TWENTY-FOUR
An hour later,the list was in front of them again. Carla insisted Jack drink a ginger ale, then dragged him on a tour of the grounds, past the lush vegetable garden, the greenhouse, the hedge maze. The distant sea crashed against the rocks, barely visible through the trees.
“This is why they call it Hidden Hill,” Carla told him. “You can’t see anything but trees for miles.”
It was difficult to believe that an entire ocean lurked only a quarter of a mile away, let alone a town. If Jack hadn’t learned the lay of the land climbing up here, he’d surely think himself lost in some vast wilderness.
They returned to the study. “Your turn,” she said, plopping down into Jack’s usual chair and crossing her legs primly. “You gotta add to the list.”
He stared down at the fountain pen. It was ridiculously expensive looking, a relic of a bygone time. Who had this belonged to? And how many people had they killed?
“Right,” he said, and added a shaky line.7) Digging up corpses.
“What else did you try?”
“Not much,” Jack admitted. “I did a lot of exploring, but it didn’t exactly yield much. Except…” He choked on a gasp as he recalled the pale man in a pinstripe suit. “Actually, there was, um, I met this man near the trailhead. He was… weird. He told me that normally ‘no one notices,’ and that I was very self-aware.”
Carla furrowed her brow. “What the fuck does that mean?”
“I’d also like to know,” said Jack. “I just…” He shuddered at the memory of milky white skin and strange, yellow eyes. “I don’t think he was human.”
“What the fuck was he, then? A Sasquatch?”
“No,” said Jack quickly, shaking his head. “I don’t know. Helookedhuman. But he had yellow eyes, and… I don’t know. Something wasn’t right. And I never saw him again after that.”
“Weird,” said Carla. Her fingernails tapped against the arm of the chair. “And you went back to the same place later? At the same time?”
“Yeah. Like I said, he wasn’t there anymore.”
Her eyes narrowed. “So, there are at least three of us.”
“I think he knows more than we do, for sure.”
“We should try to track him down,” said Carla, leaning forward eagerly. “When did you see him?”
“I think it was right before sunset,” said Jack, straining to recall something beyond the mist curling around his legs, the way the yellow-eyed man ground a cigarette butt beneath his loafer. “He was driving a blue sedan. Look, I don’t think he’s someone we should mess with.”
“Yeah, well, if he knows something, he’s gonna tell us,” Carla growled. Her lips pulled back into a snarl. “We should see if he comes back.”
“He won’t,” insisted Jack. “I think he was just passing through.” He felt this with absolute certainty, though he couldn’t explain why. Just knew that there was something inherentlyotherabout this man, the same way he might deduce that a strange-looking photograph was, in fact, actually averyrealistic painting.
“Tell me, how the fuck do youjust pass througha time loop?”
Jack shrugged. “I-I don’t know.”
“Exactly. You don’t. This fucker knows something, and we’re gonna find out what it is.” Carla snapped her fingers. “Come on.You like those detective shows. We’ll do a stakeout. We can bring some snacks, make a game out of it. It’ll be fun.”
Uncertainty flared at the base of his spine, shot up his back fever-hot. “We can try it. But he’s not—Carla, he’s not human. I don’t know what he is, but he’s fucking scary. And I doubt he’ll be back.”
“We’ll see,” said Carla, getting to her feet. “We’ll fucking see.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
The stakeout lasted four evenings.Every afternoon, they piled into Carla’s convertible with a stack of sandwiches and a cooler stuffed into the tiny backseat. They waited in the parking lot, wearing oversized sunglasses (of which Carla had an entire collection), watching as the sun set.
The radio blared the same songs with only the occasional deviation. They argued about the significance of this and then argued more when the DJ said more or less the same thing each time, with slight variation in his word choice or level of enthusiasm.
