PART 2
On that fateful Tuesday years ago, Jack the Ripper was greeted by the sight of his dogs, Rusty (a large golden retriever) and Bolt (a Jack Russell terrier), cut open and flayed on his parents’ bedding. An incision directly down the center of their torsos, their skin pulled apart at the cut, stretched and spread across the bedding like some sort of demonic wings. Inexplicably, a single thought found its way into the boy’s mind before he processed the horror within the room. No blood, he noticed.
There was a scream. A loud one, at that, bordering on a shriek. Jack would never know if it came from him or someone else, but since he was the only one in the room, it didn’t leave many options. He’d later figure that he was so terrified, he detached from the situation completely, left to observe his body’s reaction.
Jack looked at the dogs’ faces. He realized the dog’s eyes were… missing. But it was the smiles that would haunt him for years to come. Their mouths pulled into cruel grins, teeth bared. Jack noticed a large rat scurry out from under the bed, passing him. Then, Jack could see nothing. His eyelids involuntarily fluttered closed, and he fell to the floor with a thud.
*****
Toby was perplexed. A natural reaction, since a perplexing question had found its way onto an exclusive internet forum of which he was a member.
The question was as follows:
User 764: Should we experiment further with human perception of time? It seems like if we can discover which biological faculty, which part of our brain *perceives* the passage of time for us, we can then alter said faculty at will.
To slow down or speed up time would be something close to time travel, right? Toby thought. It seems as though we already travel through time in one way, Toby thought, so any change to our normal passage would be something we could accurately call ‘time travel’, at least as we think of it conventionally.
764 was ridiculed on the message board for this thought, but to Toby it was the first hint of a breakthrough in the elusive puzzle of time travel. He scooted his chair back, hopped down (when your feet dangle, departing a chair can only be described as ‘hopping’), and began his research.
Two weeks later, Toby snuck into Sleepy Grove Christian’s swimming facility at nightfall with an access card he’d plucked from an unsuspecting part-time custodian. He wore baby blue swim trunks, flip flops, and an oversized T-shirt he’d once borrowed from his father and never returned. The cool rush of the night air chilled the boy as he approached the facility’s doors. He took a sip of hot chocolate from a cooler he’d brought with him, the warmth diluting throughout his small frame.
He scanned his card, did his best to covertly enter the facility (as covert as a ten year old in flip flops can be), and checked his corners. No one in sight, he decided. He didn’t turn the lights on, such an action posed far too much risk for what it was worth. He flipped and flopped over to the control panel for the facility, then retracted the automatic tarp which covered the pool. As the gentle whir of the tarp mechanism filled the facility, Toby walked over to the pool’s debris traps. A layer of sticks, leaves, and other obstructions covered the top of the trap, which was good enough for anyone who’d accidentally open one of them. This made it a perfect hiding place.
Toby pulled a plastic bag with the phrase ‘Day 10’ scrawled across its front from underneath the rubbish, inside a translucent blue liquid was held in a small syringe. The debris trap made a convenient hiding place, as questions would indubitably be raised should Toby’s parents ever find a syringe in his room.
Toby’s research had solidified a particular theory: there was likely no way to alter the human perception of time without fundamentally altering human body chemistry. He explained it to his message board like this:
User 349: Consider all the humans who have ever lived or died. Rather, all humans with the ability to transcribe their perceptions. Don’t you think that if human beings could experience time slower or faster, someone would have accidentally stumbled across the methodology by now? Sure, we seem to think time sometimes moves slower (when we’re waiting to go home from school or work) or faster (when one is in the ‘flow state,’), but if we’re being honest with ourselves, we just say those things to communicate our awareness of the passage of time in those scenarios. We don’t perceive the flow of time differently, at least not in actuality.
Toby Dawson was both incredibly decisive and extremely impatient. He lived under the notion that he had very little time to waste in this life, so he should take whatever measures necessary to decrease times of indecisiveness or stagnation.
It was for this reason Toby decided to begin experimenting with his own body chemistry. It would be far too much trouble to find willing test subjects, and even after finding them, each subject is a loose end who could compromise the entire operation at a later date. The risk/reward just didn’t line up.
He learned some rudimentary chemistry, researched psychedelics, and within two days had created a compound that he felt could slow the flow of time (or, at the very least, make him experience the flow of time abnormally). He’d never tell another soul of the exact ingredients in his concoction (especially since said ingredients were ‘borrowed’ exclusively from the high school science lab), employing a level of secrecy that most ten year old’s reserved for knowledge of friends’ crushes.
After setting his container of hot chocolate near the poolside, he took off his father’s t-shirt and pulled an elastic band from a pocket of his swim trunks. Biting one end, he wrapped it tightly around his arm just below the shoulder. He took the syringe out of the plastic bag and took a deep breath. Slowly, Toby pierced his arm with the needle of the syringe, and depressed the plunger. Then, he waited exactly forty three seconds (counted on a wall clock in the swimming facility), and fell backward into the pool.
Eighty-four seconds later, Toby Dawson drowned.
Experiment Log: Day 10, Operation Riverwalk
A few things have become clear to me. My concoction by itself isn’t going to be enough to trigger the chemical reaction I’m searching for, at least not at its current dosage. I’m undergoing psychedelic effects, certainly, and it’s possible I’m feeling some sort of ‘high’ induced by the compound, but that was never the point of this operation. So, for Day 10, I’m adding a few twists to my current pattern of self-injection behind the playhouse in my backyard. Firstly, I’m going to do it in a near-death situation (specifically, by nearly drowning). It’s said when a person’s convinced they’re going to die, a certain chemical is released in the brain. For some, it makes them believe they’re meeting God. For others, it produces a profound euphoria. For most, however, they see their life flash before their eyes. We’ve all heard of this phenomenon, sure, but from what I understand, the word ‘flash’ is inaccurate. They see a set of memories, experience them, in an amount of time unrealistic for such an act. In other words, even if I can’t find the proper chemical for this, my brain’s got it already. As for my second twist, I’m doubling the dosage, and removing ingredients that I believe are ultimately ineffective. I don’t believe I’ll die, as the human body is incredibly resilient. At least, this is my hope. Will report back after the experiment is complete.
Also, on a side note, I’ll have to figure out what to get Mom for her birthday. I think she likes flowers, maybe the kind I can pick from our garden. What kind? Dad said she was allergic to… lilacs? Daisies? This is a subject for further review.
*****
Ace, admittedly, was starting to concur with the police force. This scared her. She lived with the head of the police force, and knew exactly what they were capable of (which, she’d tell you, wasn’t much). Regardless, there wasn’t anything to go off of here. Ace was even starting to consider the fringe possibility that the Robertsons never existed in the first place.
She walked out onto the Robertson home’s balcony, and hit her e-cig once again.
“Bad habit, that stuff,” Detective McIlroy told her, walking onto the balcony, “messes with your lungs.”
“I need it, Mac. If my mind is left to run on its own, the loose ends’ll get to me. This stuff calms me down, or something like that. Keeps my gears turning.”
“That brain of yours… I feel like I should be jealous, you know, seeing how many times you’ve bailed me out. And… well, I’m not gonna pretend like I wasn’t smoking at your age.”
“Jealousy will get ya’ nowhere, Mac.” Ace said, placing her e-cig back in her pocket. She pointed to a white wooden shed across the backyard’s lawn. “You guys already checked out the shed, right?”
“Yup.”
“Anything of note?”
“Just some gardening equipment. A lawnmower, fertilizer, and a bunch of tools hung up on the wall.”
Ace analyzed the backyard. Freshly trimmed grass, a pristine brick patio, a barbeque pit she knew would make her father jealous.
“How long ago did the Robertsons go missing?”
“Ah, something like a week ago, at least that was the last time anyone heard from ‘em.”
“Mac, you’d consider yourself to be a regular ‘home improvement’ type, right?”
“Built my own wood deck in my yard, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“I don’t know much about grass, but this seems… pretty short for a week without anyone mowing it, don’t ya’ think?”
“The grass?” McIlroy took a good, long look. “Now that you mention it, it is pretty short…”
Those gears in Ace’s head began to turn.
“Do you remember anything about the lawnmower?”
“I wasn’t exactly committing the shed to memory, but… well, the tools all seemed pretty new. Lawnmower’s a nice model, though, expensive. I’ve been waiting for a sale online to get it myself. What’s your point, Stacy?”
Ace turned around and opened the door leading back into the house before turning to detective McIlroy.
“Call around, check with the local gardeners. It means that either the Robertsons have been sneaking back to mow their grass, or they hire gardeners,” so why own an expensive lawnmower? “… and it’s Ace to you, detective,” she said, jogging back downstairs.
When you’re sixteen, you tend to get a pass for sprinting through a potential crime scene, and Ace was taking full advantage of this luxury. She bounded down the stairs two at a time, wanting to get to the shed as quickly as possible.
It’s probably nothing. And what do I know about grass? But this isn’t the type of family to spend thousands of dollars on something they don’t use… they’re tacky, right? If anything, they’d spend that money on furniture they found on an airplane catalog, or maybe a flatscreen for their kitchen.
Ace reached the shed and threw the door open. It was as McIlroy had described it. Nothing but gardening materials. Tools, fertilizer, and a very expensive lawnmower. All completely unused. Ace even found a price tag on a rake. But why buy all this equipment if you weren’t ever going to use it?
The answer was simple: to fool the Sleepy Grove PD, should the Robertsons ever need to do such a thing. Fortunately, Ace could see past it. She moved some empty boxes off the floor, then drove the lawnmower out of the shed. Underneath… a rug. A tacky, conspicuous, blue and yellow striped rug.
A grin slowly spread across Ace’s face, making her look eerily content.
“You almost got me…” Ace muttered, pulling away the rug. “The damn gardeners…”
Ace opened the trap door beneath. A carpeted staircase led to darkness below. Ace could have called for backup. She could have called out down the staircase. Instead, she gave in to her unmitigated excitement, and plunged into the unknown.
Odds and Ends 
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