“Beauty,” he said to me, pushing me down on the couch and squatting on the floor in front of me like some great lady frog, the soiled silk lying in loose folds on his flat chest. “Listen to me. I am a member of a work crew. The work crew is assigned to make certain kinds of films, like the ones you’ve been watching. There are five of us. Alice Fremont is the travel technician. She takes us places to film things. Martin Duboise is the director. He tells the cameraman—Jaybee Veolante—what pictures to get. He usually talks to me about that also, because I write the scripts, the words, you know?”
I knew he did. I had seen him at work, at a fold down place with a screen to show words and a thing to print paper.
He said, “Janice Saintjohn is the researcher.”
I asked him what that was.
“Researchers find things out. They learn about other people, other places, other times. The researcher tells us where we might be able to get good film. The director decides if we’ll do it. I write the script, Alice takes us there, Jaybee photographs it. We do maybe three stories a year, and that’s how we earn our keep. Until they assign us some other story, we can’t go near that machine. I don’t know how to run it anyhow. Alice would have to run it.”
“Ask Alice to run it,” I demanded. “You said I’m dangerous to you here. So, I’m dangerous to her, too. Ask her to run it and put me back where I belong.”
Some days I thought if I had to eat one more of those wafers or spend another day shut up in this cell called home-sweet-home I’d die. I burned and sweated and tried to keep from screaming. One morning, after I’d been restless and nightmare-ridden half the night, I woke up with an idea. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it before. As soon as Bill left, I found the sheepskin thing he had worn around his neck and some scissors he used to cut his scripts and piece them together and I cut the fleece to make a pair of boots.
I knew how to do it. I had watched the shoemaker in the village many times. I knew how to cut the sole and make the upper part and sew the two parts together. It would have been better if I’d had some stiff leather, but on the other hand, stiff leather would have been hard to sew without the right tools. The sheepskin was very soft. I put the wool part inside. I used the thick needle and the heavy brown thread from the box my mama had left. It had come to me in the night what the thread was for. It was shoemaker’s thread, so it had to be for seven-league boots. It had to be. Seven-league boots which would take me back to my own time!
When they were done I put them on, and my cloak, with my things in one pocket and Grumpkin in the other, and I opened the door and went out into the hall. “Take me to my mother,” I said, closing my eyes and waiting for the boots to work.
When I opened my eyes, there were people standing all around me, staring at me. The boots hadn’t worked. The cloak didn’t work! They could see me!
I got back inside and fell down on the hard, narrow bed and cried. I was still there, still crying, when Bill got home.
He made me tell him what I’d tried to do.
“You little fool,” he sneered at me. “There’s no magic left today. The fairies are all gone, and there’s no magic left. Put those things away, and don’t do anything so foolish again. If someone official had seen you, you’d be down the chutes by now!”
We lay on the bed, head to toe, and I listened to the sound of the world. A clangor, a constant sound of metal, distant and yet all around me. It was like being inside a gong, gently struck by an erratic wind, the reverberations coming and going without rhythm or predictability. Over that the sound of voices, a buzz, a hum, like some great hive. Over that the sound of feet, shuffling, stepping, never together, never marching, but moving endlessly up and down the corridors of the world. One listened and listened, waiting always for something significant in that sound. Some voice one knew. Some sound one recognized. There was never anything but the constant roar of everyone, everything, closing in and closing in. I put the blanket around my ears and wept while Grumpkin licked my eyes.
I cried so hard and so long that Bill said he would bring Alice to talk with me. Next time he went out, I waited for a long time walking back and forth, back and forth, like the lion one of Papa’s friends had brought back from the Holy Land with him, to and fro in my cage as he had gone to and fro in his, action that his body demanded even when his mind was hopeless, to and fro until he died at last, his feet stretched out and worn through to the blood beneath, as though he had walked himself to death, trying to get home.
At last voices spoke outside the door. I hid myself in the disposal closet until I was sure it was Bill. The woman Alice was with him. So was Jaybee Veolante. He stared at me. I realized almost at once that my hair was down and my singlet was tighter than the shirt I had worn when he saw me. He grunted, and I thought again of a boar pig.
“So,” he said as his eyes devoured me, “what’ve you been up to with her, Billy-boy?”
I found my shirt and
