Chapter 3: The Echo of Enjoyment

Chapter 3: The Echo of Enjoyment

Percy woke up feeling… clear. The word floated into his mind as he stared at the dust motes dancing in the sliver of sunlight piercing his blinds. The usual morning dread, the heavy sense of being trapped in Mountain Rim, was gone. In its place was a smooth, polished emptiness. He felt rested. He felt peaceful. The memory of Liam and Chloe on his porch returned to him not as a warning, but as a validation. They were right. He did feel better.

He swung his legs out of bed and for a moment, he just sat there, basking in the novel sensation of quiet in his own head. But as the silence stretched, he became aware of something else. A sound. Or rather, the ghost of a sound. It was a low, persistent hum, so faint it was more a vibration in his teeth than anything he could actually hear. He tilted his head, trying to place it. The refrigerator downstairs? An air conditioner kicking on somewhere down the street? No, it was closer. It was inside.

He shook his head, dismissing it, and got dressed for his shift. The feeling of well-being carried him through the morning. At the diner, the grease-laden air didn't seem so suffocating. The endless task of wiping down sticky tables didn't feel so Sisyphean. He smiled at the regulars, a genuine, easy smile that felt foreign on his own face.

"Someone's in a good mood," remarked Sarah, the perpetually exhausted head waitress.

"Just feeling good," Percy replied, and it was the truth.

But the hum was still there. Through the clatter of plates and the sizzle of the grill, it remained a constant, low-frequency thrum at the base of his skull. And then, something else started. As he was refilling the salt shakers, he blinked, and for a split second, the image of the diner vanished, replaced by a stark, white word against a black background.

ENJOY.

He flinched, dropping a shaker. Salt cascaded across the clean counter like a miniature snowdrift.

"Percy! What the hell?" Sarah snapped.

"Sorry," he mumbled, his heart suddenly pounding. "Just... my eyes played a trick on me."

He swept up the salt, but the phantom happiness was beginning to feel brittle. It was like a thin sheet of ice over a deep, dark body of water, and a crack had just appeared. Throughout the rest of his shift, the intrusions became more frequent. Every time he blinked, the word was there, burned onto the back of his eyelids like a flashbulb afterimage. And the hum was getting louder, a monotonous, electronic drone that seemed to be the source of his manufactured peace. The peace wasn't a gift; it was a signal being broadcast into his head.

He needed to talk to someone. He needed to know if this was part of the experience. He saw Mr. Henderson slide onto his usual stool, a placid smile on his face that Percy had never seen before. He’d overheard the old man talking about going to see the film the other day.

"Morning, Mr. Henderson," Percy said, his own smile feeling stretched and fake. "So, you went to see 'A Good Film'?"

"That I did, son," Henderson said, his voice strangely smooth. "Best night's sleep I've had in a decade."

"Right," Percy said, leaning closer. "But do you... hear anything? A kind of humming?"

Henderson looked at him, his expression one of mild, bovine confusion. "Humming? Nope. Just the sweet sound of silence in my head for once. It's wonderful."

"And when you close your eyes?" Percy pressed, his voice tight with desperation. "Do you see anything? A word, maybe?"

The old man’s placid smile didn't waver. "Can't say that I do. Don't remember a single frame of that movie, and that's a blessing. You kids with your anxiety, you should try it. Wipes the slate clean." He said it with the cheerful ignorance of a man recommending a new brand of coffee, completely oblivious to the frantic terror building in Percy's eyes.

Percy backed away, nodding numbly. He was alone in this. The film hadn't just made them forget; it had made them incurious. They accepted the void, embraced the synthetic bliss, and questioned nothing. They were the flock, content in their pasture, and he was the one sheep who could suddenly hear the sound of the abattoir's machinery.

That night, the phantom happiness shattered completely. Lying in his bed, the hum was a deafening thrum that vibrated through his pillow. The word ENJOY was no longer a flicker; it was a permanent fixture behind his closed eyelids, a relentless, silent command. The emptiness in his mind no longer felt like peace; it felt like a robbery. Something had been taken from him in that theater, and this awful, vibrating bliss was the cheap replacement left behind. It was a psychic anesthetic, and it was wearing off, revealing the raw, gaping wound beneath.

He couldn't live like this. He couldn't go back to being the person he was before, not when he knew this smiling sickness could swallow him again. But he couldn't live as this hollowed-out shell, either, haunted by the ghost of a command he couldn't disobey.

He sat bolt upright in bed, a cold sweat slicking his skin. The void. The ninety-minute gap. The answer was in there. The cause of the hum, the source of the word, the truth of what happened in that theater—it was all locked away in that stolen time.

His first thought was to go back and watch it again, to try and fight the effect, but he knew it was useless. The white light, the trigger... it was a failsafe. A switch that would just wipe him clean again, maybe even more thoroughly this time. He couldn't risk it. His mind was a crime scene, and the culprit returned every night to bleach the evidence.

He couldn't watch.

The thought hit him with the force of a physical blow. The command was visual. The mime. The word on the screen. The blinding flash of light. It was all about what you see. The ad promised, "You will forget everything you see." It never said a thing about what you hear.

A dangerous, terrifying plan began to form in the ruins of his stolen peace. It was insane. It was suicidal. But it was the only path forward that wasn't a slow descent into smiling madness.

He would go back. He would buy another ticket for the late-night showing. He would sit in that same decaying theater, surrounded by the willing zombies of Mountain Rim.

But this time, he would not watch. He would squeeze his eyes shut the moment the lights went out, and he would keep them shut no matter what.

He would only listen.