by Brian Harmon
“You sure you’re going to be okay?” Violet pressed. “You took a nasty fall.”
“I’ll be fine.”
But both she and Corey got out of the car with him, as if they intended to see him right into his truck and help him fasten his seatbelt.
“Here.” Violet took his wrist and scrawled something on his palm. “This is Corey’s cell phone number. If you need anything, give him a call. He’s always got it on.”
“Sure,” Jeremy lied. He had no intention of calling Corey. There was no reason. He was fine. He just wanted to go home and crawl into bed and rest his aching body.
Besides, the strangeness was behind him now. He was certain that nothing else could possibly happen to him tonight.
But he was wrong about that.
“Which one’s yours?” Violet asked as she surveyed the half dozen vehicles still parked in the small lot.
“The white Toyota.” Jeremy replied without looking at it. He was almost embarrassed to point out the junky looking heap with no hubcaps and a mismatched front fender. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d even washed it. It seemed like that fender just defeated the purpose.
“What white Toyota?”
Jeremy lifted his eyes to the vehicles parked before him. His truck wasn’t among them. “The hell?”
“Where were you parked?” Violet asked.
“Right there.” He flapped his hand toward the empty spaces at the center of the small lot.
“You think somebody stole it?” Violet asked.
It wasn’t worth stealing. It was a heap of junk with nearly two hundred thousand miles on it. Without replying, Jeremy began to walk toward the place where it had been, as though a closer look might reveal an obvious solution to this puzzling dilemma.
“Towed?” Corey offered.
“I can’t imagine why.”
“What’re you going to do?” Violet asked. It was a good question. What could he do?
He walked out into the lot, as if changing his point of view would somehow reveal his missing property. He couldn’t remember exactly in which space he’d parked the truck, since it wasn’t like he’d needed to distinguish it from all the identical junk-heaps in the city. But he was sure it had been in one of these right in front of him. He saw no broken glass to suggest a break-in, but then again he could not remember locking the doors.
A brand new Dodge minivan was parked closest to where his truck should have been. As he approached this vehicle, it suddenly lurched, as though something big and unseen had struck it from below.
Jeremy froze in mid-step.
“What was that?” asked Violet from behind him.
For a moment, none of them moved.
“That was weird,” Jeremy said. He began to walk around the front of the van, intending to have a closer look. Corey began to move around the other side, but at a distance.
Violet didn’t move. “Be careful,” she begged.
Caution probably should have been Jeremy’s primary concern, seeing as how he’d so recently survived a two-story fall following a freak belch in the universe, but he refused to believe that fate simply had it out for him. Whatever had upset the minivan, he was sure it was not the grim reaper come to finish what he started.
No one else was around. The lot was empty except for the three of them.
Jeremy stepped in front of the van and then bent to peer beneath it. Before he could see all the way to the back, however, the vehicle jumped again, rocking violently on its shocks. In almost the same instant, a sports car several parking spaces away suffered a similar jolt. Whatever it was, it had just bolted from one vehicle to the other. And with amazing speed.
“Did you see that?” Violet asked.
Corey was standing on that side of the van and he was far enough away to have had a clear view of it. He was now staring at the sports car with a startled expression that might easily have been mistaken for stupidity. “What did you see?” Jeremy asked him.
But Corey simply shook his head.
“What did you see?” he asked again, more firmly this time.
“Don’t know.”
“You didn’t see it?”
“Saw it. Just don’t know.”
“What?”
“Black. Low to the ground.” He shook his head again, slowly, never taking his eyes off the sports car. “Never saw anything like it before.”
Violet was backing away now, toward her Liberty. “Guys, let’s just get out of here.” There was unmistakable panic in her voice.
Jeremy continued around the front of the minivan and peered over at the sports car.
“You guys, let’s go!”
But he ignored her. He was staring at the sports car. There was something under it, a black shape crowded in the tight space beneath the undercarriage. It was blacker than the shadows. As he watched, it slithered toward the rear of the car like something fluid, a formless, darkling shape. He couldn’t seem to comprehend the sight.
“You guys!” Violet was begging now. He could hear the fear in her voice, but he continued to ignore her and took another step toward the car. There was something about that mysterious black shape. Even though the late afternoon sun was still shining, the darkness beneath the car possessed a depth that was unnatural. It was as if he were looking deep into a vast tunnel.
There had to be a perfectly logical explanation. He’d rapped his head pretty hard when he fell. It must have affected his eyes. It was just a dog. That was all. A lost dog. It was frightened, cowering beneath the car because it knew nothing else to do. It was his bruised brain, misreading the shadows in contrast to the brilliant sunlight of the late afternoon. That was all.
But the thing beneath the car bolted again, rocking the little sports car as it rushed out the other side and slithered up and over the chain-link fence that stood behind the parking lot. It then vanished beneath a row of semi trailers that were parked on the other side.
It was no dog. No dog could scale a fence like that. And neither could any mere dog rock a minivan the way this thing had done. This was nothing he had ever seen before. It defied his eyes, refusing him even its shape. It was just a streak of blackness, as though God had become bored with the intricacies of form and shape and simply painted a random swatch of glossy black across the backdrop of his life and breathed mysterious life into it.
Violet ran to where Corey was standing and seized his big hand in both of hers. “What was that thing?”
But of course Corey didn’t know.
“Did you see it?” Jeremy asked, already knowing that he had. He could tell by his expression that something unthinkable had passed before his eyes, and he knew that it was the same thing his own eyes had just seen.
“Wormhole.” Corey sighed the word with such awe that one might believe he had just witnessed God Himself.
“Bullshit,” Jeremy spat. He refused to believe that whatever he’d just witnessed was some sort of alien spit up by a freak cosmic fart. There was a rational explanation. He would prove it.
Violet cried out for him to stop, but he was already moving. The chain-link fence was more of a visual border for the parking lot than any actual means of keeping people out. It only ran about three-quarters of the length of the back side of the lot. On the other side was the shipping and receiving docks for the distributing facility that was attached to the office building from which he had been so violently expelled a short while before. No-trespassing signs were all that the company relied on to keep people off this second lot. Jeremy walked across the parking lot and around the fence, and then made his way back to the line of parked trailers where the mysterious shadow-thing was hiding.
Behind him, he could hear Violet calling after him, trying to stop him. He thought about telling her to go home if she didn’t like it. What did it matter to her? She didn’t know him. She had no reason to care what happened to him any more than he cared what happened to her and her fat friend.
But a strange pang in his heart told him that
was a lie. There was something about these two. Something special. He actually liked them. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d met anyone he actually liked. The very feeling was strange to him, almost alien.
But he forced these feelings away without considering them. That wasn’t important. What was important right now was making sense of this weirdness.
There were seven trailers in all. They stood tall enough to easily see that there was nothing hiding beneath them and they were too far from the building and the trucks at the other end of the lot for the thing to have gone elsewhere without any of them seeing it. As he approached the rear of the trailers, he saw that one of them was open.
“Jeremy, come back! Please! Corey, make him come back!”
Corey’s voice was soft, not shouted, yet Jeremy heard every word clearly from where he stood and it froze him in his tracks: “Nothing’s more dangerous than a cornered animal.”
Jeremy had to admit, the boy was smart. Much smarter than he let on. He was absolutely right. If that thing was in this trailer, it was completely trapped. If he tried anything it perceived as threatening, it would likely react in the most violent manner possible.
He stood there now, uncertain of what to do. He had set out to prove that there was a rational explanation for this thing, but in doing so he had almost put himself in the most irrational situation possible. If he was right and it was just some kind of wild animal that had strayed too far from its natural habitat, then it would be countless times more dangerous than a cowardly alien.
But even as he realized these things, he found himself moving forward again, slower this time, but still ever closer to the black mystery that had evaded his senses even as it scaled a chain-link fence before his very eyes.
“Come back,” Violet pleaded. “Leave it alone. Please.”
But her concern was pointless. When he peered into the open trailer he found it empty. Whatever the thing was, it had vanished as abruptly as it had appeared.
For a moment he stood there, turning in slow circles, trying to understand where it had gone, how it had escaped unseen and where it might now be lurking. But as swiftly as it had leapt that fence, it could have been anywhere by now. He turned and walked back to the fence, where Violet and Corey were waiting.
“Is it gone?” Violet asked.
“Yeah.”
“What was it?”
Jeremy didn’t know.
Violet looked back at the parking lot that did not, for some reason, contain a parked white Toyota and asked what he wanted to do now.
“Just take me home,” he replied wearily.
* * *
What was happening to him? For a long time, Jeremy sat at the table, the day’s events running over and over in his mind. He just didn’t understand. What did that strange warp in reality do to him?
Violet sat across from him, watching as he struggled to understand all this strangeness. Corey had wandered off into the other room a while ago, as though he’d grown bored with Jeremy’s plight.
Unable to tolerate the throbbing ache that had settled throughout his entire body any longer, Jeremy stood up and stretched his back. Lighting bolts of pain rushed through him as he did so. He probably made a mistake when he refused to go to the hospital, but he wasn’t yet willing to admit this error, so he did his best to simply hide his pain.
“Want something to drink?” Violet offered. “We have soda and orange juice. And water, of course.”
“No. Thank you.”
“We can make tea, too.”
“I’m fine.”
“Coffee?”
“I’m fine.”
“We’ve also got some peanut butter cookies. Corey made them. He’s awesome in the kitchen.”
Jeremy shook his head and assured her once again that he was fine. He rubbed at the knot on the back of his head.
“At least let me get you some aspirin?”
He started to decline again, but what was the point? She only wanted to help. And he certainly could use some aspirin. What was the point of refusing?
Violet left him alone in the kitchen and returned a moment later with the entire bottle. She then poured him a glass of water while he fished out two pills and slipped them into his mouth.
When Jeremy first stepped into this apartment, she explained that she and Corey shared it, but was careful to point out that they were not a couple, as if he might judge her. But what did he care? He saw no reason why two mature adults couldn’t share an apartment without engaging in some kind of elicit relationship. And what would it matter to him if they did? It was none of his business.
“I just don’t get it,” he said as he sat down at the table again. “When I woke up this morning I was Jeremy Gleer. I drove a piece of shit truck that I was embarrassed to be seen in. I lived in a crumby little apartment building at five ninety-six Yender Street. I go to a simple job interview, get knocked through a second story window by a … I don’t even know what! And now suddenly all those things are just gone. I can’t find my truck. I can’t find my wallet. I can’t even find my home.”
For two hours Violet drove him up and down the city streets, unable to find the apartment building he’d been living in for the past four years. His whole street seemed to have vanished, just like his truck.
“Could be amnesia,” Corey suggested. He had appeared in the kitchen doorway like a ghost, holding his cell phone in one plump hand.
“Where’ve you been?” Violet asked.
“Online.”
“Doing what?”
“Looking for shadow monsters.”
“I don’t think they have Facebook accounts,” Violet replied without a moment’s hesitation.
“Could be a cryptid,” Corey replied, ignoring her sarcasm. As if this had definitely closed the subject, he turned back to Jeremy and said again, this time with the surety of a skilled medical professional, “Amnesia.”
“Amnesia means you can’t remember something,” Jeremy replied tiredly. “I’ve got the opposite. I’m remembering things that apparently aren’t there.” As they were driving around, searching for his street, Jeremy discovered that his wallet and keys, like his truck, had gone missing. It was as if every detail of his life had simply vanished. He suddenly had no vehicle and no home. He didn’t even have proof of who he was.
“Maybe your interview was a year ago,” Corey suggested.
“My interview was today,” Jeremy replied, wincing at the pain in his head.
“Or two years ago. Or more.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“You didn’t get the job,” Corey pressed. “Time passed. You got another interview at the same place. You fall out the window, hit your head, forget everything back until the last interview. Now you think it’s a year ago. Or two. Or more. Everything’s changed.”
Jeremy stared at him for a moment. It was the most words he’d heard Corey use at one time. “That would be a hell of a coincidence, don’t you think?”
Corey shrugged.
“Okay,” he said, playing along, “but that doesn’t explain what happened to my apartment building. Hell, my whole street.”
“Things changed.”
Jeremy turned and looked at Violet, but she merely shrugged.
“Okay. Fine. What’s today’s date then?”
“May sixteenth. Twenty eleven.”
Jeremy shook his head. “Sorry. That’s the date of my interview. No lost years at all.”
“Just a theory,” Corey conceded.
“It wasn’t a bad theory,” Violet offered kindly. “I mean, I don’t have a better explanation.”
Jeremy nodded. “I know. It doesn’t make any sense. A wallet and keys can be lost, a truck can be stolen, but you just can’t lose a whole street.”
Corey stood silently for a moment, thinking. “Maybe somebody’s messing with your head,” he decided.
Jeremy stared at him. He couldn’t believe he was having this conversation. “Like who? Aliens?”
Corey considered this briefly and then nodded. He leaned forward, his expression deathly serious. “Used the wormhole.”
Violet began to giggle.
“Are you serious?”
“It’s possible.”
“No it isn’t!”
Violet’s giggles exploded into laughter and Jeremy joined her.
Corey’s face never broke. He merely stared off into space, contemplating the idea of aliens and their wormholes.
Jeremy wiped the tears from his eyes. He tried to remember the last time he laughed that hard, but he couldn’t. In fact, he couldn’t seem to remember the last time he laughed even a little. He stared down at his hands for a moment. He couldn’t remember a lot of things, now that he thought about it. “I think I might’ve hit my head harder than I thought. My memories are all fuzzy.”
“Probably in shock,” Corey offered.
Jeremy nodded. “Probably.”
“Maybe you’re just confused right now,” added Violet.
He looked up at her. “Yeah.”
“A little rest and it’ll be all right.”
Jeremy nodded again.
Violet smiled. “I’ll bet in the morning you’ll wake up and realize what you were doing wrong and it’ll be funny.”
Jeremy smiled. “Yeah. I’ll bet I will.” But he could not help feeling that something was terribly wrong.
* * *
“Here’s some blankets and a pillow.”
“Thanks.” Jeremy took the pillow from Violet and settled himself onto the couch.
“I’m sure everything will make a lot more sense in the morning.”
“I hope so.” He winced as he eased himself back onto the pillow.
“Still hurt?” she asked as she unfolded the blanket and laid it over him.
“Yeah.”
