Fir Lodge

by Sean McMahon

  Kara winced, ‘don’t say “out of me” ever again, that’s gross.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said Hal, ‘what would you rather I call it? I’ll amend my lexicon once we’ve dealt with the universe collapsing in on itself!’

  ‘Jeeze Hal, dramatic much?’ said Kara, shooting him a look to let him know she was kidding.

  They continued watching their friends with intent suspicion, looking for anything that could give them more insight into who these people were, and what exactly their agenda was. But the most bizarre thing of all was that nothing seemed out of place. Not one of their friends gave any indication that they knew they were being watched, and continued to behave perfectly in-character. They engaged in the same banter they always shared, referencing the same in-jokes that they always did. Hal and Kara’s initial suspicion that their friends were somehow carrying out an elaborate charade was largely debunked, as not a single one of their friends dropped the act.

  Eventually, they were forced to accept the possibility of the easiest conclusion they could get their heads around; that their friends were exactly who they appeared to be, just a version of themselves from thirty-three-or-so hours ago.

  Kara, giving up on Hal, made the conscious decision to be the one to say it out loud.

  ‘I think…I think we’re in the past.’

  Hal struggled to disagree but, despite (or perhaps because of) his love of time-travel movies, he also knew that was impossible.

  ‘Okay…’ said Hal. ‘Baby steps. So, we’ve…travelled back in time,’ he said, cringing at how absurd it sounded as he said the words out loud, but pressing on regardless, ‘as you do. Except, that isn’t something anyone can do.’

  ‘You don’t think…’ began Kara, her voice barely a whisper.

  ‘That we’re dead?’ said Hal loudly, as if doing so would take the power away from the question. ‘Thought had crossed my mind. But I think we can rule that one out too,’ said Hal, matter-of-factly.

  ‘Okay, I’ll bite. How so?’ challenged Kara.

  Hal took a deep breath, not entirely sure what he was going to run with first.

  ‘Well, for one thing…’ he said, pulling out his box of cigarettes from his pocket, along with his phone, a lighter, some chewing gum, and one of Jess’s hair bobby pins, which had a habit of turning up everywhere, apparently even inside the pocket of a brand-new costume. He shook away the disbelief, pressing on with his theory. ‘…despite my current attire, I’m no ghost expert, but I’m pretty sure you leave materialistic knick-knacks at the door before moving on.’

  In all of the insanity, she had forgotten that they were still in costume. In one swift movement, she pressed her hands to the pleat of her skirt, then remembered, once again, that she didn’t have pockets.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ groaned Kara, ‘you get chewing gum, cigarettes and a phone, and all I get to bring with me is–’

  ‘Nerdy specs and a magnifying glass?’ said Hal, in a sarcastically optimistic tone.

  Kara pulled the black rimmed detective tool from the waistband of her skirt, spinning the stem of the magnifying glass in her hand. Then, dismissively, she discarded it on the floor. They watched, as it landed solidly, bouncing several times as it travelled noiselessly across the wooden floor.

  ‘This is total bullshit,’ said Kara finally, as she fell back against the wall situated behind her, then stood upright again instantly as her inadvertent discovery dawned on her. Hal smirked once she noticed it.

  ‘Annnnd that. Remember when I walked into the car on purpose?’

  ‘I see your revisionist history course is going well?’ said Kara, not buying that statement for a second.

  Hal winced. ‘Worth a shot,’ he said, and then continued. ‘Anyway, in what ghost story in the history of ever, has a ghost not been able to walk through stuff? We couldn’t open the front door yesterday either. I mean tomorrow. I mean, you know what I mean.’

  She gave that some thought. ‘But we’re ghosts to these guys,’ said Kara, ‘they can’t see us, they walk straight through us? We can’t interact with them at all.’

  Hal had to concede on that part.

  ‘I think we need to see how this plays out,’ said Hal. ‘If we watch, listen, and try to learn as much as we can, we might be able to figure this thing out. If we wait for ourselves to come back from dropping Jerry off tomorrow night, we can fill in the blanks from what happened to us in the fog.’

  ‘You want to spend an entire day-and-a-half spying on our friends?!’ exclaimed Kara. All she wanted to do was wake up from what was clearly a terrible fever dream.

  ‘Well, when you say it like that, it just sounds weird and creepy. I prefer the term “doing research,”’ said Hal, checking his box of cigarettes and noting that only three pre-rolled smokes remained. He pulled one from the box, putting it between his lips, flipped the metal lid on his lighter, then hesitated for a fraction of a second, not wanting to be wrong.

  “I’m not wrong,’ he thought to himself, striking the flint and staring in secret amazement, as the petrol lighter generated an actual flame. He was even more shocked by the fact that the flame ignited the cigarette paper, just as physics dictated it should have done.

  ‘See,’ said Hal, smugly. ‘Definitely not ghosts.’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Jerry’s Secret

  1st Restart – Friday Afternoon, 1:27pm

  Friday played out exactly as it had before, though Kara and Hal’s new perspective certainly kept them entertained. They remained in the corners of rooms, and a good distance away from anyone when in the garden, ensuring they didn’t come into contact with any of their friends, avoiding themselves in particular.

  Hal was adamant that coming into contact with their “past-selves”, a term they had both agreed on for the sake of making their conversations easier, could result in making things worse. Kara wasn’t entirely convinced that his theory that “the same matter couldn’t occupy the same space” was anything more than lazy science fiction.

  She wanted to lash out at the woman who had stolen her life. The prospect that Kara could very well be a time traveller did little to help her shake the feeling that her life was being commandeered by an imposter, even if their working theory did mean that she was the one and only real Kara. Throughout the course of the day, she frequently revisited the notion that she had simply lost her mind. The phenomenon she was experiencing had not been documented anywhere as far as she was aware, and she found it hard to believe that she and Hal were the first people to have ever experienced what they were going through. Perhaps that simply meant that no one had ever returned to tell the tale.

  Casting the negative implications of that thought from her mind, she looked over at Hal, who was kneeling on the wooden floor of the living room, running his hands across it like it was the most interesting thing in the world.

  ‘Okay, fine. What are you doing?’ said Kara, her boredom finally causing her to give in after watching him mess about with the floor for the past twenty minutes.

  ‘Nothing. Actually, maybe something. It’s… okay, watch this. Ready?’ said Hal.

  Kara shrugged, indicating he should just get on with it. Hal stood up, and then slammed his foot down on the floor. The action generated a barely audible, notably muffled, thud. Kara stared at him, unsure of what to say.

  ‘I meeean…it’s not the greatest display of interpretive dance I’ve ever seen. Sorry, just being honest,’ she said, with exaggerated awkwardness.

  Hal cocked his head, and raised an eyebrow in an attempt to counteract her mocking tone.

  ‘World’s most underrated time-travelling comedian everyone,’ said Hal.

  ‘Actually, given that I’m probably the only time-travelling comedian, that would make me the best by default, wouldn’t it?’ asked Kara, surprising even herself by the technicality.

  Reluctantly, Hal nodded in agreement. It was hard to find fault with her logic.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s weird that we can
’t generate noise here?’ said Hal. ‘Like when you knocked on the door last night. And the shingle outside, it doesn’t move under our weight. It’s like we’re here, but not here…’ he added, pulling a face of frustration.

  He was missing something, a vital answer that was miles beyond the realm of his comprehension. Kara mimicked his earlier action, stamping her two-inch heel down hard on the wood, the transference of force emitting an equal lack of sound.

  ‘Huh,’ said Kara. She had to admit, it was a clever observation. Not out loud, or with actual words or anything, but she knew that Hal would know she was impressed.

  ‘Right? It’s totally a thing isn’t it?’ said Hal, sensing her appreciation of his discovery.

  *

  With the arrival of the late-afternoon came the inevitable arrival of Jerry. They stood in silence, as they witnessed their first encounter with him, the only difference being one of perspective. They hid behind the right-hand side of the building, peering around the corner to watch the interaction, as the event played out exactly as it had done the first time around. Kara watched intently, as her past-self noticed Jerry too little, too late, resulting in her being tackled to the ground by the enthusiastic dog. Kara winced as she heard her past-self scream in shock, her own laugh sounding incredibly alien to her. She cringed at her rambling doggy talk, all but sick of how many times she could ask a dog if he was a good boy. As the following moments unfolded, watching their past-selves and past-Jon fussing over the admittedly adorable dog, Kara made a mental note to dial it down a bit when meeting other people’s dogs in future. Not her own, of course. As far as she was concerned, her dogs were the gold standard when it came to being a good boy.

  Hal whistled absent-mindedly, his way of reconciling himself with this bizarre out-of-body experience. Jerry’s ears twitched and, leaving their past-selves in his wake, he ran towards the time-travellers.

  ‘Erm, Kar’…’ said Hal, ‘I think…I think he’s coming over to us?’

  Jerry sprinted across the garden and around the corner to where they were skulking. He sat, seemingly aware of their presence, scratched an itch that was lurking beneath his collar, and sniffed in their general vicinity.

  ‘Can he…can he see us?’ asked Kara, more for her own benefit than as a direct question to Hal. Before they could find out for sure, Jerry’s head dipped to the right. He was looking well beyond them into the distance, as if he was straining to make sense of a sound. Without warning, he set off suddenly, apparently eager to continue his adventure. He stopped at the top of the driveway, sniffing again, rolled onto his back on the same area of grass that Kara had been thrown onto earlier that morning, kicking his legs into the air. Jerry then jumped to his feet and departed, leaving in his wake even more questions for Hal and Kara to sift through.

  *

  The remainder of their second run-through of their Friday was serenely ethereal, as they traversed through the hyper-realistic, immaculately reconstructed world that they had been transported to. It was as if they were locked within a shared, lucid dream; able to observe, but not permitted to interact with their surroundings. The re-creation of their combined recollections, however, was clearly so much more than a visually-interactive memory. From the amount of liquid in bottles of alcohol that would reduce in quantity throughout the day, to the playlists of music that shifted in the same identical patterns they had done the first time around, everything was perfect.

  Hal and Kara spent their time scrutinising every detail, trying to find a chink in the armour of their current predicament that they could somehow exploit, but their efforts yielded one unchallengeable truth; their original assumption had to be correct. They were truly passengers, travelling in the slipstream of their own history, utilising an entirely independent consciousness than that of their past-selves.

  As Friday evening drew to a close for a second time, their friends and past-selves finally called it a night and went to bed, leaving the time travellers with little to do but sit in darkness, discussing how little they understood about what was happening to them.

  Laying on the now-vacant sofas in the communal living room, Hal and Kara attempted to sleep. However, after much futility, they soon realised that the ability to sleep had apparently been revoked, and was clearly an impossible endeavour in their current state. They’d decided, together, that they would let everything play out tomorrow, just as it had before. They would then study exactly what happened when their past-selves returned from dropping off Jerry.

  As the seemingly endless night unfolded around them, they ran out of things to say, and in the end settled on just pretending that they were both asleep, until the morning came.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Bubble or Nothing

  1st Restart – Saturday Morning, 7:06am

  Hal and Kara were eventually pulled away from their day-dreaming, as Daisy kicked off her Saturday morning by popping on the kettle. One by one, the gang made their way to the communal living room, forcing Hal and Kara to resume their position in the corner of the room. Hal had finished all three of his cigarettes the day before, but they were rationing the chewing gum in case they suddenly developed the pangs of hunger. Most of the seats were taken now, but given that they weren’t paying attention the first time around, they didn’t want to risk getting comfortable and sitting on a free seat, only to end up being sat on.

  Kara’s past-self emerged from her pit last of all, dragging herself up the wooden staircase and into the living room.

  ‘Wow…I really look like crap,’ said Kara, as she assessed the condition of her identical twin, then added ‘remind me to quit drinking after we’ve figured a way out of this nightmare.’

  Hal gave her the thumbs up, allowing her to pretend that her request was something he could feasibly enforce.

  In the early hours of the morning, they had been discussing a theory regarding their own proximity to their past-selves. Hal felt they should stay out of their own way, whereas Kara wanted to be as close to them as possible, in the hope that their duplicates would say or do something that might shed more light on what was happening to them.

  Kara decided to broach the subject once more.

  ‘What I can’t get my head around is that we’re not even here Hal, I mean we are but…we’re not solid. What does it matter if we shadow our past-selves?’

  ‘There’s no need to be so matter-of fact about matter Kar’, it doesn’t matter,’ said Hal.

  ‘Do you even hear yourself talking sometimes?’ asked Kara in exasperation.

  Hal scrunched up his face and nodded in the direction of the past version of himself, currently talking to Rachel and Jon in the kitchen.

  ‘Lately? More than I’d care to, if I’m honest,’ said Hal.

  Kara scowled, and he held up his hands apologetically.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I know just as much as you do. I’m just saying let’s not risk it for the time being.’

  He pulled out his phone for the hundredth time, a habit that he couldn’t kick, despite the battery being completely dead.

  ‘Who ya gonna call?’ asked Kara, with a smirk.

  ‘The late-eighties and early-nineties, presumably, to see if either of them wants that joke back,’ retorted Hal.

  ‘I miss the nineties…’ said Kara wistfully.

  ‘Yeah well, let’s not tempt fate, we’re still trying to figure out what to do after jumping a couple of days back in time. Besides, I haven’t packed much denim.’

  *

  As their friends prepared for the day ahead, Kara and Hal once more moved their operation into the garden. Kara was watching Fearne drawing freehand temporary tattoos onto Daisy and Jasmine, taking advantage of the fact that she was now invisible, which allowed her to get closer to see how the process worked. Robert was, of course, in the hot tub with Jon, both trying to eradicate their respective hangovers.

  With the art session coming to an end, Hal and Kara continued to observe, as their past-selves once again set of
f for a late-morning walk in the woods with their friends. Reasoning that there was nothing that happened on that excursion that they didn’t already know, the chronologically-displaced duo decided to hang back, giving their past-selves additional space. Hal had argued that they would need to be in places they weren’t the first time around, if they had any hope of understanding what was happening to them. The more information they had, the better equipped they would be when it came to working out exactly what had caused, as Hal had described it, the “temporal anomaly.”

  She looked over at Hal, who was standing in the rear garden and staring at the sun for reasons that were totally lost on her.

  ‘I don’t think trying to blind yourself is going to help…’ she said, jokingly.

  Hal turned to face her with yet another look of perplexity on his face.

  ‘Have you noticed how we don’t burn in the sun?’

  She hadn’t really thought about it, but given that Hal was borderline flammable due to his not-so-borderline vampiric skin-tone, she could understand why he would probably notice something like that. Hal had to take sunscreen everywhere he went in the summer months. She was pale in complexion too, but had only dyed her hair a reddish-auburn. Hal, on the other hand, was just a few shades closer to brown-haired to fully be regarded as, what he called, “Metallic Blonde.” His preferred terminology for “ginger.”

  ‘Actually,’ said Kara, ‘it isn’t hot at all, is it? I remember burning up a bit in the heat when we first got here.’ As she considered the implications of that, she realised there was another sensation that was conspicuous only by its absence.

  ‘Also, are you hungry?’ asked Kara. ‘We haven’t eaten in like…’ she looked over at Jon’s phone which was streaming music to the speaker, the shade of the overhead balcony allowing her to read the time. “10:55am,” she noted to herself, running the maths in her head. ‘…What, twenty-two hours since the barbecue?’ she said, a split-second later.