As Trey stepped out from the door and returned to the impossible tower a sharp pain rang out through his head, he grunted and leaned against the wall, pacing himself.
"I suppose we all have our stipulations." A voice rang out from further up the steps. When Trey looked to see who had spoken he was rather rattled by the sight of a man with a viper's head, the man was done up in a slick black and white suit, one you'd see someone wearing at a funeral.
"You are?" Trey grumbled with a put-out look on his face.
"You didn't even remember that girl's name, why would I tell you mine? Honestly Mr.Packston you're truly subhuman." The thing took itself down 2 more steps as its reptilian eyes speared Trey.
"Fine, call me Mr.T, or just T. Doesn't matter. I'd like to offer you some advice now that you've collected a piece of yourself."
"Shut up! God! Shut the hell up!" Trey suddenly shouted
"Where am I? What's going on? How do I just leave? I've met two people in this hell and both of you are such pricks! You just show up out of fuckin' limbo and speak cryptically, trying to give me some advice! Just-"
Mr.T raised his voice to cut Trey off
"Quiet! I can't stand people who get angry over nothing. Listen, you can keep asking anyone here these questions but the truth is none of us have an answer, it's not that none of us know it's just that we can't answer. This is why I wanted to talk to you…" Mr.T descended to Trey's level and adjusted his tie.
"No one here will be entirely honest with you, at least not anyone but me. Don't trust the girls, that last one tricked you, don't let it happen again. The truth is, the memories you are picking up aren't even yours. They are just fabricated memories from deep in the asscrack of those girls who want to manipulate you into doing whatever the hell it is they want you to do!" Mr.T spoke in a quick and sharp manner, as if he were trying to get his point across in a stern yet quick way, and it was throwing Trey off.
"What am I to do?" Trey questioned.
"Kill them. You won't be able to get to that last one but as long as you kill the others it will be fine. Work your way up and kill them. There are 2- no, 3 more… I think."
"I'm not an assassin!"
"What other options do you have?"
"I can just trust the girls!" Trey snapped back quickly. Mr.T stared at Trey for a moment before shaking his head
"When the moment comes I hope you'll make the right choice." The snake-headed man said as he walked past Trey
"You-" Trey turned to reply only to find that Mr.T had disappeared. With a huff, Trey started back on his ascent up the tower.
It took much longer for Trey to come across the next door, about 20 minutes it seemed like, once Trey finally reached the door which had a similar look to the last, he took a moment to sit down on the steps and catch his breath. Trey rested his head in his hands and took a deep breath as he mulled over the memories of his childhood. That knowledge Trey had obtained started to creep and crawl through his mind making him more and more curious about who he was, why he was sent to this place, and why he acts the way he does.
"Time to start finding myself in here." He mumbled as he stood up and entered the door.
Crossing over he found himself in a metal room, sitting on the other side of the room was a large muscular woman who resembled the last lady he met. In her hands was a black orb, it was clear to him that this was a memory of his. Unlike last time he wouldn't have to walk for ages to get the memory.
"Trey?" The woman mumbled as she looked up at Trey who kept his distance at the other end of the room.
"Hey, you… bulked."
"I'm not the same girl as the last one you met, at least not really."
"Okay…" A silence followed the short exchange.
"Can I have my memory?" Trey spoke up
"The last girl helped me-" The woman cut him off
"I don't think you should remember this, you'll probably end up despising me just as much as I despise you."
The woman placed the memory aside.
"I don't expect you to understand. You can't leave now, I'm not letting you have the memory."
"What? What the fuck? What's your issue? I've done nothing to you!" Trey started on his way towards her.
"If you get too close I'm going to punch your jaw off." She muttered
"I'm just gonna get the- " as Trey leaned down to take the memory he felt a sharp pain as his head jerked, and the splashing of blood hitting the cold metal floor could be heard.
"Aaahh?" Trey gurgled. She had punched his jaw straight off from her sitting position.
Between the pain and the immediate blood loss Trey passed out, when he awoke he was back on the opposite side of the room. Sitting up and looking over, Trey could see his own corpse lying there, it was enough to make him curl over and retch.
"I warned you." The woman mumbled as she stared at him.
"You're sick!" Tears welled up in Trey's eyes as he scooted himself back up against the wall. He was afraid, so afraid that every muscle in his body was tense and he was shaking against the metal walls.
"If you were in my position, if you knew what I knew, you would have done the same to me." She said as she turned her gaze to the corpse lying on the floor.
"You're much more likable when you don't have a jaw to speak."
All that was running through Trey's mind was "how am I alive?" And "Why can I see my own corpse?" along with the excruciating pain he felt for the few moments he was conscious, the few moments he couldn't feel the lower half of his head.
"I just want to leave!" Trey cried as he pressed his hands to his face. The woman stood
"I think I'd like to kill you some more." There wasn't much time for Trey to react, she rushed forward and placed her hand on his face slamming the back of his head into the metal wall causing his skull to shatter and his head to cave in with a crunch. When Trey came back he let out a cry of pain and buckled over, his hands flying to the back of his head.
Over and over the woman killed Trey satisfying her own desire to see Trey in as much pain as possible. She would rip and tear him apart, biting into his throat and pulling it off with a squelching that sickened Trey, she would slam her fist into his stomach and tear out his intestines, blood pooling onto the metal flooring, she'd claw into him tearing into his flesh, shearing his skin. Crunch, rip, squeeze, pop, chomp, squelch, skewer, tear, peel, thud, laughing, dancing, eating, over, and over, and over. Every time Trey came back she would find a way to put him through more agony than the last. The metal room filled up with Trey's viscera, his tears, his screams, his hurt, her laughs, her dance, her pleasure.
It must have been 3 dozen fatalities before the woman let out a deep sigh and sat down in the center of the room taking in a deep sniff, glorifying in her work. Trey lay on the floor, no longer crying but waiting, preparing for his next death.
"I think I'm satisfied for a while." She said gleefully. Trey didn't respond, he couldn't process anything at that moment, when she noticed this she crawled over to him and grabbed him pulling him into an embrace on her lap
"You've made me very happy Trey, you've made me feel so good. For that, you have earned my love back." He stayed mute.
"Did you hear me? Trey? I said I love-" before she could finish her declaration, Trey reached to the side and grabbed one of his broken radiuses and jammed it into her eye, blood flowing down her face as he fell back, letting go of him.
Trey wheezed and scattered to get to his feet, slipping in his own blood yet still managing to push himself up and rush toward the memory. Once he had hold of it, it once again slammed into his chest forcing him into unconsciousness.
"When I turned of age, I still had no one to call a family, not really. I was set free from the institution and I went to a community college even though I had no idea what I really wanted to do. I lived on campus and majored in engineering even though I had no real interest in the subject. I made no friends when I went to college, and I was completely fine with that especially after I found that same hazelnut blonde, Ava. We had reunited in the men's bathroom where she had been waiting for her boyfriend, a shorter man with one of those insufferable man buns that made him look like a douchebag. Ava only kept me around at the time so I could be a fallback for when something went wrong with her man. I didn't realize I was being used.
I remember coming to her apartment and talking with her for hours on end only for our time to be interrupted by that man, I remember the dirty looks he would give me any time I was around, I remember the way she would avoid my glance like some sort of ashamed whore, because she was one! Above all, I noticed the bruises on her body the flinching when he would make a gesture, the look of fear when he got frustrated. I knew what he was. I wanted to kill him for it, I'm not burdened knowing that I had those feelings.
At the time I was working at a hotel as a janitor, one day when I was working during the night Ava had come to visit me. I don't remember how things shifted but I remember sharing our bodies in one of the closets, it felt almost taboo but I loved it. Ava was so warm yet so quiet during the whole thing. No one caught us but I did get fired afterwards because the cameras did capture us moving into the closet.
I didn't see her after we had sex, she wasn't around campus, and she wasn't at her place. I found out that she had moved to Mississippi, leaving her boyfriend and me behind. I did the only thing I could do and I moved to Mississippi as well. Through her friends and ex, I found out exactly where she had moved. Arriving at the town I found her workplace at a library but when I tried to talk to her she wanted nothing to do with me, she didn't tell me why she left, why she didn't want me around. Ava had hurt me. I felt so alone. I got an apartment and another janitor job at a restaurant and I started to keep an eye on Ava."
When Trey awoke he quickly shot up and looked over at the woman who was sitting in the corner of the room, her eye still oozing blood. In this light, it was hard for him to tell but think back to the last lady he met and now to this woman he had realized who they both resembled.
"Ava…" he mumbled
"This doesn't make sense, you're-"
"Different?" She finished his sentence. A beat passed.
"Yeah…" he nodded
"Very different, the last lady was too tall to be Ava, you are too big."
"You'll figure it out." She looked at Trey with a bored expression. Suddenly Trey grew a faint bitterness in his heart that flared up into a roaring anger.
"Who the hell do you think you are? You had no right to be angry at me! I gave you everything! I devoted myself entirely to you while you played around with my heart! And now you show this brutal display of hatred, telling me that I regained your love?" Trey looked around at all his corpses and clenched his hands into fists
"Bullshit! I should kill you for being such an ungrateful bitch!"
The woman stared at him with a blank expression.
"It doesn't make any difference now that you know what kind of pain you put me through, you won't listen."
"You don't know me!"
"You don't even know yourself, Trey." This just enraged him, it made him question himself. He walked up to her and wrapped his hands around her neck, thinking back to what Mr.T said. He began to squeeze as hard as he could as the woman stared at him without struggling, as if to tell him "I know you won't kill me." He hated her stare for that but she was right. He let her go.
"Fuck you." He muttered as his hands fell to his legs
"You wish you could do that again hm?"