I’d peeled all the leaves; now I had a bare, battered stalk with a little cluster of magenta blossoms. “What kind of flower is this?” I asked suddenly. She stood with her hands in her pockets, her feet planted. She didn’t answer immediately; then she said, “Why do you want to know?”

“I don’t know.” Inside each star-shaped circle of petals was another ring, little bristly projections, like eyelashes around a circular eye. It still didn’t smell like anything. I tossed it on the water, where it wandered until it disappeared along the bank.

“I’m going back to the house,” I said, and slid off the boulder.

“Can I go with you?”

“It’s a big house.”

She didn’t flinch; she just closed her eyes for a moment.

6.2: Time stands still on the road

Altogether, my stay in that house was four days long. It seems longer; not because time dragged, but because of things I did, of things I looked at, of conversations I had. It seems strange that they all happened butted up against each other in four days. Maybe time, during those days, ran the way the hallways did when Frances and I’d tried to find our way out. The hallways themselves, after that first surreal morning, remained where they were put.

Mr. Lyle had promised me the library, and delivered when I came back, still snappish, from the garden. It was another long-windowed room on the first floor. The heavy moldings around the door and windows, the shelves, the pedestal table, were oak; the chairs were high-backed and upholstered in a dark fabric full of birds and flowers. The shelves were anywhere the windows weren’t, except for the floor and the ceiling. The rug under the table and the smaller ones by the windows were deep red, figured with detailed geometric medallions in many other colors. There were lamps on brackets and on stands by the chairs, and a huge oil and candle chandelier over the pedestal table. Reading after dark, it seemed, was expected.

I was impressed, but I was also in a lousy temper, and not inclined to show I was impressed. I began to read spines. I’d been caught off-guard in the ivy parlor; it would be a good deal harder to make me gape now.

Part of the collection might have been acquired in reaction to the events of the last hundred or so years: all the books in the Foxfire series, for which I had a sort of uninvolved respect; several works, theoretical and not-so, on global warming; a delectable variety of how-to books on solar and water and wind power, and the attendant wiring, storage, water heating, and whatnot. (The latter were shelved in plain sight, which nearly ruined my resolution. How secure was this house, its land, this island? Any City deputy who got a glimpse of those books would burst a blood vessel.)

The rest of the shelves, the majority, had been filled by the process of finding a book that looked interesting and bringing it home. The finders, I hoped, had been plural; there was a point at which diversity of interest became multiple personality, after all. Eventually, under Mr. Lyle’s benign eye, I found the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I took a volume down at random and pecked at the beginning. And began, after a little, to grin.