him no mind.

  'Cause they're not there. Just Jerzyck's… He tried thinking of the word, and, still thinking—

  * * *

  Gregor poured every ounce of himself into the object, forcing whatever residual spark remained into a brighter psychic flame. Dizziness grew more dominant even as it faded, as everything faded. The feel of the lighter became faint, fainter, gone. Gregor bore down—

  —and blinked to find himself standing on a hillside composed of rubble and metal, with walls of the same towering over him.

  A man, broken and covered in blood, sprawled on the debris. He gargled out blood, then winced. When he relaxed, he looked at Gregor, his eyes narrowed.

  Gregor staggered back into a wall. He's looking at me. But that wasn't possible. This was 200 years ago.

  His fingers splayed against the rock behind him and he felt its rough solidness. What was this? It made what he'd experienced with Amelia seem like a vague daydream.

  “Ya…” the man said and, like a switch had been thrown in Gregor's head, he knew who the man was: Jerry Davis. Was he speaking to Gregor? “Ya…rescue?”

  Davis's eyes were slowly opening, slowly losing focus. His face relaxed and, in the center of Gregor's head, he heard Davis's final thought: 'Cause they're not there. Just Jerzyck's…

  Jerry Davis died trying to think of the word ghosts.

  And nothing changed.

  He touched the wall, himself. Still solid, still present. What was this?

  “I'm still here,” Gregor said aloud.

  Typically, at the end of the final moment, the world as the MC saw it went dark, the doorway closed and the MC pulled the studs from his temples. Something like this did not happen.

  “But it did,” Davis said. Gregor jerked. Davis pushed himself into a sitting position against the wall. His eyes were sharper than they'd been an instant before. “Is this what you wanted?”

  “What happened? Am I really,” Gregor gestured vaguely, “here?”

  “Your consciousness merged with the remaining psychic energy on the Zippo lighter, amplifying it. You threw everything you had at it and this is the result. You are the first Memory Coordinator to go all in, as the saying goes.”

  “How do you know all that? You died two hundred years ago!”

  Davis's face never changed, but, for all of that, he looked at Gregor as if Gregor were simple. “Jerry Davis died two hundred years ago, but the energy remained and whatever energy it has merged with you just as you merged with it.”

  “You're not Jerry Davis?”

  “I am and I'm not,” Davis said. “I'm the residual. The ghost.”

  “And you've been around all along?”

  “Not for much longer,” he replied, and the sky darkened, throwing the narrow passage into deep gloom.

  Gregor recoiled from the wall as the feel of the stone changed, become somehow artificial, almost plastic. “What's happening?”

  Davis's face was lost beneath the flickering glow of his headlamp. “The last of the energy's giving out. You gave it a shot in the arm, but you aren't in tip-top shape.” He heard the shuffle-rumble of Davis moving. It sounded like a recording of a recording of a recording. “Come here. You deserve a rest.”

  Gregor did, his legs slightly numb. He felt for Davis's shoulder, and when he touched fabric—like paper—he sat down. “What happens now?” he asked.

  The details of the rocks visible in the glow of Davis's lamp were softening, disappearing at the edges. The feel of solidity beneath him was fading.

  “We're going,” Davis said, then sighed. “It's the end.”

  “For me, too?”

  Davis didn't answer, which was answer enough.

  “I just wanted to see the people,” Gregor said. “Feel them for what they were instead of what I and the others made them.”

  “I know,” Davis said, and his voice grew distant, as if he were walking away. The darkness sucked the life from his headlamp. “And I thank you for it, as I'm sure Amelia and Roger and the others would.”

  Gregor couldn't feel the ground beneath him. The light softened further, becoming gray, then winked out.

  Just before the darkness took him, Gregor felt Davis's hand on his.

  And then that was gone, too.

  * * *

  Security found Gregor's body the next morning, Jerry Davis's Zippo in his hand.

  According to clinic doctors, he died of massive cerebral hemorrhaging.

  All the artifacts Gregor used were resealed and put back on the shelf.

  Gregor's body was cremated, of course.

  Like other Memory Coordinators, he lacked many personal belongings. Because of this, his Memory Coordinator identification card was sealed.

  When it was finally unsealed, seven years later, the Memory Coordinator handling it reported a weird doubling in the psychic energy. He told his supervisor that, instead of one mental doorway—the way he imagined his way into the core of an artifact's energy—he saw two, superimposed over each other, with one brighter than the other. However, he caught nothing but darkness beyond the doorways and a queer sense of emptiness.

  The supervisor, concerned, gave the MC the rest of the week off. Too much strain, apparently. The poor son of a bitch was crying when he came out of the flash.

  Gregor's identification card was resealed and never opened again.

  Paul Michael Anderson is both an author and an editor. His stories, articles, reviews and interviews have appeared in numerous venues.

  Anderson’s “Survivor’s Debt” was published as part of the monthly One-Night Stands series. His short story, “In the Nothing-Space, I Am What You Made Me,” appear in the anthology Qualia Nous.

  He is Editor-in-chief of Jamais Vu – The Journal of the Strange Among the Familiar, a magazine that features dark fiction, poetry, factual morsels, criticism and more.

  Anderson teaches writing, frequently giving workshops on the mechanics and business of writing.

  He has recently bought a very charming house, and Harlan Ellison regularly calls him “kiddo.”

  So, my boyfriend’s what I think they call a “scabhead.”

  He wants to keep on, like, kissing and stuff, but I don’t know.

  If he just had cigarette breath or something, that’d be one thing. But flames don’t even work here. I mean, you’ll see a candle on the table by the open door of a cafe sometimes, but its flame, it’ll be this flickering blackness.

  Anyway, I think Josh has maggots too.

  It’s not his fault—we are dead, I’m pretty sure—but, where maggots are involved, it’s not about whether you meant to have them or not. It’s about if I can see them at the corners of your mouth sometimes.

  You’re not fooling me, Joshua.

  I can’t just leave him at some corner watching the streetlight click either, though. Not because I love him or anything—please—but because that thin bone right behind your ear, that if it gets infected then you might as well stick a blender in your brain and turn it on. That bone on Josh, it’s got kind of a white glow to it now. On both sides.

  I don’t know what it means. I can’t even imagine what it could mean. I wouldn’t have ever even seen it except, when we first landed here and those things were in the sky, I did what you do: dove for the basement, dragging Josh by the collar.

  Down in that moist darkness, Josh cranked his head up to watch the sound of footsteps crossing the wood floor overhead, and I saw the glow from the back of his head.

  I cupped my hands over it, held my breath. After a while, the footsteps crossed back, left by the front door.

  I was crying by then. I hit Josh with the side of my fists, but it was really more of a hug.

  Josh just looked at me like he would a utility pole, or graffiti in another language.

  I guess some of us, we come through as ourselves. Others, they bring in the corruption from the other world.

  Josh swallows the maggots down when he thinks I’m not looking.

  The skin behind his ears, it’s warm.

  * * *

  The reason I know Josh is a scabhead is that that’s what one of the women at the edge of town called him.

  What I call her is an inkfoot.

  I think it’s a form of suicide, what they’re doing out there.

  Those things in the sky? There’s something about their shadows. The people at the edge of town, their new religion tells them that if they can run for twenty steps in a single thing’s inky shadow—they’re so black they’re blue again, like in a comic book—then that shadow will become a trapdoor they can fall through.

  I like to watch them run.

  Josh, he watches the things in the sky instead. I don’t know what they look like to him.

  “You killed us, you know,” I said to him once, out there.

  He just kept watching the sky.

  The people who run out there, I’ve never seen any of them get more than sixteen steps in a single shadow.

  The time that happened, I was holding my breath.

  I was waiting.

  * * *

  The way you get here is you’re suddenly standing in a closet, and it smells exactly like the closet you used to hide in at your grandmother’s house, or your uncle’s—wherever it was you played hide-and-seek best.

  You can’t hear it, but outside there’s the distinct sense that someone’s counting you down.