Pull

by Anne Riley

  The girl starts to get up, but the two thugs push her back down, hard. Her head slams to the ground and she rolls to the side, her skirt wafting in the breeze.

  “Stop it!” I scream, and this time they look up. They’re only distracted for a split second, but the girl makes her move.

  Taking full advantage of her chunky shoes, she lands a solid kick to the bald guy’s groin. He doubles over, and for a moment, she’s free—but he snags her ankle before she can stand up, and the lanky guy rams his knuckles into her nose. She crumples to the ground like a ragdoll.

  I swallow my terror and launch myself toward them, churning my legs as fast as they’ll go. The bald guy hooks his hands under the girl’s thin arms and scuttles across the grass with her. He’s headed toward a tiny black car with a dented front fender parked on the side of the road. Both guys glance at me, probably trying to judge whether I can get to them before they can get in the car.

  I can’t. I’m still too far away. I have to do something, anything, to keep the girl out of that car.

  “I called the cops!” I yell. My voice jars with the pounding of my feet. “They’re on their way, and I gave them your license plate number!”

  The bald guy looks at his friend. Maybe they believe me. Maybe they’ll drop the girl and drive away, and everything will be all right.

  But that would be too easy.

  They shove the girl into the backseat of the car and the bald guy climbs in with her. She screams—but it’s cut off with an abruptness that sends chills up my spine. The interior of the car is dark, but I can see her silhouette as she struggles against him. I have a feeling she won’t make it out of this alive unless I come up with a plan in the next five seconds.

  Make that two seconds, because now the lanky guy’s glare has shifted to me. I slow down as his narrowed eyes slice into mine and his thin lips press together. With one long-fingered hand, he pulls a switchblade out of his pocket and flicks it open. His expression seems so empty, as if he couldn’t care less about stabbing me in order to get away. He flips the handle over in his palm without looking at it, twirling the knife like it’s nothing more than a harmless stick. The blade glints orange in the last rays of the sun.

  I squeeze my eyes shut for a second, trying to muster the courage to fight two guys who have at least one knife, maybe two. But in order to muster courage, the courage has to be there in the first place—and I think I left all mine in Papa’s hospital room.

  I turn around and throw myself into a sprint. The village is just down the road. If I can make it there, I can borrow someone’s phone; there’s no way this guy will stab me in the middle of town.

  Will he?

  My legs churn harder and I force my lungs into a steady rhythm. In and out. In and out. Just like I said to Paul outside Starbucks this morning. I keep running, pushing thoughts of the mugger’s switchblade out of my mind. Getting into town—that’s my goal. Find a phone. Call for help. Try not to die.

  But when I cross into the long shadows of All Saints Church, something stops me.

  The air thickens. My legs push against some massive invisible pressure. It’s like I’ve run straight into quicksand, except that my gray running shoes are still on solid ground. I turn to see if the lanky guy and his knife are gaining on me, but the motion is slow and strained. I can’t get my head around.

  My stomach begins to implode.

  I sink to the ground and curl into a ball. It feels like my bones and organs are collapsing. The trees and sky blur together and a hurricane-force wind rushes past. Colors swirl across my vision: the green of the heath, the orange and pink of the sky, and a black silhouette—the guy with the knife.

  My ears fill with a whooshing sound like a thousand vacuums turned on at once. I cover my face with my hands and shut my eyes tight. The pressure on my body keeps building and I’m starting to struggle for air. In one last frantic attempt to escape the vortex, I claw at the ground, gasping the word help.

  White light flashes, too bright even through my closed eyelids.

  And now—What in the world? How did I get back here?

  I’m standing on the heath. My body is perfectly intact, and the whooshing has stopped.

  The girl is walking toward me again. Her pleated skirt swishes in the wind while she struggles to tame it and her purse dangles from her shoulder.

  And there are the two muggers, shoving their way across the grass, laughing. The bald guy whistles at her. Then comes the shout: “Oi, gorgeous!”

  I press my hand to my head and take a few steps back. This isn’t possible. I’ve seen it all, just like this, a few minutes ago. It’s already happened.

  So how can it be happening again?

  The girl breaks into a run, just as she did a few moments ago, and the bald guy catches her arm, just as I knew he would—

  But this time, another figure appears from behind the church. I’m sure it’s a guy, judging from his powerful frame and the loping way he slinks along the church wall, but he’s too deep in the shadows for me to see his face.

  He is very still. Watching. Crouching lower.

  Then he erupts from his hiding place and sprints across the field. He tackles the bald guy, driving them both into the lanky guy. They hit the ground hard.

  “Run!” the stranger shouts at the girl. “Get out of here!”

  She sprints in the direction of the village.

  I stumble toward the church, hunkering down in the same shadows that concealed the girl’s savior a moment ago. I should leave, but I need to know what happened— what’s happening. If I’m seeing the same event unfold again, why is it different?

  I can’t leave until I know.

  The three guys are throwing their fists into each other’s faces. They look like a tangle of detached limbs, with feet slamming into ribcages and elbows pounding noses. I can hardly tell whose hands are whose and which one is winning, or if everyone is just getting beaten to a pulp. I’m sure the stranger will lose this fight in spite of his size; it’s two against one, after all.

  Unless I jump in to help.

  I push my sleeves up and rake my fingers through my hair. “Okay,” I mutter, and take a deep breath while wiping my palms on my jeans. “One, two, th—”

  The fight loosens for a moment and I straighten. The stranger isn’t losing. Not even close.

  The short bald thug is limping, blood streaming from his lip. His friend doesn’t seem to be able to catch his breath. But the new guy throws one punch after another, each one delivering just as much force as the one before it. Finally, the bald mugger staggers toward the black car and yanks the door open. He slides into the driver’s seat and cranks the engine, easing away from the curb as if he’s going to abandon his friend, who scrambles toward the street with a panicked expression.

  “Oi!” he shrieks at the moving car. He clambers across the grass and throws himself into the passenger seat. The door slams shut and the tires squeal as the bald guy hits the gas, filling the air with the smell of burning rubber as the black car hurtles toward downtown.

  Silence covers me like a blanket.

  I ease into the dusky half-light, watching the mysterious stranger. He’s standing in the middle of the heath with his arms hanging loosely at his sides. His back is to me, but when he looks down at his bloodied knuckles, I catch the outline of his profile. Straight nose, strong jaw. A sheen of sweat covers his powerful arms, and blood trickles from his short dark hair into his eyebrow.

  He looks over his shoulder, and his eyes lock on mine.

  Alarms go off in my head: Danger, danger, get out!

  I’m standing less than ten yards behind him and I’m clearly unarmed. I’d assumed he was a good guy because he beat up the girl’s attackers, but what if he’s part of some rival gang or something? What if he was waiting for the girl to walk past the church, and he was just mad the other guys got to her first?

  I want to run away, but my feet might as well be cemented to the ground. He could kill me with his
bare hands. His eyebrows pinch together like he can’t believe I’m still here. His fists clench; are they itching for more action? I’m an idiot for staying here just to watch the guys fight, just to try to figure out what happened.

  He drags a hand across his mouth and it comes away streaked with blood—his bottom lip is split. “Go home,” he says in a voice that rumbles like faraway thunder. “The heath is dangerous tonight.”

  I manage one step back. “What—what happened? Did you—”

  “Go!” He strides toward me, closing the gap between us so that I can see the fury in his eyes. “If they come back, I might not be able to stop them again, yeah? So go!”

  His accent is rough around the edges—not the rounded syllables of London’s well-to-do areas. This guy is a local, born and bred on the south side.

  Just like Papa.

  “The pressure,” I say, wrapping my arms around myself. “And that noise. What was it?”

  His expression shifts from anger to disbelief. “Sorry?”

  “It sounded like a giant vacuum, or a hundred hot tubs turned on at once.” Wow, that was a genius comparison. “Okay, maybe not hot tubs, but—”

  “Go home.” He’s backing away from me now, and his eyes dart around the heath as if he’s waiting for someone else to jump out at us. “Right now. Turn around and run back to your hotel, or wherever you’re staying. Don’t come back until daylight.”

  I step backwards, but I can’t quite make myself turn around. “I saw two endings,” I blurt. “Why?”

  He stops.

  Then he strides toward me again, fists tight, eyes lit with urgency. “I said get out!”

  I stumble back and hit the ground on my butt, hard. He’s still coming toward me. I can hear my racing pulse in my ears. Asking questions was obviously not a good move; I should have run the moment I knew the girl would be okay. What if this guy hurts me?

  I’m not sticking around to find out.

  Swallowing the panic that threatens to paralyze me, I plant my hands on the dry earth to push myself up, scramble to recover my balance, and take off for Nana’s.

  FOUR

  MY HANDS TREMBLE AS I OPEN THE FRONT DOOR AND slip into the hush of the entryway. I’m still shaky over what happened with Papa, but now that I’ve been to the heath, my insides feel like a giant swarm of bees. Did I really see two outcomes to the same mugging, or was that just a hallucination caused by jet lag and the shock of Papa’s death?

  I need to go to bed.

  “I’m back,” I call toward the kitchen as the door clicks shut behind me.

  No response.

  I stop by the sitting room and retrieve my phone from the couch, exactly where I dropped it after Stephen dumped me. He has called me five times.

  I block his number and then erase it from my contacts list. I know myself—if I don’t take preventative measures now, I’ll end up calling him back.

  Everybody else in the house is probably conked out already. Staying awake until a respectable bedtime is nearly impossible on the first day—jet lag usually has us stumbling toward our beds by sundown. But just in case, I peek into the kitchen.

  Dad’s slouching at the table, wearing a stained undershirt and gray sweatpants. Yet another cup of tea sits in front of him—or maybe it’s the same one from earlier, still unconsumed. His face is buried in his hands, and he’s wearing one black sock on his right foot. His left foot is bare. I can picture him sitting down to take off his socks—such a mundane thing after a day like today—and getting frustrated at it not coming off quickly enough. He probably threw it across the room and decided not to bother with the other one.

  A large part of me doesn’t want to talk to Dad, which is terrible but true. I’m torn between pretending I never saw him and locking myself in my room, or doing the right thing and checking on him. Man, I want to choose the easy way out. I could sneak upstairs, unpack my things, and start researching the word “Mortiferi” along with the freaky alternate-ending stuff I think I just experienced. I wouldn’t have to deal with Dad’s emotions, at least not until morning.

  My fingers drum silently against the doorframe. Then I take a deep breath. “Dad?”

  He sniffles and looks up. “Rosebud. I didn’t hear you come in.”

  His face is lined and patchy, as if he’s been napping since I left. There are red blotches underneath his eyes from where he propped his face on his hands, and his glasses are lying on the table. He puts them on without wiping them on his T-shirt first. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him skip that step before.

  I open my mouth to say—what? I’m sorry about Papa? I’m sorry he spoke into my mind—at least, I think he did—and I can’t talk about it because what if I’m crazy? I’m sorry I can’t tell you what just happened on the heath because I don’t know if it was real?

  “Stephen and I broke up,” I say.

  Holy crap. Where did that come from?

  Dad’s eyebrows lift. “Too bad. You all right?”

  “Not really.”

  He nods. “Sorry about that.”

  I dig my toe into the floor. If he doesn’t ask any follow-up questions, then I don’t know what else to say.

  “Right,” he says, getting up from his chair with a grunt. “Better get to bed.”

  He moves toward the door, leaving his cup on the table. Tears spring to my eyes. Is it so impossible for him to talk to me about Stephen? Doesn’t he care that I’ve said goodbye to my grandfather and my boyfriend in the same day? I get that he’s hurting—he just lost his dad, after all. And I didn’t even want to talk to him when I walked into the kitchen. But now that I’ve confessed what happened with Stephen, I’m desperate for a little fatherly compassion.

  “Dad?” I say, hoping I can get him to stay. “Did you want your tea?”

  He stops with his back to me. His head turns a fraction—a flicker of movement accompanied by a deep sigh. “If you want me to clean up after myself, then say so.”

  “No, that’s not what I meant. I just—”

  He waves me off, and I leave the sentence hanging. How could he have misinterpreted my words that badly? He stalks back to the table and hooks the mug’s handle with two fingers, sloshing tea onto the pale oak finish. His lips are turned down at the corners, exactly like a baseball pitcher’s before he throws a fastball.

  “Wait,” I say, holding up a hand. “I didn’t mean for you to clean it up, I was just hoping—”

  He hurls the mug into the kitchen sink. It slams into the stainless steel and sprays the wall with dark droplets. One chunk of ceramic bounces out of the sink and lands on the counter with a delicate dink. The other two chunks slide toward the drain.

  “Go up to your room,” he seethes.

  I know better than to hesitate.

  THE ROOM I USE AT NANA’S HOUSE USED TO BE MY AUNT Alison’s. It’s small, but the walls are almost the same shade of pale green as my bedroom in Nashville, and the carpet is soft and thick. I slip beneath the patchwork quilt Nana made when Aunt Alison was a child. The sheets are cool against my skin, which is still giving off steam from my impromptu sprint to Nana’s house. My thighs are going to burn tomorrow.

  Dad’s temper tantrum ruined any remaining chance of sleep, so I tug my phone out of my pocket and pull up the Web browser. It’s time to do some research.

  Search term #1: alternate ending to same event My screen fills with links to deleted scenes from the movie Event Horizon and the definition of the phrase “alternate ending.”

  Great. That’s really helpful.

  Search term #2: I saw the same event twice

  There’s a story about a man who was struck by lightning twice, someone complaining about a country club event being uploaded to a website twice, and a book reviewer’s blog post entitled “Why I Read the Same Book Twice (and Enjoyed It!).”

  Nope, not what I’m looking for.

  Search term #3: my mind is playing tricks on me

  The first result is a forum on out-of-body experience
s, and predictably, it’s full of people claiming one crazy thing after another. One guy, “JediWarrior423,” swears he can time travel in his bathtub. A woman, “BunnyGirl4U,” says she might have been brainwashed by aliens because she can’t remember anything from her high school years. Interestingly, she also mentions seeing the aliens more clearly when she takes her “special pills.” Somehow, I don’t think BunnyGirl4U and I are having the same experience.

  Only one girl, “PhoebeMP,” says something that lands in the right ballpark. “I hit my head and blacked out,” her post reads, “and when I woke up, I felt like I was reliving the past day of my life all over again.”

  Of course, the comments on her post are full of people telling her to go to the hospital, or see a psychologist, or stop watching Groundhog Day on repeat.

  I scroll through the rest of the forum, but Phoebe doesn’t show up again. Noticing a search box in the top corner of the page, I type in her username, but the only result is the post I’ve already read. So Phoebe had a weird experience, posted about it on the Internet, got made fun of, and never came back.

  Maybe she had legitimate head trauma.

  Or maybe she decided it was all a dream.

  What happened to me could have been a dream. The swirling colors, the deafening noise, the suctioning in my gut…

  Go home. The heath is dangerous tonight.

  I’ve never had a dream that vivid, and anyway, I wasn’t asleep.

  Search term #4: Mortiferi.

  I’m assuming that’s how it’s spelled; it sounds Latin, and thanks to my eighth-grade Latin elective, I know that “mort” is a common root for words related to death, like mortality. It would make sense that “Mortiferi” had something to do with dying. And Papa spoke it into my mind right before he died.

  Did you mean MODIFIER? asks my search engine.

  I bark out a loud “Ha!” and toss my phone on the mattress. If the Internet can’t come up with any answers, then I don’t know where else to look.