11/22/63

The drying shed was lit by a white fluorescent glow from the dirty dyehouse windows. I spotted the chain blocking off the drying shed from the rest of the courtyard. It was too dark to read the sign hanging from it, and it had been almost two months since I’d seen it, but I remembered what it said: NO ADMITTANCE BEYOND THIS POINT UNTIL SEWER PIPE IS REPAIRED. There was no sign of the Yellow Card Man — or the Orange Card Man, if that’s what he was now.

Headlights flooded the courtyard, illuminating me like an ant on a plate. My shadow jumped out long and scrawny in front of me. I froze as a big transport truck trundled toward me. I expected the driver to stop, lean out, and ask me what the hell I was doing here. He slowed but didn’t stop. Raised a hand to me. I raised mine in return, and he drove on toward the loading docks with dozens of empty barrels clunking around in back. I headed for the chain, took one quick look around, and ducked under it.

I walked down the flank of the drying shed, heart beating hard in my chest. The gash on my head pounded in harmony. This time there was no chunk of concrete to mark the spot. Slow, I told myself. Slow. The step is right… here.

Only it wasn’t. There was nothing but the pavement under my testing, tapping shoe.

I went a little farther, and there was still nothing. It was cold enough to see a thin vapor when I exhaled, but a light, greasy sweat had broken out on my arms and neck. I went a little farther, but was now almost sure I had gone too far. Either the rabbit-hole was gone or it had never been there in the first place, which meant that my whole life as Jake Epping — everything from my prize-winning FFA garden in grammar school to my abandoned novel in college to my marriage to a basically sweet woman who’d almost drowned my love for her in alcohol — had been a crazy hallucination. I’d been George Amberson all along.

I went a little farther, then stopped, breathing hard. Somewhere — maybe in the dyehouse, maybe in one of the weaving rooms — someone shouted “Fuck me sideways!” I jumped, then jumped again at the bull roar of laughter that followed the exclamation.

Not here.

Gone.

Or never was.

And did I feel disappointment? Terror? Outright panic? None of those, actually. What I felt was a sneaking sense of relief. What I thought was, I could live here. And quite easily. Happily, even.

Was that true? Yes. Yes.

It stank near the mills and on public conveyances where everybody smoked their heads off, but in most places the air smelled incredibly sweet. Incredibly new. Food tasted good; milk was delivered directly to your door. After a period of withdrawal from my computer, I’d gained enough perspective to realize just how addicted to that fucking thing I’d become, spending hours reading stupid email attachments and visiting websites for the same reason mountaineers wanted to climb Everest: because they were there. My cell phone never rang because I had no cell phone, and what a relief that had been. Outside of the big cities, most folks were still on party lines, and did the majority lock their doors at night? Balls they did. They worried about nuclear war, but I was safe in the knowledge that the people of 1958 would grow old and die without ever hearing of an A-bomb being exploded in anything but a test. No one worried about global warming or suicide bombers flying hijacked jets into skyscrapers.

And if my 2011 life wasn’t a hallucination (in my heart I knew this), I could still stop Oswald. I just wouldn’t know the ultimate result. I thought I could live with that.

Okay. The first thing to do was to return to the Sunliner and get out of Lisbon Falls. I’d drive to Lewiston, find the bus station, and buy a ticket to New York. I’d take a train to Dallas from there… or hell, why not fly? I still had plenty of cash, and no airline clerk was going to demand a picture ID. All I had to do was fork over the price of a ticket and Trans World Airlines would welcome me aboard.

The relief of this decision was so great that my legs again went rubbery. The weakness wasn’t as bad as it had been in Derry, when I’d had to sit down, but I leaned against the drying shed for support. My elbow struck it, making a soft bong sound. And a voice spoke to me out of thin air. Hoarse. Almost a growl. A voice from the future, as it were.

“Jake? Is that you?” This was followed by a fusillade of dry, barking coughs.

I almost kept silent. I could have kept silent. Then I thought of how much of his life Al had invested in this project, and how I was now the only thing he had left to hope for.

I turned toward the sound of those coughs and spoke in a low voice. “Al? Talk to me. Count off.” I could have added, Or just keep coughing.