“Ganson was the driver, Ressler the passenger.”
Tobe nodded.
Rachel bit her lip. “So he and Ganson were known to each other. Or at least, they’d just met. Maybe Ressler was hitching a ride.”
“Ressler had a badge.”
Rachel raised her eyebrows. “He was a cop?”
“Seemingly.”
“Undercover?”
“I don’t know,” Tobe said. “Off duty, maybe. It doesn’t matter. By crossing paths with that truck, we crossed paths with Ressler, and by his reckoning, what happened in that moment—what happened on the road—was interrupted, didn’t reach its natural conclusion.”
“That makes no sense.”
“I agree, but does anything about tonight make sense? Those things at the station… the fact there’s no-one here but us…”
“We’re not home.”
“No, we’re not.”
“This is crazy.”
“I know.”
Rachel’s voice wavered. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Ressler was a stranger. He didn’t know us. What business could he have had with us?”
“I don’t think he meant it literally. Prior to crossing paths, he had no business with us—other than to have the accident.”
Rachel peered over her glasses in that schoolteacher way she was prone to do. “Have the accident?” she said. “He was deliberately trying to ram us?”
“Deliberately? Maybe, but probably not. They were swerving all over the road. Maybe he and Ganson were fighting, who knows. Our paths collided, but it should have been more than that. We were meant to crash.”
“We did crash.”
“It was a near-miss.”
“We collided.”
“It should have been fatal.”
Rachel’s eyes grew wide. She shook her head. “No, maybe Ressler thought that, but he was sick.”
“He was infected, yes.”
“And he was a liar, and more than likely, a psycho. There was something wrong with him, Tobe. I could see it from the start. The way he smiled. The way he looked at us.”
Tobe recalled Ressler’s unsettling smile, his demeanour, how he had thought Ressler had the bearing of a bully who knew you were onto him, but didn’t care. Maybe Rachel was right.
“I’m telling you,” Rachel went on, “something about him doesn’t add up. He assumed Ganson’s identity, fed us a bullshit story. We don’t know that badge was real. We don’t know if anything about him was real.”
“So maybe he was a cop, maybe he wasn’t,” Tobe conceded. “But something happened inside that truck. As I said, maybe Ressler and Ganson were arguing. Hell, maybe Ganson attacked Ressler. The truck crashed. Perhaps Ganson took off—or Ressler thought Ganson was dead, got spooked, and left him. For all we know, the gun could have been Ganson’s, and Ressler took it, went for help, panicked, and assumed Ganson’s identity because he was worried he’d be blamed for his death. He was likely concussed from the accident, not thinking straight, mentally impaired.”
“I think that’s a given,” Rachel said.
“But in any case… somehow, for some reason… it all comes back to us, and Ressler,” Tobe said. “Ressler understood that. He worked it out.”
For a long time, Rachel stared into space, deep in thought. Slowly, her expression changed, as though she was on the threshold of an idea, at the dawn of some great insight. She turned to Tobe and said, “He was on his way to do something, Tobe. Something bad.”
“Something?”
“Ressler was going somewhere, was about to commit a terrible act. He was on his way to hurt someone.” Rachel’s voice thrummed, infused with certainty. “He wasn’t meant to get it done.”
“We had a job to do, out on the road,” Tobe said.
He, too, felt certain of this, but still, he shook his head. How could they be certain? They couldn’t rationally be sure of anything tonight and yet for some reason, they were.
He wondered where this insight was coming from.
We’re waking, he thought.
He wasn’t sure what that meant, or where the concept had even come from. But like an aftertaste, the idea lingered, stayed with him.
“We had to stop Ressler from making it to wherever he was headed,” Rachel said. “So he couldn’t realise his goal.”
“We failed.”
“Did we?”
“Our business was interrupted when Scottie grabbed the wheel.”
“Scottie had nothing to do with it.”
Tobe swallowed. The weight in his gut squirmed once more. “I’m not so sure,” he said. His voice cracked. “Don’t you think all this—” he swept his arm out, indicating their surroundings— “seems vaguely familiar?”
“Familiar?”
“All night, I’ve been plagued by déjà vu. Don’t tell me it hasn’t plagued you, too.”
Rachel baulked… and averted her eyes.
“It happened to you a moment ago, didn’t it?” Tobe said. “That’s how you worked it out—how you worked out Ressler.”
“It’s a gut feeling.”
“Have you read his book?”
“Scottie’s? It’s not finished. It’s a first draft.”
“Have you read it?”
“Some of it… That sci-fi stuff is over my head.”
“It’s over mine, too. But it’s suspiciously familiar, don’t you think?” Tobe said.
“Suspiciously?”
“Coincidentally familiar?”
Rachel didn’t answer.
“As I said, somehow—call it a gut feeling, if you will—Ressler worked it out. The near miss… It changed everything. It bumped us out.”
Rachel hesitated. “Bumped us out,” she murmured. She turned the phrase like a tongue probing a cavity in a tooth.
“We were meant to cross paths, but we weren’t meant to miss. The miss bumped us off the track, off a predetermined track, bumped us out of our… place-track, you could say… and our time-track.”
“Derailed us,” Rachel said. “That’s what you mean, isn’t it?”
“The idea of that… the concept… Scottie wrote about it in his book.”
“Scottie’s book has nothing to do with us, or about what’s happening here. It doesn’t mention any of this.”
“I’m talking about the theme.”
“It’s coincidence. It has to be.”
“How can it be?”
“I can’t accept that Scottie, your best friend—my best friend—had something to do with this—”
The sound of an object hitting the window startled Tobe. He recoiled, reflexively leapt to his feet, and turned. Outside, a teeming, bioluminescent blur swarmed out of the gloom, wings beating in the rain, insectoid bodies thrumming, scores of them—the same orange-striped creatures from the service station. They thudded against the pane, caused it to shudder.
“Kill the lights!” Tobe said.
He extinguished the lamp nearest him, just as Rachel, with a swipe of her arm, knocked hers to the ground. The plug pulled from the wall and the room plunged into darkness.
Scottie’s disembodied voice floated from around the corner. “It’s no good,” he said. “They know we’re here.”
Rachel’s voice started. “Babe, where are you? I can’t see you!”
White timber shutters dressed the bay window. Tobe slammed them closed, severing the view. Outside, the bugs thudded and scratched unseen against the glass.
Tobe switched on the Maglite. Scottie stood at the living room’s entrance. “They can’t see the light through the shutters,” Tobe said. “And they can’t get in, either. We’re secure.”
Rachel ran to her boyfriend, sank into his arms. “What the hell is going on, Scottie?”
Scottie kissed her lightly on the forehead and murmured something to her that Tobe could not hear. Then, more loudly, he said, “The bugs, they’re swarming. They’re out back as well. I was coming to tell you. We’re surrounded.”
“I
don’t think they’re dangerous,” Tobe said.
“I don’t care,” Rachel said. “I don’t like the sound of them.” She eased from Scottie’s embrace, and both she and Scottie turned on their flashlights.
“Not all the windows are shuttered,” Tobe said. “Other than our flashlights, I suggest we keep the house dark.”
No-one argued.
Tobe said to Scottie, “You were gone a while.”
“I’m sorry,” Scottie said. “I was checking the house, and lost track of time—”
“Shit!” Rachel said. “Sarah…”
“I’ll go check on her,” Scottie said.
“No, I’ll go,” Rachel said. She didn’t wait for a reply and ran down the hall.
Once she’d disappeared, Scottie looked at Tobe. “I heard some of your conversation.”
“Scottie…” Tobe said.
“We need to keep this to ourselves,” Scottie said. “I don’t want to worry the girls.”
“Keep what to ourselves?”
Scottie pushed his glasses up his nose, cleared his throat. “We’re in a waiting room, Tobe,” he said.
“What?”
“Originally, I thought of it as a holding cell, which in some ways it is. But waiting room is more palatable.”
Tobe hesitated, confused. “What are you talking about? We’re waiting? Waiting for what?”
“What you said a moment ago, and what Ressler told you: To finish the business from the road.”
“Ressler’s dead. It’s over.”
“When we were bumped from our time and place—our real time and place—things kind of froze… at least, back in our real time and place. Maybe—back there—we’re stuck between seconds.”
Tobe’s thoughts seemed to hang for a moment, his brain racing to catch up. “Wait,” he said. “By seconds, you mean as in time?”
“Yeah, as in units of time—sixty seconds in a minute.”
We’re between seconds?
Tonight, had Tobe not witnessed all that he had—all the strange and unexplained phenomena—he would have dismissed the idea outright. But he had seen things, hadn’t he? And he’d arrived at his own theories, too, each of them just as incredible…
Still, Tobe realised his mouth was agape, and he closed it. He swallowed hard. “And we’re stuck, both there—at the time and the place of the accident—and here, simultaneously.”
“Frozen there—and setting things right here.”
“We can’t be in two places at once.”
“You were right before, Tobe. We were bumped here, onto another track, another place birthed in that moment, when things were disrupted. And we’re still here. It’s a copy of there, Tobe, a perfect copy.”
“Scottie…”
Scottie cleared his throat, pushed his glasses up his nose. “They talk of infinite universes… multiverses, where we might, ourselves, exist infinitely.”
“The book,” Tobe said. “I was right about it. I was right about everything, wasn’t I? Quantum physics, time travel, multiverses. I never understood any of that, not really, but you’re a good writer, Scottie, and I followed it, got the gist of it.”
As though needing a seat, Scottie eased onto the arm of the sofa. The leather squeaked. “Tobe, you remember the accident? Not tonight’s accident. I mean when I was a kid.”
“When you were hospitalised?”
Scottie nodded.
Tobe reached for the window-seat and sank into it. “The word ‘accident’ makes it sound like it was something minor,” he said. “I guess by definition it was an accident, a tragic mishap, but it wasn’t minor, it wasn’t just an accident.”
“But you remember?”
“I remember the story, but it was before I knew you. You were three years old. What I know, what I remember, is only what you’ve told me.”
“I never told you everything.”
“No?”
“I dreamed.”
“Dreamed?”
“After I was gone, after they brought me back and when I was asleep, I dreamed. I remember those dreams, so vivid and clear and colourful, so real and bright. And when I woke, I could still dream.”
“You were comatose for two weeks,” Tobe said slowly. “You dreamed in the coma, and out of it… you continued to dream?”
“Waking dreams, I guess,” Scottie said. “Not all the time, but occasionally.”
Tobe’s head swam. Suddenly, it felt as though the pieces of a puzzle with which he’d long been stupefied were now, by their own volition, spinning magically into place. “That’s what you do when you disconnect, isn’t it? You see things, hear things. You go somewhere, and dream. That’s the moment when it started—the zoning out, the disconnecting.”
Scottie sat in silence.
“When they pulled you from the neighbour’s pond,” Tobe said, “it took the paramedic eight minutes to get you breathing again. What happened during those eight minutes, Scottie? Where did you go?”
For a long time, Scottie said nothing. “I dreamed, and I came back,” he said at last. His eyes shimmered. “At least… someone came back.”
“Someone?” Tobe’s heart thudded hard in his chest. He felt short of breath.
“I guess… my essence came back,” Scottie said, and his voice cracked.
“Scottie… I don’t understand.”
“Sometimes I wonder if it was me that came back.”
Although aware his body was physically present in Teesh’s living room, Tobe felt a sudden detachment. He sensed he was in motion, moving towards some profound truth. “The main character in your book,” he stammered. “He can think himself from one universe to another…”
Again, that sense of movement, and yet slowing now, as though he was rising from a deep ocean, clawing for the surface, but decompressing as he went.
I’m waking.
“Scottie, before you reached across and grabbed the wheel, stopped the accident… you went somewhere, didn’t you?”
“I saw something…”
“You had a premonition of what was to come—”
“I grabbed the wheel…”
“And that was in itself an accident,” Tobe said. “These other multiverses, the other rooms…we were bumped into one because we made a mistake, a big, universe-fucking mistake. We should have crashed. We needed to.”
Scottie opened his mouth, but Tobe went on.
“It’s why there’s no-one else here,” Tobe said. “No service station attendant, no Teesh, no Lisa.”
“No-one outside the nine of us,” Scottie said slowly. “No-one other than those directly involved.”
Tobe looked at his best friend, and his eyes began to sting. “Are we dead, Scottie?”
Scottie returned the gaze and shook his head. “No, we’re not dead. We’re very much alive. That’s why we’re here.”
“Here… and yet also, somewhere else.” Tobe felt disoriented. His mind was in overdrive. He was on the threshold of understanding, and yet was more confused than ever. Questions mounted—dozens of questions about Scottie, and how any of this could be possible—and yet with these unknowns came answers, too, confirmation of long-held suspicions. Not that he understood the answers, either—at least not fully—but he was grasping for them, and as they spun hand in hand with the questions and together played out in his head, clouding his ability to think, he realised Scottie was speaking to him. Tobe didn’t hear him, not at first, anyway, and then Scottie spoke again and Tobe perceived two words.
“Schrödinger’s Cat.”
Tobe cleared his mind and focused. He knew the term, and searched his memory. “That’s a hypothetical experiment, right? Involving a closed box, inside of which is a cat…”
“And a container of poison. The observer outside the box doesn’t know if the poison has been released. Until the box is opened and the state is known, the cat is considered in limbo, simultaneously alive and dead.”
“We’re in a box, both alive and dead, until the outcome is o
bserved,” Tobe said. He felt numb. “Observed by whom, Scottie?”
“It’s a metaphor, Tobe.”
“Is it only a metaphor?” Tobe said. “Have you noticed the smell? This whole place smells like death, and rotting.”
Outside, above the throbbing rain, the bugs continued to swarm, beating unseen against the shuttered window.
Tobe shied from the sound, wondered what would happen if the creatures, through sheer persistence and weight of numbers, caused the glass to crack and then shatter, opening the room to the outside world. “The bugs aren’t attracted to the lights,” he said to Scottie. “They’re attracted to us. They’re carrion beetles, aren’t they? Or the equivalent, for whatever lives here.”
“This place is temporary, Tobe, and we’re nearing the end.”
Tobe thought he understood, but not fully.
“They’re here for the clean-up,” Scottie said. “Maybe everything here is designed to cleanse, to break things down like bacteria, to aid decomposition. Our real time and place, where things are stuck between seconds, can’t get moving again until we get things sorted here. And this room, this place, is breaking down. It’s decomposing.”
Tobe looked at Scottie, head spinning, trying to catch up. “How do we get out?”
Scottie said nothing, and Tobe wondered if they were meant to get out.
This is heavy shit.
For a long time, Tobe sat in silence, trying to process the implications. So much of it seemed beyond his ability to do so. His mind drifted, and went back to what Scottie had said about Schrödinger’s Cat, about being simultaneously alive and dead, and as it did, a memory surfaced, hazy at first, then clearer.
“Rosie,” he said quietly.
“Rosie?” Scottie said. “Who’s that?”
“Your neighbour’s cat, remember? From when we were kids?”
“The cat?” Scottie nodded slowly. “Sure… now that you bring her up, I remember—she was a tortoiseshell, right? A skinny little thing, but cute.”
“Do you remember that day?”
Scottie hesitated, pushed his glasses up his nose. “The day we found her—the day you found her.”
Tobe nodded. “How did I know where to find her? How did I know what bush to look under, what bush she’d dragged herself behind with her body all broken by that speeding car?”
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