"Memorex" by John Giles

The home video wasn't any better a record of the moment than her memory. It was a grainy recording, clear pictures peppered with static at the edges. Her eight-year-old face peering back from the glowing television was blurry and the contrast seemed irregular. The color was fading. When she spoke to the camera the words were slurred and fuzzy. The memory had been lost in distortion.

Eve stepped off the couch and tiptoed through the dark basement. She chose another tape from the collection. On its label was the title: Eve's Birthday Number Ten.

Maybe this one would feel more vivid to her. Maybe this precious little memory would seem to belong to her.

The video played. The moments played back on the screen. Birthday cakes and candles. Proud parents and eager children too. Happiness and joy all around. The moment would have dripped with nostalgia to anyone else but to Eve it was stale.

There was so much distance, between her and her own emotions, and the memories on the television screen. Maybe the distance was time. Maybe all those things that were captured on screen were from happier, more photogenic times. Before her mother died...

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Maple Street was so quiet in the afternoon. The heat was oppressive and the children had all run inside to take refuge from the sun. Their bikes were still stranded on the lawns before their houses like horses tied to posts.

Birds sung softly down the lane and the smell of freshly cut grass lingered in the air. The smoke from the daily barbecue began to rise and hover in the congregation of smells and sounds. It wouldn't be Maple Street without them.

Eve sat on her porch with a tall glass of ice water beside her. She let her eyes wander across the rows of white pickets along the fence, counting them almost instinctively as she did so. She looked at the fence in the yard and tried to remember the last time she had touched the lock across the gate. She hadn't left home in months. She hadn't felt the reason to leave.

She had spent most of the summer in recovery. She was trying to recover something she had lost, her memories, or rather the emotions that went with them. She had watched the home movies of herself time and time again in the dark basement but their essence was still elusive.

Those memories, swimming in the lake, riding bikes, blowing out the candles on the birthday cake or skinning a knee, they were all like a wind that only came once. Although the air was still there, it would never blow the same way again.

She would never remember what it felt like to kiss Sam Carter on the beach. She could remember the sand and the waves, the beating of her heart, and his lips but the sick feeling of anticipation beforehand and the jubilation that came afterward were gone.

It was as everything was just a collection of sensory details. Now the only feeling she had was that something was terribly wrong. So she sat inside, trying to fix it with old videos, trying to force a connection between them and herself.

Eve just stared across the street blankly. Suddenly a noisy car came into her view across the way. It stopped and a young man about eighteen stepped out with bags slung across his shoulder and a backpack in his hand. The Carters must have picked their son up from the airport and now they were coming home.

She realized, as she stared at him from across the way, Sam had grown up into a handsome guy. When last she could remember seeing him he was still awkward and clumsy. She also realized that seeing the first and only boy she had ever proclaimed her love for should probably have prompted a twinge of bittersweet memory in her heart. But there was nothing. There was no love. Not even lust.

Sam's parents unlocked the door as he waited patiently carrying his heavy load of luggage. He put down his bags and turned to see Eve across the street, sitting on her porch with a vacant look in her eyes. Sam raced away from the door and across the narrow street to stand before her. His heart was pounding and he had a huge smile across his face. Eve could see he was happy to see her.

"Hey! Long time no see, huh?" he blurted out in an excited breath.

Eve made no response.

"It's been a long time. I've been at boarding school for five years...I've thought about you," he said. "Did you think about me?" He laughed.

Eve lowered her eyes and looked away into the distance. "It's been a long time. A lot longer for me than for you," she said wearily.

Sam tried to sit down next to her. "So what have you been doing so far this summer?" he asked.

"Not much," she replied listlessly.

"Well, that's going to change. I'm going to need someone to keep me company now that I'm home from school. I won't fail to bug you," he said. "It'll be fun."

Eve had no response. She only continued to punctuate the conversation with pauses and awkward silence. Sam looked away from her as he began to catch the drift: she wasn't interested in talking to him or even looking at him.

"Not real talkative today, huh Eve?" he asked. "That's surprising, the Eve I remembered always had something to say. Always something funny."

Eve began to look frustrated. "Well funny little things no longer have a habit of popping up in my mind. I don't remember that Eve. I don't remember what it was like to be her. Not since the accident," she said. "Have you heard about the accident?"

"No," he said.

"My mother and I were in a car accident. She was thrown through the windshield and she died. And according to everyone I know, I've been changed profoundly. But I don't feel that different." She finished her glass of water and resumed a vacant stare.

"Wow...Eve, I'm so sorry. I didn't know...I don't even think my parents knew. They would have told me your mother had died. I wish I could have been there for you." He put his arm around her shoulders and tried to give her a hug that she only half-accepted.

"What do you want?" he asked her. "What would make you happy?"

She thought for a moment. "I'd like to be gone from here."

"Then come with me," he said. "You still like the beach, don't you?"

She began to feel something stir within her. "Actually, I'd love to go to the beach," she said smiling.

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"You know sometimes the brain will try to forget something," Sam said, "but eventually the memory returns and its washed back up like seaweed lying on the shore after the tide."

"You think maybe that's what my brain tried to do?" she asked.

"It's just an idea," he said as he threw a seashell into the ocean and watched as the waves threw it back at him.

He finally sat down next to her in the sand.

Eve was afraid he was going to try and talk to her again. Or even worse, try and kiss her, but he didn't. So Eve took a moment to enjoy the sound of the waves and the smell of the beach. She loved how the beach moved in a reliable loop of motion. The breeze was so pleasant and the sunset so intense it forced a smile across her face.

Her moment of peace didn't last though. "Do you remember the games we used to play on the beach all those summers ago?" Sam asked.

"I don't really feel like reminiscing with you," she said coldly.

"Well, tough. I do," he said. "We used to play light as a feather, stiff as a rock."

Eve remembered the game.

"I remember that you used to always say you died by drowning. I guess you were always kind of afraid of the ocean and swimming. Maybe that's why you enjoyed it so much. Are you still afraid of drowning?" he asked her.

Eve had enough. "This is stupid. I don't feel like taking a death march down memory lane with you!" She got up and walked away towards the edge of the water, towards the darkening horizon.

"I just thought that you'd like to remember the good times." He walked towards her and put his hand on her shoulder but she pushed it away. "I remember the time we kissed here. We had rode our bikes here even though our parents said we shouldn't be riding this far away at so late in the day. But we did anyway."

She turned to look at him. "Look, I don't know what I meant to you all those years ago. That's not important. What is important is that you mean nothing to me now."

Sam backed off. "Sorry. Maybe you should tackle with whatever you're dealing with by yourself." Sam began to walk back to his car that was parked up the hill. "I guess we should go back home now," he said.

"You go. I'll walk home," Eve told him.

"If you insist." With that he walked away and drove the car off into the night leaving her alone. It was what she wanted.

Eve walked alone for a few minutes as the sun dropped behind the horizon. She began to hear footsteps and soon she realized she was not alone. Someone else was with her. She could hear a child, giggling.

Eve walked in the direction of the happy laughter. She could now see a small child about five-years-old and her mother playing together in the moonlight. They both had beautiful red hair just like her.

She sat for a minute and watched them as they worked on a sandcastle together. The mother's hands wrapped around her daughter's and guided them in sculpting the castle's tall towers.

In that single moment she felt a longing that was indescribable. She turned from the happy pair in tears. She didn't feel like watching someone else's memories, she had done enough of that today. Eve turned and ran back towards the hill where Sam was beginning to drive away.

Eve found both he and the car were gone so she began to run down the old dirt road that they had came on. Her legs picked up an almost superhuman pace as the tears rolled down her face. Fear and sadness motivated her to move and to run as far from that beach as she could.

Eve eventually caught up with Sam as the car slowly trekked down the road. "Hey Sam!" she yelled to him trying to get his attention. It worked. The car stopped and he opened the car door. Eve ran up towards him her face streaked with tears.

"I thought you didn't want to be around anyone?" he said somewhat annoyed. Eve climbed into the car and they began to drive once again. She mopped up her tears with the back of her hands and tried to gain composure.

"What caused this?" he asked.

"Something happened at the beach," she told him. "I don't know what..." She sniffled and took a deep breath. Pulling down the mirror in front of the passenger seat she looked at herself. "Am I really that different from how I used to be?" she asked.

"Honestly?"

"Yeah, honestly," she told him.

"You've definitely changed."

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The car pulled up in front of Eve's house and she quietly stepped out and thanked Sam for the ride. It was late and she didn't want to disturb anyone who might be sleeping. Her wave of emotions that hit her at the beach had subsided and she felt like she had control of herself once again. Whatever hold the beach had on her it was gone now.

Eve cautiously entered her house and soon realized that her father was probably out of his mind with worry about where she was. She tiptoed into the living room to find the coffee table riddled with empty bottles of alcohol. Her father had been drinking again which meant that he was angry or upset or both.

He drank a lot since the accident it seemed. He never touched the stuff before her mother died. Alcohol, he insisted, would interfere with his ability to create new inventions. Her father had worked for a government research lab and his job was to engineer new weapons but his specialty was robotics and cybernetics.

Now, he stayed at home all day in his lab. His dark brooding lab in the basement that was always locked tight. Eve was never allowed to go into that lab, ever! It was the one thing he was absolutely adamant about. He would work in the lab for hours. She assumed he was working on a classified project. He would only come out every so often to sit and watch the home videos with her or to get some booze from the fridge.

Other people would have been concerned about his problems, about his compulsive behavior and his obsession with his work. But Eve was as apathetic to him as she was to everything and everyone else in the world. She felt nothing for his situation.

Now, she was probably going to receive the brunt of his anger for being out so late. He didn't like her to go out.

"Eve? Are you home? Where have you been?" he called to her from the kitchen. Eve walked in to find him pouring another drink. Dark circles clung to the beneath of his eyes.

Eve didn't answer. She just stood there. "I was at the beach, that's all," she said after a moment.

"I don't want you going out like this all the time," he told her in a bitter and protective voice.

"But Daddy, this is the first time I've been out in months," she said. He just looked at her for a moment with a blank expression on his face.

"I don't want you going out. Not to the beach or anywhere else," he said. "It's dangerous for you. What with your blackouts and memory losses, you can't possibly expect to be safe."

"I haven't had a blackout in two months. I have no short term memory problems, not anymore," Eve told him. "Just because I don't remember a month before and after the accident, it doesn't mean I can't take care of myself."

"This conversation is over. You are not to go out until you are healed," he told her. "I'm going to bed. I suggest you do the same."

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Eve couldn't sleep no matter how much she tried. The beach had done something to her. Seeing that child and her mother had awakened something in her. It had ignited her soul. The entire place had bewitched her and she knew she had to go there again when she got the chance.

Crawling out of bed, she wrapped up a blanket and put on her slippers. She was going back to the beach and her father was too drunk to stop her.

She walked down the staircase quietly so her father couldn't possibly hear her and then crept into the kitchen to find something to eat. She searched the refrigerator and when she found something to eat she tucked it away in a bag that she was going to carry with her.

Eve was about to leave when she thought she heard a whisper in the hall so she decided that it wouldn't hurt to investigate. The whisper sounded like it was muttering in a language that was totally indistinguishable. It led her to the cellar door but when she began to turn the knob it suddenly ceased.

Eve opened the door and was hit by the musty, dank smell of the basement. Her eyes wandered for a moment like something was forcing them to stay, like they wanted to show her something in the basement.

Eve picked up a flashlight and turned it on. She swung the beam of light against the walls of the basement staircase and then at the ceiling. She began to see a red splotch appear on the ceiling above her. It was a deep red and it seemed to grow wider and wider like liquid spreading through a paper towel. It looked sticky and soon it was dripping in thick globs like congealing blood.

A large stream of it reached down and spilled across her face unexpectedly and she turned away. She closed her eyes in disgust and then wiped her face. When she opened them the linoleum steps were coated in thick red blood. It rolled off one step and then onto another. At the bottom of the steps there was a shovel, a large bloody shovel.

Eve gasped in panic and dropped the flashlight running back to the hall and closing the basement door behind her. She tried to gain composure as her body tried to take control of what she had just seen. She told herself it was just her imagination.

She opened the door once more to find the thick blood was gone now. She sighed in relief. It was just her imagination. A case of nerves playing with her brain. She needed to get away from this place and all the stress it brought with it. She needed the beach.

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When she reached the beach again the sun was just beginning to heave itself up over the horizon with a few early rays of light. Eve looked out across the ocean and it began to fill her with a sense of being. Of really being, not the kind of empty existence she felt at home on Maple Street.

Walking towards the edge of the water she began to hear the giggling again. It was the red-haired girl and her mother. They were still playing in the sand. Had they been there all night? Eve began to wonder who they were. It would have struck others as odd that a mother and her daughter would spend the wee hours of the morning together on a beach. Eve didn't care though. She just wanted to watch.

She just wanted to be that little girl. She wanted to have a mother. She wanted to feel like she was a real, like she came from somewhere but lately she felt like a cheap facsimile of the girl that she used to be. Soon tears came to her eyes and she began to weep. Eve shook with each sob and her anguished cries soon drowned out the laughter of the young girl behind her.

Suddenly a hand began to rest on her shoulder and then and arm wrapped around her back and held her tight. Eve didn't question them, they made her feel better as they hugged and nursed her in her time of need. It must have been the girl's mother. Now she was mothering her. Eve didn't want it to end. She wanted to sit there with her forever by the edge of the beach. The mother said nothing, she was silent as a ghost and yet she was incredibly tangible and real.

The sun was rising telling the night to end. It also seemed to tell Eve and the woman who gave her a ghostly bit of solace that their moment together would end. The woman's fingertips gave Eve's hair one last maternal stroke and then she simply disappeared in the morning breeze as quickly as she had come.

Eve suddenly felt cold and alone. "Where are you? Come back! Why won't you stay with me?" she screamed through the wind.

Eve was shocked when she looked down to find the little girl with the red hair clawing at her nightgown. She was pounding her little fists against Eve’s legs and scratching at her stomach. "She's my mother! You can't have her! You're a fake!" she screamed.

Her eyes burned with anger. Anger for Eve. "You want to know where my Mama went? I'll show you," she said. The girl took Eve's hand and began to quickly walk towards the edge of the ocean. Eve tried to break free from her grip but she couldn't. The eerie little girl had the strength of a monster. She was like a force of nature.

In a quick and violent motion the girl knocked Eve over with tremendous force and took grab of the back of her head. Eve could not break free from her grip as the girl pushed her head down towards the splashing water.

Tears streamed down Eve's face, as she could not break free. The girl suddenly smashed her head into the water and held it a foot beneath the surface with an unrelenting grip. Eve panicked as water filled her mouth and nose and then her lungs.

She began to feel dizzy. A blurry face began to float up towards her from bottom of the ocean. It was a woman. A pale, dead woman with a face caked with blood. It was the girl's mother. Eve suddenly saw black and passed out.

When she woke up again, she was wrapped in the blanket she had brought with her. She was dry and there was no pain in her neck or taste of salt in her mouth. None of it had really happened.

"What's going on with me?" No one was there to answer the question.

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"You haven't spoke a word to me for three days," her father said. "I know that I'm busy in the lab a lot but I've made time for you recently. I know you're getting antsy spending so much time in the house." Her father picked up a slice of pizza from the cardboard box and slapped it down on his plate.

Eve sat across from him with a blank stare on her face and no food on her plate. For the last three days he had been trying desperately to bond with her but Eve wasn't in the mood. The moments at the beach were leaving her feeling introverted. She didn't want to talk, not to him.

"You know I try to make our new situation work, I really do," he said grimacing. "I know it's been difficult since your mother died and I know I can never take her place. But I'm trying." He was starting to get angry.

Eve didn't flinch. She didn't even blink. She only stared into space.

"Damn! Do you have to act like a zombie? I raised you better than this! I mean I miss you...the way you were..." he told her.

Eve looked up at him. Her eyes were bitter and cold.

"It was bad enough losing your mother that day. I never wanted to lose my darling Eve," he told her.

Eve finally spoke up. "I can't be that girl," she said monotonously.

"You are that girl! You just don't want to be! You just want to spite me! You just want to blame me for what happened to your mother! I'm not going to have it! I'm not going to take it," he said. He slammed his fists against the table.

Eve stormed out of the room stomping her feet behind her.

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Summertime at the Beach Number Five, was the title of the movie. She pushed the tape into the VCR and pressed play. All those images came flooding back on the cheap Memorex film. Castles in the sand, her pink polka-dot swimsuit, her sunburn, her pigtails, her mother and the way they both giggled when they were happy.

The video suddenly seemed so ghostly to her now that her mother was dead. The way the video panned in for a close-up of her smile, it seemed to trigger something in Eve. It was if her mother wasn't dead at all, as if she had just been close to her only days ago.

Then it hit her! The woman and the girl on the beach, they weren't ghosts were they? They were more like souls playing on a video loop, repeating the same behavior over and over again until she came and disrupted them.

How couldn't she have noticed it before? The woman was her mother...and she was that little girl. She hadn't even picked up on it at first. It must have been the darkness or the fact that the beach had some strange effect on her. Now staring at the video screen, watching those memories of the beach play, she could see the it was obviously her own past that was repeating itself each night on that beach.

But why were they there? Were they ghosts? That could have been it but she wasn't dead so why would she be a ghost? Were they hallucinations of some kind? Maybe, but they felt so real to her when they touched her or even when they attempted to drown her. And what was the incident on the stairs? The blood pouring from the ceiling and that grisly looking shovel. Why had the little girl tried to drown her? What was it all about?

Eve pressed pause and the tape stopped on a close up of her face. It was a dead ringer for the girl that attacked her. Her eyes began to well up with tears as the realization of the impossible dawned on her. Haunted by the girl she once was and the girl she could never be. "Why can't I be you?" she muttered to herself in a voice racked with self-loathing.

"Eve?" her father called from the stairs. She could hear his footsteps as they walked down the staircase. "Eve? I'm sorry..."

Eve made no response. She ejected the tape quickly and hid it. She quickly tried to dry her tears before her father came downstairs. "I'm sorry I yelled at you dad," she said weakly.

Her father walked up to her and gave her a hug. "What's been bothering you? You haven't been the same since the day you left the house with that boy. Did he hurt you? Did something happen?"

"No Dad! I've just been seeing things lately, things from my past. Maybe I've just been watching too many of these damn videos," she said. "I think I'm going out of my head."

"We can all lose it sometimes dear. I know I have. We can all get a little bit crazy. But we can't be held responsible for the way we act when we do," he said.

"You really think so?" she asked.

"I hope so," he said with a tinge of pain in his voice. "For my sake."

What did he mean by that? She had to wonder. He moved his hands up to her shoulders and then he started to run his fingers through her hair. "You have the most beautiful red hair," he said. "Your mother had hair like this."

Eve turned away from him feeling uncomfortable.

"I wish I could see her smile again," he said. "She smiled so rarely before she died. Will you smile for me, Eve? You have her smile you know?"

Eve tried to crack a smile. Her lips turned slightly into a weak little curve. Tears were streaming down her cheeks now. "Why are you doing this to me! I can't be Mom! I can't be the little girl you remembered and I'm tired of her haunting me every second of the day! I just can't do it!"

She turned and ran up the stairs.

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Her feet ran nervously down the sidewalk. Her anguished sobs drenched the sound of the crickets chirping in the distance. Maple Street was silent except for the sounds of her crying.

She didn't know where she was running. She was just running for the sake of running, as if it was some primal escape instinct. Maybe she was running for the beach, maybe those ghosts were calling her back to the shore where her past had washed up like a decaying corpse.

She got to the end of the road and finally collapsed, as her lungs could no longer compete with her sobs and the strain of her running. She leaned against a stop sign and let her sobs climb out her throat violently like vomit.

"Eve?" a voice asked of her.

She turned to find Sam Carter watching her with caring eyes. "What's wrong? You can talk to me? Alright?" he asked her. Sam sat down beside her and she took his arm and wrapped it around her shoulder as she pressed her head against his chest. Sam was startled by the fact that this was the same girl who didn't even want to look at him only a few nights ago.

"I'm glad I ran into you," she said groggily. "I need you to tell me something," she said. "Am I insane?"

"What are you talking about?"

"I keep going to the beach. I keep seeing this woman and her child playing in the sand, every night until dawn..."

"That is weird. Did you talk to them?" he asked.

"Yeah. I guess you could say that. I was crying and then the woman, she came over and she held me and then she disappeared. And then her daughter, she was so angry with me that she tried to drown me in the water. She was so strong, I though I was going to die. It wasn't human. It was supernatural. And this is where it gets weird..."

"It wasn't weird already?" he asked.

"The girl was me. And her mother looked exactly like mine. I was watching videos of my mother and I at the beach together when I was a child. That's when I noticed the resemblance. I don't know what it means," she said.

"Eve, you went through a lot of trauma in the past year. This is probably your mind playing tricks on you. I'm willing to bet that those things you saw were just caused by grief. You wanted to see your mother again so badly that you believe she was really there. Have you seen anything else?" he asked.

"I had a vision. I saw blood spilling from the ceiling in our basement and dripping down the stairs," she said. Eve looked at him and pulled herself away from his arms. "You think I'm nuts don't you?" she asked.

"I think you've changed. That's all, I wish for your sake that you were the old Eve."

"You wish that for my sake? I think you want the old girl who used to waste her time with you back. You don't want me, you want what I used to be…well I can't be that person! You're just like my father!"

"Eve, wait!" Sam called to her but she ran down the street.

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She crawled into bed and slept. Her body was so tired...so very tired. When the sun rose outside her window she closed the blinds and slept some more. She just stayed there in bed all day and slept.

She dreamt of lies and secrets. She dreamt of conflict and bloody shovels. It was a disturbing sleep that she couldn't pull herself out of. It was a sleep like drowning. The dreams would carry her under the waves no matter how hard she tried to swim. When she woke she found her entire body wet, not with the water of the ocean but with sweat.

Eve threw the cold wet sheets away and went to the window to find the sun coming up over the horizon. Her father's car was gone from the driveway. He was gone and it was time to exorcise some demons from the house.

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The first thing she did was to take a hammer from her father's toolbox. She gathered some photos of herself before the accident and smashed each one with fearsome blows. When the glass was broken she took the photos and watched as each one burned away over a burning match. "I don't want to see you anymore," she told them.

Eve was dead. That girl didn't exist anymore. For better or for worse, something new had emerged.

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Hammer in hand, Eve crept down into the basement and walked down the long hall towards the laboratory door. She knew she shouldn't be there. That her father had kept his work in the lab and that no one could see it. She was tired of secrets and locked doors. She knew something was behind the door, something important. She wanted to find it.

She swung the hammer with deadly precision and soon she had demolished the locks across the door. They fell to the floor like pieces of slag melted by her fury.

Eve steeled herself as she turned the doorknob. She had no fears anymore. Whatever secrets were in the laboratory she needed to see them. Something new inside of her had taken control of her emotions. She was like a girl possessed.

The first thing she saw was that there were no windows in the room. It had pitch black walls and the air was sticky and humid. She thought her father had to be rather sick to stay in a room with no ventilation all day during the summer.

The next thing she noticed was a table filled with tools. There were pliers, screwdrivers, wires and electrical tape. There were motherboards from computers, and what appeared to be mechanisms with many robotic parts to them.

The walls were filled with gadgetry and technological junk littered the floor. The room smelled of melting plastic. It was like a factory. Things were being constructed down here. Eve wondered what it could possibly be.

She wasn't surprised by the robotics. It was her father's specialty after all. She slowly turned to face the back wall were she saw a couch facing a television screen. She soon realized that she could hear a giggling coming from the television and she saw that one his many home videos was playing on the screen. It was the one where she first learned to ride a bike. It was her favorite.

"Daddy are you home?" a voice asked her. It was coming from behind the couch. It was a small voice. It was the voice of a little girl. "Daddy? Is that really you?"

Who the hell was it? Had her father been keeping a child in the basement? No wonder he had kept the lab locked up. What kind of sick person was he? Eve didn't know how to respond to the voice. She was now sick with fear and disgust.

She had to say something. "No. It's not Daddy. My name is Eve. I'm not going to hurt you," she reassured the girl, "I just want to help you get out of here."

She slowly crept to the sofa to confront the girl. "What's your name?" she asked, as she was about to peer over the side of the sofa.

"My name is Eve too!" she giggled.

Her name is Eve? Eve jumped over the edge of the couch, holding the hammer for protection. What she saw was so horrid she couldn't help but to let out a chilling shriek. There on the sofa was something shaped like a little girl but it was definitely nothing human. It was a mess of wires and tubes and plastic shaped into the form of a human being. It had little white teeth made of synthetic plastic and optical sensors rolling around exposed in their open sockets. It was like a horrid corpse with the flesh ripped from the muscle and underneath of it was a fake robotic mess.

"Why are you screaming? When is Daddy coming home?" she asked looking straight at Eve with an unrelenting stare.

Eve lost control of her breathing. Even after everything she had been through in the last week she still couldn't believe what she was seeing. She stopped screaming and backed away from the sick little perversion of life. Her father was trying to bring her back as a little girl! She couldn't understand it and she didn't know how she could live with it.

Eve looked away and picked up a screwdriver. She braced herself for what she was about to do. She didn't think it was in her capacity to take another life but this was different, wasn't it? This was a machine that was built to think it was really alive.

Eve slowly approached the little machine. "What are you doing with that?" the robot asked innocently.

Eve approached her and jumped onto the couch dominating her. She grabbed the robot's arm tightly so that she couldn't break free and the little girl began to cry and scream. Eve tried to ignore the sounds as she pulled the screwdriver up over her head and began to strike her with it. The first blows landed on the girl's face. The screwdriver skewered her synthetic tongue and then pierced her eyes and face. The scream was raw and human and it tore through Eve's soul. She couldn't let that stop her. She had to keep going. She kept breaking the wires on the side of her skull until the screaming finally ceased.

Eve pulled away, her face streaked with tears. She looked down at her hands, stained with the oil from that ran through the girl's synthetic brain. At least that "girl" was dead. And so was a piece of Eve.

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"I killed her," Eve told him. "She screamed as real as anybody else and I stabbed her. I stabbed her in the face until she was quiet. I can't believe I killed her."

Sam said nothing at first. He wrapped his arm around her and she put her head on his shoulder. "It's going to be alright. I'm going to take you away from here before your father gets back. He's sick. I won't let him hurt you," he said.

"Thanks," she said.

"Your welcome, and Eve...I'm sorry," he told her.

"Why?"

"I'm sorry I told you that I'd rather you were somebody else," he said. "I'm sorry that I told you that you weren't as good as the Eve I remembered."

"You're right, of course. I have changed. For the better I think. The old Eve was much too trusting. I've learned a lot since then. I'm better off this way," she said through her tears. "I don't care what he was doing in that basement. I just want to leave," she said.

They sat there for a moment looking at the ocean turn itself up onto the shore. Eve turned to face Sam. She looked into his eyes for a moment and suddenly her face seemed to change before his eyes.

Eve leaned forward and kissed him.

Sam pulled away blushing and surprised. "What was that for?" he asked.

"It wasn't from me," she said. "It was from her."

Sam looked into the ocean to see a little girl about twelve-years-old now with a shock of red hair. She was walking towards the shore and she was wearing that same dress he remembered from the day they kissed. It was like a specter of the past walking from the horizon into the present. He couldn't believe his eyes. "I'm sorry if I ever said you were insane," he said.

The young girl approached them and she smiled at Sam. They were not afraid. They didn't have anything to fear from this ghost. She was like a memory from a photo album that brought a smile to both their faces. "Long time no see," she said. "And as much as I'd love to catch up on old times...I have to talk to Eve. She has to learn the truth."

Sam still couldn't believe he was really seeing a ghost. "No, I don't want you bothering her. We're leaving. You're the past and this is the present. She's tired of being compared to you!" said Sam protectively.

"Don't you want to know what really happened to your mother?" the ghost asked of Eve.

Eve’s face filled with fear. "Can you show me?"

"If you come with me," she said.

Eve turned to Sam. "I have to do this. It's the only way I can be at peace."

Sam backed off and let them go. The girl in the sunflower dress led Eve into the ocean. Together they walked until both were submerged in the cool water. Into the past...

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The waters washed them backward. Eve and the ghost stood together in the hall outside the basement door. She looked around to see the familiar surroundings. The ocean must have acted as some portal between the past and the present for the ghost. "You brought me home?" Eve asked.

The ghostly girl answered her. "I remember this day. You don't remember it. That's why I brought you here. I remember it was sunny outside and I was riding my bike. I was missing Sam. He was still at school. I went inside to get something to drink. I went into the kitchen and I heard them arguing in the hall..."

"Who?" Eve asked.

"Our parents. I heard them screaming at each other. Mother had gone into the lab. She wasn't supposed to. Father was angry. I listened through the door as they argued on the basement staircase. Mother was going to tell everyone about what he had in the basement..."

"What did he have in the basement?" Eve asked.

"I'm not sure. I started to look through the keyhole and then I saw it all."

"What did you see?" Eve asked.

"Look for yourself. I can't watch it again. I have to go," she said.

"No, you can't leave me," Eve protested. The girl was gone before Eve even had a chance to stop her.

Full of fear, she peered through the keyhole of the door. She could see them, her mother and her father. They were yelling at each other. They were tearing at each other's arms and they were hurting each other.

Her mother threatened to tell the police about his experiments. He tried to stop her. Her hand reached for the door but she fell before she could reach it. Her eye peered out at Eve as her head hit the door with a sick thud. Her eye looked dead and vacant.

"Mom?" Eve gasped. She moved away from the door as her father began to open it. He walked out the door dragging her body with him.

Eve thought she would throw up. Her father killed her mother. She didn't die in a car accident. She was murdered.

Suddenly she was hit with waves of realization. She could never remember the accident that she was supposed to have been in. The trauma of witnessing it must have caused her to bury the memory away in the back of her mind. But now it was there, the secret washed up on shore like a dead animal. It reeked and caused nausea.

She peered down the basement steps as blood rolled down them. At the bottom of the stairs was the blood-soaked shovel he used to kill her. It was all making sense now.

Eve sobbed. She wanted to leave the past. She didn't want to see this again.

She felt cold and wet. Soon her surroundings dissolved into waves that came to take her home.

**************************************************************************************************************

Eve sat up in the sand and shivered from the cold. Her clothes were wet from the ocean that had physically sent her to her own repressed past. She was still perplexed as to how that worked.

"Now you know the truth," the ghost said.

"I wish I hadn't learned it. But I'm not surprised he did it. He's a control freak. He tried to control me. He tried to recreate me with that sick little abomination he had in the basement," she said. "What did you mean a few days back when you called me a fake?"

"I'm sorry I acted that way. I felt threatened. I thought you were going to take my mother," the ghost told her.

"But she's my mother also...why would you feel that way?" Eve asked.

"I have to go now, you should get home. Make sure your father pays for what he did," she said.

"I should tell the police. They'll find the body," said Eve.

"No, take the shovel. Kill him. Bury him by the oak tree in the backyard. I'll make sure no one finds out," said the girl with a grim smile.

"I'm not going to kill him...I can't kill a man," Eve told her.

"I think that before the night is over...you'll have the guts to do it," the ghost told her.

"Who are you? How can I even trust that what you're telling me is true? Maybe this is all a trick..."

"I guess you'll find out. 'Eve,'" she said. "Why don't you go home and dig up her bones with that shovel. Go quickly before Daddy gets home." With that she was gone.

Eve stood petrified with fear. She thought a moment about what the ghost proposed that she do. The ghost wanted to use her as an instrument of her revenge. She wanted her to take the shovel and kill a man.

As much as she hated to admit it, that girl, that ghost from the past, was part of her. The part that was consumed with anger and had no sympathy or forgiveness.

That scared Eve more than anything else.

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Her father was still gone when she got home. She couldn't possibly believe that what the young girl had shown her was really true but after what she found in the basement she couldn't be certain of anything anymore. So as much as she loathed the thought she found herself picking up the shovel in their basement and carrying it with her to the small yard behind the house.

She had to know if it was true. If her mother's body would really be buried under a shallow layer of dirt like her younger self had suggested. She surveyed the yard and tried to find the spot where she thought he could have buried her.

It was hopeless. Her mother's bones could have been anywhere. What a morbid thought she would have to dig up her own mother's grave. Eve looked at the old tire swing hanging from the tall strong oak tree where she used to play. She sat down in it and closed her eyes hoping to forget everything that had happened, the ghosts, the murder and that robot. As much as she tried, she found she could not shake off all these things, they had settled into her own bones.

"What are you doing there with your eyes closed? You have a job to do. Don't you want your mother to find peace? Don't you care?" asked a voice. Eve didn't have to open her eyes to know that it was the girl, that young angry version of her.

"What do you mean? Isn't mother at peace?" Eve asked her in a tired and sad voice.

"No. She must be avenged. You must kill him. She can only rest once she knows that he has been brought to justice," she said with anger in her voice. For such a young girl she had been talking very bitterly.

"I won't kill him!" Eve told her. "I already killed one person this week."

"Are you referring to that thing in the basement. That's not a real person, it's a machine. You can't kill a machine, can you?" she said.

"It screamed. It felt pain. It was just as alive as me or...you..."

"Are you suggesting that I am alive? Do you really think so? Do you can this existence alive?" she asked.

"I don't even know what you are. To tell you the truth, I think you're just a manifestation of my subconscious. I think you're the part of myself that I hate. And I won't do your bidding, that's what makes me human..."

"If you don't kill him I'll use your body to do it. I've done it before," the ghost said with a smile.

"When?" Eve asked defensively.

"When you kissed Sam. That was I, remember? I can take your body whenever I want!" she said with a laugh.

"You're evil!" Eve said.

"I have a sense of justice!" she told her. "You don't know what it was like for me! You didn't have to live with the memory! You didn't live with the memory of your mother being bashed to death with a shovel! I'll show you evil!" she said. With that she raised her hand and summoned a wind that began to blow into a cyclone. The winds began to tear through clumps of dirt and grass as it dug a hole into the ground.

Eve got up and peered into the hole. In the ground was a skeleton. Eve looked over the edge to see the skull, with a familiar crack down the back of it. It was really her mother. Even now that she saw the body, she still couldn't believe it. She wanted it to be a trick or an illusion that that evil little girl had summoned but it was real. She could tell with all her being that it was real.

"I trust you'll do the right thing," the girl said as she vanished into the air.

Eve stared at the empty space left behind by the girl. Her sweaty palms gripped the shovel. What would she do when her father came home?

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She wasn't really alive anymore. She was more like a facsimile of what she once was. She was more like a recording on a cheap 8-hour tape. She looked and sounded like a person but it was just an imitation. She had a cheap sound quality and a grainy look. Everyone saw that she was an obvious bootleg of the original but she didn't know why. Sam knew she wasn't the same girl he once knew. Her father knew it.

And now, staring at the grainy videotapes, she realized it too. They were someone else's memories not her own. She was beginning to remember now...when she thought about the fuzzy edges of her memory. Those months surrounding the accidents, it was as if they weren't really there at all. Her memories beforehand were only about as real to her as the home videos she was constantly watching.

She wasn't sure why...but she was beginning to believe that maybe there was a reason that she didn't feel like the Eve of her past. Maybe she wasn't really that girl at all.

She of course had no way to prove this. But nothing made any sense anymore. Maybe that girl was just a figment of her imagination as she thought...but Sam had seen it also. Was he just part of her imagination? How far could a delusion go?

She could hear footsteps upstairs. The moment of truth was at hand, literally...

Thoughts raced through her mind with lightning speed. Decisions needed to be made. How would she face him? What would she say? Would she go through with what the ghost had told her to do? Would she kill her own father?

The footsteps got louder. They were directly above her now.

Eve reached for the shovel. The object seemed to be calling to her. She couldn't help the fact that she wanted to reach out and touch the macabre thing. Was the ghost starting to take control of her like she threatened? She couldn't be certain. Her motivations were blurred even to herself.

Suddenly the ghost appeared again. "It's time, Eve," she reminded her.

"No, you're not real! You're a figment of my mind," Eve protested.

The ghost just sat there without reacting. She was confident in her control over Eve and Eve knew it. "I know how this is going to end, no matter what," she warned.

"You're not human! Maybe you never were. Maybe you're just as fake as that sick little freak in the lab!" screamed Eve. She was now filled with anger. Her father's footsteps were getting closer. He was coming down the stairs.

"I'm not human?" asked the ghost. "Let me show you something."

The younger Eve went and touched Eve on the arm and a strange energy began to flow from one being into the other. Eve suddenly saw black as the electricity moved up her arm and into her eyes. When she could finally see everything was blurry and her nostrils stung. All she could see was white. All she could feel was wet. Within seconds, Eve realized that she was underwater. She shook her head and felt that it was stuck within a plastic basin. She could feel a hand holding her down. Someone was drowning her and it wasn't the little girl this time...it was her father. Somehow she knew that it was her father that was drowning her...

Almost as soon as it began, her vision ended. Eve's returned to reality. Her hearing cleared and she could tell her father was coming down the stairs. "What was that?" she asked of the ghost.

"You'll find out! Now do what you know you must..." she said as she vanished into the background. Eve turned to find that her father was now behind her. He stared at her and his eyes made her hands tighten their grip on the shovel instinctively.

"Whom were you talking to?" he asked. He looked down at the shovel. "Why do you have that?"

"I know," she said, "I know what you did to Mother. I know you took this shovel and smashed her head in. There was never any car accident. I lost memory because I witnessed the crime and I tried to repress it. But recently, things have helped me remember. I saw her bones. I know the truth..." Her eyes filled with tears and she almost choked on her nervousness as soon as the words came out. Her palms began to sweat profusely around the handle of the shovel.

"Eve...I can't have you telling anyone this..." he said. His face was filled with rage but he began to breathe deeply in order to contain his anger. He was trying to stay calm. He was trying to handle the situation without being caught.

"That's not all...I know about what you kept in the lab. I found her. That 'girl'. She tried to take my place but I killed that little monstrosity..." she said with little regret now.

"Oh really? So you found the replication android. She was quite a good match for the little girl I used to remember. She didn't look the part, not quite yet but that's the easy part isn't it?" he said with a sick smile. "I tried so many versions...but none of them were quite as much like Eve as you were..."

"And I wasn't like her at all! That must have ticked you off since you're obsessed with the girl I used to be!" Eve lifted the shovel off the ground and her father eyed it nervously.

"You think you're going to use that on me?" he asked.

Eve lifted it quickly but her father caught the handle before the blade ever struck him. He pulled it out of her hands and quickly swung the handle back around to hit Eve in the jaw with it. Eve was stunned and defenseless. Her father lifted her by her hair and dragged her down the hallway to the lab. She struggled all the way but she was unable to break free.

She was groggy and she couldn't fight back. She could hear him turning on the faucet to the large wash basin from were she was lying on the ground. She wanted to move her body and to escape but she could not. A cold, watery, paralysis had washed over her body...

***********************************************************************************************************

"Here again?" she asked herself. She looked around to find a sprawling ocean behind her. Violent waves were washing out to the shore from the gray horizon. Dark clouds were boiling in the sky. A storm was coming soon. The beach had always made her feel comfort but now it filled her with a sense of foreboding. She was not surprised that she had been transported there. Over the last few hours reality had begun to melt into dream.

The ghost appeared before her. Once again that creepy little specter had plucked her from reality through some supernatural means. She was walking slowly and she was carrying the shovel in her little hands. She was in her younger form now, the one that Eve had first encountered on the beach. "You can't let him do it again," she said. "You can't let him kill you like he killed me."

Eve was confused. What did she mean? How had her father killed her?

"Are you afraid of the water, Eve?" she asked in a quiet lowly voice. Her eyes were fixed now on the ocean's waves.

"I've always been kind of afraid of the water. I don't know why..."

"Because part of you remembers when you drowned. Doesn't it?" she asked.

"I never drowned," she said. Eve was really confused now.

"After I saw the murder...he found me. He told me I was a liability. He attacked me and filled the sink with water and he held my head under until I couldn't breath again. I drowned. I've been swimming up on this beach everyday since. When you came to the beach that one day, I decided to follow you home...I decided I wanted you to know the truth too..."

"This can't be true...I'm not dead..."

"You're not really alive either. I mean you are a robot after all..."

She was a robot? She was a robot? The suggestion echoed in her head over and over again. "No! You mean..."

Eve began to pace around nervously in the sand. Her skin felt as if it was crawling off her body. Her mind spun in circles. Everything was beginning to make sense. Everything was beginning to make her dizzy. She fell to the sand. And suddenly she felt so wet and unable to breath.

************************************************************************************************************

Water rushed past her teeth and down her throat. It poured into her nose and filled her lungs. For a few minutes, Eve thought that she should just let the hands hold her head there until it was over. There in the basin of the sink she could let him end it all. She could surrender and she would never have to live through the pain of not being Eve again.

But the women in her family had suffered enough. She wasn't Eve, she wasn't her mother's daughter and she wasn't even a real human being but they were all connected somehow. Each one of them was tied together from a sick link of obsession and abuse. They were all kindred souls and kindred victims: The girl, her mother, "Eve" and even that "abomination" in the basement.

Something in her told her to fight back. She pulled her head out of the water with an industrial strength. She ripped his cold wet fingers from off her skull and then lunged at him with an animal rage. "I remember! You killed her! God damn it you killed her!" she screamed at him.

She had her father pinned now. He looked like he was about to laugh. "You 'remember' huh? How can you possibly remember when I specifically removed the memories of your death and your mother's from your memory. Are you forgetting that I created you? Programmed you? Like it or not, I'm still your father..."

Eve was frozen by guilt. She killed that girl in the basement. She listened to her scream in agony and she kept pounding her with that screwdriver. She wasn't even any different from her. They were both androids. They were both pawns and ghosts, cheap recordings of somebody else's life. The one person that understood her she killed out of fear.

Eve stared at the shovel for a moment.

"Do it!" a voice called from far away. She knew who it was. The real Eve wanted her father to pay...but what did she want? What did she want? Who was she?

Eve picked up the shovel and poised the blade against her father's soft neck.

"Go ahead, do it," he beckoned her.

"I can't," she said. Tears began to stream down her face. "I can't be Eve. I can't act for her. It's time that I find out who I am..."

A cold chill ran down the android's back. A look of fear came across her father's face. She knew they were not alone anymore. She could feel the presence of the ghost in the room. She could almost hear a sad laughter ring through the silence as a choking sound began to crack from her father's throat. Soon his eyes rolled back in his head and a stream of bloody water spilled from his lips.

"You got what you wanted Eve," the android told her, "I hope that you’re happy now."

***************************************************************************************************************

The house was empty. Eve was alone. In the darkness of the basement she turned on the television. She looked through the videotapes and found the one she wanted. Another home video blazed across the screen. It was filled with warm colors and happy moments.

She sat there and watched for about two and a half minutes and then turned it off. "Those are somebody else's ghosts..."

She had bags to pack. She was leaving. Eve was dead. Something new was born. No longer would she be the synthetic ghost of a girl from the past.

And maybe for the first time in her life, she could say that deep within those wires and circuits, she had something all her own.