What would happen if the fog engulfed her house?
The man with Linda’s backpack and the baseball bat stared intently at her porch. A swirl of mist followed her as she retreated into her kitchen, not daring to shut her door lest it make a noise. Noise, she knew, could reach from her world to theirs. She pushed a chair out of the way, hating how it scraped on the floor, and hunched low to peer out over the windowsill. She reached for the light switch and snapped the lights off. There. She could see more clearly.
Backpack Man was staring at her window as he crossed the street, lightly slapping the bat against his palm as he came. The mist had coalesced in her yard. She saw him come into her yard, unhampered by an iron fence that didn’t exist in his world. He stood in her roses just below her kitchen window and stared up at her, his pale eyes focused past her. He studied her window, then threw back his head and shouted, “Sarah!” The word reached her, faint but clear. He stepped back, searching her window for her. She remained frozen. He can’t see me. I’m not in his world. Even if he knows my name, he can’t see me. He looked at the upper windows of her house and shook his head in frustration. “Sarah!” he shouted again. “You are there. You hear me! Come out!” Behind him, his cohorts took it up. “Sarah!” they chorused to the night. “Come out, Sarah!” The others drifted closer to flank Backpack Man.
They knew her name. Before they killed Linda, they had learned her name. And what else? The little girl took up the cry, her voice a thin echo. She stood close by the man who held her hand. Not his captive. Her protector.
Sarah slipped from her chair, folding down on the floor, her heart racing so she could scarcely breathe. Tears came and she huddled under her table, shaking, terrified that at any moment the window would shatter to his bat or he would step in through the open doorway. What a fool she was! Of course the child was part of their group. They would have a foraging territory, just like any group of primates. The gifts she had thrown intending only kindness to a hungry child had lured them here. The man out there wasn’t a fool. He’d seen Sarge come out of nowhere, the dog he had probably hunted down for meat. He’d know there was something mysterious about her house. Had Linda told him something before they killed her and took her things? How much had she told? Had she been pursued by them, had she led them here when she tried to cross back to this world?
Too many questions. She was shaking with terror. She clenched her teeth to keep them from chattering, tried not to breathe lest they hear her panting. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to be utterly still. She heard the door creak on its hinges. The rising wind pushing cold air into the room, or the man with the baseball bat? She curled tighter, put her hands over her head, and closed her eyes. Don’t move, she told herself. Stay still until the danger is gone.
“Mom, what the hell! Are you all right? Did you fall? Why didn’t you call me?”
Alex, face white, on his knees by the kitchen table, peering at her. “Can you move? Can you speak? Was it a stroke?”
She blinked and tried to make sense of what she saw. Alex had his coat on. Snowflakes on his shoulders. A wool watch cap pulled down over his ears. Cold air flowing in from the open back door. “I think I just fell asleep here,” she said, and as his eyes widened, she tried to make repairs by saying, “Fell asleep reading at the table. I must have slid right down here without waking up.”
“Reading what?” he demanded wearily.
She tried to hide how much it hurt to roll to her hands and knees and crawl out from under the table. She had to grab hold of the chair seat to lever herself up and then onto it. The kitchen table was bare. “Well, how odd!” she exclaimed, and forced a smile onto her face. “And what brings you by here today?”
“Your neighbors,” he said heavily. “Maureen called. She was on her way up to Emergency with Hugh. She couldn’t stop, but she saw that your back door was open but your lights weren’t on. She didn’t see any footprints in the snow and she was worried about you. So I came.”
“How’s Hugh?”
“I didn’t ask. I came here instead.”
She looked at the kitchen floor. A delta of melting snow showed where the storm had blown into her kitchen. She’d slept curled on the floor with the door open during a snowstorm. She creaked past him to the coffeepot without a word. She went to turn it on and saw the burned crust of dried coffee in the bottom of the pot. She moved methodically as she washed out the pot, measured water, and put grounds into a clean filter. She pushed the button. No light came on.
“I think you probably burned it out,” Alex said heavily. He reached past her to unplug it. He didn’t look at her as he took off the pot, threw away the grounds, and dumped the water down the sink. “I think you must have left it turned on for a long time to evaporate that much coffee.” He pulled her small garbage can from under the sink. It was full. He tried unsuccessfully to stuff the coffeemaker into it and then left it perched crookedly on top.
He was quiet as he put water into two mugs and set them both in the microwave. She went and got the broom and swept the snow out the door, and then wiped up the water that remained. It hurt to bend; she was so stiff but didn’t dare groan. Alex made instant coffee for both of them and then sat down heavily at her table. He gestured at the chair opposite, and she reluctantly joined him.
“Do you know who I am?” he asked her.
She stared at him. “You’re my son, Alex. You’re forty-two and your birthday was last month. Your wife has two children. I’m not losing my mind.”
He opened his mouth, and then shut it. “What year is this?” He demanded.
“Two thousand and eleven. And Barack Obama is president. And I don’t like him or the Tea Party. Are you going to give me a handful of change now and ask me how much more I need to make a dollar? Because I saw the same stupid ‘Does Your Aging Parent Have Alzheimer’s?’ quiz in last week’s Sunday paper.”
“It wasn’t a quiz. It was a series of simple tests to check mental acuity. Mom, maybe you can make change and tell me who I am, but you can’t explain why you were sleeping on the floor under the table with the back door open. Or why you let the coffeepot boil dry.” He looked around abruptly. “Where’s Sarge?”
She told the truth. “He ran away. I haven’t seen him for days.”
The silence grew long. He looked at the floor guiltily and spoke in a gruff voice. “You should have called me. I would have done that for you.”
“I didn’t have him put down! He got out of the yard and ran off when a stranger shouted at him.” She looked away from him. “He was only five. That’s not that old for a dog.”
“Bobbie called me a couple of nights ago. He said he came home from working late and saw you carrying groceries into the house at midnight.”
“So?”
“So why were you buying groceries in the middle of the night?”
“Because I ran out of hot chocolate. And I wanted some for watching a late show, so I ran to the store for it, and while I was there, I thought I might as well pick up some other things I needed.” Lie upon lie upon lie. She wouldn’t tell him that the clock no longer mattered to her. Wouldn’t say that time no longer controlled her. The heater cycled off. She heard it give a final tick and realized that it had been running constantly since she’d awakened. Probably it had run all night long.
Alex didn’t believe her. “Mom, you can’t live alone anymore. You’re doing crazy things. And the crazy things are getting to be dangerous.”
She