Interlude–Ramona Part Three

Last Part of the Interlude

Ramona looked to where the terrible metal-covered man had been only moments earlier. He was no longer there. It felt as if she had been standing in that very spot for hours. Her joints were stiff, and she was parched.

The voices continued.

Where was the murmuring coming from? From her vantage point, she couldn’t see anyone. She ducked down and looked around. They were thirty feet away from her, at least, yet she could hear them whispering as if she were far closer.

Ramona had seen enough movies to know that if the plot required it, characters could overhear more than physics ought to allow, but she had no idea that she was in a movie. In fact, she had no idea she was in a different decade.

Still, she couldn’t help but listen. She was hidden from the view of the car as she crouched in the field behind a row of poorly trimmed bushes. Ignoring human speech is easy, but human whispers have a way of catching one’s attention.

“When is he supposed to get here?” one man asked.

“Geist is tearing him a new one about some movie scene,” another voice said. “He let the air out of Geist’s town car’s tires to make sure ol’ Carlyle would need a ride. If I’m right about Bensen calling Daddy for help, Carlyle will be here soon.”

Carlyle Geist? Ramona thought. Everyone knew that Carlyle Geist was dead. What was the rhyme about the Geist’s deaths again? Middle school in Carousel was quite an odd experience.

She tried to remember…

~-~

Bart met his end, scared by his own shadow,

Lost in the night, alone in a meadow.

Ellie fell in a well, left there to dwell,

Tom got caught in a spell, rang heaven’s bell.

Children gone missing, some snatched in the night,

Vanished from beds, a community’s fright.

Cherise, they do say, was gnawed by a rat,

In the asylum’s halls, her habitat.

Carlyle and Bensen, with gears and a crash,

In the factory’s grave, they turned to ash.

The rest were charred in the manor’s fierce blaze,

Smoke, flames, and just deserts ended their days.

Old Jed remains, with a grin ear to ear,

He’s outlasting them all, year after year.

~-~

That was right. There were more, of course, though the deaths before Bartholomew were not as sensationalized.

Carlyle Geist had died in a factory accident. She looked at the building in the direction the men were staring—a factory. The word Geist was painted on the building large enough that she could read it from where she was, even in the dying sunlight.

That couldn’t be. Ramona refused to believe the picture her mind was piecing together. What proof could she find, though?

She listened further to the men as they sat in the car and repeated their plans over and over in different ways. If she didn’t know better, it almost sounded like they wanted her to understand what was going on.

That couldn’t be it. If she had been thinking about movies, she might have called this lazy writing. Having men of ill intent speak their intentions in earshot of a hiding main character. She wasn’t thinking of movies. She was thinking that these men had, to the best of her understanding, hired someone to burn down the factory.

She couldn’t believe they were after Carlyle Geist. He was dead. This had to be some kind of misunderstanding.

And then she saw the car arrive. It was a mid-size car, fairly well-kept. It pulled up to the front entrance of the factory, and the passenger door opened. An older man with a cane stepped out.

Did she recognize him? She couldn’t tell in the distance. She had definitely seen Carlyle Geist before. He was famous when she grew up. He had been in a lot of Geist films, though he usually just did introductions for things like double features.

She recognized the cane. That was his trademark accessory. What were the odds that this man carried a cane, just like Carlyle Geist?

He walked into the building and the car that delivered him left.

No, it wasn’t leaving. It was coming in her direction. It ended up parking right next to the brown car with the men talking.

A man stepped out. He wore a brown jacket and had a ratty goatee.

“If he is still alive in the morning, I’ll kill him myself,” the man said as he slid into the backseat.

As they spoke, she learned that he was a film director who hated Carlyle Geist for some petty reason or another.

Then, after learning more than she could have hoped about these odd men, she saw them light a fire in a flask and then jump out of the vehicle as it smoked and spat.

She practically crawled away from her hiding spot and ran down the street, hoping that they didn’t see her. She needed to find a pay phone or a newspaper stand or something to confirm that she wasn’t going mad.

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Luckily, pay phones and newspaper dispensers were a common sight in those days. She never did find something to prove she wasn’t going mad.

The newspaper told her the day’s date: January 1, 1984.

Either this was the world’s most elaborate prank, or she really was lost in time.

Resolute, she called the fire department and told them there was about to be a fire at the Geist Factory.

After she called, she ran to find a place to watch everything go down.

Eventually, she saw the man covered in metal walking toward the factory, but the adrenaline had worn off, and she did not dare approach him.

Moments after he entered the factory, a fire started. Moments after that, the fire department arrived and evacuated everyone.

All the while, Ramona fought off thoughts about her sister’s fate, her chest crushed under the weight of a metal girder.

She couldn’t bear it.

Having done her good deed, she needed to get back to the festival. This time, she walked, observing the world of the past. She had been nineteen years old in 1984. She couldn’t tell if everything was the same. Time was funny that way. Change happens slowly, and the past fades. Dates get blurry.

By the time she arrived back at the town square, it wasn’t 1984 anymore. It also wasn’t April 12, 1992, the date of the real Centennial, where her sister had died.

It was March 15, 1993. She had been gone for nearly a year.

~-~