Sea Sick: A Horror Novel(25)
Her room was nice, personal, with a wide assortment of chintzy knickknacks adding to its charm. Jack took a seat on the foot of the neatly-made bed and Tally sat down on a chair beside the room’s cluttered dressing table.
“So, what do you know?”Jack asked before she even had time to settle in her seat.
“The day is resetting.”
Jack sighed. “I know that! The day keeps repeating over and over.”
Tally shook her head. “No, you do not understand. It is not repeating. It is resetting.”
“What’s the difference?”
“For the day to be repeating it must first exist, an unchangeable part of our timeline. That is not what is happening. For whatever reason, this day is being wiped clean at midnight and reset to start over.”
“But the same things happen every day. Repeating.”
Tally looked at Jack as though he was a child. “No. The things that happen on this day are fated to occur. They happen because they are a culmination of the almost infinite events from the days preceding them. What people do tomorrow is a product of what they do today. The world ripples and those ripples do not change.”
Jack tried to understand. He sort of did. People kept acting the same way because they were acting however they would have if the day had just gone by once. There were no factors to make them behave any differently so they didn’t. Things only changed if Jack did something to directly influence events.
As if reading his mind, Tally said, “This is why you can change things, Jack. If the day was repeating, so too would you repeat. Your free will exhibits that the day is being reset, and that you are the only passenger of this ship that can still remember the previous version of events that have been erased. Whoever did this chose you for something.”
“And you,” Jack quickly added.
Tally shook her head. “No. At first I was like everybody else. I didn’t realise what was happening.”
“So what changed? How come you know now?”
“I am Romany. My people have dealt with magic for centuries. We have built up certain…resistances. At first I was oblivious, the same as everybody else, but the longer the spell was in effect the more it failed to get through my natural defences. At first I just felt a little odd, daydreaming about things that hadn’t happened – or at least I believed so at the time – but then, gradually, I became aware of what was happening. I stayed in my room for many days, trying to make sense of things. On one of those days I saw you knocking on doors and asking about me. I was frightened, of course, and I hid from you, but I also realised that whatever is going on wasn’t just happening to me.”
“What is happening?” Jack urged her to tell him because the anticipation was killing him. This woman sitting in front of him perhaps held the knowledge to end his suffering.
Tally sighed. “I do not know for sure, Jack, but I believe there is a pathwalker aboard this ship.”
Jack swallowed a mouth full of saliva and stretched his eyes wide to clear them of their fuzziness. He wanted to make sure he had heard her properly. “A pathwalker? What the hell is a pathwalker?”
“A pathwalker is a very powerful being. Human, yet…changed. They undergo a ritual at a young age which allows them to see across the many threads of time. They are the true seers of the future and the past. They can even see sideways.”
“Sideways?”
“Yes, sideways. Every time you make a decision, Jack, there are a thousand possibilities that you did not follow. Each of those possibilities plays out in an alternative version of events, with alternative versions of you.”
“That’s sounds a bit Movie of the Week to me.”
Tally did not seem to understand his incredulity. She carried on her explanation as if she were reading it from a textbook. “Think of time as a piece of string made of many, many tiny threads. Each time you choose left, another version of you chooses right, and the string is pulled apart into two separate threads. This happens millions of times every second and the strings eventually become a tangled weave, a tapestry of existence. We call this tapestry the celestial pathways. And a pathwalker can grab a hold of every one of these tiny threads and see the events that transpired there. They can even, sometimes, affect things – I think we are seeing an example of that now – although there are consequences.”
Jack leant back on his palms and let out a long, laboured breath while he tried to absorb everything. It sounded like a bunch of hocus-pocus and new-world superstition but, with what he had been through for the last six months, he really had no option but to believe what Tally was telling him. Jack had to believe in something or he would go insane.
“So, this pathwalker?” he said.“He’s evil, right? Like some kind of witch?”
Tally shook her head. “No, Jack. Not at all. Pathwalkers are good. They are protectors of the world. I do not know why they are doing this, but it will be for a reason.”
Jack couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He couldn’t agree that anyone responsible for the hell he was in was good. There was just no way. Jack had to find out who this pathwalker was, and force him to stop doing whatever it was he was doing. The madness had to stop.
Even if it means I have to kill the son of a bitch!
Day 199
Jack had gone back to his room after talking to Tally. He needed to think things through. What Tally had told him, about pathwalkers and time-threads, was a lot to take in for a sane person. Jack’s already-crazy world had suddenly grown to include time-controlling wizards and magic-resistant Romany gypsies – and, for some reason, he’d been selected to play some part of a plan he knew nothing about. Tally hadn’t even gotten around to discussing the virus onboard; it had almost seemed like a background event to her.