Case 1031

“Good evening, Caesar,” the woman purred. “My name is Camden, I am from the local police force, and I am here to ask a few questions.”

I found her waiting for me in my living room. She was tall and built like what I’d imagine a “1” to look like if it were a human. Dressed as though she had been a part of a fashion show, her midnight blue denim jacket hung loosely over a black dress. The cascading curls of her auburn hair arched towards her back, which sharply contrasted against her warm, chocolate eyes. Glittering under the faint lights like fireflies, her nails were long and ruby-red, as if mined from the earth and chiselled to perfection. Her right hand clasped a mug of steaming coffee, which she cautiously took periodic sips from. A notebook was perched on the coffee table in front of her. 

It was clear she had let herself in. The front door handle looked like an ogre had chomped on it, and the door itself hung slightly ajar. 

After five seconds of gawking, I found my voice again. “How did you come in here?”

“Honey, I’m a police officer,” Camden explained. “And my investigation, Case 1031, called for some drastic measures. I just need a few answers from you, and I should be on my way.”

Hesitantly, I sat down on the chair facing her. 

“A while ago, we received a report about a missing person,” she began, as though she had memorised a script in advance. “This person - who I cannot name just yet - lived in your neighbourhood. Are you familiar?”

I racked my brain, but I couldn’t find anything. Strange, I thought. My thoughts had been murky all day long. 

“I don’t remember,” I confessed. 

She nodded as if she had been expecting this. “That’s alright. We have plenty of time to revisit the past. The missing person is a twenty-one-year-old man who has been working at a small office downtown. He had been working as a lawyer for a year and a half before he was reported missing.”

“That’s interesting,” I interrupted. “But what does this have to do with me, again?”

Her eyes narrowed like daggers and she tensed her grip on the coffee mug. “Caesar, there are some things that we need to make clear here. I am the police officer here, so I’m expecting you to stay silent and obedient, lest I have to arrest you. Have I made myself clear?”

“Yes, Officer Camden.” I rolled my eyes as she began asking the next question. 

“Where were you on the 29th of October, 1947?” she demanded. 

“I was…” 

My voice trailed off again. It was absurd to think that I couldn’t answer such a simple question. After all, I had the highest IQ a twenty-one-year-old could ever have! That was what the psychologist had told me when I had gone to take the test. Which made me wonder, what was the name of the psychologist…?

“Mr. Caesar, it has been a minute, and you have not responded to my question,” Camden snapped, drawing me out of my daydream. “Does this mean you are responsible for the disappearance of the victim?”

“No!” I yelped, nearly jumping out of my seat. “I was…um, I’m sure I remember…”

“I’m sure you would.” She flipped through several pages of her notebook before she swivelled it around and pointed at a coloured photograph she had taped into the page. “Do you recognise this?”

It was a photograph of a green park in the middle of a thunderstorm. As I stared at the terrified ducklings, rusting benches, and the defunct streetlight, a thought went off in my head like a lightning bolt. 

“I do recognise it!” I exclaimed excitedly. “That’s the neighbourhood park!”

“Indeed it is,” she agreed. “My missing person was last seen walking through Rosevale Park on the morning of Wednesday, October 29, 1947. So I ask you again, what were you doing that morning?”

I chuckled nervously. “Well, I was doing what I always was doing! I was walking to school, chatting with my friend, and chewing gum.”

Her eyes bored into mine, and I felt like I was being sucked into a whirlpool. “What’s the name of this friend of yours?”

“My friend is a very good person,” I began, “who goes by the name…”

Again, something that unquestionably should’ve been easy to remember slipped out of my grasp. I glanced around nervously, trying to search for anything that might help me remember the memory. I found myself looking at the antique grandfather clock. Its hands were pointing at 7:30. Where had I gotten that from?

Camden shook her head in disappointment. “I’m assuming his name was - is Gerald Rieman, am I right?”

The memories of my ruddy-faced friend came flooding back like a dam that had opened its sluice gates. “Yes! That’s the one! Gerald and I had known each other for five years!”

She flipped to another page, and pointed to another photograph, this time of Gerald. “I’m assuming this is the one?”

I nodded in agreement, relieved that my memories of my school life were coming back. What an odd day it was!

“Well, as a matter of fact, the last person to see the missing person was Gerald Rieman. And he is nowhere to be found today.”

I frowned. “Really? But I just came back home with him. We always stop by the street food place on the way home, and I remember we got…”

“Lukewarm, overpriced coffee,” she finished, flipping to another page of her notebook. “Bought from the decaying stall set up at the corner of the street, where there’s the intersection. I tried finding the stall to interrogate the owner before coming over here because the missing person’s last purchase was at this coffee stall. But it’s no longer there.”

I laughed. “Are you sure about that? Because this afternoon I went by -”

“- with your friend. Yes, you told me that already. I could find neither your friend nor the coffee stall today. Which brings us to my next question.”

I glanced at the grandfather clock, only to find that the hands were still pointing at 7:30. How strange!

“Sorry, I think my clock is broken,” I explained as I stood up. 

“Sit down.” Darker, deeper, and more ominous than the roar of a lion, the sound of Camden’s voice was enough to give me goosebumps. I sat back down in the armchair, which felt more like a glacier than a velvet couch. 

“Your clock is working perfectly fine,” Camden continued. “And even if it weren’t, neither of us can afford to waste more time, after all that you have wasted already.

“Moving on, can you tell me anything about your neighbours?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

She sighed. “Just answer the question, please. Tell me just one detail about someone you know, or someone you think you know, who lives near you.”

“Er…there’s the gruff old woman,” I stuttered. 

“‘Gruff old woman,’” Camden repeated. “According to a census done last week, your neighbourhood block is one of many that are purely made up of the younger generation. There is no ‘old woman’ anywhere near your house. Are you sure you’re thinking straight?”

“Of course I am,” I assured her. She was right, though. For as long as I could remember, I had not seen any seniors in our neighbourhood. How could I have not remembered that?

“The one who lives across the street from me is a family of three,” I finally blurted out. 

Surfing for these details was like trying to fish blindly. What was happening to me?

“There used to be,” Camden corrected. “They are nowhere to be seen today as well. Your entire neighbourhood is deserted.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I laughed. But then, I began wondering, why hadn’t I heard any noises of the children playing football, or the dogs barking, or the parents shrieking over the past few days?

She pursed her lips and set her empty coffee mug on the table. As I watched in astonishment, the brown liquid seemed to top itself off, and soon steam was billowing out of the cup again. 

“How did you do that?” I gasped. 

“We are nearing the end of the interview,” she interrupted. “There are still a few things that I’d like to get to. This one should be simple. How do you feel on a day-to-day basis?”

It was like slamming into a brick wall. “I…don’t know.”

“I see.” She flipped through the notebook until she pulled out an ancient, crusted, and yellowed page that had been slotted into it, presumably from a diary. “Does this ring a bell for you?

“‘I feel like a tidal wave of melancholia keeps washing over me, and drowning me, over and over again. It’s a relentless current of grief that refuses to let go of me. I can’t bear to go to work, see anyone else, or sleep ever since I lost her. I can’t. Someone, please help me.’”

She set the page down so that I could read it as well. The writing had been done in jet-black ink, which had seeped through the paper and had lost its vibrancy. Something felt very familiar about the way the top of the letters curved and swirled, and the diary entry itself. I just couldn’t place my finger on it…

“This diary entry was written by the missing person, on the night of October 28, 1947.”

“The day before the person went missing,” I pointed out, for once being a step ahead of Camden. 

“Indeed.” A coy smirk spread across her lips as if she were a circus trainer watching a lion perform a trick. “Very poetic stuff. Technically, I shouldn’t have shown you private information, but I needed to show you it to ask my final question.”

She paused to take a sip of her coffee, before fixing her piercing eyes back on me. “What is today’s date?”

“That’s easy,” I declared with a triumphant clap. “It’s October 29, 1947!”

“Are you sure?” Jagged like icicles, hearing her voice was more jarring than being put through a medieval torture device. “Think about it again. Carefully.”

“It should be…isn’t it?”

The coffee in her mug automatically refilled itself again. “As much as I’d like to see you drown yourself in your viscous confusion, my patience is coming to an end. So let’s clear a few things.

“As I mentioned before, your friend, your neighbours, the coffee stall - they’ve all vanished. And they have been gone from the face of the Earth for the last few billion years.”

“Officer Camden, don’t be ridiculous,” I snapped, a splintering migraine burning its way into me. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m a busy guy, and I need to get going with some homework.”

“Will you hear yourself?” she crowed. “Homework? What for, Caesar? You’re not a student; no, you’re a twenty-one-year-old lawyer! Or at least, you used to be a twenty-one-year-old lawyer.”

I pressed my eyes together, trying to blur out her voice. “Officer, why do you keep using the past tense?”

Camden clucked her tongue. “Caesar, have you still not connected the dots yet? I’ve been dropping so many hints to free you from the spell. I suppose you need a piece of concrete evidence to help solidify everything. Look over there.”

Pointing at a window at the far side of the room, she opened the charcoal curtains with a flick of her wrist. Rather than there being an ordinary neighbourhood outside, it was like someone had come and painted the windows black. There was nothing outside the house. 

My heart beat at light speed. “But I live in a neighbourhood! How can that be?”

“It’s a simple answer. If humans were still around today, today’s date would be January 1st, 897,053,438,912 A.D. The universe dissolved into nothingness dozens of billions of years ago. Your house is all that’s left.”

“I’ve been frozen in time?” My hands turned clammy, my blood turned to ice, and I felt worse than when I had secretly drank whisky. Desperate to focus on anything but the madwoman sitting across from me, I found myself gawking at the date written in the diary entry. October 28, 1947. Camden was right. Hundreds of billions of years had gone by. 

“Now we’re talking! And there’s more, Caesar. The missing person I was investigating - well, guess who it is!”

It was like a resident tempest suddenly decided to leave my mind. “Oh no.”

Camden nodded encouragingly. “You’ve been missing from the rest of the universe for countless years now. Immobilised in time like a hibernating reptile. Ring any bells, Caesar?”

It wasn’t so much a bell, but more like a haphazard cacophony of gongs. Like a volcanic explosion on fast forward, everything came rushing back to me. The night after I heard the news that my sister had died, overcome with grief, I prayed for hours to be able to forget my sufferings. In a twisted way, I supposed my prayers had been answered. 

“Who are you?” I whispered, hugging my legs to form a cocoon around me. “What do you want from me?”

“All I did was answer your prayer. I let you live out your life in nigh-eternal peace. But not even time can run forever. So I released you from my spell.”

She snapped her fingers, and the mug vanished. Rising to her feet, she towered over me, casting me in her shadow that stretched across the floor like a jagged dagger. 

“You’ve been lucky, Caesar,” she thundered. “Luckier than anyone who’s ever existed. And I think it’s time for you to realise that.”

“Who are you?” I squeaked again. 

Stretching across her face, her lips curled into crescent moons. “I’ll leave you to figure that one out. Here’s a hint: look at that lovely grandfather clock you’ve got over there. It captures a part of me that you’ll be able to understand. Good night, Caesar. Thank you for assisting me with Case 1031.”

With that, she vanished into a puff of midnight-blue smoke. 

The clock began ticking again.