by Sean McMahon
The offer genuinely seemed to strike a chord with Malcolm, as if he were legitimately weighing her attempt at haggling against his darkest, most innate desires. And for a brief second, he almost forgot why they were fighting at all. The fog did that. Even to him. But that was the problem; almost just wasn’t quite enough.
‘The rat-catcher…’ began Malcolm.
‘Off the table. Non-negotiable. The deal is me, in exchange for everyone else.’
‘Kara, what are you doing?’ said Hal, still trying to reach the blade.
‘Do we have a deal?’ she pressed, ignoring her friend entirely.
Malcolm looked up at the ceiling, his eyes darting left then right as if he were trying to locate missing tiles. He slowly weaved and bobbed on the spot, before chuckling darkly.
‘No, no, no, no, Kara, you know that won’t cut it,’ he said, remembering and retrieving his second restarted blade from under his apron. Truthfully, he had refused to resort to using it, as if doing so…as if needing it would have forced him to accept that he was indeed outmatched. He began brandishing it at her as if he were a wizard casting a spell. ‘It has, to-be, the both, of you,’ he sang rhythmically, ‘that’s the only way I can acquire true freedom from this place.’
As tantalising as the thought may have been to him, eliminating half the cause behind his temporal incarceration would simply leave him with the same problem.
It had to be the both of them.
‘Noooo deeeeal, Kara,’ he sang, his eyes indicating that so much time spent alone had clearly sent him so far past the edge of reason that the edge itself was little more than a dot on the horizon to him now. ‘I think I’ll just take all three of you and be done with it.’
‘Please don’t do this,’ Kara pleaded, her voice strong, but loaded with sincerity. ‘It’s not too late, we can work together, we can all get home.’
‘The only way I’m getting home is by ending your life Kara. And then, when I’m done, I’ll kill the rat-catcher. And then, just to remove every last feasible way in which you can meddle in my affairs, I will kill each and every one of your friends.’
‘Okay, I get it,’ she said, tears of anger forming.
‘Do you, though? Do you really “get it”? I don’t think you do,’ The Dark Restarter drawled, popping out of existence and reappearing inside the cage with Hal and Fearne.
Hal cursed, clambering into the opposite corner of the cage and trying to claw at a nearby bike pump to defend himself, which remained unmoving despite his best efforts.
Malcolm reached down and hoisted Fearne from the ground, disappearing with another pop and reappearing on the outside of the cage, holding his knife to her already severe wound.
‘You see, whilst there is even the faintest memory of you, I run the risk of repercussion. For me to be free, truly free, I must destroy even the most tenuous of connections to your existence. Your family first of course, then Harold’s. A boyfriend perhaps? We can’t have that. I will not stop, Kara. I will destroy everything you have ever loved, and not only will I take pleasure in it, I will savour it. As every last drop of blood drips into the dirt, I will devour everything you hold dear. Case in point,’ he added, plunging the blade into Fearne’s spine viciously.
Repeatedly.
‘Fearne!’ Kara screamed in horror.
As Fearne began to disintegrate, Kara’s recently restored form simmered once more with energy, crackles of blue suddenly darkening in hue…into a shade that didn’t suit her.
A shade of red.
Her light hair turning black, red electricity coursed through her veins and spewed wildly from her clenched fists.
She ran at The Dark Restarter, intent now on killing him.
There was simply no other way.
Kara had exhausted all other options.
But as she grabbed his shoulders Malcolm tried to phase away from her, using his unique ability to pull himself further along in both time and space on their current restart.
‘Let go,’ barked Malcolm, realising something was wrong, but Kara held on tight and pushed him against the wall of the basement, their combined red energy causing them both to phase, like an image glitching in and out of focus.
The air between them rippled savagely, as if desperately trying to repel them apart until, in an instant, they vanished.
Knowing the coast to be clear, Future Malcolm trotted down the stairs and inspected the wall where his past self was once standing. Placing his palm down flat upon it, his alive-self slumped to the floor, as if The Dark Restarter had been his power source.
Or, perhaps, simply with exhaustion.
‘No, no, no! Where did they go?!’ said Hal, his mind blown.
‘Remarkable,’ said Future Malcolm, still holding his palm to the wall. ‘Seeing it from this perspective. An outsider of my own past, looking in through the window of eternal–’
‘Stop monologuing! Where did they go, Malcolm?! We need to find them!’
‘Where they’re going, we simply cannot follow.’
Hal scowled, utterly done with riddles that weren’t so much riddles, as they were withheld facts.
Somehow, despite his apathy, Malcolm managed to feel the room, deciding that ending Hal’s torment would not be detrimental to the outcome. After all, what harm could Hal really do from here anyway?
‘The nexus,’ said Malcolm. ‘They are between us both, now.’
‘The White Lodge? But how? You didn’t acquire that level-up until after you pulled the plug on your life support?!’
Malcolm growled under his breath, wading deep between the rivers of faded daydreams.
‘I didn’t acquire that ability at all. It was Kara that passed it on to me. Just now, in fact. At least, that’s the only explanation I can think of that makes any sense.’
‘Whatever,’ said Hal. ‘So, we go to the Restart Point and go after her!’ he reasoned feverishly, as if it were obvious.
‘Even if I wanted to, which I do not,’ Malcolm clarified, ‘The boundary line is closed for business, remember?’
‘But with past-you gone, it might…’
‘It won’t work,’ said Malcolm, leaving Hal on the cusp of asking how he knew, before diving straight in and providing the simple explanation as to how he knew that to be true. ‘Because you and I weren’t there for what comes next.’
‘Well, you wanna at least let me out of this cage?’ said Hal, trying a different approach, unable to process “no” as an answer, but reasoning there was little he could accomplish from inside his metal prison.
‘Not really,’ said Malcolm.
‘Dick.’
*
Kara and The Dark Restarter landed hard on what looked like snow but felt a lot more like face-breaking concrete.
After an ungraceful time-traveller landing to say the least, Kara pulled herself up from the ground and realised she was on the upper level of Fir Lodge. Or rather, an intensely vibrant, almost glowing, white equivalent.
She swatted away some rogue snow-like particles, which barely had time to become displaced themselves following her arrival, but which continued to circle her with curiosity regardless.
‘Oh no,’ said Kara. ‘Not good. Not good!’
‘What is this place,’ said Malcolm, taking a break from the fight to take in their new surroundings. ‘Where have you brought us?!’
‘I didn’t…this is…we call it The White Lodge.’
‘Imaginative,’ said Malcolm drolly, momentarily dazed as he tried to swat away what appeared to be flakes of perpetually dancing ash, marvelling at how they seemed determined not to settle onto either the ground or his body. Collecting his weapon from the floor he strode towards her. ‘Anyway, where were we?’
‘Malcolm, stop, you don’t understand, we can’t do this here, it’ll draw–’
But her words were cut short, literally and figuratively, as he slashed at her arm, drawing a sickly slice that she prayed was a graze, but quickly opened like a mouth, a red lacquer sm
iling back at her.
‘You are such a bastard!’ she screeched, trying to stem the flow of blood, and focusing her anger in the hope of repairing herself like she had done just moments ago down in the basement. Unfortunately, the energy refused to cooperate.
Malcolm stared blankly, then chuckled. ‘It looks like you’re running on empty,’ he said happily.
‘Dammit,’ she muttered. He was right.
Whatever it was that had brought them here had taken a tremendous amount of Restarter energy out of her, resulting in her being little more than regular old, puncturable Kara.
He came at her again with the knife, but she backed away just in time, and made her way to the communal staircase, losing her balance and hitting the wall hard at the base of the stairs.
Malcolm slowly dragged the tip of his blade against the spokes of the bannister as he followed her down, generating a scratching noise between clacks that somehow met her ears in reverse.
She froze in fear, powerless, alone, and trapped in the nexus that connected not only her multiple incarnations of existence, but all of time, knowing that it would be just a matter of the latter before the vampiric creatures that dwelled here…
“The creatures,” she thought. “It just might work.”
Pulling herself away from the wall, Kara made her way to Robert’s bedroom, opening the door as she passed it and leaving the room behind as she made it into the rear garden of Fir Lodge.
She ran across the garden, but came to an abrupt stop as an open expanse of blackness greeted her. The edge of the garden was now a cliff-face, separated from the rest of the Pentney Lakes and extending into a void of nothingness.
Kara turned her back to the edge of the universe, noticing that the entirety of Fir Lodge was surrounded by the same blackness; a white gemstone cut off from the rest of time. She watched ineffectually as Malcolm strode towards her, the killer smiling at the development in their surroundings that had left her with nowhere to go.
She thought quickly, and spoke faster.
‘If you kill me, you’ll be trapped here,’ she said trying to recount some fancy-sounding terminology to hook him in with, only then realising how easily Hal made it look.
There was definitely an art to it.
‘I’ll take my chances,’ Malcolm shouted across the garden.
‘We’re…we’re quantumly-entangled to our past-selves, if you sever yourself from the restarts you’ll be stuck here forever in…temporal purgatory.’
A valiant effort. At least she thought it was, but she needed to dig deeper. Malcolm didn’t seem to be buying what she was selling and seemed reluctant to barter with the extra time she so desperately needed.
‘There’s only one way out, and that’s with me,’ said Kara. ‘You can only absorb energy, but I can…I can create it.’
A truth contained with a presumption, but surely an appealing one.
Malcolm stopped a mere several feet in front of her.
‘Then I’ll just take what I need,’ said Malcolm, grabbing her by the wrist of her bleeding arm and siphoning off the dregs of the retained charge she held.
But it was enough. It had to be.
She knew it before she saw them. A single spark was like a drop of blood in the ocean, and the megalodons were hungry.
Always hungry.
She saw their slick oily outlines filing out from Robert’s room and blocking the hallway, quickly reasserting her gaze back to Malcolm in case he caught-on that they were about to have guests.
‘How utterly heart-breaking,’ Malcolm’s voice devoid of the compassion his words implied. ‘Such promise. When you came at me like you did, I almost experienced a hint of worry. That, perhaps, inexplicably, I had my work cut out for me.’
‘Last chance,’ said Kara. ‘Work with me, and you can still live. We can get out of here…together.’
‘How many times, Kara? You will never beat me. And I don’t need you! Look at you; a desperate mess of pathetic second chances. All that power, and this is how your story ends.’
‘That's always been your problem, Malcolm. You're always so focused on us that you never fail to miss the bigger picture.’ She smiled. ‘I'm not trying to beat you. I just needed to keep you busy long enough.’
‘Busy for what?’ he said, a raised eyebrow coexisting with a smirk brought on by the fact he had this in the bag.
‘For them to find us.’
She jutted her head towards something behind him, and for the first time in his miserable life, the Dark Restarter felt what his victims felt when they laid eyes on him.
‘All that energy you’ve been siphoning? It’s a beacon. Like moths to a flame...’ said Kara, feeling weak, but her contempt filling her cold body like a fire.
Malcolm dropped her, lashing out with his knife at the reflective, midnight-black skin of the nearest creature, slicing into its arm, causing it to shriek.
The act achieving little but sending the others into a frenzy, as more of them piled out of the trans-dimensional recreation of Fir Lodge and on top of him.
Kara could do nothing else but watch, feeling utterly drained and rolling onto her back. If this was how she was going to go, it was a good death.
Taking that bastard with her…
She smiled up at the white, featureless sky, feeling oddly at peace now that the battle was over. That she had won, in her own little way, on her own terms.
Two of the creatures appeared above her, stepping into her view and blotting out the relentlessly-white, perpetually-restarting sun, their slick skin contrasting against it and making her wonder if that was really a sun above her at all.
As their hands reached out to her, presumably to shred her flesh and bleed her dry, she drifted into unconsciousness, wondering on that for a moment.
Every time they restarted, were they creating a separate universe? Were they duplicating an entire galaxy? Or was it localised to just their little corner of time, confined to their time bubble?
The talons of the Time Vampires dug deep into her, feeding on the meagre scraps that were left, and she was relieved that the pain didn’t last long.
As the creatures of the nexus fed on her, she slipped into a peaceful, almost meditative state, swirling white fireflies dancing in the sky above her, giving her space, and reluctant to land on her cheeks, as the sounds of Malcolm’s screams took on the role of a reassuring lullaby that sent her into the oddly welcoming arms of death.
Hello?
She called out into the void, as if checking she was truly alone, her disembodied voice floating away like an autumnal leaf into the heart of oblivion.
Death was not as terrifying as she thought it would be.
An existence without pain.
Warm.
Inviting, even.
Her mind, or what was left of it, drifted listlessly, as she tried to absorb this new world, staring without emotion at a pitch-black horizon separating an ocean of oil and a sky made from a swirling black fog.
A place both devoid of light but, paradoxically, shielded from darkness also.
“Peace,” she realised. This was the truest definition of the term.
A voice reached out to her from the darkness.
“You shouldn’t be here…” each word dragging across her soul like forgotten nails along a metaphysical chalk board.
“Where am I?’ she thought, both asking herself and the disembodied voice.
She was greeted by silence, until a new presence revealed itself via the faintest whispering of a single word.
“Kara.”
A word from another time.
Its utterance filling her surroundings with a faint blue hue, as if by magic casting an outline around a previously unseen structure.
A Black Lodge?
Odd.
“Kara,” her drifting consciousness echoed back at her.
She knew that word once. As well as the owner of the voice that had used it. It belonged to someone she knew, long ago. Someone close to h
er. Someone named–
“Hal?”
She sensed a flicker of electricity.
Followed by a surge of power.
Too much power!
And there was that pain again, arriving like an unwanted sales call…
If she had eyes, they would have rolled in their sockets.
What did it want?
Surely, this was one accident nobody would be willing to insure her for…
THGIE-YTXIS RETPAHC
Stir of Echoes
R.I Timestamp Error: Recalculating…
System Error
As the claws gripped her arms, the Restarter felt a warmth flow through her body. A heat that stripped away the fog addling her mind until she regained the strength to open her eyes, only to be greeted by two very unexpected faces.
Kara gasped, her body eager to suck in some oxygen, as she was pulled from the black abyss of a partially de-molecularised mind, electricity coursing through her veins and refusing to plateau, increasing steadily as if searching for an unattainable amplitude. She gripped the wrist of her formerly damaged limb with her free hand, the gash on her arm having fully repaired itself and allowing her to flex her fingers. Kara expected her arm to burn with at least a flicker of residual pain, but all she could feel was the pulse from her wrist, which throbbed against her clenched hand as each finger waved back at her without protest.
‘araK,’ a female voice repeated kindly.
‘Rachel? How?’ she was clearly hallucinating. She looked down at her arms which were glowing blue, presumably thanks to the contact between herself and her fellow Restarter. That at least explained where the sharp jerking sensation of being electrocuted was coming from.
Hal popped into her field of view, turning the duo into a trio, and making her feel suddenly both exposed and embarrassed by the crowd.
She noted Hal’s clothes; his brown leather jacket and blue jeans throwing her sense of when and where she was off entirely.
‘How are you here?’
‘thgir wonk I!’ said Hal, rather unhelpfully.
His voice rose in pitch at the final syllable, and she suddenly realised he was talking in reverse. Or at least that’s how it seemed from her perspective.