The Time Loop

by Anita Oh

“You remember?”

  “I remember you standing by the clock with the light streaming in behind you,” he said. “The rubbish just seemed obvious.”

  We made our way carefully across the room, slow, careful steps in the patches of clear floor. We’d brought a blanket to sit on, so when we reached the sofa, I took it from the tote bag I was carrying and spread it out over the filthy cushions. The smell was just as bad as before but he didn’t mention it, so I did my best to ignore it.

  When we sat down, he took my hand again, and I didn’t object. I welcomed the comfort of it, and it didn’t mean anything. Pack members touched each other all the time. I knew Sam wouldn’t find anything weird about it. He knew I’d die before I betrayed him. If it did mean anything, all it meant was that we were comfortable with each other as pack members, whatever else Althea might think.

  We arranged our phones so that one light shone toward us, illuminating our faces, and the other faced out into the room so we could see if anything weird happened.

  “What else do you remember?” I asked him, mostly so we weren’t left alone in the darkness.

  “Hmmm,” he said, tapping one of his long fingers against the back of my hand as he thought. “I remember you in that purple dress, dancing with Sam. I remember when you lost gravity. I remember when you spoke to your father.”

  We both fell silent, thinking about what might happen – what would probably happen if we failed to get any useful information tonight.

  “There is an eerie quality to this room that may make our wait uncomfortable,” Tennyson said.

  “Don’t talk about it,” I told him, squeezing his hand tight enough to hurt. It was all too easy to imagine the ghost of Constantine Wilde appearing before us, resenting our presence in his grief. “Nope, not thinking about it.”

  Tennyson huffed something too short to be a laugh. “I told you the legend of Rosalind and Constantine, didn’t I? When we came here before.”

  “Jeepers, Tennyson. Don’t talk about it!” I lowered my voice to a whisper. “What if he can hear you?”

  I suddenly felt as if we were in the prologue of a TV show, the two dumb kids who wander into a ghost-infested tower. Our guts would splatter all over the walls, and then the opening titles would flash up. I did not want to be those dumb kids.

  “Oh, listen!” Tennyson said.

  “Stop it!” I said, and tried to pull my hand out of his.

  He gripped my hand tighter. “No, nothing like that. The dance!”

  I let myself be quiet and focused on the world outside. Then it floated in, the music from the dance. If I concentrated, I could even hear the occasional peal of laughter or excited yell, but once I’d heard it, the music didn’t stop.

  “That’s nice,” I said. It made me feel less as if we were alone.

  We sat and listened, there on that filthy sofa, hand in hand and waiting for something to end.

  I fell into a kind of lull, sinking against Tennyson’s side rather than the back of the sofa. He was warm and nice-smelling and surprisingly soft. I could just stay there in the dark with him. I was so tired. Tired of living the same day over and over. Tired of mini quiches and thoughtful gifts and forcing a smile. All I wanted was sleep.

  “Don’t fall asleep,” Tennyson said softly. “The day will reset, and we don’t have long to wait now.”

  “What time is it?” I asked. There was no way to judge in that room, where the passage of time seemed meaningless.

  “Almost time for the reset,” he said. “Maybe fifteen minutes or so.”

  I’d been out for longer than I’d thought. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m not the best company.”

  “You’re not the worst,” he said.

  The music outside had gotten louder, or maybe my thoughts were just quieter. It was a slow song, and there was something about it that made the hair on my arms prickle.

  “We could dance,” said Tennyson. “Get your limbs moving so that you wake up. If something happens, you may need to be alert.”

  His words made sense, so I agreed.

  “Fine, but if I get tetanus from being stabbed by some stoner’s empty beer bottle, I will not be happy.”

  “You’re a werewolf. You can’t get tetanus,” he said, pulling me to my feet.

  “You said werewolf!” I said, slightly breathless from how tightly he was holding me. “The term is lycanthrope.”

  I could feel every point where our bodies touched in heightened detail: the hard muscles of his forearm pressing into the small of my back, the solid bulk of his chest against mine, the way our fingers interlaced, his thumb softly stroking mine. His breath ghosted across my cheek, and I wondered at him that he could breathe at all; it seemed to me that all the air had been sucked out of the room.

  “Nikolai said there’s no tomorrow,” he said lightly as we swayed from side to side.

  “There is for me,” I said. “Always.”

  He started to say something else, but then the music stopped. We both froze in place, waiting. There was no thunder. I could hear no rain, no sound at all outside of the room.

  A blue light appeared, and Tennyson let go of me as he staggered and fell.

  “Tennyson!” I yelled, grabbing him and trying to direct him onto the sofa.

  The blue light grew brighter, and Tennyson started twitching. His eyes rolled back in his head, and the twitching became more violent until his entire body was convulsing. I stared at him helplessly. There was nothing I could do but make sure he stayed safely on the sofa and didn’t fall onto broken glass, but soon the convulsions became so strong that I could barely hold him down. The light grew brighter and brighter until it was almost blinding.

  Tennyson stopped moving, his body frozen awkwardly in place, the whites of his eyes still showing.

  “One has been taken,” he said in a voice that wasn’t his own.

  He sagged back onto the sofa, and the light grew so bright that I couldn’t see at all.

  Then I woke up, back in my bed. It was Friday morning again.

  Chapter 12

  “What do you mean, ‘one has been taken’?”

  For once. it was Tennyson asking me the questions, not Althea. The five of us were sitting around the breakfast picnic again. Cakes and mini quiches again. Recapping all the previous Fridays again.

  “You didn’t exactly go into detail as you were writhing around, foaming at the mouth.”

  “Did he actually foam at the mouth?” Nikolai asked through a mouth full of mini quiche.

  “No, but his eyes were rolled right back in his head like…” I tried to roll my eyes back so only the whites showed.

  “Ew,” said Nikolai.

  “Ew, yourself,” said Althea. “Eat with your mouth closed.”

  “I suppose he meant that someone has gone missing,” said Sam. “We need to find out who.”

  “Why?” asked Nikolai. “It’s not as if we can bring them back.”

  “I suppose if we can find out who it is, we can possibly learn some details about the spell,” said Althea, going straight into deduction mode. “For example, if someone is missing, but nobody remembers who they are but Lucy, that would mean the magic is working retroactively as well. That’s an entirely different type of magic from simple time manipulation, much more malevolent. It would mean we couldn’t trust anything we know at all.”

  “Just a moment,” said Tennyson. “Are we not going to address the fact that I somehow became a conduit for dark magic?”

  I could sense his anxiety and what was behind it.

  “It’s not your fault that someone is missing,” I said. “You didn’t cause them to be taken. You weren’t an instrument in it. You just delivered a message.”

  Althea opened her mouth to say something, and I knew she was going to argue that we couldn’t know that was true. I shook my head slightly at her so she would know not to say it. If Tennyson was, as he’d said, a conduit, then it was likely that the “energy” my father had stolen, the human life, had tra
velled through him. He was in no way to blame, but the fact remained that energy couldn’t travel without a conductor.

  “We just won’t go back to the clock tower again,” I said. “It had never happened before, and I’m sure it only did because we were at the place where the lightning struck.”

  Althea opened her mouth to speak again and then bit her lip.

  “So, for now, we should maybe research magic that uses a conduit to see if we can stop Tennyson from being used again, and find out who is missing. It’s best if you do that, Lucy. We might not know. Do you think your roommate might help you? You said she is stuck in the same way you are.”

  When I thought about it, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen Katie. She was never there when I woke up, and most of the time, I was with the Golden. She’d made it pretty clear she wanted nothing to do with me, so I hadn’t exactly been seeking her out. I’d just been assuming that she was part of my father’s plan and he’d gotten her out somehow, but if she was stuck the same as I was and not actually evil, it would be horrible for her. She didn’t have anyone else she could go to at school, not anyone who’d understand. Only me. And I totally hadn’t been there for her.

  “I’ll find her and ask,” I said.

  “I’ll help Lucy,” said Sam. “I can get all the class rolls and see who’s absent, and then Lucy can check them to see if anyone isn’t on there who should be.”

  That actually took most of the work out of it for me, and I smiled at Sam gratefully.

  Katie wasn’t in our room. She wasn’t in class. She wasn’t in the library or the forest or the lighthouse. I tried to track her by scent, but there was nothing. It was as if she hadn’t been anywhere on the island for a long time, definitely not that day.

  “So, she’s evil,” said Nikolai. He was slumped in the biggest chair in the Golden common room, his legs dangling over the arm. It was one of his “life has no meaning” days, not a “no tomorrow”. Try as I might, I couldn’t find any factors that were consistent in causing one or the other, and I’d been through all possible variables.

  “She might be the person who vanished,” I said, feeling like I needed to stand up for Katie. Nobody else there had ever liked her, and if she’d vanished, then my father hadn’t gotten her out. She’d been just as trapped as I was, and I hadn’t helped her at all.

  “Even if she is, she’s still evil,” said Nikolai. “And if someone has to vanish, it’s better that it’s an evil someone.”

  “It’s not better,” said Althea. “When something is that awful, there’s no better.”

  Tennyson was barely speaking. He looked pale and preoccupied. I wished I could sit beside him, hold his hand and comfort him, but the closeness of the night before was gone. It had never happened. I couldn’t just assume that today’s Tennyson would welcome it.

  Eventually, Sam came in with the class register and that day’s roll call. He’d already verified that everyone who was absent was genuinely absent and still on the island, so together the five of us went through the lists of names, cross-referencing them with all the class information we had. There was a spreadsheet on my laptop from the previous year that had everyone in the school listed, and they all matched up. There was nobody missing, not unless it was a freshman none of us knew. We scoured all the freshman information we could find, but everyone seemed to be there.

  “So, it’s Katie,” I said, feeling sick to my stomach. When had I last seen her? What had I said? It was so long ago that I couldn’t even remember. I wondered where she was now, if she was still alive.

  “Wow,” said Nikolai. “You are not lucky with roommates, are you? Maybe you should request a single room next semester so nobody else mysteriously vanishes. Oh, hey, I wonder if you’ll be the prime suspect in the investigation!”

  “That’s enough, Nikolai,” said Althea. “This isn’t funny.”

  “I know,” said Nikolai. “Any one of us could be next!” He slouched down farther into the chair so we could only see his hands and feet. “Help! Oh, no, I’m being eaten!”

  “Enough!” said Tennyson, getting to his feet. There were dark shadows under his eyes, and he was even more pale than before. He glanced around at us, and all of a sudden, I knew exactly what he was thinking. He didn’t need to send anything through the bond; I just knew. He turned and fled from the room.

  Without waiting even a second, I followed him. When I caught up with him, he was at the front door.

  “Don’t you dare,” I said, the words so full of emotion that they stuck in my throat. “I know exactly what you’re thinking, and there is no way I’ll let you.”

  “You can’t stop me, Lucy,” he said, sounding anguished. “I have to die, so I can’t be used to channel the magic or take anyone else’s life. It’s the only way to fix this. You know that.”

  “I know nothing of the sort,” I told him. “If I have to shackle you in the dungeon myself, I’m not letting you sacrifice yourself. We’ll find another way.”

  “There is no other way,” he said, his voice barely more than a whisper. His eyes pleaded with me to let him go, but I’d rather die myself.

  “I’ll find a way,” I told him, using all my strength to pull him away from the door, back toward the common room.

  But there was only one way. It was the only way there had ever been. If it was a choice between that or Tennyson’s life, it was really no choice at all.

  I got him back into the room, and from the looks on everyone’s faces, I knew they’d heard every word.

  “I have an idea,” I told them, pushing Tennyson down into a chair. “Do not let him out of your sight.”

  My mind raced as I ran through the forest, trying to find some other way. We had tried everything, tapped out every resource at our disposal, left no stone unturned. Maybe some last-minute solution would pop into my head, something we’d overlooked, something all too obvious once we realized it, but there was nothing.

  Nothing but surrender.

  I hardened my heart as I climbed the stairs of the lighthouse.

  I got to the top and picked up the phone. I could do this. My heart was hard like a lump of coal. I didn’t even have a heart. I was cold and numb and logical. I was so logical that I was Spock in The Wrath of Khan. Tears prickled my eyes, and I took a deep breath. I could do this. It was for Tennyson. It was for the pack. It was for the whole school, and their families and everyone who would miss them if they all suddenly vanished. The needs of the many had to outweigh the needs of the few. Or the one.

  I hit the call button and wiped my eyes.

  The sound of my father’s voice when he returned my call was like poison in my ear.

  “Hello, my precious daughter! How goes it, this fine Friday?”

  “Is Katie dead?” I asked him.

  “Well, that depends on how you define death, I suppose. Does anyone really ever die? Does anyone ever really live? Something to think about during your endless days.”

  Hard heart. The needs of the many. Deep breath.

  “I accept your terms,” I told him. “But you have to agree to leave the pack alone after this. No more messing with them. And I want one more day. One final day to set everything right.”

  The line was silent, and for a moment, I worried that he’d hung up, that he’d rejected my offer. Maybe he didn’t want me on his team anymore; maybe he just wanted to torture me. Then, finally, he laughed.

  “That works for me,” he said. “It will give me time to gather the other leaders. Very well. Be at the bottom of the cliff below the lighthouse at 11:55 tomorrow night. But, Lucy, I warn you. Don’t try anything. I’m not the only one involved in this, and there are eyes on your brothers. At the first sign of funny business, those eyes will become daggers.”

  “You’re really filling me with confidence about teaming up with you,” I told him. “Don’t worry, I have no intention of going back on this. 11:55 tomorrow, I’ll be there.”

  I ended the call, then collapsed to the floor. My h
eart wasn’t hard. I could barely breathe. And putting the needs of the many before my own didn’t stop my tears.

  Chapter 13

  When I woke up on the last day, I was ready. This was the real Friday, the one that would stick. Everything had to be perfect.

  I messaged Sam to say I was on my way, then hunted around under my bed for my box of precious things. It only took me a second to find what I wanted — a picture of Sam and me with my little brothers and his sister. It was in a white frame, and I’d hidden it away when I found out Sam was alive because I didn’t want him to see it and get sad. But if he was okay, if he’d dealt with everything enough to sort through his family’s things, then it was something he would appreciate. I dressed, then made the effort to brush my hair, and after thinking about it a second, I used some of Katie’s mascara and lip gloss. I’d looked so different after Althea’s makeovers that I kind of wanted to try it for myself, and it didn’t look terrible.

  I got to the greenhouse in record time. It seemed kind of strange not to be meeting the whole pack there, but since it was the last day, I didn’t want them to know about the time loop. I wanted them to think it was just an ordinary Friday. It would be easier that way. I’d explain everything they needed to know to them another time, if there was one.

  “Hey, sorry I’m late,” I said, sitting down beside Sam and kissing him on the cheek. It might be our last day together, so I’d be a real girlfriend for him to the best of my ability.

  “Hey there,” he said, smiling at me with a slightly puzzled look on his face. “Are you okay?”

  “Just excited about our triannual anniversary!” I said. “Is it triannual? Or quarter-annual?”

  “Three months probably works,” he said, drawing back to look into my face. “Are you sure you’re okay? It’s really Lucy in there, right?”

  I laughed and started piling food on my plate. After this, I’d probably never eat mini quiches again, so I could do it this one last time. “What do your werewolf senses tell you?”

  “Well, you definitely eat like Lucy,” he said, laughing.