4:37 A.M.

- Chapter 3 -

The alley came back all at once.

Not gradually. Not kindly. Not with any interest in helping me understand where I had been.

One instant there was pressure, light, distortion, a feeling like the world had let go of me from behind. The next instant there was brick. Wet pavement. The doorway to Weights and Scales. The stink of garbage and old beer and rain. My own body standing upright as if that were a normal thing to be doing.

I jerked in place so hard my knees nearly folded.

Cold air hit the inside of my lungs like I had forgotten what breathing was for. I bent forward with both hands on my thighs and dragged in a breath sharp enough to hurt. Another. Another. My heart was detonating in my chest, not racing so much as slamming, like it was trying to reassert jurisdiction over the rest of me.

For a second I thought I was going to throw up.

Nothing came.

I stayed there bent over in the alley, staring at the black-glass shine of the pavement between my shoes. The puddles were still. No circles. No white shimmer. No silver pressure in the air. No pale forms. Just alley water reflecting the weak glow of the fixture overhead and the diluted strip of light leaking from under the bar’s back door.

I looked up so fast I got dizzy.

The door was shut. The chalk crown was still on the wall. The dumpster was still by the brick. The chain-link gate was still at the alley mouth. Everything was where it ought to have been.

Except the night was gone.

That realization did not arrive in language at first. It arrived as wrong color.

The alley was no longer midnight blue and sodium gold. The sky above the gap between buildings had gone that thin, washed-out pre-dawn gray that means the dark has already started surrendering even if the day has not fully claimed the ground yet. The alley itself had flattened under it. Less mystery. Less cover. More exposure.

I blinked hard. Then harder.

“No,” I said.

My voice came out rough and private, like I had not used it in hours.

That thought hit me half a second later.

Hours.

My phone.

I looked down and found it still in my right hand.

That alone should have steadied me, but it did not. It made everything worse. Because I remembered dropping it. Or almost dropping it. I remembered it hanging in front of me for one impossible beat with the time burning on the screen like a warning label. I remembered reaching. I remembered not being sure what a hand even was.

And now here it was. In my hand. Quiet. Ordinary. Cold.

I brought it up and looked at the screen.

4:37 a.m.

For a second the numbers meant nothing. My mind refused to compile them. It just held them there, unprocessed, like a machine locking up on corrupted input.

Then the meaning landed.

I felt the bottom drop out of my stomach.

“No.”

Same word. Different man.

I turned in a full circle in the alley like maybe the missing hours might be lying around somewhere if I changed my angle. The wall. The door. The dumpster. The gate. The brick. The puddles. Nothing. No explanation. No evidence that the laws of time had been touched, bent, or insulted in any way. Just the kind of damp alley where a man could smoke, throw up, make a bad decision, or get jumped. Not the kind of alley where the entire architecture of a life could be stepped over like a crack in the sidewalk.

My phone still read 4:37 a.m.

I checked it again as if the numbers might feel ashamed and rearrange themselves. Still 4:37.

The band.

That thought slammed in next. Patrick. Darnell. Evan’s set. The car. The whole ordinary chain of the evening.

I moved toward the alley mouth too fast, half slipping on the wet pavement, one shoulder scraping the brick as I caught myself. At the gate I shoved through into the open stretch leading out toward Mellen Street.

The block looked emptied out.

Not dead. Not abandoned. Just done with me.

A few cars were still parked along the curb, but not enough. Not anything like the earlier crowd. The music from inside Weights and Scales was gone. No cluster of smokers by the side entrance. No laugh bursts drifting out from the front. No loose little satellites of people lingering in the spill-light of a night they were not ready to let end.

Whatever version of the city had been here at 11:17 had already closed its file and moved on.

I stepped farther out and looked toward where I thought Patrick’s car had been. Empty curb. Wrong dark. No car.

My heartbeat started going strange all over again.

“Okay,” I said to myself, but there was no okay anywhere in the sentence.

Think.

I had carpooled. Right. Patrick drove. Darnell rode in the back. I knew that. I knew it clean. We had pulled up together. We had joked in the lot. We had gone inside together. That part was intact.

So why had I just checked for my own car?

I stopped moving.

Something small and mean began scratching at the inside of my skull.

Because for a second—just for a second—I had remembered driving myself.

Not a full memory. More like a counterfeit reflex. My body had reached for a fact that did not exist and only failed at the last second.

I put a hand against my forehead. My skin was clammy. The back of my neck hurt. My shoulder still ached from where I had hit the wall, which at least gave me one piece of the night that felt attached to cause and effect.

The rest of me felt out of sequence.

I stood there trying to breathe normal and listen for some internal click that would put everything back in place. Instead I got fragments.

Cold brightness. Silver-white. A smooth curved surface parting. Something like a face and not a face. A sentence arriving without air.

Do not be afraid.

I shut my eyes. Bad move. The fragments brightened. Not into a full memory. Nothing that generous. Just flashes too clean to belong to imagination and too incomplete to qualify as useful. A white arc. A hum that might have been in my bones. My own fear moving through me in measured pulses like it had been observed.

I opened my eyes again fast.

No. I was not doing that out here. Not on Mellen Street with dawn leaking in and my life operating under the false assumption that reality was still one piece.

Headlights swung across the lot.

I turned so sharply my chest hurt. A patrol car rolled slow around the corner and into the small open area beside the bar, white and blue paint muted under the early light. It was not moving with urgency. More the deliberate, end-of-shift drift of men checking the edges of a night for whatever mess had not yet reported itself.

The cruiser slowed when the driver saw me standing there alone.

For half a second I thought about pretending I was fine. That thought died instantly.

I lifted an arm. The cruiser came farther in and stopped.

Two officers inside. Both looked tired in the particular professional way that says they have seen just enough foolishness tonight to have no appetite left for another serving. The driver rolled the window down.

“You all right?” he asked.

That is one of the strangest questions I have ever been asked. Not because it was unreasonable. Because there was no legal answer for what was true.

I stepped closer to the window, trying hard not to look as disordered as I felt. “I—”

My mouth stalled.

What was I supposed to say? No officer, I am not all right, thank you for your concern, I believe reality opened in the alley and now approximately five and a half hours are missing from my operating system.

Instead I gave him the version I could survive. “I need a little help,” I said. “I came here with friends. I think they already left.”

The passenger leaned slightly toward me. “You got a phone?”

I held it up. “Yeah.”

“Then call them.”

That should have irritated me. It almost did. But mostly it just reminded me that the rest of the world was still obeying procedure. You lose your ride, you call your ride. Basic stuff. No need to involve cosmic horror.

The driver looked me over another second. “You been drinking?”

“A little,” I said.

He nodded like that fit the visible data. “All right. Why don’t you try your people first. If that doesn’t work, we’ll see what we can do.”

Reasonable. Entirely reasonable.

Which made me want to grab the door frame and tell them reasonable had left the building sometime around 11:17.

I did not do that.

I thanked them. My voice sounded like it belonged to somebody trying very hard not to break in public.

They stayed there while I unlocked the phone. My thumb felt clumsy, off by half a beat from the device in my hand. The contact list opened. Closed. Opened again. For a moment I forgot Patrick’s name even though I knew Patrick’s name, which is one of the most humiliating kinds of mental failure there is. Then I found it and hit call.

The ring sounded too loud.

One ring. Two. Three.

I started praying he would answer before I had to decide what version of the truth I could afford.

On the fourth ring he picked up.

Not awake. Not happy. Very clearly dragged out of sleep by obligation.

“Hello?”

“Patrick.”

He went quiet for just a beat. Then: “Enoch?”

Relief hit me so hard I almost had to lean against the cruiser. “Yeah.”

“Where are you?”

The question had an edge to it. Not anger exactly. More like the tail end of confusion that had already burned through irritation and settled into something closer to accusation.

“I’m at Weights and Scales,” I said.

This time the silence lasted longer.

“Man,” he said slowly, “what are you talking about?”

My mouth went dry. “I’m behind the bar. Near Mellen.”

Another pause. Then he exhaled hard through his nose.

“Enoch, we looked for you.”

The words did not land all at once. I heard them one at a time. We. Looked. For. You.

My grip tightened around the phone.

“What?”

“We looked all over for you,” he said, more awake now. “Me and Darnell. We checked outside. We checked the side. We checked every place around the block we thought you might’ve wandered off to. I figured maybe you got sick somewhere or got in a conversation or something stupid. We stayed looking for over an hour.”

I could not feel my legs right.

The officer in the driver’s seat was watching me now. Not aggressively. Just with that quiet cop awareness that says a routine inconvenience may be about to turn into paperwork.

Patrick kept talking. “We went down Mellen. We checked the other bars. You were nowhere.”

My mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.

“How long ago did y’all leave?” I asked.

“We been gone for hours, man.”

Hours. There it was again. Not abstract. Not speculative. Witnessed. A fact from outside me.

I turned away from the cruiser and stared at the paling sky above the buildings. The dawn looked cheap. Thin. Unworthy.

“Patrick,” I said, and hearing my own voice tell me what I already knew almost split me open, “I’ve got almost five and a half hours unaccounted for.”

He did not answer right away. When he did, the irritation was gone. All that was left was concern trying not to say its own name.

“What happened?”

I looked back toward the alley. The bar door sat there closed and harmless. Brick. Light. Metal. Nothing in the world to justify anything.

“I don’t know.”

That was the first completely honest sentence I had spoken since the cruiser rolled up.

“I don’t know what happened.”

Patrick let out another long breath. “All right,” he said. “Stay there. I’ll come get you.”

A burst of gratitude passed through me so fast it almost hurt. “Yeah,” I said. “Okay.”

“You all right?”

Again with that question. Again with no legal answer.

“Just come get me.”

“All right.”

He hung up.

I lowered the phone and stood there a moment with the pre-dawn air against my face and the police cruiser idling beside me like the world was still reducible to engines, schedules, and people missing their rides.

The driver leaned an inch toward the window. “You got somebody coming?”

“Yeah.”

“How long?”

“Fifteen, twenty minutes maybe.”

He nodded. “All right.”

The passenger looked at me another second. “You want to wait at the station?”

I glanced toward the alley again. Every muscle in me wanted distance from that place. At the same time, I could not make myself leave its perimeter, as if stepping away from it too soon would somehow finalize whatever had happened there.

“No,” I said. “Here’s fine.”

They studied me just long enough to tell themselves I was weird but manageable. Then the driver gave a small nod. “All right. Stay put.”

They pulled away slow and rolled back out toward the street, leaving me alone with the rising day.

I watched the cruiser disappear.

Then I looked down at my phone again.

4:41 a.m.

Time had resumed. Or at least the clock had.

I stood there in the weak early light outside Weights and Scales with my shoulder throbbing, my stomach still dropping in little private increments, and the alley behind me holding its silence like it had never once misbehaved.

And that was when the breeze moved through.

Cool. Precise. Not strong enough to count as weather. Just a narrow passing thread of air brushing the side of my face and the back of my neck, sliding down the alley and around me with almost deliberate care.

Every hair on my arms rose.

Then I heard it.

Not with my ears. Not exactly.

Closer than sound. Cleaner.

A sentence placed gently into the center of my thought.

You were taken up.

I went still so completely I could hear my own pulse.

The breeze passed. The street remained the street. The sky kept brightening. Somewhere far off a bird, stupid with innocence, started trying morning out.

I stood beside the emptied lot with my phone in my hand and the words inside my head, and I understood one thing with perfect, uninvited clarity.

Whatever had happened to me was not over.