A long silence. Boris took another sip of whisky, winced. “This shit ain’t strong enough for this conversation.”
“Yeah,” agreed Jack, making a noise halfway between a laugh and a gasp. “I lost my wallet on the way here. Your whisky is all I’ve had in, uh, technically weeks.”
Boris sputtered. “Weeks?! I’ve been sharing whisky with you forweeks?”
“Yeah, something like that. I lost count.”
“Fuck,” Boris groaned, burying his face in his hands. “Fuck, why the fuck do I believe you?”
Jack shrugged. Tried to stay nonchalant even as his heartthreatened to burst free of his chest. “Probably because you know something weird is going on.”
“Yeah, but the same day over and over for weeks? And the worst day, too. Shit.” Boris slumped back against the chair and tilted his face to the ceiling.
“Sorry to break the news.”
A long, pained groan. “OK, but what about the lady?”
Jack paled. “What lady?”The one we dug up?
“The lady at the end of my bed a couple nights ago.” Boris raised an eyebrow, like Jack should know her. His thoughts flashed to the old lady in the room above him but surely,surelyBoris was referring to someone else.
“You’ll, um, have to elaborate on that.”
“You haven’t seen her?”
“Definitely not.”
“Huh. How ‘bout that.”
Jack waited impatiently for him to explain himself. When he didn’t, Jack prompted, “So, what about her?”
“Dunno. She just sat on the edge of my bed and like, stared at me. I didn’t know who the hell she was, but I couldn’t ask, either. I was, like, frozen or something.” Boris gave a one-shouldered shrug and spun around in the chair. “I thought it was just a weird dream, but now… Who knows.”
“What did she look like?” Nausea roiled in Jack’s stomach. Something about this didn’t feel right. The image in his mind was shadowed and fast-moving, silhouetted in moonlight, dripping in blood. Whatever Boris saw, he hoped it wasn’t so ghastly.
“Kind of pale. Dark-haired. Scrawny in, like, a sickly way. Her arms looked like sticks.” He shuddered. “And her eyes were hollow. I think I coulda seen straight inside her skull if she got any closer.”
Jack recoiled, like the incremental distance could save him from this nightmare vision. “Freaky.” He thought of the yellow-eyed man and his vanishing sedan but opted to keep that tohimself. As badly as he wanted to trust Boris, he was afraid of revealing too much too soon.
“Yeah, I dunno. It didn’t feel like a dream.”
“But I did?”
“Yeah,” said Boris. “More than you can imagine.” His nails tapped against the bottle.
Jack didn’t know what to say to that. His stomach flipped. After a long pause, he decided to change the subject. “Hey, did anyone call for me?”
“No,” Boris said. “Don’t think so. Why?” A beat passed. He frowned as he realized. “They don’t… call every day.”
“No,” said Jack, tapping his foot in a frantic rhythm.
“Do the days—Are they different? Like, there’s actual variation?”
“Yeah,” Jack scoffed. “When I do something differently.”
“How do you know—” Boris paused, pinched the bridge of his nose. “How do you know it’s the same day?”
“Because everyone keeps telling me it’s the seventeenth,” said Jack pointedly.
