The Waiting: A Supernatural Thriller(77)

“Evan, what’s going on?”

He turned. Selena was standing in the hallway, her hair sticking out in several places, her eyes bleary.

“I, I thought I saw something, someone.”

“You saw someone? In the house?”

“Yeah, it was there in the room. It held my hand.” The memory of the thing’s grip made him convulse, and he rubbed his palm on his pants leg.

“Held your hand? Evan, you’re not making sense.”

“It was there, right there,” he said, moving past her and into the hall. He pointed toward the bed, looking at the floor, hoping for a telltale sign of the thing’s passage. “I went to hold your hand, and it wasn’t yours. It was something else. It ...”

His dropped his head as Selena came closer.

“I think you may have been dreaming,” she said, touching his shoulder.

“I wasn’t dreaming, I was awake. I know I was awake.”

“Are you sure? I’ve had a few clients with night terrors that they swear are as real as waking life.”

“This wasn’t a night terror,” Evan said, shrugging off her hand.

He moved into the hallway again and stood, sniffing the air. A faint hint of rot lingered.

“Do you smell that?”

“Smell what?”

“That smell. It’s like something rotten, spoiled meat. Here, come here.”

He motioned her into the hall, then pulled her closer to the living room. “Do you smell it?”

Selena raised her face and inhaled a few times. She frowned.

“No, I don’t. All I smell is last night’s dinner.”

Evan closed his eyes, opened them, and walked to the living room. He looked at the dark lake, no light on its surface yet, only a black cloth beyond the trees.

“Let me ask you this,” Selena said, moving to the couch. “Was I the first one you told about your wife, what she asked you to do?”

Evan didn’t answer for a long time, and then finally said, “Yes.”

“Do you know what kind of stress comes with a burden like that? Keeping it all inside, letting it whittle away at you?”

He didn’t say anything, just let her talk.

“Releasing something like that can cause stress too, you know. It’s like pulling out a knife that’s been keeping a wound from bleeding. When you do, there’s trauma.”

“You know, I’d like to believe that, I really would.” His voice sounded strange, far away, not his own. “I want to think stress, the past, is what’s doing this, but I’m not sure, and that’s the worst part. Not being sure is worse than anything else. You’re on a high wire knowing you’re going to fall, but not which way.”

“I’m sure it’s stress.”

“Well, that makes one of us.”

“What you’re experiencing is perfectly normal.”

He coughed laughter. “Nothing in the last four years has been normal.”

The faint inklings of the treetops across the water became visible. The sun was rising, throwing its radiance out like a candle in another room.

“The how is fine, I can relate to that, understand it,” Evan said, after a while. “The how is measurable, calculable, it’s numbers and math. It’s the why ...” His hand bunched into a fist and shook at his side. “The why is what gets me. It’s what makes me dream at night and wonder during the day. It never makes sense, and what really pisses me off is, there is no answer to that one.” He spun, seeing and not seeing her. “That’s the biggest joke there is, and it doesn’t have a punch line.”


Evan walked toward the kitchen, meaning to put on some coffee, but instead went to the basement door, pulling it open and descending before Selena could say anything more.





25





He sat in the basement staring at the clock.

The f*cking clock. Its black skin, its quiet contemplation. Serene and uncaring.

“Damn you.”

The air was cold, and he shivered, his skin rippling. He could almost see the air he breathed out. Could that be? Evan stood and moved to it, staring up at its height, feeling like he was in front of an avalanche. Power. That’s what the air tasted like. An electric coppery tang, almost like simmering blood.

He put out a hand and touched the clock’s front. His arm went numb to the elbow, and he opened his mouth to gasp but stopped, letting the thrum travel through him.

Power.

Enough to scorch the outline on the wall. Enough to chill the air. He wasn’t imagining that. Power to change things, to make them right. He tried to pull his hand back, but it seemed glued there. The clock could explode at any second, he was sure of it, explode and blow him all the way across the room. It could— The feeling returned to his arm. He let it drop to his side, his eyes staring past the clock, through it.

“It was there the whole time.”

His eyes traveled up to the clock’s face, and he saw the position of the hands, a startled thrill running through him. A hand on the two, two hands on the zero, one hand on the eight. The year before Shaun’s accident—2008. Had he changed that the day before? No. A ripple of fear and wonder went through him as he remembered looking at the clock as soon as he’d come down to the basement. It had been at 1919 less than an hour ago.