The Dark Restarter

by Sean McMahon

  Fearne, on the other hand, felt the complete opposite, as a rogue memory attempted to force its way to the forefront of her mind. She couldn’t shake the feeling they had met this man before. Like the memory of a memory of a dream. Unfocused, fragmented. But in her current state, out-of-phase for however many years it had been, it was simply beyond the realm of her capabilities to remember just how important that information was to them.

  *

  ‘It’s done,’ repeated Peter, echoing his thoughts by presenting the words to his cohorts.

  Malcolm grimaced. He was losing them. It felt like trying to herd cattle into an invisible enclosure. One that regularly vanished and reappeared elsewhere between blinks.

  Why he alone was able to maintain his own focus was a mystery to him. He had travelled more than either of the young couple standing before him, whose minds were becoming increasingly afflicted by the addling after-burn of reductive amnesia. The pride within him made him reason it was his sheer will that kept him grounded, though he knew deep down – and from first-hand experience – that this character-trait alone would not have kept him from falling foul of the insidious fog.

  In the end he suspected that it had more than a little to do with the manner in which he had cut the tether to his present and future, by turning off his own life-support at the hospital.

  Malcolm placed a heavy hand on each of their shoulders, creating a bridge between them, one that was illuminated by both the red energy that flowed through him and small splutters of the remaining blue energy within the meek individuals he was trying to wrangle.

  ‘We are far from done, Peter,’ said Malcolm, his voice forceful yet somehow calm, as if articulating the words would assist Peter in his rapidly decreasing ability to process them. ‘We have rearranged the board to aid our escape, but there is one more crucial component for us to implement.’

  Fearne remembered now, infused by the energy she was siphoning, thanks to the connection to Peter and their self-proclaimed saviour. The sun-drenched garden making the blades of grass look like a flowing ocean of gold water, as they were flicked by the cool mid-morning breeze.

  She felt drained again, stealing a glance to her shoulder, seeing the red energy spiralling savagely, and realised all too late that they had placed their trust in a man who almost certainly possessed a more convoluted agenda that he was willing to share with them.

  But as she looked upwards and into the eyes of Peter, who was gazing back at her with moistened eyes of sadness, she made a choice; she knew how far she was willing to go in order to return to the world of the living, to a time where she could once again hold him in her arms.

  ‘To the end and back,’ she muttered, a single tear running down her cheek.

  *

  They moved quickly, as Fearne rushed up the central staircase of Fir Lodge, waiting for her instructions. Meanwhile, Peter and Malcolm headed into Robert’s bedroom.

  The two men waited patiently, standing there in the dark, utterly silent, arms interlocked, until Peter’s past-self finally entered the room, on his predetermined path of seeking a phone charger.

  Malcolm closed the door behind the Repeater’s past-self as he entered, and they edged as one towards the living, breathing version of Peter.

  ‘Now,’ said Malcolm, barking the order.

  And together, they plunged their free hands into the brain of Peter’s living facsimile, red and blue energy spiralling wildly from the connection.

  Peter’s alive-self took a step forward, seemingly trying to fight against whatever unseen force was assaulting his physical form.

  Drawing on both the energy being produced by his contact with Peter’s time-travelling self –which held considerable potency, given the proximity the two Peter’s were currently sharing – and his own brand of equally powerful, red-coloured energy, Malcolm pushed the Peter of the past against the wall.

  It was working.

  “Just a little longer…” thought Malcolm.

  Malcolm noticed a flicker of blue light to his right, dancing just outside the realms of his peripheral vision. A mere glimmer, but it signified something more…they were being watched. Someone was spying on them, invading their realm of existence.

  The flicker of blue took on a more prominent shape; that of two jet-black bodies.

  Malcolm had come too far to allow an unexpected intrusion to ruin everything, so he leaned closer towards the wisps of blue light, hoping it would scare whatever, or whoever, it was back to whence they came.

  His vision was suddenly filled by the arrival of two featureless entities. Their forms began to take a more stable state, and Malcolm turned his head slightly, facing Peter’s alive-self once more.

  “There you are,” thought Malcolm, as he saw an additional two arms come into focus. Arms that were also reaching into Peter’s body.

  Peter’s alive-self spoke, though it was impossible to tell if he was talking to Malcolm, to his time-travelling self, or to the two intruders, as he muttered but five broken words;

  ‘Ha-Hal? Karrr? M-my f-ft. Mist…’

  Malcolm knew what he was doing here would lead to Harold and Kara inheriting the restarts of Peter and Fearne, but their presence here, between phases was unexpected. Had they found a way to traverse through The White Lodge? Surely not. Though it was a concern.

  Malcolm peered closer, reducing the gap between his own face and that of the Restarters. It seemed to do the trick, as the humanoid black shapes vanished. If they could travel between the timelines like he had mastered then–

  ‘What’s The White Lodge?’ asked the Repeating version of Peter.

  Malcolm froze. This was his first time encountering the inherent degree of telepathy between time travellers. A by-product that occurred when the temporally-afflicted connected for any length of time. In this case, the connection between Peter, his past self and Malcolm had apparently led to an irksome transference of thoughts.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ lied Malcolm. ‘We’re done here,’ he added, noting that the intruders had vanished.

  He signalled to Peter that he could pull away from his physical form.

  ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me,’ said Malcolm curtly, ‘I need to assist Fearne.’

  *

  Fearne waited impatiently, wringing her hands with anxiety.

  For a moment, she wondered if Malcolm would show at all, as he bounded up the stairs just in time, striding towards her like an army general. Fearne’s focus was bolstered by the music filling the room, the catchy beat of “Spirit in the Sky” laced with irony, as the lyrics hit her hard.

  Malcolm grabbed Fearne’s arm and nodded, signalling for her to mimic his action of thrusting his hand into the head of Fearne’s alive-self who promptly became dizzy, falling forwards towards the staircase. Stacey caught her just in time, and escorted her temporarily-dazed friend to one of the communal sofas.

  And with that, the deed was done.

  Peter and Fearne departed through the rear garden and kept walking, needing to distance themselves from the music that kept them anchored to their memories, eager to forget that in order to escape their damnation, they had made a deal with the devil. That the price for their freedom was as devastating as it was simple; they had sacrificed the lives of two of their closest friends, sentencing them to a death they wouldn’t see coming, and could do nothing to stop.

  For a brief moment Peter wondered if those two friends would have to make the same trade for their own freedom. Would they have been able to find another way? Another solution? Or would they too sentence people they loved to an eternal nightmare?

  He knew that together they…that he…what were their names? He couldn’t remember. The fog was coming, and they were standing too far away from the music inside the building behind them to fortify their senses. Despite the wave of temporal dissonance, the side-effects he was experiencing did little to combat the burning sensation he felt in his throat.

  The two spectators watched the events unfolding before t
hem from a distance, everything playing out in the same order it always did, hoping they had done enough. The young man looked over to the woman standing beside him, a stranger to him once again…and yet, at the same time…somehow not. Her presence was simultaneously a comfort, and a horrifying reminder that everything was wrong.

  He blinked to release the tears that were building up in his eyes, like a wall of doubt, blurring his vision. His throat burned with regret, for a sin he could barely remember, one that he also had no desire to clutch on to any longer.

  Why did his throat hurt? What was he upset about? Who was the woman walking beside him?

  And as his body disintegrated, it felt like he was falling head first into a bottomless ocean of white mist; a fog paradoxically static, yet seemingly shifting with a life all its own.

  It suffocated him like a pillow being pressed against his face, preventing him from drawing breath.

  As he tried to lash out at the force pressing down on him, he realised he no longer had arms with which to do so. Until, finally, there was nothing but the sweet release of darkness.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The Offer

  Timeline Delta – 167th Restart – Friday, August 24th, 12:48pm

  Hal and Kara sat there in silence, unpacking all of the information Peter and Fearne had just unloaded onto them, both with a look on their faces that seemed to say they were sorry they’d asked.

  ‘But instead of returning home, we found ourselves back here,’ mumbled Peter. ‘Then you guys showed up. We didn’t know what was happening...so we just…’

  ‘Ran with it,’ said Fearne. ‘Until we had a better understanding of what we were dealing with.’

  Kara and Hal remained silent.

  ‘Say something, please,’ said Fearne, unable to handle the prolonged stares of judgment.

  ‘All this time…’ said Kara finally.

  ‘…It was you that brought us here,’ said Hal quietly. ‘Trapped us here. Left us to die.’

  ‘It’s not as simple as that,’ said Fearne defensively.

  ‘I mean, it kind of is, though,’ said Hal angrily.

  ‘Hal, we didn’t know what we were doing until it was too–’

  ‘I can’t even look at you both right now,’ said Hal cutting Peter off. ‘If you’re asking me to feel sorry for you, magic 8-Ball says not bloody likely. The only one I feel sorry for is poor Jerry!’

  ‘Kara?’ said Fearne, hoping her friend could understand.

  But Kara was equally lost for words, clearly unable to process the huge bomb of knowledge that had just been dropped on top of them.

  ‘Let’s…we need to talk to Malcolm,’ said Kara, eager to dodge further questions. ‘Future-Malcolm,’ she added, in an attempt to snap Hal out of his thousand-yard scowl.

  ‘Yeah.’ said Hal distantly. ‘Sure.’

  *

  Armed with the full picture on exactly what Peter and Fearne had done to escape their incarceration, they silently marched to Kevin’s home, where they hoped to find the once and future Malcolm.

  The Restarters were relieved to find him sitting in the same chair, waiting patiently.

  Malcolm wasted little time, seemingly oblivious to the tension radiating between the four potentially-former friends.

  ‘I must admit,’ said Malcolm happily, ‘I didn't think you'd succeed on your first attempt. Bravo.’

  ‘Save the kudos, Kujo,’ said Hal, needing answers more than he needed false praise. ‘Why are we still here? We played your game, restarted the past. How are we even talking right now?’

  ‘All in good time,’ said Malcolm, clearly revelling in the power he had over them. ‘Saving Peter was just the beginning. That was the day I was meant to escape from this place, but we’re now occupying a restart unlike anything we have encountered before. Something of a blank slate, as it were.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ said Peter.

  ‘As I said before,’ said Malcolm, pointing towards Hal and Kara, ‘the two of you escaped after – how many restarts was it?’

  ‘One, six, five,’ said Kara through gritted teeth.

  ‘Ah yes,’ said Malcolm, as if he didn’t already know that.

  And so, it began, as Malcolm filled them in on every facet of his own journey.

  How he had been defeated by Hal and Kara no less than thirteen years ago, relatively speaking.

  What followed after that fateful encounter came to be known to him as The Dark Days; after they had vanquished him, he had spent two of those years reliving their 165th restart over and over, focusing squarely on revenge. It had proven to be a fruitless pursuit, however. One that had ultimately resulted in him having to make peace with the fact that he would have to let the two Restarters go.

  His shift in focus led to a revelation; by concentrating on a more realistic goal, that of escape from the endless loops in time, he was able to act far more productively. Especially once he had deduced how being dislocated from time came with some unexpected new abilities. Most potently of which, after many restarts, was the discovery of being able to communicate with his alive-self, albeit indirectly at first.

  ‘You found a way to communicate with yourself in the past?’ said Hal, barely able to hide how impressed he was by that. ‘How is that even possible?’

  Kara thought back to when she had witnessed the first evidence of this being more than possible, during their 165th restart.

  The Big One.

  She had casually uttered “go team” to herself, and her alive-self had mimicked the exact same words. Kara had thought little of it at the time, what with everything being on the line, and there being far more pressing matters to contend with.

  Was it really that much of a stretch for Malcolm to have made the quantum-leap to perfect this method of cross-phase communication? It suddenly all made sense to Kara.

  ‘He’s relying on the repetition of it all,’ she said. ‘Using the restarts as a tool to communicate his thoughts through time, all the way into the present! Or past. You know what I mean. Malcolm 2.0 is manipulating Malcolm 1.0! That’s how he’s changing everything.’

  ‘That is…exactly right Kara,’ said Malcolm, realising he had grossly underestimated her. ‘Though the consequences are far more dangerous than my Restarter-self is willing to admit. By attempting to control his alive-self in the past, he is unwittingly creating a feedback loop, preventing my considerably more-corporeal self from forming new thoughts of his own.’

  ‘You mean alive-you can’t make decisions of his own anymore?’ asked Fearne.

  ‘Not whilst my Restarter-self is there, like the proverbial devil, resting on my own shoulder, no. I surmise this is one of the discerning factors that has resulted in my being comatose in the present.’

  ‘Wait, coma?’ said Peter, confused already.

  ‘Patience,’ said Malcolm, and he continued with his story. ‘In the additional two years that followed, I finally succeeded in changing the course of events of your 165th restart by trading Peter’s life for the two of yours. Destiny returned me to a new present, with no memory of this cursed life.’

  ‘That explains the funeral,’ Hal mumbled to Kara, who nodded gravely. “But not the coffee shop,” he thought, slowly sliding off his backpack enough to retrieve his trusty notebook, whilst Malcolm surged onwards.

  Time, it seemed, had changed around them to account for the changes Malcolm had made by sacrificing Peter.

  ‘But, alas,’ said Malcolm, his words heavy. ‘It didn’t last. I found myself back here, in these wretched woods. I had no idea back then that my return was instigated by my own intervention here today.’

  ‘When you sent us to save Peter just now,’ said Hal, piecing it together. ‘You changed your own future. Why?’ he added, confused by why anyone would return here by choice.

  ‘I was stuck. What we have changed today will eventually result in all of us escaping. That version of myself included. But...I will awake in an Intensive Care Unit on the most elusive o
f days for those of our…ilk. Sunday the 26th. You think 165 restarts is bad? Try thousands. Eight years, Harold. In twelve-hour chunks. Inside a single room. In the end, I will then pull the plug on my own life support.’

  Left comatose, a new anomaly in space time had manifested that day, trapping him in another time-loop reserved just for him. And for a further eight, bitter years, he waited. Defeated, shamed, Malcolm was left with nothing but a cup of anger and a side dish of damaged pride, doomed to spend an eternity staring at his own fragile body.

  It was torturous, knowing the body before him would never wake from its vegetative state. For him, his hospitalised time-loop triggered automatically every twelve hours, meaning that every twelve hours of healing his body went through was undone with each new restart.

  The horrifying truth had dawned on him quickly; he could never recover.

  As the black fog had thickened, and the red energy within him faded, he explained to his captive audience how he eventually forgot who he was entirely. Everything that drove him faded away. Even his years of murdering the innocent felt less like reality, and more like fever dreams. But one singular desire remained; freedom.

  ‘Black fog?’ asked Peter.

  ‘Yes, the fog that claims you when it’s time to start over,’ said Malcolm, as if he were explaining something as obvious as how online shopping worked.

  The four Restarters shifted uncomfortably.

  ‘Out with it,’ said Malcolm impatiently.

  ‘Well,’ said Peter, clearing his throat awkwardly. ‘It’s just…well, the fog is always white for us, right guys?’ he said, directing his question to Hal and Kara, suddenly worrying he had made the assumption for the four of them based solely on his and Fearne’s experiences.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Kara. ‘I guess serial killers get a different package than us mere normal folk.’

  Malcolm pursed his lips, clearly intrigued. He had heard Peter and Fearne discuss the white fog during his time with them, of course, but had never outrightly confronted them on it.

  It seemed of little importance now, as Malcolm moved on to how the eight years he had spent within the confines of that hospital had far more pressing, unprecedented side-effects.