Chapter 12
CHAPTER
TWELVE
The next morning, Jack used the pay phone at the train station, where the pile of spare change awaited him.
He worried that he might be too memorable so early in the morning, when the station was far from busy, and the employees looked at him like something that had been scraped off the tracks.
But he was hesitant to use the phone in his room.
If this was what actually broke the loop, he didn’t want the police to easily trace him.
His hands shook so badly that he nearly missed the buttons. Afraid to trust them further, he cradled the phone between chin and shoulder. As it rang, bile sped up his throat, foul taste lingering in the back of his mouth.
A deep, raspy voice answered. “Hidden Cove police department. What’s your emergency?”
“Oh, um, hello,” said Jack. Only once in living memory had he called 911, and he was terribly out of practice. For all the crime he’d witnessed downtown, he was never the first to reach a phone in an emergency. “Yes, I’d like to report a… well, I think it’s a body.”
“You reporting a crime or ordering a pizza?” the voice demanded. “Tell me more. Where’s it located?”
Definitely a smoker on the other line, Jack decided.
Possibly a woman. An irrelevant detail either way.
“I—It’s just off the trail south of town.
If you take the Red Line trail toward the Green Line trail, there’s some trampled bushes and drag marks.
About fifty feet into the forest, there’s, um, a mound under a tree, and it’s—”
“We don’t investigate mounds,” the voice interrupted.
“But there’s drag marks—”
“Nah, you gotta have more proof than that.”
“Can’t you send someone over?”
“No,” the voice snapped. “Have a good day.” A pause. “Or don’t. I don’t care.”
“Wait—” Jack began.
Only the dial tone answered.
“Your police force,” Jack spat, slamming his coffee down onto Boris’s desk, “is the worst police force I’ve ever encountered.”
Boris looked from the dripping mug to Jack, wearing an expression of confused disgust that might’ve been comical under other circumstances. “Ain’t my police force. I don’t work for them.”
“This whole fucking town!” Jack seized his mug and brandished it. Coffee flew. In a profound panic, Boris snatched up the magazine and shoved it between the file cabinet and the desk. “You’re all so fucking weird. It’s like none of you have ever interacted with a real person before.”
“I’m a real person,” said Boris, growing more annoyed by the second. “What the fuck do you mean, we aren’t real people? You’re the weird one, buddy.”
“They won’t let me on the train because the date on my ticket is wrong, your police won’t investigate the body I found, everyone here is horribly rude and obtuse—”
Boris held up his hands, palms facing out. “Wait, wait, wait. You found a fucking body?”
“Yeah, that’s what I said,” Jack grumbled, slurping from the mug. Coffee slopped down the front of his shirt, lukewarm and sludgy. “And your police won’t do anything about it!”
“You, uh, you got a little something there, buddy,” said Boris, gesturing to his own chest.
“I know that!” Jack snarled.
“Just saying. You don’t look like you can afford a dry cleaner.”
“Well, this whole fucking place is cursed, so I don’t need one!”
“Cursed?” Boris’s eyebrows lifted.
“I’ve been here two weeks! It’s been the seventeenth of October every single day!”
“Uh-huh,” said Boris, unconvinced. “Yeah, that sounds rough, buddy. What’s this about a body?”
“I found a body in the woods! Or at least, I think it’s a body. It’s a person-sized mound under a tree, and—”
“Fuccckkkk.” Boris leaned back in his chair and folded his hands behind his head. “Yeah, that’s probably the mob.”
“The… mob?”
“Yeah. The mob. Angry guys with guns in suits? All about money and drugs? The mob, fuckwit.”
“I know what the mob is! I didn’t know you had the mob here. I thought that was a city thing.”
“City’s like thirty minutes that a-way,” said Boris, jabbing a thumb over his shoulder. “Those guys vacation here all the time. You see all those empty houses? Mob guys own them.”
Jack stared at him. Observed big, earnest blue eyes.
“Listen, you want a drink, man? You look like you need a drink.” Boris dug under the counter and emerged with the bottle of whiskey. “I can make you an Irish coffee. Well, a shitty Irish coffee.”
Jack sat in the chair across from him and slid the mug over. “Sure. Yeah. Might as well start drinking.”
“Fuck yeah,” said Boris, grinning. Whisky splashed into the mug, replaced the coffee twice over.
It tasted terrible, but Jack was grateful for each burning sip.
“But seriously,” said Boris, replacing the mottled cork. “You are fucking weird, dude.”
“I know,” Jack moaned, putting his face in his hands.
“What does ‘obtuse’ mean?”
With his only real lead scorched to dust, Jack spent the rest of the afternoon poring over the newspaper.
He’d managed to gather several editions and searched through each for anything notable.
Reports of anything that could be attributed to conspiracies or war.
But there was nothing suspicious. A single reported murder several towns away, some missing cows, and a review for a new cafe that had opened down the street.
Irritated and bored, Jack strolled through town, pausing to look inside windows and glaring down shopkeepers who raised their noses at him.
He’d done nothing but try to look as if he might consider giving them business.
If he’d really been a potential customer, their unfriendliness would’ve driven him off. And they deserved to know that.
Really, he was doing them a favor.
Honestly. This fucking town.
He perused the bookstore, this time paying more attention to the conspiracy books. The shopkeeper looked at him like he was one of the aliens featured on the covers, but Jack paid her no heed and marched straight up to the counter. “You, uh, like conspiracies?”
“I don’t support conspiracies,” the clerk snapped. “I support the truth.”
Jack nodded. Trailed his fingers over the surface of the counter. They came away coated in dust. All around him, hip-height stacks of books teetered. “Alright, that’s interesting. So, these books in here? They’re about the truth? Aliens and stuff?”
The shopkeeper nodded, watching warily, as if worried Jack might sprout tentacles and strangle her with them.
“Can I ask you a question then? I’m kind of looking for an expert’s opinion.”
Something just short of a grin appeared on her wrinkled face. “Well, I’m no expert, but I can offer some perspective.”
“Great!” said Jack, bobbing his head enthusiastically.
“OK, yeah. Some perspective would be great. So, let’s say, in theory, that I was caught in a time loop.
Every day is exactly the same. It’s always October seventeenth, no matter what I do or where I go.
It’s just October seventeenth, again and again.
Everyone does pretty much the same thing every day, and they have no clue.
What would cause something like that? Other than mental illness. ”
The shopkeeper stared at him, her lips pursed, brows raised. “That’s highly specific.”
“I know,” said Jack apologetically, worried he’d already scared her off.
“Well…” She frowned, tucked a long strand of graying hair behind her ear. “I guess it could be anything. A time traveler, maybe. One who broke the rules, or whose machine malfunctioned.”
“Oh,” said Jack. Time travel hadn’t even occurred to him. That someone or something could have interfered with the universe in such a way as to have effectively broken it.
If that were the case, how could it be fixed? Jack knew little of science. A childhood fascination with space exploration and a love of old television shows portraying life on alien planets did not a scientist make.
Fuck. He’d have to find an actual scientist and explain the situation to them. There was no chance that Jack could solve this on his own.
“Maybe a curse,” the clerk suggested, tapping a finger against her chin. “I think a cursed object could cause something like that. Or aliens.” She lowered her voice. “The greys are everywhere. Never, ever underestimate them.”
Jack’s stomach churned. “The, uh, the greys?”
“Grey aliens.” The shopkeeper gave a long-suffering sigh. “Like these.” She pointed to a book whose cover depicted a figure with long, sticklike limbs, and a bulbous head with no nose and huge eyes. The creature was naked and sexless, bathed in green light.
“Oh,” said Jack. His insides squirmed. He felt oddly like he’d just looked upon someone’s especially perverse fantasy. “I see. Um, why would the aliens do that?”
“To harvest your organs,” said the shopkeeper gleefully. “Or your soul. Or your memories. Accounts vary, and so do the projected reasons.”
“Why not harvest all my organs at once and just incinerate my body? Or chuck it out the airlock?”
“A time loop means they can keep harvesting your organs,” said the shopkeeper pointedly. “As many as they need, and you’d never know it.”
Jack shivered, and the shopkeeper laughed.
“You’d never know. They’d just keep stealing organs.”
“A lovely image,” Jack mumbled. “But who needs my organs?”
“The greys!”
Right then. This conversation was going nowhere. He turned to leave. “Thanks for your help.”
“If you’re looking for a book—”
But Jack was already gone.