While I was finishing breakfast, I decided my first step should be to make phone calls to all the local hospitals and see if Charles had ended up at any of them. Just half an hour revealed he hadn't, as far as anyone could tell me. No one I talked to had been able to locate anyone matching his name or description. So, he had either been arrested or was, I could assume, reasonably close. It really depended, I imagined, on what time he had left, how much of a head-start he had.
It immediately struck me as odd that I had considered it a head-start. Did I think Charles was running away from me? Running from what he'd "seen" in the apartment? I couldn't even say definitively why he had left, but I did have the impression that I was trying to catch him.
Whatever the circumstances, he couldn't have gone too far. He had no money for any sort of transportation, as far as I could tell. And with the exhausted, haunted look he carried, I doubted he would find anyone willing to give him a ride. Wherever he was, it was a safe bet that he was on foot, and this gave me a significant advantage in catching up to him. Until I realized my keys were gone.
Every time I came home, I tossed my keys into a small, wooden bowl on my kitchen counter; I had done this for so long it had practically become a reflex. I started the practice years ago after frantic, early-morning searches for keys had made me late for work twice in the same week. Since I'd moved into this apartment, there hadn't been a day they had ended up anywhere but that bowl. That bowl was their home, and now they were gone. Charles had taken them.
I couldn't make sense of the thought, though, as my car had still been in the parking lot when I had gone outside earlier. Why would Charles take the keys and then not use them? Had he taken something from inside the car? Did he drive somewhere and bring it back? Had he wanted to take away my best means of finding him?
I walked out to my car to see if he had actually taken anything from inside. I didn't have much: a few dollars in change and a road map were all I could think that he might find useful. I reached the driver's-side door and tried the handle. Locked. Something moved in the back seat.
I stumbled backward in shock, nearly fell, regained my balance, and put a neighbor's motorcycle between myself and my car. I craned my neck to try and see into my backseat. Charles sat up, squinting in the sunlight.
I advanced back to the car. "What the hell are you doing?" I shouted through the window.
Charles opened the door but made no move to get out. His entire frame drooped; he reminded me of every cartoon robot I'd ever seen get shut off. "Sorry," he murmured.
Back in the apartment, Charles had just finished his own breakfast, through which I waited as patiently as I could before questioning him on what he had been doing sleeping in my car.
"I thought it was just at my apartment, that was the only place they were. I mean, I saw them sometimes outside too, but- I don't know I just thought maybe they wouldn't come here," his voice was rising, threatening tears, "or they wouldn't know I was here and I could just ... hide."
"Charles, what are you talking about?"
He looked up at me; his eyes were equal parts fear and pain. "I don't know who they are; they all look the same. They don't have faces or colors. They're ... shadows." His eyes fell back to the table, and his whole body slumped with the revelation.
I wished more than ever that Daniel had written me back that morning; I tried to hide the panic I could feel rising through my thoughts. "Charles, I don't know what that means."
"I don't know!" He was crying now or something close to it, some visceral reaction that only a long-standing panic could produce. "I don't know. Call them ghosts or shadows or spirits, I don't know. But they're here too. They were in the walls. I couldn't stay here."
I stared at Charles; I felt like I was taking far too long to respond, but I couldn't imagine anything I could say. "What- where- ?"
He looked up at me again, his gaze cutting through every atom it crossed. "They followed me. They followed me from the other dimension into ours, and now they followed me here."
"Charles-"
"I need you to help me. Help put them back."
I could only stare, couldn't react even internally to what he was saying. Everything about me had been interrupted, cut off.
"I need you to come back with me."
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