The Blank Gap

- Chapter 4 -

Patrick got there in seventeen minutes.

I know because I checked my phone three times in ways that had nothing to do with time and everything to do with distrust.

4:49. 4:52. 4:56.

The numbers kept behaving. That was almost insulting.

By then the sky had gone from bruised pre-dawn to that thinner gray-blue that makes every street look like it stayed up too late. Weights and Scales had settled into its daytime lie. From the outside it was just brick and signage and locked doors and rain-dark pavement. Whatever had happened in the alley had left no seam in the building, no scorch on the wall, no clean little clue packet for a reasonable man to carry into daylight.

Just me.

Patrick’s headlights came down the block and turned into the lot without hurry. He did not swing in dramatic or angry. He just pulled up, put the car in park, and sat there for one second with both hands on the wheel, almost exactly the way he had earlier that night when none of this had happened yet.

That nearly undid me.

Not because it was emotional in some grand way. Because it was normal. Because the same small mannerism had survived on the other side of something that had not.

I got in on the passenger side.

Neither of us said anything for the first few seconds. The heater hummed low. The dashboard lights gave his face a tired, greenish cast. He smelled like sleep, stale bar air, and the faint after-trace of whatever soap he used that always made me think of department store towels.

He looked at me once. Full look. No joking in it. Then he put the car back in gear.

We rolled out onto the road under a sky still deciding whether morning was worth the effort.

“You look bad,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“I’m not trying to hurt your feelings.”

“I know.”

He glanced at me again. “You sure you don’t need a hospital?”

That question moved through me slower than it should have. The word hospital pulled things up. White. Clinical. Smooth surfaces. Procedure without explanation. My stomach tightened.

“No.”

“You hit your head?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so.”

“That’s the best I’ve got right now.”

Patrick gave a quiet exhale through his nose and turned onto the main road. Hampton at that hour looked like it was running diagnostics on itself. Empty intersections. Signal lights changing for almost no one. Water shining in the low places of the asphalt. Utility poles holding the whole little world in place with wires and old stubbornness.

“You want to tell me what happened?” he asked.

I kept my eyes forward. The windshield framed the road in moving strips of sodium gold and dawn blue. Every time another puddle caught the light I had the stupid reflexive feeling it might ripple by itself.

“I went outside,” I said.

Patrick waited.

“That part I know.”

He nodded once. “Then what?”

I licked my lips. My mouth felt strange. Too dry and too aware of itself. “I looked at my phone. It was 11:17.”

He looked over. “You remember the exact time.”

“Yes.”

“And after that?”

I let the silence sit too long. Not to be dramatic. I just did not know how to move through it clean.

“I remember the alley feeling wrong.”

Patrick said nothing. That helped.

“It got quiet,” I said. “Too quiet. Like the sound around me went... not muted. Removed.”

He kept driving.

“I know how that sounds.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“I know how it sounds anyway.”

He drummed his thumb once on the steering wheel. “What else?”

There it was. The edge. Not skepticism exactly. But the part of him that wanted facts badly enough to resent fog.

“I remember...”

The sentence stalled.

What did I remember? Not a narrative. Not a sequence. Pieces. Cold. Light. A pressure in the air. Pale forms. A voice that had not used air.

I closed my eyes for one second and saw silver-white curves sliding under my thoughts like fish under black water. I opened them again immediately.

“I remember being afraid,” I said.

Patrick was quiet a moment. Then: “Were you jumped?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

“You get drugged?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You keep saying that.”

“Because that’s where I am.”

He nodded once, jaw tightening a little. “All right.”

I leaned back into the seat and let my head rest against it, careful of the tender spot near the back right side where I had hit the wall. The motion of the car should have calmed me. Usually motion did. There is something about being carried along a road by an engine and another person’s attention that can make a bad night feel temporarily outsourced.

Not that morning.

Every passing streetlight seemed too deliberate. Every reflective surface held my eye too long. Every gap between buildings looked like it might conceal a second version of itself if I stared wrong.

“You were gone,” Patrick said finally.

I turned to him.

His eyes stayed on the road.

“I need you to hear me on that,” he said. “This wasn’t us getting impatient and leaving you after ten minutes. Me and Darnell looked everywhere. I asked staff inside. We checked the bathrooms. We checked the side, the back, around the block, out on Mellen. I figured maybe you went to clear your head and got in some long conversation with a stranger about the election or music or Revelation or some nonsense only you would think counts as normal at midnight.”

That almost got a laugh out of me. Almost.

Patrick kept going. “We kept looking because it got weird. You weren’t answering, and then you just weren’t anywhere.”

I looked down at my phone in my lap. No missed calls.

That hit me fresh.

“You called me?”

“More than once.”

I checked the call log. Nothing between 11:17 and 4:37 made sense. A blank space sat there in the device like a small digital insult. No incoming calls. No outgoing. No texts opened. No evidence of human continuity.

“What?”

Patrick glanced over. “What?”

“There’s nothing here.”

He gave me another quick look, then back to the road. “What do you mean, nothing?”

“I mean nothing. No missed calls. No...”

I stopped.

My thumb moved over the screen. Call log. Messages. Clock. Same phone. Same wallpaper. Same stupid little crack near the bottom right corner from where I dropped it six months back at a gas station. But the hours between 11:17 and 4:37 sat there smooth and sterile like they had never belonged to a living man.

Patrick swore under his breath.

I held the phone tighter. It suddenly felt less like property and more like evidence that had been cleaned.

By the time we turned into my street the sky had brightened enough to expose things without blessing them. The world looked too honest and not honest at all. Lawns wet with night rain. Mailboxes. Driveways. Porch lights turning irrelevant. Everything ordinary lined up in a row like witnesses refusing to speak.

Patrick pulled up outside my place and left the engine running.

I did not move right away.

“You want me to come in?” he asked.

A normal person might have said yes. A wise person definitely would have said yes.

Instead I looked at the front of my house and felt a stupid, stubborn need to enter it alone. As if whatever had happened to me needed to meet me there without audience.

“I’m good,” I said.

Patrick did not believe me. He was kind enough not to say so directly.

“All right,” he said. “Then at least let me know later you didn’t die in your sleep.”

“That’s very comforting.”

“That’s friendship.”

I managed a weak, short laugh. The first real one since the alley. It hurt more than it helped.

I reached for the door.

“Enoch.”

I paused.

Patrick was still looking at the windshield, not at me. “Whatever happened... if you start remembering stuff, call me before you decide it’s smart to handle it alone.”

I studied his face a second. There it was again, that thing men do when concern has to wear work boots and pretend it came to fix something practical.

“Yeah,” I said. “All right.”

I got out.

The damp morning air met me halfway to the door. The key felt heavier than usual in my hand. Maybe everything did. Maybe once time breaks on you, even your own house key starts sounding like a tool from the wrong drawer.

Inside, the house was stale and quiet and exactly as I had left it.

That should have been a relief. It was not.

Relief requires trust. And I no longer trusted the idea that unchanged things had necessarily stayed that way.

I locked the door behind me, stood in the dim living room, and listened.

Refrigerator hum. Pipe noise in the wall. The tiny settling clicks older houses make when temperature changes start moving through them.

No silver pressure. No impossible silence. No thought-voice placed directly into my mind.

Just house.

I let out a breath I had not realized I was holding and went to the kitchen sink. The overhead light was too bright when I switched it on. I winced and then stayed there staring at my reflection in the dark window over the sink while the tap ran cold.

I looked like I had been pulled through something.

Eyes wrong. Skin pale under the tan. Hair damp and disordered. A faint grime line on one sleeve where brick dust had caught when I hit the wall. Nothing dramatic. Nothing cinematic. Just enough disorder to tell me my body had indeed gone somewhere my mind had not been invited to document properly.

I cupped water in my hands and splashed my face once. Then again. Cold. Real. Local.

I lifted my head. For one instant the reflection in the window did not move exactly with me.

I froze.

It was tiny. Probably nothing. A trick of low light and exhaustion. My own face in the glass seemed to lag by half a heartbeat before matching me again.

I shut the faucet off hard enough to make the pipes complain.

“Enough,” I said to the room.

The room accepted the order and did not honor it.

Because the moment I stopped moving, the images came.

Not full scenes. Not memory the way memory is supposed to work. No start and finish. No reliable camera angle. Just flashes forcing their way through the dark like signal bleed.

A curved white surface. Smooth beyond usefulness. A seam opening where no seam should be. Light so clean it felt hostile. A shape bending over me—not with menace exactly, but with purpose so cold it made menace seem almost emotional by comparison. A hum without source. A thin mechanical mercy. Something touching the side of my head or almost touching it. My own fear held flat and observed.

I braced both hands on the sink until my knuckles went white.

“No.”

Another flash.

A row. Not of people. Not of instruments. Something between. Pale forms arranged in a space that seemed to have no walls and yet all the qualities of enclosure. One turned. Or perhaps the room turned it toward me. Hard to know.

Then another fragment:

A feeling of being inside a container made not of metal but of decision. Held in place. Measured. As if something had taken the dimensions of my body and was checking whether they matched the dimensions of my soul.

I backed away from the sink. Too fast. My hip clipped the edge of the table. Pain flashed sharp and stupid and useful.

I put a hand over my mouth and stood there breathing through my nose until the room stopped pitching.

Sleep, I thought. That was the answer. Not because I believed sleep would fix anything. Because consciousness was no longer a trustworthy neighborhood.

I went to the bedroom without turning on more lights. Dawn was coming in thin around the edges of the blinds, enough to shape the furniture into familiar silhouettes. Bed. Dresser. Chair with yesterday’s clothes over the back. Bible on the nightstand where I had left it. Lamp. Clock.

The clock read 5:18.

Time, obedient as ever.

I sat on the edge of the bed and unlaced my shoes with fingers that did not feel fully under contract. When I pulled the right one off, a little grit spilled out onto the floor. Brick dust maybe. Alley residue. Real debris from a real place. That helped more than it should have.

I set the phone on the nightstand. Immediately hated being away from it. Picked it up again. Set it back down.

I looked at the Bible. Then at the phone. Then at nothing.

“Lord,” I said quietly, “I don’t know what that was.”

My voice sounded raw in the room. Not performative. Not pious. Just stripped.

“I don’t know what happened to me.”

Silence. Normal silence this time. Not loaded. Not pressurized. Just the kind a room keeps when it has no opinion.

I lay back anyway. One arm over my eyes. Shoes off, jacket still on. I did not have the strength for ritual.

For a minute nothing happened. Then the inside of my eyelids lit up.

I jerked upright. The room was the room. Clock. Lamp. Blinds. Bible. Phone. No light source except dawn beginning to organize itself outside.

I sat there breathing hard. Waited. Nothing.

I lay back again, slower this time, like I was negotiating with an animal that had already bitten me once.

This time the images did not wait.

The moment my eyes closed, a white-grey face—not human, not entirely inhuman, smooth in all the wrong places—floated up from the dark and stopped inches from my own. No expression. No rage. No mercy. Just examination.

I shouted and rolled off the bed onto the floor.

The impact knocked the breath out of me. The vision vanished.

I stayed down there on the rug staring at the underside of the bed frame like a man who had been evicted from sleep itself. My shoulder throbbed. My heart was back to slamming. Sweat had broken cold across my neck and chest.

I laughed once. An ugly little sound.

“Well,” I said to the floor, “that’s new.”

I pushed myself up slowly and sat with my back against the side of the mattress. Outside, morning was beginning in earnest. Birds trying things. Tires somewhere far off. A neighbor’s door. The ordinary world booting up around a man who could no longer enter it at the same speed.

I reached up and took the Bible off the nightstand by feel. Set it in my lap. Did not open it yet. Just held it there with both hands like weight mattered.

After a while I tried the bed again. Not to sleep. Just to sit higher. The sheets were still cool. Innocent almost. I hated them for that.

When I finally did open the Bible, I was not looking for any verse in particular. That is not true. I was looking for a door that opened the right way.

My eyes landed without help on a page in Psalms. I do not remember the number. I remember the shape of one line though, because it struck my chest with the plain force of a hammer:

I will lay me down in peace, and sleep.

I looked at it a long time. Then laughed again, quieter.

“That feels aspirational at the moment.”

Still, I kept the book open beside me and leaned back against the headboard. The room had brightened enough now to stop pretending dawn was optional. Everything in it had edges again. That helped.

I must have drifted after all. Not into sleep exactly. More like a shallow, guarded drop below full waking.

Because at some point I became aware of a room that was not mine.

White. Curved. Too clean. No corners visible. No shadows with any courage in them. A surface beneath me or around me—I could not tell which. And somewhere nearby a figure standing still with its hands folded not like prayer but like procedure.

Then a sound.

A single tone. High and pure and brief.

And a voice, again without air, entering me like a completed file:

Residual witness confirmed.

I came up off the bed like I had been thrown. The Bible slid off my lap and hit the floor. The room snapped around me in ordinary human pieces. Morning light. Bedroom wall. Phone. Clock.

6:03 a.m.

I sat there shaking with both feet on the floor and the taste of metal at the back of my mouth.

This was no longer just fear. Fear can live with doubt. What I had now was worse.

Evidence without coherence. Memory without sequence. A blank gap full of aftermath.

I looked at the phone. Then at the fallen Bible. Then at the bedroom door standing open to the hall like the rest of the house had been listening.

Something had happened to me in those missing hours. Something structured. Something procedural. Something that had not fully let me go.

And whether or not I could remember the event itself, it had already started leaking back into me in fragments sharp enough to cut.