Eight Seconds

What Daniel Mercer had worked out about them, eleven days in, was that they were terrible at blinking. Not that they never blinked. That would have been convenient. They had watched people, learned the rhythm, copied it: three quick ones when somebody laughed, a long one for pretending to think. Close enough for a stranger. Not close enough for him.

The woman across the aisle wore a navy uniform and white sneakers.

Blink. Eight seconds. Blink. Eight seconds. Blink.

Forty-something, county EMS badge clipped to her pocket, brown hair pulled into the kind of knot that gets done in a parking lot. Daniel studied the Spanish-language dental ad above her head.

“Don’t.”

“Excuse me?” Her head came around.

“Nothing.”

She smiled. Something moved under her cheek. Not muscle; muscle moves up, toward the ear, while this went sideways, an inch of something crossing beneath the skin and lifting the surface as it traveled, the way a mole crosses a lawn.

Then her face was a face again.

Daniel got into the aisle while the bus was still moving, and the driver found him in the long mirror. “Sir. Sit down.”

“I’m getting off.”

Daniel took the overhead rail. The woman kept her hands folded in her lap. She rode the turns without leaning, while the man beside her grabbed at a seat back.

He put his eyes on the yellow STOP REQUEST strip. Do not test the hallucination. Voss wanted it tested and called that reality checking. Daniel called it letting the monsters know you’ve spotted them.

The bus knelt and let him out into a wall of August. She stayed aboard. As it pulled away, her head rotated smoothly on some interior hinge to keep him centered, and for half a second her smile stretched too far.

Daniel sat down on the bench. “Okay. Fantastic.”

The bottle rode in his front pocket. He pressed his thumb into the cap without taking it out. He had told Rachel three days off it, and Voss zero.

#

“You look like shit.” Rachel stood in the doorway with a grocery bag against her hip, wearing the face she kept for flat tires and dead pets.

“Good morning.” Daniel took the bag from her.

“It’s two in the afternoon.”

“I’m freelance.”

“You’re unemployed.” She found the empty half of the counter.

“I freelance unemployment.” Daniel threw the deadbolt behind her. The chain took two tries.

“Got enough locks?” Rachel stopped with a can of soup in her hand.

“Crime.” He checked the chain again with his thumb.

“You live on the fourth floor of a building where the elevator smells like soup.”

“Criminals like soup.” He folded the empty bag into the drawer of empty bags.

“Are you taking your medication?” She set the can down among the others.

There it was. Daniel opened a cabinet he did not need. “Coffee?”

“Medication.” Rachel had not taken her blazer off.

He held a glass up between them. “Water?”

She shelved the rest of the cans in a hard little rhythm, and Daniel watched her hands. Ten fingers. Correct knuckles. The scar on the thumb from a pickle jar in 2011, exactly the wrong shape for anything to copy. In the doorway he had timed her: four seconds, then nine, then three. Sloppy and human, with no schedule at all.

He opened the refrigerator on mustard, pickles, and a lime old enough to vote. Rachel leaned around him. “When did you eat?”

“Cereal.”

“When?”

“Tuesday.”

“It’s Friday.” She pushed the door shut with two fingers.

Something left her face, leaving only worry behind. Daniel hated worry. “I’m okay.”

“You’re losing weight.”

“I’m getting cheekbones.” He turned his head to show her the left one.

“Show me the bottle.” Rachel put her hand out.

“No.”

He tossed it underhand. One shake answered the question for both of them.

“You stopped.”

“I’m tapering.” Daniel wiped a ring off the counter with his sleeve.

“Did Voss tell you to taper?” She turned the label to the light for the fill date.

“Voss thinks my brain is a smoke alarm with a dying battery.”

“Your brain told you the mailman had antlers.” She got the cap off and looked inside.

“He did have antlers.”

“Daniel.”

“Small ones.”

“You ended up in the hospital.”

“I voluntarily entered a psychiatric facility.”

“You threw a chair through a laundromat window.” Behind him the refrigerator compressor labored, caught, and quit.

“There were circumstances.” The chair had been plastic and the window had already been cracked.

“You said the dryers were breathing.”

Daniel went still. Forty minutes he had watched the third machine from the chair by the folding table, certain the glass was pushing out and drawing back.

Rachel’s shoulders came down. “Please.”

“They’re back.”

“Who?”

Daniel looked at the window. “Them.”

“Danny.” Rachel closed her eyes to say it.

“Don’t say my name like I’m five.” He set the glass in the sink.

“I’m scared.” She said it to the table. Her phone buzzed in her blazer pocket. She silenced it without looking.

“So am I.” That landed. Daniel pulled a chair out for her and stayed standing. “They look better now. Last time they were obvious. Teeth where teeth shouldn’t be. Faces opening.”

“Hallucinations.” Rachel sat.

“Now they blink. They learned it. Eight seconds apart, almost every time.”

Her fist clenched. “You’re timing strangers?”

“Yes.”

“That is the most concerning answer you could have given me.”

She stood the bottle upright between them. “Take one.”

“No.”

“They go away when I take these.” Daniel left it standing where she had put it.

“Yes.”

“Exactly.” Daniel smiled at her. “See the problem?”

Rachel’s mouth opened and nothing came out, long enough for Daniel to count it. “No.” Her chair scraped back an inch. “I see the entire point of antipsychotic medication.”

“The pills don’t prove they aren’t real. They prove I can’t see them.”

“You hear yourself?”

“Constantly. It’s exhausting.” Below them a dryer started its cycle, a coin loose in the drum, and Daniel put his hand flat on the counter until it stopped.

Rachel had her phone up. “Take the pill or I call Voss.” She slipped the bottle into her blazer pocket.

“Call him.”

She dialed. Down the short hall the deadbolt was still thrown. The chain hung loose off its track, its swing no wider than a fingernail.

“Rachel.”

“What?” She kept the phone against her ear.

“Did you touch the chain?”

She looked past him. “It isn’t on.”

“I know.”

“So you didn’t put it on.” Rachel lowered the phone without ending the call.

“I put it on. You watched me do it.” She had. Daniel saw her remember it, then decide she had remembered it wrong.

He turned the deadbolt. The corridor beyond was too bright and too empty. At the far end the stairwell door settled the last of its swing into the frame, and the pneumatic arm let out a long, patient hiss.

Daniel ran.

He hit the door with his shoulder. The landing was ten degrees colder. The air smelled of pond water and pennies.

“Daniel!”

A wet footprint sat on the concrete. Bare, longer than a foot should be, the arch too deep, the heel too narrow, the water still settling toward the edges.

Six toes.

Rachel came through the door behind him. “What are you doing?”

“Tell me you see that.” Daniel pointed from where he stood.

She crouched, hesitated, then put a fingertip into the print and dragged it out into a gray comma. Five rounded shapes. Maybe six. Maybe nothing at all.

“Somebody walked through water.” Rachel kept her eyes on the smear, not on the stairs going down.

“With six toes?”

“It doesn’t have six toes.” She came up off her heels.

“It did.”

She wiped her finger on her jeans. “Come upstairs.”

Two floors below them, something laughed. Soft, private, a man alone in a room remembering a joke. Rachel took his arm, and Daniel flinched hard enough that she let go.

“You heard that.”

“Heard what?” She was already on the first step up.

Nothing moved in the shaft. No shoe on a step, no hand squeaking down a rail, no water anywhere in the pipes.

#

Rachel called Voss’s office from the car, one finger off the wheel, the one that had gone into the print. Dry now. It had not rained since Sunday. Two missed calls from work sat on the screen. The Delaney file was due Wednesday. She went past them to text Daniel’s building manager about the fourth-floor stairwell camera, around two-thirty.

#

Voss kept a soothing office, which Daniel held against him. Soft lighting. Beige carpet. A tabletop fountain trickling in the corner, because nothing steadies a schizophrenia workup like decorative water. The fern was plastic. Daniel had checked it twice.

“Eleven days?”

Daniel tipped his head at his sister. “Informant.”

“She’s concerned.” Voss looked at him over the chart.

“She’s a narc.”

“I’m sitting right here.” Rachel kept her eyes on Voss.

“I know.” Daniel picked at a thread on his cuff.

“Stopping ziprasidone this fast raises the odds that symptoms come back.”

“I’m aware.” The fountain stuttered halfway through its pour.

“You’re describing visual hallucinations.”

“Observations.”

“And disrupted sleep.”

“Sleep is surrender.” Daniel studied everyone now and made no exception for his psychiatrist. The beard trimmed short. One hinge of the glasses repaired with a jeweler’s screw. Crow’s feet creasing on the way to a thought, the same as always. Blink. Four seconds. Blink. Seven. Blink.

“What are you looking at?”

“Your eyes.” Daniel did not look away while he said it.

“How long have you been monitoring people’s blinking?” Voss asked it without writing anything down.

“A few days.” He counted another blink on Voss.

“And what does it tell you?”

Daniel looked from one to the other. “Whether you blink every eight seconds.”

The fountain went through its cycle. Four seconds later it repeated, identical, stuttering at the same point in the pour. Voss smiled with enormous gentleness, and Daniel hated gentle even worse than worry.

Voss closed the chart. “I’m not going to ask you to take one right now.”

Daniel waited for the rest of it. Nothing came. “That’s a trick.”

“It’s a Friday.”

“You don’t see them.”

“No. I don’t.” Voss kept both hands flat on the desk.

“Exactly.”

“That isn’t evidence they exist.”

“It isn’t evidence they don’t.”

“True. Look at the pattern with me, though. You stop the medication. Your sleep goes. Threatening figures arrive.”

Daniel watched the fountain. The dryers had breathed. The mailman had grown antlers. After treatment there had been eight quiet months, most of them slept through. He put his hands over his face. “Maybe.”

“Maybe what?” Rachel leaned in.

“Maybe I’m wrong.”

She took his hand. “Being wrong isn’t the problem. You have an illness, Danny.”

“That’s less comforting than you think.” Daniel took his hand back.

Voss opened the drawer for a pen he already had. Click. Daniel looked up to find him turned toward the monitor.

Click.

The second one did not come from the drawer. It came from inside Voss, from behind the beard, a cabinet latch giving up. His jaw slid forward a quarter inch, then another quarter inch, then a distance no jaw goes, before rocking back into place.

Daniel held still with his mouth open. The fountain kept running.

“Daniel?”

He got up fast enough to skid the chair. “I need to leave.” Rachel caught his sleeve.

“Sit down.” She had both hands on him now.

“I saw—”

Voss stood. Daniel backed into the plastic fern.

“Nobody here is going to hurt you.” Voss came around the desk with his palms open and stopped when Daniel put a chair in the gap.

“Don’t come closer.”

Voss looked exactly like Voss. The jeweler’s screw in his glasses caught the light while he waited.

Blink.

Eight seconds.

Daniel ran.

#

Security found him in the garage twenty minutes later, crouched behind a Honda with a tire iron in both hands. It took two guards four minutes to talk him out.

Rachel stood past them with her arms crossed. She was crying without making a sound. Daniel set the tire iron down and pushed it away with his foot.

The ambulance came in with no siren. The woman who climbed out of the passenger side had white sneakers and a county EMS badge. Daniel laughed one hard bark that came back off the ceiling.

“Daniel?” She crouched a few feet short of him.

“You.” He stayed down on his heels.

“Have we met?”

“Bus.”

“I take the 14.” She showed him both empty hands.

Daniel turned to the second paramedic. “You see her?”

“Yep.”

“Normal?”

“Looks normal to me.”

“Good.” Daniel climbed onto the stretcher without being asked.

Rachel got a hand on the rail. “What are you doing?”

“Going. I’m tired, Rach.” He let his head go back against the pad, then found the woman again. “Hospital?”

“Yes.”

Rachel squeezed his hand until his knuckles ached. The straps clicked home over his chest, thighs, and wrists, and for the first time in eleven days Daniel felt ridiculous.

The doors shut.

#

Voss came down to the garage a few minutes later. “He went willingly?”

Rachel nodded. “I let him talk me into believing he was fine.”

Her phone buzzed. The building manager. Found the stairwell footage. Not sure what I’m looking for.

She opened it. Grainy, right timestamp. Daniel came through the door, she came after him, she crouched. “There. It was water.”

She rewound it to the empty landing. The door swung open, and in the instant before Daniel came through it, something crossed the frame. Tall. Thin. The image broke into blocks, and part of the shape went behind him.

“Compression artifact,” Voss said over her shoulder.

She played it again. There, or not there. A shadow, a dropped frame, or a shape Daniel had taught her to look for.

Rachel raised her eyes from the screen.

Blink. Eight seconds. Blink. Eight seconds. Blink.

She had counted three before she understood that she was counting.

“It’s bad video.” Voss kept his eyes on the phone.

“Yes.”

“You’ve had a hard afternoon.”

“Yes.”

Click.

She checked the jaw. It had not moved. Somewhere across the garage a car door had closed, which was almost certainly the sound. It had been closer than that.

Rachel took one step back.

“Rachel?” It was the voice he had used on her brother for two years, and it had always worked on her. “Are you all right?”

She turned to the guard four feet off, who was still chewing away at his gum. “Do you see him?”

“Ma’am?”

“His face. Look at his face.”

The guard looked at Voss, then at her, with an expression she recognized, the one she had worn in a kitchen that afternoon. “You want to sit down?”

Blink.

She was running before the count reached eight.

“Rachel.” Voss’s voice came after her, even and entirely human. “Rachel, come back.”

She hit the stairwell door with both hands. Once through, she put her back to it and felt nothing push from the other side, and nobody said her name again. She went down three steps at a time, phone shaking against her ear.

“St. Matthew’s Emergency.”

“My brother. Daniel Mercer. An ambulance brought him in.”

“One moment.” Above her the door shrieked on its hinge and kept shrieking.

“I don’t see a Daniel Mercer.”

Rachel stopped on the landing. “What?”

“No patient by that name.”

“He left five minutes ago. In an ambulance.”

“Which service?”

She opened her mouth. There had been letters on the side of it, a logo, a color. She had watched it drive away and could not name one single thing about it.

Footsteps started down behind her at a walk. Whoever it was had no reason to hurry.

#

Daniel opened his eyes.

No siren. No radio chatter. The tires had gone too smooth for city asphalt, and through the rear windows the buildings had turned industrial, with chain link and a water tower on stilts.

The second paramedic was gone. There was no seat where the man had been sitting. The woman sat beside the stretcher with her hands folded in her lap.

He tested the restraints at his chest, his thighs, his wrists. Excellent work all around.

“Wrong hospital?”

She said nothing. Eight seconds later the water tower came back past the window, the same rust streak down the same side, or another tower built by the same people. Daniel twisted for a better angle until a warehouse took it.

The woman tilted her head. Her cheek moved sideways.

Daniel laughed. Eleven days without medication, three nights without sleep, and now this. “Do you have any idea how annoying this is? My sister took my pills. I got talked down by two security guards.”

Her mouth widened a quarter inch past where her face allowed, then came back inside it.

“Rachel is never going to let me live this down.”

The woman leaned in. She did not sway when the ambulance took the turn. Something seated itself behind her cheek, a small latch sound. She worked her mouth twice, got the corners level, and left them there.

Daniel stopped laughing. “Oh.”

Nothing tore. Nothing opened. She adjusted a hair at a time until she had an expression he had seen on a thousand tired women at the end of a shift. The brown in her eyes stayed just as worn, while a pale membrane came in from the side of each one, swept across, and went back.

Eight seconds.

Blink.

Daniel smiled. “Knew it.”