The warmth slowly crept out of the room as I processed what Not-me had told me. I noticed other aspects of the place, like the temperature shift had caused my perception to shift with it. Instead of smelling clean, the antiseptic smell of the nurse's office took on a bitter stink. My nose itched, and I wanted to get outside. What I wanted was to do something. I shook my head.

“No,” I said.

I made a decision. Not-me didn't know what was best for me all the time. He said that we were completely out of options with the luck curse. But I figured it out. I could figure this out too. It's what I did. I found answers. I solved problems. This is what I wanted to do with my life. I was going to find Dad.

I took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. I couldn't think about Dad now. I couldn't afford to cry. There was stuff to do. I raised the spoon and spoke.

"Okay. What is going to come? And don't just repeat what you told me before explaining. I need to understand."

"You know, I genuinely don't know," said Not-me. "There's some spooky, scary stuff out there, and I don't know what was in charge of this local area when I was your age. I never stuck my nose in it and found out."

I raised an eyebrow. "Stuck my nose in it?"

"Yeah," said Not-me. "You're like a bull in a china shop. The minute you see something out of place that might be supernatural, paranormal, or potentially dangerous, you stick your hand in and find the button and press it."

"Hey," I said. "That's not fair."

"Oh," said Not-me. "Tell me one instance when you saw something potentially paranormal and dangerous and didn't touch it."

I couldn't think of anything. He had me there, but it was a tilted argument to begin with because my whole set of paranormal experiences had begun when he had apparently possessed me.

‘Stop now,’ I thought.

I was literally arguing with myself.

"Forget about it. Okay, something's coming. You don't know what. Probably scary. Is it after me for touching the stick? Or is it after Mrs. Streep for not having received the bizarre consequences of us taking some of her luck?"

Not-me shook his head. "It'll be tagged to the USB stick, kid. The mission didn't get completed. Only something that can interact with the supernatural would have been able to interfere. No one else would have noticed. It's a special quality that gremlins have. People who don't know how to look, don't see them. They also don't see what they're doing. How do you think they get away with so much shit?"

I shrugged. "I don't know. I only learned about them like a minute ago. What do they get away with?"

"That's not important. Why are you asking? This thing's falling apart." I could see bits of Mrs. Streep's skull in the spoon's reflection. This was not an image that I ever wanted to have. The antiseptic smell of the room became sharper, and I winced as I began to think what formaldehyde smelled like, the memory coming back sharp and clear.

"Okay, it's tagged to the USB. So does that mean that if I pick up that USB stick and go somewhere with it, that it will follow the stick?"

"Yeah, that's what it's gonna do. So what? Honestly, this wasn't how I wanted to reset this loop, but it'll work as well as anything."

"Fuck that," I said.

"Oh, using big boy words now, huh?" Not-me said.

"No, seriously," I said. "I'm not going to lay down and die. That sounds like the stupidest thing I've heard of. We need to find out all that we can so we can succeed."

"No, you don't," Not-me said. "You need to keep your head fairly empty so you can head towards the right future."

"I think you're wrong," I said. "I think you were wrong about what would happen when you came back. I think you were wrong about what happened when you possessed me. I think you were wrong about us being..." I glanced up at Mrs. Streep, almost having repeated Not-me's language verbatim, and then thought better of it. "Out of luck," I finished. "And I think you're wrong about how we head into the correct future. And I'm going to try something."

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

I grabbed the USB stick. Moving as quietly as I could, I left the room. I'm sure Mrs. Streep would eventually notice my absence, but I had bigger fish to fry, as the old adage goes. I moved down the halls at a walk. The surest way to attract attention is to look like you don't want attention or to run. I was pretty good at being ignored. I had been practicing it for a long time now.

I walked down the long hall past the lockers and exited the building, then crossed a sidewalk and a green lawn to reach a building that housed the principal's office, the counselor's offices, and an administration office in which an overworked secretary handled the majority of everyone else's jobs from the look of things. I trotted up the steps, went inside, and knocked as I stepped in.

I had found that if you were assertive enough in your own certainty, most of the time, you could get away with being believed, even if you weren't supposed to. I had picked up a bad habit a couple of years back of telling people things that I knew for a fact were untrue. But I wanted to see if the people that I was telling these things to would call me out on it and say, "No, it's not true," or "Wow, no, that's not how that works," or "That's a lie." What I found was people, unless they're babying you, are reluctant to confront and correct. And oftentimes, they'll believe even the absurd. My experiment ended in more failure than anything, and I was known by all the kids in the neighborhood that we had moved from as an outrageous liar. I supposed it was a fair reputation, but it felt unjustified, because I had been ready to own up to the lie, curious who was going to call me out on it, when no one ever did.

So, I pushed open the office door, lightly knocking as I peeked my head in. "Excuse me," I said. "Mrs. Streep sent me here to use the phone so I can call my mom for a ride."

"Oh, it's over there, dear," the woman behind the desk said. I didn't remember her name. I glanced at the nameplate on the desk. Mrs. Harwood, it read. Names were weird. I wanted names to make more sense, to have an important significance or meaning or an underlying logic behind them. In storybooks I had read, your true name held a certain amount of power. And in old stories, people were named after deeds or inherently embedded traits or qualities that they possessed. Names seemed to hold less significance now. The woman behind the desk didn't look like a hardwood or any sort of woodworker that I could tell at all.

I walked over to the phone, picked it up, and dialed Cece's number from memory. She picked up on the third ring.

"If this is spam, I'm going to find your mother and give her a bad day," was the first thing that she said.

"Hey, creeper," I said.

"Oh, hey, freak. What's shaking?" There was a pause. "Hey, why aren't you at school, kiddo?"

"I need you to come pick me up."

"I'll be there. Where you at?"

"I'm still at the school. I've got an important errand I need to run, and it's urgent. I need you to take me to see Jemima."

"Whoa, freak. You just freaked me out on another level. How do you know about Jemima?"

"It's a long story," I said. "I don't even know if you want to know it. But you're welcome to hear it. We need to get there ASAP. It's probably going to be dangerous," I said.

"Well, shit yeah, son," Cece said, sounding genuinely excited. "Count me in. I'm there." There was another pause. "All right, I am four miles away, residential roads. I'll be there in eight minutes. Be near the road. Let's go." She ended the call.

I hung up and glanced at the lady behind the desk. She didn't appear to have listened to my conversation. I thanked her and excused myself and went to stand near the road. I didn't know how Cece planned to make four miles in eight minutes on residential streets, and I didn't want to know. What I did know is that she would be here in eight minutes. She didn't exaggerate. It was simply not in her nature.

***

I timed her. Cece made it in seven and a half minutes. She came to a screeching stop, tires smoking. She leaned across the car and threw open the passenger door.

“Get in!” She shouted.

Her eyes grew wide as she looked behind me.

I turned to look. There was a figure in a dark cloak sliding across the lawn toward me. When I looked directly at it, it vanished.

“Timothy, get in the the car,” Cece’s voice was commanding, no nonsense, “Do it now.”

I turned and leapt into the vehicle. I yelped as she screamed off the curb before I was all the way in. My door slammed shut. I struggled to sit up against the momentum of the acceleration. I looked out the back window. The dark figure slid off the sidewalk and onto the road. I had to keep moving my eyes back and forth to keep it visible.

It reminded me of the classic depiction of death. It was a tall figure in a dark cloak and cowl. Floating a few inches off the ground, flowing toward me like a fog. The garment it wore, was darkness incarnate, black becoming insufficient in the ability to describe it. It was like an absence of things. The opening to the cowl contained nothing but a feeling of dread. It was physically hard to look at, the feeling quickly becoming overwhelming. While I had the figure in sight, the world behind and around it dimmed and took on gray tones. We were leaving it behind quickly, but I felt certain it would follow where ever we went.

I lost sight of the figure as we made a hard turn. I was thrown against the door, and decided I needed to buckle. Looking at Cece, she was concentrating on driving for the first time I had ever seen. Clicking my seatbelt, I glanced at the speedometer. We were doing over a hundred, blowing stop signs like we were earning points for each one. More than once, Cece swerved around a car that was in the intersection, missing them by what had to be inches.

I looked at her face. Her mouth was set in a hard line. I realized that she had seen the figure. When I had looked, it disappeared like the gremlins. Which meant, what? It was something that existed between worlds? In the spirit realm? Cece could see it too?

Cece looked over at me, still driving like a maniac, screaming around corners, taking risks. "All right, spill," she said, looking me in the eye.

So I tried to tell her everything, about reliving the day, about helping her write prescriptions, about getting shot, coming back, discovering it was my future self, about going to Jemima's, about her taking my luck, but it not stopping, about me having to try and find a way to stop it, about me becoming what was now essentially a luck vampire.

She brought the car to a hard stop at the mention of Vampire and looked over at me. "Vampire?" she said.

I nodded. "I know, creature of darkness, right?"

She shook her head. "I'm serious, you mentioned that other people can't see your reflection?"

I nodded.

"There is an easy way to test this," she said, and she tilted the rearview mirror so that she could look me in the eye. Her expression grew perplexed. She looked in the mirror, and then down at me, then up in the mirror, and then down at me. Somebody behind us honked. I could smell burning rubber from where she had laid it down on the asphalt coming to a stop.

"Holy shit," she said. "So what? You became this luck vampire thing, and then what?"

I looked over at the mirror, then I looked at her. I explained what I had done to the school nurse, and then interfering with the gremlin, and then the consequences, and how I had been speaking with Not-me, and learning about all these things, and his suggestion that I needed to head towards his future in order to fix things. The person behind us honked again, but Cece was immune to their prodding.

She looked me in the eye. "So what, you've decided to take control of your life," she said, "instead of living the same day over and over?"

I shrugged. "I don't know," I said, "but I'm not gonna sit and wait for death to come and take me. I'm gonna go back to Jemima. Whatever is after me, can be after me at her house, since she started it."

"And what about your other self?" she said.

"I'm on the fence about how much I trust him. I think he's being honest, but I think future me has compromised judgment. As best as I can tell, he's been wrong about almost everything," I said.

Cece looked thoughtful, then she started driving again. "All right, in for a dime, in for a dozen."

I cocked my head to the side. I didn't think that was how the saying went. It felt good to tell somebody. It felt good to have somebody on my side. I needed to process what was happening to me with somebody that wasn't my zombie future self.

It was time to go talk to Jemima again, and if that figure in the dark cowl caught up with me there, well, I figured Jemima had it coming.

***