A Matter of Time

by Brian Harmon

  “Oh well. I guess it’s kind of sweet, really. Saving yourself for me.”

  Yeah. That’s what he was doing. Sure. Why not?

  “It’s adorable,” she told him. “Mmmm… It’s going to be incredible. I just know it. See you tonight, lover.”

  She made a kissing noise over the intercom and then there was a click and she was gone.

  “Can’t wait…” he grumbled. “Freaking psycho…”

  TOTALLY BUGSHIT, agreed Isabelle.

  PLEASE GET THE HELL OUT OF THERE. I DON’T THINK I CAN TAKE ANY MORE SCARES FOR A WHILE

  Nothing seemed to have followed him, but he didn’t stick around any longer to be sure. He hurried across the waiting room and out of the nightmare that was the Rossetter Psychiatric Hospital.

  The sun was blinding, but welcome. He slipped the phone back into his pocket and hurried to the PT Cruiser, eager to get as far away from this place as possible.

  Spooky was still sleeping in the passenger seat, undisturbed. Eric sat down behind the wheel and started the engine. With the air conditioning running again, he closed his eyes and took a calming breath. This day was seriously wearing him out.

  And it wasn’t over yet. Not by a longshot.

  As he sat there, he felt the cold, hard barrel of a gun press against the back of his head.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Spooky never stirred. He was sound asleep, completely unfazed by the fact that an armed intruder had entered the vehicle and was waiting to ambush him.

  This was why dogs were man’s best friends, not cats.

  Now that he was aware of the person crouched behind his seat, he could hear him breathing back there. He could smell him too. He smelled of sweat and musty places. And of blood.

  Even before he heard the intruder’s voice say, “Try anything and you’re a dead man,” Eric found that he already knew who was back there.

  Very slowly, he lifted his head and peered into the rearview mirror.

  Wire Ties was looking back at him, his eyes intense, his mouth pressed tightly closed. He looked pretty rough, but overall considerably better than the last time he saw him. He was even wearing a clean shirt. No more unsightly blood and bullet holes.

  Eric wasn’t even surprised. He simply sighed and said, “I’m still not armed. You can put that away.”

  He expected a response like, “I’ll decide when I can put it away!” or simply, “Shut the hell up!” But instead the noticeably not-dead Wire Ties said, “I’m not comfortable putting it away yet.” His voice was softer than last time. He seemed calmer. More patient.

  “Okay. That’s fair, I suppose.”

  “Hands on the wheel where I can see them.”

  Eric did as he was told.

  The two of them sat there for a moment in silence, staring at each other through the rearview mirror. Then, finally, Wire Ties said, “You shot me.”

  Eric cringed a little. “Ah… You remember that…”

  “In my head.”

  “It all happened so fast, I was kind of hoping you wouldn’t remember it.”

  “You shot me in my head,” he said again.

  “Technically, it was my brother who shot you. And to be fair, it was your gun.”

  “He’s the one who stole my gun?”

  “He took it when we thought you were dead. He thought whoever killed you might still be around. Then you weren’t dead and he freaked out. Sorry about that.”

  “I want it back.”

  “What?”

  “My gun. I want it back.”

  Eric was confused. “Aren’t you pointing it at me right now?”

  He glanced down at the weapon. “This is a different one. I want the other one. They’re not cheap, you know. I don’t have a lot of money. I can’t just go and buy another one.”

  “He doesn’t have it. He ditched it before we left.”

  “It’s still at that motel?”

  Eric nodded. “And it’s not exactly safe to go back there again.” By now it would probably be fully consumed in Steampunk Monk’s nausea-inducing incense.

  He looked confused. “That place is gone now. It disappeared after I left. Like it was never there.”

  “Yeah. It does that.”

  He looked frustrated, but also extremely weary. “Did he take my notebook, too?”

  “No. I took that.”

  “Where is it?”

  “In my pocket.”

  “Leave it there. Keep your hands where I can see them.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “Why were you at that place?”

  He didn’t see the point in lying. “We were hiding a dead monster.”

  Wire Ties squinted at him as if this reply gave him a headache. “What?”

  “I told you in the tunnels that I saw monsters at the rec center. We ran into another one at the high school. We killed it. We didn’t want anyone finding it because…well, it’s a monster. People might freak out. So we hid it at the motel. That’s how we found your…um…body?”

  He rubbed at his mouth, frustrated. “In the motel,” he said, trying to wrap his head around it all.

  “Right.”

  “Before it disappeared.”

  Eric gave a wobbly sort of nod. “It’s complicated.”

  “Who are you?”

  “We already went over that. My name’s Eric.”

  “Right. Eric. The high school teacher.”

  “That’s me.” Eric watched him in the mirror. Something was different about him this time. He didn’t seem so high-strung. Just the opposite. He seemed drained. Subdued. And he seemed oddly dismissive about the fact that Paul shot him in the head. “Um… If you don’t mind me asking… How are you not dead, exactly?”

  “I can’t die. Every time I do I just end up waking up again.”

  He studied Wire Ties’ face in the mirror. There was no bullet hole in his forehead where Paul shot him. “Not even a scar.”

  “There never is. It’s like it never happened. Like I’ve gone crazy and just imagined it all.”

  “Who are you?”

  Wire Ties didn’t tell him it was none of his business. He didn’t tell him that he was the one who’d ask the questions. He didn’t say anything all for a moment. Then he sighed. He lowered the gun and rested it in his lap, but he kept it pointed at Eric’s back. He looked exhausted. Was it tiresome coming back to life?

  “I’ve been afraid of everyone…” he said. “How the hell am I supposed to trust anybody?”

  Eric had no idea where this was coming from, but it was a step up from being left tied to a gate in the dark to die. “Sometimes you can’t,” he replied. “And other times you don’t have a choice.”

  He didn’t reply. He shook his head. He had an incredible sort of weariness about him, as if he’d been trying to carry the entire world on his shoulders for as long as he could remember.

  “You’re the one with the gun,” Eric reminded him. “It should be a little easier for you to trust me than for me to trust you.”

  He looked down at it. “Good point, I guess.”

  “What’s your name?”

  He didn’t think he’d answer, and for a while he didn’t. Then, to Eric’s surprise: “Jay. My name’s Jay. Tinnerly. I’ve spent the past three years looking for the woman who murdered me and my best friend.”

  Eric didn’t need to go over that bit about him looking for his own murderer. This guy had risen from the dead twice now in the past few hours. And he wasn’t even the first person he’d met with this peculiar ability. He had a nightmarish encounter with another man who refused to die in Hedge Lake. Instead, it was the word “woman” that caught his attention. “This woman… Was she a shapely brunette, by any chance? Long legs. Really big…uh…delusions.”

  Jay nodded. “I don’t know her name. But she did this to me.”

  He had to think about this for a few seconds. “Did what to you? Made it so you couldn’t die?”

  Again, he nodded.

 
; Eric recalled his first encounter with Jay in the municipal tunnels. When he lost his temper, he accused him of working with a woman. (“You and that fucking woman!”) At the time, he thought he meant Karen. But he was talking about Mistress Janet. “How could she do something like that? And why?”

  “I don’t know. She’s some kind of witch, I think. I know that sounds crazy, but I swear it’s true. She’s evil. She cursed me somehow.”

  It wasn’t crazy at all, of course. He couldn’t even say that witches weren’t evil. The unfortunate truth was that not all witches were like Holly and her sisters. There really were some nasty ones out there. It wouldn’t surprise him, now that he was thinking about it, if Mistress Janet was a witch of some sort. What she called “sexual energy” could just be another form of magic. “How’d it happen?”

  Jay sighed. “It’s embarrassing.” He turned and looked out the window. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Okay…”

  He rubbed his eyes, frustrated. “The whole thing was stupid. I was stupid.”

  “We’ve all done stupid things.”

  “I messed up in an epic way.” He looked up at the rearview again, his gaze hardened. “I got my best friend killed. I really don’t want to talk about it.”

  Eric stared back at him, unflinching. “Fine. We won’t talk about it. Let’s just get to the point then. What do you want from me? Last time we met you threatened to shoot my fingers off one at a time.”

  Jay looked embarrassed. “Oh… Yeah. Sorry about that. I…can’t really explain it. I wasn’t myself back there.” He shook his head. “There’s something about this town. I started feeling anxious the first time I went to that rec center. By the time I spotted you sneaking into those tunnels, I was convinced that you were one of them. That you were all out to get me.”

  “You were paranoid,” realized Eric. Steampunk Monk told him that the traps at the rec center should’ve left him either paranoid or distracted to the point that he wouldn’t have been able to properly focus on the task at hand.

  “Yeah. I guess so. I didn’t shake it until after I woke up at the motel.”

  “Which door did you enter when you first went to the rec center?”

  “The same one you and that woman came out of.”

  That explained how he got out of the building without getting dusted by Steampunk’s party crackers. Karen unintentionally broke the first one when she went in ahead of him and this guy broke the one from the other door. No wonder he was so intense when they met in the tunnels.

  “You still going to tell me there was no woman with you?”

  “I am until I’m sure you’re not going to go looking for her with that gun.”

  Jay looked down at the weapon in his hand. “Right. That makes sense. She’s probably a friend of yours, huh? Sorry…”

  “So you weren’t yourself in those tunnels. That explains why you were such a dick then and why you’re so much more composed now. But why trust me at all? You gave me your name. You told me why you’re here. You don’t know me from those agents.”

  “He said I could trust you.”

  Eric stared at him, confused. “‘He’?”

  “The driver.”

  “What driver?”

  “I didn’t see his face. It was after I woke up in the motel. The second time. After you shot me.”

  “My brother shot you. I’ve never shot anybody.”

  Jay ignored him. “I didn’t know where I was. I followed the light through the opening in the closet. The door didn’t want to open, so I broke the window and climbed out that way. Then I stumbled across the parking lot, trying to figure out where I was and how to get back to my car. When I got to the road, I looked back and saw that the motel had disappeared. The whole parking lot, too. Like it was never there. It was just…woods… I was standing there, trying to decide whether it was the world that had gone insane or me. That’s when this old, rusty limousine drove up beside me and stopped.”

  Eric sat up a little straighter, surprised. An old limousine? He encountered an old limousine once in his weird travels. A white one. It was parked beside an equally ramshackle gas station in the middle of nowhere. He rode home in that vehicle after he first obtained the profound secret. The man who owned it was the same man who pushed that secret deep into his mind so that it only burdened him in his dreams. He was an extraordinarily small man, but he possessed a remarkable presence.

  “I couldn’t see who was driving,” said Jay. “All the glass was tinted and he only cracked his window a little. He said I looked like I could use a ride. I almost told him no, but… Well, I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t even know for sure that I was still in the same town. My shirt was soaked with blood and I was stranded on the side of the road. And to be honest, I was exhausted. I was starting to think I’d be better off giving up. So I figured what the hell and I got in the limo.”

  Eric watched him in the rearview. He could see that same weariness on the young man’s face. He looked like he’d been through hell. It wasn’t surprising, really. He couldn’t die. That must have been an awful burden to bear.

  “The limo driver kept the privacy window closed and talked to me through the intercom. He asked me where I wanted to go. I told him I was parked on Hudson Street. I had a change of clothes and a spare gun in the trunk. Then he told me to help myself to a Coke from a little fridge back there. He never asked why my shirt was bloody or even if I needed a doctor, like he already knew I didn’t.”

  It certainly sounded like the diminutive gas station attendant. He’d known things. Lots of things. And he even offered Eric a Coke the first time they met.

  Jay looked up and met his gaze in the mirror. “That’s when he told me I should trust you.”

  “He mentioned me, specifically?”

  “He did. He told me I didn’t have to do all this alone. He said not everyone in the world was a monster. I asked him how I was supposed to know the difference. He said I could start with you. ‘Start with Eric,’ he said. Then he told me you were at the hospital. That’s how I found you. I recognized the vehicle.”

  He reached down and picked something up off the floor where he was hiding when Eric sat down. It was another large, manila envelope. “When he dropped me off at my car, he pushed this through the crack in his window and told me to give it to you.”

  Another letter.

  Eric took it. It was just like the last one. But why was it coming to him like this? Why didn’t Hector hide these letters like he did those before it? And did the gas station attendant deliver the first one, too?

  He tried to recall everything he saw when he found the first letter. Did he remember seeing the tail end of a white limousine disappearing down a side street? Or was he only imagining that now? It was difficult to remember for sure.

  “What is that?” asked Jay. “I peeked inside. But I didn’t understand what I was reading.”

  “It’s a long story. We can talk about it after I read this. If you’ll put the gun away, that is.”

  Jay stared at him for a moment. Then he nodded. “What’ve I got to lose? It’s not like you can get me killed.”

  “Doesn’t seem like it,” agreed Eric.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  I had the same nightmares again last night. They’re getting more vivid each time I have them. And they’re getting harder to wake up from, too. It’s like they’re becoming so real that my mind doesn’t realize I have the option of waking up, like I could get lost in them forever.

  I think it’s because I’m getting closer to the events I’ve been dreaming of. I’m running out of time. I can feel it. It’s going to happen any day now. Maybe even tonight.

  It doesn’t make any sense. Why are these things still happening? I stole the book. I hid it in a place where I know they’ll never find it. But I haven’t stopped anything from happening and I just don’t understand why.

  And my dreams aren’t helping me anymore. They aren’t telling me what to do. They j
ust keep showing me how horribly everything is going to go wrong.

  They haven’t even shown me where to hide these letters.

  I don’t know what to do.

  What I do know is that I can’t let them have the book back. I have to protect it from them. No matter what. If I don’t, they’ll use it to destroy Creek Bend. And even if they can do that without the book, even if I can’t stop that from happening, they’ll use it to do other horrible things in other cities all over the country. All over the world.

  Who knows how much evil they’ve already done with it?

  I won’t let it happen again. I won’t let them have it.

  It’s mine.

  That’s why it came to me. If you’ve shown me one thing, it’s that everything is happening for a reason. I’m convinced that I have a responsibility to protect the book. I think God sent it to me, the same way he sent you to me in my dreams. Together, you, me and this book, we create a sort of trinity that is more powerful than the evil inside it.

  I think that’s why the words inside were so compelling, why I can’t stop thinking about them. They were speaking to me. Not like any book speaks to its reader. It was speaking to me alone, as if it was written specifically for me.

  I was always meant to have it.

  That’s why I know I can read it. I only need time. I need to study it. But I can’t do that while everyone’s looking for me.

  I have to make them go away. All of them. It’s the only way.

  That’s why I decided to go after the men in the gray suits.

  That sounds crazy, I know. But it’s only a matter of time before they find me. Sherry already knows I was looking for Zachery when the book first went missing. I’m surprised they haven’t come looking for me themselves. They could come knocking at my door at any time. And something tells me they won’t write me off as some curious, trouble-making kid. They’ll kill me. They’ll kill anyone who gets in their way, just like they killed that poor woman.

  Which means I’ve put my parents in terrible danger.

  I have no choice.

  I decided to start at the old folk’s home. That’s where they told Zachery they were staying. If he needed him, he was supposed to ask for the executives.