Caravellum

“Sit down, George.” The Major said, and he gestured to the stool opposite his. It was the first time the Major had said his name. 

“Sir.” George stammered, before making his way to the small stool. He was a big man, and the seat forced him to hunch himself over, shoulders pulled together like pigeon’s wings. The chess board from lunch, still set in the array of his defeat, sat upon the wooden table. Its pieces stood eternally battle-ready, carved with swords drawn from white birch and greybark.

“Do you understand why you’re here?”

“Sir?”

“You should know by now I’m not one to repeat myself, George.” He said with a smile that held no mirth.

George thought upon his objective, the truth and facade melding and conflating as the words uttered in their morning assembly rose up in his mind.

“To stop the invaders.”

The Major sucked his teeth, tonguing a piece of hardtack into the recess of his cheek.

“And which invaders would they be?”

“Sir?”

“Do you know the telltale sign of a possession by an invader, George?”

“No, sir.” George shook his head emphatically.

“Memory loss. A domination of the mind requires space in its memory, and it comes at the cost of others.”

George watched the Major’s jaw contort over the piece of dry tack, the ends of his moustache quivering with each chew. A sense of something unknown welled within the pit of his stomach, its form still ensconced in the shadowed recesses of his mind.

The Major gestured to the board.

“We’ve played this game before, George.”

George stared at the board. The echoes of ‘Queen to D4’ lapped on the shores of his mind, pulling for threads that, as if triggered by the investigation, were left dangling by an excision of the memories to which they once connected.

“As we have for the past fortnight.” The Major continued. “Some variation here or there – a Sicilian instead of a Scotch, a sacrificed bishop instead of a knight – and yet, each time, without fail, you allow the Queen to checkmate,” He tapped the dark square upon the board, “on D4.”

The Major ran his fingers, scarred with age-old lacerations, along the board, resetting the board with deft movements.

“So, tell me again, George, why are you here?”

The question again rattled upon his mind, and he found an unsettling lack of answers. He remained silent and watched as the board, reset and in file, revealed four grey pawns amongst the alabaster army.

The Major looked at it. “Ah, I wonder how they got there?” He removed three of the pawns and held them in his hand, using his finger to teeter the fourth upon the edge of its base.

George remained silent, fighting to keep his muscles from contracting and shooting him across the room to the door. The Major smiled at George. His eyes remained steely and resolute.

“Have you met an invader before?” He asked.

George shook his head, feeling the certainty he had once felt in the cause give way as the community he thought he had once known pulled loose as he struggled to remember their faces.

“Perhaps you should think harder, George.” The Major placed the pawns down and hovered his hand over the silver handle of his pistol. “And I mean, a lot harder.”

George felt his consciousness propelled in several different directions. It flickered across memories, each one too sudden to capture more than a glimpse of his life. The brook he used to play in as a kid. Beats of a drum, no, a heartbeat. The fraying tire swing. Juniper. The recruitment drive. The march. Flaxseed and ribbons. His mind spun connections between them, like a blind weaver amidst unspooled wool. Fragments of something else caught between the teeth of his true memories.

The beating of his heart so loud, the tautness of the red ribbon tied across his knuckles and the smell of flaxseed. Tia gripped his arm firmly, pulling him through the creeping juniper branches that lashed against his shins with a strength hidden within her. He tried vainly to pull away from her, no longer certain if he had understood what she had meant by her invitation. They entered a clearing, enveloped in shadows. Tom stood there, head crowned with a wreath of thorned bracken, rivulets of blood flowing freely down his ashen skin. Finn stood by him, carrying a silver chalice within cupped hands.

Beyond, in the darkness, were shapes. A court of shadows, forming and disforming in the shawls of the overhanging branches. George remembered fear, yet his mind fought against him in trying to recall the faces of the ones in the dark. Their voices oozed out from them, pervading into his mind, pulling at the edges of his sanity and replacing his thoughts of dreadfear with memories of community. The solace filled him, yet he now knew where these thoughts had come from. The community was a creation, the revolution a figment. With that realisation, the shapes turned to him, and he knew in that instant that they saw him. 

“You were meant to forget this.” The thing spoke to him. A hand snapped out from the darkness, gripping his forearm with black as tar fingers. 

The panic tore the recollection from George’s tenuous grasp, like quicksilver through his fingers. His mind snapped back to himself, the inertia of its return rocking him from the stool and onto the floor. He struggled for air through sharp gasps, the fingerprints on his skin forming dark stains.

“What did you see?” The Major knelt over him.

“I don’t understand.”

“The domination was fresher in your mind, it had not yet fully taken hold. The others were not as fortunate.”

The Major gripped George’s shoulders and started into his eyes, looking for something within them.

“Now, it is very important that you tell us what you can remember of their plan.”

“I don’t know.” George said, the wrenching of the domineering objective from his mind tearing out chunks of his memories with it.

He held his head in his hands as a mutter spoke in strange sounds within it. For just a moment, he could make out the briefest moment of sense. 

He jumped up from the floor, pushing the Major away as he dashed to the door. He was already out and moving through the hallway with pounding footsteps when he heard the Major shout from behind him. He careened around the corners of the sterile hallways, devoid of all action and movement. He wondered if this was Tia’s soup, or something else. The wool had fallen from his eyes now, and he could see what a fool he had been as he made it to the gate for sector 4. There were two guards standing facing the door. 

“Open the door!” George called to them.

They did not respond. He grabbed one of their arms.

“I said, open the-” The guard could not respond. The colour of their irises blended into the milky-white of their sclera as they oozed out from their eyes onto the red skin of their cheeks, capillaries of blood bursting into an urgent rose complexion. Their breath was shallow and pained, muttering broken syllables from their frozen lips. George pulled a pistol from one of their holsters and typed in the control code on the panel to open the security door. If he could just make it to the gate in time, then there was hope yet. As it opened, he saw, for the briefest of moments, the creature. Then, he felt his vision blur and fade as he fired blindly. He knew it wouldn’t help, and he knew the bullets were useless, ricocheting blindly from steel walls. One passed through his thigh, but he did not feel the pain. He felt nothing other than fear, as the Queen entered Door 4.

A voice spoke in his mind, the ghastly mutter that had echoed on the periphery of his mind now clear in his consciousness.

“Checkmate.”