The Man From Taured (11 page)

"This is great," Noble whispered to the darkness. "This is just great."

Minutes later, somehow, he managed to get to sleep.

***

Noble was six years old. He was in the grocery store with his mother. He liked going to the store with his mom at that age. He usually got to
ride beneath the cart and the world looked so cool from down low. You saw legs and feet and people doing things from a spot that was nearly invisible.

Today was different.

Today his mom had asked him to move out from under the grocery cart and walk beside her. She had put several large cases of soda on the bottom of the cart and Noble had whined, but did as he was asked and clung to the side of the cart as they walked. Along both sides of the aisle there were cans of vegetables. Noble hated vegetables like most six-year-olds and he just wanted to go.

His mother towered over him, studying her shopping list, looking through the pouch filled with coupons that she carried with her at all times, and then eyeing the shelves. Noble was bored.

He yawned.

Something caught his attention out of the corner of his eye. Noble turned away from the cart and from his mother and walked over to the shelves. There were cartoon characters on the side of this can of vegetables. Probably someone trying to do something to attract kids to eating nasty veggies.

Noble smiled. He recognized the characters. They were from a cartoon he watched. There was a funny dog that talked and the people who traveled with him doing funny things. He forgot the name.

Noble walked over to the shelf of cans, after looking back to see that his mother was still standing right there. He turned back toward the can with the cartoon characters. There were other people in the aisle, all of them grown ups, all of them looking at the shelves and their own shopping lists.

As Noble got near the other shelves there was a strange feeling in his stomach. It was the same feeling he got in his tummy when his
daddy threw up him up in the air and caught him. It was a weird, flippy-floppy feeling. It passed fast and Noble was soon in front of the can, with the attention span of a six-year-old, he forgot the weird feeling almost as soon as it passed.

Except that now the can did not have the funny dog and the funny people. Instead it was some kind of cat creature standing on two legs. There was a smaller cat standing to the right of him.

Noble frowned.

This was weird.

Noble turned around to tell his mom about how weird it was and that was when he noticed that his mother was no longer there. The spot where she had just been a second ago was empty.

Noble felt a moment of pure panic.

"M-mom?" He called out.

Noble looked from face to face at the people around him. None of them looked like the people who had just been there before. Over there, to the left, was a man with wild dark hair and a beard. Noble was sure that he had not been there before. He started to breathe heavily and it felt like there was a weight on his chest. He backed away slowly, his eyes still darting around. The people in the aisle were looking at him and all of them were looking at him strangely, as if they had never seen anyone like him before. He felt like an insect on a slide.

"MOM!"

"What?"

His mom’s voice was behind him. He turned and ran back to where his mother had been standing. Halfway across the aisle he felt that strange sensation in his stomach again. He had the briefest of moments when it felt like he had lost his vision, as if everything had gone white. Then his vision returned. His mother was still gone, but the people around him were the people he had seen before. He cast a glance back across the aisle and saw the familiar cartoon figures on the can of vegetables.

"Noble, where are you?"

It was his mom's voice. Of that he was sure, but she was not in the aisle. That sense of panic hit him again.

"I'm over here!" Noble called. The eyes of the people around him were looking at him, but they were worried, concerned. No sense of menace.

"I'm in the next aisle," his mom called.

Relief washed over him. He bolted through the aisle, his little sneakers slapping against the tile. He reached the end of the aisle and skidded, nearly falling over, and then he righted himself and made the turn around the corner. There she was, halfway down the aisle, holding a box in her hand. She turned as Noble made the turn around the corner.

"Mom, I turned around and you were gone!" he said and now the tears were coming, tears of relief, but tears none the less.

His mother smiled at him and she kept smiling, ruffling his hair with her fingers when he tried to tell her about the strange can of vegetables and how the cartoon figures had changed. His six-year-old self did not have the words to convey the confusion, the sensation of falling, the sense of menace he got from the strange people who were staring at him. It was a feeling like he was in another world, some place else, and only her voice was able to pull him back.

"You have such an imagination, Noble," his mother said. "Don't wander off and you won't get lost. Now stick by the cart."

So they kept shopping, his mother focused on her shopping list and her coupons. Noble was nervous the rest of the time, his fingers gripping the shopping cart like it was a lifeboat. His eyes swiveled from one person, one fact, to the next. He waited for that feeling in his tummy again. He was sure that the faces of the people were going to change again and that he would turn around and it would be the man with the wild dark hair and beard pushing the cart instead of his mother.

That did not happen.

And over the years, Noble forgot all about it.

***

Noble awoke in his loft and on the sofa. He was sure that he was still in that grocery store. He was six-years-old again and he was lost and his mother was lost. He nearly let out a scream, shouting for his mother. He caught himself, but then there was a pressure on his legs and then his stomach, something walking on him, pushing him back. He nearly called out again, screaming this time for Olivia. He saw eyes glowing in the darkness, reflecting the hall light that he had left on so he could find his way to the restroom down the hall.

Then the tongue lapped against his face and he realized it was Henry. Noble spat as the wet tongue licked his mouth and then pushed the eager puppy away.

"Jesus, Henry," he said.

The puppy cocked his head to the side and panted, looking like he was smiling or laughing at Noble. Then the pup leaned forward and licked Noble's nose again and let loose with a high-pitched bark.

"Yeah, yeah," Noble said, pushing the puppy off of his chest and sitting up. He ran a hand through his hair.

Noble looked at the clock on the DVR and saw that it was nearly six in the morning. That meant it was nearly time for him to get up anyway. He still had to pack for the overnight stay in D.C., too. He was thirsty and his hair was wet with sweat. The blanket he had pulled over himself was twisted around his legs so he nearly fell right over onto the coffee table when he stood up. Henry barked at that as if amused.

"Same to you," Noble replied to the dog.

He walked down the hall and checked on Olivia before hitting the bathroom. She was still sound asleep. The other two dogs raised their heads, but did not get up. They all appeared to have fallen asleep in one position and were still in the same position from the night before. No one had disturbed them and they must have all slept soundly.

Noble walked and fed the dogs and then took his shower. He was tired. He felt as though he had not slept at all. He also felt dehydrated from sleeping on that sofa that had the tendency to drain you of water like some furniture vampire.

He had not thought about that time when he was six in ages. The fact he had so successfully pushed it out of his mind amazed him. Had there been other times? As he stood there shaving, staring at his face in the mirror, he could not remember anything, but he had that tingling at the base of his skull. It was as if the memories were there, but just out of reach.

His brain was churning around and around, trying to find other strange happenings throughout his life while he got out his suitcase and began to quietly throw clothes into it. He moved in the dark, not wanting to wake Olivia up. When he was done, he sat on the bed and looked at her for a moment.

He loved her. There was no denying that. They had met five years ago via an online dating service. The moment she had appeared in front of him at the coffee shop where they had planned to meet, he knew she was something special. Smart. Funny. Beautiful. He was in love before he knew what hit him, but unlike the other times he thought he had been in love, this time everything about her and about them felt right.

Now he worried he had just betrayed something with her.

Plus, there was that nagging feeling that he might be losing his mind.

"Olivia," he whispered. "I'm heading out. I'm going to be in D.C. for a couple days."

Olivia muttered something in her sleep and then her eyes opened slowly. She blinked and looked at him, her hair a bit of a mess and a crease down her right cheek from the pillow.

"OK," she said. "Have a safe trip."

Noble leaned in and she kissed him. There was a tension between them that even the dogs could feel, as they all raised their heads to look at them curiously. He hugged her.

"I'm sorry about last night," he said.

"Have a good trip," she repeated. "Call me when you get to the hotel."

Noble pulled back and then he extended his right hand, balled into a fist. After a moment of staring at him, Olivia extended her own fist and bumped it with his.

"Wiiiinnnnnnnn," they said in unison.

Noble leaned in for one more kiss and then stood up. He looked back at her as he exited the bedroom and walked down the hall.

He felt better. The fist bump thing had started the first time they had gone on a road trip together. It was now a good luck ritual that they did anytime one of them had to travel or had something big planned for the day.

It wasn't much, but the fact that Olivia had not seemed mad at him and had done the fist-bump ritual, he felt better.

***

Noble was not the world's best flyer. He did not enjoy the idea of being over 20,000 feet in the air because, if something went wrong, and the plane fell, it would take a while and he would be awake and screaming that entire time. It was hard to shake that image once it wiggled its way into his brain.

The airport was full of activity, people running all over the place, but this time Noble barely noticed. He had this nagging feeling that he was supposed to be making this trip. He had important things to learn and nothing was going to stop him. If the plane started to crash, he would find a way to sprout wings and fly there himself.

Despite that thought, he was still nervous.

The plane was not very crowded which allowed Noble to spread out and once the plane reached cruising altitude, he was able to pull out his laptop and get it hooked up to the plane's Wi-Fi. He checked his emails and spent time trying to learn more about Dr. Shaw.

The man had a reputation, it seemed, for writing about the supernatural. Noble spent some time reviewing the paper the man had written about alternate dimensions. Much of it was well over his head, but there were a few things that stood out.

Shadow men, for one.

Black-eyed children for another.

Noble did a search for shadow men. It turned out that people had been reporting seeing strange men with red eyes lurking in the shadows for a long, long time. There were theories that they were ghosts or aliens. Other-dimensional beings seemed to be the most popular version. A guy who had a nightly radio talk show about the supernatural and unexplained had an entire episode dedicated to the shadow men.

The shadow men never seemed to do anything sinister. They did not usually interact with the people who had seen them and most of the time the shadow men appeared surprised that the person they were watching was able to see them in return. This brought about the idea that they were from different dimensions, but sent here to watch us and study us. Perhaps, went one theory, they vibrated at a different frequency from the rest of us, but some people were more tuned to those alternate frequencies.

It sounded like heaps and heaps of steaming bullshit to Noble.

The black-eyed children were a relatively new phenomenon. All of the incidents that Noble could find constituted the same thing. They showed up at night and knocked on the door. They asked for a phone. At some point, they would raise their heads and reveal that they had pitch-black eyes.

What was absent was any detail about what happened if the black-eyed children were let into the home. It seemed anyone who had a story to tell did not let them in, but just left them on the porch until they eventually went away. However, the general consensus was that they were up to something sinister. They wanted to scare people.

Again, it sounded like bullshit.

Except that Noble had seen the shadow men. He had seen the message left on the fridge. And he had most definitely seen the black-eyed children at Eveline's house.