She said, carefully, ‘I told you what you’d have to do—go back and back; find all the places you’ve been and the things that happened, right to the beginning. You can do it, given time.’ The terror was in her face again and turned to a sadness. ‘But there isn’t any more time.’
He laughed almost joyfully. ‘There is.’ He seized her hand. ‘This morning I found the cave. That’s two years back, Janie! I know where it is, what I found there: some old clothes, children’s clothes. An address, the house with the porte-cochere. And my piece of tubing, the one thing I ever saw that proved I was right in searching for… for… Well,’ he laughed, ‘that’s the next step backward. The important thing is that I found the cave, the biggest step yet. I did it in thirty minutes or so and I did it without even trying. Now I’ll try. You say we have no more time. Well, maybe not weeks, maybe not days; do we have a day, Janie? Half a day?’
Her face began to glow. ‘Perhaps we have,’ she said. ‘Perhaps… Driver! This will do.’
It was she who paid the driver; he did not protest it. They stood at the town limits, a place of open, rolling fields barely penetrated by the cilia of the urban animal: here a fruit stand, there a gas station, and across the road, some too-new dwellings of varnished wood and obtrusive stucco. She pointed to the high meadows.
‘We’ll be found,’ she said flatly, ‘but up there we’ll be alone… and if—anything comes, we can see it coming.’
On a knoll in the foothills, in a green meadow where the regrowth barely cloaked the yellow stubble of a recent mowing, they sat facing one another, where each commanded half a horizon.
The sun grew high and hot, and the wind blew and a cloud came and went. Hip Barrows worked; back and back he worked. And Janie listened, waited, and all the while she watched, her clear deep eyes flicking from side to side over the open land.
Back and back… dirty and mad, Hip Barrows had taken nearly two years to find the house with the porte-cochere. For the address had a number and it had a street; but no town, no city.
It took three years from the insane asylum to the cave. A year to find the insane asylum from the county clerk’s office. Six months to find the county clerk from the day of his discharge. From the birth of his obsession until they threw him out of the Service, another six months.
Seven plodding years from starch and schedules, promise and laughter, to a dim guttering light in a jail cell. Seven years snatched away, seven years wingless and falling.