Chapter 5: You See It Now

Chapter 5: You See It Now

The first time it happened, Leo thought he was having a stroke. The second night, a psychotic break. By the fifth, as the world dimmed and the air grew thick and hot at precisely 9:03 PM, he simply accepted it as the new, horrifying rhythm of his life. Terror had become routine.

The week that followed was a slow, grinding erosion of his sanity. Each day was a countdown. Dread began to seep into his afternoon, a cold stain that spread through his chest as the sun went down. By 8:00 PM, his hands would be shaking so badly he could barely tamp the espresso grounds without spilling them. The little bell above the door, once a minor annoyance, was now a harbinger, each chime a nail being hammered into his coffin.

The arrivals were a liturgy he had unwillingly memorized.

At 8:58 PM, Pendleton would materialize from the evening gloom, his brown trench coat seeming to absorb the very light from the streetlamps. He would slide into the same booth and order his black coffee. Leo would make him an Americano, his hands moving on autopilot. He would place it on the counter, and Pendleton would pay with the same two crumpled dollar bills and a quarter, never waiting for the change. And when Leo, in a desperate, early attempt to break the script, had asked how it was, Pendleton had fixed him with those mournful, ancient eyes and delivered the same verdict: "It tastes like rainwater in an empty grave." Leo didn't ask anymore.

Minutes later, Macy would appear. The scent of wet canvas and old, wilting flowers would announce her arrival before the bell did. She would ignore him completely, her wide, alarmed eyes already scanning the room. Her slow, methodical walk around the shop’s perimeter, fingers tracing the cracks in the wall, was a ritual of its own. A warding? A reading? Leo didn't know, and the not-knowing was a special kind of torture.

Then came the boy. Always last. He would shuffle in, hood up, eyes down, and place two quarters on the counter for a small cup of hot water. He would take his place in the booth, completing the silent, watchful trinity, and stare into the steaming cup as if it held all the sorrows of the world.

And then, Leo would wait. He would busy himself with meaningless closing tasks, wiping down clean surfaces, arranging and rearranging sugar packets, all while his eyes darted to the plastic clock on the wall. Every stutter of the red second hand as it approached the twelve was a physical blow.

Then, 9:03 PM. The plunge. The dimming light, the suffocating heat, the crushing, vacuum-sealed silence. The patrons would freeze into their living-statue poses. And for sixty agonizing, eternal seconds, Leo would be the sole conscious being in a broken world, his heart hammering a frantic, silent rhythm against his ribs while the second hand on the clock trembled in a blurred, impossible rage.

And at 9:04 PM, the world would snap back. They would unfreeze, resuming their actions as if nothing had happened, their profound indifference the most terrifying part of the entire ordeal. They would linger for another ten minutes, then leave as silently as they had arrived, leaving Leo alone in the aftermath, drenched in a cold sweat, his sanity hanging by a single, frayed thread.

He tried to find logic where there was none. Faulty wiring. Shared delusion. He even googled "mass localized atmospheric phenomena," a search that yielded nothing but weather balloon sightings and crackpot theories. The veil of coincidence was wearing thin, becoming a transparent, flimsy thing that offered no protection from the monstrous truth he could feel breathing on the back of his neck.

On the eighth night, the thread snapped.

He was jittery, over-caffeinated and underslept. The dark circles under his eyes felt less like shadows and more like permanent bruises. The patrons had arrived, the ritual had begun. Pendleton nursed his grave-water. The boy watched his drowning world. Macy had finished her perimeter check and stood, as she often did, by the condiment bar, her unnerving stillness a counterpoint to Leo’s frantic energy. It was 9:01 PM. Two minutes to go.

Leo was collecting the last few dirty dishes left from earlier customers, his movements jerky and hurried. A half-full water glass, slick with condensation, slipped from his trembling fingers.

The sound of it shattering on the linoleum floor was an explosion. It was a violent, jagged tear in the thick fabric of the pre-Anomaly silence. The sharp crack echoed off the grimy walls, a sound so real, so grounded and mundane, that for a split second it felt like a reprieve.

“Damn it,” Leo hissed, the curse a ragged exhalation of breath.

He saw Pendleton’s head lift slowly, his eyes registering the sound with a deep, weary sadness. The boy didn’t even flinch. Macy’s gaze, however, snapped toward the sound of the shattering glass, her focus sharp and absolute.

Leo’s first instinct was to ignore it, to retreat behind the counter and wait for the inevitable minute of hell to pass. But the sight of the glittering shards, a dangerous mess on the floor of his workspace, offended the last vestiges of his professionalism. Gritting his teeth, he grabbed a dustpan and brush from under the sink and came around the counter.

He was exposed.

The counter was his shield, his barricade. Out here, on the main floor, the air felt different. Colder. He could feel their collective presence more acutely, a silent, mounting pressure. He knelt, the knees of his jeans crunching on tiny fragments of glass. He avoided looking at them, focusing on the task, on the scrape of the brush against the floor, the tinkle of glass shards being swept into the pan. It was a real task. A normal task. He clung to it like a drowning man to a piece of driftwood.

He swept the last of the glittering dust into the pan. His heart was still racing, but the simple, physical act had calmed him slightly. He took a deep breath, his knuckles aching from his tight grip on the plastic handle. He pushed himself up, turning back toward the safety of his counter.

And his breath caught in his throat.

Macy was there.

She was not by the condiment bar. She was directly in front of him, standing inside the U-shaped sanctuary of his counter, her feet planted on the worn rubber mat where only he was supposed to stand. She was less than a foot away. One moment she had been fifteen feet away across the room. The next, she was here. There had been no sound. No footsteps. No whisper of movement. She had simply… arrived.

Leo stumbled back, hitting the stainless-steel refrigerator with a painful thud. The dustpan clattered from his numb fingers, spilling the glass shards across the floor again. He stared, his mind refusing to process what his eyes were seeing. She had crossed the perimeter. She had violated his space.

Her wild, frizzed hair seemed to crackle with a static energy in the dim light. Her too-wide eyes, which always seemed to be looking at something else, were now fixed entirely on him. For the first time, he felt her full, undivided attention, and it was a terrifying, crushing weight. The cloying smell of her—wet, decaying flowers and something richer, deeper, like freshly turned earth from a place that never saw the sun—filled his nostrils, making him gag.

He opened his mouth to scream, to yell at her to get out, but no sound came out. His throat was locked in ice.

She leaned in closer, her face just inches from his. Her breath washed over him, and it was the smell of the grave Pendleton’s coffee tasted of—rot and old secrets and cold, damp stone. Her lips, pale and cracked, parted. She spoke, and her voice was not a voice at all, but a dry, sibilant whisper, the sound of leaves skittering across a tombstone.

“You see it now.”

It was not a question. It was a statement of fact. A final diagnosis. An ordination.

In that single, horrifying instant, the last of Leo’s denial shattered like the glass on the floor. It wasn’t faulty wiring. It wasn’t a stress-induced hallucination. It wasn’t a bizarre, repeating coincidence.

It was real. It was happening.

And worse, her words confirmed his deepest, most primal fear. This wasn't random. This strange, silent congregation, the clock that broke time, the suffocating minute of wrongness—it was all for him. It was a performance, a lesson, a warning. And he, Leo Martinez, a burnt-out barista who just wanted to go home, was the terrified, unwilling audience of one.

He was seeing it now. And he knew, with a certainty that chilled him to the marrow of his bones, that he would never be able to unsee it again.