Page 9 of Echoes

“It was supposed to be for me! It’s not yours to hide.”

“Promise me you’ll leave them alone. They don’t know a thing.”

“You’d say anything to save them,” the man argued.

“I would, but they don’t know. Why… would I… tell them… something… that would get them… killed?”

“Daddy,” she said to herself.

Her younger self had run back into the cabin already, so this didn’t make any sense to her. Teenage Eliza hadn’t seen this that night. She hadn’t heard her father exchanging words with this man. How would she even know this? Was she making it up? Was this a delusion? If so, why did it feel so real?

“I will find it,” the man stated.

“It wasn’t meant to exist. You need to… let it… go.”

Her father’s eyes closed, and Eliza’s filled with tears as she stoodthere, trying to think, trying to process what was happening and how to get out of this nightmare. Then, her father’s killer stood and turned to her. She took a step back, believing he could see her and would kill her next in this vision, but he just looked right through her as if she wasn’t there. It was then that Eliza really got a good look at him, the man who had murdered her father, and she realized that she recognized him. She knew who he was.

“Oh, my God!”

The Day of the Funeral

Her father had been dead for five days. Normally, the funeral would’ve been earlier, but since he was a victim of a crime, they’d conducted a full autopsy, needing his body for a few extra days. God, his…body. Her father was now a body. It was inside that casket that they’d just lowered into the ground at the cemetery.

Now, people were coming up to her and telling her how sorry they were while her mother sat on the bed in the bedroom, avoiding all company. Eliza had barely made it through the funeral herself, but her mother had collapsed at the church and hadn’t even gone to the cemetery. Someone had brought her back to the house, and she hadn’t left her room since. That meant that Eliza was the star of this macabre show. She was just a teenager, left on her own to deal with every adult in the house asking how she was, telling her she had their condolences, offering food she didn’t want to eat, and saying they’d be there for her. Every adult except for one.

An older man was in the corner of the room, standing next to a woman who was talking to him and eating a carrot. He made eye contact with her for only a second and quickly looked away as if he hadn’t meant for Eliza to see him. He had a short, cropped haircut, wore black-rimmed glasses, and was older than her parents by at least a couple of decades, but Eliza couldn’t put an exact age range to him. Then again, she also wasn’t sure who half of these people were. More than half, really. She suspected they were friends of her father’s or both her parents, but she didn’t know more than a handful of them. A woman she’d also never met before approached Eliza and stole her attention from the strange man.

“We’re so sorry, honey. If there’s anything you need, please let us know.”

“Thank you,” Eliza replied.

She didn’t know who theweandusreferred to, but she nodded all the same, and the woman walked off, leaving Eliza to sit on the sofa, holding a plastic cup of water and waiting for the next person to inevitably approach and tell her that they were there for her, too. She appreciated it, but all she really wanted was her father. She wantedhimto be there for her. She wanted her mother to return to the land of theliving, too, because, even though one of her parents was still alive, it felt to Eliza as if she’d lost both of them at once that night. Eliza knew that in time, her mother would return to her old self – or, at least, shehopedfor it because she knew she couldn’t do this on her own.

Almost Sixteen Years Later

Eliza was back in the storage room. The garage door was still closed most of the way. The boxes still surrounded her on the floor. The device sat next to the metal container she’d found it in, and the note was back in its place. It was as if she’d never been transported to a part of the past she hadn’t even witnessed back then. She flopped more than sat on the floor and just stared at the wall for a while, not saying anything but trying to figure out what had just happened. When she caught sight of the device again with her peripheral vision, she thought about pressing the button purposefully this time, but she chose not to. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to live through that event a third time. And that was what it felt like to her: like she was physically there all over again, but as her adult self and not the teenager she’d been. Living through it once had already been hard enough, but revisiting that horrible night had been even worse somehow.

The man with shaggy ash-blonde hair and a full beard with a mustache, whom she’d just seen by the cabin, had been the same man she remembered from the funeral, only he’d been clean-shaven that time, with the short, cropped blonde hair and black-rimmed glasses. Eliza knew that for sure for two reasons. She’d seen his eyes. They were a pale, watery blue and a little too big for his face. She’d also seen a scar just above his right eye. It had still been a little pink as if he’d gotten it only weeks or months ago, so it hadn’t yet healed. It had been small but noticeable enough from the other side of the living room.

“It can’t be…” she said to herself.

This wasn’t as if she’d just remembered more details about the man who killed her father. She couldn’t have seen those details from where she’d been standing as a kid. She remembered watching her father fall down, get stabbed, her mother running out, and Eliza having to pull her back into the house, but she didn’t hear a conversation between the two men. She couldn’t have just made that up in her own mind.

All those years ago, the police had concluded that her father had been murdered by a vagrant or just someone who had wandered through the mountain and might have had a mental disorder, and Eliza had had no reason to doubt them back then. But the man who had killed her father in this vision had been perfectly coherent and had also known her father. He’d been at his funeral…

Eliza jumped up then, unable to take it anymore, and yanked the door open. She ran outside, around the corner unit three doors down from her own, and vomited onto the gray concrete. The man who had killed her father had shown up at his funeral and had eaten their food. He’d talked to friends and family and probably expressed his condolences to them when he’d been the one to cause all of this pain. At that thought, Eliza grew angry. She wiped at her mouth and tried to stand but wobbled a bit.

“Hey, hey. I’ve got you,” Lydia said and put her hands on Eliza’s hips to steady her. “El, are you okay? What’s going on?”

“I…” She couldn’t reply. “I feel sick.”

“I can see that,” Lydia said. “Let’s get you in the car. I’ll lock up and take you home, okay? The pizza will keep.”

“Pizza?”

“Yeah, I got us lunch. Remember?”

“But…” She turned to Lydia. “It’s only been a few minutes.”

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