Shadows Out of Time

It’s overwhelming, all of it piling up to crush me under its weight. I’ll go mad if I don’t find some way to control it. The supernova is still there in my mind, like an anchor, and as I concentrate on the fiery white void, I discover I can focus on a single moment instead of all of them at once. I reach through the white, and like a miracle I find myself back in that moment, reliving it, but I still remember. I remember everything.

Emily stood before Professor Vaughan’s office door, listening to his voice inside and the harsh, buzzing whisper that came in reply. She understood what those sounds were now. The creature behind the door in the wall. That was how it communicated, making its promises to Professor Vaughan in return for handing over her and Sean. But she’d been given another chance, a do-over, and this time she wouldn’t be caught by surprise. She could stop what had happened to her, make it so that it never happened at all. She just had to make sure things went differently this time.

She pounded on the door. She heard the professor whisper to the creature, give it time to disappear back into that impossible room off the side of the building, and then he opened the door.

“Hello, Miss Bannerman.”

“Oh. How did you know I was—?” She heard the words she’d spoken before, an echo reverberating through time, but this time would be different. This time she wouldn’t cry or freeze up. This time she’d have the upper hand.

Emily pushed past Professor Vaughan into his office and walked right to his desk.

“What are you doing?” Vaughan demanded, hurrying after her.

She opened the drawer, pulled out the gun, and pointed it at him. She wanted him dead for what he did to Sean, what he did — or was about to do — to her, but she hesitated. Her heart jackhammered in her chest. She’d never shot anyone before. Could she do it?

He put his hands up, his Adam’s apple bobbing at his throat. “Miss Bannerman, whatever it is you think you’re doing…”

At the sound of his voice, that pompous, condescending way he called her Miss Bannerman, she had her answer. She pulled the trigger, and the gun jumped in her hand with a loud bang. Professor Vaughan fell to the floor in a spray of red. She ran to the door in the wall and pushed it open.

The room beyond was just as it had been before, with its strange machinery and shelves full of cylinders, with one missing. She understood those cylinders’ dark purpose now. Sean’s body was on the surgical table, his head open and empty, his brain removed and housed in the missing cylinder. She thought of him floating in darkness, a bodiless consciousness just as she had been, or still was, and very nearly forgot the creature hiding behind the door. Emily turned just as it emerged from its hiding place, its head splitting open in that terrible shriek. She pulled the trigger, and the shot blew off a chunk of its eyeless, antennae-laden head, revealing spongy, fungoid flesh within. She screamed, not with terror this time but with righteous fury, and pulled the trigger again and again, blowing off more pieces.

She didn’t feel the sharp object piercing her from behind, so when the long, pointed tip of a pincer came out of her stomach, she stared at it in confusion. There was a harsh buzzing sound at her back, and she realized another creature was in the room, one she hadn’t seen. The gun dropped to the floor. She would have dropped, too, but the pincer through her middle held her upright. It would take a long time to die from this kind of wound, she knew. Long enough for them to harvest her brain, just as they’d done before. She’d failed.