The Loop

One Day Ago - July 30th

“So you’ve known all day? And you forgot until you came home?” Angie’s tone was accusatory, and more than a little bit suspicious.

Fuck, I thought. Of course, my mother hadn’t texted me anything about Angie’s friends; I’d gleaned the information from Angie’s mind, but I wasn’t about to tell her that. I could have come up with a better excuse, though, if half my thoughts weren’t somewhere else, miles away, back at the restaurant or guessing where my friends—or former friends—had gone from there.

As Angie stomped off up the stairs, the cat meowing angrily and leaping out of her way, my thoughts turned back to the here and now, only a little bit too late.

I tried to subtly nudge Angie’s mood in a more positive direction, but I wanted to do it without prying into her actual thoughts. I was trying to be non-invasive, but it occurred to me that there probably wasn’t any real non-invasive way to handle being inside someone else’s head. I pulled my mental tendrils back inside my own mind.

It felt odd how quickly I was getting used to the power—to what should have felt like a serious breach of boundaries, confidentiality, trust. And not just getting used to the moral implications of it, but to the mechanics of it. While the others had spent hours at the restaurant doing little experiments and tests, and they still didn’t seem to fully grasp the extent of their powers, for me it was like I’d always known how to use the power, and my mind and body were just waiting to have access to it. I just wish I knew how that could be.

Experimentally, I reached out toward the cat. I found foreign and alien images there, images my mind could almost resolve into recognizable objects, sounds, feelings. Instead of focusing and trying to make sense of her mind, I let my attention drift and float along the surface of her sensory impressions and memories. Her conscious mind was an ever shifting mass of feelings and sensations, her attention constantly moving from one thing to another.

After a few minutes I started to recognize things as she saw them: a cotton ball that had fallen behind the couch looked like a mouse to her, the cabinet drawer behind which her food was kept glowed with a strange emotional color that I understood as ‘want’ and ‘happy’. She looked at me with a curious head tilt and a narrowing of the eyes and I pulled back. I had already been devastated today by what the people closest to me thought of me, seeing how my cat really saw me might have sent me over the edge.

It wasn’t late, but I couldn’t handle being awake anymore, so I went up to my room and flung myself on my bed, not even bothering to take off my shoes.

I shouldn’t have been able to sleep so easily. I should have spent hours torturing myself mentally, and as I felt myself drifting off, I felt guilty that I wasn’t, but at a certain point emotional and mental exhaustion overpower whatever else is going on in your head. In the strange and fleeting moments between wakefulness and sleep, I saw two things: a man I didn’t know wearing a silly mask and telling me that I’d find a way to save everyone, and Christine’s body lying face down in a desert somewhere, the wind-blown sand conspiring with the vultures to methodically remove her flesh from her body.

Beyond these images, my sleep was dreamless.

July 31st

I awoke covered in a sheen of sweat the next morning, surprised to find myself still dressed. I was even more surprised to find that it was two in the afternoon. My mind, now revitalized by sleep, immediately started looping through the events from yesterday. I hadn’t changed my stance on whether it was right or wrong to go after Shannon—I still believed we should have informed the authorities and let them handle it—but I realized now that if I couldn’t have convinced the others of this, if they were going to go after her regardless, then I should at least have gone with them.

I wasn’t interested in vigilante justice, or in us all getting ourselves killed trying to do something we weren’t equipped to do, but I was interested in protecting the people I cared about, and they were certainly more likely to be safe if I was with them than not.

Even if I hadn’t been able to see her thoughts, I would have realized before long the mental association Angie had made between the conversation we’d had in my car a couple weeks ago and what had happened to Sarah’s brother. And it didn’t take much mental effort to draw a logical line from that to what had happened to her parents, or to Sarah herself. Angie wasn’t justified in blaming me, not that I could see, but blame doesn’t require a justification. Blame only requires a feeling. Hell, I knew what happened wasn’t my fault, and even I blamed myself.

Did I want something like that on my conscience again? Something so weighty I wasn’t sure I’d ever clear it completely from my mind? Could I handle another thing like that so soon?

I knew at that moment that I had to go after them, but I didn’t even know where to begin. To Lincoln and Harper’s house? That seemed logical, but surely they would have moved on from there by now.

Moved on, I thought. Yeah. They did. Of course they did. Where? Shannon’s office? Dale’s home? Who’s Dale? Shannon’s coworker. But no, not there. Shannon’s house. Yes, that seemed right.

Where were these answers coming from? Where were these questions coming from?

I couldn’t say right away, but I knew they were right, whatever their source.

I wasn’t just thinking, or guessing. I was remembering. I had been through all of this before. How was that possible? I had no idea, but I knew it was right.

I’d been having increasingly frequent episodes of déjà vu over the last few weeks, and this felt like another one of those. But for the first time, I was certain that it wasn’t just a misfiring of signals in my brain, or memory wires getting crossed, I was sure the things I was remembering were real. They had really happened, in some other time, in some other place.

So Shannon’s house. Yes, that’s where they’d be heading. I didn’t think they’d be there yet. If I left now I’d probably beat them there. I got up and was about to grab my keys, shout goodbye to Angie, run out the door, but … There was a nagging doubt at the back of my mind.

This can’t be real, it told me. It doesn’t make sense. I couldn’t know these things because they hadn’t happened yet. Seeing the future wasn’t my power. Was it even the future I was seeing? No, it was the past. My past, at least. But again, I wasn’t seeing it, because it wasn’t real.

What else could I remember? They’d get there, fight this guy—this Dale—and eventually overpower him somehow, but not before he killed Shannon. Lincoln would never forgive me, he’d leave the city, the state, the country. He’d fall off the radar for a while, until eventually he resurfaced as the leader of a massive criminal organization in Europe. He’d overthrow a government or two. He’d come after me, after my team, and it wouldn’t end until his own sister was forced to kill him.

That’s what would happen. That’s what did happen, my mind corrected itself.

No. No.

I was fighting against a wave of nausea, and I realized I hadn’t eaten since before my shift started yesterday. I decided that getting something in my stomach would help settle it.

Leaving my room, I realized with a start that the only other mind I could feel in the house was the cat’s. My parents would be at work, I supposed, but I had no idea where Angie would be. I hadn’t driven her to swimming this morning; if she weren’t so mad at me she probably would have woken me up to do it, but she hadn’t sent a text or left a note and so I had no idea where she might have gone.

As I walked out the front door, I felt another bout of déjà vu threatening to roll over me. I distracted myself with thoughts of mundane things: my work schedule, the upcoming enrollment dates for my fall semester classes … how to proceed in my relationship with Christine—after the night we’d gone to the movies and ended up kissing, we’d been as close as ever, but it was like there was some unspoken agreement between us to not mention that night—and that inevitably got me thinking about the task at hand again.

I wasn’t sure why I was hesitating to act now. I’d made up my mind to do something, to be the opposite of the man I normally was, but now these memories, if that’s what they were, were making it harder to act than ever. And why? Because if they weren’t real, they could send me on some wild goose chase that got me farther from my friends than I already was? No, that wasn’t it. Because some part of me had already accepted that they were real, that if I behaved exactly as I somehow remembered myself doing in that impossible long ago situation where I’d apparently found myself in these same circumstances, then things really would play out exactly as I remembered them. Was it because I couldn’t think of how to do things differently, that I was afraid any action I did take would make things worse instead of better? That was closer to it, but not quite.

No. The real reason I couldn’t act right now was because these bouts of déjà vu were starting to feel more and more like the inevitable course of things. Like fate. Like events predestined and determined that are not meant to be changed. It wasn’t so much that I was afraid of making things worse, but that I was afraid of some universal moral punishment if I dared to interfere with fate at all.

———————

I pulled into the parking lot of a local restaurant shaped like a pie slice at the fork of two streets that split off in a Y-shape. This restaurant, The Wedge Diner, looked like a dingy nightmare that hadn’t been updated or renovated since the early 80s, but it had the best pecan pie in the county, or at least it claimed to. That sort of comfort food appealed to my emotional state, even as I wasn’t sure if my stomach could handle it.

Fate, I thought. How else could I explain seeing these things? It wasn’t a part of my power, and it had started before anyone knew anything about powers. I had to accept now that all my strange dreams and weird moments of time repeating over the past few weeks were related to the more intense thing I’d been experiencing today. But why would the universe intervene to show me the future if I wasn’t supposed to change it? Simply to prepare me?

I ate four bites of pie, mushed the rest with my fork until it hardly resembled food, pushed it around my plate so it looked like I had eaten more than I had, and flagged the waitress over for the bill.

“Not in the mood for pie today, hon?” she asked me.

“Not in the mood for anything.”

“Well, the day’s bound to get better. In fact, maybe it can get better starting right now. Your pie’s on the house.”

I smiled up at her. “No, I can’t let you do that.”

“Hon, I’ve seen people who just need a little bit of kindness in their day, and you’re one of them. I can’t fix all your problems with pie, but it’s a start.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s not like you ate much of it anyway.”

I didn’t say anything else, just got up and walked out to my car. I was holding back tears, certain they’d start flowing once I was out of sight of the waitress and the other patrons, but a strange thing happened; the closer I got to my car, the more sure I was feeling. My hopelessness was fading. I didn’t believe in fate, I reminded myself. I never had. There would have been no point in eternally agonizing over my actions or lack thereof over the years if I didn’t truly believe that I could have done something else.

Shannon’s house was on the other end of town, about a forty-five minute drive. If I started right now, I’d be there faster than I had been in my impossible memory, maybe fast enough to make a difference.

———————

I got to the house in time to watch the others go inside, but not in time to stop them. I tried to shout out, but as soon as they were in the door, a wall of shadow enveloped the exterior of the house, like some sick oily film that blocked both my voice and my power. I could feel them inside the house, faintly, but it was like pushing my hands through thick mud and trying to make out the shapes of the objects I found inside.

Their minds were even harder to feel. I had only the vaguest sense that the things I was encountering with my power were conscious, human minds. Complicating matters further was the fact that they—both bodies and minds—periodically seemed to blink out of existence for some time. Christine reappeared in my perception first, then Jaleel. The two of them were easier to make out than anything or anyone else in the house, but still significantly obscured.

I circled the house, looking for a break in the impenetrable shadow through which my power might be able to get inside. I could feel the shadow, and the more I felt of it, the more my brain seemed to be making sense of it as something I could understand: another mind. I could start to see familiar shapes within it. Familiar sensations, familiar desires. Memories. A hated mother, a beloved girl, betrayal, dead pets and wild animals.

Almost every mind I’d encountered with my power thus far had been fairly well ordered, and always in a similar fashion to my own, making them easy to comprehend. This mind, though, was fluid, disorganized, connections between one thought and the next were in constant flux, feelings about specific memories and how they related to the present were shifting ceaselessly. If other minds were cars that moved along well-designed infrastructures of streets and highways from one stop to the next in a logical and predictable pattern, his mind was a ship on a stormy sea, never quite in control of where it was going or even fully aware of where it was.

It amazed me that such a mind could support a living person at all without collapsing in on itself. But then it occurred to me that it had been collapsing for some time, that I was witnessing the ineluctable conclusion of that collapse in real time.

After what seemed like a prolonged struggle inside the house, I felt Harper emerge from the shadows alongside Jaleel and Christine. I felt Jaleel’s exhaustion, Christine’s struggle to keep whatever fragile safety they had achieved alive, Harper’s relentless optimism fading. I needed to get in there.

All at once, the shadows shrank back and fled to a corner of the house upstairs, away from where my three friends stood in the front hallway. As soon as they did, I got a clearer glimpse of both the house and the state of their minds. They were worn out. Too worn out to sense the trap they were being lured into.

The shadow slinked around upstairs and came back down the backside of the house, covering the windows and doors as it did so. Once again my perception of the interior of the house was diminished, but not so much that I didn’t sense Christine proceeding into the kitchen, her head turned away from the window where the shadow thing was approaching.

I started panicking, still finding my power’s reach inside the house too weak to actually do anything besides observe. I tried to lift something that might have been a book on a shelf in the living room. Nothing happened.

Instead I focused on my adversary’s mind, convinced that cracking the strange enigma of his thoughts was the only way forward. How had Christine and the others beat him before, in the time that couldn’t have really existed and yet did? In that memory, I hadn’t arrived until after the battle was finished, and yet they’d all come through it unscathed. All, that was, except Shannon.

Christine had fought him from the inside, had found that her power still worked when she was within the shadow. She’d found a way to absorb the alien energy there and use it to overwhelm him, to punch a hole out through him, killing him in the process. Yes, I thought. But not before he killed Shannon in a last act of rage. It had been the first of Christine’s kills, and his defiant, spiteful murder of Shannon had only reinforced in her the notion that it had been righteous.

So I wasn’t really here to save them, not all of them. They’d win this fight without me. I was only here to save Shannon’s life. And, maybe, ensure that Christine and Lincoln would become better people than they’d been, than they were meant to be.

As the shadow made its inevitable way down the hall toward both Jaleel and Harper, it left the doors and windows at the back of the house guarded by only a thin, shimmering sheen of shadowstuff. It no longer felt like a barrier. I pushed forcefully with both my powers, into the mind of the shadow man, Pitch, and into the glass window he guarded with insufficient care. The window broke first, but his mind wouldn’t be far behind.

———————

Later on, after I’d explained, briefly, most of what I’d seen and why I’d come, and Lincoln had briefed us on how we should talk to the cops; after we’d sat outside on the stoop and watched the police car pull away with Dale in the back seat; after the ambulance had taken Shannon away to be looked at, even though she appeared uninjured, with Lincoln insisting on going with her to the hospital; after much of the noise and chaos had ended and left us alone on a darkening street, ordinary but for the police tape around one of the houses, I took the remaining three into my confidence. I told them what I hadn’t been able to tell Lincoln or Shannon.

“There was something inside her,” I said.

“Inside whom?” asked Jaleel.

“Shannon,” Harper answered, frowning. “I saw the way you looked at her when she came down the stairs, with like, a mixture of pity and … fear.”

“Fear?” Christine asked. “Why would you be afraid of her? What was inside her?”

“He put something in there. She was carrying it. Like … like a child.”

“He what?” asked Jaleel.

Christine leaned over the railing behind the park bench we were sitting on and retched. Nothing came up.

“How could he …? What did he …?”

“I have no idea how, or what. But I think it was part of his plan. He wanted to make her into something his own mother never was. The perfect mother. The thing he put inside her, it was … like him. Made of the same stuff.”

As we sat in a profound and uncomfortable silence, I saw Christine’s mother’s car pulling up. Across and down the street, Shannon’s house was still lit up, and we could see detectives and medical examiners moving around inside, behind the curtains. The police had asked us to stay nearby while we waited to be picked up, but we’d insisted on walking to the park. They’d seemed skeptical, but I’d said it wasn’t good for us, mentally, to stay so close to such a traumatic place. I may have given them a small mental nudge in the right direction, too.

“Your ‘rents are meeting Linc at the hospital, right?” Christine asked Harper.

“Yeah.”

“Come on, I’ll give you a ride.”

The two girls got up to leave. Christine gave me a quick hug. Harper gave me a tight smile and a wave as she turned away.

“We’ll talk later,” Christine said, and then she, too, was turning to leave.

Harper had been walking around wide-eyed, unable to focus on anything for any length of time, and I had been surprised that the paramedics hadn’t insisted on bringing her to the hospital, too. It was best that she was with someone right now, and Christine, despite her hard exterior, was probably the best person for the job.

My car was parked around the corner, and Lincoln’s was a street over. No one had even discussed us taking them home tonight. The notion seemed absurd.

Jaleel’s parents would be another few minutes, and my own were probably not far behind.

Jaleel leaned toward me and looked at me levelly. His eyes roved my face for long enough that I started to feel uncomfortable before he spoke.

“You’re serious? About something being inside her?”

“Something was inside her,” I said. “And of course I’m serious.”

“When you say ‘was’ instead of ‘is’, what do you mean?”

“I … I killed it, snuffed it out, whatever it was.”

“Good. That’s … good, I guess.”

“Is there something else?” I asked him, even though I already knew there was.

“When … When I used my power the last time, I only saw darkness. I thought that meant that at 10 p.m. tomorrow—the time of my vision—I’d be dead. But then you showed up and changed the outcome of things. Thing is, I thought that my predictions were set in stone unless someone who knew about them changed something. But you didn’t know, couldn’t have known, because I didn’t say anything about that prediction to anyone, and you were already on your way in the house when I made it, so …”

“So you’re wondering if it still comes true? If maybe whatever I did tonight didn’t actually change your fate?”

He nodded slowly. I knew even without using my power that he didn’t want to say it out loud for fear that it would make it true.

“I can tell you this, Jaleel: my own thing, it isn’t a prediction, although I know it must sound that way. What I experienced was a memory of what seems like a long, long time ago—like you’d remember junior high, or your eighth birthday—that is to say, all this happened. Don’t ask me how. But the point is, what I know for sure, what I remember, is that you didn’t die tonight, or tomorrow … Even without my intervention, you lived for a long time”—here I stopped, almost choked up, not wanting to qualify what a ‘long time’ meant, as some other impossible memory of Jaleel threatened to surface—“and you were the best of us.”

“So what? Your memories trump my actual prophecy powers? The ones that work in the here and now?”

“Why don’t you have another look?”

He shook his head violently.

“Okay,” I said. “Well, darkness doesn’t have to mean death.” His mother’s car was approaching us now, slowing as it went past Shannon’s house. “Have you considered that after the last couple days, you'll need to catch up on your sleep? Have you considered that at 10 p.m. tomorrow night, you could be sleeping?”

He looked at me as if I’d just lifted some horrible burden from his shoulders.

“I think that’s it,” he said. “Holy shit, I think that must be it. Why didn’t I think of that?”

“Give yourself a break,” I said as he stood up and stretched, waving at his mother. “You had a lot on your mind.”

He stood and looked back and forth between the car and me a few times before asking if I wanted him to wait with me a little longer for my own parents to arrive. I told him no, that was fine, I didn’t mind being alone. And I didn’t, never had. We shook hands and said goodbye, said we’d talk again soon.

We had a lot more to discuss, but it could wait. For now, I needed to be alone with my thoughts. With the things I hadn’t—couldn’t—tell any of them. Like how close Lincoln had come to being a murderous tyrant, like how Christine’s trajectory toward rage and violence had, hopefully, been averted, like how I’d almost thought I sensed the thing inside Shannon still squirming even after I’d used the full weight of my power to crush it.

Like how I wasn’t certain that changing fate had been the right decision because with each deviation from my how things were in my memory, any other memories I had of my impossible past would become further from reality.

Like how part of me thought it might have been better to let Shannon die.