Out Of Time

OUT OF TIMEChapter One: The Day That Should Not ExistAt 11:47 p.m., a dead man knocked on my bedroom door, and the moment I opened it, my phone displayed a date that did not exist. I knew the man was dead because I had watched his funeral on the evening news, seen his photograph surrounded by white flowers, and listened to a reporter explain how his body had been discovered in a locked room with no sign of forced entry. His name was Daniel Hayes, a billionaire whose wealth could buy entire city blocks and whose private life had remained a mystery even to the people who worked for him. Yet there he stood in my doorway, wearing the same black suit he had worn in the photograph, with rainwater dripping from his hair and a dark stain spreading across his chest. He looked directly at me, his expression filled with a fear so human that I forgot to be afraid of him. Then he glanced at the clock above my desk and whispered, “Abigail, you must not let tomorrow happen.” I should have screamed, slammed the door, or called the police, but something in his voice held me still. I had spent the last three years working as a junior records officer at a private insurance company, where I had learned to question everything that seemed impossible. Documents could be forged, witnesses could lie, and even the most convincing evidence could conceal a carefully constructed deception. Death, however, was supposed to be different. Daniel Hayes had been declared dead by a medical examiner, and the news had reported that his body was being prepared for burial. There was no reasonable explanation for the man standing before me. “Who are you?” I asked, although I already knew the answer. His lips parted slightly, and for one strange moment, he looked almost disappointed. “You know who I am.” He took a step forward, and I noticed that his shoes left no footprints on the dry floor. “What you don't know is that you have already met me tomorrow.” I backed away from the doorway, gripping the handle of a kitchen knife I had taken from the counter without realising it. Daniel glanced at the blade but made no attempt to approach me. Instead, he reached into his jacket and removed a folded sheet of paper, which he placed on the small table beside the door. “Read that when the clock strikes midnight,” he said. “Until then, don't trust anyone who claims to remember yesterday.” I stared at him, struggling to understand how a dead man could speak about time as though it were a room he had entered and left at will. Outside, thunder rolled across the city, and the lights flickered. When I looked back at him, a thin line of blood had appeared at the corner of his mouth. He touched it with two fingers and stared at the blood as if he had expected it to be there. “How much time do I have?” I whispered. His eyes met mine. “You have twenty-three hours and thirteen minutes before I kill you.” The lights went out. I heard the sound of something heavy striking the floor, followed by a sharp breath that seemed to come from directly beside my ear. I swung the knife blindly, striking nothing but air, and stumbled against the wall. When the emergency light above the kitchen doorway finally came on, Daniel was gone. The front door remained open, but the corridor outside was empty, and there was no sign of anyone leaving the building. I checked the locks, shut every window, and searched the apartment twice before allowing myself to sit down. My hands were shaking so badly that I could barely unlock my phone. The time displayed 11:48 p.m. I opened the news application and searched Daniel Hayes's name. His death appeared in dozens of articles, all carrying the same photograph and the same date. According to every report, he had died yesterday morning at 6:15 a.m. But when I checked the date on my phone, my stomach tightened. It was yesterday's date too. Somehow, I had lost an entire day without noticing. I called my closest friend, Maya, and asked her what day it was. She laughed at first, assuming I was joking, until I repeated the question. “Abigail, it's Thursday. Are you all right?” I looked at the calendar hanging beside my refrigerator. Thursday had been yesterday. I remembered waking up that morning, travelling to work, arguing with my supervisor about a missing insurance file, and returning home after sunset. Those memories felt real, but my phone's calendar insisted that the day had not yet begun. When I asked Maya whether we had spoken the previous evening, she went silent. “We didn't speak yesterday,” she said carefully. “You called me on Tuesday, remember? You were upset about your mother's hospital bill.” I remembered that conversation too, but I also remembered speaking to her on Wednesday. Both memories were equally clear, and neither felt like a dream. Before I could explain, Maya asked me to send her my location. I refused, not because I suspected her, but because Daniel's warning had begun to feel less like the rambling of a dead man and more like a rule I would regret breaking. At midnight, the folded paper on my table began to move. I watched it slide several centimetres across the wood, although the windows were shut and the air was still. Then my phone vibrated, displaying a notification from an unknown number. The message contained only six words: OPEN THE LETTER BEFORE YOU REMEMBER. I approached the table cautiously and unfolded the paper. Inside was a photograph of a house I had not seen in eleven years, the small white house where I had grown up with my parents before my father disappeared. I had always been told that he died in a road accident, but no one had ever shown me his body, and my mother had refused to discuss the details of his death. On the back of the photograph, someone had written a sentence in blue ink: THE FIRST TIME YOU DIED, YOU WERE SEVENTEEN. I dropped the paper. I was twenty-eight years old, and I had no memory of ever dying. Yet beneath the sentence was a signature I recognised immediately. It was my own handwriting. I spent the next hour searching through old photographs, school records, and the few documents my mother had allowed me to keep after we moved away from our childhood home. Most of the records were ordinary, but one detail disturbed me: there was a gap of eleven days in my school attendance during the month I turned seventeen. My mother had explained it as an illness, and I had accepted her explanation because I remembered very little about that period. I found a photograph taken shortly before the gap, showing me standing beside a young man whose face had been scratched out with something sharp. On the back, my handwriting read, Daniel, before everything began again. I sat down slowly. I had never knowingly met Daniel Hayes, and I had certainly never written his name beside a photograph from my teenage years. My phone rang before I could examine it further. This time, the caller's name appeared on the screen: MUM. “Abigail, where are you?” my mother asked. Her voice was strained, and I could hear the sound of a car engine behind her. “I'm at home. What's wrong?” I asked. She did not answer immediately. Instead, she asked whether I had seen a man in a black suit, whether he had mentioned tomorrow, and whether I had opened a letter. I stopped breathing. “How do you know about the letter?” I demanded. “Because I've been waiting eleven years for him to come back,” she replied. Her voice broke on the final word. I wanted to ask what she meant, but she began speaking rapidly, warning me to leave the apartment and go somewhere with no clocks. Before I could ask why, a loud crash sounded at her end of the line. She screamed my name, and the call ended. I tried calling back, but her phone was switched off. Then a message arrived from her number, containing an address I recognised as the abandoned house where my father had supposedly died. I drove there just after two in the morning, carrying the photograph and the letter in my handbag. The streets were nearly empty, and every digital clock I passed displayed the same time: 11:47. At first, I blamed a power failure, but the clocks inside my car, on petrol station signs, and on the phones of two people I stopped to ask all showed the same impossible time. When I reached the house, I found the front door unlocked and a light shining in the upstairs bedroom. The room had been left untouched since my childhood, with faded wallpaper, a broken wardrobe, and a small wooden desk beneath the window. On the desk sat a black box bearing my name. Inside it was a silver key, a hospital identification bracelet, and a newspaper clipping dated eleven years earlier. The headline read: TEENAGE GIRL DIES IN MYSTERIOUS TRAIN ACCIDENT. The photograph beneath it showed me at seventeen. According to the article, I had been declared dead at 11:47 p.m. on the night of October 20, eleven years ago. My knees weakened as I read the report again. The article described an accident near an abandoned railway station, where a train had struck a young woman whose identity had initially been difficult to establish. The victim had been buried two days later, but the name on the grave was missing. I searched the box for an explanation and found a final sheet of paper folded beneath the bracelet. It contained three sentences, all written in my handwriting: If you are reading this, Daniel has failed again. Do not allow him to save you. The world must remember that you died. A floorboard creaked behind me. I turned, expecting to see my mother, but Daniel stood in the doorway, his face pale and his shirt stained with fresh blood. This time, he looked alive enough to frighten me more than his ghost had. He glanced at the newspaper clipping, then at the silver key in my hand. “You weren't supposed to find that yet,” he said. I stepped away from him. “What happened to me eleven years ago?” Daniel's expression changed, and for the first time, I saw genuine grief in his eyes. “You died,” he answered. “Then someone changed the past, and the world forgot.” I shook my head, refusing to accept an explanation that made no sense. “Who changed it?” He looked toward the window, where the clock on an abandoned railway signal had suddenly begun ticking. “Your mother tried to save you. Your father tried to stop her. And I have spent eleven years making sure neither of them succeeds.” He reached for the silver key, but before his fingers touched mine, a gunshot shattered the silence. Daniel staggered backward, clutching his chest, and fell against the desk. Blood spread across his shirt as he stared at me in disbelief. I turned toward the doorway and saw my mother standing there with a smoking pistol in her hand. “I'm sorry, Abigail,” she whispered. “But this time, you must stay dead.” Then every clock in the house struck midnight, and I remembered who had killed me.