Whispers
The feeling returned to Evan’s arm half an hour later, but the soreness it left behind was going to be there awhile. He had stayed in the prayer room the whole time, partially trying to figure out everything that had happened so far, partially afraid to move.
When he left, he noticed the secretaries were back at work in the main office, though the pastoral staff was still nowhere to be found. He thought about leaving a message for the pastor to call him later, but decided against it. He quietly walked out and back to the bus stop.
On the way home, he stopped at the mall to pick up his pictures, but due to the discomfort in his arm, he didn’t even bother to open them until well after he’d returned to his apartment and taken a nap. He still hurt afterwards, but it was bearable enough not to call a doctor for, so he picked up the photos and began browsing through them.
The first few were from his most recent trip to the zoo, though that was well over eight months ago. There were some more from a baseball game around three months ago. The majority of the rest were pictures of his baby niece, now six months old, but four in the photos. They were all adorable, of course, but one in particular stood out as cuter than the rest and perfectly suited for the one empty frame in the hallway.
Evan stopped. One? He darted over to the wall and, sure enough, all but one were filled with pictures of his parents, brothers, cousins, closest friends and his niece. He distinctly remembered the wall consisting of empty frames just days ago. The more he thought about it, however, he also remembered taking each of the ones he was looking at now. He even remembered hanging them.
Oddly, he couldn’t remember ever removing them, much less think of a reason why he would. True, most of the frames had at one time held pictures of girls he’d like, but when they didn’t pan out he had replaced them with the pictures that were there now. Only the top left remained empty. So why did he remember them all as being empty?
He couldn’t figure it out, but it did occur to him that had only one frame been unoccupied Saturday night, he would have been less likely to notice the strange shadow configuration that looked like a blurred photo of the man in white. If he hadn’t seen that, he would likely have forgotten about the man and not looked for him Sunday morning. The interview with Richard might still have seemed a little strange, but would probably have been far less unsettling. What seemed most odd at this particular moment was how he still remembered exactly what that that “blurry photo” looked like.
No way, he thought, his mind turning back to the pictures he hadn’t yet finished looking through. He started to think, That’s impossible, but he’d learned to believe otherwise through everything else he’d seen. He went back to the photos and picked up the last two, the ones he’d taken from the hip that very morning.
The first was a skewed, blurred angle of a telephone post as far as he could tell. The second one started him shaking so bad he almost dropped it. He forced himself to calm down enough to look at it again. If it was a vision or a hallucination, it was still holding. The photo was a pixel perfect match of the one that had filled the empty frame on Saturday.
Evan wasn’t sure what he was supposed to feel at this point, but fear, bewilderment, frustration and anger were all there to some degree. The stranger had been in his neighborhood, and it couldn’t have been to see Richard or the pastor, as neither lived in this neighborhood. Could the man have come to see him just after he had left for the mall?
Desperation kicked in, and Evan raced to the door, throwing it open. A short gust of wind rushed in as he raced outside. He looked around anxiously in every direction only to find the street empty save for the occasional passing car.
“NO!” he screamed. “You can’t do this to me. I will not go crazy. Do you hear me?! I will NOT go crazy.”
He scanned the street for another minute, then beat his fist in the air before turning back inside. He regretted the gesture immediately, as the pain in his arm returned to full force, subsiding to half the intensity as he walked through the door.
When he finished locking it back, he turned to notice that the earlier gust of wind had blown over a few of the pages of the open bible on his armchair. Had his arm not been hurting so badly, he would have checked to see what the new open page was. It would have to wait.
Evan couldn’t tell if it was the frustration or the pain that had him shaking so badly, though it hardly mattered at this point. With his good arm, he clumsily pulled out a Ziploc bag from his cupboard, and then pulled the ice bin from the freezer. Dropping as many as he held onto, he filled the bad, sealed it up, threw the dropped cubes into the sink, and then slumped to his knees.
He held the makeshift compress to his arms and started to breathe deeply. When he felt his pulse return to some semblance of normalcy, he started to get up, then realized he was right where he needed to be. For the first time since this all began, he began to pray, and not just a cry for help like at work. For the first time in a long time, he was really, truly praying.