Shadows Out of Time

And then he awoke, and said out loud, “I want to go home.”

He awoke, not in the coffin, but in his own bed, not at home of course, but in his quarters near the dining room and the top of the great staircase. He got up, and put on his black robe and slippers, which he always wore now. He had been here long enough that he had definitely outgrown the blue jeans and flannel shirt and jacket he had been wearing when he first arrived.

Acting on no more than a hunch, he made his way downstairs, through the main hall there, and he found, very much to his surprise, that the front door was open.

He felt a sense of urgency. He had to get out quickly. Was Big Thomas perhaps asleep on the job and getting careless? Had he actually awakened from a long nightmare and shed the last few months or years like a heavy coat? If he dawdled, would he fall back into that dream, that nightmare, that otherness?

He hurried down the front steps, which were cracked and leaf-strewn as he remembered them. He knew where he was. He was in the woods, in Maine. He looked back at the house, and saw that it was covered in shadow, indistinct, almost like a thing of smoke. But the white birch trees were solid enough, as was the ground beneath his feet. He hurried down the hillside. He noticed after a few minutes that the leaves were turning colors. Here and there in there in clearings he saw goldenrod. So it couldn’t be July. He didn’t care. He kept on going, and after tripping and falling a few times realized that it was difficult to scramble down a slope through underbrush in an ankle-length robe, so he had to bunch it up around his waist, which left his legs exposed and caused him to be scratched considerably on briars.

Nevertheless, he emerged from the woods into the back yard of the very familiar motel. He made his way across the lawn. The grass hadn’t been cut. The place was closed, the driveway empty.

So, it might have been off-season, but he knew where he was and that was a tremendous relief. Route One was right in front of him. A tractor trailer went by. Across the road was a field where he and his brother had chased butterflies many times. Beyond that, Penobscot Bay. There were sail boats on the water.

To his left, downhill, was Lincolnville. A beach. The Lobster Trap restaurant. The ferry dock. In the other direction, Camden, which was a bigger town, perhaps three miles away. He headed uphill, toward Camden. Cars and trucks raced by, the wash of their passage tugging at his robe. Before long he realized that his thin slippers were not really suited for this sort of hiking, and he was footsore and limping by the time he got to town. But it was a tremendous thrill to see all the familiar places.

Some of it was familiar, some not. But he knew it and that was enough.

Where the road turned sharply left in front of the library, he sat down on a bench, exhausted. He was startled when a woman passing by said “Good morning, Father” to him as if she’d mistaken him for a monk or a priest because of his robe. But then she drew away, obviously realizing her error.

Maybe she thought he was just a weirdo. He didn’t care.

It took him a while to notice that the cars all looked slightly strange.

But still he lurched to his feet and made his way past the shops, some of which he recognized, some he didn’t. He turned down a familiar alley and emerged onto the docks, where schooners were tied up. For all it might have been late in the season, there were still tourists.

After a while he realized that people were staring at him. So he retreated and made his way up a flight of stairs he knew onto Bay View Street, which branched off Main Street and went almost all the way down to the water. There was a used-book shop on Bay View, where he’d spent many hours. His parents were friends with the owner, Mrs. Lowell.

He stood in front of the window of that shop and looked in at the familiar shelves. But he also noticed his own reflection in the window and stared at it realizing that the face he saw there wasn’t quite that of Tommy Brooks, aged twelve, soon to be retired butterfly collector. This boy was a bit older. He had the beginnings of a dark moustache.

Then there was an old lady staring back out at him. It couldn’t be Mrs. Lowell. Maybe it was Mrs. Lowell’s mother. The look on her face was one of astonishment and even a little fear, to use a familiar phrase, as if she had seen a ghost.

He turned and ran back uphill toward Main Street, past the shops, toward the library. One of the stores was a walk-in newsstand. There was a pile of newspapers on the sidewalk. He stopped to look at the date on one of them: September 8, 1997.