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Over the coming weeks, John performed several checks to make sure the Handsome Man had left town. We found a few discarded masks, and we didn’t see any people sneaking into the school after-hours. That was all John needed to put the whole thing to rest, but it was clear that it put him on edge. He wasn’t a frontline kind of guy.
I got the sense that something was worrying him. He got more obsessed with keeping time, putting up a clock in every room and having me always wear a digital watch.
“If something, anything, feels out of place – check the time,” he told me. “If time stands still, you need to do the same.”
Trying to get anything out of John was like pulling teeth; he was especially reluctant to talk about the clocks. He kept repeating that the less I knew, the better, and that it might save my life to stay ignorant. That didn’t help though. If anything, it just made it all the more intriguing.
I got to spend more time with John, learning more about him and his daily routine. I learned that he only slept three hours every night between 2 and 5 am. He only ate a single meal; a prepared black pudding that he microwaved in the morning. He also drank a lot of water. Like, a lot of water.
He checked my blood regularly, and I was put through a cleansing routine every two weeks. Every time, a thick black goo was separated from my blood cells. He saved it in a small test tube, dated it, and put it in a freezer.
“Just in case,” he explained. “I have to make sure it doesn’t get worse.”
As February turned to March, things were going pretty well. John started to forget about obsessively checking the time. I was feeling better, and I only had to go through the cleaning routine every three weeks instead of every two weeks. I had moved on from testing cable compositions to working with a machine learning algorithm. Simple stuff, like explaining if there are any dogs in a picture. Some of the prompts were a bit strange though. “Can you recognize any items from your childhood” was one of the strangest, but John insisted that it was just a hiccup.
One night, I couldn’t sleep. I decided to tire myself out in the workshop and get a head start on next day’s work. Maybe I could sleep in if I did. John usually got so anxious about me sleeping more than 6 hours. For someone who never slept more than 3, anything past that must seem like a waste.
I put my feet up and leaned back in an old office chair. A cheap plastic one, something out of a public school. Prompt after prompt popped up, hypnotically showing images in a 3 by 3 grid. Basic stuff like dogs, cars, kids. Every now and then something tricky, like the concept of an aunt, or an emotion.
Then, the clicks stopped working. I tried to click on the image of an owl, but nothing happened.
Strange.
Something cold crept up my back as I checked my watch. The seconds were stuck.
Shit.
Shitshitshit!
I tried to remember what John had said. If time stood still, I needed to do the same. I took a deep breath and held it, listening for movement.
Footsteps.
I closed my eyes, holding on for as long as I could. Stumbling feet, someone dragging themselves forward. Flailing arms, knocking over an IV stand and a box of CDs. Stale limbs crackling from years of inactivity. Dry skin slapping against concrete floor.
I could feel myself grow lightheaded. I couldn’t hold my breath that long. I imagined seeing the snake monster, the goo-man, or the white mask. Anything could’ve walked into this room, ready to tear me apart.
And yet, nothing happened. The moment I stopped hearing movement I had to gasp for air.
I was alone, and time was passing as normal. But something had moved around in the workshop, knocking things over. Something had moved around, blindly, without a word.
I brought this up to John at his pudding breakfast. He sighed, waited for his pudding to heat up, and sat me down by the breakfast table. He horked the whole thing down in a matter of seconds.
“Alright,” sighed John. “So you’re aware of it. That’s bad.”
“What is it?”
“Did it talk?” he interrupted. “Did you hear it say anything?”
“No, nothing. It just sort of stumbled around.”
“Wait… are you sure?”
I nodded as John leaned back in his chair. I could see something moving beneath his hair. Five in the morning and he was already wearing sunglasses.
“That doesn’t make sense,” he said. “It talks. And it isn’t the kind of thing to fumble.”
“So what are we dealing with then?”
John fetched a coaster with a little picture of a sunflower, the color of which had faded years ago.
“Imagine this is us, here,” he said pointing to the flower. “This is our world.”
He then flipped the coaster, pointing to the bottom side.
“But this is also something. The space is equally big, but the two sides never meet.”
“Unless you punch a hole through it, I guess.”
“Sort of. It is not a physical place. It is our world, right here, but different.”
“I’m not following.”
He held up the coaster.
“There is only one coaster,” he said. “But there are two sides. Both exist at the same time, in the same space, but they are vastly different.”
One side with a picture of a sunflower. One side with nothing but cork and crumbs.
“So what are we dealing with?” I repeated.
“Something from the other side of the coaster,” said John. “And it doesn’t like to be seen.”
John had started working on all kinds of countermeasures. Conventional weapons wouldn’t do anything, but John had access to all kinds of strange machines. Detectors who seemed to adapt to perceived rather than objective time, for example. I was given a sort of black hood that I could pull over my head. He argued that if the thing couldn’t see whether I knew it was there or not, it might hesitate to attack. He needed confirmation that we were dealing with whatever he had in mind.
Then there was… some guy.
I try to give accurate accounts of my time in Tomskog, but this guy… I don’t have a clear memory of him. It was someone that John asked to come over to help in the workshop for a few days. I can’t remember his face, his voice, his mannerisms… it’s just a void. I don’t even remember if it was a guy, might have been an old woman for all I know. I just remember someone being there.
We started spending more time in the workshop. Day in and day out we worked on the various gadgets. Menial labor, seemingly just to keep us busy. Checking cables, running diagnostics, salvaging old circuit boards. For three whole days, all we did was work, eat takeout, and check the time. Every hour, John tested the alarms. A piercing red light came on whenever a watch detected interference. It was so strong that it burned my eyes.
By the third day, we were all a bit out of it. Not John though, he seemed to operate fine without sleep. All he needed was his microwaved pudding and buckets of water. He’d sit there for hours, reading code that was seemingly written in another language. It was strange; the text went from left to right, then sometimes right to left (being written on top of existing code). Sometimes, the code was written vertically, cutting off horizontal lines. I’d never seen anything like it and couldn’t even begin to imagine learning it.
Then, out of nowhere, the red light came on.
We had practiced this. We put on our black hoods, we took shallow breaths, and waited. John had made a sort of camera; automatically taking pictures about once every relative two seconds. It was way for us to hear that the danger had passed, and get confirmation about the assailant. The camera was reverse-rigged to only work when there was a disturbance, so when it stopped clicking we were out of danger.
The camera clicked, and I heard that shuffling noise again. Footsteps. More than one this time, at least half a dozen. I tried to keep still, but I was close to flinching when something brushed against my shoulder. I wanted to scream so bad that my lungs hurt.
It was something cold.
The guy was sitting across from me, and he audibly gasped. Suddenly every bit of movement in the room focused in on him.
He panicked.
There was a burst of movement, knocking both me and various equipment over. I just curled into a ball and tried to keep still. I felt feet bumping into me as a small crowd hurried past me.
I remember him screaming something. Screaming at me to do something, but I can’t remember what. His screams grew lighter and lighter, until finally they stopped altogether. There was an awful fleshy sound, like skin being torn apart. Bones breaking. Sinew snapping like tense rubber bands. Something warm was spreading across the floor, and the guy had gone completely silent.
I expected a click from the camera, but nothing came. I couldn’t feel the warm glow of the red light anymore.
“I-I… I don’t…”
John, at the other side of the room, was at a loss for words.
“What the fuck was that?!”
The workshop was fine overall. A few boxes knocked over, but nothing on the floor. The guy was gone. I remember feeling strange, like I was confused about not remembering him. I remembered so little that I wasn’t even bothered about him being gone.
John, on the other hand, was panicking.
“That wasn’t it!” he screamed, checking his cameras. “That was… was… what the fuck?!”
He slapped a box of cables, sending it sprawling across the floor, as he dug his fingers into his scalp.
“It’s supposed to be one! Just one, and it… it doesn’t stalk you! It doesn’t come back!”
“That was way more than one,” I added. “I don’t know what-“
“Look, I’ve seen a lot of things,” John said, grabbing my shoulders. “But this? Whatever the fuck that was? I don’t know!”
John got nothing on the cameras. He poured over them all through the night, forgetting to heat his pudding in the morning. I just sat beside him, quietly, waiting for the adrenaline to pass through my system. Sometime in the early morning, I must’ve passed out in my chair.
It was almost lunchtime when I woke up.
“They’re not attuned,” he said. “They’re not part of the other side.”
“Huh?”
“The coaster!” he said, tapping his temple. “Remember? The other side! They’re not part of it, that’s why the cameras didn’t get anything!”
“Wait, so… what-“
“They’re from here,” John said. “Somehow, they’re from our side. I don’t… I don’t know.”
“So what do we do?” I asked. “What’s our move?”
John leaned back in his chair and took off his sunglasses. He buried his face in his hands.
“I don’t know!” he sighed. “I don’t fucking know!”
I stayed in his workshop all day, drifting in and out of exhaustion. I had a hard time closing my eyes, imagining the light turning red. I listened so hard for the camera to start clicking that I jumped at every noise. My nerves were shot to hell, and the clatter of John’s keyboard didn’t help. Later in the afternoon, as I drifted out of a stress-induced nap, I let my mind do the talking.
“What happens to the people it catches?” I asked.
“What?”
“You said it doesn’t want to be seen. So what happens if you see it?”
“Usually, it tears your head off.”
“It what?!”
“It tears your head off,” John repeated. “And it keeps you in this sort of… quantum semi-realm. Time stands still, so you don’t really die. You just lose your head.”
“What the fuck?!”
“That’s why I didn’t want to tell you. If you know about it, you can see it, and then it kills you. But you already seem to know, so at this point it doesn’t matter.”
I took a short walk to clear my mind and get something from the kitchen. John didn’t keep much in the way of snacks, but I’d stocked up on power bars and sugar-free cola. I could get a pot of coffee brewing. I had to get something, I was running on fumes. John might not need much sleep or food, but this was one of the many ways we were different.
I collapsed at the kitchen table, chewing on a stale piece of fudge. I was tired of feeling scared. I was shivering, but it wasn’t even cold. I shook so much I bit my tongue. Frustrated, I threw the fudge across the room.
Looking out the kitchen window, I saw someone. There was a person, 20 feet from the window. A young man wearing a red summer jacket.
He didn’t have a head.
I hadn’t noticed the clocks stopping. I just froze, staring at the thing outside. A person without a head looks so weird, the silhouette just looks… off. It hit me just how alien it felt.
It didn’t see me. It couldn’t hear me.
I moved a little and saw it twitch to life. An arm shot out in my direction, and one of its’ legs moved. It had to be the vibrations. Maybe it didn’t know if I could see it, but maybe it could feel the vibration of sound and movement.
After what felt like minutes, it was gone with the blink of an eye. I hadn’t even noticed I was holding my breath. My hands were curled into claws. I ran out of the kitchen, leaving the fudge for the ants.
I hurried back into the workshop, my eyes struggling to stay focused. John looked up at me, confused.
“It’s the victims!” I said. “It’s… it’s not the thing that kills them, it’s the victims!”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “Why would they-“
He put a finger to his lips. I could see the cogs turning behind his eyes.
“Hold on.”
He brought out a notebook and a pen.
“So, here’s the thing,” he said. “You’re doing the Yearwalk. At the end of the year, you might get something similar to a wish.”
“I’m… it’s not all that clear.”
“But here’s the thing; things are crawling out of the woodwork to kill you. The thing in your bathroom, at your apartment, at the school… they all have their own agendas. But there has to be a common reason.”
“It has something to do with me.”
“The wish,” he said. “I think, if they kill you, they get your wish.”
For a solid minute, John just looked at me. I could see thoughts fluttering in his mind, like he was calculating something. His eyes kept drifting around the room, looking for something. He shook his head.
“That’s it,” he said. “That’s why they’re coming for you.”
“That’s why the victims are coming for me,” I said. “They want to wish themselves alive.”
“Or dead,” nodded John. “That has to be it. That makes sense.”
“Barely.”
John got up from his chair and fetched his car keys. I could see the excitement return to his face.
“I know what to do,” he said. “Let’s go.”
We ran outside, only stopping to open the gate and lock down the house. John started the car, and I jumped in as it rolled up next to me. I hadn’t jumped into a moving car in a few years.
“The thing that killed them,” he said. “We haven’t seen it. It isn’t there. It doesn’t follow them.”
“Well, it doesn’t need to kill them twice.”
“And they’re scared of it. They’re scared of… of the other side, right?”
“It’s a theory.”
“So we need to keep you near something that scares them. Something from the other side.”
“And I suppose you-“
We took a sharp left turn, and John threw himself on the brakes.
The entire road, full of standing, headless corpses.
I couldn’t hear the engine over my beating heart. I got hyper-aware of my hands, trying to find something to do. Something to grab, something to defend myself with. It felt like the seat belt was choking me.
John just stared, dumbfounded.
“We… we gotta-“
“Yeah, yeah, we- we, uh…”
Then they started running.
Bodies piling on top of each other. Men, women, children. Old and young. Broken bodies and discolored skin, wordlessly sprinting towards us. Crawling over one another. The entire road was covered with them, there was no way for us to get through.
John put the car in reverse, turned, and just took off. The engine struggled, and for a second, it sounded like it was about to give in.
Hands smattered against the windows. One of them tried to crawl up on the trunk.
The clock stood still.
“Come on!” John screamed as he punched the dashboard. “Come on!”
More of them grabbed on. Dead fingers curling around the edges of the bodywork, trying to hold us back.
Not a word.
The car lurched forward as the car got loose. John just screamed as we shot down the road, leaving them in the rear-view mirror. Moments later, the clock started ticking, and they were gone.
I could see John sweating. Not much, but a little. Oil-black drops falling from his brow, much like the goo he extracted out of me whenever we did the blood cleanse.
“Oh my fucking God!” he screamed. “Jesus Christ!”
I just cheered, all the tension releasing. There’d been so many of them. So, so many. But it made sense; this happened outside of linear time, and no one seemed to remember the victims. How would we notice an abnormous amount of dead if we can’t remember them?
A silence settled on us as we kept going down the road. My breathing slowed. I kept looking back at the clock, just to make sure it moved.
“Where… where are we going?” I asked.
“You’re gonna have to stay with a friend of mine for a while,” he said. “At least until they stop bothering us.”
“A friend?” I asked. “Who is it?”
“I set up the wi-fi for his mom. And a, uh, firewall,” John said. “He doesn’t get out a lot.”
“And… you think being around him might scare them off?”
“Hell, it can scare me off.”
As we got out on the highway, John relaxed. He patted me on the shoulder.
“Look, I’m not gonna sugar-coat this. This is a bit of a hail mary,” he admitted. “This guy is a bit of an odd one out.”