“As soon as the sand started to fall, I just … I knew something was wrong. Even before the old lady showed up.”
“Old lady?” said Emrys. “In the locker room?”
“I figured she was lost. Harmless.” He winced. “Till she spoke. And her voice, something in it, it just set off every alarm bell in my brain. Without even thinking about it, I picked up my football helmet and threw it right at her. And that’s when things got weird.”
Serena made a small noise as she swallowed back a sarcastic comment.
“The helmet—it never made it. I mean, it just stopped, midthrow, and it hovered there in the air.” Mr. Pierce’s eyes had a faraway look, as if he were seeing the scene unfold before him all over again.
“The helmet,” said Emrys. “You said you picked it up? You hadn’t been holding it the whole time?”
“Does that matter?” Serena asked pointedly.
“I don’t know, Serena,” Emrys said, a little hotly. “Maybe.”
Mr. Pierce shook his head. “I can’t say for sure. It was a long time ago.”
“That’s all right, Mr. Pierce,” said Hazel. “What happened next?”
“I panicked and ran out onto the street, right into traffic. I probably would have been hit by a car, except none of the cars were moving. None of the people were moving. Everybody, every single person, was frozen in place, just like that football helmet.”
Serena scoffed. “How is that possible?”
Mr. Pierce lost his faraway look. His gaze refocused on her. “I told you. You don’t want to hear this. Not really.”
“Maybe not,” Emrys said. “But we need to hear it.” He turned to Serena. “Right?”
Serena crossed her arms. “Right,” she said. “Sorry, Mr. Pierce.”
“The old woman,” said Hazel. “She could move.”
“That’s right,” said Mr. Pierce. “And she seemed to be everywhere at once. Behind me one second, then ahead of me the next. She was laughing the whole time.” He withdrew a handkerchief and dabbed at the sweat beading on his forehead. “I was fast back then—in good shape. She was faster.”
Emrys frowned at the idea of an elderly woman outpacing a young athlete. Seemingly toying with him.
“I couldn’t outrun her, so I hid. The idea came to me at the wharf. I thought, I don’t know, I thought maybe she was following my scent. I know how that sounds, but there was something … something inhuman …” He shuddered, closing his eyes and taking a moment before continuing. “So I waded into the water—it was freezing cold, I mean freezing—and I hid beneath the old pier, treading water for an hour. Long enough that I didn’t even feel the cold, after a while. I couldn’t feel anything except blind terror. That never dulled. I still feel it, sometimes, as I’m just about to drift off to sleep.”
“But she didn’t find you,” Emrys said, eager for the happy ending. “You got away.”
“It was a near thing. She never stopped looking. I could hear her, calling my name. She said she was going to eat me, and I believed her.” He licked his lips. “But it was worse when she was quiet. I kept expecting to see her sagging face, peering down at me through a crack in the pier. Or to feel her bony fingers beneath the water, gripping my ankles. I—” His voice cracked. He cleared his throat. “It was so quiet that I could hear her searching for me. It didn’t sound like footsteps though. It sounded … it sounded like slithering …”
“She knew your name,” said Hazel.
“Yeah,” said Mr. Pierce. “She said it in the locker room, too. She was trying to trick me into trusting her.”
“What happened next?” Hazel asked.
“I passed out. I guess some fishermen pulled me from the water, once the hour was up. Next thing I knew, I woke up in the hospital. Took a long time to believe that I was safe.”
“What did you tell people?” asked Emrys.
“I told them the truth. At first. But it was easier to believe it had all been a hallucination, brought on by hypothermia. Easier for everyone but me.” He grimaced. “The worst part was when other kids started disappearing—all from the neighborhood around my YMCA. Not one of them was more than half a mile away. I knew what happened to those kids. She got them. She killed them, most likely. But nobody ever found any trace of them. And the more I insisted that it was the hourglass … that an old woman was using it to stop time for an hour to hunt down kids … the more I saw folks grow cold. Suspicious. I wore out their sympathy real quick.” He sighed. “They stopped calling it hallucinations. Started accusing me of doing it all for attention, trying to … I don’t know … attach myself to other people’s tragedy.
“When the cops started treating me like a criminal, I finally got the message and shut my mouth. It got easier after the disappearances ended. No internet back then, but there was a missing-persons board up at the YMCA. A month went by without a new poster, and then another, and I figured the old woman was gone. Moved on, maybe. Or …” He grimaced again. “Or she had her fill.”
Emrys saw Hazel start to say something, but she hesitated. “What is it?” he prompted. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking … maybe Edna Milton wasn’t a victim of this thing. Maybe she’s behind it all.”
“The old woman from the article?” Serena shook her head. “She’d be over a hundred.”
“Unless she can literally freeze time,” Hazel said. “Or, I don’t know … maybe she’s a ghost haunting the hourglass. Maybe she isn’t human anymore.”
“All good theories,” said Emrys. Then, remembering they were in the presence of a traumatized survivor, he said, “I mean, your theories have merit. None of this is good.”
“Why would she come back now?” Serena cast a suspicious look at Emrys’s tote bag, as if directing the question at Van Stavern. “After all this time?”
“Maybe she got hungry,” said Mr. Pierce flatly.
Emrys felt queasy. If Edna Milton was feeding …
How many kids would it take to sate her?
“Thank you, Mr. Pierce,” said Hazel. “For telling us your story. This is more than we’d hoped for.”
“We should go,” Emrys said. “It’ll be dark soon.”
