Small Thomas considered the possibility that he had gone insane, or that he was dead, or that he had been abducted by aliens.
There was nothing to do but go on.
Once he came to a round room high in a tower. On every side, round windows like portholes revealed only stars. In one, a pair of brilliant stars, one green, one a bloody red, burned so brightly that it was hard to look on them. There was something strange about the gravity in the room. His body felt heavy. He struggled to breathe the thick air. Nevertheless he turned his back to block out the light of the too-bright stars and made his way to the center of the room. There, in a glass coffin set on a pedestal, lay a boy in a black robe, who looked very much like himself only maybe a little older, and who, he came to understand as he became that boy, was dreaming the house, the whole situation, his life and memories and predicament into existence. His mind could not sort that all out, but somehow he knew that it began here, with the boy in the glass coffin, who dreamed that the house swung back in time to a hillside in Maine in 1964, where it picked up Tommy Brooks, who became the boy dreaming, and so on and so on until he became Big Thomas too, and all the others, each of them gradually getting older, like looking at himself in an infinite hall of mirrors into the future.
Sometimes he dreamed of the white underwing moth, fluttering in the dark.
And then he awoke, and said out loud, “I want to go home.”
He awoke, not in the coffin, but in his own bed, not at home of course, but in his quarters near the dining room and the top of the great staircase. He got up, and put on his black robe and slippers, which he always wore now. He had been here long enough that he had definitely outgrown the blue jeans and flannel shirt and jacket he had been wearing when he first arrived.
Acting on no more than a hunch, he made his way downstairs, through the main hall there, and he found, very much to his surprise, that the front door was open.
He felt a sense of urgency. He had to get out quickly. Was Big Thomas perhaps asleep on the job and getting careless? Had he actually awakened from a long nightmare and shed the last few months or years like a heavy coat? If he dawdled, would he fall back into that dream, that nightmare, that otherness?
He hurried down the front steps, which were cracked and leaf-strewn as he remembered them. He knew where he was. He was in the woods, in Maine. He looked back at the house, and saw that it was covered in shadow, indistinct, almost like a thing of smoke. But the white birch trees were solid enough, as was the ground beneath his feet. He hurried down the hillside. He noticed after a few minutes that the leaves were turning colors. Here and there in there in clearings he saw goldenrod. So it couldn’t be July. He didn’t care. He kept on going, and after tripping and falling a few times realized that it was difficult to scramble down a slope through underbrush in an ankle-length robe, so he had to bunch it up around his waist, which left his legs exposed and caused him to be scratched considerably on briars.
Nevertheless, he emerged from the woods into the back yard of the very familiar motel. He made his way across the lawn. The grass hadn’t been cut. The place was closed, the driveway empty.
So, it might have been off-season, but he knew where he was and that was a tremendous relief. Route One was right in front of him. A tractor trailer went by. Across the road was a field where he and his brother had chased butterflies many times. Beyond that, Penobscot Bay. There were sail boats on the water.
To his left, downhill, was Lincolnville. A beach. The Lobster Trap restaurant. The ferry dock. In the other direction, Camden, which was a bigger town, perhaps three miles away. He headed uphill, toward Camden. Cars and trucks raced by, the wash of their passage tugging at his robe. Before long he realized that his thin slippers were not really suited for this sort of hiking, and he was footsore and limping by the time he got to town. But it was a tremendous thrill to see all the familiar places.
Some of it was familiar, some not. But he knew it and that was enough.
Where the road turned sharply left in front of the library, he sat down on a bench, exhausted. He was startled when a woman passing by said “Good morning, Father” to him as if she’d mistaken him for a monk or a priest because of his robe. But then she drew away, obviously realizing her error.
Maybe she thought he was just a weirdo. He didn’t care.
It took him a while to notice that the cars all looked slightly strange.
But still he lurched to his feet and made his way past the shops, some of which he recognized, some he didn’t. He turned down a familiar alley and emerged onto the docks, where schooners were tied up. For all it might have been late in the season, there were still tourists.
After a while he realized that people were staring at him. So he retreated and made his way up a flight of stairs he knew onto Bay View Street, which branched off Main Street and went almost all the way down to the water. There was a used-book shop on Bay View, where he’d spent many hours. His parents were friends with the owner, Mrs. Lowell.
He stood in front of the window of that shop and looked in at the familiar shelves. But he also noticed his own reflection in the window and stared at it realizing that the face he saw there wasn’t quite that of Tommy Brooks, aged twelve, soon to be retired butterfly collector. This boy was a bit older. He had the beginnings of a dark moustache.
Then there was an old lady staring back out at him. It couldn’t be Mrs. Lowell. Maybe it was Mrs. Lowell’s mother. The look on her face was one of astonishment and even a little fear, to use a familiar phrase, as if she had seen a ghost.
He turned and ran back uphill toward Main Street, past the shops, toward the library. One of the stores was a walk-in newsstand. There was a pile of newspapers on the sidewalk. He stopped to look at the date on one of them: September 8, 1997.
Now he understood why the cars had looked strange. Now he understood why the plan forming in his mind wasn’t going to work. The idea was to find a pay phone and call home. For one thing, he didn’t have any money. In the pocket of that pair of jeans he couldn’t wear anymore, back at the house, was a certain amount of 1964 change, which he supposed would still work, if he had it. Without it, he might still convince the operator to let him make a collect call…what then? Were his parents still alive? His brother Clifford would be forty-seven.
By the time he got back to the house, after another long and painful hike, he was sobbing and bedraggled. He’d lost his slippers somewhere, probably climbing the hill, and his feet were bleeding. Big Thomas was waiting for him at the top of the stairs and took him gently into his arms. But he did not offer comfort. He merely held him firmly and the look on his face was one of satisfaction, as if an important lesson had been completed.
IV
Now I have to take over the narrative. I told you this isn’t some cute-kid story, no magical coming-of-age sort of crap. Not so simple.
First person from now on. No sense pretending this happened afar, to someone else.
Some while after the aforesaid, I was looking at myself in a mirror in the bathroom — yes, the house had that sort of convenience, albeit the toilet worked with a chain and an overhead tank and the bathtub had clawed feet — but I digress. I stared into the mirror and saw that I was beginning to grow a dark beard, just like…you are ahead of me. I am ahead of me. I am he and he is we and we are I and all of us are the same, and my name is not Tommy or Thomas or even Big Thomas, but Legion, for we are many.
It was I who found the boy in blue jeans and a flannel shirt, still equipped with knapsack and butterfly net, asleep at the top of the stairs. I took him to breakfast. I knew how he felt because I remembered feeling it. I amazed him with the resurrected moth because I remembered being amazed. I knew that he would dream of that moth, and identify with it, and imagine himself flying up, up through the dark house forever, in terror and growing despair, but never quite giving up on the hope that he might find a speck of light and a way out.