Fir Lodge

by Sean McMahon

  As she made it to the communal kitchen, the cold-water tap on the sink burst to life, obliterating the silence. A dark figure dominated the kitchen, the moonlight affording her eyesight nothing more than a silhouette.

  ‘Oh, hey Jas’! Just grabbing some water,’ whispered the entity. ‘You’re up late?’

  It was only Hal. She berated herself for being so jumpy.

  ‘Hey, yeah I know,’ said Jasmine. ‘Same here,’ she added, raising her empty water glass.

  Hal extended his hand, and she gave him her empty glass. The noise of running water erupted once again, stopping abruptly, as he passed her back the refilled glass.

  ‘Well, g’night!’ said Hal.

  ‘Goodnight,’ she whispered back, noting that Fearne and Peter were dead to the world in the far corner of the communal dining area, engaged in a deep sleep on one of the sofa beds. Will and Stacey mirrored their inactivity, on the sofa bed situated on the opposite side of the room.

  As she heard Hal descending the stairs, the steps emitting noticeable squeaks under his weight, she stood in the darkness for a moment. Jasmine stared out through the kitchen window, into the black, night sky, resting with her back against the stair-rail, waiting until she finally heard Hal’s bedroom door closing with a gentle click.

  It was then that the fridge shook violently, as the door opened, bathing the kitchen in an amber light. She stood their frozen, staring at the inexplicably-open appliance. It shook once again, less violently, though this did little to ease her frayed nerves. She stepped towards the fridge, the light meeting her face, casting a sickly glow upon her.

  She stepped backwards, then towards it, her instinct to retreat overridden by her practical, adult mind, knowing that if she didn’t close it, the small amounts of food wedged between the ridiculous amount of beers would potentially turn bad in the night.

  Closer now, she reached out to the fridge door, her fingertips mere millimetres away. But before they could make contact, the door itself was pulled away from her, slamming inwards into its frame. The bottles of various spirits resting on the counter above it rattled violently.

  Her scream was suppressed beneath her hands, which she had impulsively covered her mouth with. Her eyes wide with confusion and terror, she backed away from the fridge, not entirely convinced that it didn’t now contain a terrifying creature, like a movie she had seen many years ago. As yet, there were no eggs frying on the counter at least.

  Taking the long way around the stairs, she doubled back on herself, and power-walked down the wooden stair-case, covering her ears as she was forced to walk directly past the malevolent appliance, almost expecting it to chase her.

  As she reached the lower level, she turned left, desperate to get back to the sanctum of safety that was her bed. Looking back up the stairs, expecting to see something no-one living ever should, she was relieved that there was nothing to see or, more importantly, no one.

  Taking a moment to catch her breath, she rested her left arm on the stair-rail at the bottom of the stairs for support, whilst she shook off what was clearly a waking-dream of some kind.

  It was then that she saw it; a black rectangular object above a table it had previously been resting on. Jon’s speaker again, in itself not intimidating in any notable way, except that it was currently levitating three feet above the table, with no apparent support.

  ‘That’s…not possible…’ she whispered to herself, in both amazement and terror.

  Jasmine suddenly felt a solid object behind her back. She had automatically walked backwards, and into the wall that backed onto Hal’s bedroom. The small cube of chalk, that men always seemed to dramatically apply to pool cues when they wanted to look professional, rose up from the wooden edge of the pool table, until it was perfectly level with her terrified face. Slowly, it bobbed towards the blackboard that was intended for score-keeping but, in reality, was used for new guests to write messages on.

  The cube of blue chalk connected with the board with a soft, shrill squeak, moving downwards. Disconnecting from the blackboard, the chalk bobbed two inches upwards, then erratically changed course, moving horizontally. The process repeated, mirroring the first step. A poorly drawn letter ‘H’ now adorned the board. But the cube of condensed powder was not done with her. It began the next stage of its journey, creating a forward slash, then a horizontal line, culminating with a crudely drawn back-slash. The seemingly erratic movements now seemed less random, forming a word:

  HA

  That was enough for Jasmine. She ran past the speaker, knocking it out of the air, making a mad dash for her room. Something sinister was clearly laughing at her. She woke her friends, begging them to come with her, to witness concrete evidence of a world beyond their own. Jon and Rachel came running out with her, though Kara was still dead to said world.

  Jasmine pointed to the speaker, which was now on the floor, following her collision with the entity that had previously been taunting her with it. Then to the board, which was indeed adorned with the letters ‘H’ and ‘A’ respectively.

  It took over an hour before they managed to calm Jasmine down. In the end, they had all concluded that her mind had been playing tricks on her, despite her being adamant that she had truly seen what she had seen. But as they spoke their calming words of reassurance, she relinquished her hold on the accuracy of her memories, questioning their authenticity.

  After all, the mind is a funny thing. When presented with the impossible, it’s quite reasonable and natural for a false memory to overwrite a true experience. Especially when the alternative could pull everything you thought you knew about reality into question.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Exorcising Caution

  20th Restart – Saturday Morning, 6:23am

  ‘Yeah...might have overdone it with the chalk…’ said Hal, saving his smokes for later and chomping on a piece of gum instead. Whilst they had learned early on that their teeth didn’t get dirty here, it still felt awful not getting to brush them twice a day.

  They were both lying on the covered hot tub, waiting for dawn to get its act together and arrive so that their friends would wake up and embrace yet another Saturday.

  ‘You think?!’ asked Kara, clearly in a rhetoric mood.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, it’s cool for you to go all Magneto with a speaker, but I try and make contact in written-form and suddenly I’m Swayze’s traitorous best friend?!’

  ‘I actually get that reference, it was very well put together.’

  ‘Thanks. I was quite proud of–’

  ‘But why write “HA”?’ She must’ve thought some demon thing was laughing at her.’

  ‘Oh, c’mon Kar’, isn’t it obvious?! I was writing “HAL”, and I would have got to finish it–’

  ‘If it weren’t for those pesky kids?’ said Kara, unable to resist interjecting with a perfectly-timed Scoob quote.

  ‘I was going to say, if she hadn’t bailed on us,’ said Hal, torn between given her a high-five for her excellent one-liner, and his frustration at having to explain himself. In the end, he conceded by switching out a high-five for some straight-forward praise. ‘But yes, that was very good. Well played.’

  ‘I know,’ said Kara, unknowingly landing a killer blow with a flawlessly executed Captain Solo quote. Hal decided she didn’t need the points.

  Their biggest window for experimenting was at night. The central communal-area was directly in-between where their past-selves were sleeping, and it created a “sweet spot” of sorts. But they hadn’t accounted for the consequences of their friends witnessing their antics, and potentially losing their minds. The last thing they needed was for the gang to get distracted by thinking the lodge was genuinely haunted, despite the fact that, technically, it kind of was.

  They sat in silence, Kara wanting to throttle him for chewing his gum so loudly. She sighed, then asked ‘so why didn’t you finish writing? Maybe opening a dialogue with them isn’t, well, the worst idea we’ve ever had.’

/>   Hal spat out his tasteless gum, much to Kara’s relief.

  ‘Something weird happened when they all piled into the room. Even though I was near to my past-self, I couldn’t grip the chalk. It’s like…’

  ‘Time was fighting back?’ said Kara, finishing his sentence for him. ‘Shocker,’ she added.

  Hal shook the notion from his head, and offered a counter-argument.

  ‘Not really, it just took all the willpower I had to pull off two letters.’

  ‘I’m telling you, it’s time fighting back. That was the boldest thing we’ve attempted since you killed Robert,’ said Kara, chirpily.

  ‘That wasn’t my…’ but he refused to bite, telling by her smile that she was just winding him up. ‘It’s probably more a case of the universe in general, maintaining boundaries.’

  ‘How so?’ asked Kara.

  ‘Well, I mean, if we move something inconsequential and no one sees us, who cares right? But communicating between timelines…we’re not just messing with time, we’re reaching across an entire dimension.’

  Kara jumped off the hot tub.

  ‘Yeah, well, I’m going to go check you didn’t break Jasmine. Seriously, she’s probably a jabbering wreck right about now. See you in a bit?’

  ‘Yeah, you know when to find me,’ said Hal.

  *

  Despite being a little subdued, Jasmine didn’t show any notable signs of stress, and Hal and Kara had decided to let events play out, to see if their cross-dimensional shenanigans had any adverse, or positive knock-on effects. As it turned out, with the exception of Jon taking the piss out of Jasmine for the majority of the day, everything settled back in to the predetermined order by around midday.

  They spent the remainder of their restart testing the limitations of their abilities, focusing intently on extending their range. Following their past-selves around, they attempted to move tiny items, taking a few steps back each time, to test precisely how far away they could be from their duplicates before the carefully chosen objects could no longer be manipulated.

  After much trial and error, they had determined that, at approximately thirty-two metres, they could nudge small objects only a minor amount. Being closer, and dependent on how much they concentrated, they could actually move larger objects, and even lift smaller ones, as evidenced by their recent antics with the fridge and the speaker.

  Eventually, their experiments led to a final conclusion, and they were in agreement that they couldn’t extend the distance any further. Deciding it was time to move on, they set off to wait for their would-be murderer, consolidating their efforts to focus on a new mission; to follow the steps their killer had taken prior to him even stepping foot into Kevin’s home.

  *

  It was now their twenty-third restart, and the Restarters were slowly beginning to realise that trying to follow someone in reverse was not as easy as they had expected. They had assumed, wrongly, that simply knowing when and where someone was destined to be would make tracking the route that they took to get there a simple matter of looking up a road, waiting for them to appear, triggering another restart, then starting the process all over again, road by road.

  Their first challenge, however, was ascertaining which entrance Kevin’s captor had used to enter the lodge in the first place. Despite there only being two entrances, they didn’t have a definitive arrival time for, who they had tentatively named, “The Big Bad”. They had to take the loss of a whole restart just to determine he had entered through the back door, though they did learn an additional titbit; The Big Bad had accessed the property by utilising a key safe attached to the rear door-frame, which he had forced open with a screwdriver.

  ‘This isn’t working is it,’ said Hal.

  Every time they followed The Big Bad to a new point in his chronological journey to Kevin’s, there were multiple possibilities of where he could spring from next. It would have been simpler if they had line-of-sight, but everything seemed to conspire against them. The trees obscuring their view, the multiple cut-throughs to other lodges, not to mention the fog that was mocking them with its ever-increasing density.

  ‘We can do this!’ said Kara enthusiastically. ‘We just have to split up and keep trying.’

  *

  ‘We can’t do this,’ declared Kara with an air of finality, at last accepting this wasn’t going to work. It was now their twenty-seventh restart, and they’d managed to track The Big Bad in reverse, gaining a 30-minute head-start on him, until eventually losing him by choosing an incorrect vantage point.

  ‘How can it be so difficult to track someone’s steps in reverse?!’ she added.

  ‘I don’t think it’s the difficulty exactly,’ said Hal. ‘More the trial and error of it all,’ he added, as they took stock on how much of a painfully-slow process the entire experience had been thus far.

  After seven restarts, they were forced to accept that their idea, though clever in theory, simply wasn’t working. Realising that they needed to employ fresh tactics, they adapted their plan, choosing to follow Kevin instead, hoping that The Big Bad would be present somewhere along the way, lurking in the shadows and stalking his soon-to-be victim.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  28 Daisy’s Later

  28th Restart – Friday Afternoon, 12:01am

  As soon as the sound of rushing air has ceased, and Hal had regained his balance from yet another failed time-traveller-landing, they turned their focus towards the next crucial element of their plan, which was simple, in theory. Armed with the vital information that the killer wasn’t actually Kevin, contrary to their initial assumption, all they had to do was find the real murderer, in order to devise a way to change the past. Whilst they didn’t know where their killer was in relation to Kevin’s lodge on Friday, they knew that he had captured Jerry’s owner late that Saturday afternoon.

  Hal and Kara headed over to Kevin’s late that Friday afternoon knowing, through trial and error, that tracking his whereabouts any sooner was a waste of time. During their multiple attempts at following The Big Bad, they had discovered that Kevin was not at home at the very beginning of their restarts, and they had no desire to scour the hundreds of acres of woodland on the off-chance that they would be able to locate him.

  Upon their arrival, they followed Kevin around his house like shadows. Kevin eventually grabbed the keys to his truck and called out for Jerry, until his dog dutifully returned from the woods. They knew better than to get locked in, slipping out of the front door, as Kevin closed it behind him and got into his truck.

  Hal impulsively jumped into the back of the open-topped vehicle and gestured for Kara to follow. She followed his lead and, for the first time since they could remember, they didn’t have to walk for a while. She positioned herself with her back to the rear axle of the vehicle, as Hal positioned himself at the opposite end of the storage section of the truck, leaning against the rear of the cabin that Kevin was occupying.

  As Kevin drove through the winding roads, Hal was trying to get his head around how they could be in a moving vehicle, despite being out-of-phase was time.

  ‘All I’m saying is, it’s like when you’re on a train. If you jump when it’s moving, you don’t go flying down the carriage right?’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said Kara, not really paying attention to a conversation that would clearly have been more up Alex’s alley than hers.

  ‘I guess it’s something to do with everything inside, moving at the same speed as the train itself?’ continued Hal.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘But we can’t be moving as fast as this truck if we’re not even technically in–’

  ‘Hal…’

  ‘–the truck, I mean we’re displaced from the physical–’

  ‘HAL!’ shouted Kara, pointing to something directly behind him.

  Hal stopped talking, and turned around to look out at the road ahead.

  Kevin was heading in the direction of the boundary line, hurtling them straight towards where the time-barri
er was lurking.

  ‘Shit. Shit! We have to jump!’ said Kara, as she perched herself on the edge of the truck, spun her legs over the side, and assumed the foetal position, as she jumped out. Hal looked out at her as she got up and dusted herself down, rapidly decreasing in size as the vehicle sped away from her.

  ‘Okay, okay…we don’t feel pain here, just jump,’ said Hal, in what was clearly a futile attempt at convincing himself. But after five attempts of counting to three and not jumping, he realised he was caught in an endless loop of over-thinking it.

  As the portal to another restart approached at a giddying speed, Hal finally jumped off the side, landing like a crash-test dummy, arms and legs everywhere. He watched, as Kevin drove off into the distance, unrestricted by the same laws that were keeping them here.

  As he picked himself up off the dust covered concrete, he realised he had lost one of his boots. Hal turned around, and saw that half of his boot was over the barrier, like it had been cut at an angle with a laser-sword, a blue rim of glowing energy burning around where it had been cut.

  Gingerly, Hal reached out for it, pulling the boot towards him. The remainder of his boot had been either sent hurtling back in time, or erased entirely. He held it up to show Kara, who had decided to sit on the grass rather than walk towards him.

  Throwing the remaining half of his wellie into the abyss over his shoulder, it vanished with a faint sizzle, comically reappearing on his foot in an instant. Hal marvelled at what must have been the most flagrant misuse of time-travel since a famous witch was given unrestricted access to a time-displacement device to facilitate her request to attend extra school classes.

  *

  With the arrival of yet another Saturday, the Restarters waited impatiently for Kevin to make his appearance at what was technically now their annual barbecue. The most-frustrating part of being a Restarter was waiting for the moment you wanted, but knowing there was nothing you could do to get to it besides waiting for it to arrive. They had places to be, things to do, but none of it could be accomplished until the correct chain of events began. They had returned to Kevin’s lodge the night before, avoiding getting trapped in his storage cupboard, only to discover that Kevin’s Friday evening was entirely unremarkable.