“Do you remember our trip to China?” I said.
She made a noise of surprise in her throat. “I haven’t thought of that in ages.”
“I thought about it recently. If I had to pick the happiest moment of our marriage, it would be there, in the City of Ghosts. I felt close to you then.”
She held me tighter and stroked my head. “You can feel close to me now, here. You never have to leave, Roger. You can stay with me forever, frozen in time. We’ll be happy, just like old times. You know I love you.”
I nearly burst into tears. Reaching up, I curled one of my arms around her neck to give her a hug. “I love you too, Jenny. For so long I wanted to be here, right here, with you, never leaving. I wanted us to be together like we were in China. I wanted that moment to last forever.”
“It can, darling, it can. If you stay with me—if you stay with Mommy—the world will move along without us and we can dwell in the past, free of time. All you have to do is let it go. Let it all go.”
“I have wanted this so much…” I muttered. “I have wanted you to come back to me so we could be together. But now…” I morphed my hand into a blade behind her head. “Now everything is different.”
She shushed me. “No, sweetheart, no. Nothing is different. We can be together. We can make it last forever. Remember, I know what’s best.”
But at this crucial moment I was able to summon my courage, my warrior, my strength. I remembered Annabelle. I remembered James. I remembered myself.
“I’m sorry,” I said, tears in my eyes, “but I refuse to live in the past. I refuse to give in to my own suffering.” I very gently brought the blade down across her neck. It sliced through her flesh. Her eyes regarded me for a moment before she opened her mouth to say something. Then the head fell into my lap and I screamed.
Her corpse tipped forward, spewing black, purple blood. I pushed her off me and jumped to my feet, casting away the severed head as though it were a loathsome insect. I looked at her sagging body, now lying in a puddle of blood.
The sky darkened. Stars and planets blinked to life, and right then I knew—God help me, I knew—the Time Eater was coming. It was on to me, but it was also too late. I had already done what I had come here to do. I had severed Jenny’s hold on my soul. I had stepped out of the past.
As its massive shadow crept across the land, I fell to me knees, face aimed at the sky.
* * *
When I came to, the doctor was leaning over me. His bushy eyes and wrinkled face were all I could see, and he smelled of incense and herbs. When he saw my eyes open, he smiled. “Ah, here he comes.”
He pulled back, and when he did the sky and trees and branches and colors all swung into view. Annabelle was kneeling behind him in the grass. Her pretty face was corrupted by worry. The wind had seized her long black hair, was stretching it out behind her… reminding me of Jenny.
She touched my arm, fingers cold. “How do you feel, Roger?”
My heart was thundering. I felt the icy chill of a cold sweat over my body. Remembering the strange alien form I had inhabited in the spirit world, I sat up very quickly to inspect myself. To my relief, I inhabited my old flesh and bones again.
“Oh Christ,” I said. “Christ, I did it. I cut off her head. It was… horrible—but it felt great!”
Dr. Li patted my shoulder. “You did good, Mr. Borough. I’m proud of you. Now we can proceed to the next step.” He rose cautiously to his feet, careful of his joints. Annabelle helped me and supported me because my legs felt like Jell-O. We made our way across the yard to the house. Judging by the sunlight, it was well past noon.
“What is the next step?” Annabelle said.
Dr. Li pointed to the upstairs window—to James’s bedroom. Annabelle and I both gasped simultaneously as we looked and saw James’s peaked face hovering in the glass. Ghostlike, his complexion pale, his eyes void-black. He watched us.
The doctor said, “Next step is getting inside your friend and seeing where the Time Eater has dug its hooks into him.”
We went inside and Annabelle made some hot tea. I still felt very tired, and I spent much of the afternoon on the couch, watching episodes of Have Gun Will Travel on the TV while she and the doctor spoke in the kitchen. She was helping him prepare more herbs, I suspected. A little while later, I dozed again.
Chapter Seventeen
The TV blared an annoying commercial for the evening news, and I got up and quickly switched it off. The house was dimly lit with a few lamps and the purplish light of twilight in the windows. I listened, waiting to hear either the doctor or Annabelle, but there was nothing.
Shit, maybe they started without me. I panicked, then thought, Shit, maybe they started without me and failed and now they’re up there being torn to shreds!
I jumped to my feet and ran into the kitchen. The place was a mess, pots and pans everywhere, jars of herbs, books outspread, and curious glass containers. Dr. Li’s medical bag was open with its contents spewing out. They’d been busy, whatever they were doing. I was about to rush upstairs when I happened to glance out the window. The car was not in the driveway.
They went somewhere?
I decided to go upstairs anyway and check. As I ascended the darkening staircase, I shivered. I’d really grown to hate coming up here. Every time I wanted to fool myself, thinking everything was back to normal, I’d come up here and all hell would break loose.
I opened James’s bedroom door and peered in. The moment I did, the lights sprang on. The window facing the backyard was open; a stream of purple twilight flowed in, mixing with the artificial light to create a murky ambience.
He was sitting up in the bed, back to the wall, reading a book that at once looked familiar. He pretended not to notice me, but I knew he was only pretending. My attention focused on the large leather bound book with white pages and gold trim, which he read with furious intensity, flipping the pages.
Holy crap, is that…?
He glanced up. His eyes burned me down, voided and dead, his face taking on the characteristics of a rodent.
He’s with the Time Eater.
“Oh, it’s you,” he said. “Guess what I found.”
I stepped inside, closing the door behind me. I made a quick scan of the room to be sure Annabelle and the doctor were not here.
“Come close,” he said, indicating the chair beside the bed. “Your favorite spot.”
I wasn’t used to this room appearing so bright, could not recall seeing it with this many lights on. A cold, uninviting glare, the kind of illumination you find in a hospital: sterilized, clinical.
I did as he asked, but even as I sat down my eyes never left the book.
James noticed me looking and smiled. “Has it crossed your mind yet, pal? This thing ringing any bells?” He shook the book at me. “Let me give you a hint, you’re gonna have to go back. Way back.”
Just like that I knew. Like I had plucked it out of the air. I said, “No fucking… it can’t be. Is it? Where the hell did you get it?”
My reaction pleased him, and he laughed. “You do remember. This is how it all started, isn’t it? Where we first blurred the line between reality and fiction, past and present…” He paused before adding, “Between you and me.”
James flipped through the pages, reading again, pretending like I wasn’t even there. For an instant, my eyes lighted upon the title, embroidered on the leather cover in gold letters. It was Latin, but I remembered that Randolf, owner of the occult bookstore I haunted in college, had translated it for me. Roughly, it worked out to Sprit of the Infinite and the Solomonic Key to Christ.
“Here’s an interesting passage,” James said, reading aloud in Latin. The foreign words and complex declensions filled the room. He sounded like a monk in a monastery, and a few of the words I recognized, though it had been so long since I studied Latin, and I knew for a fact that James couldn’t read it.
He stopped and looked up. “Any of this sound familiar?”
�
��You know it doesn’t. It’s not English.”
He scoffed. “But you were able to read it that night. Yes, you read it fluently, not once second-guessing yourself. Your voice echoed off the tall campus buildings. I can remember it. Eerie shit, man.”
I was starting to get confused. “But I never took classes, never had any proper instruction in Latin.”
“But you spoke it. You said the owner of that weird little bookstore taught you.”
He turned the book around, offered it to me, temptingly. “Come on, if I can do it, you can do it. Try it. See if you remember.”
I reached for the book, but he immediately pulled it away and laughed. “Have to do better than that, pal. Looks like I’m the only one capable of speaking Latin around here.”
“The way you speak it is unnatural. It’s not really you speaking it. It’s that thing.”
He made a face as if to say, And your point is…, then went back to reading aloud. As his voice stirred the air, I noticed the walls begin to grow thin, transparent, to flicker like images on a movie screen. One by one, they faded out.
James kept reading as the world turned pitch-black. The stars and planets glimmered to life, the cosmic mists flowed in from the distance, and the asteroid belts rolled imperceptibly. I shivered. We were in its territory now.
“Stop it, James,” I said, growing more afraid. “Stop reading it. You’ll draw its attention.”
He paused. “That didn’t stop you that night.” Then continued.
Our world swelled with darkness. Any moment the Time Eater would be here. And then what? What would happen if, when the being started sucking things into itself, we stayed put and didn’t move? Would it eventually siphon us away as well?
I need to get my hands on that book. Even if I can’t read it, I’ve got to get it away from him.
A section of reality to our left tumbled down, huge transparent chunks of space and stars toppling over like kids’ blocks; they kept falling, down and down, into oblivion.
“Goddamn it, James, stop!” I approached the bed. The moment my knee touched the mattress, he went berserk, yelling and cursing, clutching the book to his chest, showing me his teeth.
“Fuck… the hell away from me!” he screeched. He spit and the fluid struck my face, getting into my eyes. I can’t say I was surprised by his behavior; however, the abruptness of it sent me into high alert. Meanwhile, a massive warbling presence was taking shape behind the falling reality blocks, something sensed more than seen, a thing black and vast and mindless.
“Give it, James,” I said, groping at him. He’d tucked himself into a fetal position with the book at his chest. When I reached for it, he actually tried to bite me; on impulse I slapped him hard in the face. Drops of saliva pelted the sheets, but he was momentarily stunned.
I jumped on the opportunity and snatched the book from his grip. As it left him, he let out a wail that sent shivers up my spine. I turned immediately and stalked toward the door.
“No!” he called after. “I found it, not you! I thought about it until it appeared in my hands and now you come to take it away from me—not fair!”
I couldn’t help glancing in the direction of the tumbling reality blocks on my way out. Big mistake. I was held captive by a vision of the Time Eater. Black and massive, more like the view of a distant horizon than any organic creature; it stretched back as far as I could see. It resembled something I’d once perceived under a microscope in a Petri dish, a single-cell organism, a bacteria, an amoeba. A giant inkblot trembling in a neon purple membrane, with eyes and a set of teeth—maybe? No… all blackness there. Nothing more.
I hurried out into the hall.
Chapter Eighteen
I sat at the kitchen table for the next hour poring over the text. It felt strange to hold this book in my hands again after so many years. A flood of memories came back from those years I had forgotten, my time spent as an occult practitioner. I recalled the people I helped in college, how I solved their problems using magic and intuition.
The memories seemed unreal, as if they’d happened to someone else. At that time, I was so immersed in magic that I never gave it a second thought, but from this angle, it felt surreal.
Who am I really? I kept thinking, and the scariest part was I had no idea.
When the car pulled up in the driveway, I had the book set on the table and was staring at it. For the life of me, I couldn’t decipher a single phrase of the text. If I was so able to read Latin once, I couldn’t understand why the ability was now lost to me.
Annabelle and Dr. Li came through the door, saw me sitting at the table. They were each carrying a brown shopping bag, which they put on the countertop. Dr. Li noticed the book almost immediately, his eyes going wide.
“You’re up,” Annabelle said. “Feeling better?”
“A little. Where’d you go?”
“The store to get more ingredients,” the doctor said. “There are certain things required for a Chinese medical practitioner to do his work.” He hoisted out a six-pack of diet Pepsi. “Like diet soda.”
I laughed. “Ancient Chinese secret?”
“Yes.” He sat down in the chair across from me and picked up the book. The second his hands touched it, his expression changed and his face went pale. “Where’d this come from?” he said.
I pointed to the ceiling. “James.”
“You saw him,” Annabelle asked. “How’d he look?”
I shuddered, remembering the way he had snapped at me when I tried to take the book from him. “Not good. But he had that.” I indicated the book. “He said he found it. But I haven’t set eyes on it in twenty years.”
“You’ve seen it before?” Dr. Li asked.
I nodded. “That’s the book I was telling you about, the one James and I used to summon the Time Eater. After going to Cosmos, Psyche, and Higher Worlds I thought it was a lost cause, but now James turns up this copy. The strangest part is I think it’s the same copy we used in college.”
Annabelle joined us at the table, carrying the soda, a bowl of ice, and three glasses. “How can you tell?”
“May I?” I retrieved the book from Dr. Li, opened to about the middle where a bunch of the text was underlined in black, and showed it to her. “I remember doing that on the night of the ritual. When I performed the chants, the text would seem to blur together, trip me up. Underlining it kept me on track.”
I passed it back to the doctor so he could continue looking. Then Annabelle said, “How do you suppose James got it?”
“I’ve been thinking about that. Most of that night on the Ohio State campus is a blur. But I do recall the misplacement of the book after the ritual was over. I threw away all of my occult paraphernalia the next day, vowing never to practice magic. But the book… it was gone. I never had a chance to toss it. My guess is that James snuck it home for whatever reason. And he’s held on to it ever since.”
“That would make sense,” she said.
“What do you think, Doctor?” I asked.
He was silent. Finally, he placed it on the table and took a sip from the glass of soda Annabelle had poured for him. “I lived in China until I was about twenty-nine, in a tiny village in the Hunan province. My parents were farmers for a burgeoning company. They saved enough money for me to attend college, and this I did, all the way in Hong Kong. But in my younger days, I studied under the elder grandmaster of the village, Chiang Zu, whom I have already mentioned to you. He was very wise, knew many things. Sometimes he took me into mountains to practice acupuncture on animals.”
He paused, pointing at the book. “We found something just like that half-buried in a pile of rotting bamboo.”
“Get out of here,” I said. “This exact book?”
He inspected it again, as if to be certain, then nodded. “I remember the funny shapes of the words, and this…” He opened the back flap to where a gold engraving had been stitched into the binding. It was a curious symbol, one that surpassed even my knowledge of the occ
ult. It depicted three triangles—one upright, the others placed above and angled down, one to either side, all three points touching.
“What’s it mean?” Annabelle asked.
I shrugged. “Beats me. I have the faintest recollection of Randolf telling me something about it, but I don’t recall.” I looked at Dr. Li. “Do you know?”
“I only know what Master Chiang told me. The day we found it, we had been searching for sick animals to heal. We came upon a vast expanse of fallen bamboo. I knew it had recently been cut down, because the blade marks were still fresh. Resting on top of the pile was that book.
“My master grew very still, very tense. I had never observed him to be so nervous. He crossed the bamboo and lifted the book from its resting place. When he returned, he flipped through the pages and showed me this engraving in the back. He said that Taoist wizards sometimes poked their noses into places they didn’t belong—dark places, evil places. He recognized the symbol, but he did not relate to me its origin. He did, however, decipher it.
“He told me that the human organism is composed of three parts: the spirit, soul, and body. The spirit goes through different incarnations, and it is eternal, infinite. The soul is the personality of the present incarnation. The body, well, that is self-explanatory—it’s the vehicle. Each triangle in the engraving represents one of the three. If you noticed, three triangles together form another triangle. A forth triangle. This is the fourth whole. Divinity.”
I picked up the book and flipped to the back. Sure enough, the engraving depicted four triangles total. I thought that I remembered something about this, but the memory came and went like a breeze.
“What happened to the book after you and your master found it?” I asked.
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