Page 8 of Echoes

“All of them have to go, so wherever.”

“Do you want to go through them here or there?”

“There. Do you mind helping me get them there and then maybe giving me a few minutes to look through them? I think I might want to be alone when I do that.”

“No problem. I could go pick us up some lunch, since we didn’t eat here, and meet you back at the storage facility after we drop these off.”

“You’re the best,” Eliza said, meaning it.

At the storage facility, which looked almost abandoned, they unlocked the garage-style door, and Lydia helped Eliza unload the boxes they’d been able to bring in Lydia’s SUV. Placing them inside the space, they made sure to leave Eliza enough room to open each one and review the contents before deciding how to stack them against the walls. There were still more boxes left at the house, but only three or four smaller ones that Eliza would be able to bring in her car on another day, so they’d made some good progress for her mother just by bringing these here for her.

When Lydia said goodbye to go get them lunch, Eliza knew that she’d take her time. Lydia would probably go to their favorite pizza place, which was always busy this time of day, and she’d stand in line by herself to place their usual order. Then, she’d have to wait until they made it. That gave Eliza at least an hour to an hour and a half when she added in the drive to and from the restaurant.

The storage unit had a concrete floor, so it wasn’t the most comfortable material to sit down on, and it was cold both inside and out, but she would need to sit down to go through everything. To keep out at least some of the cold, she decided to close the door most of the way, leaving just a few inches for the sunlight to add to the one exposed light bulb in the space. Then, Eliza finally sat down and opened one of the boxes.

The first one took her back instantly, and she now knew why it had been so heavy. It contained her father’s coin and stamp collections. Most of the coins in there weren’t of any real value. Her father hadn’t ever planned on making money on them; he just liked finding them places. He’d buy a two-dollar penny here and a fifty-dollar nickel there. Sometimes, he’d also pick up a coin off the ground, and even though it wouldn’t be worth more than its denomination, he’d just say something like, ‘You never know,’ and tuck it into his pocket.

Eliza didn’t have the energy to go through the whole collection right now, so she closed the box and left it where it was, needing Lydiato help lift it onto the one provided shelf in the room. She knew her father wouldn’t want his collections to rot on the floor like they had been in her mother’s basement all these years, and she supposed she could go through it one day when she had more time and decide what to do with everything inside.

The next box was somewhat strange. On the outside, it was just a standard cardboard box, but inside it, there was another one, a silver metal box with a clasp that kept it closed. There was also a small, slightly rusted padlock on it, kind of like what a preteen girl might have on a diary, only a bit bigger. Eliza set aside this metal box the size of a large shoebox to see if she could locate the keys that probably came with the padlock, but the only other items inside the cardboard box were some old papers, likely old bills that had either been paid or no longer mattered, and those were wrapped in only rubber bands and were now faded from the years of sitting in the open basement air. No key to unlock the padlock.

Eliza picked the silver thing up and felt it’s weight in her hands. If papers like the ones inside the cardboard box were also inside this metal container, they were heavy piles of paper, which made no sense to her. She wondered what her father would’ve needed to hide from her mother because they’d always seemed like they’d had a great relationship to her. Of course, Eliza had barely been a teen when her father had died. She’d still been at that age when her parents were superheroes and could do no wrong. Even though that had already started to fade around the time when he’d died, it hadn’t yet gone away entirely, and thus, Eliza was stuck in a perpetual state of thinking of her father as Superman and that the world lost a superhero that night. Deciding to give the padlock a tug before she moved on, she was surprised that the rust on it was so severe that the lock broke at that point, and she was able to remove it.

“Howoldare you?” she asked the box.

The metal was dented in several spots, and there were scuff marks all over it as if it had been tossed around and dropped a few times over the years before it had ended up hidden among her father’s stuff, protected well enough by piles of rubber-banded papers as if those were the bubble wrap insulating this metal container from the things that might damage it. With it unlocked now, though, Eliza could solve the mystery by just opening the thing, so she unclasped it and lifted the lid. It creaked as it opened, and she set it on the floor, looking down inside it.

The box contained a strange-looking object that also seemed to be made of metal. A cord or something was sticking out of one side of it, and it resembled a small, more robust boomerang. It looked like it had been welded together, but not very well, and she only knew that because her father had shown her how to use a soldering iron when she was twelve and they’d worked on a model of a battleship together. Glue was fine, but he’d never met a ship model that he couldn’t solder. Eliza hadn’t been able to hold the implements herself because he’d said that she hadn’t been trained yet, but she’d watched him, and it was way better than what she was looking at here. An untrained hand had made an attempt on whatever this thing was.

Eliza lifted the item out of the box, and it was heavier than she’d anticipated. She supposed she thought it would be hollow, but it felt like it had something inside it, giving it that weight. Beneath the item in the box, there was something else that she could now see. It was a piece of paper, and it was yellowed with age and folded over, so she couldn’t see if there was anything on it. Noticing that this boomerang-like item appeared to have a button on it, she didn’t dare to press it just yet and set the object down before she picked up that piece of paper, pulling it apart for possibly the first time in sixteen years. It was a note that looked like it had been typed on a typewriter, not a computer.

To Whom It May Concern,

If you’re reading this, it means you’ve found the device. I can’t tell you too much, but I need to warn you: the things you’ll see, you weren’t meant to see. There was a tragedy, and energy was absorbed. This is confusing to you, I’m sure, but people died making this thing. Some people were brought back to life. One of them put the device inside this box and gave it to his son to keep it safe. Destroying the device was too risky, but keeping it safe and away from the government was paramount. Its original intent was something altogether different than what it does, and it hasn’t been explained by any conventional science. There was a team of people who were tasked with creating something. They were successful, but it was also very dangerous, so they protected each other. One night, something happened, and a woman died. Something about her death transformed the device. We can only assume it was the energy. Everything runs on energy, you know? We tested the device, but it no longer worked as intended. It did something else. If you’re reading this note, you’re now in possessionof something that you cannot allow to get into the government’s hands or anyone else’s. It’s likely you’re related to the man we brought back. That man is me. I wasn’t supposed to have a family. I should have died, but the team brought me back. I came back, and I got married. I had two kids. My wife died young. So did my first son. I told my second son about the device and asked him to keep it safe. That’s as much as I can tell you without bringing you in all the way and risking your life. This should be enough to make you not want to learn anymore, but if no one has taught you about this because they died young, too, that should be a good enough warning to leave this alone. Lock it away and pretend it doesn’t exist. Bury it far from your family and forget the location, if you must. This note is confusing, but I don’t have time to type it again. I changed my name, but I know they’ve found me. It’s only a matter of time. I wish you luck.

The note wasn’t signed, and it felt to Eliza like it had been written by someone in some kind of psychotic break with reality. They’d said they had been brought back to life. She shook her head at that because that wasn’t possible. The note also mentioned a woman dying, the government, and danger. This was written by someone who was really going through it, she decided. Then, Eliza’s brow furrowed when she thought about something else. A coincidence, no doubt, but her father had been a second son. His older brother, her uncle, had died as a kid. There had been an accident, and he hadn’t made it. Another coincidence, to be sure. Eliza had never met her grandmother because she’d died in that same accident. Her father had been there but had been fine. All of that had to be a coincidence, right?

While this old note was definitely intriguing, it wasn’t worth her time today, trying to solve some strange mystery, when it was probably written by someone who hadn’t been all there, so she folded the paper back up exactly how she’d found it and put it back in the box, deciding to tell Lydia about this weird thing her dad had later. When she picked up the device to place it back where it belonged next, her hand must have slipped because it felt like it had landed on that button. Eliza looked around the room, but the room was no longer there. She was outside. It was freezing cold. She was staring at a man holding a knife to her father’s chest.

“Oh, my God!” she yelped at the sight and covered her mouth with her hand immediately.

Then, she looked down at her own body. She was still herself.She was also dressed the same way as she was in the storage room. In all of her previous nightmares or visions of that night, she’d always been a teenager, wearing only socks and a short-sleeved T-shirt. When she looked up just in time to see her father get stabbed, she heard something. Quickly, she turned to the sound, and she could see her teenage self outside the cabin, witnessing her father being murdered. No nightmare had ever been like this or felt this real.

“No,” she cried out as she watched her dad get killed all over again.

And it dawned on her. She’d been helpless as a kid, but not anymore; she was an adult now. She took a deep breath and ran toward the man then, trying to stop him this time, but she just went right through him, ending up on the other side as her father fell to the ground. Eliza looked down and watched it all happen. She wanted to close her eyes, to run away, but she didn’t. She couldn’t because her father’s lips were moving. He was saying something.

“She doesn’t know anything,” he let out so softly that she almost didn’t hear it. “Leave her alone. Neither of them knows.”

Eliza covered her mouth again as the man above her father stabbed him once more.

“Tell me where it is,” the man demanded.

“You’ll never find it,” her father replied. “It’s safe. No one will use it again.”

“It’s mine! It belongs tome.”

“It belonged to the team,” her father stated as blood spurted from his mouth. “To the government. Not to you.”