Echoic

A Short Story, Noir Thriller

Echoic

“I’ve never told anyone about this. It’s private knowledge, handed down within my family,” Zared Mansfield said.

He’d given much thought to this, turning the matter over and over in his head until he was certain to go insane. The secret had driven his father mad, hollow in the eyes, twitching at odd moments, mumbling under his breath: nothing matters, it’s all been before. Pointless. Pointless! Before his fourteenth year, Zared had found him outside hanging from a tree. In the following years his mother was worn down. She became frail and trembled constantly. Finally, she moved out. Told him he ought to do the same. But he couldn’t; it was his birthright, his burden to bear.

Zared had hoped the presence of his tenant, Ezra Collins, a man of similar age, might distract him, and it had for a time. But then he had a bad day. He’d had a string of bad days recently. So many he couldn’t count. And he had begun to wonder if they were really bad, or if it was just the knowing that made them bad. He couldn’t leave, but it was getting to the point that he couldn’t stay, either. He lived in the prison of his mind long enough; he needed the perspective of another person, the light of another set of eyes.

Ezra was a councilor by trade, and he never seemed to be in a hurry. He spent his days earning a living listening to men and women bemoan the choices in their lives, the things they wish they had done. Ezra waited, enjoying his cup of tea, ready to accept whatever strange thing Zared might say. It was that openness that allowed Zared the space to express what he had wrestled with since he turned eighteen and the house had become — officially, legally — his.

“Do you know how old this house is?” Zared asked.

“Very old, I imagine,” said Ezra.

His inheritance was a craftsman bungalow, built in 1910. Thick wooden beams spanned the ceiling, creating deep coffers that collected dust. They were sturdy, though they bowed under the weight of the last century. The varnish had faded years ago, and the joists caught shadows from the flickering light in the stone hearth, giving the spacious living room a cave-like quality. The dwelling was expansive. Furnished with an old Chippendale-style pedestal desk, antique side tables, and a grandfather clock from the 1930s, it felt more like a monument to the generations who had played out their lives here than a home. Now it was just Zared, and he couldn’t bear anymore the disordinate whispers, half-form thoughts, drizzling through his mind. With another being present, the worn chairs felt cozy and welcoming rather than sad, the scuffed remains of old money.

“It was built at the turn of the century. My family were prospectors, pioneers who crossed the country looking for gold, or something of value which would turn their fortunes around.” The warm fire glowing next to them was a faint comfort against the chill outside. How many times could he have had this conversation without even knowing it? “Well, they found it, but it wasn’t gold.”

“What did they find?” Ezra set his teacup down.

“A unique site. My ancestor, Arlo Mansfield, several generations ago, felt there was something different about this place. He theorized it was the ritual grounds for the spiritual traditions of the natives. I have found nothing in my research to conclude the validity of these conjectures. His grandson, Dr. Cyrus Mansfield, was a scientific man who poured his resources into studying the land; the peculiar effects this place had on the human body. He decisively concluded there was something different.”

“Something different?” Ezra asked.

“About the land. The energy. Something to do with magnetics and electrons, space and time.” Zared fell silent, waiting for Ezra to interrupt and say some polite triviality about how strange everyone’s families were, and how we all had at least one odd duck in our family trees.

But Ezra said nothing. Light and shadow flickered across the hearth. The tiles once glossy, neat, and colorful, were now faded with soot, chipped in the corners, scraped and cracked in places. Old. Zared could not bring his gaze to meet his companion’s. It would break the spell of courage that the darkness had woven around him.  He pressed onward.

“There is something strange in the way time moved on this land. One could imagine oneself at a previous moment in time, never more than a few days earlier, and then they would find themselves in that past moment, able to rectify mistakes. Make different choices. Better choices.”

Now that it was finally coming out, he could not hold back the flood. He rushed onwards.

“Dr. Mansfield sought to cultivate and capture the possibilities of such an irregular relationship between time and space. He conceived a revolutionary notion. Knowing that he would be laughed out of reputable institutions, or else murdered for his research and land rights, he left the company of other scientists and set to work.”

This was why the secret had stayed within their bloodline, revealed only to the next generation. Zared kept the secret, faithful to his lineage, but it was, as his father had said, pointless. There was no point. It was a mark of Zared’s desperation as much as his trust in Ezra that he now revealed this deep dark truth that plagued his family tree. He had trod the well-worn path of his forebears, kept the secret to himself, but look at how their lives had gone. Was it too late? Was he entrenched in the bunkers the previous generations fortified? Was there no way through?

“In one year, he built this house,” Zared said.

The Persian rug beneath their feet, no doubt priceless, was threadbare. The glass cabinets gathered scummy dust on the edges, veiling the artifacts inside. Too many black and white photos filled the dark wooden bookcases built into one wall, and Zared knew who every person was, the offshoots of a sickened family tree.

“What did he believe?” Ezra asked.

Zared met his eyes. The dark surfaces in the room were illuminated by the amber glow from the fire, and it felt like he had been waiting for this evening, this conversation for a very long time.

“He believed he could concentrate the strange magnetism and energy into one single spot, one point in the house and, through various experiments and mechanisms, he would be able to control how far back he went. According to his journals, time was a wave, a pattern, and in this location, the wave of time and the wave of space became somewhat… unbound. Untethered. He sought to concentrate that polarity into a single spot, as one would concentrate the sun’s beams into a magnifying glass and channel the power of the brightest star onto a very small point.”

 “Did he succeed?” Ezra asked.

“He did,” Zared said, releasing in a breath the secret to a person outside his bloodline. “In this house, there is a room. In this room, my ancestors channeled the energy through devices built into the walls. He magnified the polarity between space and time. His journals build on a hypothesis that I am not educated enough to follow with any certainty. The overall effect was precise, though not to his desired outcome.”

“What was the outcome?”

“The room became a reset. It channels the human body and consciousness back in time, by approximately one day. In short, whatever body enters that room, they are then transported to wherever they were at precisely the same time twenty-four hours earlier.”

“This is revolutionary. How is it that no one else knows about this? Why have you not publicized it?” Ezra asked.

“Because of the fatal flaw,” Zared said. “It cannot be proven.”

“How do you mean? Surely all one must do is try it for himself.”

“I’ve no understanding of the technical sciences that caused this, but in containing this warping of the space-time relationship to such a magnitude, the effects rippled outward and not only reset the human body but also the human psyche. In short, Ezra, they have no recollection of entering the room or restarting their day. They receive the gift of the do-over, the opportunity to set to rights all that has gone awry in their time, with the curse of forgetting they already lived these same hours.”

“Well, that’s useless,” Ezra said with frustration. He still did not understand.

“It is worse than useless; it is a curse. Say a son goes back in time to save the life of his mother. He has no conception of what awaits him in his day, and she dies again. Yet on some level, his soul knows. Anticipates it. He has no way of knowing if, in fact, he is now causing his mother’s death.”

“Surely not, how can the son cause his mother’s death if he has gone back in time to prevent it? The logic is circular,” Ezra said, keeping up with the theoretical conversation far better than Zared could have hoped.

“Due to the same effects that finally alerted Dr. Mansfield to the flaw in his operation. One enters the room, one is sent back in time one full planetary rotation, both body and mind so that there is no record of events. And yet, it seems rather that the time-continuum is on a train track, on rails, and the actions are repeated, but there is wear, on a microscopic level, left on the rails. I am speaking of the material order of our world. Of the synapses and grey matter of the brain. There are imprints on the soul of events previously exposed. Thus, the question becomes not: how does the son save the mother? But: did she die to begin with? Perhaps the son set out that day to rectify a much smaller error. Say he missed a train or crashed a car, and then, by the slight unconscious changes in action, due to the microscopic wear on the fabric of reality, events are changed just enough, leading to an even greater catastrophe.” Zared could feel the suppressed mania bleeding into his words.

The day his mother had left, he had known she would. Known it, down to the very fiber of his being. That day, more than any other, he wanted to break his solemn vow to never enter the room; to change what had happened, to keep her with him. He could not bear to be alone in this house. But he had felt it, the chilling echo of certainty that she would leave, and now the uncertainty if he had driven her to it. Had he set out to fix another issue? Large or small, and brought this about himself? He could not go into the room and risk an even worse fate. This was why he never searched for a wife, a partner to sit with him in this eternal damnation.

“But how could anyone ever prove this was the case? You say a man walks into a room and is sent back one day, with no recollection of ever having lived the day. From where I’m sitting, the point seems moot,” said Ezra.

Ah, and this was the crux of it. Ezra was open-minded, but not foolish. He needed evidence. But would Ezra believe him? Zared couldn’t bear the idea of not being believed, of being alone in his enduring dread of this understanding. But once he shared it…

“Dr. Mansfield himself was unaware of the malfunction in his experiment. I have no idea how long it took him to realize, only he began to notice and ‘echo,’ a recollection of events before they happened. He theorized the events had been written, erased, and rewritten on his mind so many times that those synapses conducting the memory never actually left, only been repressed. In his mind, he carried the memory of a thousand days that were in fact all one, and the impact of space and time had worn down the cushioned barrier between the conscious and the unconscious.”

“That is still theoretical. Even I experience de ja vu from time to time,” Ezra argued.

“True, but Dr. Mansfield kept a very precise journal of his experiments, of the progress with the room. He would write in it every evening, recording how the experiments of the day had gone. He began to see…”

Zared broke off. He must stop this instant. How could he be so selfish, dragging another human being into his misery? The misery of knowing, of walking up a staircase that went in circles and ended nowhere.

“What did he see?” Ezra asked, his voice a whisper.

“The pages in his journal were thin… much, much thinner than the pages before, or the pages which came after. It was almost as though… as though someone had written on them, and then erased them. Again and again, day after day. Every day they were clean, blank, without trace or mark, but they were thin. Just before these pages, he recorded his intention to test the completed room the following day. Four pages after, the thickness resumed.” He spoke faster and faster, unable to help himself. “I know this because I have read the journal. Have felt the pages. Now written on these pages, are his theories. He believed that the same way metals lose their magnetism when thermal energy disrupts the magnetic dipoles within atoms, the physical articles which encounter this rewriting of events too many times become ‘demagnetized’ to the space-time continuum.”

“Indeed,” said Ezra.

“You do not believe me,” Zared said. He tried to hide the disappointment in his voice.

Ezra sighed. “I need more proof than that, I think. I am a doubting Thomas. Let me put my hand in the wounds.”

Zared could not blame the man. He knew this was a fantastical story, and he would not have believed it if he had not seen the journal pages himself. Felt the thinness of the texture, as faint as a moth’s wing, when the other pages, though aged with time, were still of hearty weight.

Zared went to his desk. He took out a key, unlocked the drawer, and retrieved his most precious treasure: his great-great-grandfather’s journal. It was wrapped in cloth. He took it back to their chairs and handed it to Ezra. His fingers trembled. He turned and resumed his seat.

“There, open it. Yes, you may. That is his journal. I think you will find the pages I mean.”

Ezra carefully unwrapped the journal, laying the cloth across his lap. With gentle fingers, he opened the cover and turned the pages. Zared knew what he would see: tiny, precise font, a scientist’s hand, with drawings of the house they now lived in. Diagrams, inventions of scientific equipment. Depictions of the space-time wavelength. All of it was above Zared’s head though he had given much time and attention to disentangling its mysteries.

Ezra turned each leaf, his eyes roving over the pages with a frown, intent. The look of a man trying to understand, rather than dismiss the ravings of a lunatic, or simply humor his landlord. Ezra held the journal up to his eyes, level to inspect the thickness of the pages. His frown deepened, and he stared harder. Finally, he closed the book and passed it back.

“You will have to forgive me, Zared, I see no difference in the thickness of the pages.”

“What?” Zared asked, aghast.

He took the book and opened it quickly, not giving as much heed as he ought to such an old journal. He turned through the pages that were more familiar to him than his own face. Past the tight, neat script, past the plans for the house, the drawings of inventions, the theories, and came finally to the thin pages, the pages which had first alerted his great great grandfather that there was something amiss.

But… they weren’t there. His fingers traced the joining between leaves. They had been ripped out. The frayed, torn edges encountered his fingers like the fluttering of a wing.

Zared’s shock was so complete he did not move for a full minute.

“It was here. They’re gone.”

“How can they be gone?” asked Ezra.

“Look, they’ve been torn out,” Zared said. A chill settled into his skin. When Ezra reached for the book, Zared passed it to him with numb hands. How could this be?

Ezra squinted one eye at the open spine.

“Oh, yes, look at that. There are missing pages. I didn’t see it, they are so thin.”

Ezra closed the journal and gave it back to him. Zared’s brain had yet to make a forward thought. It was as though he had been on a singular track, been shoved off the side, and was now flailing, not certain where to go from here.

Did Ezra do this? No, Zared couldn’t see how that could be. He wore the key around his neck at all times, and he’d only told him about the room that bent space and time today. Had they finally become completely demagnetized and faded into the waves of space and time? It couldn’t be, for there was the fringe where the pages had been.

Zared didn’t say anything, his mind whirling and going nowhere. Ezra, discerning on some small level his landlord’s distress, leaned forward.

“My friend, sometimes we must accept what is, and simply move forward.”

Zared gave him a small nod. Ezra rose and departed for the evening.

Zared allowed the fireplace to burn out, opening the journal and examining it as he had countless times before. Except now it was as though the earth had lost its gravity: a crucial truth he could not prove, but which he had founded his life on, was gone.

What was true? He hadn’t imagined it, had he? Was there a madness in his genes that had finally expressed itself in him, and he had simply failed to notice? Perhaps this journal was nothing more than the ramblings of a lunatic, and that was why he couldn’t understand them. But who had torn the pages out? Had it been him? It couldn’t have been, he had no memory, no echo, to warn him that he had fallen into the snare of his forbears.

His thoughts chased round and round, and he felt his sanity slipping. He’d sought to steady himself on the collected mental surety of his tenant, a man he had grown to respect. But what he saw reflected back at him was a disturbing creature to behold.

When the fire in the grate burned out, Zared wrapped the journal in cloth once again. He returned it to his desk, locked the drawer, and retired for the evening. On the way to his room, he stopped. Unthinking, he turned and walked down another hallway. He followed the route to the back of the house where decorations had not been updated because he did not bring guests here. Curtains with patterns out of style hung in the narrow windows, discolored from decades of sunlight. A broken broom leaning in one corner, and a layer of dust coated everything. It was empty, forsaken. Why, then, did it feel as though there was a presence here?

He approached the last door. The door Dr. Mansfield had installed many decades ago. Behind this door, the walls were inlaid with complex mechanisms, the very height of scientific experimental technology: instruments that performed the strange alchemy and turned today into yesterday. He always got chills when he stood before this door. He never walked inside. He didn’t want to end up with the same twisted circular fate as his great-great-grandfather and the sons that followed after him. But today, today was different. He had to know: was it his own insanity? Was any of this real? If only for a second, he needed certainty.

He reached out and grasped the iron doorknob. It was cool on his hand, and it hummed against his skin. Before he opened the door, something caught his eye. A little wedge of cream white. He released the handle, bent down, and pulled it out from beneath the door. Zared’s eyes widened, stunned. In his hand lay a page with sprawling notes, the tiny precise font of Dr. Mansfield’s hand, on a piece of paper as delicate as a moth’s wing.

In a past iteration, he had torn the pages out himself. He had come down here seeking to undo or to understand, he didn’t know. He could never know his original intention. All he knew for certain was his desperation now, on this day. The desperation to share his torturous secret with another living soul, to come down here and find out for certain. How long had he been lost, afraid, abandoned in the hollowed carcass of a diseased family tree? He had been desperate enough, depressed enough, to tear out the pages, to send himself a message beyond time, a shout into the shifting shadows, an essence blown away like dust. But here, here was the evidence; the pages ripped not only from their binding but from space and time.

Zared returned to the living room and stoked the fire. He tore the leaves from the journal and watched them burn.

---

S. C. Durbois Newsletter

• 1st Saturday every month: a new original short story.

• 3rd Saturday every month: a writerly check-in with updates.

• 4th Saturday every month: a new chapter from “Bohan the Mage,” a dark academic fantasy novel. Subscriber access only.