The Promise

Complete Story

Bill Baron looked out of the window of his office. A truck was driving far below. Ships on the channel a bit farther in the distance. He had always liked this view. His office. What he had achieved here. Now he would lose it, one way or the other. For a moment he looked at his reflection. A man in his thirties, stylish black hair, clean shaven, brown eyes, looking at himself with a mix of anxiety and expectations. He would miss all of this.

A knock at the door.

Bill turned around, seeing Helen enter. His secretary had a strange look on her face.

"Word is your terms have been accepted," she told him.

He let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding. Relief and fear tangled in his chest. For a moment it felt as if he was falling.

"I want to congratulate you," Helen noticed. "But I must admit I'm worried."

Bill looked at her. Soon no longer his secretary, he appreciated the true concern in her eyes.

"I will live well enough with this package," he explained. "Forever, if I calculated right."

The woman in the stylish dress mustered him, as if she tried to find something in him she had missed in the years she knew him.

"You seem happy here," she continued. "I know you said it is burnout, but ... but why give all this up."

Bill could hear the fear that she crossed a line clear in her voice, just as he could hear the worry for him. Fear and compassion. He weighed his options and chose the truth.

"I gave a promise."

A promise made in a room so very different from this one, he thought.

***

"You don't know what you get yourself into," Doctor Plow remarked. "I can promise you this."

Bill put his shirt back on after the doctor had taken his EKG.

"The psychiatrist believes otherwise."

“To be regressed to an age this young isn't an easy journey. Maybe never will be.” The doctor entered some data into his pad and took place at his desk. “Nor might you like what you find at the end.”

Bill took a seat at the desk opposite to him, considering this.

“Nothing is safe in life, you know this,” he finally answered. “Sometimes the risks are worth it.”

Doctor Plow mustered him for what felt a long time, then he sighed.

“I will regret losing you to a pediatrician.”

He signed the standard document for regression. In its middle a single large number.

5

***

After a long jog in the park a now 17 year old Bill was happy to enter his apartment. His breath normalizing, he checked the time. He had gotten slower. No reason to panic. His muscles were shrinking … as did his legs. By the easy way his shoes got loose, as did his feet. Again, no reason to panic. He had bought enough clothes in all sizes.

The shower was strange, as most showers had been since the treatment had begun. His body felt like not his own for a moment and only active rubbing seemed to help, to reconnect brain and body again. Still, less and less hair. Smoother skin. The way he had shrunk already and knew he still would ...

Bill's doctors had explained to him that his brain needed to constantly adapt to a body changing in two months as much as it had before in 25 years. And the greatest changes were just beginning.

***

Bill, now 15 and the big man with the digital pad were walking through the run-down house. The floor creaked. Carpet was worn out. Some tapestry had holes. He had been here often during the last months, but couldn't help but feel hurt by this sight every time.

“Remember, the staircase should be white,” Bill instructed and despite his voice cracking slightly, he tried to fill it with the security of his time as manager. A life which already felt so very distant. “Work room upstairs and kitchen according to the agreement. The rest furnished and equipped according to the photos.”

The man nodded.

“As I said last time, most won’t be found in original,” he said. “But I will try to find look-alikes. You got the simulation.”

Bill nodded and stopped a moment in front of a room. A storage room. At least the boxes, derelict furniture and an old tv meant it had been used as this by the previous owners. Children’s laughter made him turn around sharply. Through a window he noticed a boy who seemed to be his own age for now racing down the street on a bicycle. He clenched his teeth.

As he looked at the contractor, he noticed a reserved look the man tried to hide but failed so. The regressed man knew it was hard for the other to take him seriously. Knew this would become even harder soon.

“I will go to a hospital for a while,” Bill revealed openly. “I will not be able to be here during the renovation and even with the updates …” He shook his head. “I trust you with all of it. If I had any doubts, I wouldn’t have hired you.”

He extended his hand and while the man took it to seal the deal, both noticed how Bill’s nearly vanished in that of the man.

***

Bill entered the hospital the very next day. He hadn't truly believed it necessary, when he had planned it as advised by the doctors – but already the day after he knew better.

He vomited for two days and felt sick and feverish for quite a bit longer. Chills in the night crowned this experience. Puberty in reverse, at this speed ... had consequences. He remembered being sick like this as a child and being cared for by his mother and father. Both were gone a long time now, but at least he wasn't alone in the hospital.

“Feeling better?”

Bill opened his eyes and looked at Stan, the other patient in the room. Now ten, he had been in his forties when the therapy had started. Looking at the smiling boy, Bill, himself twelve according to the doctors, found the previous age mattered less and less to him … it nearly felt like a sleepover with another boy. He blamed exhaustion.

“Yeah,” he managed to say and sat up in the bed. “A bit.”

The regressed man wasn’t sure if this was true.

He felt better, sure, but his body felt wrong. No more hair at all but his head. So much weaker and smaller. His bare feet seemed farther away from the end of the bed than even yesterday. And inside his head things were shifting, too, though more subtle. Emotions seemed to shift weight. Thoughts connected to women … didn't come at all. He remembered Elaine, the woman he had been betrothed to, but found he no longer could define her the way he had before. They had never made it to marriage. An argument had made them separate. A silly one in retrospective. If she could see him now …

“Catch!” Stan shouted.

Something landed besides Bill on the bed. As he picked it up he found it to be a teddy bear with a white heart on it.

“You seem to need it,” the other regressed man noticed smiling.

Bill threw it back, unable not to smile. Stan's good humor was infectious.

“Your daughter would kill me if she saw me with it.” Bill said.

Not far from the truth. Emily, age 6, had gifted her father her teddy. She had been the reason Stan was going to regress himself to her age in the first place. She needed a transplant and donors her age were rare these days. Children were rarer.

“She could wrestle with both of us and probably win!” Stan admitted, love in his eyes.

“Not with you,” Bill noticed. “You are her hero.”

“Heroes need capes. We could make them out of the bed sheets and play heroes,” Stan suggested. “I’m Superman and you are Batman.”

Bill stared at him, not quite sure if he was serious. The doctors had warned him mental regression was a risk while getting younger, but …

Stan laughed and Bill joined in, embarrassed to have been tricked. To worry so much about what he had decided long ago. He rubbed his long since hairless chin … and stopped.

“What is it?” Stan asked, suddenly serious upon noticing the look on his face.

Bill explored his mouth with his tongue. He spit out. A tooth landed in the palm of his hand and felt the emptiness where his upper left canine had been. The first of his adult teeth to go, the baby teeth waiting to replace it.

“I guess I will get a visit from the tooth fairy tonight.”

***

The tooth fairy didn’t come. Neither for Bill’s first adult tooth, nor for the 27 which followed it. When he finally left the hospital he had 20 fresh baby teeth as any other five year old. The time inside had felt like an eternity. As he made his first steps in the world outside to the taxi waiting for him, he couldn’t help but marvel at how much everything had changed. How fresh and large the world looked. He had believed to remember the first time being this young, but now he realized he had been wrong. On the drive home he couldn't help but look out of the window with a sense of wonder.

In his apartment, preparing to move became a good test for his new body. Up the ladder and down. Packing boxes, most to be donated. He should have done more before he went to the hospital, but he had underestimated his new lack of size and strength. Still, he didn’t fail, though he knew he would need help in the long run. In between, during much needed breaks, he spent many minutes in front of the mirror. Looking at the kindergarten kid that was him.

This night he slept for what he assumed to be the last time in his bed. His old bed. Much too big just as everything in the apartment. And his plans seemed to be this now, too. Too big. He had believed to be strong enough to handle this all, but back then he had been a man, now he was just a boy.

Yet, he had promised.

Bill fell asleep, feeling small and alone.

***

As Bill entered the freshly renovated house, he barely noticed the men bringing in the last boxes. He walked through a freshly painted floor, smiled at the white staircase, checked the kitchen and finally stopped in front of what had been a storage room weeks before. Now it was a bedroom … no, more than that, a nursery. Cartoon tapestry. Stuffed animals, toys, blocks and puzzles. A little table with little plastic chairs. Most nearly as he remembered it. Everything just his size, including his bed, having a Peter Pan in Neverland cover.

He remembered the day so many years ago. Him thirteen. His belongings in boxes. Everything ready to move out. The room empty and feeling too big for him, always had.

Behind him he had heard his parents talking distantly and then … he had felt someone in the doorway.

“I will come back,” he had said. “I promise.”

Now he looked at the second bed in the nursery, one covered with a Cinderella cover.

***

A bit later the men had left.

Bill had checked everything one last time. The time the food service would be there. The refrigerator. The internet connection. And now … he took a toy truck out of the nursery and walked barefoot into the newly mowed backyard, where he sat down. His red shorts allowed his scrawny legs to really feel the grass, his blue Simba shirt giving just the right amount of protection against wind and sun as he began awkwardly to move the truck back and forth.

Bill suddenly remembered the view out of his office window. What had been his office window. He felt something cold in his stomach. What if he had been wrong? What if she didn't come? Clenching his teeth, he concentrated on the toy truck.

No worries. Just play. Just as when he had been five year old the first time and she … he should at least give it a try after how far he had come. He continued moving the truck around in the grass, not quite playing, not yet. Part of him remembered having played with a truck just like this, part of him knew he would have to learn it anew … but this was okay. Children his age learned fast and he would not get one day older.

The regressed man had already lost himself in play, somewhere in the sweet spot between memory and imagination, when a breeze moved through the yard. The grass shifted besides him – though he hadn't touched it. He noticed someone approaching. Not quite hearing it. Not really.

“Bill?” A girl’s voice, soft as the wind and warm as the sun.

Bill looked up. His eyes filled with tears. A black haired girl, five as him, in a green summer dress with flowers. She was smiling in disbelief, a hope shining in her eyes, fragile, yet so very warm … just as the sun which was shining through her.

“I told you I'd come back.”

He felt her embrace soft as a feather.

***

From a window in the first floor of the house next door, Harry and Lisa watched their new neighbor play in the backyard.

“So the millionaire bought himself the illusion of a childhood,” the man commented cynically.

“I don’t think this is why he did it,” the woman replied and upon her husband’s look she sighed. “You know the ghost there.”

“I don’t believe in these …”

“I know, I know,” Lisa interrupted him. He didn’t believe in ghosts or that regressed adults were in any way children again. “Still. The laughter and often cries? The sound of little feet running through an empty house? The reason for the insane turnover and abandonment of this house?”

Harry didn’t answer.

“You know the Bolton’s said she appeared to their young children,” his wife continued. “Played with them.”

“Too much fantasy.”

“They say ghosts appear to children more freely.”

“So Mr. Baron is hunting ghosts?” Harry concluded.

“Mrs. Hunter told me the story,” Lisa gave him a queer look. “He is her brother.”

This made Harry look from her to Bill for a moment.

“Brother?”

“Twin,” she confirmed quietly. “She died young. I don’t know if he knew of her ghost back then, but he must have heard of it later and … decided to not leave her alone.”

Harry looked from her to the boy still playing in the backyard with his toy truck, now smiling, as if he was showing it to someone.

“You expect me to believe this?”

Lisa sighed, wondering if them having their ages fixed meant her husband would ever change.

“No.” She shrugged. “I expect you to help me in the kitchen.”

With this she went down the stairs.

Harry threw a last look at the backyard. Bill had jumped up and now was racing inside, laughing. Later Harry would tell himself it had been just an illusion by the sun and by his mind being confused by all this silly talk about ghosts, and yet … as he watched in this moment, he could have sworn he saw the boy following a girl his age. A girl in a green dress with black hair like him, both kids laughing as they ran inside.

The End

 

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