No answer. Perhaps he had known and forgotten; perhaps he had never known at all.

Easy, I told myself . . . as I had five years before, when the first strands of gray had yet to show up in my hair. Just take it easy.

I ducked under the chain, my left knee yipping, then stood for a second with the high green side of the drying shed on my left. This time there was no chunk of concrete to mark the spot where the invisible stairs began. How far away from the chain had they been? I couldn’t remember.

I walked slowly, slowly, my shoes gritting on the cracked concrete. Shat-HOOSH, shat-HOOSH, said the weaving flats . . . and then, as I took my sixth step, and the seventh, the sound changed to too-FAR, too-FAR. I took another step. Then another. Soon I’d reach the end of the drying shed and be in the courtyard beyond. It was gone. The bubble had burst.

I took one more step, and although there was no stair riser, for just a moment I saw my shoe as a double exposure. It was on the concrete, but it was also on dirty green linoleum. I took another step, and I was a double exposure. Most of my body was standing beside the Worumbo mill drying shed in late November of 1963, but part of me was somewhere else, and it wasn’t the pantry of Al’s Diner.

What if I came out not in Maine, not even on earth, but in some strange other dimension?

Some place with a crazy red sky and air that would poison my lungs and stop my heart?

I looked back again. Lang stood there with his coat whipping in the wind. There was still no expression on his face. You’re on your own, that empty face seemed to say. I can’t make you do anything.

It was true, but unless I went through the rabbit-hole into the Land of Ahead, I wouldn’t be able to come back to the Land of Ago. And Sadie would stay dead forever.

I closed my eyes and managed one more step. Suddenly I could smell faint ammonia and some other, more unpleasant, odor. After you’d crossed the country at the rear of a lot of Greyhound buses, that second smell was unmistakable. It was the unlovely aroma of a toilet cubicle that needed a lot more than a Glade air-freshener on the wall to sweeten it up.

Eyes closed, I took one more step, and heard that weird popping sound inside my head. I opened my eyes. I was in a small, filthy bathroom. There was no toilet; it had been removed, leaving nothing but the dirty shadow of its footing. An ancient urine-cake, faded from its bright blue operating color to a listless gray, lay in the corner. Ants marched back and forth over it. The corner I’d come out in was blocked off by cartons filled with empty bottles and cans. It reminded me of Lee’s shooter’s nest.

I pushed a couple of the boxes aside and eased my way into the little room. I started for the door, then restacked the cartons. No sense making it easy for anyone to stumble down the rabbit-hole by mistake. Then I stepped outside and back into 2011.

7

It had been dark the last time I’d gone down the rabbit-hole, so of course it was dark now, because it was only two minutes later. A lot had changed in those two minutes, though. I could see that even in the gloom. At some point in the last forty-eight years, the mill had burned down. All that remained were a few blackened walls, a fallen stack (that reminded me, inevitably, of the one I’d seen at the site of the Kitchener Ironworks in Derry), and several piles of rubble. There was no sign of Your Maine Snuggery, L.L. Bean Express, or any other upscale shops. Here was a wrecked mill standing on the banks of the Androscoggin. Nothing else.

On the June night when I’d left on my five-year mission to save Kennedy, the temperature had been pleasantly mild. Now it was beastly hot. I took off the sheepskin-lined coat I’d bought in Auburn and tossed it into the ill-smelling bathroom. When I closed the door again, I saw the sign on it: BATHROOM OUT OF ORDER! NO TOILET!!! SEWER PIPE IS BROKEN!!!

Beautiful young presidents died and beautiful young presidents lived, beautiful young women lived and then they died, but the broken sewer pipe beneath the courtyard of the old Worumbo mill was apparently eternal.

The chain was still there, too. I walked to it along the flank of the dirty old cinderblock building that had replaced the drying shed. When I ducked under the chain and went around to the front of the building, I saw it was an abandoned convenience store called Quik-Flash. The windows were shattered and all the shelves had been taken away. The place was nothing but a shell where one emergency light, its battery almost dead, buzzed like a dying fly against a winter windowpane.

There was graffiti spray-painted on the remains of the floor, and just enough light to read it: GET

OUT OF TOWN YOU PAKI BASTARD.

I walked across the broken concrete of the courtyard. The lot where the millworkers had once parked was gone. Nothing had been built there; it was just a vacant rectangle filled with smashed bottles, jigsaw chunks of old asphalt, and listless clumps of trash grass. Used condoms hung from some of these like ancient party-streamers. I looked up for stars and saw none. The sky was covered with low-hanging clouds just thin enough to allow a little vague moonlight to seep through. The blinker at the intersection of Main Street and Route 196 (once known as the Old Lewiston Road) had been replaced at some point by a traffic light, but it was dark. That was all right; there was no traffic in either direction.

The Fruit was gone. There was a cellar-hole where it had stood. Across from it, where the greenfront had been in 1958 and where a bank should have been standing in 2011, was something called Province of Maine Food Cooperative. Except these windows were also broken, and any goods that might have been inside were long gone. The place was as gutted as the Quik-Flash.

Halfway across the deserted intersection, I was frozen in place by a great watery ripping sound. The only thing I could imagine making a noise like that was some kind of exotic ice-plane, melting even as it broke the sound barrier. The ground beneath my feet briefly trembled. A car alarm blurped, then quit. Dogs barked, then fell silent, one by one.

Earthquake in Los Angle-ees, I thought. Seven thousand dead.

Headlights splashed down Route 196, and I made it to the far sidewalk in a hurry. The vehicle turned out to be a little square bus with ROUNDABOUT in its lighted destination window.

That rang a faint bell, but I don’t know why. Some harmony or other, I suppose. On the roof of the bus were several revolving gadgets that looked like heat-ventilators. Wind turbines, maybe? Was that possible? There was no combustion engine sound, only a faint electrical hum. I watched until the wide crescent of its single taillight was out of sight.

Okay, so gas engines were being phased out in this version of the future—this string, to use Zack Lang’s term. That was a good thing, wasn’t it?

Possibly, but the air had a heavy, somehow dead feel as I pulled it into my lungs, and there was a kind of olfactory afterscent that reminded me of how my Lionel train transformer smelled when, as a kid, I pushed it too hard. Time to turn it off and let it rest awhile, my father would say.