“Mike, you sound almost sick.”

“I’m okay. Better than I was, actually.”

“And you understand why I didn’t tell you any of this until now? I mean, if I’d known the ideas you were getting… if I’d had any clue…”

“I think I understand. The ideas didn’t belong in my head to begin with, but once that shit starts to creep in…”

“When I got back to Sanford that night and it was over, I guess I thought it was just more of Jo’s “Oh fuck, there’s a shadow on the moon, nobody go out until tomorrow.” She was always the superstitious one, you know—knocking on wood, tossing a pinch of salt over her shoulder if she spilled some, those four-leaf-clover earrings she used to have…”

“Or the way she wouldn’t wear a pullover if she put it on backward by mistake,” I said. “She claimed doing that would turn around your whole day.”

“Well? Doesn’t it?” Frank asked, and I could hear a little smile in his voice.

All at once I remembered Jo completely, right down to the small gold flecks in her left eye, and wanted nobody else. Nobody else would do.

“She thought there was something bad about the house,” Frank said. “That much I do know.”

I drew a piece of paper to me and jotted Kia on it. “Yes. And by then she may have suspected she was pregnant. She might have been afraid of… influences.” There were influences here, all right. “You think she got most of this from Royce Merrill?”

“No, that was just a name she mentioned. She probably talked to dozens of people. Do you know a guy named Kloster? Gloster? Something like that?”

“Skuster,” I said. Below Kia my pencil was making a series of fat loops that might have been cursive letter l’s or hair ribbons. “Kenny Auster.

Was that it?”

“It sounds right. In any case, you know how she was once she really got going on a thing.”

Yes. Like a terrier after rats.

“Mike? Should I come up there?”

No. Now I was sure. Not Harold Oblowski, not Frank, either. There was a process going on in Sara, something as delicate and as organic as rising bread in a warm room. Frank might interrupt that process… or be hurt by it. “No, I just wanted to get it cleared up. Besides, I’m writing. It’s hard for me to have people around when I’m writing.”

“Will you call if I can help?”

“You bet,” I said. I hung up the telephone, thumbed through the book, and found a listing for R. MERRILL on the Deep Bay Road. I called the number, listened to it ring a dozen times, then hung up. No newfangled answering machine for Royce. I wondered idly where he was. Ninety-five seemed a little too old to go dancing at the Country Barn in Harrison, especially on a close night like this one. I looked at the paper with Kia written on it. Below the fat/-shapes I wrote Kyra, and remembered how, the first time I’d heard Ki say her name, I’d thought it was “Kia” she was saying. Below Kyra I wrote Kito, hesitated, then wrote Carla. I put these names in a box. Beside them I jottedjohanna, Bridget, andjared. The fridgeafator people. Folks who wanted me to go down nineteen and go down ninety-two. “Go down, Moses, you bound for the Promised Land,” I told the empty house. I looked around. Just me and Bunter and the waggy clock… except it wasn’t.

When it wanted you, it called you. I got up to get another beer. The fruits and vegetables were in a circle again. In the middle, the letters now spelled: lye stille As on some old tombstones—Godgrant she lye stille. I looked at these letters for a long time. Then I remembered the IBM was still out on the deck. I brought it in, plonked it on the dining-room table, and began to work on my current stupid little book. Fifteen minutes and I was lost, only faintly aware of thunder someplace over the lake, only faintly aware of Bunter’s bell shivering from time to time. When I went back to the fridge an hour or so later for another beer and saw that the words in the circle now said ony lye stille I hardly noticed At that moment I didn’t care if they lay stille or danced the hucklebuck by the light of the silvery moon. John Shackleford had begun to remember his past, and the child whose only friend he, John, had been. Little neglected Ray Garraty. I wrote until midnight came. By then the thunder had faded away but the heat held on, as oppressive as a blanket. I turned off the IBM and went to bed… thinking, so far as I can remember, nothing at all—not even about Mattie, lying in her own bed not so many miles away. The writing had burned off all thoughts of the real world, at least temporarily. I think that, in the end, that’s what it’s for. Good or bad, it passes the time.

I was walking north along The Street. Japanese lanterns lined it, but they were all dark because it was daylight4right daylight. The muggy, smutchy look of mid-July was gone; the sky was that deep sapphire shade which is the sole property of October. The lake was deepest indigo beneath it, sparkling with sunpoints. The trees were just past the peak of their autumn colors, burning like torches. A wind out of the south blew the fallen leaves past me and between my legs in rattly, fragrant gusts. The Japanese lanterns nodded as if in approval of the season. Up ahead, faintly, I could hear music. Sara and the Red-Tops. Sara was belting it out, laughing her way through the lyric as she always had… only, how could laughter sound so much like a snarl? “White boy, I’d never kill a child of mine. That you’d even think it!” I whirled, expecting to see her right behind me, but there was no one there.

Well… The Green Lady was there, only she had changed her dress of leaves for autumn and become the Yellow Lady. The bare pine-branch behind her still pointed the way: go north, young man, go north. Not much far ther down the path was another birch, the one I’d held onto when that terrible drowning sensation had come over me again. I waited for it to come again now—for my mouth and throat to fill up with the iron taste of the lake—but it didn’t happen. I looked back at the Yellow Lady, then beyond her to Sara Laughs. The house was there, but much reduced: no north wing, no south wing, no second story. No sign of Jo’s studio off to the side, either. None of those things had been built yet. The ladybirch had travelled back with me from 1998; so had the one hanging over the lake. Otherwise-“Where am I?” I asked the Yellow Lady and the nodding Japanese lanterns. Then a better question occurred to me. “When am I?” No answer. “It’s a dream, isn’t it? I’m in bed and dreaming.” Somewhere out in the brilliant, gold-sparkling net of the lake, a loon called. Twice. Hoot once jr yes, twice jr no, I thought.

Not a dream, Michael. I don’t know exactly what it is—spiritual time-travel, maybebut it’s not a dream. “Is this really happening?” I asked the day, and from somewhere back in the trees, where a track which would eventually come to be known as Lane Forty-two ran toward a dirt road which would eventually come to be known as Route 68, a crow cawed.

Just once. I went to the birch hanging over the lake, slipped an arm around it (doing it lit a trace memory of slipping my hands around Mattie’s waist, feeling her dress slide over her skin), and peered into the water, half-wanting to see the drowned boy, half-fearing to see him.

There was no boy there, but something lay on the bottom where he had been, among the rocks and roots and waterweed. I squinted and just then the wind died a little, stilling the glints on the water. It was a cane, one with a gold head. A Boston Post cane. Wrapped around it in a rising spiral, their ends waving lazily, were what appeared to be a pair of ribbons—white ones with bright red edges. Seeing Royce’s cane wrapped that way made me think of high-school graduations, and the baton the class marshal waves as he or she leads the gowned seniors to their seats. Now I understood why the old crock hadn’t answered the phone.

Royce Merrill’s phone-answering days were all done. I knew that; I also knew I had come to a time before Royce had even been born. Sara Tidwell was here, I could hear her singing, and when Royce had been born in 1903, Sara had already been gone for two years, she and her whole Red-Top family.