***

Nothing happened.

I was still standing in front of the mirror in the bathroom of the high school, staring at Kaye’s zombie-paled features.

"It didn't work," I shouted at the mirror.

"Well, no shit, Sherlock,” Not-me said. "It doesn't take a genius to figure out something didn't work. Run!"

"What?" I said, not understanding.

"Run! Run, kid, run! I wasn't shitting you. Do not let that fucker catch you. You find a way to die, and you run!" He sounded terrified, for the first time ever.

I ran.

I tripped once in my urgency to get out of the room. Something in Not-me's words had sparked a near-panic in me.

Breathing.

Breathing.

Remembering what panic felt like.

Remembering what it felt like to see Mom at the bottom of the bottle.

Remembering what it felt like for Dad to disappear.

I counted my breaths. One in, two in, hold three, hold four, out, two, three, four. In, two, three, four. Out, two three four.

Square breathing was one of the ways this was referred to as a method for containing your panic, sheer anxiety, and terror, and calming your mind, forcing your body to regulate. And so, as I ran, I tried hard to square-breathe, to slow my movements into a jog. If I sprinted until I collapsed, I would cover less ground than if I ran flat out.

And then it occurred to me: I needed Cece. I had to call Cece because there was no one faster than her. Tripping over myself as I turned around in the hall before I got to the doors outside, I sprinted back the way I had come and burst into Mrs. Streep's office.

She screamed, a high-pitched and girlish sound. I didn't know that women really did that. I thought that was a storytelling trope.

"Sorry," I said. "Emergency!"

And I sprinted to the phone. I punched Cece's number from memory.

"Oh my," said Mrs. Streep. "Are you okay? Emergency? Are you calling 911?"

I waved her off. "No time," I said, listening to the rings. The phone was answered on the third ring.

"'Cece’s Business Solutions. How may I direct your call?" said a familiar voice.

"Hey, Creeper," I said, out of breath, trying hard to catch it.

"Hey, Freak, why are you calling me in the middle of a school day?" Cece practically sang, happy to hear my voice.

"Emergency," I said. "9-1-1. I'm leaving the school and running north on Houston."

"On it," said Cece. "There in six."

I hung up and looked out the window.

I wished I hadn't.

The tall man was standing there underneath the tree. He was too tall. He was too dark. His hands were too big. His arms were too long. His legs were too long. His face was too long.

My mind was gibbering at his mere presence. It took a force of will that was Herculean in effort to pull my gaze away from his features. That smile on his face, that evil, wicked smile on his face…

Have you ever seen that internet jump scare crap where somebody puts a picture of one of those stupid-ass scary faces in the middle of the screen, in the middle of what's supposed to be a normal video to try and get you to jump out of your skin? And it's got the smile that's far too big. It's got the uncanny valley vibe like something's reaching for you from the end of your bed.

Yeah.

That was what I wished I saw. That was a shadow, compared to the reality.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

The Tall-man was the real fucking thing, and I don't use my curses lightly.

I ran.

Mrs. Streep was yelling something at me. I couldn't hear her. I was actually panicking, and I couldn't control it.

I ran through the door.

I think I hit it with my elbow. I may have broken it. It hurt like I had fractured the bone. I didn't care.

I ran down the hall.

I careened off the locker wall so hard one of them popped open. I didn't know that was possible.

I ran.

I could feel him pursuing me. I didn't need to look back. I heard him laughing.

He was enjoying himself.

"Run, run as fast as you can," he sang after me. "I'll catch you, I'm the Tall-man."

He started to laugh. It was full of mirth and glee and horrible intent. He intended to do terrible things to me, and I could hear it in his laughter, in the pleasure that he took at my panic.

I burst through the push-arm doors at the end of the hallway with such force that it bounced back hard enough to nearly knock me off my feet, but I spun, twisting in the air, landing hard on my hands and knees and turning it into a running block sprint start and kept going.

"South on Houston," I repeated to myself. "I'm going south on Houston," I said.

"I'm coming for you," sang the thing behind me.

His voice had the same uncanny valley presence that his face did when he was in full Tall-man form. It inspired a new pang of panic just hearing it. I swallowed down the bile that rose in my throat with the pressure of it, and I ran.

I think luck was the only thing that kept the panic from taking me into a complete wipeout with the speed that I was sprinting. It's like the luck made my feet lighter. It's like I was running from my center. My hips propelling my every movement forward. My legs achieving a perfection that took Olympian athletes years to train into. It was thoughtless. It flowed. It was flawless. I don't know how fast I was running, but I'm willing to bet I could have broken a four-minute mile.

"I'm gaining on you," the voice sang from behind me. "I'm almost there. Run faster, little boy. Run faster." He held the last word like a gleeful note, singing as he came after me.

The temptation to look back was strong, but if I did, I knew it. I knew it in my core. I knew it in my head, and I knew it in my heart. If I looked back once, that would be the end of me. His aura would capture me, and I would be gone. The fear I had heard in Not-me's voice when he had told me to run startled me. I had never heard Not-me scared like that. He hadn't said it, but I got the impression that if the Tall-man caught me, there would be no loop reset. There would be no, ‘whoopsie-daisy, here we are, back at the beginning of the day once more. There are no consequences for our actions.’

No.

I felt sure if the tall man caught me, this was the end. He would keep me. And it wouldn't just be death. It would be torture.

I remembered reading about the concept of hell. Many different cultures have it. It's the place where you go and you are tortured forever. In the work Dante's Inferno, he paints a particularly colorful picture of what eternal torture is going to look like. I don't know why, but whenever the Tall-man spoke, Dante's hell was what I heard in the tone of his voice. It was horror and pain of indescribable portions in which the soul was held and could never be released and the mind would never be allowed to break so that you could not retreat to escape from the insanity, but instead be tortured into and beyond madness in a horror that Lovecraft never even conceived of.

I tried hard to focus on breathing.

Every time the tall man spoke, he broke me out of my rhythm. I believe he was doing it on purpose. But square breathing was the only thing keeping me from falling on my face into a gibbering madness.

I had made it across the grass, past the field, to the sidewalk, and was now running parallel to Houston. I trusted Cece would show up with tires smoking as usual. She seemed to be able to break the laws of physics when she drove. I had tried to use math to calculate how fast she would have to be driving and what route she could possibly take in order to get from one place to the next. It didn’t add up. My call to her in Mrs. Streep's office the other loop, was not the only time I had called. Not the only time she had shown up like a bat out of hell, screaming tires and burning rubber.

I was trying to distract myself, and somehow I was detached and remotely aware of it.

"Uh-oh," sang the tall man from behind me. "I've almost caught you, and you were trying so hard. Can't you run any faster?"

The pleasure in his voice was evident. He was taking a deep and perverse pleasure from my terror. I wished I could drop the luck on the ground. I remembered in a movie a hero being pursued by a bad guy had thrown money in order to distract his pursuers, and it had bought him time. But I didn't have any way to do that that I knew of—and a thought thundered into my head. Or didn't I?

If aura and luck were currency that spiritual entities used to fuel their powers and operations, and I could use it for supernatural acts such as telekinesis, then wouldn't it be fuel that could be ignited? In that moment, it was like I was struck by the hand of creativity itself. I knew how Kaye had used her pyrokinesis. She had taken the energy from the tree, and instead of pushing it, she had ignited it. It was just about changing your perspective. Because ignition was all about the excitement of molecules, which meant it had to be going faster, which meant you had to be thinking faster, which meant you had to be focusing faster.

I took an entire medallion of luck, finding in my panicked state that I could reach it, and I slowed down my perception of time and turned, throwing my hand out.

The tall man hadn't been joking. He was literally right behind me, within reach. My gesture of flinging my arm out would likely collide with his body once time sped back up.

He was the most terrible thing I had ever seen. His face had changed from that of a handsome man to that of a horrific conception straight out of a Japanese tale of the demonic, the oni, as they called them. Their version of the spirit world was one of the more terrible depictions that existed in folklore. And what I had within my grasp was a face as large as a car. Its nose reached down with a wicked scything curve, its skin a pale opalescent hue that reeked of death and decay but spoke of an endless hunger. The mouth was as wide as the head was itself. Its grinning, leering, gaping maw a pit from which there was no return. The eyes were two burning furnaces of demonic hatred. The worst nightmare that I had ever conceived of, hungrily devouring me with its gaze.

I was staring into the face of madness and it was hungry to swallow me whole. I knew in that moment that I was right. I knew in that moment that if the tall man caught me, there would be no return. There would be no loop. There would be no second chance. There would be no go again.

And so, with every ounce of will I could muster, I moved the luck medallion that I held, those twelve shining, scintillating cords of demonic or angelic or spiritual currency—I didn't know, and I didn't care— and I spun them until they were screaming. The I flung the disc at its open mouth, imagining that every molecule of them was vibrating past the point of combustion.

I don't know what I expected to happen, but it wasn't this.

As the spinning, vibrating, violently screaming luck left my hand, it exploded like a jet of flame. But not red flame. Not merry orange flame. Not happy yellow flame. Not angry or reaching flame. It was blue.

The fire lanced out like I had a handheld flamethrower. And it had an ethereal quality to it, not being as solid and visible as flame normally is, and not being hot the way you would associate with a torch or a flame, but being cold. A cold so deep it burned.

It engulfed the face before me. The giant, unbelievably wicked, cruel features about to swallow me whole were doused in flame, and there was a screeching scream that caused me to release my hold on slow time and throw my hands over my ears as I fell to the ground, suddenly unable to stand. I smelled smoke. A burning asphalt rubbery smell that had a sulfuric undertone.

"What are you doing? Get in!" Cece's familiar voice screamed.

I looked up from the fetal position in which I had huddled to see her car, smoke still rolling off her tires, parked right beside me.

Frantic, I looked around for the tall man but saw nothing.

The door was open to the passenger side, and as quickly as I could manage, I flung myself inside the car.

I heard laughter, cruel, malicious laughter, peeling from somewhere behind me, somewhere ahead of me. somewhere inside of me.

I don't know where it was coming from. And then I heard the tall man's voice. His light, jocular, malicious tone returned in full force.

"That stung," he said. "Naughty boy. I'm going to have to punish you for that. I have some special things in mind."

"Go," I screamed, and Cece hit the gas. I was in a lousy position for this maneuver and realized so as I bounced off the back of the seat and the first turn we took, I rolled into the passenger footwell.

"Run, run as fast as you can," sang the tall man from somewhere behind us.

"Where to?" Cece shouted. The vibration of the car was such that I had an enormous amount of difficulty righting myself. Finally, I got my head out of the footwell and answer her.

"Out of town," I screamed. "As quickly as possible. As straight a route from the school as you can. Don't have time to explain."

Cece looked down at me. "Freak, you may be the most interesting person I know. Hells to the yeah! Let's step on it!"

And somehow, she went faster.

***