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Part Four (roughly 3100 words)
Thomas Mercer drove home with the flyer from the sandwich shop folded in his shirt pocket and Elias Whitaker riding beside him like an unwelcome passenger.
The rain had passed, but the storm had left its fingerprints everywhere. Water stood in shallow pools along the roadside. The shoulders of the county road steamed faintly where the late-afternoon sun pressed against wet asphalt. Live oak limbs drooped under the weight of rainwater, releasing drops in slow, uneven bursts as Thomas passed beneath them.
Most days, the drive home settled him, but today, it did nothing of the sort. He had spent over twenty years working among old records, and he knew the difference between a document misplaced through neglect and one hidden by intent. The accession ledger entry had been too clean and far too carefully. There were no box numbers, department stamps, or destination. Just those nine words.
Special Materials — Do Not Discard.
And beneath them:
Transferred by: Elias Whitaker.
Thomas tapped one finger against the steering wheel. “Transferred where?” he murmured, but the road gave no opinion. By the time he turned onto their street, the sun had dropped low enough to burn through the pine trees in long golden strips.
Their house sat at the end of a quiet lane, white paint beginning to soften with age, porch railings freshly touched up because Linda had insisted faded paint was not “character,” no matter what Thomas called it.
He pulled into the driveway and shut off the engine, and for several seconds, he remained seated, and that was his mistake. Linda noticed everything. She opened the front door before he had reached the porch. “You’re late,” she said.
“Forgive my tardiness, but it’s only ten minutes.”
“Twelve.”
Thomas smiled. “I stand corrected.”
“You usually do.” This was the same routine they had used for years. She stepped aside to let him in, but her eyes stayed on his face. Forty-three years of marriage had given Linda Mercer a talent no county file could match. She could read silence, maybe not always accurately, perhaps, but close enough to make his denial useless.
“You found something,” she said.
Thomas hung his keys on the little brass hook beside the door. “That depends on what you mean by found.”
Linda folded her arms. “That is exactly the sentence you use when you don’t want to answer.”
He took off his shoes slowly, then looked at her. “I found a name.”
“You find names every day.”
He whispered, always cautious of the ears of others, and told her, “This one found me back.” Linda’s expression softened then. Not fear, not exactly. Concern wrapped in long practice.
“Thomas.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t. That’s why I’m saying it that way.” He turned toward her, and for a moment he saw not the woman in the blue robe from that morning, not the woman who reminded him to buy hamburger buns. Still, the girl he had married decades earlier—the one who had learned, slowly and stubbornly, that curiosity was not something Thomas did. It was something he was.
He reached into his shirt pocket and unfolded the flyer. “There’s a historical society meeting tomorrow night.”
Linda looked at it. “Forgotten Surveyors of North Florida,” she read aloud.
“Yes, I want to talk to Professor Harold Benton.”
“Is he important?”
“I don’t know. I hope.”
Linda looked up. “But you think Elias Whitaker may be.”
Thomas nodded.
She handed the flyer back. “Then I suppose we’re going.”
“We?”
“Oh, don’t start that.” She turned toward the kitchen. “You think I’m letting you wander into forgotten history alone?”
Thomas followed her, smiling despite himself. “I was going to ask.”
“No, you weren’t.”
“I might have.”
“You were going to spend all evening pretending you hadn’t decided yet, then casually mention tomorrow afternoon that you might stop by after work.”
“That sounds possible.”
“That sounds married.”
He laughed, and for a little while, the house became ordinary again.
Dinner was meatloaf, mashed potatoes, green beans, and the hamburger buns Thomas had somehow remembered despite the day’s distractions. Linda declared this a minor miracle. Thomas accepted the praise with humility, a response that lasted until she reminded him that purchasing buns did not qualify him for sainthood.
They ate at the small kitchen table, the one they had bought when Caleb was still in a high chair, and Marissa was convinced peas were created as punishment. Outside, evening insects began their thin chorus. Somewhere down the lane, a dog barked twice and lost interest.
Thomas almost told Linda everything. Almost.
He wanted to describe the envelope, the napkin, the symbol, the ledger, and the phrase "second visit" written on Whitaker’s map. He wanted to say that something about it all felt less like research and more like being quietly summoned, but he didn’t, not because he wanted to keep secrets, but because Linda deserved more than fragments.
So instead, he told her enough to keep her from asking a few dozen more questions. “There was an old envelope,” he said. “No return address. No official markings. Just a symbol.”
Linda cut into her meatloaf. “What kind of symbol?”
“Three curved lines crossed by a slash.”
She paused with the fork halfway to her mouth, and Thomas noticed her reaction. Forty-plus years of marriage will do that. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“Linda.” She set the fork down. “Say that description again.”
“Three curved lines crossed by a slash.”
She frowned slightly, searching. “I’ve seen that.”
Thomas sat still. “Where?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged her shoulders, but it didn’t seem to make a difference in his questions.
“That is counterproductive.”
“It isn’t supposed to be helpful. It’s supposed to be honest.”
He leaned back in his chair. Linda looked annoyed now, but not with him, but rather with her memory. “It was years ago,” she said slowly. “Maybe at church. Maybe on something your mother had. No … not your mother.”
Thomas waited. He had learned long ago that interrupting memory was like startling a deer. It vanished.
Linda closed her eyes. “It was stitched,” she said.
“Stitched?”
“Yes. On cloth. Maybe a small square of fabric.”
“Like a quilt?”
Her eyes opened. “Yes,” she said softly. “A quilt.”
Thomas felt the room shift around him, not physically, of course. It was just enough that ordinary evening sounds, like the refrigerator hum, the ticking clock, the scrape of Linda’s fork against her plate. It all seemed suddenly too loud. “Whose quilt?”
Linda shook her head. “I don’t remember.”
“You’re certain?”
“I’m certain I saw it, but I’m uncertain where.” She gave him a look. “And before you ask, no, I don’t have one of your mysterious notebooks hidden in my purse.”
Thomas smiled faintly. “Pity.”
“But I know what it felt like.”
He looked at her. Linda’s voice lowered. “It felt like somebody didn’t want to talk about it.”
Thomas didn’t sleep well that night. He lay beside Linda, listening to her breathing settle into the slow rhythm that had accompanied most of his adult life. The storm had moved east, but distant thunder still rolled occasionally, soft enough to be mistaken for trucks on the highway.
He stared at the ceiling and thought about symbols, forgotten surveyors, old quilts, and the strange way memory sometimes knocked from the wrong side of a door. Around two in the morning, he gave up. He rose carefully, took his robe from the chair, and padded down the hall.
The study greeted him like an accusation. Boxes waited in their uneven towers. Cassette tapes lined the shelf beside hand-labeled folders. Legal pads, notebooks, clippings, letters from strangers, typed transcripts of interviews—forty years of things too odd to discard and too sincere to mock. Linda called it his collection of impossible things.
Tonight, it felt less like a collection than an unfinished conversation. Thomas turned on the desk lamp. The yellow pool of light fell over the old legal pad where he had written the sentence months earlier. There are no isolated mysteries.
He sat down slowly. In the distance, a woodpecker was hammering an old tree for food, deep in the pines. He looked at his watch and saw it was 3:05 am. It must be that the woodpecker couldn’t sleep either. “Maybe,” he whispered, “there are only isolated listeners.”
He opened a fresh page and wrote three headings. Envelope. Napkin. Quilt.
Underneath, he added: Whitaker — 1946 — second visit.
Then, after a moment: Special Materials — Do Not Discard.
He stared at the page, and for the first time since finding the envelope, the mystery seemed to have a shape. It didn’t have an answer, or even a direction, but it had weight, like that big sunfish he had caught last year. For ten minutes, it was just something submerged just beneath the surface of the dark water.
Thomas reached for the oldest cassette box on the shelf marked PERSONAL INTERVIEWS — 1978–1992.
He didn’t know what he was looking for, which was strange, something that had rarely stopped him before. As he pulled them out, the faint smell of dust and ancient plastic filled his nostrils. He whispered the labels as he removed each file, one by one.
M. Carter — lights over river — 1981.
H. Bell — missing cattle/church bells — 1983.
A. Rhodes — dream account — 1987.
L. Pritchard — old road story — 1988.
Unknown caller — “the humming place” — 1989.
His fingers stopped on Althea Rhodes. Hmmm. Mrs. Rhodes’ kitchen napkin. He had kept the napkin, but had he kept the tape? Thomas slid the cassette from its case and turned toward the old recorder on the shelf. He had nearly thrown the machine out twice. Both times, Linda had asked why he needed it, and both times, he had said, “Because one day I might.”
He almost smiled. “One day,” he whispered. The machine clicked when he pressed play. For several seconds, there was only a hiss, then a younger version of Thomas Mercer spoke from forty years ago. “This is Thomas Mercer. Interview with Mrs. Althea Rhodes, March seventeenth, nineteen eighty-seven, concerning what she described as a recurring dream.”
A woman’s voice followed, thin but steady.
“It wasn’t recurring, Mr. Mercer. That makes it sound like my mind was stuck. It only came three times.”
Young Thomas replied gently, “Three times, then.”
“Yes. Three visits.”
Thomas leaned closer.
On the tape, younger Thomas asked, “Visits?”
Mrs. Rhodes was silent long enough for the tape hiss to fill the room.
Then she said, “That’s what they called them.”
Thomas stopped breathing for a moment.
The old recorder continued.
“I know how it sounds,” Mrs. Rhodes said. “I knew how it sounded then. That’s why I didn’t tell Earl while he was living. He would’ve thought I’d taken leave of my senses. But the first time, I was standing in my mother’s kitchen, except it wasn’t her kitchen. Not really. It had the same windows. Same table. Same crack in the plaster above the stove. But everything felt … copied.”
Young Thomas asked, “Copied?”
“Yes,” she said. “Like someone had made the room from memory, but they didn’t understand what made it home.”
Thomas reached blindly for his pen.
Mrs. Rhodes continued.
“There was a man there. Not a man, maybe. I don’t know. He had a face because I expected him to. He told me not to be afraid, which naturally scared me to death.”
Young Thomas gave a soft laugh. Mrs. Rhodes did too, but only briefly. “He showed me a mark. Three lines and one crossing. He said it meant intersection.”
Thomas wrote the word in capital letters. INTERSECTION.
On the tape, younger Thomas asked, “Intersection of what?”
There was another long pause as Mrs. Rhodes’ voice dropped.
“He said different people would call it different things. Roads, dreams, doors, heaven, and maybe even madness. The old stories. Science someday, maybe. He said none of those names mattered much.”
“What mattered?” younger Thomas asked.
Mrs. Rhodes answered so softly that Thomas almost missed it. “Whether we mistook the hand for the whole animal.”
Thomas froze. The phrase did not belong there. Perhaps the words weren’t fully formed, or the title, as he now thought of it. But close enough that something cold and bright passed through him.
He rewound the tape.
Played it again.
Whether we mistook the hand for the whole animal.
Thomas sat in the lamplight, every box in the room suddenly feeling awake.
Behind him, Linda’s voice came from the doorway.
“Thomas?”
He turned. She stood in her robe, hair silvered by the hallway light, looking not frightened but completely drained.
“I heard voices.”
“It was a tape.”
“I figured that much.” She stepped into the room, looked at the papers and audio cassettes strewn around the place. “You found something, didn’t you?”
He looked down at the cassette.
“Yes.”
“Something bad?”
Thomas thought about that.
“No,” he drawled. “I don’t think bad is the right word.”
“What is?”
He removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes.
“Large.”
Linda crossed the room and rested one hand on his shoulder, and for a while neither spoke. Finally, she said, “Then maybe you should stop sitting with it alone.”
He covered her hand with his. “I was coming to that conclusion myself.”
“No, you weren’t.”
He smiled. “No, you are right,” he admitted. “I’m probably not.”
She squeezed his shoulder. “Bring the tape to the meeting tomorrow.”
Thomas looked up. “To Professor Benton?”
“To whoever knows enough to be afraid of it.”
He stared at her, surprised. Linda shrugged. “I married a strange man. I’ve had decades to adapt.”
Thomas laughed softly, but the sound did not last. The tape recorder clicked at the end of the cassette. The room fell silent again. It wasn’t empty. It was listening.
By morning, the storm had passed completely. The world outside looked washed clean, which Thomas distrusted on principle. Things that looked clean too quickly often had merely hidden the dirt better.
He arrived at the records office ten minutes early and found Ellie already at the counter, staring at him over the rim of a paper cup. “You look awful,” she said.
“Morning to you too.”
“You didn’t sleep.”
“I slept in installments.”
“That’s what old people call not sleeping.”
Thomas paused. “When did you become so disrespectful?”
“About the time you stopped pretending not to enjoy it.”
He smiled despite himself.
Martha appeared from the hallway with a stack of folders. “You’re late.”
Ellie glanced at the clock. “He’s early.”
“For Thomas,” Martha said, “that’s late.”
Thomas took off his raincoat. “I’m feeling unappreciated.”
“You are appreciated,” Martha said. “You are also obvious.”
He looked at her.
She nodded toward his shirt pocket, where the folded flyer showed just enough white edge to betray itself.
“Historical Society?” Thomas sighed.
Ellie brightened. “Oh, this is one of those days.”
“No,” Thomas said.
Martha handed Ellie the folders. “It is absolutely one of those days.”
Thomas continued toward his office. Ellie called after him, “Should I notify the filing system?”
“Only if it asks.”
He closed his office door behind him, but not before hearing both women laugh.
For a while, he allowed routine to have its way.
He processed two deed requests, answered a phone call from an attorney who wanted a miracle by noon, and found a probate file misfiled under the decedent’s middle name because someone in 1974 had apparently believed alphabetizing was a matter of personal interpretation.
Routine steadied him. That was its purpose. Near ten-thirty, he opened the accession ledger again. The line remained unchanged.
Special Materials — Do Not Discard.
Transferred by: Elias Whitaker.
He took a ruler and followed the row carefully, searching the margins. Nothing. No initials. No date beyond the ledger year. No receiving department.
Then he turned the page. For a moment, he thought the next page was blank, but he saw it wasn’t. At the very bottom, in handwriting so faint it nearly vanished into the paper, someone had written: Returned after third visit.
Thomas sat back. That’s odd. The second visit on the map, but the third visit in the ledger. Mrs. Rhodes said it only came three times. He realized he was no longer looking at a coincidence. He was looking at vocabulary, and vocabulary meant community.
Someone had used these words before. Someone had understood them enough to repeat them. Thomas reached for his notebook and wrote:
VISITS = recognized term?
Then:
Who counted them?
Thomas stared at the question, his concentration only broken when the phone rang. He answered without looking away from the page. “Records office, Thomas Mercer.”
For several seconds, there was only static. Then an old man’s voice said, “You found Whitaker.”
Thomas went still. “Who is this?”
“You brought the papers into the light.”
Thomas looked toward the closed office door. “Sir, if this is about county records, I’ll need your name.”
The old man gave a dry little laugh. “No, Mr. Mercer. You won’t.”
Thomas tightened his grip on the receiver. “How did you get this number?”
“It’s a county office.” The caller coughed and almost gagged, as old smokers do.
“That is not an answer.”
“It’s the only one you’re getting today.” A faint laugh echoed in his ear,
Thomas swallowed. “Did you know Elias Whitaker?”
After a long pause, the old man said, “No one knew Elias. Not after the third visit.”
Thomas’s mouth went dry. “Who are you?” The line crackled again, much louder this time.
“You’re going to Benton’s talk tonight.” The words caught his ear, but Thomas said nothing. “That’s good,” the voice continued. “He knows the maps. But maps won’t be enough.”
“What will?”
The old man breathed slowly into the phone. “Ask him about the places surveyors marked twice.”
Thomas reached for his pen. “Marked twice,” he repeated softly.
“And Mr. Mercer?”
“Yes?”
“If he tells you they were errors…” The old man’s voice dropped. “…ask him why so many errors drew the same symbol.” Then the line went dead. Thomas remained seated, receiver still pressed to his ear.
After a moment, Martha knocked once and opened the door without waiting. “Are you all right?”
Thomas slowly replaced the receiver. “No,” he said.
Martha’s teasing expression faded. “No?”
He looked at the ledger, then his notebook, and finally the old envelope sitting quietly on the desk. “No,” Thomas said again, softer this time. “But I think I’ve finally found the entrance.”
posted by
BigV
on July 12, 2026 at 1:49 PM
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Re: Time
Thank you. I'm posting these because I have it much easier to edit here than on a Word doc. If any of you read it as I edit, so much the bettter.
V
posted by
BigV
on July 10, 2026 at 3:29 PM
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Time
I know I am not up to your professional writing skills, but I have noticed that stories, however brilliant, do not cut the mustard on here. Of course I always read your work even if I do not always comment. Sadly, everything has been reduced to smart-ass quips.
I think some take a pleasure in trying to annoy rather than appreciate any form of artistic work. Not on this site of course. Hope you heal quickly.
posted by
C_C_T
on July 10, 2026 at 2:30 PM
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