I’m Nine Again - Chapter 8 The Dark Room

A single ray of dark orange light broke through the dark monotony of the room, spawning from the small slit in the drawn closed curtains, halted by the hardwood floor of the room. The gathering dust in the room drifted slowly through the light, reflecting the specs like a natural glitter. Off white walls that encompassed the room lay bare of any notable furniture apart from the double bed blending out of the back wall into the center of the room and two bedside tables.

When Matthew had tried to tell me the news of my mothers’ death, I lost consciousness soon into the conversation. When I awoke, I was in this room, in this bed. Only leaving to use the bathroom and occasionally breathe the fresh air of the night sky on the balcony. I was immovable by any other being. Alice had been bringing me food and even though I have been trying to eat, I’ve only been able to stomach a minimal amount of food before throwing it up soon afterward. The closest thing I’ve had to a real conversation in days was when Rachel told me that I could take as long as I needed and that everyone would be there for me when I was ready to talk. I haven’t talked in what feels like days. I would wake, drink a glass of water and attempt to eat some food. I would throw up and clean my face. Then I would hop back into the bed and silently sob my self to sleep only to repeat the process.

Today, my form of mental stimulation resided within the ray of light moving slowly across the floor with time. My thoughts shifted sporadically between depression, self-loathing, existentialism, anger, and daydreams about how I could have done things differently. Actions I could have taken, words I could have said, people, I could have spoken to and my knowledge of the future that could have helped. At first, I didn’t want to believe it, I wanted to believe that Matthew was lying. I even justified to myself that Matthew must be lying because that’s a trait of investment bankers. That led into self-loathing at my own erratic thoughts.

The small ray of light slowly thinned until it disappeared completely leaving the room in a dim state as the sun started to drop below the horizon. The door to the room opened smoothly without a creak as light streamed in from the hallway. The lightest I had seen in days, illuminating the room with the artificial light of the fluorescent-lit hallway. The light cast a long human shadow across the floor. I shifted my gaze to look only towards the shadow. It leaned against the shadow of the door with arms crossed.

“It stinks in here,” coming from the voice of Alice echoing lightly in the bare room.

Leaving the door open, Alice entered the room, crossing from one side to the other where the window was. She opened the curtains and slid open the window. The temperature of the room dropped as the warm air started leaving for the cold night sky. I looked up at Alice, expecting the sight of a friend. I saw only the truth. A nine-year-old girl. We were both just nine-year-old children. What could we do?

Alice switched on the lamp on one of the bedside tables and went back to close the door. My gaze followed her the entire time. It was the first time I’d really noticed the difference in mannerisms between adults and children. The way she walked, the way she drew the curtains and opened the windows. The way she quietly closed the door pressing her weight ever so slightly against it till the click of the locking mechanism sounded. The way she would stand and stare, and the way she sat on the end of the bed with one leg down to the side and the other leg over the blankets as she reclined against the kickboard. These things all seemed strange from the body of a nine-year-old child.

“I have no idea what to say, Sean,” Alice said in a tone of voice that was softer than I’d heard her before.

“Neither,” I said coldly, avoiding her eyes.

“I don’t think there is anything to say,” she said, “I’ve tried to rehearse this conversation in my head for the past few days, but I’ve got nothing. It all sounds too artificial and I don’t want you to hear that.”

“I don’t know what I want to hear,” I said, “I don’t think I want to hear anything. I guess I want someone to tell me that It’s okay, that I’m not useless and that none of this is my fault.”

“It’s okay, you’re not useless,” Alice said, “None of this is your fault.” ]

We sat there in silence for a bit longer.

“I guess, I don’t know what I want to hear,” I said, “I think I’m confused, and I can’t see a way forward. I don’t have a plan. I’m scared of not knowing what comes next or how to deal with that.”

“I don’t know what you’re going through,” she said, “And I’m not going to pretend I know what your going through or try to pretend I know all of the answers because I don’t.”

She stood up from the bed and walked over to the door. Turning back to me she held out something in her hands. It was a packet of cigarettes.

“That’s bad for your health,” I said.

“My parents are at a charity function,” Alice said with a smirk, “There is no one else around, just us. Come outside with me,” she said in a soothingly commanding tone.

I pushed the blankets back and stood up. I pushed my feet into some slippers that were left beside the bed for me. They were a little big but they fit well enough not to slide off with each step. The large and normally warm feeling house was now isolating as I walked through the almost overbearing size of the living room. We made our way downstairs and out into the street, Alice handing me an overcoat on the way outside.

“See, no one is around,” she said lighting a cigarette and handing it to me, “It’s just you and me.”

“How did you even get your hands on a packet of cigarettes?” I asked.

“I stole them from one of my fathers’ friends when he came to visit yesterday,” she said, “having a smoke here and there used to get me through the stress of university.”

The sounds of the suburbs surrounded us as we stood in the cold. Inhaling and exhaling the smoke. It was hard to tell if the white of our exhale was mostly smoke or mostly mist from our hot breath hitting the cold air.

“You came outside with me,” Alice started, “None of us know what is coming next. We are all scared of the unknown. Every day that we wake up, we don’t know what is going to happen, but we push through that and just live.”

“Really?” I asked.

“It’s the same thing I think,” she said, “Those fears of not knowing what is coming next. Sometimes they are amplified, sometimes they are dulled, but every day we wake up and leave the house, not knowing what the day has in store for us. Most of the time nothing goes to plan, and we are surprised, but we survive.”

“I think I understand what you’re getting at,” I said.

“You think that you’re useless and that you can’t do anything,” she said, “But there is two option there. You can either give up and wallow in your own inability to be useful, or you can try to be useful and fail.”

She took a deep breath and watched the white mist from her exhale rise into the sky and dissipate. She took one long drag from the cigarette and threw it out onto the street.

“You can’t change what has happened,” she said, “But you can change what will happen. It’s not always going to work out and there are going to be times when you fail. Times when you fail horrifically and times when you fail fatally. But I think what makes us human is our ability to persevere in the face of extreme uncertainty.”

“We keep on fighting,” I said, “Even in our darkest of hours, we keep on fighting until the bloody, bitter end.”

“Sean,” she said, “I know it’s hard, what happened is inexcusable, it’s unfair and it just really sucks. But we are going to change the world. Not you, and not me. Us. We are going to change the world together and I’m going to need your help to do that.”

“Yeah,” I said. I threw my cigarette but out into the street, “Yeah, we have to keep on fighting. Keep moving forward.”

We turned to walk back into the house. Walking side by side, almost shoulder to shoulder.

“Your mother’s funeral is in two days,” she said.

“I suppose I should go to that,” I replied.

“I know you only knew her for two weeks, but I also know just how quickly we can get close to a family that loves us when we know nothing about them,” she said, “I think it’s important.”

We made our way inside. I took off my coat and placed it on the coat rack and started to walk upstairs with Alice. The air felt different. It wasn’t cold and lonely like it was when we walked out, and it wasn’t warm and homely like the other times I’ve been here. It was, off. Alice opened the door to the second story living area and that’s when I heard an unnatural creak in the stairs behind us. Alice looked through the door with her mouth open.

“What is this!?” she asked.

I turned around to look down the dark stairway to see the barrel of an assault rifle pointed at us from a few stairs down.

“Keep walking!” the deep male voice commanded.

We stepped into the living room and saw it full of people all dressed in black. As we stepped passed the door, I noticed it was flanked by two men in black with assault rifles. The man behind us stepped into the room, poking my back with the assault rifle ushering me forward and closed the door behind him. All the lights were on and the curtains were drawn. I counted eight people altogether, walking around the living room with assault rifles and carefully looking through draws and cupboards. In the center of the room, standing out from them all was a female aged what looked to be in her late 30’s. She turned to face us and lowered her rifle, letting it hang off the side of her body.

“Don’t waste any time,” she said, “You two need to talk, and you need to talk fast. Which one of you is it?” she asked.

“I don’t understand,” Alice said.

“What are you on about?” I asked.

“Don’t play games with me, I don’t like to play,” she said, “One of you, and you know exactly who you are, know things that you shouldn’t know.”

She was talking about time travel. Was she a time traveler or a secret government agent? Once again, the butt of the rifle was poked at the back of my head ushering us forward.

“Ow, okay chill out!” I said.

We walked further into the room and sat on the couch as the woman walked over to stand in front of us, the rifle swinging forward and back as she walked.

“On July 16th, 2002 at 14:00, a male child is murdered by his father, that night his mother commits suicide,” the woman stated, “The problem is, that never happened.”

She pulled a chair away from the kitchen table and moved it over to in front of the couch, facing the back towards us and sitting over the edge in reverse, slinging the rifle over the back of the chair and letting it dangle back and forth in front of us like a pendulum.

“Instead,” she said, “On July 18th, 2002 at 15:24, a man murders his wife in a fit of rage after their son had run away from home, and the principal of a local school is arrested on a DUI charge after days of media pressure.”

I looked over to Alice who had her mouth open the entire time. I looked back at the woman in front of us who continued to speak.

“The problem with what I just told you,” she said, “Is that none of that was supposed to happen. The woman wasn’t supposed to be murdered, she was supposed to commit suicide. The son wasn’t supposed to run away, he was supposed to be murdered by his father. That principal has never had a criminal record and was due to retire on a comfortable acreage in the country. The problem is, these things didn’t happen how they were supposed to and now I’ve tracked this back to you two,” she said.

She leaned forward over the chair and picked up her rifle. She pulled back on the bold and a shell was ejected out of the side as she raised the gun to point in our general direction, resting the but of the rifle in her left shoulder.

“I’m going to ask again, which one of you is it,” she asked, “Who is not from 2002.”

“What do you want?” Alice asked, “We aren’t going to answer your questions if you aren’t going to tell us what it is that you want!”

“So,” the woman said, “It must be you then.”

“She’s right,” I quickly chimed in, “If you’re going to shoot us anyway, why should we answer your questions. Better to leave you in the dark!”

“It’s both of us!” Alice blurted out. I shot her a look but her eyes looked confident in what she was saying, “Neither of us is from the year 2002,” she said, “Now that you have the information you need, are you going to kill us or leave us alone because whatever it is, I’d rather you just hurried up with it instead of wasting both of our time!”

Alice was speaking with confidence and passion. She had two sides to her, no three sides. No. Alice was a wild card. Sometimes she was childish, sometimes she was an adult. Sometimes she was nice and chirpy, other times serious and insightful, other times confident.

“Really?” the woman said, “Well that makes this easier. My name is Scarlet, obviously not my real name. We are a group known as ‘The preservationists.’ Let me tell you how this is going to work.”

“Are you going to kill us?” I asked.

“Because if so,” Alice said, “Get it over and done with!”

Scarlet laughed and lowered her rifle back down. She stretched out her arms as if she had just dropped a heavyweight and then lent back forward on the chair.

“I’m not going to kill you,” she said, “Not if you both listen to what I say. As I was saying, we are ‘The Preservationists.’ You two are not the only people who are from the future. There are many more, our group estimates roughly between 80 and 120. But that doesn’t include the people like yourself that have kept to the shadows.”

“There are more!?” I asked.

“Yes,” Scarlet replied, “And no, we aren’t all one big happy family. As I was saying, we are ‘The Preservationists,’ we use our knowledge of the future to make sure that everything plays out exactly how it was supposed to play out. We make sure that we aren’t messing with time.”

I could feel Alice tense up next to me on the couch. I looked over to her and could see she was visibly calm, but I knew her well enough to know that she was seething.

“What do you want with us?” Alice asked calmly.

“This is a show of force girl,” Scarlet replied, “We want you to know that we have guns. We want you to know that we can sneak into your house in the small five minutes it takes for a bunch of kids to have a cigarette. We want you to know that we know more than you do and that we are a threat.”

Scarlet stood up from the chair lifting the rifle to her side and walking over to stand in front of us with the rifle barrel so close to my face that I could clearly read the serial code stamped into the side of it.

“Win your horse bets and place your money into the stocks,” Scarlet said, “Invest in those big companies and make millions of dollars. Then fuck off to a beach house somewhere and live out your life on your millions of dollars. Don’t interfere with the natural progression of the timeline. Let things that are supposed to happen, happen. We exist to make sure other time travelers don’t mess the world up,” she said.

Clicking her fingers, all the men dressed in dark black all ran to the center of the room and lined up in formation. Every face was covered with a balaclava. There were almost no indistinguishable features among the group other than Scarlet being the only female.

“We don’t want to hurt you, but if you mess with the timeline, we will kill you. No trial, no chances. It will be two bullets between the eyes on both of your bodies,” Scarlet said.

“You’d really kill children?” Alice asked.

“Both of you aren’t children,” she said, “And if it was what we had to do to protect the natural timeline then yes, we would kill children.”

The men with guns all started filing out of the living room and down the stairs towards the entrance of the house. Before she left, Scarlet turned to face us once more.

“Remember today,” she said, “If we have even the slightest doubt in our minds about you two, you won’t even see us coming. One moment you’ll be alive and the next moment you’ll be dead. There is nothing else to it. Remember, we let you live today.”

The room remained cold and quiet for some time as Alice and I sat there on the couch stunned. Eventually, she walked over to the door to make sure it was locked. She came back over to the couch with a notebook and pen scribbling down a note to hand to me. Rightly worried that these people may have bugged the house. She passed the note to me and I read it.

~’Fuck them, we are changing the world’~

I took the pen and wrote a note back to her.

~’They made a mistake by showing themselves to us. Now we know that we need to be even more prepared.’~

We passed two more notes back and forth.

~’Let’s save this world.’~
for visiting.

~’Let’s change the future.’~