A Page from Beau’s Journal- From the journals of Beau © Starr Hall. All rights reserved.
I carried the key with me for several days before deciding to do anything with it. The bartender was certain it belonged nowhere in the building. Six rooms above the bar, six keys…no more, and yet the leather tag on this one read RETURN. Not a room number, not a name, a curious instruction for a key. I spent most of the evening trying it where reason suggested it belonged. Nowhere, not a single lock would take it.
I was preparing to leave when I noticed something I am certain I had never seen before, a door. Small enough to be overlooked, easy enough to dismiss. Not built into a wall, but into something far smaller. I cannot explain why I tried the key, only that I did. There was no lock, only a space carved precisely for the key itself, as though the two had been separated and were finally finding one another again. Inside I found a collection of things.
Photographs, and questions I cannot answer. Photographs showing Esther and me together, walking outside the bar, seated at our table, laughing. Nothing in the photographs seemed unusual. The bar, the street outside, the table where we often sit. The unsettling part was her, she appears in every photograph, and I do not remember any of them.
I studied them carefully, I remember none of it, not a single moment, and yet the photographs appear genuine, as though someone had simply captured days of my life that I have somehow forgotten. With them, a note from Esther which lead me to a newspaper clipping. I read the headline twice. Then a third time.
BENNY FOUND SLAIN IN BARROOM OFFICE.
I looked up from the article, benny was standing behind the bar. Alive. Drying glasses, arguing with a patron about baseball, exactly where he had been all evening. I looked back at the clipping, the photograph was Benny, the bar was this bar, the office was the one above us, and according to the paper…he was dead. The date stopped me. May 31, 1929, a date that has not yet arrived. I folded the photo of the clipping and put it in my pocket. I have not told Benny, what would I say? That I have seen a newspaper that has not yet been printed? That it claims he is already dead?
Tonight, I leave with more questions than answers.
– Beau
Clue One:
You found the key. Now find the door. The seventh room takes up far less space than it should. Look where a door should not be, the next clue waits there.
Clue Two:
Beau,
The photographs are real. I know you do not remember them,
that does not make them any less true. There is something
else you need to see, you will find it among the pages of a
book devoted to a game played two moves ahead,
a book that has not quite found its way here to your time.
-L, E
Clue Three:
Beau,
Benny is dead. The newspaper is telling the truth.
What it does not tell you is that his killer is still out there,
still searching, and now he is searching for me.
Find him. Find him before he finds me.
If you cannot…there may come a time when I no longer return.
-L, E
Final Clue: BENNY IS DEAD, or so the newspaper claims. Next month, the investigation begins. Friday, July 24th– Grab your tickets at the bar!
