One Hundred and Twenty Two Days

&;#65279;A short story by Alan Geldard (c) 2002
122 Days

Narrowly avoiding a collision with two awkwardly entwined young lovers,
Nick ducked down the
alleyway. He sensed that he was being followed. He quickened his pace a
little, taking care not to
make it too noticeable. Nearing the end of the alley he sidestepped
into a doorway and waited,
palms flat against cold, damp brick, neck craned, listening for his
pursuer. He tried to imagine the
events that would follow, the twisting of arms, pulling of jackets, the
muffled obscenities flying
back and forth.
He heard nothing. No hurried footsteps. No sounds of hoodlums in
pursuit of prey.
Maybe there was no-one following him. Maybe it was just his over active
imagination. He had to
know one way or the other. This was not bravado or a sense of pride, it
was commonsense, as
the only departure route available to him, now, was back down the
alleyway.
He stood erect and took a deep breath then stepped out purposefully
into the alley.
He was instantly aware of something close to his right. He turned, feet
astride, arms out. His eyes
widened trying to focus on the sight now directly in front of him. He
stood mesmerised. All
thoughts of muggers and assailants went. What stood there before him -
was like nothing he had
seen before.
His eyes widened more, drinking in the spectacle before him. Lights.
No ... light, one
parcel of light. It's different coloured and shaded hues constantly
changing, as if revolving around
some invisible axis. The light appeared to be increasing in size.
Nick was still motionless. His nerves and muscles frozen with shock,
although his brain
was now allowing small slivers of normality to creep back into his
mind.
Throughout the encounter Nick had not felt overly threatened, but now
a dawning feeling
spread over his entire body. The light wasn't getting larger. It was
getting closer! His mind now
tuned itself towards the one thought of survival. Turn and run. TURN
AND RUN!
His legs did not respond. His torso would not turn. The light now just
three or four feet
away continued its advance. Nick could do nothing to avoid the
inevitable. The light was going to
hit him, slowly, yes, but not knowing what the effect of collision with
the light would involve, the
relatively slow impact speed did not lessen his fear. Nick braced
himself, mentally, as best he
could, as the light began to brush against his still outstretched
hands. There was no feeling or
sensation as the light entered the space occupied by his hands and
wrists.
Both his arms and his jacket, from the elbows down, now appeared as if
they had
somehow merged with the dancing array of colours. Still, there was no
sensation. He tried to pull
his arms back and away from the light, but they were still as immobile
as before. The illuminance
of the changing colours appeared to lessen as they swallowed his arms
further beyond the
elbow. The slow yet steady advancement that threatened to envelop the
young man stopped a
couple of inches from his face.
Nicks' internal panic had reached a point at which it threatened to
overpower all thought.
He was now peering into a cloud of red. Its ever-changing hues appeared
to have dropped in
number to two or three deep scarlets. Nicks' eyes were wide and bulbous
as if held open with
invisible wires. His eyes manically flicked to all their extremities as
he tried to gain a bearing. A
small pinpoint of white light appeared in the centre of his field of
vision. Nicks eyes struggled to
focus on the pinprick within the swirling clouds of now deep crimson
light. The white speck
expanded elliptically along the horizontal until it divided its darker
surroundings into two.
The white divider now expanded vertically, increasing in brightness,
forcing Nicks' eyelids
to strain in the fight to remain open. The brilliant white light raced
towards the observer and hit
him in the centre of his brain with a deafening crack.
Nick pushed himself up into a sitting position, let out a half-checked
groan and forced
his eyes open.
Scanning the area as he raised himself to his feet, he steadied
himself on the damp wall
at his side. Backing up against the wall, Nick closed his eyes and
rubbed his temples with his
both index fingers as he tried to make sense of the encounter. He
recalled the footsteps, red
light, a white light ... a loud white light?
As he tried to grasp and hold onto the details that were rapidly
fading from his usually
efficient memory, a sudden realisation hit him. He wasn't the observer!
It was HE that had been
observed!
He shook his head and winced with pain as the dull ache behind his
eyes sharply
intensified as if internal fingers had flicked both eyeballs from
behind. He propelled himself down
the dim alleyway, bouncing off one wall onto the other.
As he neared the open street he stopped, spread his feet and steadied
himself by
protracting his neck upwards and pulling the sleeves of his jacket taut
with clenched hands. He
stepped out onto the now busy high street.
Nick quickened his pace as he neared his apartment. His head still
ached and his
bedroom beckoned as he closed the door lazily behind him. He threw his
keys onto the dining
room table and unbuttoned his jacket. Walking towards the bedroom in
the half-light cast from
the orange street lamp outside the window, he hung his jacket
haphazardly on the back of a chair
and finished undressing. He threw himself onto the untidily made double
bed and instantly fell
sound asleep.
The next morning as he wiped the condensation of the bathroom mirror,
Nick stared at
his half-shaven face and smiled at himself. He was 29, quite handsome
and had a reasonably
well paid job as Journalist on the local rag "The Rothport Enquirer", a
weekly paper consisting of
80 per cent ads, 15 percent local dross - births, deaths, lost cats and
the like, and 5 percent real
news. Nick contributed most of the real news. His hunches nearly always
paid off. Occasionally
the fruits of these hunches could be sold to the Nationals and Nick
could make serious cash from
the follow-ups.
As he reached for his jacket off the back of the chair he hesitated
and a frown covered
his clean-shaven face. Why was his jacket on the chair? He usually was
careful to hang it
properly on a hanger. He slowly pulled his jacket on and tried to
recall the previous night. He
remembered being extremely tired as his head hit the pillow and the
fact he was stark naked on
top of the bed when he awoke confirmed this. Being exhausted after
working late was nothing
unusual for Nick, he occasionally didn't even make it out of the office
before sleep got the better
of him, waking in the early hours amidst a team of agency cleaners
hoovering around him.
He buttoned his jacket and emptied the cold coffee from his cup and
returned the cup to
the table. He snatched his keys up from the table the puzzled frown
reappeared on his face. Why
weren't the keys on the hook? He must have overdone it yesterday.
Making himself a promise to
finish early that night, he put the keys safely into his inside pocket,
entered the small corridor and
swung the apartment door closed behind him.

122 Days later:

Nothing unusual this morning. No big news. The only reasonable lead
Nick could work with was
an item supporting a pensioner in his fight with a Rothport Councillor.
The Councillor, living next
door to the pensioner, had allegedly poisoned his neighbours' pigeons.
The idea being to exact
revenge on the poor birds who apparently regularly redesign the
paint-job on the councillors pride
and joy, his sports car, which he leaves uncovered in his driveway. Not
exactly the meaty
material Nick liked to get his teeth into, but recognising it as the
best of a bad lot, he decided to
visit the pensioner and ferret out a story. He grabs his jacket from
the stand and heads out of the
office.
"NICK!", a voice boomed from behind.
Nick stopped short of the door and swivelled on his heels.
"Come here lad.", A rotund, middle-aged man beckoned to Nick from a
side office.
Nick walked slowly towards the small glass room and through the open
door.
"Yes ... Mister Roberts?.", Nick replied, mockingly as he approached
the small teak
desk, cluttered with paper of all sizes.
"It's too early for sarcasm Nick, so don't waste my time. Sit down.",
rebuked Bob
Roberts, the Enquirers Editor.
Nick hung his jacket neatly on the back of the wooden chair, and
noisily pushed the chair
towards the desk. Sitting opposite the pallid looking man, he fixed his
gaze on one of the
photocopied certificates taped to the glass partition behind Bobs'
head.
"What's on for today?", the Editor leaned forward and rested his
flabby, exposed
forearms on his desk. He looked expectantly at Nick.
"Well Bob, I'm going er .... I was going to get some info on the Don
Ashton 'v' Tim West
story. You know, the bird poisoning Councillor", a stifled smile crept
on Nicks' face as the wording
of his reply hinted at a better story. The image of a six-foot pigeon
slipping arsenic into a bowl of
Town Hall coffee vanished as Bob spoke.
"Yes, I thought you'd pick up on that one.", Nick shifted in his
chair, Bob continued,
"While you're there could you throw something together for the new
'Spooks' feature for me?
Councillor Wests' neighbours, the Ashtons, have another good story to
tell"
"Yeah, of course I will. What do I have to work with?" Nicks' reply
revealed his
eagerness.
"Here, sift through these." Bob shifted a pile of folded, discoloured
newspapers towards
Nick, "Some old copies of The Enquirer - before it was 'The
Enquirer'.
They ran a series of articles in the thirties on the disappearance of
a young couple.
Apparently, for years after their vanishing act, they were seen
haunting the streets of Rothport.",
He swung his chair to the left and made a lazy sweeping motion with his
hand towards the open
window overlooking the roof tops of Rothport, "The Ashton's son 'Vince'
and spouse ...may still
be out there.". He continued to gaze out of the window, smiling at his
hauntingly spooky voice.
"I'll get on it.", Nick ignored the amateur dramatics, grabbed his
jacket and left the room.
After sorting the newspapers into chronological order and marking
related articles with
post-it stickers. Nick got down to work.
When he had finished typing up the article, he felt disappointed. It
was really a rehash of
a sixty-year-old ghost story. A story without an ending. A young couple
Vincent and Mary Ashton,
recently married and still living with Vinces' parents, disappeared
after attending a dance at the
local hall. No-one had a clue as to what happened to them, but a few
months later they were
seen laughing and joking with each other by a crowd of shoppers, one of
which approached the
couple and found that Vince and Mary ignored all attempts to interrupt
their jollities and when
this forthright individual reached to shake Vinces' shoulder, he found
his hand passed right
through Vinces' body -much to the horror of the other onlookers. The
mayhem that ensued was
reported under the cringe rendering headline 'Ashton Ghosts Antics -
Whole Street Panics', not
exactly the papers finest hour.
One curious thing - Nick had read through all the follow-ups and
sightings of the ghostly
couple following their disappearance, two dark figures traipsing around
town - laughing and
giggling. But after pulling other editions of the paper from the
archives and spending far too many
hours on the microfiche, he had delved further and discovered that the
reports didn't stop months
later, but carried on all through the forties and the fifties. The
reports finally petered out in the
mid sixties after the paper was bought out and renamed.
Nick scrawled an address on a sticker, placed his half-finished
article in Bobs tray and
left the building.
He headed downtown towards the Ashtons house. Although he didn't know
this area
too well, Nick felt he knew enough to not get lost and anyway, it
wasn't a great distance from the
office. He passed the bingo hall and slowing to get his bearings
calculated he could take a short
cut at the next right turn and the street the Ashtons lived on would be
just a little further on. He
quickened his step a little.
Nick saw the figure of a man walking briskly ahead. He kept his pace
constant so as not
to spook the man but felt he had failed as the man hurriedly
side-stepped a young couple and
ducked down an alleyway.
As he turned into the alley, Nick slowed. The running man was nowhere
to be seen.
Nick began to doubt the wisdom of continuing as he neared the end of
the alley, as it was dimly
lit and end of the alley lay beyond in the darkness. He continued on
though. Still walking very
slowly, he prepared to give a wide birth to the approaching
doorway.
The man jumped out, arms outstretched. Nick turned and faced the man.
He stared in
horror. The man opposite was Nick. It was himself. Identical, even the
same expression fixed on
both faces.
Nick took a step forward, disbelief carved on his face. The other Nick
did not move. He
took another small step, then another. Almost involuntarily, Nick
stretched out his arms out to
mirror the other 'he'. Reaching out he touched, then held, the others
arms. He stared into wide
eyes. His opposites' eyes were filled with a red haze, he moved in
closer.
As their faces neared and the red deepened in the others eyes, it
dawned upon Nick. He
knew what was to happen.
Any second he would join with the other Nick and live the past 122 days
again. The red light he
had encountered so long ago was the same light the other Nick was
encountering now. The red
haze in the other Nicks eyes was the reflection of himself. The alley
may be the meeting place of
two time lines or a rip in time - producing some sort of self
perpetuating paradox - whatever the
cause Nick knew that sixty years earlier Vincent and Mary fell victim
to the same fate he must
suffer. To live the same four months for all time and know nothing
until it was time to live it again
and again.
He let out a deafening scream as the other Nicks eyes reflected an
ever growing
whiteness....

(C) Alan Geldard 2002