A Matter of Time

by Brian Harmon

  “You’d think a guy up to no good would want to keep a lower profile,” agreed Paul.

  “You can’t underestimate him,” warned Eric. “He still might be an agent. And they’re all dangerous.”

  “We won’t,” Promised Paul. “Take us back a block or two and drop us off on the opposite side of the street as him. We’ll keep pace like we’re just minding our own business. Maybe we’ll find out where he’s going next. At the very least, we might find out what he’s driving.”

  That would probably be useful. If they saw the guy’s vehicle parked somewhere, they’d have a heads-up that he was nearby.

  “And you can keep your date with Holly. For all you know, the important thing she has to tell you is don’t follow the freak in the ugly coat.”

  “Good point.” Listening to whatever dire warnings a trustworthy witch might have for him did seem like the highest priority in any situation.

  He circled around and found a spot two and a half blocks back. Paul and Kevin jumped out and closed the doors behind them.

  “We’ll call you if we have anything to report,” promised Paul.

  “Remember,” warned Eric. “Do not try anything with this guy. If you even think he’s onto you, get the hell out.”

  “Do not engage,” said Kevin, lifting his hand in a mocking salute. “Abort if compromised. Got it.”

  “We’re taking it seriously,” promised Paul.

  “Good. We’ll meet up after I’ve talked to Holly. I’ll call you.”

  “Right,” said Paul. “Now get out of here before you blow our cover.”

  “Careful,” Eric stressed.

  “Go!”

  Eric pulled away. Now that it was done, he wasn’t nearly as sure about this plan. He looked down at his phone again, remembered that he couldn’t see the screen and turned it around again. “Is this a really bad idea? It’s a really bad idea, isn’t it?”

  OH I’M CERTAIN OF IT

  Chapter Nineteen

  The Top-Down Bar wasn’t exactly on Creek Bend’s list of top ten travel destinations. Unlike, say, Madge Badger’s or the Ginger Haus Café, it wasn’t hip or trendy or even family friendly. The owner, Trace Hollandy, was an ex-convict and known to be a violent drunk. The place was cramped and windowless. It was dirty and grimy and dark. As such, the Top-Down didn’t often cater to a very classy crowd. For the most part, this was where you came when you wanted to get drunk on the cheap. Or when all the other bars refused to serve you. It had long been rumored that all manner of immoral and illegal activity went on behind those doors. Eric doubted very much that evil plots and maniacal plans were really in the works there, as most of the bar’s patrons were too drunk to find their way back from the restrooms, but it was certainly a well-deserved reputation, considering that the police were called there almost nightly for some manner of drunken misconduct or another.

  Why Holly would want anything to do with the place was beyond him.

  It sat on the very edge of town. Beyond it was miles of woods and farmland. There wasn’t even much traffic.

  He drove into the cramped lot and parked beside Holly’s little Prius. It wasn’t an impressive car, by any means. It was used. It was dinged. But it was hers. She’d bought it with her own money and she was extremely proud of it.

  As soon as he stopped, she jumped out of her car and climbed into the Cruiser. “Finally!”

  “Sorry.”

  Holly’s curly red hair was tied back in two bushy pigtails today. She was dressed casually, in tight, blue jean shorts and a simple, pink tee shirt. She looked like a young college girl enjoying a summer day off, but her expression was both grim and worried. Her eyes told the truth: She was a witch on a dire mission.

  “What’s up?”

  “It’s bad,” she told him.

  “I expected bad. How bad? Last time it was apocalyptically bad. Is it apocalyptically bad again?”

  “Well there’s not a cosmic conqueror worm about to tear a hole in the entire universe,” she admitted, “but Creek Bend is in serious trouble. As in you either have to stop whatever’s going on right now, or we gather up everyone we care about and leave town as fast as we can. And that’s kind of a lot of people.”

  “Okay. You have my attention.”

  She took a breath and began slowly: “As soon as Karen called me I hurried home and consulted the water. It was mostly the usual nonsense. Like, I saw you, me and Paul at a party.”

  “A party? Why would we go to a party?”

  “I don’t know, but I was dancing, Paul was drunk and we all got lost in a fog.”

  Eric nodded. “Well, we’ll just have to see how that turns out, I guess. What else did you see?”

  “I saw a dead man rising from his grave. I saw a beautiful woman with devil horns. And I saw a broken clock. The hands were moving, but for some reason it wouldn’t tell the time. And it had the number six for every hour.”

  “Why the number six?”

  She shook her head. “I have no idea. Maybe whatever is going to happen will start at six. Or maybe you’ll have to face six enemies. Or maybe it means nothing. Sometimes it’s just random noise.”

  Eric nodded as if he understood. The broken clock seemed to represent the strange time loop that he and Hector Conant shared. Time marched on and yet it never changed. Wasn’t that sort of how Isabelle described it? The past and future were both fixed, regardless of what either of them did? But why would they go to a party? How could a man rise from his grave? And who could be the woman with the devil horns? “Go on,” he said.

  “Then…” She looked over at him, her eyes glistening with tears. “Then I saw people burning.”

  He stared at her, horrified.

  “It was terrible. It wasn’t like a metaphor, I was sure of it. It was so real. I felt like I could hear their screams. Like I could smell their flesh burning.” She hugged herself as if cold and stared through the windshield again.

  He was starting to understand why she didn’t want to tell this to Karen and Diane. It would’ve terrified them.

  “It was so disturbing… I had to get up and leave the room. I couldn’t look at it anymore. I actually called Del. I needed her advice.”

  Delphinium and the rest of the coven had remained in Illinois after the events of last summer. They’d lost their home, three of their sisters and the head of their household, Desmond Weizner—who they all called “Grandpa,” though he was related to none of them. After Eric returned to Wisconsin with Holly in tow, the coven sought an arrangement with Clara Stamis, owner and operator of the Wordsley House, a shelter for battered women. As it turned out, Delphinium and Clara had common goals. They both wanted to find and protect helpless women.

  “What did she say?”

  “She said that sometimes magic flows stronger under certain conditions. For example, it’s not clear why, but during some full and new moons, it’s stronger. And even during certain celestial alignments, which totally sounds like something from a cartoon to me, but whatever. Anyway, she said that this weird time thing might have the same effect.”

  “I guess that makes sense,” said Eric, thinking of the broken clock again.

  “Right? She also said that sometimes there are events that take place that are so profound that they can’t be altered. They’re actually predestined to happen, no matter what. If we’re dealing with something like that, it may also be easier to see things that are directly related to that event.”

  “Which would mean we’re heading for something we can’t change.”

  “Exactly. Which is a little bit terrifying in itself.”

  It certainly was.

  “So Del and the others, they cast a spell to send me some of their collective magic so that I could see more clearly through the haze.”

  “And did you see more clearly?”

  She nodded, but she didn’t have to. He could see it on her face. Even the memory was disturbing to her.

  “The images I saw next were different. It was
like an eye opened inside my head. I still only saw fragments, but those fragments were so vivid.” She turned and looked at him again. “I saw the city burning, Eric. I saw something horrible rising from the flames. Something huge. I saw it trample the school. Your school. The high school. I saw bodies everywhere. I saw people I know dead and mangled in the streets.” She turned and looked at him. Tears had sprung to her pretty eyes. “I saw you, too. You were dead. And something was dragging your lifeless body away.”

  “That’s not going to happen,” Eric assured her. “Delphinium said so, remember. She said I’d always make it home. She saw it in her own spell, before she sent you home with me.”

  “I know. And she even told me today that I should trust in you. But the future’s fragile. You know that. Anything can change at any time. And any little thing can change everything.”

  He wasn’t sure what to say to that.

  “I’m afraid,” she said. “I’m afraid something’s changed and you’re not going to survive.”

  He reached out and took her hand. “Nothing’s changed. I promise.”

  But she shook her head. “You don’t know that.”

  “I do,” he insisted. Deep down, he knew that was a lie. He knew no such thing. He couldn’t possibly know if something had changed because he didn’t even know what he was supposed to do. He never knew what he was supposed to do. He just muddled through it all, utterly clueless, hoping he didn’t screw everything up. But if only for a moment, he made it true. If only for Holly.

  She sniffled and wiped at her eyes with the heel of her hand. “They’re going to do something really bad. I know it. They’re going to turn Creek Bend into a hell on earth.”

  He squeezed her hand again.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. We’re going to stop this.”

  She nodded.

  He looked out at the litter-strewn parking lot around them. “And apparently we’re going to start at a seedy bar on the wrong side of the tracks.”

  Holly giggled. “Yeah. That.”

  “Why are we here?”

  “I saw one other thing in the water before the visions ended. A small house in the woods. A bungalow. At one end of a long driveway. At the other end, there’s a rusty, blue gate with signs posted on it. No hunting. No trespassing. Beware of dog. Stuff like that. I’ve seen that gate before.”

  Eric had seen it too. It was just up the road from here. Practically next door. It couldn’t have been much more than a hundred yards from where they were now parked.

  “I looked it up on Google Earth.” She pointed at the forest to their left. “We should be able to cut right through there.”

  He looked out into those woods. He didn’t like the woods. Bad things tended to happen to him in the woods. He promised himself he wasn’t going to go into the woods again if he could help it. And these woods looked particularly unwelcoming. “And you think that’s where we need to go?”

  “It was the last thing I saw. And it was the clearest. It was unmistakable. You have to go there. And I’m coming with you.”

  He tried to look on the bright side. At least they weren’t here to visit the sketchy bar.

  He sighed. “Okay. Let’s get it over with, then.”

  Chapter Twenty

  The patch of forest surrounding the Top-Down wasn’t maintained for hiking. There were no paths. The brush grew thick between the trees. And the ground was littered with beer cans and bottles, fast food wrappers, cigarette butts, plastic bags and all manner of trash. Eric even saw a discarded condom lying on the ground. “This is disgusting.”

  Holly didn’t disagree. She was tiptoeing around the trash and trying to avoid any weeds that looked even remotely like poison ivy. “I really should’ve changed before I left home.”

  “Probably.” He wasn’t exactly dressed for a wilderness excursion, either. He was in his teaching clothes, khakis, a polo shirt and Converses. But at least he was wearing long pants.

  He was worried someone would see them. Mostly because he didn’t want to explain to anyone why he, a mild-mannered high school English teacher, seemed to be luring a beautiful young woman barely older than the students in his classroom out into the wilderness behind a seedy bar on the outskirts of town. That was just the sort of attention he could do without. But no one pulled into the parking lot and no one came out of the bar. Within a couple minutes they were deep into the brush and well out of sight. In fact, as the brush grew thicker, it became increasingly difficult to even see each other through the foliage.

  Eventually, the litter thinned and the bulk of the trash was behind them. Only a tattered, plastic bag here and the remains of a napkin over there, the things that the wind had blown deep into the trees before they became tangled. And yet even here there could still be found the occasional beer can and bottle, as if someone had gone out of their way just to drop it out here.

  Pushing his way through the brush, Eric asked, “So how are your sisters?”

  “They’re good,” replied Holly. “They’ve doubled the number of residents at the Wordsley House and they’re starting to talk about expanding the property.”

  “That’s good to hear.”

  “Del and Clara are a good team.”

  They were. Clara took care of the house and provided a home for everyone. Delphinium and the other witches helped locate women in need and made the Wordsley House arguably the safest women’s shelter on the face of the planet. Eric pitied any man foolish enough to walk onto that property with ill intentions.

  Holly yelped and then cursed as a cluster of thorns bit into her bare leg.

  “You okay?”

  “I’m fine. My fault for dressing stupid.”

  “Well you look pretty,” he assured her. “It’s just not very practical.”

  “I know. My sisters would totally tell me I was asking for it. Oh! That reminds me. Alicia says hi.”

  Eric grunted. “Shouldn’t she be over that by now?”

  “Apparently not.”

  Allicia Vaine was the youngest of Holly’s surviving “sisters.” She took an instant liking to him when they first met and rapidly nurtured it into an awkward crush. She was only seventeen at the time. He taught children who were older than her. Everyone seemed to think it was adorable. Even Karen. Only Eric seemed to find the whole thing embarrassing, which he supposed was what Karen enjoyed so much about it.

  Finally, after what felt like at least half an hour of battling the bushes, they came upon a narrow driveway. If they went right, it would doubtlessly lead back to the blue gate. To their left, a structure was just visible through the dense foliage.

  “That’s it,” said Holly. “It’s exactly what I saw in the water.”

  They walked toward it. As more of it came into view, Eric saw that it was, indeed, a small, bungalow, with a wide porch and dormer windows upstairs. The lawn was so overgrown that it was difficult to tell the yard from the surrounding wilderness and the building was in need of new siding and shingles, but otherwise it looked well-maintained.

  There were no cars in the driveway. No one seemed to be around.

  They walked up the front steps and stopped at the door. It didn’t look like a very evil place. It was sort of nice, even, except perhaps for the less-than-welcoming barrier at the end of the driveway.

  Eric withdrew his phone from his pocket. It was much more awkward with the charger plugged into it, but at least it was charging. He held it up so both he and Holly could see the screen.

  THERE’S DEFINITELY SOME KIND OF ENERGY IN THAT PLACE, reported Isabelle.

  “What kind of energy?” asked Holly.

  I’M NOT SURE, TO BE HONEST. I THINK THERE’S MORE THAN ONE

  Eric and Holly glanced at each other. More than one kind of energy? What did that mean?

  IT FEELS WRONG THERE

  BE CAREFUL

  Eric returned the phone and charger to his pocket and glanced around again, uneasy. “Did your spell show you anything inside th
is place?”

  “Nothing. I have no idea what might be in there.”

  He nodded. “Okay then. Here we go.” He knocked on the door and waited. When nobody answered, he knocked again. He tried a third time and then peered into the nearest window. He expected the place to be empty, but it appeared to be nicely furnished.

  “Do we break in?”

  Eric was hesitant to break any windows. If possible, he’d prefer that nobody ever knew they were here. But if her spell was correct, and it usually was, they needed to get inside here.

  He tried the knob. Surprisingly, it was open. “What’s the point in all those keep out signs if you aren’t even going to lock your door?”

  Holly shrugged. “Don’t complain, I guess.”

  But Eric had a bad feeling. Somehow, the unlocked door seemed like a bad sign.

  Inside, the bungalow was nice. It looked like the kind of place a nice old lady might live. There were pictures on the walls and cookbooks on the shelf. It was a little dusty, but otherwise very clean.

  “Keep your guard up,” he advised as he walked out into the middle of the tidy living room. “You can still do that thrust thing, right?”

  “I think so.” She tried the light switch. Several lamps around the room immediately came on. So did a small table fan next to the door. “I mean, I haven’t done it in, like, a year, but I’m pretty sure I still can.”

  Holly, like most of her sisters, had learned to cast a short range spell they called “thrusts.” By focusing their magical energy and thrusting it forward, they could essentially send out a magical blast capable of doing physical damage to an enemy. Every witch had a unique one. Some blasted holes like bullets. Some hit with crushing force. Some carried an electrical current. Holly’s was like a knife blade. He’d personally seen it slice imps in half. It was an impressive attack, and also quite frightening.

  But she could only use it a few times before it left her physically drained and helpless.

  She turned off the fan and began looking around. On the right were two bedrooms. Two full-size beds were neatly made with homemade quilts. There was a clock and telephone in each room, like a hotel.