The Time Eater

by Aaron J. French

  He waved to me. I waved back. He had an old-fashioned fishing rod slung over one shoulder, a yellow tackle box clutched in his other hand. He kept looking around like he was expecting someone. But no one came. After a few minutes of searching for a suitable place to set his line, he came over to where I was sitting.

  “Howdy,” he said.

  I remember looking up at him, how it felt like looking at a giant. The sky, crisscrossed by branches, reared behind his head, endless. The shape of his hat, and the shadow it cast across his face, seemed larger than life. It was like the magic of the woods had given birth to this towering figure.

  “Hello,” I said.

  He glanced at my rock pile. “What’s that you got?”

  “Some rocks. I like to skip them across the stream.”

  He chuckled. “Yes, I do that sometimes. Mind if I join yah? I think this’ll be a good spot to get a nibble.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. He set his tackle box down in the dirt.

  We remained quiet for a while. He set his pole in the water and watched it sink to the bottom. The rushing stream closed over it, parting around the line and forming rippling currents. His pole was not like the ones I’d seen other people fishing with: metal, with a crank to turn the reel. His was nothing but a stick with some fishing line attached to it. I remember thinking that was weird. I couldn’t imagine why he’d chosen that sort of a rod over the more convenient types.

  I asked him about it, and he glanced at me sidelong without responding. He did this frequently, kind of peeked at me, watching. I got annoyed. Here I was minding my own business, when this weird guy waltzes over and doesn’t even say anything, just watches me, like I was a TV show or something. I didn’t like it.

  Finally he said, “You only need a pole of this caliber for pulling trout out of a stream this small. Fly fishing also works. It’s when you’re fishing in a lake or the sea that you need the type of pole you’re talking about.”

  He looked at me, and I nodded without fully understanding. Then he said, “Say, what are you doing out here all a-by yourself? Don’t you have school, parents?”

  “We’re on break,” I said. “My mom’s dead, and my dad… don’t care much what I do or where I am.”

  He made a noise in his throat. “A dead mother, an indifferent father… that’s a shame. Christ, I’m sorry, boy.”

  He’d said he was sorry, and I remember thinking there was nothing to be sorry about, but in his face he displayed another emotion. His cheeks cracked in a leering rictus, a smile too wide and too broad to be anything but grotesque. A gleam twinkled in his eyes, dancing around those leaden black eyebrows. He peered into the forest the way he had come, muttering, “…a real shame.”

  (God, no. No, no honestly, no really—that? Is that what happened, are you sure, are you positive? Oh God! Why—?)

  The man returned to watching his fishing pole, but something about the scene was now different. I felt a heavy weight hanging over us, a thing encumbering but unseen, holding back the blue sky, invisible. He was looking both at me and over his shoulder, one way then the other, a series of quick, feverish neck-swivels like a deranged animal. It frightened me.

  That heavy unseen presence lingered. For a moment, I thought I saw a great shadow fall upon the stream, a dark amorphous shape stretching over the water.

  “You sure ain’t nobody missing you right now?” he said, and again I noticed that horrible eagerness and excitement in his voice, present just beneath the words. He began doing something with his free hand—something having to do with the straps of his overalls. But my mind was too preoccupied with that unseen shape, the roiling blackness hovering like a swarm of bees over the water.

  It lurched then—all of it: the blackness, the shadow, the stream, the trees, the man. It all rocked to one side, then settled back into position. An explosion of sights and sounds entered into my field of vision. I heard ringing. I saw colorful starbursts wheeling over the water. A crack had opened, shaped like a lightning bolt, above the stream, directly in the center of the blackness.

  Through the crack passed something old and silent and massive, something full of dead stars and digested planets, something warbling in its own purple vacuum, something beyond my wildest dreams.

  Then the pain hit. I realized that my head was banging and my ears were ringing. My teeth had chomped down on my tongue and I tasted blood. I looked up toward the man who was standing over me. In his right hand, he held one of the boots he’d taken off, was holding it above his head.

  I touched my head, felt warm liquid. Looked at my hands. It was blood. “You… you hit me.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said maniacally. “That ain’t all I’m gonna do…”

  His hand came down like a hawk out of the sky. A curled and twisted claw trying to close around my neck. I batted it away, but he kept thrusting it at me. Soon both of his claws were out and reaching. No matter what, he wouldn’t stop.

  “Leave me alone!” I shouted, struggling to my feet. But the second I attempted to move, the world and all its stars danced again. The blood leaked down into my eyes and I grew nauseous, tumbling back in the dirt. The man pounced on me, throwing all his weight on top of me. I screamed.

  “Shut your rotten mouth or I’ll kill you!” he snarled. His boot came down and knocked the world off kilter. I tasted bile. I sensed darkness closing in on my periphery. A dropping sensation—down and down—but where was I going? Was I about to die?

  He flipped me on my stomach, and then the weirdest thing—my pants were stripped down, along with my underwear, allowing the cool forest air to tickle my skin. I was overwhelmed by confusion. Nothing made sense.

  He lied down on top of me, crushing me with his weight. I suddenly noticed he too had his underwear down, though I couldn’t imagine why. My eyes looked out across the tranquil stream, over which hung that indescribable darkness, ancient and lurking behind it all, seeable but unseen. A wind, rustling the trees, flung leaves on the surface of the water.

  “I’m gonna split you good, boy,” he breathed into my ear. “Split you right in the middle.”

  An explosion of pain. Pressure, assault, violent tearing.

  I screamed again.

  “Shut your mouth!” he cried. “Do as your daddy says and it’ll be over afore you know it!”

  His hand covered my mouth. I thought about biting it, but suddenly a wave of vomit rose in my throat. The violent throttling I experienced caused me to swallow the vomit down inadvertently, and I started choking. My vision dimmed.

  I imagined I was a fish, like the darting trout I had glimpsed in the stream. Only I was dead and being dashed against a rock by some wild boar. But what did I care? Dead things didn’t feel pain. They didn’t get confused or scared. Dead things just lied there.

  So that’s what I did. And as I lied there, my eyes zeroed in on the black shape over the stream. It seemed to be opening itself like a flower. It grew larger, wider, stranger, darker, and deep in its depths I glimpsed stars being pulverized, whole planets being rent to dust. I was mesmerized and somehow the amazement managed to block out the pain. For that I was glad.

  All at once, the shape reached out to me. Distorted purple appendages made of light and stardust. Warm, comforting, like saviors sent to bear me away from this torture. I wanted to fling myself into them, into those two purplish limbs stretching across the stream. But I was pinned, my whole body crushed under the weight of a wild boar.

  So I sent my other self. The one that existed before my mother’s death and my father’s mourning had distorted it. I gave up the part of me that loved magic, the woods, the world. I thought by doing so, I could save it. I thought the blooming black being would carry it away.

  However, the moment I sent it out, the being changed. It turned into a hungry ravenous beast—hungrier than the man on top of me—and it sent out a violent wind to suck me up, pull my other self into its depths.

  I felt that part of me go. And after it left I felt empty and e
xposed and alone. I suddenly understood I’d made a grievous mistake. The black being, now shrinking into the background, disappearing into the trees, was not my savior. It was my captor. It had tricked me, and now it had the most precious part of me—my other self, the magic self—and I knew it would never, under any circumstances, give it back. Not unless it was forced to.

  It had me, and now it was gone, back from whence it came. I was left lying by the bank of the stream, trapped under a monster who was inflicting the greatest suffering on me. The feeling of falling returned and darkness filled my eyes. The world went black and I realized, at that moment, I would never be the same.

  Chapter Twenty

  (Now I know. Now I know what you wanted me to forget. And now that I know, I swear—I swear to that part of me which is magic, which is holy—I will never forget again.)

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Light. Coming from all corners, closing in, circulating. It came from above like rain, from below like waves, from both sides, where it entered my vision like a pair of collapsing walls. Soon it was everywhere—in everything. Then, as it began to dim, I saw shapes.

  The last thing I could remember was the horror of lying beside the stream. The horror of what that awful man did to me.

  But I wasn’t in the forest. I was in a dark room whose windows had been thrown open, through which spilled great yellow shafts of sunlight. Piles of clothes and rags, furniture covered in sheets, and stacks of old board games surrounded me. A group of people I didn’t recognize sat close by.

  “Look. He’s up,” one of them said. The voice was female.

  I found that I was, in fact, lying down, but not on the ground beside the stream. I was in a large wooden bed without a blanket, my lower half wrapped in a sheet. I was shirtless. My body felt incredibly weary. To move an inch seemed like the greatest task, and so I just stayed still, and that felt good.

  Slowly the room came into focus, including the people sitting around me. The clearer I saw them, the more I began to remember. But it was confusing. I scanned their faces. The small Chinese man with gray hair and a beard, with a face like an angel’s. I remembered him. He was the acupuncturist. Someone (was it me?) had gone into the city to contact him. Next to him stood a small table with a number of strange-looking Asian items scattered across it: candles, scrolls with Chinese characters, smoking sticks resembling incense, curious glass cups, and a slew of acupuncture needles. I could still feel the pinpricks all over my body and the hot bruises on my back from where the cupping had been performed.

  In the chair beside the small doctor sat Annabelle. Her face was a vision, her long black hair falling around her shoulders. She had tears on her cheeks, messing up her mascara.

  “How do you feel?” she asked.

  “Great. A bit tired. Actually I feel like I could sleep a week, but other than that… yeah, great.”

  She smiled as more tears came, then reached forward to touch my arm. But my attention had turned to the people standing behind Annabelle and the doctor. I was speechless, in shock. I stared at them wide-eyed, my mouth hanging open.

  “Bet you haven’t been mind-fucked like that since you were married to me,” said Jenny, giving me a wink. She looked exactly as I remembered, yet slightly older and more dignified. She was every bit as attractive, her face a mask of perfectly drawn make up, her eyes crystal blue, framed in straight blonde hair.

  I couldn’t answer her, couldn’t get my tongue to function, so my eyes strayed to the woman next to Jenny. Celeste. She too looked as I remembered, not a young college co-ed, but a pretty middle-aged brunette woman about my age. At that instant I was flooded with memories. Who the hell was she? And how did I—

  “Didn’t think you’d get rid of me that easy, did you?” she said, smirking.

  My brain felt like it was going through convulsions. Nothing made sense. I was all mixed up. When I saw the final person standing by the bed—Norma, the woman who’d been my—I mean James’s—nurse, I was overwhelmed. My memories and my awareness of time crumbled.

  “What the fuck is going on?” I said. “How the hell did you all get here?”

  “Drink this,” Dr. Li said, handing me a tonic, “and take these,” a handful of various herb pills. “That will stimulate memory as well as relaxation.”

  I swallowed the pills, dousing them in tonic. Everything had an acrid taste, but I managed to keep it down. I felt the effects almost instantly.

  “How do you feel, James?” the doctor asked.

  I chuckled sleepily. “Who are you calling James? What are you talking about, my name is Roger Borough—”

  “Christ, you guys weren’t kidding,” Jenny interrupted. “I had no idea it had gotten this bad. I mean, when we were married there were signs, but he never—”

  “When we were married,” Celeste said, “I sometimes caught him signing his bills as Roger Borough. The times when I didn’t catch him, of course, they came right back.”

  “What’s this?” I said. I felt too dopey to fully comprehend their words, however I was conscious of a low murmuring in my skull, an underlying suspicion. An image floated into the blackness behind my eyelids: an inflated rubber ball rising up through the water.

  The doctor leaned forward, bringing his massive gray face up close. “Your name isn’t Roger Borough. Roger Borough is a delusion, an alternate personality you created in your head following the incident with the man beside the stream, the man who raped you.”

  “That’s crazy. What the hell are you telling me, that I’m…” But I couldn’t even finish the sentence, for I was overcome by a vast, black, paralyzing fear. Anxiety flooded my blood.

  “Christ, what’s going on?” I screamed into the doctor’s calm, emotionless face.

  He sighed. “This is all part of the process, James. Your whole entire life you have hid from this memory, denied it to yourself—and with good reason. The man by the stream told you he’d kill you if you ever told anyone what he did. Being a child, you believed him. However, this forced you to turn the pain inward. You repressed it, and that repressed part of you split away, became Roger Borough. All along you remained James Steiner. Although James was the more dominant, the two personalities existed inside you simultaneously.

  “You presented yourself as either one depending on how you were feeling. When you were in high school, you did this to some extent, but it wasn’t until you went to Ohio State and got away from your father that the spilt-personality really turned on. In college you consistently displayed yourself as two separate people: one who was a sports-playing jock, the other an occultist bookworm. In a sense, you led two different lives. It’s a good thing Ohio State is so big or else you might have attracted more attention than you already did. You weren’t able to fool everyone concerning your two lives, and so you gained a reputation of being eccentric. This, in combination with all the magic spells you were casting for people, made you a… how do you say it in English—ominous figure?”

  I was flabbergasted. I stared at him with my face full of awe. The worst part was that somewhere deep inside, I knew everything he’d said was true. It was only a matter of letting myself accept it.

  “How do you know all that?” I asked him, a tinge of anger in my voice.

  Jenny answered. “Dr. Li interviewed us after Annabelle called to inform us of your condition. The rest you actually told him, laying right there in that bed, and he filled us in once we got here.”

  I looked to Annabelle, who was crying. “You called them?” She nodded. Then I felt compelled to ask, “What does this mean for us?” She started to answer, but I cut in—“No wait, I know. You and I were next-door neighbors back when I lived with my father… back before that man did what he did with me. We hung out sometimes, played doctor, all that. Is that right? I’m pretty sure we liked each other—boyfriend and girlfriend liked—but, by the time we became old enough to understand, we were too good of friends to wanna risk it?”

  She nodded, crying, and took my hand. “You�
�ve basically got it. Although you forgot one thing.”

  “I did?”

  “We also shared our first kiss together, one day in fifth grade, during recess. It was be—”

  “—hind the bleachers on the softball field,” I finished. “I do remember. You were so special, tolerating me even when I acted like a crazy weirdo. But…”

  I looked at all their watching faces. “I’m still confused. How did I get here? Why can’t I remember—it’s so frustrating not to know!”

  Dr. Li stayed my temper. “A percentage of amnesia is common in patients with your condition. It can be temporary, and the kind of procedure I performed on you is most conducive to recovery. For now, all you can do to understand everything is listen to us.”

  I scoffed. “Well, then someone tell me already. Quit beating around the bush!”

  Annabelle answered. “About a month ago, I got a very strange letter in the mail. It was from Roger Borough, whom I’d never heard of, but it was signed by you, James Steiner. I knew right away something was terribly wrong with this, even before I read the part about you having only a month to live. It was in the tone of the letter: scary, hopeless. Only now do I understand that you were in the middle of having a nervous breakdown. But I believed you, and to be honest I was lonely myself and wanted a man in my life. I always felt I loved you, since we were kids. So I sent you a train ticket and told you to come. After that…” she lowered her head, “things got out of hand. I needed help. First I hired Norma, but that proved ineffective. Eventually you turned up with Dr. Li’s business card. So here we sit.”

  “Let me get this straight, was I really given a month to live? What about the inoperable brain tumor?”

  “I’m sorry,” Dr. Li said, “but that was a delusion.”

  I was horrified. “Are you out of your mind, look at me! I look like I was dragged by my ears through a rocky field!”

  “Oh you were going to die, there’s no question of that. But it was a self-imposed suicide. You weren’t confined to the bed. You came and went as you pleased. You were having a nervous breakdown, so you told yourself you had a month to live. You wanted to die and you even gave yourself a time limit; then, you started to focus your will and your qi on this task. If you had not come to me when you did, I’m certain you would be dead by now.”