Chapter 4: A Crueler Timeline

Chapter 4: A Crueler Timeline

The return was a brutal expulsion. Sara slammed back into her own body with the force of a car crash, her gasp for air a raw, desperate thing that burned her lungs. One moment, the impossible agony of claws tearing at her stomach in a sun-drenched garden; the next, the cold vinyl of her car seat sticking to the back of her neck in a dark, silent car park. The lingering, phantom scent of roses and blood filled her nostrils, a ghostly perfume overlaying the mundane smells of old upholstery and exhaust fumes.

For a disoriented second, she sat bolt upright, hands clamped over her stomach, fully expecting to find them slick with her own blood. Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic drumbeat against the sudden, oppressive silence. The streetlamp buzzed, its flicker now just a normal, annoying pulse of electricity, not a frozen monument to a broken moment in time. The pigeon was gone. The world was moving again.

A sob of pure terror escaped her. It was real. All of it. The dreamlike reunion, the accelerating horror, the static thing from beyond the fence. Her hands, trembling uncontrollably, fumbled with the hem of her shirt, pulling it up with a jerky, panicked motion. She looked down, bracing herself for a gruesome wound.

There was nothing. Her skin was pale and unbroken. No blood, no torn flesh. Just… scars.

Three faint, silvery lines arced across her abdomen, puckered and ancient, like old burns that had healed impossibly fast. They were a brand, a permanent record of a history that should not exist, etched onto her body. She traced one of the lines with a shaking finger. It was cold to the touch, the skin numb and dead. The pain was gone, but the memory of it, the phantom agony, still echoed deep in her nerve endings.

The car door was wrenched open, flooding the small space with weak, orange light and making her scream.

“Sara? Are you alright?” Mr. Milton’s face peered in, a perfect mask of gentle concern. His ill-fitting shirt, his cheap-rimmed glasses, his unnerving grey gloves—he was exactly as she had left him. “You looked… distressed. You were gone for just a moment.”

“A moment?” she rasped, her voice raw. She scrambled out of the car, stumbling on the cracked asphalt, her legs unsteady. “A moment? I was gone for two days! I saw him! I saw my father! And then… and then that thing—" She pointed a shaking finger toward the empty space where the creature had appeared in her memory, her words tumbling out in a frantic, incoherent rush. "It came over the fence! It was made of static and it killed him! It killed him all over again!”

Milton listened with a patient, practiced nod, his expression one of profound sympathy. “Ah,” he said, his voice soft. “Yes. The auditor. I was afraid of that.”

“The auditor?” Sara stared at him, her mind reeling. He had a name for it. He knew. “What was it? What did you do to me? You said I could see him!”

“And you did, didn’t you?” he countered, his tone reasonable, soothing, the way one might speak to a hysterical child. “You had a conversation. You shared a meal. The boomerang grants the visit, Sara. It doesn’t, however, pay the toll. When you disrupt the flow of time so significantly, it attracts attention. Think of it as a… correction. An anomaly being erased. It’s the price of the ticket.”

His calm, bureaucratic explanation was more terrifying than any monster. He spoke of the thing that had butchered her father as if it were a cosmic parking warden. The horror of it, the calculated coldness, stole her breath.

“The price?” she whispered, the fight draining out of her. “It tore him apart in front of me.”

“Oh, my dear girl,” Milton said, and for the first time, he reached out, his gloved hand resting on her shoulder. His touch was dry and cold, even through her coat. “It wasn't supposed to be like that. The corrections are usually… cleaner. Less violent. Your father’s original death, a car accident, was a simple, closed loop. Easy to replicate. But you were there this time. Your presence, your emotional state… it complicated the equation. It made the correction… messy.”

He was blaming her. He was standing in a dark car park, telling her that her grief had somehow caused her father to be murdered in a more horrific fashion. A wave of nausea, sharp and acidic, rose in her throat.

She pushed his hand away. “I want to go home,” she said, her voice flat, dead. “I need to see my mother.”

At the mention of her mother, Milton’s sympathetic mask tightened. A shadow of something unreadable passed through his cold eyes. He took a half-step back, clasping his gloved hands together.

“Sara,” he began, his voice dropping low, heavy with feigned sorrow. “When you tug on a thread of the past, the entire tapestry can unravel. Things have… changed here. Now.”

A new dread, colder and sharper than before, pierced through her shock. “What are you talking about? What’s changed?”

“Your father’s death,” Milton said, choosing his words with surgical precision. “The police report… it’s different now. It wasn’t a simple accident on the motorway anymore. It was… brutal. Unimaginable. The official record calls it an animal attack. Unprecedented in its savagery. They found him in his own garden.”

Every word was a hammer blow, cracking the foundations of her reality. She was living in a world she had broken. A world where her father hadn't died in a quick, tragic accident, but had been ripped to pieces by a thing from outside of time.

And then came the final, devastating blow.

“Your mother…” Milton’s voice was thick with false pity. “She was never the same after. She was the one who found him, you see. The sight of it… it broke something inside her. She held on for a few weeks, but… it was too much for her.”

Sara’s world, which had already cracked, now disintegrated into dust. “What are you saying?” she asked, though she already knew. She felt the answer in the sudden, crushing emptiness that opened up inside her, an abyss far deeper than the one her father had left.

“I’m so sorry, Sara,” Milton said, the words utterly meaningless. “In this timeline… your mother took her own life three weeks ago.”

The air left her lungs. The buzzing streetlamp, the cold night air, the solid ground beneath her feet—it all ceased to exist. There was only the roaring in her ears and the two memories warring in her head: her mother, laughing in the sunlit kitchen just yesterday, and a new, horrifyingly clear image, a phantom memory from this new timeline, of her mother’s empty, grief-hollowed eyes.

He hadn’t brought her father back. He had taken her mother away.

Her legs gave out and she collapsed onto the cold asphalt, the jagged stones digging into her knees. A sound tore from her throat, a raw, inhuman wail of absolute despair. She had traded one tragedy for another, a clean wound for a festering, poisoned one. And this one, this cruelest of timelines, was her fault.

Through the blur of her tears, she saw Milton squatting down in front of her. He wasn’t comforting her. He was observing her, his head tilted, his expression a clinical study of manufactured empathy.

“Such an unforeseen consequence,” he murmured, almost to himself. “A terrible, terrible mess.”

He reached into his pocket and produced the small, metallic pebble. It looked dark and malignant in the orange light. He didn’t force it on her. He simply opened his palm and held it out, letting it lie there between them—an instrument of damnation, now presented as the only possible cure.

“It’s a terrible thing,” he whispered, planting the seed in the fertile soil of her brand-new agony. “To leave things so broken.”