The Dark Restarter

by Sean McMahon

  He noticed the rat-catcher and orange secretary immediately, laughing and joking at opposite ends of the large expanse of grass. Suddenly, Malcolm was able to make sense of their attire; it was a party, and the outfits were costumes.

  Over the past decade he hadn’t had much time for either television or movies on account of his art, but he wasn’t so out of touch that he couldn’t place a few; Marilyn Monroe, Santa Clause, and now that he could see the rat-catcher in his full costume in the ultra-bright harsh light of day, he realised he was dressed as a Ghostbuster.

  He had watched that particular film with her once. A long time ago. In another life. A life before she was taken–

  His musings were halted, as he was brought crashing down back into the present, and he watched with malice as the insolent partygoers paraded around like idiotic children, fussing over the creature whom he immediately recognised, and would later learn was called Jerry. But that wasn’t what pulled him back from his ruminations. It was the arrival of Kevin that saw to that.

  A man in a black and blue plaid shirt, whom he of course knew by name before the introductions were even made.

  For a moment, Malcolm wondered how Kevin had escaped from the confines of the room in the basement beneath his own lodge, and a wave of panic swept over him as he feared the man would tell these strangers all about how he had captured him.

  Shaking away the ridiculous notion, the killer reminded himself that those events had not yet happened. At least from the perspective of all those in front of him, who were operating on a very different clock than him.

  Malcolm smiled darkly over the fact that the man in the plaid shirt had yet to make his acquaintance, then made his way past the hot tub, striding through someone dressed in 70’s disco attire.

  Jasmine shuddered, as Malcolm’s out-of-phase molecules effortlessly passed through her, and he positioned himself to the right-hand side of the building next to a moderately sized terracotta plant pot.

  Despite his high intelligence, Malcolm was struggling to readjust his mind into thinking fourth-dimensionally. The concept wasn’t complicated, but his mind was battling him constantly, refusing to grant him permission to accept the new status quo. The hairs on his neck once again reverberated, and he experienced another faint sensation of static shock.

  The dog inhaled a piece of sausage and looked up at him from across the garden, cocked his head as if he could see him, and ran towards him.

  Malcolm took several steps back, as Jerry sauntered towards him then stared oddly at the side of the lodge.

  Malcolm followed Jerry’s gaze, resting on the wooden structure, then back at the animal, before gingerly reaching out into the space between the creature and the lodge. He could almost see a ripple in the air, and as his fingers connected with it, he saw a brief spark of blue energy, which curled violently and surged into his hand like an electrified eel, causing him to pull his hand back as quickly as his reflexes allowed.

  Jerry eventually lost interest, turned on the spot, and gave Malcolm a wide berth, shooting the murderer a barely perceivable sniff of indifference. Malcolm watched as the dog sped off towards the edge of the property, before stopping to sniff into empty space once again.

  Jerry rolled onto his back, kicking his legs into the air, and Malcolm stared as the same ripple in reality presented itself a second time.

  As the quantumly-displaced killer strode towards the animal to get a closer look, the dog jumped up onto its feet and departed, leaving even more questions for Malcolm in his wake.

  An idea was forming in Malcolm’s mind, but it lacked substance. He was too analytical to make half-baked assumptions, and instead turned back to the party taking place behind him, eager to learn more. The key to his escape resided somewhere amongst these idiots, he was certain of it.

  The answers were merely dormant somewhere within Fir Lodge. It was just a matter of time before he turned over the right stone to find them.

  He could feel it.

  *

  Malcolm followed the participants of the past like a disembodied shadow lurking in the corners of their history. A poisonous serpent intent on unravelling everything that made them who they were, with the sole purpose of discarding them to the ravenous rapids of time as soon as the opportunity presented itself, so that he could find his way back to the present and continue his quest for artistic perfection.

  Events took an unexpected turn when Malcolm, purely by luck, had followed the golfer named Peter into a side room.

  Sensing what was slowly becoming a regular occurrence, a strange resonance of displaced energy brushed against his hand. Malcolm flexed his fingers, staring at them with interest, then continued onwards into the bedroom.

  What happened next changed everything.

  In an instant, the golfer was seemingly pushed against the rear wall of the room. Malcolm watched, as a faint blue sizzle of luminescence began to radiate throughout the golfer’s eye sockets, before increasing in intensity to such an extent that Peter’s black cheeks looked almost pale amidst the anomaly.

  Malcolm moved closer, eager to see the energy up close, having only previously witnessed it fleetingly, but was forced into diverting his attention for a nanosecond, as he heard the door close gently behind him, seemingly of its own volition.

  ‘Fascinating,’ said Malcolm, drinking in the spectacle before him, eager to learn the secrets the past had to offer.

  Something was clearly holding the young man in place, preventing him from moving, and that something appeared to be connected to a mysterious blue energy that seemed to flow throughout this nefarious netherworld in which Malcolm had been imprisoned within.

  For reasons he couldn’t explain, he wanted to reach out and touch the ethereal power of the electricity that was twisting and turning before him. With fingertips mere millimetres away from Peter’s face, he could feel the power, as it thrummed wildly. The answer to everything. The key to the doors of time could be his, if he could just grab hold of–

  ‘Still…s-sorry,’ said Peter, causing Malcolm to recoil.

  He wasn’t expecting the young man to be conscious, let alone lucid, and felt unexpectedly exposed. Before he could regain the courage to try again, the energy dissipated, Peter’s eyelids fluttering eerily, until eventually his eyes rolled back into a healthier and altogether less erratic state.

  Malcolm cursed at the missed opportunity, as Peter walked straight through him, shuddering slightly as he left Malcolm behind in the room.

  *

  There was little time to mull over his findings, as he noticed that the Ghostbuster he now knew to be called Hal (which he reasoned was short for Harold) and the orange secretary named Kara had set off to where Malcolm’s past-iteration was currently residing.

  Whilst he knew how this part played out, he rushed ahead of them and back to Kevin’s lodge. The front door was ajar, but not enough for him to pass through it, and Malcolm found himself both relieved and elated as the door moved under his touch and creaked inwards to allow him passage over and across the Welcome mat. A loophole which he would later discover was due to his proximity to his considerably more alive past-self occupying the basement below him.

  He stepped across the threshold, surveying the area around him.

  Everything looked ordinary. Identical to how he remembered it.

  The time traveller moved out of the way as a past incarnation of himself ascended the stairs from the basement and into the living room. He watched as his duplicate navigated the room, his mannerisms and deliberate movements solidifying the notion that this was indeed a perfect recreation of himself.

  Malcolm’s equilibrium underwent an unexpected nosedive, as if he was being pulled by an unseen force in three directions; in the past, during his present, and from his now unwritten future.

  As he attempted to dismiss the feeling, a plate resting on a worktop behind him fell to the floor of its own accord, delaying his past-self from returning to the basement as planned.

 
; And then it dawned on him.

  ‘Oh…’ he said to himself, the truth finally revealing itself to him. ‘Ohhhh! Of course,’ he added, his thoughts finally taking shape and forming less a theory, and more a form of understanding that more than echoed a full-blown revelation. ‘I’m not the only one here, am I?’ he said, challenging the universe. Daring it to offer a counter-argument.

  The realisation that he wasn’t the only out-of-phase entity occupying the current timeline was about to change everything. There were clearly others in this place, plucking at invisible strings and operating in accordance with their own agenda, as evidenced by the intermittent sensation of static charges he had felt during many of his previous Cerebral Reversions.

  The ripples in the surrounding environment.

  Not to mention his past-self held in place by the same form of blue energy that had attacked the golfer at Fir Lodge…

  Someone had changed his past. Of this he was certain. There was no other way of explaining how his plans with the man in the storage room below had come so unstuck.

  But who?

  Allowing the remainder of his last moments on earth to play out, a psychotic grin appeared on his face, his shark-like teeth piercing through the surrounding gloom, as two familiar faces ushered Jerry into the lodge.

  He knew what he needed to do now.

  It would take time to figure out precisely how he would accomplish his new mission. But luckily, that was one commodity that was not only at his disposal, it was something he had an infinite supply of.

  Through all the commotion, and a multitude of moving pieces, he quickly honed in on the one constant. The one reoccurring factor that was too obvious to ignore.

  Or rather, the two reoccurring factors;

  Harold, and Kara.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Doorway to the Grave

  1,060th Cerebral Reversion – Saturday, August 25th, 8:31pm

  It had taken him longer than he ever expected, but after hundreds of Cerebral Reversions, Malcolm was not just getting through to his past-self, he was entirely and without exception fully in control.

  What started off as whispers on the wind had eventually solidified into his words granting him far more power than he ever could have hoped for.

  It started small, with Malcolm’s past-self mumbling the words his duplicated counterpart was muttering in frustration.

  Eventually, however, Malcolm had become an insidious conduit, channelling all of his ideas and plans into the mind of his past-self until, on one beautiful morning, he had managed to manipulate himself into killing Kevin outright, rather than simply storing him in the basement for later. It was a huge win, and one that had ultimately led him to what he was certain would be the crown jewel in an already impressive catalogue of achievements whilst he had been alive.

  But today, Malcolm was playing a much more intricate, and dare he say it, reserved game. Waiting until nightfall, he skulked along the outskirts of Fir Lodge, before whispering his final instruction of the evening to his flesh-and-blood self, whose mind was so addled by his time-travelling counterpart he could barely form his own thoughts at all anymore.

  ‘Now, remember,’ said the time-traveller, once again whispering into his own ear. ‘Once in position, you must stay there until I instruct you otherwise. Understood?’

  Malcolm’s past-self mumbled unintelligibly, and he glared disapprovingly. A party was in full swing, and he could sense the reluctance brewing in the posture of his chronologically cloned brother. ‘Say it,’ he hissed.

  ‘Understood.’

  ‘Good. Now off you go,’ he said, placing his hand on his own back, causing his alive-self to shiver. It seemed to have the desired effect, as the puppet shook off the self-doubt and made his way closer to the lodge.

  As per his own instruction, Malcolm watched as his double stepped quietly onto the gravel driveway of Fir Lodge, hoisted himself onto the balcony, then finally onto the roof, where he laid himself down flat in a prone position on the slates above where the dining room was situated. His positioning was crucial; his physical self would be mere meters away, albeit vertically, from Robert’s room.

  The restarting version of Malcolm glided happily towards the building, and slipped in through the side entrance.

  Having spent the lion’s share of the past thirty-two hours, seventeen minutes and thirty seconds maintaining constant contact with his past-self, he knew the power contained within his hollow body would be enough for what came next. He could feel the energy coursing through his quantumly-disentangled veins. Malcolm also knew that they were here. Harold and Kara. Of this he was certain.

  He couldn’t see them, nor could they see him. But it mattered little. He was about to pull the rug out from underneath them all the same.

  It had taken Malcolm a long time to deduce that he wasn’t just reliving his last hours on this earth, but that he was actually reliving the hours leading up to his murderer’s end game; that he was trapped within the culmination of what was possibly hundreds of their own self-contained Cerebral Reversions. Reversions in time that had led, ultimately, to them freeing themselves. And they had achieved this, rather impressively, by altering the surrounding environment in incredibly subtle ways.

  Any doubts he had of this hypothesis were immediately eliminated during the early hours of one Saturday morning in particular…

  It had been a defining moment for him, and the final part of the puzzle for formulating his plan. His thoughts drifted backwards in time, as he replayed the events over in his mind…he recalled having all but given up, during a particularly intense brooding session where he had taken to staring at the moon through the kitchen window on the upper level of Fir Lodge, when two glasses on the kitchen counter moved of their own accord, gliding across the table top. The sound of glass against wood was barely audible, like gas moving through a distant pipe.

  That in itself would have been enough to confirm his suspicions. But the real moment that changed everything, when he truly began to realise he was on to something, came when the bottle of tequila rose up impossibly into the air, fifty or so centimetres above the counter, the contents pouring into the glasses.

  The shot-glasses themselves then began to levitate smoothly, the liquid within them falling out of the glass onto the floor, followed by the bottle of tequila moving slowly back into the corner of the worktop.

  As the two shot-glasses lowered themselves and collided with the worktop in tandem with a revelatory clack, he realised both Harold and Kara were still, technically speaking, here with him. Carrying out their own operation to change their destiny and free themselves from the same prison he was trapped in.

  He reasoned that they were echoes of a changed past. More specifically, his changed past. And were reliving their final moments over and over. But what did that mean for him? He couldn’t see them. Merely their actions in the physical world.

  But that had been their mistake. And now every single Cerebral Reversion he experienced was, in actuality, him reliving the last thirty-three hours they spent here. To beat them, he would need to foil the changes they had made. And to do that, he would need something they could never have predicted he would have access to…

  “Help,” he had thought. He was going to need help…

  Malcolm was pulled back to what constituted the present, the arrival of a familiar face causing him to retreat from the balcony of Fir Lodge on which he was standing and return to ground level in order to greet him.

  Kevin stepped onto the gravel driveway and once again found himself struggling to wrap his head around the lack of crunch the action generated.

  His eyes skimmed the top of Fir Lodge, then down to the balcony, just in time to see the back of Malcolm, who he realised must have seen him arrive and would surely be making his way down to meet with him.

  Kevin looked down at his own plaid shirt, and turned his back on the lodge to face his best friend, who sat there panting enthusiastically.

  ‘What would
you do?’ said Kevin, addressing Jerry directly.

  Jerry looked up at him, hearing his words despite being alive and entirely out of phase with his dad, before sniffing the space where his boots would have been were he alive.

  He heard his name being called out behind him, and Kevin grimaced at having incorrectly assumed how much time he had left to be alone with his thoughts. Hearing Malcom’s voice always made him feel like he was going to vomit, yet he somehow always managed to keep it down. Something about this place had that affect.

  ‘Kevin!’

  ‘Malcolm,’ he said, the word dripping with disdain.

  ‘Wonderful. I see you’ve reconsidered my offer?’

  ‘Not much of an offer. Kill some kids or spend a lifetime with you.’

  ‘And yet, here you are.’

  Malcolm had him there. The truth was, Malcolm always had him over a barrel.

  After sixty-eight time loops of the same thirty-three hours, forty of which Kevin and Malcolm had spent together, Kevin had tried desperately to make sense of it all. But despite finally wrapping his head around the fact he was some kind of ghostly echo reliving the past, the truth was he had no way to interact with history like Malcolm could.

  He was powerless.

  Though he had seen how Malcolm controlled the past version of himself, the one who existed in the physical realm, Kevin just couldn’t seem to connect with himself in that way.

  Sure, there had been glimmers that he was getting through to himself, but with Malcolm instructing his own respective alive-self to kill Kevin every morning it quickly became pointless. According to Malcolm, forming a bond between the past and present version of one’s self required a rather inconvenient base level requirement of said self being alive.

  Malcolm knew that of course.

  And every time Kevin got close to reaching his alive-self after begging him to leave the Pentney Lakes, Malcolm would issue the kill order on Kevin, or just tie him up to keep him out of the way.