What did the men pursuing me see in that moment? Did they even hear me calling out? They were right on me, ready to lay on hands, perhaps reaching at that moment. Did they see the air open in front of them, the blue light of all our stories knifing through the world, illuminating the night? What I saw was the woods folding back against themselves, a rolling mist, and beneath it a bowling green that I immediately recognized as belonging to Lockless. That was my first thought. But then as the scene came upon me—and that was how it felt, like the world was drawing to me more than I was drawing to it—I saw that this was not the Lockless of my time, for there were tasking folk who I knew to no longer be with us. And directing them I saw, as I remembered him all those years, laughing and thoughtless, Little May. He was pointing back at the house, yelling something, and drawn to that direction, I saw that he was yelling at me, not me floating above but me on the ground, in time, in that first year of service, stripped from the instruction of Mr. Fields, still apprehending my place in things.
The moment struck me not as another turn on the carousel, but wholly new. It was like being asleep and never recognizing, no matter the absurdity of things, that you are in a dream. The very nature of logic and expectation was bent, and the absurd struck me as normal, so I simply observed myself, observed Maynard, as we had been, in that other time. Even as I watched this younger me cornered off with another group of tasking folks and lined up to run, even as I saw myself racing off, even as I felt myself to be racing with them, though my legs were not moving, I did not understand. I watched as I separated myself from the line, faster than all of them, and touching the tip of the field, I saw myself turn back, and then trip, scream, and fall, grabbing at my ankle. I remember wanting to comfort this child, this me from another life. But when I moved to him, the world again peeled away and I was back in my own time.
But not in my own place. Pain again shot through my ankle. I was on the ground howling. I tried to crawl. And then I stood. I took one step. It was agony. I fell. And again I felt myself slipping under. I looked up one last time and saw one of the men standing over me.
No. A different one now.
“Quiet down, boy,” Hawkins said. “The way you hollering liable to wake the dead.”
12
I WAS BROUGHT BACK BY the pain in my ankle. It was no longer the sharp stab from before, but a dull throbbing. I opened my eyes and saw the daylight, the beautiful daylight that I hadn’t seen in weeks, blaring through a window like a horn, so loud that the rest of the world blurred before me. Slowly my eyes shifted so that the blur began to take shape—a table by the bedside with a pipe hooked onto a vase shaped like a ship, a large clock on a ledge across from me, and above my head a canopy, and scarlet-red curtains pulled back. I looked down and saw that I had been fully washed, and fitted in cotton drawers and a silk night shirt. It occurred to me that I might still be down under, and this just another turn on the carousel. Or perhaps I had ascended out of the hell of my dungeon and gone, at last, to my reward. But the dull throbbing of my ankle signaled that the world around me was real. And I saw that I was not alone, for there were figures, too, forming out of the blur. One was Hawkins, the man who had, now twice, found me on the other end of miraculous flight. He was seated in a chair, and next to him, no longer in her mourning clothes, I saw the forsaken bride of Maynard Walker, Corrine Quinn.
“Welcome,” she said.
She was smiling, smiling joyously even, and I was aware that I had never seen her smile in such a way before. It was as if she had discovered something