The Consent of a Fallen Tree

I couldn’t tell you how long I’ve thought about doing this. I wouldn’t call it going “public” per se, but this is the first time I’ve ever felt the need to actually announce what I can do. There’s always been a reason to keep it quiet, whether it’s because people would think I’m crazy, or because they’d try to exploit me, or because they’d become crazy paranoid around me. The few times I’ve managed to convince someone of my abilities their attitude towards me changed and things went horribly wrong.

But now I need to know. I need to put it out there because if there’s anyone else out there like me... I need to find out who’s fucking with me and why. I know it can’t just be me and if just one person could come out and confirm they have the same power as me then I can rest easy knowing that I’ve not gone completely insane.

Because there has to be someone else like me out there. It’s that or…

I don’t know.

I don’t even know how I do it. I just do. I don’t know how it works but I do know that when time stops, I can move things freely using my own strength, but that’s it. Water still flows, air still flows into my lungs, but nothing decays, and I don’t age. I’m ashamed to say I’ve lived almost my entire life with time frozen, sleeping in other people’s beds and eating other people’s food. Pretty much the only reason I even resume time is because I need to get somewhere and driving with time frozen is a bitch.

And the thing is, I’ve spent years, decades even, like this. Why would I ever leave? The whole world is a frozen paradise and there’s nothing I can’t do. And for ages I assumed it was just me, right? But it can’t be. And I know this because lately things have started happening that just don’t make sense.

It started out small. And the thing is it’s easy to ignore the small things. Do you know how lonely it is to wander through a busy high-street with time paused? Do you know how easy it is to become paranoid with all those people around you? It’s easy to trick yourself into thinking, “Oh that person must have moved.” Or, “was that guy there when I entered? Was she staring at me like that? Did I just hear something?”

So sometimes I’d leave a shop after taking something and I’d look up and see the cashier staring at me angrily. Other times a security guard might be standing there, arms frozen, with a look of anger on his face. Time was still frozen, they were still just standing there like statues, but I’d always be left wondering if they’d been like that when I first entered. And I’d have to try and convince myself that their expressions had nothing to do with me and the things I was taking.

But pretty soon it started to get weirder. I’d go to leave and the cashier would be staring at me with their hands held out and a finger pointed at their palm in a sort of “Pay up” gesture. When I broke into places I started finding the owners hiding under the stairs, or in airing cupboards, acting like their homes were being burgled. Sometimes they’d be crying, or afraid, and they’d be clutching their phones, and always with an over-exaggerated expression (like a theatre mask). One guy even had the emergency number ready to dial on his phone, like he was seconds away from pressing ‘call’.

The weird thing is if I resumed time they’d just put their phones away, or stand up and act like nothing ever happened. I couldn’t quite understand it. It’s like they weren’t frozen like that, if anything most of them showed a bit of confusion as to how they’d wound up cowering under the kitchen table, but at the same time there was no way they were moving around when time was stopped

I wondered, even at the time, if maybe someone else with the same abilities as me was messing around. But the changes were still just small enough that I could dismiss them. I never had any actual proof someone was moving. I never saw anything change with my own eyes so I kept dismissing it.

But that changed a few months ago. You see, I love a good bath. I have all the time in the world and there’s nothing better than breaking into some millionaire’s house and taking a long soak in their tub. I have found some truly amazing places dotted around that I like to revisit but one of my favourite is a luxury apartment in a high-rise belonging to a pretty well-off tech investor. And he just so happens to have a tub that fits my back like a glove. Well, I climb on in and proceed to really soak it all in. I put my feet up and a sleep mask on, I play some classical music, and just lazily enjoy the bubbles and relaxing smells. Eventually, after an hour or so I decide to run the hot tap for a little bit to heat the water back up.

I pull the sleep-mask off and boom, there he is.

It’s the owner, standing over me and clutching a kitchen knife. He’s frozen, completely still, but he has the knife raised like he’s going to plunge it into my gut. I freak out, splash around like crazy, and manage to slide out of the tub. Once I calm down I take some time to look over the scene and the thing is… there were no footprints, and I never heard a damn thing. The music was way too quiet to have masked someone coming in, so I should have definitely heard him approach. And he was definitely, 100%, not standing over an empty tub waiting to gut me when I first came in. The only conclusion I could reach was that he had been moved.

I don’t even know how they did it. But something about his face, the way it had twisted so his mouth was over-sized and his eyes were wide, it just crept me out. It was worse than all the others, but at the time I just hoofed it out of there and prayed to God nothing like that would ever happen again.

It was just a harmless prank, I told myself.

But it just kept happening. A week or two ago, I was walking through a busy street, meandering between people and ducking below outstretched arms (and occasionally taking a peek in the odd shopping bag to see if there was anything I liked) when something caught my eye a few dozen people away. This was Oxford street in rush hour so I couldn’t see very far at all, it was all just a close press of people like a forest of navy suits and beige heels, but still, I manage to glimpse a sort of twinkle in the sunlight. It was like when you walk on the beach and the sun catches a distant shard of glass. It caught my eye and I decided to walk through the people and get closer and when I did it was like my whole world was shrunk with terror.

It was another one of them... Someone like the man from the bath, that is. It was a little girl, maybe nine, wearing pyjamas. She was hiding behind a larger man like he was a building and was holding a box-cutter that poked ever so slightly beyond his silhouette. It had been that blade I’d seen glinting in the sun. It was almost like finding a child playing hide and seek, except everything was all wrong. She resembled the other man, in that her face was twisted out of sorts. But her skin was pale and her features even more grotesque. And there was no denying what she had in mind, the way she was crouched down with her tongue pressed into her bottom lip, her legs and arms tensed to spring out at any second. She looked like a little monster, and her eyes had been fixed in my direction.

I still don’t know how anyone could have managed it. To move her seems like so much work, but that’s not even accounting for the look on her face. I even had to check to make sure it wasn’t rubber, even as my hand shook with fear just to touch her. God my mind played tricks on me, filling my head with images of her suddenly lunging at me the second my thumb brushed her cheek.

How are they doing it? I asked myself, over and over.

Pretty soon they started appearing almost everywhere I go with time frozen. One time, I went to break into a lovely manor house only to look up and see a pair of pale-faced people staring at me from a terrace up-high. They looked like a couple and were each holding a pair of scissors like a knife, standing completely naked, head-to-toe. Their sagging chubby skin and pitiful tufts of white body-hair made them look almost ghostly, and I decided to avoid that place entirely.

Other times I spot them spying on me from distant places. When I wander around in cities, I can catch glimpses of them in high-rise office windows. They stand out, even from a distance, always catching my eye. I don’t know if it’s the way they’re always looking directly at me and the human mind has a way of knowing when that happens. Or if it’s because their warped almost clown-like faces are strange enough to scare me even when I can barely see them clearly. But no matter what, again and again, I’m faced with the question:

How?

How are they doing this?

It must be someone like me. It just has to be. And yet I cannot work out for the life of me how they could be running around putting these people all over the place. One or two, here and there, maybe. But I can barely even stop time for more than an hour before dozens of these leering white faces start to appear in distant shadows, lurking under stairs and cars, or on top of distant rooves, and one time even standing atop a speeding truck.

They look like self-satisfied gremlins, leering at me and laughing at me. It’s like they’re setting traps but they deliberately want me to see them. At first it didn’t make any sense, the way I’d catch them standing behind my bedroom curtains with knives in their hands, or standing awkwardly behind doors, or trying to conceal themselves in wardrobes. It seemed to me that their efforts at hiding were always laughable. What was the point?

But it quickly started to make a perverse sort of sense. I haven’t slept right in a month. I check every seat before sitting and pour over every inch of a car before driving it. I’ve taken to checking every nook and cranny of a room before staying there and I can’t even bring myself to go near an elevator. It’s exhausting, and every close call just makes it worse. Every thumbtack I find in a chair, every needle I pull out of a sandwich, every severed brake line… it’s driving me further and further into paranoia and I don’t know what to do. That’s why I need to know if there’s someone else out there like me. If I’m not alone then maybe someone else is doing it, right? It has to be that.

But still, I can’t explain everything I’ve seen. I couldn’t explain, for example, why I once used a pair of binoculars to look at a plane flying overhead and saw one of those pale-faced people standing on the wing, waving at me, mocking me. Nor could I explain how their faces look so warped, but magically return to normal when I resume time. I just need to know if I’m the only one with this power…

I guess that’s why I’m asking you guys. Someone out there has to have the same ability as me. If I could just find one more person then maybe I could confront them or at least explain it. Maybe loads of people are messing with me? I don’t know. It’s just lately when I freeze time I can’t stop this feeling of raw hostility coming from every little thing around me. It’s like the universe knows I’m cheating and it’s not happy. Things move around when I’m not looking, machines break when I touch them, food rots, and those people are everywhere, stalking me like damn prey.

Please tell me I’m not the only one?

I don’t want to consider the alternative because sometimes, and I can’t say for sure, but I swear I can see those faces in the darkness even when time is running normally. I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve seen those laughing rubbery faces glaring at me from under the tracks of a passing train, or in a doorway I just turned my back to.

Lately I've been thinking about why it's happening like this. Why they're so obvious, the way they hide. And why they always seem so happy to see me. It's the same reason I've had such a good life, why I've never been stressed before now. Of course they can go slow and have fun with it.

Whoever's doing this to me... They have all the time in the world.