“Says he’s from the future,” Emma replied. “I say he’s mad as a box of weasels.”
A strange look came over the bartender’s face. “Says he’s what?” he asked. And then he must’ve recognized me because he gave a shout, slammed down the whiskey bottle, and began to scramble toward me.
I was poised to run, but before the bartender could even get out from behind the bar Emma had upended the drink he’d poured her, spilling brown liquor everywhere. Then she did something amazing. She held her hand palm-side down just above the alcohol-soaked bar, and a moment later a wall of foot-high flames erupted.
The bartender howled and began beating at the wall of fire with his towel.
“This way, prisoner!” Emma announced, and, hooking my arm, she pulled me toward the fireplace. “Now give me a hand! Pry and lift!”
She knelt and wedged her fingers into a crack that ran along the floor. I jammed my fingers in beside hers, and together we lifted a small section, revealing a hole about the width of my shoulders: the priest hole. As smoke filled the room and the bartender struggled to put out the flames, we lowered ourselves down one after another and disappeared.
The priest hole was little more than a shaft that dropped about four feet to a crawl space. It was pure black down there, but the next thing I knew it was filled with soft orange light. Emma had made a torch of her hand, a tiny ball of flame that seemed to hover just above her palm. I gaped at it, all else forgotten.
“Move it!” she barked, giving me a shove. “There’s a door up ahead.”
I shuffled forward until the crawl space came to a dead end. Then Emma pushed past me, sat down on her butt, and kicked the wall with both heels. It fell open into daylight.
“There you are,” I heard Millard say as we crawled into an alley. “Can’t resist a spectacle, can you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” replied Emma, though I could tell she was pleased with herself.
Millard led us to a horse-drawn wagon that seemed to be waiting just for us. We crawled into the back, stowing away beneath a tarpaulin. In what seemed like no time, a man walked up and climbed onto the horse, flicked its reins, and we lurched into juddering motion.
We rode in silence for a while. I could tell from the changing noises around us that we were headed out of town.
I worked up the courage to ask a question. “How’d you know about the wagon? And the planes? Are you psychic or something?”
Emma snickered. “Hardly.”
“Because it all happened yesterday,” Millard answered, “and the day before that. Isn’t that how things go in your loop?”
“My what?”
“He isn’t from any loop,” Emma said, keeping her voice low. “I keep telling you—he’s a damned wight.”
“I think not. A wight never would’ve let you take him alive.”
“See,” I whispered. “I’m not a whatever-you-said. I’m Jacob.”
“We’ll just see about that. Now keep quiet.” And she reached up and peeled back the tarpaulin a little, revealing a blue stripe of shifting sky.
Chapter Six
When the last cottages had disappeared behind us, we slipped quietly from the wagon and then crossed the ridge on foot in the direction of the forest. Emma walked on one side of me, silent and brooding, never letting go of my arm, while on the other Millard hummed to himself and kicked at stones. I was nervous and baffled and queasily excited all at the same time. Part of me felt like something momentous was about to happen. The other part of me expected to wake up at any moment, to come out of this fever dream or stress episode or whatever it was and wake up with may face in a puddle of drool on the Smart Aid break room table and think, Well, that was strange, and then return to the boring old business of being me.
But I didn’t wake up. We just kept walking, the girl who could make fire with her hands and the invisible boy and me. We walked through the woods, where the path was as wide and clear as any trail in a national park, then emerged onto a broad expanse of lawn blooming with flowers and striped with neat gardens. We’d reached the house.
I gazed at it in wonder—not because it was awful, but because it was beautiful. There wasn’t a shingle out of place or a broken window. Turrets and chimneys that had slumped lazily on the house I remembered now pointed confidently toward the sky. The forest that had seemed to devour its walls stood at a respectful distance.