Patrick Wilson lifted his head from the pillow and turned to face the red glare coming from the digital clock beside his bed.

  2.47 am.

  The numbers were a taunt.

  He let his head flop back onto the pillow, resigned to inevitable failure, yet stubbornly determined to try. He sought sleep with grim defiance of the waking world.

  With calm and steady breaths, he tried to trace the lingering lines of the rapidly fading dream, picking up the threads of vapour that remained from the half-forgotten dream and follow it back into the depths.

  But all threads of dream slipped from his grasp, and he was left with nothing more than the sense of something hiding in the recesses of his mind.

  He punched at the pillow and sat up in the darkness.

  The cool breeze from the ceiling fan caressed his skin and pushed back the heat that lingered from the previous day.

  He reached out towards the dark silhouette of the bedside lamp, fumbling around for a moment before finding the switch.

  Light flooded the room. He turned away, shielding his eyes from the harsh glow.

  Tara squinted up at him from the foot of the bed and gave a few flicks of her tail to show her disapproval.

  “Sorry girl,” he stroked her fur and felt her whole body rumble as she purred forgiveness.

  Getting to his feet, she lifted her head to watch him as he made his way to the bathroom door.

  “You may as well go back to sleep, no point in both of us being up.”

  He watched her give one final flick of her tail, then drop her head back onto her paws and appeared to return instantly to sleep.

  He huffed a single breath of laughter and started to sing beneath his breath. “If I could talk to the animals, just imagine it, chatting with a chimp in chimpanzee…”

  The song was a broken fragment of memory, with no association to a single moment of his childhood, just words and a tune that had somehow managed to survive in his subconscious for the past 30 or so years.

  He studied his reflection in the bathroom mirror, running his hand over his face, trying to rub out the faint lines left by the pillow.

  He didn’t look tired. There were no dark circles under his eyes, no weary squint that hinted at a longing for sleep.

  His eyes were clear and bright, and his mind sharp.

  “What the fuck is going on?” The sleepless questioning the sleeplessness.

  He thoughtfully scratched at the light stubble that had sprouted from his cheeks over the last few days.

  “Little bit too much grey in there for 34.”

  With a sigh, he turned from his reflection, then stripped down and stepped into the shower.

  The cool soothing water flowed over him, pushing back the heat that still managed to seep in from the outside and washed away the remains of sleep.

  This strange addiction to insomnia had come upon Patrick suddenly, a little more than six weeks ago. A habit unwanted, yet impossible to break. It was like an alarm going off inside his head that he couldn’t ignore. It drew him up from the realms of sleep against his will and thrust him back into the waking world with an abruptness that was shocking.

  If he was lucky, some nights he managed to get two and a half, sometimes three hours of restful sleep. But more often than not, it was less. And, as far as he could tell, there was no end in sight.

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  He finished dressing in the bedroom and gave Tara a final scratch behind the ears before heading to the other end of the house, where the home office was located.

  His desk faced towards the large windows that looked out over the bay, still covered in darkness and moonlight.

  Boredom was the worst thing about insomnia. He had stopped trying to watch TV to pass the hours, repeats of infomercials and early morning talk show hosts waffling on about nothing were enough to drive a man insane.

  So he did his best to keep busy, to stop his mind from dwelling on thoughts until they reached the point of obsession.

  He switched on the computer and tried to work. After six weeks of sleepless nights, the company's finances had never been so organized, there were only a few unreconciled transactions in their accounting software that needed to be dealt with, but after just 15 minutes, the bookwork was completely up to date.

  He searched a few online auction sites, browsing the antiques that were listed in the hope of finding a hidden gem that he could snatch up for a steal.

  After 15 years in the antique business, he had yet to come across a lost or forgotten Rembrandt stashed away in someone’s attic. But there was always hope.

  When he finished with the auction sites, he sat and stared at the screen. Willing something interesting to suddenly occur to him so that he could fill the remaining hours until daylight.

  He typed the word ‘interesting’ into the search engine and scrolled through the results.

  Halfway down the second page, he found a link to a story about a man named Henry M, who, due to an accident in his youth, was now incapable of creating new memories. At 82 years old, the most recent memories he could recall were formed in his twenties and were as vivid to him as though they had happened moments ago.

  A head injury at the age of 23 had damaged the part of Henry’s brain that was responsible for creating new memories.

  Not a single event since the day of the accident was available for recall in Henry M’s mind.

  Yet, despite the sixty-year gap, whenever Henry looked in the mirror and saw an eighty-year-old man staring back at him, he was never surprised. There was no shock or dismay at the lines of age criss-crossing the once youthful features. The face in the mirror belonged to him, and he never questioned it.

  Stranger still was the fact that, at some point in time since his accident, a musical therapy program had been initiated at the hospital where Henry M was a permanent resident. Very quickly, the doctors treating him noticed that Henry was making steady improvement in his ability to play the piano. Intrigued, the doctors intensified the level of teaching provided to Henry, and within a few year,s managed to teach him to play the piano with considerable skill.

  Each time he sat down at the keys, he had no memory of ever having played before. But some part of him remembered, and his fingers played upon the keys without dropping a single note in even the most complicated tunes.

  Patrick read the article to the end.

  'Am I searching for clues?' The question was strange and out of place. 'Why do I keep coming back to memory?'

  He felt a wave of nausea pass over him, and a chill shook his entire body.

  The moment passed, and he began to focus his attention on filling the time that remained before dawn.

  Fifteen minutes to gather up a load of laundry. Carefully going through all the pockets, looking for loose change and pieces of paper, then putting them all into the washing machine.

  Forty-five minutes, for the third time in seven days, he vacuumed every room in the house, making sure to run the nozzle along all the skirting boards to pick up any dust that had gathered there.

  Twenty minutes hanging the wet clothes on the clothes rack on the back verandah.

  By the time he had pegged the last sock to the rack, the light of dawn had only just begun to shine upon the horizon.

  Patrick went back inside, dropped the laundry basket on top of the washing machine and walked into the kitchen.

  Memory tickled at his consciousness, a thought he had been trying so hard to avoid rising to the surface. The Package was still at the back of the cupboard next to the fridge. He hadn’t moved it since he had hidden it there two nights ago. He tried not to think about it.

  He reached in past the dry foods and boxes of cereal and removed the package from its hiding place. He made sure it was still wrapped tightly in the same cloth it had been covered with when he had taken possession of it. He didn’t open it; he didn’t want to see it, the weight of it in his hands was enough to make him feel nauseous. Although if he had been asked, he would not have been able to explain why.

  He stuffed the package deep into one of the pockets of his laptop bag and immediately pushed it from his mind.

  He would have to deal with it today. He would have to take it out of his bag and unwrap the cloth. He would have to look at it again. He couldn’t explain why the thought of that bothered him so much, but it did. He pushed it from his mind, a feat that was far easier than it should have been. If he had the will or inclination to stop and think about why it was so easy to forget, he may have come to the insane conclusion that the object wanted to be forgotten.

  But he didn’t have the will or the inclination.

  He slung the strap of the laptop bag over his shoulder, grabbed his keys from the hall stand and headed for the door, grateful to be getting out of the house.

  From the front step, he looked to the east, just in time to see the peak of the sun breach the horizon. He stood there for a moment, appreciating the sight of the golden light of dawn reflecting off the clouds.

  He walked down a short path to a little green Toyota sitting in the driveway and got in. He slowly backed out of the drive and headed towards the highway, still humming the song that had lodged itself in his head since waking. “If I could talk with the animals, walk with the animals…”

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