Item and Time

2 What the Hell?

2

What the Hell?Jonah was bewildered as he followed this woman into a coffeehouse some five stores down from S.T.R. called The Southern Bean. Jonah had passed the place on several occasions, but never entered. The place looked so woebegone and secluded, particularly in comparison to The Shining Brews, which was the newer, sleeker, more spacious coffeehouse down the street.

When Jonah and the lady crossed the Southern Bean's threshold, he could see why people avoided the place—it resembled office space that had been abandoned, and then poorly refurbished. The floor looked like it had been brightly polished at one time, but was now so aged and worn that Jonah barely trusted walking on it even with his shoes on. A dusty display showcased pastries and delicacies that were on sale if they were a day old, but Jonah would easily wager that those things were older than a month. The owner, with his sagging, leathery skin, curved frame, and supplicating eyes, looked about as old as the pastries. The look in his eyes was so pathetically pleading that Jonah was almost moved to buy something just to humor him, but the impulse was quelled the minute he turned and noticed a wave of dust swirl where he'd moved his foot.

“Um, why exactly did you pick the Southern Bean, ma'am?” he asked.

“Off of the beaten track,” said the woman. She looked around very carefully, as if she expected something to pounce from the shadows. “I'm not likely to be overheard here.”

Jonah looked around them with a frown. There were only three of them in the entire place, and the owner was preoccupied with a television set that looked even older than he did. “Who do you think will overhear you?” he asked her.

The woman looked Jonah in the eye. “Everyone,” she said simply. “Please sit with me.”

Now that the woman was near Jonah and was subject to closer scrutiny, he noticed something very odd about her. Her features seemed, for lack of a better term, indistinct. It appeared as though the outer edges of her form were not completely defined. She even seemed to flicker slightly, or was Jonah imagining that? The more he thought on it, her form had a two-dimensional appearance, like a photograph. But that didn't make any sense, either—Jonah had seen the back of her when he followed her into the store.

“Look,” he said delicately, “I must ask you. Are you a spirit?”

The woman actually managed a timid chuckle. “No.”

“Okay,” said Jonah. “A hologram, or something?”

She regarded him. “You were closer when you said spirit.”

“Huh? But you just said you weren't—”

“Look, Jonah,” said the woman, urgency in her voice, “the point is I'm here, and I desperately need your help. There are people after me and I am virtually alone. They wish to cause me grave harm—”

“Lady,” interrupted Jonah, “Stop. Before we get into all of that, I want some questions answered. First, how were you in my dreams? Second, what was that place in my dream, and third, how are you here now?”

She sighed. “I guess I do owe you a modicum of explanation. First of all, my name is Vera Haliday.”

“Did you mean Holiday?” said Jonah.

“No,” she said with impatience, “I meant Haliday, with an 'A'. The dreams were the easiest and safest way for me to talk to you, as they wouldn't expect me to be so bold and invasive. I'm here now due to some very good luck on my part. I had more strength than I thought.”

Jonah still found her rather creepy, but was curious in spite of himself. “Okay, Vera. I'll bite. But by my count, that was only two out of three. What was that odd, misty place in my dream?”

“I cannot say,” said Vera. “The name would invoke power, and alert them. Besides, you cannot go to that place anyway. You have to help me here.”

Jonah was tiring of all the cryptic talk. “Lady, I don't know what is going on with you,” he said, “but if you need some type of protection—”

“I do—”

“—then maybe the police can give you what you need.”

Vera closed her eyes, exhaled, and looked at Jonah with eyes as pleading as the owner of the Southern Bean's had been. “Tenth Percenter police cannot stop these people.”

Jonah straightened. “You're an—” he hesitated, and threw a wary glance at the owner's back, but he was preoccupied with dusting off the pastry display. “You're an Eleventh Percenter?”

Vera looked Jonah in the eye again. “No. I'm not.”

The emphasis on the “I'm” was not missed by Jonah, but he couldn't figure out how to make a further inquiry. Reluctantly, he let it pass, and moved on. “How do you know about Tenth Percenters, then?”

“Can you accept the fact that I just do?” asked Vera.

“Not if you're asking me to put my neck on the line against some unknown threat, no,” Jonah shot back.

Vera sighed again. “Please trust me, Jonah. I need your help. Badly. I cannot be taken; the consequences would be dire. It wouldn't bode well from a…from a time standpoint.”

Jonah surveyed her carefully. She seemed to exhibit a carefully vague approach, and was careful to reveal as very little information as possible. It was suspiciously familiar. He couldn't help but recall how Marla had sucked everyone in so expertly with her flawless sob stories. But this lady, Vera, didn't seem sinister. As much as Jonah wanted to be leery of her, there was just something about her that let him know that this wasn't an act. That fear that was present on her face, that overt caution, and the anxiety she showed when her eyes would dart out of the windows of the Southern Bean were not phony. Those emotions were legit.

He just didn't know what it was that she actually needed.

“I have some friends—” he began, but she tore her eyes from the window and shook her head.

“It has to be you,” she insisted. “You alone. At least at first, anyway.”

“Why?”

Unless Jonah was mistaken, Vera suddenly looked awkward. Jonah knew that look; it was the same look some of his past employers had when they planned to renege on a promise. “I—I don't think that I'd cater too well to a—a group just yet,” she managed.

“Look—” Jonah began, fast reaching his level of patience, but at that moment, Vera's eyes widened and her face paled.

“I have to leave,” she gasped, staring in horror at something outside.

“What is it?” asked Jonah. He looked around, confused, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. There were people who carefully walked to their cars, arms laden with purchases from various stores, there were people who had cups of coffee from The Shining Brews (which had been Jonah's original plan), and (he chortled slightly) there was Roger telling off that hooded vagabond yet again. Apparently, the man had returned to the parking lot of S.T.R. with a fresh collection of twigs. “What do you see? You think someone out there is going to hurt you?”

Clearly petrified of something outside, Vera reached into the pocket of that antique coat of hers and pulled out a folded piece of paper, which she dropped in front of Jonah. “This is where—where I live,” she said. “Time is short. What I'm doing is a gamble, I know, but the faster this process begins, the better it is for me. And for you.”

“Process? What're you—?”

Vera glanced over Jonah's shoulder once again, and gave a sharp gasp. Jonah looked outside again, more confused than ever. Nothing out there had changed other than the fact that Roger had successfully chased off the vagrant.

“Vera, you need to calm down,” said Jonah. He turned around to further reassure her, but with a jolt, saw that she was no longer there. There wasn't even a sign that he'd been sitting with anyone at all. That made no sense. Vera hadn't walked past him to exit through the front door, which he would have noticed in any case. He glanced at the man at the register, intending to ask where she'd gone, but he was still staring at the television, his hearing aid sitting uselessly on the counter. He was completely focused on some show about prairies. Jonah couldn't really tell as the reception was bad, and the crinkly rabbit antennas perched on top of it did nothing to help.

Frustrated and puzzled, Jonah rose and left, silently scolding Vera for disappearing on him and also silently apologizing to his lungs for subjecting them to this grungy, dusty place.

The remainder of the work day at S.T.R. was smooth, but Jonah hardly registered that because his mind was still full of that weird woman, Vera. What was it that she needed? Why had she appeared so indistinct and spirit-like? It seemed like the light from the windows in the Southern Bean, however dusty they were, played tricks on Jonah's eyes. And what had frightened her so badly? The look on her face when she had glanced over his shoulder…he wouldn't have been surprised if she'd had a coronary right then and there. And then there was her disappearing act. Jonah had scanned the parking lot on his way back to the bookstore, and hadn't seen anything remotely out of the ordinary. Well, other than the fact that The Shining Brews had upped the price of their espressos. Idiots.

Jonah bade Mr. Steverson goodbye, and was unsurprised to find Roger had decided to stay behind at work. With a handful of old books, he headed upstairs to S.T.R.'s second story. Jonah shook his head.

“Roger, you are a bigger bookworm than I am,” he murmured. The hilarity of a person who voluntarily stayed at work after hours was a welcome distraction from the strangeness of the afternoon.

“Guilty,” said Roger, “but Mr. Steverson has outdated, forgotten editions of books people have long since written off.”

“And that's a good thing?” asked Jonah.

“Indeed it is,” said Roger, in a tone so serious that Jonah almost laughed. “Everybody knows that new editions don't quite detail things the way the old tomes do. The older, rehabbed books have the proper way of it. I appreciate the old school, because it makes your escape from a limiting world absolute.”

“Don't I know,” muttered Jonah wistfully. That was the same feeling he had when he wrote. He achieved leaps and bounds with blogging, opinion columns, and journals. If only he could craft out a full novel, he'd be untouchable. “I'll leave you to it, Rog, and I hope you find what you are looking for.”

“Oh, I intend to!” said Roger with glee.

“Damn dork,” laughed Jonah, but his mirth ebbed away as he reached for his car keys and felt the folded piece of paper with Vera's address, which he had unceremoniously crammed in his pocket. While the occurrence had been on the outskirts of his mind all day, reading her address as he smoothed out the piece of paper thrust it back to the forefront.

He stared at the address, 810 Colerain Place, and committed it to memory. The more he thought on finding the place, though, the more the address seemed indicative of some unknown crap about to fall into his lap. It was almost like his mind was shouting to him to run in the opposite direction as quickly as possible. These past months had been so quiet and uneventful…did Jonah really want to potentially sacrifice that?

But then he remembered the panic in Vera's voice. That absolute certainty and fear that someone was after her.

Time is short, she'd told him. It has to be you, at least at first.

“Maybe I'm crazy,” he sighed to himself, “but what the hell.”

810 Colerain Place wasn't difficult to locate. It turned out to be about a half hour away from Jonah's old job, Essa, Langton, and Bane. He spared very little thought about that place, but he hoped that their penchant for stupidity didn't have a radius that reached out to here.

Jonah exited his car and glanced around the neighborhood to familiarize himself with the surroundings. He closed his eyes, inhaled deeply, and willed the curtain to open in his mind. The Spectral Sight was instantaneous.

Jonah enjoyed Spectral Sight. It was an attribute all Eleventh Percenters had that allowed them to see the spiritual inhabitants of Earthplane. Reena taught him to do it, and he took to it like a duck takes to water. He was intrigued by the spirits' appearances (some were vividly opaque while others were more transparent; their composition was based on how far along their remaining loved ones were in accepting their loss), and was pleased to see how thankful they were to still be present and relevant in their own way. It served to validate what Jonathan had told him when he'd discovered the Eleventh Percent: Life never ends.

Jonah's Spectral Sight also made him privy to something else: The spirits could also help him to ascertain the feeling of a place. He'd figured this out at the movie theater one evening. The spirits in that place had been lively, pleasurable, and happy. As a result, the overall feeling of the environment had been welcome and quite homey. This also worked the other way, too—angry spirits contributed to a collection of people sometimes being unusually frustrated and on edge, tense spirits contributed to anxiety-ravaged crowds, and sad, depressed ones contributed those same emotions to the physical beings around them. People who visited cemeteries never actually realized that they weren't necessarily sad because they were there. They simply associated the place with those feelings, when in reality, it was their empathic link with the spirits of their loved ones who were actually sad for them because they didn't desire to be mourned.

The feeling of Colerain Place, however, didn't bring about any funky vibes. It felt…normal. The spirits that moved about the area held impassive or pleasant expressions, which meant that they were all here voluntarily, helping loved ones or simply on their own paths. They didn't appear to be afraid of anything around, a fact that quelled Jonah's initial misgivings. He walked towards the intimate, quaint house that was a shabby and weather-beaten shade of red, and knocked on the door labeling it as 810.

No one answered. Jonah knocked again. Still, no response.

He frowned slightly. It wasn't like he had beaten Vera getting here. She had had four and a half hours to return home after they'd talked. He placed his ear to the door.

He didn't hear television going, but he did hear some rather rigorous steps, like someone was throwing a tantrum.

“What is going on in there?” he mumbled to himself. He knocked again, hard enough to redden his knuckles, but there was still no response.

“Looking for Vera?” said an amused voice.

Jonah turned and saw a stooped man near him, with unkempt wisps of blond hair on an otherwise shiny bald head. He also had an unsightly mole on the tip of his nose that didn't do anything to take away from his overly magnified gaze, compliments of some very thick bifocals.

“Yes I am,” Jonah said to him, wondering what was so funny. “Is she home?”

“Of course she's home,” laughed the guy. “But it's 5:20.”

“Meaning…?”

“Meaning that she is doing aerobics,” said the man, laughing again. “She'll have headphones in and won't hear you at the door. If I were you, I'd try the window.”

Jonah glanced at the window, and then back at the goofy neighbor, who seemed to be getting much enjoyment out of his inconvenience. Given that this was supposed to be such a dire need, being held up like this annoyed him.

“Thank you, Goggles,” he muttered under his breath. He was about to move towards the window when the worn door opened.

Jonah's mouth opened slightly.

Since her wardrobe that afternoon had been so antiquated, it was quite surprising to see Vera in modern clothing. She was in a sweaty long-sleeved T-shirt, blue yoga pants, and cross trainers. Her brown-blonde hair and hazel eyes were the same, but her face was more visible, courtesy of her hair being pulled back into a haphazard ponytail. There was no trick of any light here; Vera looked just as three-dimensional and distinct as everyone else. Despite the sweat and mild frustration on her face, she did something that Jonah found curious. She slightly turned her face to the side, so that the left side was more visible. Jonah guessed that she was attempting to obscure the scar on her jaw. That was odd. She didn't have any issue with anyone seeing it earlier in the day.

“I heard you banging on my door,” she said. There was no panic, worry, or fright in her voice; she seemed more ticked off than relieved to see him. “I hope you have a good reason for bothering me right now. I have work in an hour and have to get my aerobics done.”

Jonah regarded her off-putting appearance once more, and then collected himself. “Of course I have a good reason,” he said slowly. “But I've got to ask you. What was the deal with the Murder, She Wrote getup this afternoon? Were you trying to be incognito? Because, forgive me, it wasn't very good. If anything, you stood out more.”

Vera raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

“I guess that explanation can wait,” said Jonah, “to each their own. Now, what's your trouble? Who's after you?”

“What are you talking about?”

Jonah blinked. “The danger you're in. The big trouble. What is it? I'm not sure how to help, but tell me everything you can. You came looking for me, after all.”

Vera's eyes narrowed suspiciously. “ 'Looking for you?' ” she repeated, looking at him as though she feared his sanity, or lack thereof. “Are you one of those door to door thumpers with a religious fixation or something? Thinking you know how to help with my 'innermost pain' or whatever?”

“Innermost—? Look lady, you can stop playing now.” Jonah was quickly losing his patience. Why was she acting like this? “It's me, Jonah Rowe, remember? You came to me, practically in hysterics, and said you needed my help. You are in danger, they're…well, whoever they're supposed to be, are after you, and that would be bad for both of us. You said time was short, or something. Now get on with it. What's going on?”

The frustration on Vera's face slowly got displaced by alarm. “I have never seen you before in my life.”

Jonah gaped at her. “What?”

“I don't know who you are,” she repeated. “You are really starting to creep—”

“Wait,” said Jonah. Was this some sick joke? It sure as hell didn't sound like one earlier! “Wait. You're Vera Haliday—”

Her eyes widened. “How did you know my name?”

“You told me your name!” exclaimed Jonah. “You wrote it down, with this address! It's right here!”

He showed Vera the piece of paper, and for some reason, she recoiled, with a look of fear that made her features identical to the visage Jonah had seen at The Southern Bean.

“Look sir,” she said, and now she sounded worried and frightened, “I'm only going to say this once. Leave now, and don't come to my house again.”

“What are you talking about?” demanded Jonah. “Never come to your house again? You sought me out! I've had dreams about you—”

Jonah immediately knew that that was the wrong thing to say. It was as if he heard himself say the words and didn't have the ability to stop himself. With a horrified look that scared even Jonah, Vera slammed the door in his face.

Jonah stood there, frozen. He didn't comprehend even one thing that had just happened. There were no people around him. There was no one to talk to. Yet, he asked aloud the question that completely summed up the entire day:

“WHAT THE HELL?”