EDIT: sorry about the hella awkward formatting. I am too lazy to fix it. Fucking deal.
PROLOGUE
The machine is in the cracks.
In the rivets and fissures of the world, where you wouldn’t think to look, there are many things. In the back alleys and abandoned factories, the holes in the wall where the mice don’t go. The answers to questions, all of them, are tucked away in there. The proof for things that have no proof, like philosophy, faith and theory. Secrets fester in the cracks. Interesting secrets. Secrets I bet you would like to know. Everything is in the cracks. Or, everything that matters.
And one of those things is broken.
CHAPTER ONE: DEJA VU
Evelyn spent the afternoon watching birds with her cats, but with less of an instinct to kill. Her companions, Mandy and Pat, had murder on their minds, but Evelyn had little or nothing. She followed the birds with glazed eyes, a delicate trail of spittle tracing the contours of her chin and ending in a little pool on the sofa cushion against which she was resting. Mandy thought the best way would be to attack from the side, by going through the sliding door onto the porch, climbing from the railing to the cherry tree, jumping from there to the hedge, and subsequently to the side-yard fence, from which she could easily pick the sparrows off one by one as they tried to fly from the poplars to the telephone wire that ran parallel to the house. Pat thought it would be better to simply scratch through the screen on the window in front of her, and make a daring, but almost definitely possible leap straight into the nearest poplar, snatching as many birds as she could in the panic of flight that would ensue. Evelyn, being a vegetarian, had no ideas.
It had been nearly two months since the sluggish move west in the van without air-conditioning, and still she knew no one in her new town. Kara had called once, near the end of August, and they spoke awkwardly for a while until Evelyn invented a soccer practice and said goodbye. Others from home were more communicative, inundating her with emails and instant messages and invitations to join a seething mass of social networking sites. Even Mr. Bastille is on there! enthused Joan. You can see his pictures! Corky had sent a postcard from the tourism bureau featuring the low grey block of municipal buildings and a note that read “HOW CAN YOU HAVE LEFT THIS BEHIND??” Evelyn had laughed, and then cried a little, and then felt silly about it, and pinned the postcard to her wall.
It wasn’t the new town that bothered her. Per se. It was quaint. Boring. The ladies on their way to church functions eyed her funnily. But she would be leaving for university in a year. Less than a year. She would survive.
No, it was more than that. There was something about the town; something besides the typical complaints of a displaced teenager. Something bizarre.
It had started with the movers. In their matching stripy hats and overalls, they trotted around outside the new house carrying boxes and lamps, assembling furniture, juggling valuables, checking checklists, and looking for all the world like she knew them from somewhere. She had sat on the porch steps for a while, scrutinizing them, but to no avail. They were strangers.
“What?” her mother had said. “No. No, I don’t see what you mean. We just found them in the Yellow Pages.”
Then, weeks later, there was the woman in the grocery store. An older woman, methodically and obsessively squeezing limes in the produce section. Evelyn, humouring her mother, was out “to buy milk”. It was a ploy to get her out of the house, loosely disguised at best, but by this point even Evelyn was bored with her own sulking. She was lurking in the grey area between produce and dairy, trying to calculate whether the ten her mother had given her would cover bulk candy as well (she didn’t work for free) when Evelyn saw her. She was seventy, maybe, wearing a faded purple overcoat on top of copious layers, with ripped nylons and cheap sandals, and a luridly patterned scarf around her elaborately coifed hair. Evelyn paused by the apples.
I know her.
Which was impossible. Evelyn knew exactly two elderly ladies, both of whom were her grandmothers, maternal and paternal respectively, and both of whom were tucked safely away in nursing homes halfway across the continent. Besides, Grandma Pam was decidedly shorter than this woman, and Nanny Annie couldn’t handle citrus, not with the state of her lower intestine.
And yet...
Evelyn crouched slightly and crept along the side of the apple display.
It wasn’t even necessarily the fact that this lady was old. It had more to do with... her aura? No, that was stupid. It was... it was almost as if Evelyn knew someone remarkably like her. Yes, that was exactly it. Not as if she had ever known her, but as if this woman belonged to some sort of of group of people who were all alarmingly similar, and Evelyn had been accidentally invited to one of the meetings once, many years ago. It was the way she looked, but it was also the way she moved. The way she picked up each lime with a kind of plodding delicacy, turned it once or twice over in her hand before squeezing it, then shook her head “no” with an expression of subtlest disappointment, before moving on to the next. Evelyn felt as if she could guess exactly which sort of books this woman might read, or predict exactly what she would say in any given situation. She was even sure of just how she would pronounce each word.
How strange.
And then nothing. Nothing, for over a month. Everyone was a stranger, as they should be, and Evelyn felt just as awkward and alone as anyone could expect.
But it had happened again this morning. And then some.
*
Evelyn had left gym class early, sneaking out the door by the basketball hoop as Ms. Castor searched for a softer dodgeball and two of the girls carried an unconscious Amelia Piccoli to the infirmary. It was close to October now, and the wind made a balloon of Evelyn’s standard issue stop-sign-red gym shorts, and pulled the hair on her legs taut. She hugged her grey sweatshirt closer.
She was hungry. She could not play dodgeball on an empty stomach, as evidenced by her aim. Amelia would be fine. She was scrappy, if absurdly small. Evelyn needed food.
The town was essentially a downward sprawl from a small rise in the centre: winding streets of houses and yards dotted with churches and stolen shopping carts. The shops and restaurants were in the centre, and so Evelyn headed uphill.
Presently, a sandwich board exclaimed to her, “PIZZA two 4 $1 students special!” Peering in the windows of the shop, Evelyn saw a number of students she recognized from the halls at school hunched, sprawled, perched, and propped around a circular table, munching pizza. This was disconcerting. And yet: pizza.
“Hey, Evelyn!” exclaimed a blonde girl in leggings and boots as Evelyn walked in. “It’s Evelyn, right?”
“Yes,” replied Evelyn. She had her eye on a slice of tomato and feta under the heating lamp.
“You’re in my Geography. Block Geeeee,” the girl continued.
There was no one at the counter. Evelyn tapped the little bell, and made a show of looking around for help.
“I’m Erin,” said the girl.
“Oh, hey. Nice to meet you.” Evelyn proffered her hand.
Erin’s hand flew to her mouth in amazement. “Oh my god, that’s hilarious! You are so funny!”
“I-- what?” said Evelyn.
“Ha ha... no, it’s just, that was, like, so formal.”
“Oh,” said Evelyn. This was fun.
“Are you the same Evelyn who just moved from Orangeville?” said a boy beside Erin with his arm around a diminutive brunette.
“Yeah.”
“Oh. Cool. My cousin lives in Orangeville.”
“No way.”
“Yeah.” The boy squinted at Evelyn suspiciously.
“Um--”
“May I help you, miss?”
Relieved, Evelyn turned toward the counter and--
I KNOW HIM.
A flash of colour: a small, mustachioed man coming toward her, hands in the air. He is brightly dressed, and waving a tambourine. Something is reeling in the background, and then--
“Miss?”
Evelyn stared at the man behind the counter. A small, mustachioed man in a bright blue shirt, garish orange apron, and multi-coloured cap emblazoned with “TWO 4 $1!” No tambourine.
“I-- are you--? I’m sorry,” Evelyn stammered. The man looked nervously between Evelyn and the group of teenagers around the table, as if anticipating some sort of joke.
“Miss... would you like pizza?” he said nervously.
I know him. Evelyn stumbled backward, tripping over her own feet. I know him. And she couldn’t have said why, but she was definitely not happy to see him. She ran.
“That was weird,” she heard Erin say before the door swung shut behind her.
