02 – Florence Erika Walker

Erika sat hunched over a bowl of breakfast cereal, watching her mother’s back as the woman washed the range with a rag cloth.

The woman in the kitchen wore a plaid shirt with an apron thrown on over the top. The teal and white blouse that was today’s outfit for her job as a hotel clerk hung over the back of one of the counter stools, ready to put on as soon as she had to go in to work. Erika paid attention to every little detail. From the large freckle on her elbow to the way her sandy brown hair lightly curled. She kept in shape from her younger days, working out daily. Her clothes, the same ones Erika could remember her wearing several times in the past, fit without being too tight or too loose.

“Cart’s birthday is coming up,” Erika said between spoonfuls of granola, keeping her tone conversational. “Get him anything? I hope not the same as last time. He hasn’t played with the last few sets for more than five minutes.”

“Carter,” Leah said, turning to frown over her shoulder. Erika paid special attention to the dimples on her cheeks and the barely-there crow’s feet at the corner of her eyes. “Cart makes him sound like something we should have left behind at the grocery store.”

“Cart is snappier.”

Leah just rolled her eyes. “Not Legos,” she said as she turned back to put a little elbow grease on the stovetop. “And not something I’m going to tell you, little miss snoop. Not going to let you spoil his surprise.”

Erika huffed. Like she would do that. Well, not normally. This year? Maybe.

Shaking her head, Erika turned her huff into a thoughtful hum. “What kind of cake is he getting?”

“German chocolate. Again,” Leah said with some consternation. “Same thing he has had for the last few years.”

“No fancy theme to it like his eighth birthday party?”

“The pirate cake?” Leah shook her head in the negative. “Hard to decorate German chocolate. It’s just brown on brown on brown. Which, while a shame because that pirate cake was cute, is much easier. Dabbing out frosting in the shape of a skull and crossbones took half the day.”

Erika frowned at her mother’s back, drumming her fingers on the countertop in irritation.

The conversation was fine. Fine. Perfect and dandy. There was nothing wrong with it either in content or in tone. The cadence of Leah’s speech sounded normal and fine. There wasn’t a single aspect of anything that Erika could point to and say that it was off.

It should have been comforting. Except…

“Erika, aren’t you ready?” Carter said, coming out from the hallway bathroom. His voice was quiet. Subdued. His eyes stayed locked on the white and black speckled carpet. “We’re going to be late.”

Erika’s eyes flicked to the clock on the wall. It ticked along, one second flowing into the next. Until the flow stopped. The clock still ticked along but now with a few minutes of stolen time. Not much. Enough to ensure Carter wouldn’t be late.

Normally, she would have let him handle this. Carter was leagues better at it than she was. It was the difference between a professional musician and someone who had only seen a five-minute guitar tutorial online. Carter could steal time like Flea could rock the bass while Erika was out here trying to remember which strings were which.

Nevertheless, she pulled five minutes out of nowhere.

She immediately glanced at her mother.

Leah frowned at the clock and then carried that frown as she looked between the two of them. “You need to be careful doing that.”

“Not going to do it around normies, Mom.”

“It isn’t normal people I’m worried about. What are they going to do?” Leah said with a dismissive shrug. “That kind of stuff leaves traces that others might pick up on. It is fine here as long as I’m…”

There it was. Instead of that uncertainty and avoidance that Erika was used to where she tried to ignore the fact that any time had gone missing at all, Leah acted ambivalent. It wasn’t the fact that they were breaking the way the world was supposed to work, she treated it like someone finding out about a little underage drinking. What would the neighbors think, or something.

Though, that did beg the question… “Who is going to pick up on it?”

Leah’s eyes widened ever so slightly, like she realized that she had said something she shouldn’t have. The slip of her expression vanished the same instant it appeared. She crossed her arms and adopted a serious expression. “Florence Erika Walker, you have already taken enough time and if you don’t use it, you’re going to be late anyway. Go. Get to school.”

Erika stood, about to press the matter.

Carter stopped her with a hand on her arm. “We’re going to be late,” he said again. His eyes pleaded for them to get out of there as soon as possible. Erika had half a mind to stick around and argue anyway. Were it not for the faint trembling in Carter’s arm, she would have.

Instead, she sighed. “Fine. Let’s go, Cart.”

Erika, a mature teenager, did not stomp away or slam the door behind her. She grumbled under her breath, blowing away a stray lock of her hair with an irritated huff. She got Carter buckled into the passenger seat of her old pickup and fired up the engine. Turning it over took a bit longer than normal, but ol’ reliable started up eventually.

“Next time,” the thing pretending to be her mother shouted from the porch, “set your alarm five minutes sooner!”

Erika stuck out her tongue and peeled out of the driveway.

They drove in silence for a few minutes, getting out of their neighborhood and onto a main road.

Carter let out a small sniffle. “Mommy isn’t mommy again today.”

“I know. Of course, I know. You think I don’t know? Because I know.”

Erika didn’t mean to snap at her brother. But she couldn’t help it. She was stressed, worried, and had no idea what to do about the situation. How did someone deal with their mother disappearing without actually going anywhere?

It wasn’t like they could go to the police. What would they say? The thing pretending to be Leah Walker knew everything Leah Walker should have known. It knew birthdays and blood types, it knew bank accounts and social security numbers. It was the right height and weight. If they did a blood test, Erika did not doubt that it would come back saying everything was normal.

Hell, Erika hadn’t even noticed for two weeks, and then only because Carter had been acting stranger than normal for a while.

They couldn’t just say that ‘Oh yes, our mother isn’t afraid of us breaking reality anymore. Strange, innit?’

Maybe they could go to Child Protective Services and claim abuse but… couldn’t that be easily disproved? Even if CPS removed them from their house, what would that accomplish? It wouldn’t bring the real Leah Walker back and, if the thing that had taken her place could do all the things they could do—and more, according to Carter—then just being removed from its presence wouldn’t keep them safe.

Besides that, CPS might decide to split them up. Erika was almost eighteen so she would probably be fine but what would they do with Carter? Would they let her look after him or would they ship him off to some foster home filled with people that didn’t know how to handle his oddities?

Erika wouldn’t let that happen.

Besides, it didn’t seem… hostile. Erika had slept in the house without a care in the world for two weeks. Neither she nor Carter had been harmed.

Everything just… carried on like normal. Erika was almost afraid of breaking that normalcy. Would it reveal its true, monstrous colors if she accused it of being something other than Leah Walker? She couldn’t take that chance either. Not without knowing what they were dealing with.

Hence, she had to carry on, pretend like things were normal.

It galled. It grated. What happened to Leah, her mother? What was this thing in her place?

Erika stewed the entire way to Littlemore Middle School. She barely realized that she had pulled into the parking lot until Carter started unbuckling his seatbelt. The entire ride had been silent.

Had all those lights she had passed been green? Erika couldn’t even remember.

Whatever. They got here safely. The auto-pilot she had been on in her simmering thoughts probably knew how to drive better than she did consciously.

“Hey,” Erika said before Carter could open the truck’s door. “Sorry about snapping at you.”

Carter sniffed a little, bobbing his head in a nod. “It’s okay. I don’t know what to do either.”

“Is it…” Erika paused, reaching for the one vaguely hopeful possibility in the middle of all this mess. “Is it possible that mom just learned how to do all those things?”

There was nothing strange about the things Erika and Carter could do. Except that most other people couldn’t do them. Erika hadn’t even realized until sixth grade that other people thought she just had an overactive imagination when she talked about wondering why other people didn’t do the things she did. Shifting a few seconds here or there was just how the world worked. If she could do it, anyone could.

But Carter was shaking his head. “No. I don’t even know how she did the thing with the clocks and I was watching. It was like she threw them out of the flow of time completely and then brought them all back in at once. They’re still tick-tock-tick-tocking in perfect time and it has been one million, four hundred ninety thousand, four hundred eighty-four seconds. I haven’t even needed to reset the weights.” He let out a light, content sigh. The happy look on his face vanished in an instant, replaced with uncertainty and fear. “It would be perfect if…”

“If mom,” Erika finished for him.

He bobbed his head again and didn’t say anything else.

Erika’s hands tightened around the steering wheel. How dare… whoever. Whatever. She had to close her eyes and take in a deep breath before she ended up breaking something.

It was a close thing. The steering wheel was rattling.

Or maybe that was just the old engine lugging along.

Opening her eyes again, Erika looked over to Carter and tried for a reassuring smile. “Just go to school and act like everything is normal.”

Carter, head down against his chest, lifted his arm to his ear. He stayed still for a moment, listening to the ticking of his wristwatch. As he did so, he visibly grew calmer, straightening his back and taking a deep breath. Slowly, he lowered his arm once again and turned to Erika. “Are you going to school like everything is normal?”

“Please,” Erika said, rolling her eyes. She flashed a bright grin. “I don’t go to school half the time anyway.”

“So what are you—”

“Nothing you need to worry about,” Erika said, reaching over to ruffle his hair.

He dodged, scurrying out from under her extended hand and opening the truck’s door in the process. He slammed it shut behind him, hooked his thumbs under the straps of his backpack, and headed toward the school building. Erika watched him go until he disappeared inside.

The smile slid from Erika’s face.

“Fuck.”

---

“Hey. You alright?”

Erika’s pen tapped against the busywork on her desk. Her eyes roamed over the math questions, reading each line without actually reading the line. Find the center of the ellipse. Solve for x. Find the inverse function of the following exponential function. Normally, she could breeze through the questions with her eyes closed.

“Erika?”

A pale hand with multi-colored fingernails swept through Erika’s vision. The sudden movement was enough to make her blink and jerk back.

Kassandra sat reverse in her chair, hands wrapped around the back of it. She grinned. The braces wrapped around her teeth looked almost ready to come off. Another few months and she would have perfect teeth. Most seniors who were ever going to have braces would have already been done with them but Kassandra was a bit of a late bloomer in that regard.

Erika blinked and shook her head, wondering what she was even thinking about.

“You look a bit outta it today.”

Affecting a yawn, Erika shrugged. “Got a lot on my mind lately.”

Erika went to school like normal, despite what she had said to Carter. She had a plan. Nothing that would solve the situation with her mother but something that should hopefully shed some light on the problem. To enact that plan, she couldn’t be missing class just yet. The school would send text messages when she missed class and she didn’t want to deal with that just yet.

So she had to sit here, mind hopping from bad thoughts to worse thoughts and back again, all while she was trying to plan her next few steps out. She tried not to stew in her thoughts too deeply. Over the last few days, after realizing that she had no idea what happened to her mother, she had done that more than enough. The spiral wasn’t needed.

“Uh huh,” Kassandra said, waving the rainbow of her fingernails again. “You still here?”

Erika blinked. “Yeah.” Her eyes flicked up to the clock in the corner of the room.

If the fake Leah Walker was trying to slot seamlessly into the real Leah Walker’s life, she would head off to the hotel today a little before ten. There, she would work as a clerk until three. She would get home roughly at the same time that Erika would if she stuck out the full day at school. Not enough time after school but too much time between when Erika had dropped off Carter and when the house should be empty.

And she wasn’t ready to risk stealing any time against something that could possibly do that as well.

“Whatever,” Kassandra said, flipping a bright red lock of hair out of the way of her freckled face. “Look you like Hellstorm, right?”

“What?”

“The band? Hellstorm? You were talking about them nonstop last year.” She dropped her gaze to a narrowed look of suspicion. “I thought your tastes were a little less fickle than that.”

“Yeah, yeah. I know who they are. I meant why bring them up? You don’t like good music.”

Kassandra turned up her nose at that. “I thought you might want to know that they’re playing at The Hole next weekend and I can get tickets to meet the band. But it is going to cost you a little extra this time around. I’m thinking—”

Erika held up a hand. “Sorry. Don’t think I’ll be able to make it.”

“But—”

The bell signaling the end of math class interrupted her protests. Mister de Vries started talking about something or other. Homework, probably. Erika didn’t care to stick around for it and she definitely didn’t care to come up with excuses for Kassandra. The woman could be pushy when she wanted something.

Something like cash.

The halls quickly filled with students. Those on the earliest lunch schedule headed for the cafeteria. Others stopped to chat outside classes or lockers. Erika headed to easily the worst class she had ever made the mistake of signing up for.

Home economics.

Erika had figured that it would be an easy elective and, to be fair, it was. She had just thought it would also be a place where she could eat some decent food, practice chopping food, stitching holes in clothes, and maybe a handful of other skills that would be valuable in actual day-to-day life. But no. Knives weren’t allowed and the closest they had gotten to cooking was tossing a frozen pizza in the oven.

The class would be perfect for what she needed today.

The Home Ec class was set up with a series of kitchen-like booths and a larger common area in front, where they would meet first to discuss the day’s plans. Erika took her usual seat near the door and checked the task list for the day.

They would be making cookies. Knowing how the rest of the class went, they would use premade cookie dough, and the only preparation would be preheating the oven and spooning the dough onto cookie trays. Regardless, it was work that would keep people moving around at least a little and using the kitchens.

Erika waited for the class to fill out, her foot thumping against the ground in impatience. The clock seemed to move so slowly and she wasn’t even doing anything to it.

Finally, Daniel walked in. Just before the bell for class to begin rang. For a moment there, she had thought that he would be missing school but no, Daniel King was a reliable and, importantly, a studious sort of guy.

Erika leaned over as Missus Wheeler began taking attendance. “I need you to cover for me. I’m ditching class.”

“Present!” he called before leaning over. “Why are you here if you’re skipping?”

“I want to be marked here today.”

“You care about your attendance?”

“Today,” Erika said with a smile. “Present,” she added when the teacher called her name.

The younger boy—he was a junior; Erika was the only senior in this class—pursed his lips and shook his head. “She’s going to notice if you disappear.”

“That’s why you’re covering for me. Stick with the program, Danny.”

He leaned over, whispering as Missus Wheeler started the directions for the cookies. “What am I even supposed to say?”

“Be a good friend and say you’ll cover for me.”

The look on his face turned flat. “I mean when she notices you.” He tugged at his short brown hair. “You can’t just spring this on me now. I need time to think.”

“I don’t have your number so last minute warning is all you get,” Erika hissed back. She forced a quick smile as Missus Wheeler turned and looked at the two who were whispering back and forth. As soon as the woman’s back turned back to the board where she was writing directions—looked like they were actually going to mix something in a bowl today, so more steps than expected—she whispered, “Just say I’m on the rag and it’s a bad one or something.”

“Rag? What rag?”

Erika turned, staring at the boy. He winced, clearly realizing he had said something foolish but also not realizing why it had been foolish. His ears started burning bright red. “You have a girlfriend, don’t you? I know you’ve got a sister—freshman or sophomore, right?”

“I… I don’t. Have a girlfriend— What does that have to do with anything?”

“Jeeezus. Just tell her I’m on my period.”

In the blink of an eye, the red in Daniel’s ears spread out over the rest of his face. It might have been amusing were Erika not suddenly worried he would have an aneurysm. He sputtered a moment only to clamp his jaw shut as Missus Wheeler turned to face them again.

“Something to share with the class?” she asked, plump cheeks jiggling with every word.

“Danny was just telling me how excited he was to make cookies today, just like his dear old nan.”

Missus Wheeler raised a single eyebrow before shaking her head. “Alright, alright. Get going. The first tray needs to be in the oven in the next thirty minutes or you won’t have time for two trays before the end of class.”

As the class got to their feet and started moving around for ingredients, Erika gave Dan a wink. He shook his head, looking very much like he wished he hadn’t showed up today. “As soon as her back is turned, I’m out. Hopefully, she doesn’t notice for a while.”

“I can’t tell her… that.”

“Sure you can,” Erika said, giving him a hearty slap on his shoulder. “Just open your mouth and say it. Now…”

She trailed off, watching as two other students approached the teacher with a question and made her turn her back to the door.

“Good luck,” she said with another wink.

“Don’t leave—”

Erika quietly pushed open the door and slipped out into the hallway.

Brownstone High School technically was not an open campus. Nobody stopped the students who left for the nearby fast food places, however. Erika didn’t even have to hide as she walked out the back doors near the cafeteria and across the short yard to the parking lot.

Erika hopped into her pickup and headed toward her house. She didn’t go all the way there, stopping at a small park near their subdivision in the opposite direction from the route to the hotel. Even if Leah were running excessively late for work, she wouldn’t go past the truck. From there, Erika walked until she reached her street.

The Corolla wasn’t in the driveway. As it was the only vehicle besides the pickup they owned, that meant that either her mother was off to work or someone had stolen it. Betting on the former, Erika headed home and pulled her house key out of her jeans pocket.

“Home for a minute,” Erika called as she pushed open the door, just in case. She could explain away her presence and run off if it came down to it. “Forgot some homework.”

Only the silence of an empty home answered back.

Slipping inside, Erika locked the door and casually strolled through the house. As if she were home for nothing more than homework. She rummaged through her room for a few minutes, during which she listened to the house. The odd creaks from thermal expansion as the day heated up. The muffled ticking from the clocks in Carter’s room. The refrigerator’s compressor humming to life in the kitchen.

Nothing out of the ordinary. No sign that anyone was secretly home.

Paranoid? Maybe. Erika figured that if something could come and slot into her mother’s place as seamlessly as it had, there wasn’t such a thing as too paranoid.

“Mom, you home?” Erika asked after coming out of her room and knocking on Leah’s door.

No answer, of course. The house was well and truly empty.

The master bedroom was barely larger than either of the other bedrooms in the house. A queen-sized bed took up most of the space. In one corner, near the window, a small desk and laptop took up a little more space. The last few square inches held a large armoire with a television hidden inside its doors. There were two other doors in the room, one leading to a small three-quarter bath and the other to the tiniest walk-in closet that ever existed.

Erika moved through every space, checking under the bed, the drawers of the armoire, behind the television, between each outfit in the closet, and everywhere else she could think of. She did find a new pair of light-up shoes and a rather fancy mechanical pocket watch hidden on the top shelf of the closet. Aside from that, not a single thing stuck out as suspicious or conspicuous.

Pulling out the small chair in front of the desk, Erika sat down and opened up the laptop. After applying a sticky note from a desk drawer to the camera lens, she powered it on and found herself at a password screen.

Erika knew her mother’s passwords. Not every single one of them—it took effort and pain to get her to use a password manager with randomly generated passwords but enough website hack scares had convinced her. Still, the laptop’s main password had never been important enough to lock away behind a twenty-six-character behemoth. Not to mention how annoying that would have been to type in every single time.

Password Incorrect. Please try again.

Password Incorrect. Please try again.

Password Incorrect. Please try again.

Password Incorrect. Please try again.

Password Incorrect. Please try again.

“Huh.” Erika leaned back in the chair, frowning at the message on the screen. She had tried all the common passwords she knew plus a few variations. Nothing worked. That… didn’t necessarily mean anything.

No. Who was she kidding? That right there was the first thing that made sense. Finally some evidence that the impostor in the appearance of her mother wasn’t just a figment of her imagination.

Erika cracked her neck and rested her fingers on the keyboard once again. A part of her hesitated. The fake Leah had just warned her over breakfast that something could take notice of the so-called oddities that she and her brother could do. But nothing ventured, nothing gained. She took a breath and focused.

Where Carter treated time like it was a suggestion more than a fundamental force of existence, Erika’s talents rested elsewhere.

Her fingers didn’t move. Her eyes remained dead on the password field. The screen flickered and twitched. The image stretched and distorted like someone held a magnet against an old tube television. With one more flicker, she broke into the machine. The desktop flickered to life, cluttered with various shortcuts ranging from tax tools to cheap idle games.

“Let’s see,” Erika said, cracking her neck back and forth once again. “What have we been up to, fake mother.”

The first thing to check was, obviously, browsing history. There wasn’t too much in there. A few nights ago, Leah had gone on a brief spree of eighties music videos. There were a few different sites for homemade German chocolate frosting. Some local news sites were on the books at various points but nothing that looked interesting; it was like she had just been browsing the news.

Erika checked around in a few more places including a mail program and a calendar. Nothing odd.

Going back to the browser, however, she pulled open the settings. People knew to clear their browsing history. It was practically the first thing anyone concerned about privacy learned. However, there were other places where incriminating information could linger. Clearing history didn’t always clear cookies. Neither cleared saved passwords.

AtomMail cookies stuck out, having been created just the day before. Erika might have skipped over it had it not been missing from the browsing history. She opened up the site and, while there was no saved password, the forum autofill provided the email address login. A seemingly random string of numbers. It didn’t look like a date. More like an identification number.

The screen flickered once again and Erika found herself in a mostly empty mailbox.

From: 194573902092@atommail.000

To: 4736294857493@atommail.000

Subject: Re: Re: Re: Info Request

Body:

It might not be what you are looking for exactly, but I guarantee you won’t be disappointed.

>Tuesday at two.

>Don’t waste my time, Cross. This had better be something.

>>The Puppet are of little cause of concern to us, Dice. Let The Castle and The Eclipse quake in fear. We won’t.

>>How does this Tuesday work for you?

>>Cross

>>>You are well informed as usual. I almost wonder if you have been spying on me personally.

>>>It is quite distressing that even you have failed to uncover the information I require. The threat is real. Its agents have already destroyed my previous cover. How can you turn up nothing?

>>>I suppose I must see these other elements of interest. Though, are you sure The Church is the best place to meet? I hear The Puppet has been lurking around it as of late.

>>>>Mister… Or is it Miss Dice, these days?

>>>>The results of The Mummy investigation are inconclusive. If I cannot locate the information you require, it does not exist. Nevertheless, there are a few elements I turned up in my investigation that you may find interesting. Would you care to join me at The Church to discuss these matters in person? I am available at your convenience.

>>>>Cross

“Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy,” Erika said, tutting like an old lady. Fake Leah must have expected someone could get into the email account. It had been cleaned out. There were no other messages, including previous emails in the chain. This one was only here because it had only been sent this morning. Forty minutes ago, well after the fake Leah went to work.

Erika marked the email as unread and then cleared the browsing history for the last hour. Properly cleared it. If breaking into the computer did leave some sort of trace that this fake Leah could detect, hopefully what she had investigated would remain obscured.

Mister or Miss Dice, Cross, The Mummy, The Puppet, The Castle, The Eclipse. Lots of suspicious words there. That wasn’t even getting into the conversation itself. Was this Cross person some private investigator? Mister now Miss Dice, Erika presumed, was the fake Leah.

The message mentioned a church but not which church. There were a dozen within five minutes of driving and even more throughout the rest of Chicago. The only way she would be able to figure it out is if she followed the fake Leah.

It was Monday morning. They were meeting tomorrow.

Two. Did that mean two in the morning? Or afternoon.

Erika closed down the laptop and removed the sticky note. She performed one cursory look-through of the master bedroom to ensure that nothing had been left obviously out of place. With that done, she closed the door, slipped out of the house, and headed back to her truck.

She had less than a day to figure out how she was going to tail her fake mother.

For now, she had to get back to school. She should be able to make it before the end of Home Ec if she rushed. Hopefully, Daniel had done his job.