by Sean McMahon
‘What do you think he’s got in there?’ asked Kara, intrigued by Kevin’s seemingly suspicious demeanour, coupled with his apparent eagerness to move the large black fabric container into the house as quickly as possible.
‘I bet you any money it’s doughnuts,’ said Hal, still salty over the fact that the stakeout just didn’t feel cliché enough without them.
‘Hal,’ said Kara, pinching the bridge of her nose, ‘for the last time, even if we had access to doughnuts, we couldn’t eat them even if we’d found a way to drag them here. Let it go already.’
He hummed something about the cold not bothering him anyway and stood up, brushing the grass from the back of his boiler suit, despite the fact that foliage debris wouldn’t have adhered to the material anyway.
‘I’m gonna go peer through the window, you coming?’ asked Hal.
Kara stood up, following Hal’s lead, as he made his way across the road, and they both took up position at separate windows, peering through into Kevin’s home. Kevin was unlocking a door to the left of his kitchen and, moving backwards, he pulled the big black sack in after him. Hal and Kara could hear the faint sound of Kevin talking to himself and then, shortly after, Kevin reached from the darkness of what lay beyond the door and slammed the door shut.
Jerry barked at it incessantly.
‘Well, that wasn’t creepy as shit,’ said Kara solemnly.
‘Yeah, real glad we did this, it’s been fun,’ said Hal, walking away from the lodge at a pace that was just slightly too brisk for someone trying not to look freaked out.
‘We should get in there, see what he’s up to, suggested Kara. ‘The front door is partially open, maybe we can squeeze through…’
‘Hard pass,’ said Hal. ‘I don’t care what he’s up to. Let’s stick to the plan and keep an eye out for this swirling time portal, or whatever it’s going to be, okay?’ but she ignored him, staring into the dimly-lit cabin.
‘Kara, snap out of it yeah, let’s head back to our spot.’
Begrudgingly, she pulled herself away from the window, and they made their way back to the patch of grass directly opposite the increasingly mysterious lodge.
*
Jerry had forced himself out of the front door an hour or so ago, staying true to his own timeline, and making his way to Fir Lodge. They couldn’t shake the tenseness, as the evening slowly approached, knowing that their past-selves would be directly in front of them soon. Despite not having a watch, or a working phone, to confirm exactly when they were in the current restart, they knew they didn’t have long to wait now.
As if right on cue, their saint-like perseverance had paid off. There they were; Velma and a ghost-busting scientist, casually walking towards Kevin’s lodge, being lured there by Jerry. A few houses away, Kara saw her past-self lean down to check Jerry’s tag.
This was it, any second now.
They held their breath in unison, as they watched themselves walk up the short driveway, the past incarnation of Hal calling out to see if anyone was home. The Restarters were so focused on watching events play out, that they failed to notice the thickening fog that was rolling across the grass behind them, dispersing through the fir trees like a viscous, yet entirely intangible liquid. As it moved across their line of sight, they drew their focus away from their target for the first time in hours, sensing that something wasn’t right.
‘It’s too early, why is the fog here already?!’ Hal asked Kara, despite knowing she knew as much as he did, and wouldn’t have the answer.
‘It’s so thick, what do we do?!’ responded Kara, the panic in her voice putting Hal even more on edge. If the fog was here, a restart wouldn’t be far behind it.
‘We make a run for it,’ said Hal, ‘to our past-selves!
Having come too far to allow the omnipresence of time to steal their reward out from underneath them, they stood up, and began to run across the road, realising all too late that they’d lost sight of themselves. In their frantic attempts at trying to locate their past-selves amidst the debilitating fog, their eyes eventually landed back on Kevin’s lodge.
Being the only landmark that was currently visible, they moved towards it, but barely made it two steps before the sound of rushing air brought them to their knees.
Kara felt like her head had been split open with an actual ice pick. Meanwhile, Hal was rolling on the floor, unable to catch his breath, due to the excruciating sensation of a trapped nerve being plucked like a harp-string in his chest. Their surroundings were shaking now, from side to side, and for a brief moment Hal thought he was going to fall into the sky, as if it were a bottomless ocean beneath him. And then the pain, along with the temporal distortions, retreated just as quickly as they had taken them down, the fog lessening in its opaqueness, albeit only slightly.
‘Where are we?’ said Kara.
Hal knew she was referring to their past-selves. He pointed into the distance, where they could just about make out the faint outline of themselves walking back to Fir Lodge.
‘They’re getting away!’ shouted Hal.
Hal and Kara immediately pulled themselves up from the ground, and headed off in pursuit, the answer to their biggest question still within reach. The fog began to thicken again, causing the outlines they were chasing to disappear from sight. They picked up the pace, but the road seemed to go on forever. It was then that they realised they had run completely past Fir Lodge. The sound of rushing air arrived once more, at first a mocking whisper, gradually increasing in pitch and severity, attacking them from all sides.
‘Oh, you sonuva–’ Hal shouted, both into the night, and at the deafening crescendo that followed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
A Trip Through Time
4th Restart – Friday Afternoon, 12:01pm
‘Bitch!’ finished Hal, landing in the next restart with the grace of a man doing a teddy-bear roll after drinking two bottles of tequila.
He stormed off to their favourite picnic bench, running through various expletives with frustration. Kara caught up with him, and sat down next to him, as he sparked up the first of his three cigarettes for this restart, and waited patiently for him to calm down.
‘We were so damn close!’ said Hal.
Kara hadn’t seen him lose his cool quite like this before. Even when they had first arrived here, in this cursed place, and considering what they were up against, Hal had always seemed relatively calm and collected.
‘If it weren’t for that damn fog rolling in…’ he continued, playing through the events in his mind. ‘We were right behind our past-selves! You saw them walking back to our lodge too, right?!’
Kara skimmed through her recent memories, then realised she didn’t actually know what she saw.
‘I mean…I thought I could see us, but the fog was so thick. It was barely an outline…’
‘Well, this isn’t working, I think you were right all along,’ said Hal. ‘We need to be more proactive here. We need to go on the offensive. Whatever is causing this clearly doesn’t want us to have all the facts,’ he added, throwing his cigarette over his shoulder as he realised he wasn’t getting anything from the clearly fake tobacco.
‘What did you have in mind?’ asked Kara in a soothing tone, trying to get him to calm down.
‘I think we’re going about this all wrong,’ said Hal. ‘Instead of trying to find out what happened, I think we need to prevent it from happening at all. We need to stop our past-selves from leaving Fir Lodge. If we don’t go, we can’t end up in this mess.’
Kara considered the concept, then shook her head as if she was shooing a wasp out of her hair.
‘Can we even change things like that?’ said Kara, ‘I mean, the most we’ve been able to achieve is making our friends shiver when we walk through them. We’re hardly the masters of our own destiny in this place.’
Hal looked over his shoulder and saw his past-self talking to Jon by the hot tub. It was then that he remembered something. It was so obvious, that he
couldn’t believe he’d missed it the first three times. Then he remembered that they hadn’t made it to the garden early on, during their first restart, which meant it was technically only two restarts that he needed to berate himself for having missed something so crucial.
His past self-was leaning against the hot tub now, the sound of the jets rumbling gently, just as they always were at this time of the morning. Except, they weren’t rumbling at all the first time he arrived.
He shot up without warning, and sprinted towards the sauna room to the left of Jon and his past-self, his cumbersome rubber boots colliding soundlessly on the tiled flooring. His eyes darted frantically, as he scanned the room for what he needed, and then he saw the closed cupboard door in the corner of the room. He ran to the door and reached for the handle, his past-self being close enough to allow him to interact with it. And there it was; cast in darkness, a tiny black plastic switch, the initials “HT” emblazoned above it in a humble font that failed to do justice to their significance.
Reaching out, he flicked the switch to the “OFF” position, and heard the stream of jets slow down, eventually grinding to a halt. He waited, as he heard past-Hal and Jon discussing what had happened.
Hal counted to ten, then flipped the switch back to the “ON” position, causing the motor to restart, and filling the jets with life. Stepping out from the cupboard, Hal closed the door behind him, a ridiculous grin on his face, then walked back out to Kara.
“This is going to blow her mind,” he thought to himself.
*
‘What’s with the ridiculous grin?’ asked Kara, as Hal popped the collar on his boiler suit, walking towards her with a swagger that lacked the desired cool factor he was going for, given that she had no context for its usage.
‘Every morning we sit here, I can’t believe I missed it!’ said Hal, gearing up for a good old ramble.
‘Missed wha–’ began Kara, but Hal cut her question short.
‘We move out of the way to make room for past-me, who sits right where we’re sitting, something always niggled me about that. I think on a sub-conscious level I felt it, that the timing was off. Then I noticed the jets! I can’t believe it took me three damn restarts to spot it! The jets Kara!’
‘Hal, you’re rambling. It’s annoying. What jets?’
‘On the hot tub! When we first got here, as in the first time around, to Fir Lodge, I came out and chatted with Jon. Whilst we were talking, the hot tub cuts out, right? The power tripped!’
Hal was talking even faster now, his tone indicating that this conversation contained the greatest discovery since the instant-coffee that fuelled the very existence of his former-self.
‘That’s…a cool story,’ said Kara, pulling a face that she usually only used moments before pushing a panic button, to signal the help of a security guard that would descend on the situation, rescuing her from a crazy person that had approached her at work.
‘Kara, those jets haven’t cut out at this time of day for the past three restarts. But they did just now. Because I tripped the power.’
Kara stared at him, her mouth slowly dropping open. She understood now. Hal smiled as he saw the realisation dawning on her face.
‘We’ve been changing the original timeline all along through our own inaction,’ said Hal excitedly, ‘by doing nothing at all. Imagine what we can do when we actually try!’
Kara was having a hard time getting her head around Hal’s bombshell. Hal, on the other hand, was clearly in his element. Kara had so many questions, which Hal happily countered with a volley of answers.
‘But how is that possible?’ asked Kara. ‘I mean, if you were the one, in a restart, that turned off the hot tub, how was that the true timeline? That would mean that we, us, Restarter us,’ she barked snappily, irked by how hard it was to form a sentence when referencing herself whilst she was occupying two periods of time simultaneously, ‘that would mean we were already here before whatever happened sent us here?’
‘Exactly,’ said Hal, without missing a beat.
Kara scrunched her eyes closed, unsuccessfully faking the appearance of patience via the medium of a clenched jaw. ‘You can’t just say “exactly” like it explains everything!’
Hal laughed, ‘But that’s exactly it! It’s a paradox! We were already travelling through time before we arrived here for the first time. And by me not tripping the hot tub, we’ve been changing the true course of events purely by accident. Me tripping it just now has put things back on the course they should have been since the beginning.’
Kara surrendered to his relentless certainty that there was logic hidden within his words, rubbing her temple as a preventative measure for the headache she was surely about to get.
‘Okay,’ said Kara, ‘so, our actions here can directly affect our…original timeline. Before the restarts kicked in…’
‘That’s right!’ said Hal.
Kara knew Hal well enough to be able to tell that he was gearing up for a mic-drop moment.
Hal finally took a breath, then said ‘and if our inaction can change the past, it stands to reason that our actions here can undoubtedly affect the future!’ he mimed the action of dropping a microphone, precisely as Kara had predicted.
‘Okay, settle down Obama,’ she retorted. ‘So, assuming we can change something larger than the destiny of a trip-switch, how the hell are we going to manipulate–’ she paused, running the numbers in her head, and continuing once she’d cracked it, ‘–all twelve of our friends? Fourteen if you include us. That’s a lot of meddling.’
‘You’re thinking too big Kar’, all we need to manipulate is this guy,’ he said, pointing at his chest with his thumbs, ‘and that girl,’ he added, gesturing towards her by shooting imaginary bullets of knowledge from his fingers.
‘Uh-huh,’ she said, with a smile. ‘Okay cowboy, so what’s the plan?’
Hal shook his hands, then holstered his imaginary six-shooters.
‘It’s simple. We just need to find a way to stop ourselves from leaving the lodge tomorrow evening.’
And with that, they began to sift through their combined memories to find their window of opportunity, trying to pinpoint the exact sequence of events they could set in motion that would change their past, in the hope that they could somehow save their future.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The St Nick of Time
9th Restart – Friday Afternoon, 5:32pm
Throughout the anthology of restarts that followed, the glamour of being elite time-travellers with the power to alter the course of reality itself had worn thin pretty quickly for them both. In fact, it mostly amounted to Hal tripping the hot tub whenever his past-self was in close-enough proximity to the sauna room, which housed the breaker switches. Whilst it initially seemed like these acts of time-manipulation would send the course of their self-contained history spiralling into chaos, it seemed that time itself was not having any of their shit, deploying counter-measures to ensure their antics equated to little more than the equivalent of turning your watch back by an hour in accordance with daylight savings time, in that whilst you were technically travelling backwards and forwards in time by an hour, it made little difference to anyone but the wearer of the watch.
Events generally unfolded in the following way; Hal would trip the switch, some of their friends would exit the tub, engaging in conversations that were either identical to what they would speak about later in the day, or completely tangential. These erratic, spin-off discussions tended to end quickly, and ultimately led their friends back onto the predetermined course they were destined to follow for the day. Though their experiments seemed frustratingly fruitless in the grander scheme of things, they did discover one indisputable truth to their newly-found capabilities.
Hal approached Will’s car, casually stepping onto the rim of the protruding number plate, onto the bonnet, and fell with a noiseless thud onto the roof of the car. He grabbed his second cigarette of the day, lighting it as Kara clamb
ered up onto Jasmine’s car.
‘Right,’ said Hal, ‘it seems altering the course of history sends everyone off on different tangents, but it only lasts a little while before they steer themselves back on track.’
His fellow time-traveller had experienced the same, irritating phenomenon.
‘Same as upstairs,’ said Kara, recounting how she had knocked over some glasses, delaying Rachel and Fearne for a little while whilst they cleared it up, eventually resulting with them both ending up where they would have been anyway.
They thought on that for a little while, until Kara interrupted their contemplative silence with another of her many observations.
‘You know, our rooms are basically at either end of the pool table? Whilst our past-selves are sleeping, that whole area is wide-open to manipulation. We’d be close enough to them over a prolonged amount of time. Maybe we could…I don’t know…use that time to move things above them, around them.
‘Holy crap, that’s genius!’ said Hal. ‘I think that’s the problem though isn’t it,’ he mused. ‘For this to work, we need to change the natural order of things just before we leave Saturday night. Anything we do before that will just get smoothed over by time.’
They were in agreement. Nothing they did seemed to matter. All that mattered was what they did just before their past-selves were due to leave. Changing the events that led to that moment was the only sure-fire way of freeing themselves from an eternity of restarts.
*
Having resisted the temptation to mess with their past too much throughout the next few hours, they spent most of their tenth Saturday waiting impatiently for the evening to arrive, and observing the natural order of things as they attempted to isolate what they could exploit and manipulate to achieve the desired result.
