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The Diary and the Knife

The four of them now stood in this teen girl’s room, on one side of the door, staring across the open space to the other side of the door, where once upon a time, there waited a hallway. A hallway they’d been in only minutes before.

And it was now gone.

Instead, they stared across the doorway into what looked like a dining room.

The walls were wood paneled. The table, covered in a plasticky tablecloth decorated in yellow flowers, orange birds, green ferns. A tacky not-really-gold chandelier hung above it, the kind with fake candles and glass bulbs shaped like flames. The chandelier gently swung back and forth, the spiderwebs attached to it swaying and stretching, but not quite breaking. The table was set with paper plates and glassware. On each plate was a piece of yellow cake and festive generic birthday icing. Half eaten. Forks askew. A few flies buzzed above.

Owen felt sick.

Beyond the table, on the far side of the room, next to a bookshelf on one side, a kerosene heater on the other, was another doorway closed by a louvered bifold door, the unfinished wooden slats cracked and crooked. A closet door, maybe.

They all stared, silent for a while. Unsure what to say, or do.

It was Hamish who eventually broke the silence: “That could be my grandmother’s dining room. I mean, it’s not, it’s fucking totally not, I just mean—”

Lore jumped in:

“Late seventies, early eighties vibe. Knickknacks on a shelf in the corner, the cheap tablecloth, the—the wood sconces with mulberry red candles. Not just grandma energy. This is just what people’s houses looked like in the seventies and eighties, man. People who would become grandmas one day, I guess.”

Owen, frustrated, said: “Who cares whose room it is? It’s not a hallway, and more to the point, not the hallway we used to enter this bedroom. The house, or whatever this place is? It shifted. It fucking shifted .”

This place hates you, this place hates you, this place hates you—

He stuck a thumbnail in his mouth, peeling a crescent off of it.

Nick started to walk through the door.

Hamish put a hand on his chest, hard.

“Dude. Wait.”

“I’m just checking it out.”

“We need to just stop for a second.”

Lore nodded. “Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Hamish is right.” Owen felt a twist of petty jealousy: Oh, sure, he’s right, but not me for saying hey let’s stop talking about interior design eras for a minute . “If this place really does shift, then what if it does it while one of us is in there and the rest of us are over here ?”

“But we know Matty isn’t in here, ” Nick hissed through his teeth. “And he might be that way. So I want to go that way.”

“Nick, c’mon, man,” Hamish said. “Let’s just—fuck, man, let’s just calm down, take a minute, sit down in this, uhh, this girl’s bedroom and think. Okay? Can we just stop and think?”

It was hard not to hear the panic vibrating at the edges of Hamish’s every word. It contrasted hard with Owen’s memory of him. As a kid, Hamish had always been a leaf in a stream—just happy to float wherever the water was taking him. He was the easiest going, a wad of human Silly Putty eager to be molded. Life and time had changed him.

It had changed them all, hadn’t it? A small voice inside Owen said, Not really. You’re still the same, Zuikas.

“Fine. Yeah.” Nick shrugged and backed into the bedroom, going over and sitting on the edge of the bed. “Whatever.”

Owen sat at the desk.

Lore stood.

Hamish paced.

“I’ll start,” Lore said, talking it out. “We started in a forest. There was a staircase that was not supposed to be there. We walked up it, and as a result, we all went somewhere else. Here. In this…place, this house, this structure. A hallway that led to this room where a phone was ringing and where I heard our lost friend, Matty, on the phone. And then there was another shift. Right? The hallway is now gone. It’s been replaced with a dining room. What else? What am I missing?”

“It’s fucked,” Hamish said. “It’s all fucked, man.”

“Very helpful, Ham,” Nick said.

“And the rooms don’t really match,” Nick said. “This room is for a girl in the 1990s. That dining room? Like you said, late seventies, early eighties. The hallway and stairs and shit, with all that wood? I’d say, older, maybe much older.”

“Not necessarily,” Owen said. “Not everyone has an interior designer make one house look consistent. A couple inherits a house, an old house, they make changes where they can. Different generations inhabit the house, decorate it differently. It’s only rich people that have really consistent visions for their houses and have the money to implement those visions, right?”

“Right,” Lore said.

He felt a twitter of validation. Senpai noticed me, he thought foolishly.

“What else?” she asked.

Hamish offered: “These two rooms shouldn’t connect. Nobody is putting a girl’s bedroom right off a dining room.”

“ And someone’s already been here,” Nick said. “That table in there has cake on it. Half eaten. Like a family was in there chowing down and got raptured or some shit.”

As the others spoke, Owen looked at the computer lying on its side down near his feet. He leaned over and got it back upright before seeing that it was unplugged. He spied an outlet against the wall—cracked white plastic. Then he looked up. Christmas lights, blinking.

“There’s power,” he said suddenly. “Electricity.”

He plugged in the computer and turned it on.

It started to boot.

“What kind of system is it?” Lore asked.

“It’s like a—maybe a first-gen Pentium, by the look of it. A Gateway. Remember those?”

Lore laughed a little. “Yeah, the cow boxes and stuff.” She stood up and came over to him, stooping over and watching the screen. A Windows 95 logo booted. “Gateway, Pentium, Win95, the TLC poster, the Spice Girls—”

“So this is a teen girl’s bedroom from 1995, ’96, something like that.”

“Yeah, looks like.”

Lore put her hand on his shoulder.

It steadied him. Amazing how easily she could keep him steady—or knock him off his axis in one go. Don’t forget what she did to you, he reminded himself. At that thought, it was as if she could hear it, as if his bad thought was a short sharp electrical shock—she pulled her hand away suddenly.

In its absence, a strange, almost cold pain. Isolation and loneliness.

Lore reached over him and grabbed a pen and a small pink book. The pen had a wispy end, like the hair of one of those little troll dolls. “Feather pen,” she said. “And this is some kind of diary. It’s locked, but—”

She wrenched it open, and the lock popped off.

“Settle down, Hulk,” Owen said.

Lore shrugged. “You know me. Lore stands for Lorge .” She started flipping through pages as the computer booted all the way up, took them to a garish teal desktop with big chonky icons. As Lore went through the book, Owen grabbed for the two-button mouse, moved the cursor over the icons.

My Computer, Network Neighborhood, Recycle Bin, Solitaire, Control Panel, System, and so on. “She was a Prodigy kid.” Lore, he remembered, used CompuServe. The others, AOL. But Owen, too, used Prodigy as a way to get onto some early version of “online.” Though both he and Lore also used dial-up clients to access various BBSes—bulletin board systems, hyperlocal online hubs run by users out of their homes. Lore ran one for a while called Bizarroland BBS. On a lark, he tried clicking it, but when he did, the icon turned to a spray of pixels, like graffiti painted on the wall in Pac-Man’s world. “Shit.” Then he saw another icon, down in the corner of the screen, hidden away from the others:

oldtimer.jpg

An image file.

His heart crawled up into his throat, lodged itself there.

A pulse beat kicking at the sides of his neck.

Owen clicked the file.

It opened, blank.

But then it started to render, pass after pass, an image refining itself pixel by pixel, layer by layer.

Lore, meanwhile, was chatting about the book. “Typical teen girl squad shit, blah blah blah, she likes this boy, his name is Grady, Grady with hearts all around him, Grady written in cursive, in different colors, ugh. Her name is Marsha, by the way, but she seems to go by Marshie. Marshie. That’s too cute by a country mile. Marshie .” Flip, flip. “She hates her parents—girl, who doesn’t. She thinks her math teacher is weird. She’s sad a lot. Welcome to being a kid in the nineties, I guess. Lots to worry about, and she talks about some of it. Acid rain and ozone layer and will anyone ever love her and she’s afraid of sex but wants to have sex and—” Flip, flip, flip. “This is just a page where she writes the lyrics to TLC’s ‘Waterfalls’ over and over again in an increasingly erratic—” Flip. “Oh. Oh shit. Oh no.”

But Owen was barely listening.

On the screen, the JPG finished rendering.

It was a photo. Of a pocketknife. The knife lay on its side, the blade half open, at a forty-five-degree angle. Nickel bolsters at the end, brass pins holding it together, and a little metal inlay icon that read OLD TIMER. The brand at the base of the blade read SCHRADE.

The edge of the blade was darkened. Just a little. Wet and red.

“Are you listening to me?” Lore asked him.

“I—” He hadn’t been. Not really. Not since that image came up.

“She killed herself.”

“What?”

“This girl. Marshie. I think she killed herself.” Owen felt dizzy at the thought of that. The knife in the photo. He knew that knife. He had one growing up. Used it for…well. Had she used one just like it? He understood her, suddenly. The worries, the anxieties. The unreturned love. That feeling deep down in you that you’re not good enough, not anything, that you’re just a hole to throw things into, a hole that sucks the light out of the room, out of the world. That knife, how it could open you up, let it all out…

He shook his head. Don’t think about it. That was one of those thoughts that would bore its way into him, termites chewing him to pieces.

Lore kept on:

“Marshie told Grady she liked him, and—and he made fun of her. Jesus. Said she was ugly. Had a butterface. Fucking prick. She said she’s gonna kill herself and even talked about how she’s gonna do it, she’s gonna end it all, and then—these brown spots, I think they’re blood—wait, what the fuck?”

Then, two things happened simultaneously—

First, the image of the knife, oldtimer.jpg, glitched hard. The image broke into RGB pixels, distorting it so deeply that barely any of the original photo could still be seen.

Second, Hamish screamed.