“Huh,” the man at the one end of the table said. A member of the family. “I’d hoped she would slip in her old age. A shame, she made other arrangements.”
The blonde woman opposite him folded her hands in front of her. “That was… noteworthy in scale. Kind of her to point the way, but she was never crude. We’ll need to know what she did before we move on.”
“Agreed,” the man said. He opened a pocketwatch, glancing inside. “For now, let it be. There is enough at stake here that someone is bound to make a play.”
The blonde woman nodded. She turned her attention to the pair on either side of her, a blonde girl and a dark haired boy. reaching out for their hands. “I believe we were talk about wedding plans?”
I realized I’d been holding my breath, trying not to be heard. When I did breathe, it was a small gasp, not enough to bring air into my lungs.
I closed my eyes, trying to shut it out. When I opened them, I saw a room, everything turned to a right angle. A house, messy, with pizza boxes and garbage here and there. Two twenty-something individuals, a boy and a girl, approached, getting so close their faces filled the field of vision.
A lurch, and the view was righted.
“The metronome?”
“Something big just happened,” the girl said. “Told you. Just now, I told you.”
“You’ve been ‘telling’ me for a while now. This doesn’t mean we should do anything.”
“You’ve got no balls, no balls. We should investigate, and, just to be safe, we should investigate with weapons in hand.”
“I don’t- no, Eva. This is dangerous, and-”
“And what? We should ignore it all?”
“It’s dangerous.”
“So are we, little brother. So are we,” she said. She opened the ledge beneath the living room window, hefting a crossbow. She threw it at him.
“Fuck!” he shouted. “Eva!”
“It’s not loaded, dink,” she said. She picked up a revolver, then spun the chamber. “What should we bring? Silver bullets, inscribed bullets, incendiary bullets…”
“Cold-forged iron,” he responded, a little sullen. “Bone. Paper. Every other follows different rule. What looks like a goblin could be a demon, or a wraith, or a glamour. I mean, you remember those ‘vampires’ from out west.”
“The faerie? Sure.”
“You’re not getting what I’m saying. If they can fool themselves into thinking they’re vampires, and believe it to the point it becomes sort of true, sparkly skin aside, then they can fool us. This is what bothers me about all this. You can’t make any guarantees, you can’t slap on convenient labels. It’s why we call them others. You can’t plot-”
“We can try. And if we can murder self-deluding faerie, we can murder whatever this is.”
“Even if it’s human?”
“You’re supposed to be the smart one in this partnership. Anything that can knock the metronome over isn’t human anymore, or it won’t be for long. Let’s assume I’m going out anyways, what do I need?”
He sat down, leaning back, and sighed heavily. “Bring everything? Might as well bring me.”
“Now we’re talking,” Eva said, smiling.
I turned my head, and gripped the mattress. Like someone trying to come up for air, I pushed myself to an upright position. Still, I couldn’t see. When my vision started to clarify, it was a third location, outdoors this time.
“What the drat was that?” A girl asked. She stood in the snowy field, her checkered scarf frozen hard where the moisture of her breath had crusted it and solidified. “It felt like something moved.”
“Someone moved,” a young man responded. “Come on, now. You know better. Everything has a price when you’re dealing with this world, Maggie. Even answers to stupid questions.”
“Right. Thanks,” she said. “I’ll figure it out myself, Padraic. I hope it’s a noob. Be nice to not be the rookie on the block.”
“Funny thing, Maggie,” Padraic said, and when he smiled, the expression extended further than it should have. The smile too wide, the eyes too long and narrow. “When something momentous occurs, it can be the equivalent of lighting up the night sky, scattering fog and clouds to the horizons. You can see more clearly… but when you look, they can look back, too.”
Maggie went stiff. “They’re watching. And listening. Darn it. Now I’m going to have to do something.”
“I’ll give you that one for free. It was worth it, to see that expression on your face.”
He reached out, to touch her face, and she slapped his hand aside, hard. The small impact banished the scene.
There was no relief before I saw a fourth picture.
A girl or a woman, swaddled in winter clothes. Shouting, pointing.
The individual on the receiving end was a rabbit, sitting on a snow-covered rock.
The rabbit turned, and the girl turned to look in the same direction.
Bending down, she reached through the snow until she found a stone. She threw it right for the center of the ‘image’, breaking the ‘picture’.
Another, quickly after the last. They were starting easier and finishing easier.
A weathered aboriginal woman, brushing a young girl’s hair with a broad-toothed comb. It might have been an ordinary scene, except it was the dead of night.
She picked up a chain, then shackled the girl at the wrist. She noted the observer, then scattered the image with a wave of one hand.
And now a man, sitting on a throne, a tall, long-nosed, long-haired dog at his side. The room at the top of the tower was subject to strong winds, and his long hair blew as the dog’s did.
A still scene, quiet, the visions slowly stopping.
Below him, the small village sprawled. Jacob’s Bell. Except things were different. A twisted reflection of the buildings, with embellishments and decorations. Arches, steepled roofs, pointed roofs that curled and bent in zig-zags. All lit up in crimson sunset.
The other scenes had been at night.
The dog looked up. It spoke, “Johannes.”
“Mm,” the man in the throne said. “‘Lo, stranger. Listen, I don’t think you should believe what any of them say about me. If you need help, I can offer it.”
“For a price,” the dog added.
“For a price. Resist the urge to dismiss what you just saw, you’re in a bad enough situation as it stands. Now do yourself a favor and wake up.”
I did. I was sitting on the edge of my bed now, panting, gasping.
That feeling Molly had described, four months ago? Being surrounded? I could feel it. It was as bad as the strangeness of the visions. Or whatever those things were. Had I been drugged? Poisoned? Was I ill?
My hands were shaking. If they’d belonged to someone else, I would have thought they were acting, it looked so exaggerated. Impulsively, I looked over my shoulder. Nobody and nothing in my studio apartment. No hallucinations, no strangers, nothing to explain.
I felt like I had when I had been homeless, sleeping under the bridge, where there weren’t any lights to break up the oppressive darkness.