A Matter of Time

by Brian Harmon

  He had to admit, that was a valid question. It was also a troubling question. Why was the building unlocked? Was someone else here?

  “Come on,” urged Karen. And before he could argue, she stepped inside and let the door swing closed between them.

  Eric cursed under his breath. He opened the door and peered inside. Then he glanced back over his shoulder and scanned the woods, the mostly concealed fairway, even the nearby treetops. This seemed wrong. “Do you feel anything?”

  I DON’T, replied Isabelle. EVERYTHING’S NORMAL AS FAR AS I CAN TELL

  He stepped inside and let the door close behind him. His first impression was that it was hot in here. Not stifling, but definitely stuffy. His second impression was that it smelled funny. Like old sweat and rubber. But like something else, too. Something dank. Something unclean.

  He ran his hand through his hair and sighed loudly, but if Karen heard him, she didn’t give him the satisfaction of letting him know it. She was already making her way up the hallway, peering into doorways as she went. “I still don’t like this,” he muttered.

  I KNOW YOU DON’T

  Shouldn’t I? he thought.

  ABSOLUTELY. I TOTALLY AGREE WITH YOU. THERE’S NO REASON TO THINK THERE WON’T BE SOMETHING DANGEROUS IN THERE. I DON’T THINK YOU’D BE HERE IF THERE WASN’T. BUT NEITHER OF US CAN STOP HER, SO JUST GET IN THERE AND PROTECT HER

  Isabelle looked like a thirteen-year-old girl. She often spoke and behaved like a thirteen-year-old girl. Her unique existence outside of the flow of time as Eric knew it had prevented her from aging physically or mentally since her disappearance, essentially freezing her at that age for almost forty years. But she was actually fifty-one and, although not affected by it, was fully aware of the time that had passed. She was psychically bonded not only to Eric’s mind, but to the minds of her parents. As a result, she had access to all three of their mental databases. And in her strange travels through places caught between worlds, she also occasionally came across other, less fortunate souls who were trapped in the same queer state. Although these people were always mad or rapidly plunging into madness when she found them—it was a mystery why only Isabelle retained her sanity—she was able to absorb whatever knowledge they still retained as soon as she entered the property.

  Long story short: Isabelle was not a naïve little girl. She was a very wise woman. And she often said very wise things. Like now. She was absolutely right. The important thing at this moment was protecting Karen. If he couldn’t stop her from going inside the creepy, deserted building, then he had to remain at her side until she left. Keeping the phone in his hand, where Isabelle could contact him instantly should she sense something suspicious, he hurried after his wife, peering into each darkened doorway along the way, his eyes wide open for any sign of danger.

  All the doors on the right opened into small, empty rooms. Offices, Eric thought, though he couldn’t be certain. Did rec centers have offices? He thought they probably did, but he’d never actually been to one.

  The few doors on the left all opened into the same cavernous room. There was no mystery about that one. It was a gymnasium. They could still play basketball in there if they only had a ball and time to kill. They had neither, which was just as well because Eric was lousy at basketball. He’d blame it on being short, but the truth was he’d simply never been all that good at any sport.

  “This place is cool,” whispered Karen.

  “Yeah,” said Eric. “Cool.” Although “cool” wasn’t the word he was thinking. “Eerie” was more like it. It was deathly quiet in here, and darker than it should’ve been at this time of day. The sun was shining brightly outside, but there were too few windows. The far corners were deeply shadowed.

  Beyond the gymnasium was an intersection where the first corridor intersected a second one. To the right was the lobby and the main entrance. To the left, this hallway ran the entire length of the building. It was here that the enormity of the task before them really sank in.

  “Where do we start?” asked Karen.

  That was the question. They’d come here to find the next letter from Hector. But a letter, even one rolled up inside a booze bottle, was a considerably small thing. And if it was really hidden here, then it had been here for over fifty years, meaning that it had to be somewhere nobody had looked in more than half a century. They weren’t going to find it just lying in a corner somewhere.

  And yet, if Hector dreamed that Eric found it, then it couldn’t be bricked up in a wall or buried on the grounds somewhere. It had to be somewhere he could actually reach it. Furthermore, it had to be somewhere that hadn’t been serviced in those fifty-four years. So it wouldn’t likely be found in an electric panel or light fixture.

  Karen turned and looked at him. She was still waiting for an answer to her question.

  Where did they start?

  “I’m thinking,” he assured her. He glanced down at his phone.

  NO IDEA

  “Okay then…” He glanced toward the lobby. That didn’t seem very likely. That would be the busiest part of the building when it was operational. They needed to find somewhere with minimal traffic. He turned and pointed the other way, toward the back of the building. “This way.”

  Karen set off ahead of him and he hurried to keep up.

  “Do you know what this reminds me of?”

  It reminded Eric of quite a few things. None of them pleasant.

  “That time we snuck into the auditorium. Do you remember that?”

  He did. “We were lucky we didn’t get caught.”

  She shot him a dirty look. “Is that what you think about when you remember that night?”

  “No.” The truth was that he thought about a lot of things when he recalled that night. He thought about how unlike him that was. He thought about how amazing it was that she could make him do things like that. He thought about how she made everything else in the world seem unimportant compared to her. But most of all, he thought about how incredibly stunning she’d looked as they made love in the dark, only half-hidden between the seats in the back corner.

  Although it was hard to believe now, the two of them were once strangers living in the same town. They attended the same middle school and high school. They had the same teachers. They even had a few classes together. But as far as either of them could recall, they never spoke a word to each other in all those years.

  Then, by sheer chance, they went to the same college. They were in the same European History class. He didn’t even notice her for those first few days. He took his studies seriously. He had no interest in socializing. He’d never been very good at that anyway. He kept his focus firmly on his studies. After all, he was paying a fortune to be there. Then, out of nowhere, she appeared. Literally. He stood up to leave and she was standing in front of him, blocking his path, a skinny teenage girl with intense, brown eyes and a skirt that allowed a very generous view of her long, gorgeous legs.

  The first words she ever spoke to him were, “You went to Creek Bend, right?”

  The first words he ever spoke to her were considerably less concise. He seemed to recall that they were something along the lines of, “Duh…me think so…” although he suspected that he might’ve sounded marginally less dumb in reality. It was hard to recall much about that day. It spiraled out of control after that.

  When he woke up the next morning, he had somebody else’s textbook, lipstick on his face and a slight hangover. Nothing was ever the same again. She single-handedly derailed his life, although in the very best possible way.

  She had a way of reaching out and seizing whatever she wanted. So it didn’t surprise him that she’d finally taken it upon herself to take charge of one of his weird adventures, as she’d always threatened to do. It didn’t even surprise him that she was leading the way into the dark, scary, abandoned building. She was a brave woman. She wasn’t afraid of silly things like no trespassing signs and geriatric agents.

  But she also wasn’t nearly as br
ave as she pretended to be, either. He knew her better than that. And as they made their way down that long hallway, past the gymnasium, past the empty, shadow-filled classrooms, toward the dark, gaping doorways to the locker rooms, she began to slow down. He didn’t have to hurry as much to keep up with her. By the time they passed the signs by the doors to the weight room and what might’ve been a game room, she was walking side-by-side with him. And when they stepped into the empty social hall and found the dusty stacks of old tables and chairs, she’d taken hold of his arm and was clinging to him.

  Now she was looking around, her pretty eyes wide and alert. But he didn’t ask her if she wanted to leave. He didn’t say anything at all. She wouldn’t admit to being scared. That wasn’t her way. She didn’t wear her heart on her sleeve. She kept her emotions firmly in check. She didn’t let people know when she was frightened or angry or sad. It wasn’t anybody’s business what she was feeling but her own.

  He knew, however. And she knew he knew. It was why she was clinging to him right now. He was the only one she’d ever let in. But that was as far as it would go.

  “I like this place,” she said without even a hint of a waver in her voice. “We should buy it. It’s so much cozier than our place.”

  “Right, then we’d have an excuse to get one of those vacuuming robots.”

  “Well, yeah, because I’m not cleaning all these floors.”

  “You do hate doing floors.”

  “I do.”

  They crossed the social hall and stepped into the unlit kitchen. It was particularly dark here. Karen tried the light switch, but there was no power. “Breakers must be switched off,” she reasoned.

  Eric illuminated the screen on his cell phone and shined it around, trying to push back the gloom, but he still couldn’t see all the way to the back wall.

  “Oh come on!” she hissed, snatching it from his hand. With a few quick motions of her finger, she turned on a bright light that shined from the back of the phone. Suddenly, the shadows parted and the kitchen was bathed in a brilliant, white glow. The chrome surfaces gleamed, even under a thin layer of dust.

  “How’d you do that?”

  “All smart phones come with a flashlight. I told you to read the manual.”

  “I don’t want to read the manual. I told you I didn’t want a stupid smart phone.”

  “Well you have one. Deal with it.”

  Eric grumbled. A few weeks ago, while he was in Northern Michigan, he fell into a lake and drenched the cheap, prepaid model he was used to. A friend placed it in a jar of dry rice for him and told him to let it sit for a few days to dry out. It might’ve worked or it might not have, but he never had the chance to find out. One morning he got up to find the jar—rice, phone and all—gone, thrown out with the trash, and a brand new iPhone 6 lying in its place.

  He still wasn’t over it.

  He’d hated that phone, but he hated this one even more.

  Still grumbling, he turned and examined the kitchen. Why were there never any windows in these kinds of kitchens? Shouldn’t there be at least one natural light source? What if there was a power outage? It’d be just his luck to get caught in a blackout in the middle of the lunch rush, surrounded by confused chefs wielding razor-sharp knifes and smoking pots and pans full of boiling water and sizzling oil.

  But maybe the real question was why did he keep finding himself snooping around dark kitchens in deserted buildings?

  There were two doors, not including the one they entered. The nearest one was a marked exit. The other was at the far back of the room. It was a swinging door. A pantry, probably.

  He tried the exit first. Like the side entrance, it was unlocked. Brilliant sunshine poured in, blinding him for a moment as he peered out through squinted eyes at the empty back lawn.

  “It’s good to have an exit handy,” decided Karen.

  “Always,” agreed Eric. “Escape routes are good.”

  “But why are all the doors unlocked?”

  “That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?” He squinted out at the surrounding trees for a moment longer and then eased the door shut again. “I don’t like it. Something’s not right here.”

  Karen pulled out her own cell phone and added her light to his. “There must be a reason for it.”

  “That’s what I’m worried about.” He focused his light on the pantry door. A kitchen was closer to the sort of place he was looking for. People worked back here, probably multiple times a day, but it was also one of those places where access would’ve been restricted. Less traffic meant less people to stumble across a curious message in a bottle.

  The pantry, however, seemed even better.

  With his wife close behind him, he walked to the rear of the kitchen and pushed open the door. Lots of empty shelves greeted him.

  On the right was a large, insulated door. A walk-in freezer. He opened it. Inside were even more empty shelves. But he never expected Hector’s message to be sitting on a shelf in plain sight. If it was here, it’d be hidden. It’d be somewhere no one else had thought to look in more than half a century.

  The question was where?

  Karen looked back the way they came. “Did you hear something?”

  He hadn’t, but he turned and listened anyway.

  “I think I’m getting jumpy.”

  “Good.” Being jumpy was never a bad thing. Not in a world where monsters were real and murderous, nameless agents with terrible powers had a tendency to visit your home town. But there was no one in the kitchen, monstrous or otherwise. “Eyes and ears open,” he said, turning to survey the pantry again.

  Where was it?

  “You’d think it’d be easier to find in an empty building,” reasoned Karen.

  “You’d think. But if it was easy, someone would’ve found it decades ago.”

  “True. Do you think it’s in here?”

  Eric shook his head. “I don’t see anything.” But neither had anybody else who’d been in this building since Hector’s last visit.

  For all he knew, Hector didn’t even leave the letter in the building, or even on this property. Maybe he left it somewhere else altogether.

  But then how was he supposed to find it? At the very least there should be a clue in here to point them in the right direction.

  Another noise came from the kitchen. Even Eric heard it this time.

  Their eyes met. Mirrored panic stared back at them.

  Something was in the kitchen.

  Eric fumbled with the phone, trying to turn off the light, but he had no idea how to do it, so he simply stuffed it into his pocket.

  Karen followed his lead and extinguished her own light.

  Bathed in darkness, they both peered through the window in the pantry door.

  Still, the kitchen was abandoned.

  “What was it?” whispered Karen.

  Eric shook his head. He didn’t know. He eased open the door. It scraped too loudly on the floor, making him wince.

  She seized his arm and looked out over his shoulder.

  Nothing was out of place. But there wasn’t anything in place, either. There wasn’t anything that had a place. Yet something had made that noise. Something had moved.

  “Okay, suddenly this isn’t so fun anymore,” she whispered.

  “I told you this wasn’t fun!” he whispered back. This was precisely what he was talking about.

  “Maybe we should get out of here…”

  He nodded. Getting out of here sounded like an excellent idea. They should head straight through that kitchen exit and then run as fast as they could to the PT Cruiser. Then they could speed away from here before things turned nasty for a change. Never mind Hector’s letter. He could always come back alone later.

  But first, they were going to have to get to the far side of the kitchen.

  He pushed the door open wider and stepped out of the pantry.

  Nothing was here.

  “Maybe it was a mouse,” whispered Karen.
/>   Maybe it was. It certainly didn’t seem to be in any hurry to jump out and disembowel him. He reached into his pocket and withdrew his cell phone. The light flooded the kitchen in an instant, revealing even more nothing in the gaps where the appliances had been removed.

  They were still alone.

  They crept across the floor, studying every surface. Eric was reminded of a similarly empty kitchen inside the main building of an abandoned nudist resort. There had been nothing there, either. Not until he was at the basement steps near the back door. Then something awful had appeared. Something nearly unstoppable. Something he’d barely escaped.

  He still had the scars from that monster’s claws.

  His heart was pounding.

  He had to remind himself to breathe.

  The exit was just a few steps ahead. They didn’t even have to retrace their steps through the building.

  He was reaching for the handle when the thing leapt onto the dusty countertop, its eyes shining in the gloom.

  Chapter Seven

  Karen screamed. It was a short, piercing cry, right in Eric’s ear. Between that and the unexpected appearance of the creature, he barely managed to bite back his own scream. Fortunately, the only sound that escaped him was a slightly shrill curse.

  But it was no monster that sent their hearts thundering into overdrive. It wasn’t even a dangerous animal. It was a cat. A familiar cat.

  “Is that Spooky?” gasped Karen.

  It was. He’d know that stout, furry silhouette anywhere. Not very long ago, this cat saved his life.

  “What’s he doing here?”

  It was a damn good question. “No idea. Unless I let him in when I opened the door a minute ago.” He recalled how the sunlight blinded him for a moment when he looked out. He could easily have missed a cat darting in past his feet, even one as large as Spooky. (According to Google, he was a Maine Coon.) But even so, why would he be here of all places?

  Karen brushed past Eric and scooped the fluffy beast into her arms. Spooky didn’t protest. He never did. He liked her. He let her pick him up. He liked to curl up in her lap. He even let her brush him. By contrast, he rarely seemed willing to give Eric a passing glance.