Prologue

The last thing Margaret Henley remembered correctly was the taste of copper pennies.

She stood in her kitchen at 3:47 AM, blood running from her mouth in thin rivulets that she didn’t notice, couldn’t notice, because the memory of having teeth had begun to fade. The window above her sink reflected not her face but her daughter’s—Sophie, dead three years now, killed in the accident Margaret had caused but couldn’t quite recall.

Except Sophie’s reflection was aging in reverse, skin tightening, wrinkles smoothing, until a child of perhaps seven stared back with hollow sockets where eyes should be.

Margaret tried to scream but produced only a wet gurgle. Her tongue found the spaces where molars had been moments ago, or years ago, or never. Time had become negotiable in Millbrook Falls, and memory had grown teeth of its own.

She reached for the phone, fingers fumbling with numbers she’d known for forty years. But whose number? Her mother’s? Her mother had been dead for—no, her mother was in the living room, wasn’t she? Margaret could hear her humming that old song, the one about birds that weren’t really birds but the spaces between heartbeats.

The penny taste intensified. Margaret’s fingers found her mouth, probed the gaps, and came away red. Not blood, she realized with the last fragment of rational thought she would ever have. Not blood at all.

Memory fluid. The stuff that leaked when you forgot how to remember forgetting.

In the reflection, Sophie’s child-face split open vertically, revealing rows of what looked like tiny photographs—each one a moment Margaret had lived but no longer owned. The child-thing’s mouth moved.

“Mommy, you’re leaking.”

Margaret Henley forgot her own name at 3:52 AM.

By 3:53, she had forgotten she was forgetting.

By 3:54, the kitchen was empty except for sixty-three teeth arranged in a perfect spiral on the linoleum, each one containing a memory that would never again belong to anyone.

The spiral pulsed once, gently, like a sleeping heart.

Then it began to grow.

Part One

Chapter 1

Dr. James Carroll had been counting the holes in his memory for six days when the first patient arrived at Millbrook General with their past literally seeping from their pores.

The patient—Mrs. Chen from Sycamore Street—sat rigid in the examination room, clear fluid beading on her skin like perspiration. But perspiration didn’t contain fragments of Christmas mornings from 1987, complete with the smell of pine and her father’s cigarette smoke. James could see them, somehow, projected in the droplets: miniature dioramas of a life being secreted through her skin.

“When did this start?” he asked, though he already knew the answer would be wrong. Time had become unreliable in Millbrook Falls. Yesterday might have been a week ago. Last month could have been this morning.

“Tuesday,” Mrs. Chen whispered. “Or when Tommy was born. They feel the same now.”

Tommy was her son. He’d been born in 1996. It was currently October 2024, or at least James thought it was. The calendar on his wall showed three different months simultaneously, the pages somehow occupying the same space.

James reached for his stethoscope and froze. His hand had passed through it. Not through it exactly—around it, as if the space the stethoscope occupied was negotiable, subject to interpretation. He tried again, this time remembering more firmly that stethoscopes were solid objects that existed in definite locations. His fingers closed around the metal.

“Doctor,” Mrs. Chen said, and a bead of memory-sweat rolled down her cheek, carrying within it the entire sensation of her wedding night. James could smell cake frosting and champagne, could feel the texture of lace against skin that wasn’t his. “Doctor, I think I’m coming apart.”

She was. James could see it now—the edges of her beginning to fray like an old photograph left in water. Not her body, exactly, but the idea of her body. The memory of having a body.

“We need to run some tests,” he said automatically, though he had no idea what tests could measure the disintegration of personal history. He’d been saying those words—we need to run some tests—for twenty-three years of practice. The phrase had worn grooves in his mind, paths of least resistance his thoughts followed when faced with the inexplicable.

But now even that was changing. The words felt different in his mouth, as if they belonged to someone else’s career, someone else’s life. He caught a glimpse of himself in the examination room mirror and saw his reflection wearing a different tie than he was, saw his hair parted on the wrong side, saw his wedding ring on a finger that had been amputated in a childhood accident that had both happened and not happened.

“Doctor Carroll?” Mrs. Chen’s voice pulled him back. Another bead of memory rolled down her face, this one containing her son’s first word. James heard it—“mama”—as clearly as if the child were in the room. “What’s happening to us?”

Before he could answer, his pager buzzed. Then buzzed again. Then continued buzzing in a pattern that spelled out words in Morse code he’d never learned but suddenly knew:

MORE COMING STOP

PREPARE ISOLATION WARD STOP

MEMORIES CONTAGIOUS STOP

He looked at the pager. The message on its LCD screen was different, simple: ER STAT – MULTIPLE CASUALTIES.

But underneath those digital letters, he could see other messages, older ones, messages that had been sent to this pager before he’d owned it—messages to doctors who’d worked in this hospital in decades past. They layered like geological strata, and in them he could read the history of Millbrook General’s suffering: pandemic flu in 1968, a chemical spill in 1984, the factory explosion in 1991, the thing they’d found in the water in 2003 that had made the children speak backwards for a month.

“I need to go,” he told Mrs. Chen. “The nurse will—”

“There is no nurse,” she interrupted. “Not anymore. I can see the space where she used to be, but it’s empty now. She forgot herself completely about an hour ago. There’s just her shoes left, and they’re full of Tuesdays.”

James looked where Mrs. Chen pointed. A pair of white nursing shoes sat in the corner, and from them leaked a slow tide of what could only be described as concentrated Tuesday—the feeling of a workweek barely begun, the taste of cafeteria meatloaf, the specific quality of fluorescent light at 2 PM.

His pager buzzed again: HURRY

This time the message was written in his daughter’s handwriting, though she’d been two when he’d gotten this pager, far too young to write. The impossibility of it made his temples throb.

“Stay here,” he told Mrs. Chen, knowing she wouldn’t, couldn’t. The concept of “here” was becoming negotiable. “I’ll send someone.”

He left the examination room and entered a hallway that was twelve feet longer than it had been that morning. Or twelve feet shorter. The perspective kept shifting, and with each shift came a wave of nausea that tasted like childhood—specifically, like the motion sickness he’d gotten on the school bus in third grade, the day Jennifer Martez had shown him what a dead bird looked like when you turned it inside out.

He hadn’t thought about that in thirty years. But now the memory was so vivid he could feel the vinyl bus seat sticking to his legs, could smell Jennifer’s strawberry lip gloss mixed with the stench of decay.

The emergency room doors were ahead. He could hear sounds from beyond them—not screaming exactly, but something worse. The sound of people trying to scream but forgetting how halfway through. The sound of voices losing their connection to the throats that produced them.

James pushed through the doors and stopped.

The emergency room was full, but not with people. Not exactly.

It was full of what people leave behind when they forget they were ever people at all.