by Edward Hogan
“Hello, Daniel!” Dad said. “We were about to get our flashlights and come out looking for you.” He was beaming. “This is Gavin, Mike, and Martha.” He pointed to the guests, who all waved. “And you know Tash, of course.”
“Hi,” I said. “None of you play bingo, do you?”
They looked puzzled. “No,” they said.
“Good,” I said.
“Hi, Daniel,” Tash said. She was walking toward the door. “What happened to your face?”
“Oh, I got in a bit of a scrap. We were just messing around.”
“You and the fellas, was it?” Dad called over.
“Yeah,” I said.
“I bet the other guy’s in worse shape, huh?” Dad said.
I thought of Jack scrambling out of the water, his eyes wide with terror. “Yeah, he’s struggling,” I said.
“Good lad,” Dad said. He turned back to the guests. “He’s a big old thing is our Daniel. Good healthy temper on him, and all,” he said.
I followed Tash out to the door. “How’s Chrissy?” I asked.
“She’s fine. She’s just a bit tired. How are you?”
“The same.”
We said our good nights, and she walked next door. I went through to my bedroom. I heard Gavin open the fridge. “Another beer, Ricky?”
“No, thanks, Gav. I’ve had enough,” Dad said.
These were strange times, indeed.
I opened the window in the bedroom. The darkness had a greenish, submarine tinge. I felt the surge of energy again, at once enlivening and calming. The trees looked like the thick wires of some giant machine. I could hear Chrissy and Tash talking in their garden.
“Don’t be silly, Chrissy,” said Tash. “He’s absolutely fine. This is just more of your hippie nonsense. You’ve smoked too much tofu.”
I sat on the bed and stroked the place on my leg where the long gash had been. I wanted it back: I wanted the connection; I wanted the trouble.
“I’m telling you, Tash,” Chrissy said, her voice weak and strained. “I’ve never felt energy like that before. If he’s not careful, something terrible is going to happen.”
The next morning, I biked to the Internet café round the back of the Dome. I took my code and descended to a basement lined with computers. This, it seemed, was where the Leisure World rejects hung out: a goth wearing big headphones, an anxious-looking woman, probably checking her work e-mails, and a boy with a cold playing World of Warcraft. These, I supposed, were my people. It was eight a.m. Everyone else was jogging in the clean crisp air or playing vigorous tennis while we withered under fluorescent lights and the haze of a standing heater cranked up to the max.
I turned my monitor away from the others. The search engine took me to the website of the Derby City News. Wednesday, November 3, 2010. A few days after the second date Lexi had carved into the tree.
The main headline for that day was “CITY STILL GRIPPED BY FREAK ICE STORM.” There was a picture of the freezing city center, a statue of a boy astride a ram. The animal had icicles hanging from his mouth and horns.
Lexi’s story must have been on page two of the hard copy. “GIRL GOES MISSING FROM PARTY.” I clicked the link and scanned the text: “Alexandria Helen Cocker, 17, who goes by the name of ‘Lexi’ . . .”
The article said she had been wearing a blue dress, with leggings underneath, and a black parka coat. She was last seen at a nightclub in town, talking to a tall man in his thirties who was wearing a suit and a long gray coat. The police asked for any information and requested that the man come forward. They said that accounts of Lexi’s movements were confused due to the clocks going back for the end of British Summer Time.
A teacher from her school said, “Lexi is a sensible, straightforward girl and always willing to help others. Obviously we’re worried because this is unusual — she’s so capable and never in any sort of trouble.”
I felt my hands trembling on the mouse. I was so mixed up. The article was describing the hours before she died — I could feel it — and I was so scared for her. But, on the other hand, I knew where she was. She had spoken to me. I hadn’t even met her before October 31, 2010.
I typed her name into the website’s search bar and read the other stories from the following weeks and months. They were shorter each time: further appeals for help from the police, a vigil organized by Lexi’s friends. In December there was a plea from her parents for her to come home. There was a picture of her father, a tall, lean man with longish curly hair in a checked shirt, and her mother, her head buried in her husband’s chest. The article quoted Mr. Cocker:
“We just want her back for Christmas. For her birthday. We miss her so desperately. Her sister misses her. We have hope, but that’s all.”
I thought of them eating Christmas lunch, fish and corn, without her. They had hope. Above the article was a picture of Lexi, in her swimsuit, her head thrown back, laughing. No scars or bruises. The caption read: “Alexandria: Still Missing.”
I kept going back to the first article, reading over the scant details of her last night out, as if the answers would somehow rise from the gaps between the lines. I thought of the man in the long gray coat and Lexi in her blue dress. There was still so much I didn’t know. Why were her wounds getting worse? Why did she run away from me that night? Where had my own injuries come from, and how could they just disappear?
I clicked on every article that had appeared in that day’s newspaper. I felt like crying. I printed some of the articles and went upstairs to retrieve them. I folded the sheets of paper and slipped them inside my sock so they wouldn’t fall out when I was biking. I walked outside and tried to clear my mind, but without the water, without the rhythm of the swim strokes, I couldn’t find any peace. On the breeze, I could smell the lake.
When I got to the clearing, she was hiding again. This is what I deserve, I thought sadly. I wouldn’t be surprised if she never spoke to me again. I felt something trickling down the back of my neck and heard a hissing sound. It was sand. I spun away and looked up. Lexi was in the high branches of a tree, the sand leaking out of her closed fist.
“You’ve got nerve coming back here,” she said.
“I came to say sorry,” I said.
“I can’t hear you,” she said.
“Well, come down, then.”
She shook her head. “I can’t believe you brought those hick perverts here to spy on me. Like you’re some idiot pimp. I should have known. It’s in your nature as a male.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Pardon?” she said.
“I’m sorry!” I called, louder this time.
“It definitely means more when you shout it,” she said. She slid down the tree in a seamless series of lithe movements, but remained on the other side of the trunk so I couldn’t see her.
“You let me take a beating, though,” I said, trying to peer around the tree.
“You deserved one.”
“You made me look like a fool in front of them.”
“You are a fool when you’re in front of them.”
“But you saved me from any real damage, in the end,” I said. “Didn’t you?”
She paused. “Well,” she said.
I thought about the newspaper articles. Lexi, without any blemishes or scars. The man in the long coat. “Can I see you?” I asked.
“Apparently you can,” she said from behind the tree. “Although it might not be for the best at the moment.”
She walked out into the open. The wounds were livid. Both of her eyes were now blackened above the lids, and bruises marked her cheekbones like small dark clouds. Her hands were reddened and swollen, her left thumb bent back at a strange angle. One of her fingernails was ripped off. She wore her red hoodie and denim skirt, and she was shivering. “Ta-da,” she said sarcastically.
I knew I had to hold back my shock, so I forced a smile. “Hi,” I said.
She sniffed a little trail of blood back into her nose.
&nbs
p; “I’ve brought you a present, to say sorry,” I said.
I had made a headdress from a white terry-cloth headband I bought from the tennis shop and a magpie feather. “I made this for you, because you did a coup on me. You touched me and ran off. I couldn’t find an eagle feather.”
She threw her head back and laughed, like in the picture from the newspaper. “That is the absolute height of Crow fashion, Daniel. Although I did get hurt, so we may need to paint the feather red.” She put it on, tucked some strands of hair behind her ears.
“There,” I said. “You can be my squaw.”
“I think, Daniel, that I can be your chief.”
“Yeah. You’re probably right.”
“Damn straight,” she said.
She ran down to the water and studied her reflection. “Oh, it’s perfect,” she said. “Just perfect to lighten up my rather dull complexion.”
“I went to the Internet café,” I said.
“Really?” she said.
“To look at newspaper archives,” I said.
She turned around slowly but didn’t say anything, so I continued. “You said that if we’re going to be friends, you won’t talk about yourself. I’m not sure that’s the way friends behave.”
She walked over to the tree and sat down. She patted the ground beside her. “OK, Daniel. Questions.”
“Are you, you know. Are you . . . ?”
“It’s best not to start off with your rudest question,” she said.
The truth was, I couldn’t say the word. I didn’t want to, as if saying it might make it real. Dead. “What happened to you?” I said.
She sighed and looked up at the tree nearest the water. It had a long, thick branch overhanging the lake. “I went out for my friend’s seventeeth birthday party. Jade. It was the last day of October, but weirdly icy. It was getting late.”
I remembered the statue of the ram on the front of the paper, the icicles. The big freeze. “A man came into the pub. It was a basement bar. The Vaults. He was handsome, thirtyish. He seemed a bit down on his luck. He’d slipped on the sidewalk, he said. The whole left side of him was wet, and he had a graze down his arm. He said he’d come in to warm up. Bought me a whiskey. He was nice. Said he couldn’t believe I was still in school. That old line.”
“What did you say?”
“I said I was in college. I’d never had whiskey before, but I didn’t tell him that.”
“Where were your friends?”
She tenderly rubbed the swelling on her left hand. “Most of them had gone home. Jade, the birthday girl, was drunk. But she was making out with my best friend, Tom. Me and Tom had a bit of an on-off thing.” She smiled and closed her eyes.
“You were jealous,” I said. “You left them.”
“No,” she said. “Well, yes, I was jealous, but I stayed. Obviously I didn’t sit next to them while they were snogging. I stood at the bar. This guy came over in his suit, half soaked, and it was nice to have someone to talk to. Flattering, actually.”
“What did you talk about?” I asked. I was trying to be brave, but also trying to delay the moment when she came to the end of the story.
“We talked about change.”
“Sounds profound.”
“No. Change — money. He said he once dropped his wedding ring in a nightclub, and while he was looking for it, he found twenty-four quid in change on the floor by the bar. So then we scouted around on the floor ourselves. It was funny. We found about five pounds. Filthy little coins, covered in that black stuff that ruins your shoes when you go to clubs.”
I had never been to a nightclub. “So he was married?”
“No. He said she’d left him for another man. It was probably a lie. I was ready to believe it, though.”
“Because of Jade and Tom?” I asked.
She nodded. “Anyway, he said he’d give me a lift home. Said he was going back that way. I didn’t even say good-bye to Jade on her birthday. Leave them to it, I thought.”
My hands were shaking. I tried to hide them. I thought I might be sick. If she’d have stopped talking then, I’d have let her and not asked another thing. But she didn’t stop.
“As I got into his car, I felt a cold shock on the back of my neck. He must have hit me.”
“Jesus. Why did he do that? What did he want?”
“What does any man want?”
I thought back to the video on Jack’s mobile phone. I wanted to tell her again that not all men were like that, but I had led those boys to her, after all. I was part of the problem.
“What time was it, when you left?” I said.
“That’s controversial,” she said.
“Why?”
“It was the night when the clocks go back — the last Saturday night in October. It was one thirty Sunday morning when we left the bar. But when I woke up, I looked at my watch, and it was five past one.”
She showed me her watch. “It’s radio controlled. When the clocks go back, my watch does it automatically.”
“Where did you wake up?”
“Don’t know. Somewhere in the forest.” Her eyes began to glaze over now. She seemed far away from me.
“This forest? Leisure World?”
“Yeah. Think so. He dragged me off into the thick of it, and . . .” She looked around her. Her breathing had quickened, and I could see that she was sweating, although it could have been the water dripping from her wet hair. “Well,” she said. “The rest is history. Except it’s not, of course.”
“What do you mean?”
She shook her head. “History’s a circle. He stabs me. In the chest, here.” She unzipped the hoodie slightly and pointed to a place on her swimsuit. I could see a dark purple stain on the black Lycra. “And — just when my watch beeps for two o’clock — everything goes black. The next day, I wake up. It feels like a dream, like one of those dreams where you’re drowning, but you’re trying to get back to the surface. And then suddenly I open my eyes, and I am in that lake, rising up through the water.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Neither did I, the first time it happened. Put it this way. I live each day forward, but my body goes in reverse. Tomorrow my hair will be shorter. And so — God knows — will my fingernails. All I ever wanted was long, elegant fingernails. My wounds will be less healed, more open. And this watch, which I was wearing when I first came here, will continue to tick backward.”
“When will it end?”
“Same time it always ends. On the night the clocks go back, I will wake up in the forest, with no wounds on my body, and he will pull me into the woods again. For that extra hour, this watch will tick forward. And then, again, he’ll kill me.”
She had said it. My mind was no place to be. I wanted out.
“How do you know that will happen?” I said. I wanted her to be wrong.
“Because it’s what happened last year. It’s a cycle. A loop. These wounds have been getting worse and worse for twelve months. Just like last time. I’m trapped.”
“But can’t you change it? Can’t you do something different when he attacks you?”
“No. That hour doesn’t belong to me. I’m conscious, but I’m just watching him and watching myself react. I can’t control myself.”
“Can you . . . feel what’s happening?” I asked.
“God, yes.” She looked away. “It’s like purgatory. Hell’s waiting room.”
“But you didn’t do anything wrong,” I said.
She did not reply.
“Why don’t you just leave, before the clocks go back? Why don’t we go now? There’s holes in the fence, and we could —”
“I’ve tried everything. I can’t leave.”
“How many days do you have left?” I said. “Until it happens again?”
She looked at her watch. “Clocks go back on Saturday night. Two days,” she said.
I closed my eyes tight, to stop the tears. “Aren’t you scared?” I said.
“Yes,” she said.<
br />
I would like to say that I held her. That I was a comfort. But in truth I was just as frightened as she was, and we clung to each other. “I didn’t want you to be involved,” she said. “When I saw the gash on your leg, I knew it was a bad sign, that you were getting dragged into the loop.”
“What do you mean?”
“You were changing the future. You were choosing a different path, choosing to follow me into the woods on the night of the attack. Those wounds you had . . . he made them.”
I felt a biting chill of realization. “That’s why you wanted me to go away,” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
“But why did my injuries disappear?” I said.
“Because we fell out. We argued. And that meant you wouldn’t go after me.”
I thought about what she’d said. I thought of the different paths, each decision I made taking me into an alternative future.
“But you know that I can’t leave you now, don’t you?”
She closed her eyes and gave the faintest of nods. I could feel her body shaking, although it wasn’t a cold day.
“You’re freezing,” I said.
“Yeah, that happened last time, too.”
“We need to get you some more clothes.” I took a deep breath and tried to raise my spirits. “Come on, let’s make a night of it.”
She sat behind me on the bike and hung on. I could feel the vibrations of her shivering. I tried not to think of the things that she’d told me as we headed toward the shopping center. There was a part of me that was resigned to what was happening. If we had two days together before it happened again, then we should enjoy them. But there was another voice inside me. You have to do something, it said. You can’t let this happen again.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
There was that green tinge to the air again. The lights of the shopping center blinked behind the waving branches. “Nothing,” I said. “Let’s go shopping.”
A family cycled toward me, and I waited for them to move over. They didn’t. The dad — a big macho man on his mountain bike — just kept coming straight for us. I swerved away at the last moment. “Moron!” I shouted. He slowed his bike and looked up at a tree, but he didn’t respond.
