“But,” I said. I felt the situation was passing out of my control. I had a brief and shuddering reprise of the feeling I’d had upstairs in the guest lecturer’s hotel room, of the darkness thickening around me, pressing in—but that, I thought, could not really have happened. I pushed the thought away from me firmly.

“Are you sure that’s the time?” I said.

“Yes,” said the young man smoothly. “I’m sure. The bar closes at eleven.”

“At eleven,” I repeated.

“That’s right,” he said.

We stood there in silence for a moment. “Is something wrong?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“It’s only that I must have … lost track of time, somehow.”

“Well,” said the young man, smiling, “that, and your watch stopped.”

His features, now that I was seeing them up close, were remarkably smooth and perfect—he was too delicate to be called handsome, but everything looked as though it had been made very carefully, with great attention to detail. What an unusual creature, I thought, remembering his “Good evening, sir”—he was certainly not from around here.

“I hope you had a pleasant stay,” he said. Evidently, he had mistaken me for a hotel guest. “Do you need help with your car?”

“No,” I said. What kind of help would I need? “Thank you, I’ll be fine.”

He stood, watching me, as I walked out of the hotel, and a million different questions suggested themselves. What was that thing in the briefcase, for one? And what could account for that … change in the atmosphere, upstairs? What had happened to the time, or rather, to my watch?

I glanced back over my shoulder at the hotel and saw that the impressively large bellhop had gone to stand by the little front desk man in the entryway. Backlit by the soft glow of the lobby lights, their silhouettes were comically mismatched—the bellhop huge and stoop-shouldered, the dark-haired young man tiny and still. I had the unsettling feeling that they—and perhaps the hotel itself—were watching me go.

It was a relief to be out in the night air, under the quiet sky, and the sudden drop in temperature gave my senses a welcome little shock. It was a relief, too, to have escaped the company of the guest lecturer; the moment in the car when she’d laid her hand on my knee had been particularly difficult. But, I thought, tomorrow she would fly back to Colorado, and I would never encounter her again. The piece of stationery! I thought. But when I felt anxiously in my pocket, I found it was still there.