LITMIR.BIZ

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      “Gloucestershire. Get a runt.”

      I smiled at Lux, trying to put her at ease, and she shifted her weight from her left to her right foot nervously. “Are we done here?”

      “Almost,” I said.

      Nardo disappeared and a few minutes later returned with a piglet, pink with black spots, tucked under his arm.

      Lux lit up at the sight of the pig. “Oh, he’s adorable.”

      “Give the pig to her,” I said.

      Nardo handed him over. “He’s scared. Hold him close. Let him feel your heart beating.”

      “Will you do me one last favor?” I asked Lux. “Before you go.”

      But she was preoccupied with the piglet. “You need a name. I’m going to name you Wilbur,” she said, stroking its silky ear. “You know, from Charlotte’s Web.”

      I nodded impatiently. “Will you step into the fog for a moment? With the pig?”

      “Why do you want me to do that?”

      “I need to test a hypothesis.”

      “What hypothesis?”

      I’d have to tell her the truth—a partial truth anyway. “The fog makes us sick. But it didn’t make you sick.”

      “Why does the fog make you sick?”

      I couldn’t think of a lie quickly enough. “I have no idea,” I said.

      Her face softened. “Oh. Okay. So you’re wondering if something’s changed. That’s why you’re all looking at me this way. Because I came through and I’m fine and now you’re wondering if you’ll be fine, too?”

      “Exactly.”

      “You want me to test it out for you. With the pig?”

      “If you wouldn’t mind.”

      Everybody had left the dining hall now and was standing just a few feet behind us, listening carefully to our conversation.

      “Please,” said Fancy.

      “All right. But then I really have to go,” she said.

      I pulled out my pocket watch. “Sixty seconds. I’ll let you know when it’s time to come out.”

      “You’re not worried I’ll run away with your prized pig?” she joked.

      That was the least of my worries.

      She entered the fog. A minute later I called to her and she stepped back into the sun. The pig lay still in her arms.

      “You—it’s dead,” she stammered. She glared at me. “It’s your fault. You did this. You made me kill it. Why did you do that?” she cried.

      “I’m sorry. Listen, it’s only a pig,” I said, thinking at least it wasn’t one of us.

      She shook her head, angry. “I have to leave right now. I’ve got to go home.” Clearly rattled by the pig’s death, she blathered on. “It’s almost time for my son to start school. I haven’t even bought his school supplies.”

      “But it’s only August,” I said.

      As I said it, I was struck by a foreboding which I realized I’d been trying to fend off from the moment she arrived. But now it overtook me, filling me with trepidation.

      “Mid-August,” she said, “practically late August. The sixteenth. Nineteen seventy-five—in case you’ve forgotten,” she added, looking me up and down. My trousers and suspenders. My boots and linen shirt.

      I could sense everybody behind me stunned into silence, holding their breath. I finally said, “Well.”

      Well was a workhorse of a word that could mean so many things. Well, nice to have met you. Well, this certainly has been an illuminating conversation. Well, a madwoman had found her way through the fog to Greengage.

      “I don’t feel so good,” said Lux.

      “What’s wrong?” asked Martha. She was using her clinical voice, firm and calming. It made you want to tell her everything.

      “I’m dizzy,” said Lux. “I think I’m going to puke.”

      She swayed and slid to the ground, the pig falling out of her arms. Then she went very still. Martha sank to her knees and pressed her fingers to the side of her neck, seeking out her pulse.

      Dear God! Had I done this by forcing her back into the fog? Had I killed her?

      “She just fainted,” said Martha, sitting back on her heels. “She’ll be fine. No thanks to you, Joseph. Asking her all those questions. Scaring her half to death. What were you thinking?”

      Fancy, dumbstruck, said, “Nineteen seventy-five?”

      Fancy’s comment triggered the crowd and everybody started speaking at once.

      Martha ignored the hysterics.

      “Let’s get her home,” she said to me.

      I bent and lifted her into my arms. Lux. This stranger.

      Her name meant light.

      We were halfway to the house when Martha said, “It was a full moon yesterday, wasn’t it?”

      During the four months we’d been trapped, it seemed that full moon days passed differently than all the rest of the days of the month. Just after midnight on the day of the full moon, time began to race by. Like a record on a gramophone played at ten times the normal speed, we sped up, too. Hours seemed to go by in minutes. The sensation lasted for twenty-four hours. It was only on the morning after the full moon that time resumed its natural pace.

      “The earthquake happened on the day of the full moon,” she reminded me.

      “What are you implying?”

      She made the irritated face she always made when she hadn’t quite figured something out.

      “Obviously she’s mentally unstable,” I said.

      “That’s just it. She doesn’t seem unstable to me. Joseph—” She stopped. “What if she’s perfectly sane?”

      “Put her in the wing. The back bedroom,” said Martha.

      I laid Lux on the bed and she did not wake. Since she was unconscious, the two of us took the opportunity to survey her openly.

      “What is the meaning of her shirt?” asked Martha.

      “Something … sexual?” I guessed.

      “Maybe. But why does she wear it?”

      “Perhaps she likes drawing attention to herself.”

      “How can she breathe in those trousers? That can’t be good for her reproductive organs. I wonder if she has any identification on her? I’m going to check her pockets,” Martha announced.

      She approached the bed and slid her hand into Lux’s left dungaree pocket. Nothing. From her right pocket she pulled out a wrinkled-up sweets wrapper. Jolly Rancher. She smelled it.

      “Cherry,” she said. “Admit it, Joseph.”

      “What?”

      “You’ve never seen any woman dressed like this.”

      “Yes, because I do not make a habit of cavorting with the insane.”

      “Oh, stop it. Something about her isn’t right, but it isn’t that she’s crazy. There is no mercantile on earth that sells clothes like this in 1906.”

      “You’re saying she’s telling the

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