I back away down the length of the hall to my own room as he turns around, looking through me with those indistinguishable black pits for eyes, blank like the dead, out of that strangely unfocused face. I walk backward all the way to my room, grateful to find the doorknob in my hand. With a thrill of unfounded fear I close and lock the door behind me, then turn and listen to the slow footsteps creaking across the hall toward my room. Inside all looks just as it did when I was a girl, and it is to the bed with its ruffled blue comforter that I move, where I sit listening to my anxious heart and the heavy approaching footsteps that stop just outside my door. Stop being so afraid, I tell myself. You are being foolish.

Yet I can’t help it. I think of that poor bird, and I am afraid of being a small helpless creature, afraid of being fragile and ineffectual. I have always been thin and small like a child, and I always feel, even behind the podium of a classroom, that my students and colleagues must not take me seriously.

Cold autumn sunlight pushes weakly through the heavy curtains behind me. The room is a semidusk of blue though it is not yet midday. On my desk lie a handful of artifacts I excavated from the swamp—a gunflint, a piece of a broken bowl, an animal bone fragment. I palm the gunflint, turn it over in my fingers, hoping it will bring me luck, will keep me safe.

A thud on the door jars my heart. Then something drags down across the wood in a long grumbling scratch, pulls back, and repeats. He is dragging the point of the knife along the door.

I can feel a sick taste in the back of my throat. I am trapped and small and caged like a weak little bird. Why should I be so afraid of this boy except that, even as a teenager, he is already taller than I am? I would like to be large, like a man. I almost envy Elizabeth for her sheer girth. I can only imagine what it must feel like to be that size. To be so huge, to take up so much space.

But here I am, curled up and making myself even smaller, reminding myself that we are not in the same time, that he cannot hurt me. I squeeze the gunflint.

Still, in the hall he looked so solid. The memories are often just as real as the present. It’s hard to tell sometimes.

The scratching stops and I think it must be over. Whatever this frightening memory is, whoever this disturbed boy is, it must be over.

Then a low voice calls softly through the door: “Let me in.”

My breath catches in my throat. Beneath the door I see the two dark shadows of his feet. His face, his hands, must be pressed against the wood. I sit still and try to make no sound even as I remind myself that he cannot hear me, it’s not really me he wants.