“Who’s there?”
Nothing. Another caress from the dark, this time on his right side, toward the back wall of the clock. It felt like a bony hand running down the length of his arm. Evan swung again, this time his knuckles encountering some resistance, but only momentarily. A warm draft of air, then cold.
His dream from the night before came back to him. The darkness alive around him, touching, picking, tasting him. He moved backward, turning in a circle, losing all sense of direction.
“Shaun!”
His yell echoed back to him from a thousand feet, ten thousand. His foot struck something in the dark, and he heard the rustle again, a susurration, and then quiet.
Evan.
The voice came from everywhere at once—the walls, if there were any, spoke his name, as well as the floor. Worst of all, he heard it in his head. Not the normal musings of his internal voice but a foreign communication.
“Who’s there?” he asked again, hoping for and dreading a reply.
Evan.
The voice sounded synthetic, a miasmic blending of tones and depth, not human in the least. The space brightened, lit by a shape behind and above him. Evan turned toward it, squinting at the source until it became clear.
The steel crescent-moon dial had increased in size, along with the rest of the clock. It was now several yards across, and shone with a vague opalescence mixing with the darkness so that the light shifted and moved like a tide through the air. At one moment it would be on his left, and then would flow gradually to the right, all the while the crescent moon grinned its malicious smile down on him as its eye pinned him to the ground.
“What is this?” His voice resounded for a second and then stopped as though crushed in midair.
Your destiny, Evan.
He clutched his ears, the voice bubbling through his skull with a paralytic touch of violation.
You’ve come through the years to this time and place, and I’ve been waiting, patiently waiting.
Evan blinked, his vision hazy with the rolling light of the steel moon. The floor he stood on remained black despite the touch of light, and no defining features were revealed in its glow.
“Where’s my son?”
Here, Evan. Everyone is here, can’t you feel them?
“Who are you?”
I am one and many. I am the creator. I am the time and the soul.
His knees unhinged, and he dropped to the ground, feeling something begin to drip from his nose. Hearing the voice was like standing inside a giant speaker, with a smaller speaker in his head. The noise of it was everywhere and nowhere.
“Stop, stop, get out of my head,” he said, bracing a hand against the floor.
More blood fell from his nose, splashing to his hand. It looked like tar in the moon’s sick light.
Is this better?
The voice now came from directly in front of him, and something stood there, just outside the moonbeam’s reach. Something rumpled and hunched. Manlike, but so wrong he couldn’t find words to describe it.
“Where’s Shaun?”
His head felt huge, heavy on his neck, but the nosebleed had stopped, a faucet shut off within his skull. He stood and wiped away the blood drying on his upper lip. The man-shape was gone. He pivoted slowly, trying to distinguish his position within the cavernous space.
“Who are you?”
Evan caught movement off to his right and turned as the figure walked toward him, the moon’s light finally illuminating it.
It looked vaguely human, but it wasn’t, he was sure of it. It wore a swirling suit of darkness that continued to move even after it stopped walking. Its cloak twisted and crawled with life of its own. Shining eyes inspected Evan from various places on its body and then melded with the rest of the darkness. Its face had no continuity, a wax blur of features without structure. It flowed, melted, a nose erupting and then receding, a mouth blooming, teeth flashing, then gone. Hair grew and shrunk, while eyes, sometimes one, sometimes three, blinked and then sank away. It was then that he realized it did not wear the darkness—its skin was the darkness.
Evan took a step back and something crunched beneath his heel. He nearly stumbled but managed to keep his feet as he looked down at the pile of bones he’d tripped over. The skeleton wore a faded pair of women’s slacks, their original color no longer discernable. A blouse, thin and flowing, lay around the sunken rib cage like a deflated balloon. Curly strands of gray hair sat in piles above the grinning skull.
They never found my grandma. Jason’s voice came back to him, the memory nudged either by seeing the bones on the floor or by the thing standing nearby.
He tore his gaze away from the bones as the figure’s shape churned and became a kind-looking woman in her seventies who had Jason’s chin and cheekbones. She smiled at him, an upside-down grimace.
The swirling moon’s light shifted and shone on another rumpled mass a few paces from Maggie’s remains. This corpse had some flesh still covering its bones, but death had taken its eyes away, along with its lips, so that it smiled, its teeth bright ivory.
Bob Garrison. He was the first in many years.
Evan gazed at the body and recognized Bob, even in death. He looked back to the figure to watch it shift again, taking on the form he’d seen on the Internet while researching the former caretaker’s past. Bob sneered at him, his eyes sharpened points.
The light swirled, washing past Bob’s rotting corpse. It coursed over the floor, illuminating the unmistakable hind-leg bones of a dog, and then brightened a spot where another full skeleton lay, this one blinding white through tattered suit pants and a limp jacket.
The figure melted again, a long nose and two cold eyes solidifying in a sallow face. The suit pants and jacket came into focus and hung like a loose skin on the man’s frame, although they looked brand-new. The man’s lips moved when he spoke, but there was a delay as the words crossed the air between them.