Before the door to the restaurant flew open like a twister shot out of a shotgun and --

Before Sam landed back at the table with the sad waiter kid in tow plus one hell of a story --

Before everything seemed to blow up all at once, for Sam and Hillary, for the diners in that doomed restaurant, and for --

Hillary’s patience was wearing thin. Then again, so were her options. It wasn’t like she could storm out of the place; that had proved futile once already. Frustrating as it was, all she could do was wait for him to get back. What might happen after that was anybody’s guess. The only thing she particularly cared about at that moment was getting far from that trap of a booth and the feeling of being a pariah she couldn’t quite shake.

She didn’t know how long Sam had been gone but knew it was long enough. Too long. She didn’t like sitting alone there, but for their now emptied glasses of water, still the locus of so much attention. Now and then she was still catching the stray glance or the harried stare. She could do nothing about it but stew. That only ate at her further.

It was no comfort to her that she wasn’t the only one seemingly stuck there. Few if any of the other diners ever got up and none of them made for the door. With weary resignation, they ate and they drank. Plates came and they went. It was barely any different for the staff. The waiters and waitresses were ambulatory, yes, but, no less affixed to the place. Hell if all their movements weren’t rehearsed or if they had been riding along tracks sunk into the floor. This didn’t feel like living. It was more akin to being the background noise in somebody else’s life, extras in a made-for-TV movie.

She needed to distract herself. She needed to think about something other than the invisible anchor that moored her to the spot. She needed to figure out how they’d gotten there in the first place.

There were no bread crumbs or footprints in the sand. As far as she could tell, they were born in this dump, and, unless they figured something out soon, they might die there, too. There had to be something she could retreat to, a memory, a relic caught in the gunk of her memory.

There was the motel, of course, the one back in Nevada. She still hadn’t told Sam about it. She didn’t know if she ever would. Or could. Then a string of middling days up and down the desert in an unkind, otherworldly heat. She pushed Sam even when he told her they were pushing the van, too.

“New or not,” he had said in a way that suggested that, on some future day, he might harken back to with an ‘I told you so’,” you’ve still got to treat a vehicle like this right. You can run a husband -- ex-husband, excuse me -- into the ground, but treating your wheels that way doesn’t serve anyone.”

She’d heard him but did not listen. Not in Stapleton, not in Wesley, not in Little Mission…

Not until they got to San Nicolas. It was a spot on a map and nothing more. Everything pointed to another dead end. Sam had said he didn’t like a knocking sound he heard coming from the carburetor.

“Either we stop here for a little so I can check this out or we get caught with our pants down somewhere else when it blows a gasket. It’s up to you Hillary.”

At least he had called her by her full name. She insisted they poke around first. The report from the leaked files had described a simple power outage. No lights in the sky or explosive noises. It certainly was odd that no one could identify the source of the power cut. And it didn’t make sense that it seemed confined just to San Nicolas. And that no one could fix it for months. Still, this was meant to be an investigation of unidentified flying objects, not electricity troubles. No wonder this one had remained unsolved. It didn’t even belong in the files.

They drove around town, though Hillary was never clear on what it is they were looking for. Signs of a power outage six decades ago? A downed power line? It wasn’t a hunch or instinct or gumption that propelled Hillary to insist they keep driving. It was stubbornness. Each time Sam asked if they could call it a day, she took it as a sign that they had to push further still.

They might have kept going like that forever if not for the van finally quitting on them of its own volition in the dusty, empty parking lot of a boarded-up old shed of a building. The last thing Hillary remembered was getting out of the car with a snide word towards Sam before noticing the faint traces of a black swan on the teetering old sign that once beckoned forth to passersby.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

It was at that moment when Hillary thought she might have finally pieced together most of the story, when the front door of the Swan Song burst open and, moments later, Sam and Troy sprinted back into the room.

“The Lip Reader!” Troy and Sam shouted.

“The what?”

“The Lip Reader,” Sam said again, this time a little quieter, though offering nothing by way of explanation since, technically speaking, he knew no more about the Lip Reader than she did.

Neither had long to wait to find out.

A figure emerged from the vestibule that had so stymied Hillary. It was tall and broad-shouldered, wearing a red sports coat and tweed pants. It had hazel eyes and the faint wisps of hair suggestive of middle age. Something about its smile -- its curvature, its length, maybe its sharpness -- hinted at malfeasance.

And it had no ears. Not even holes where ears ought to have been. It was the kind of thing that was difficult to notice at first, but once you stumbled upon the absence of ear lobes and a smooth patch of skin where there really should have been holes, it was hard to forget.

“Uninvited guests,” the Lip Reader said to one of the patrons. “Tell me, am I the sort of person to welcome uninvited guests?”

The man shook his head sternly before dropping his eyes back to the waffles on his plate. For so many years he had been looking down at waffles on a plate.

“No, no indeed. And tell me, “ it was talking to a waitress this time, young and short-haired and altogether flimsy. “Am I the sort of person who likes to, I don’t know, shake things up now and then? Do something different for a change?”

She too shook her head.

“No. Change, you say, is the antithesis of order. And order, Sir, you say is the enabler of life.”

The Lip Reader bowed its head in thanks to the waitress and moved on.

“That’s right, I do say that. Gravity, after all, is order. Time is order. The past becomes before the present which is followed by the future. From order all things are possible.”

The Lip Reader now stood before Sam and Hillary. Troy, by dint of well-honed survival instinct, had managed to skedaddle away unseen.

“You two, however, represent disorder. You are here upsetting my system. Why is that?”

Hillary ceded the floor to Sam, hoping he had learned something from the waiter that might get them out of the situation. Sam ceded it right back because, well, because he was Sam.

“You’ll have to speak up, please. Do you know why they call me the Lip Reader? Do you?”

He tapped at the place where his ears might otherwise have been.

“When they first met me, they thought I couldn’t hear. No ears out, no sound in, they thought. Untrue, of course. I can hear fine -- better than most of you Terrestrials, that’s for certain. In fact, I often hear the things people wish they hadn’t said, the things said when it was thought that no one was listening. No, I hear perfectly well. It’s only that, well, even I can’t hear a thing unless…”

It leaned in close enough to Sam that the two might have kissed were this a different kind of story.

“...YOU SAY SOMETHING!”

Hillary finally came to her senses and remembered what she was dealing with when it came to her ex-husband.

“Our car broke down.”

“Yes.”

“And we stopped in the lot outside here.”

“Yes.”

“And we just wanted to see if anybody inside could help.”

The Lip Reader might as well have grown fangs, its face dripped with so much aggression.

“The windows, boarded-up, the paint peeling and the wood rotten. No sign of life for decades. The kind of place you’d expect to find help? The kind of place you just, barge into?”

“We were just looking for help.”

“What you were doing was inviting yourself somewhere you weren’t wanted. Whether you were looking for help is now a moot point. You’ve found something else altogether.”

There was a look of resignation on the face of everyone else in the diner, the regulars. This was their fate and they were used to it. That these others, these outsiders, had ensnared themselves into this mess may have been unfortunate, but it was of little concern to them. Whatever might come to Sam and Hillary, how could it compare to what the rest of them had already endured?

“Who are you, anyway?”

The Lip Reader had begun strolling around the diner. It greeted those at the tables, playacting the maître d’. Of course, it wasn’t interested in knowing how the eggs tasted or if the coffee was to their liking. Nor was it looking for anyone or anything in particular. It was it’s domain and it needed no excuse to surveil it.

“The Lip Reader moniker isn’t good enough for you, trespasser?”

“You had to be someone, something before you came here.”

“What is it you’re after? What do you think your questions will accomplish? Don’t you think they’ve all wondered the same things? Do you think it’s done them any good? Look at them!”

Hillary shrugged.

“Maybe I just want my curiosity satisfied.”

This made the Lip Reader chuckle. But not smile.

“Oh, and I’m here to serve you. I would be a terrible host to have you in my fine establishment only to leave you dissatisfied.”

Prisoners. They were his prisoners. It had only fully dawned on Hillary then that everyone in that room, she and Sam included, were captives.

“I came from a place of chaos. Far from here. Not just in space but in time.”

“The future?”

“The future. The past. Both. Neither. The condensation of a cool glass of water on a hot day. Does it cease to exist in a future when it has evaporated? Did it not exist before its droplets took shape on the outside of the glass? In one form or another, it has always existed. And will always exist. The future and the past are….tangential.”

“Surely you had a sense of beginning or end? Of time progressing or--?”

At this, the Lip Reader turned in her direction with anger in its eyes.