Once again, Eric checked the time on his phone. It was seven, now eight minutes past the hour. The possibility of the mystery person not showing up had always remained in the back of his mind, but the message had so heavily emphasized the time and place, he hadn't really considered it. It seemed he had gotten all worked up over nothing. It was a prank, or a mistake that he had received this message. The requested location's proximity to his own was a coincidence and nothing more.

"Tch," escaped through Eric's teeth as he left his resting place and started back down the way he came. He felt like an idiot for jumping to conclusions, and yet, he felt like there was still something he was missing. There was something wrong. Maybe there was something going on here after all. He took a step, then another, and another.

He stopped.

He had determined what was bothering him. Each of his footsteps sounded impossibly loud. When his shoe made contact with stone, the noise filled his ears. It was as if he was walking in a crypt. He couldn't hear the sound of countless other voices that had followed him since he had started living here. Even the crickets had gone totally silent.

Eric glanced at a broken light that had previously been in the process of being repaired by a park worker. The glass cover was on the ground, and wires hung out of the light, but the worker was gone. He shifted his gaze to the other side of a nearby pond, where there had been a young couple on a date. They had disappeared too.

But Eric wasn't completely alone. Behind him, there was the sound of another set of footsteps besides his own. Was this the person he was supposed to meet? He turned and looked back at the place he had been waiting, but it was just the seven or eight people that had been there before, one of them preparing to leave just as he was, and a man who was ridiculously dressed even by New York standards that had now appeared among them. There was no way...

"Is this some kind of a joke?" he said finally.