But this one passed, too.

She relaxed slowly, panting, her head turned up toward the ceiling. For the moment, at least, the dancing reflections up there didn’t torment her; all her concentration was focused on that fiery bundle of nerves between and just below her breasts, waiting to see if the pain was really going to go away or if it would flare up again instead. It went… but grudgingly, with a promise to be back soon. Jessie closed her eyes, praying for sleep. Even a short release from the long and tiresome job of dying would be welcome at this point.

Sleep didn’t come, but Punkin, the girl from the stocks, did. She was free as a bird now, sexual enticement or no sexual enticement, walking barefooted across the town common of whatever Puritan village it was that she inhabited, and she was gloriously alone-there was no need to walk with her eyes decorously cast down so that some passing boy might not catch her gaze with a wink or a grin. The grass was a deep velvety green, and far away, on top of the next hill (this has to he the world’s biggest town common, Jessie thought), a flock of sheep was grazing. The bell Jessie had heard before was sending its flat, monotonous peals across the darkening day.

Punkin was wearing a blue flannel nightie with a big yellow exclamation point on the front-hardly Puritan dress, although it was certainly modest enough, covering her from neck to feet. Jessie knew the garment well, and was delighted to see it again. Between the ages of ten and twelve, when she had finally been persuaded to donate it to the rag-basket, she must have worn that silly thing to two dozen slumber parties.

Punkin’s hair, which had obscured her face completely while the neck-stock held her head down, was now tied back with a velvet bow of darkest midnight blue. The girl looked lovely and deeply happy, which didn’t surprise Jessie at all. The girl had, after all, escaped her bonds; she was free. Jessie felt no jealousy of her on this account, but she did have a strong desire-almost a need-to tell her that she must do more than simply enjoy her freedom; she must treasure it and guard it and use it.

I went to sleep after all. I must have, because this has got to he a dream.

Another cramp, this one not quite as terrible as the one which had set fire to her solar plexus, froze the muscles in her right thigh and set her right foot wagging foolishly in the air. She opened her eyes and saw the bedroom, where the light had once again grown long and slanting. It was not quite what the French call l'heure bleue, but that time was now fast approaching. She heard the banging door, smelled her sweat and urine and sour, exhausted breath. All was exactly as it had been. Time had moved forward, but it had not leaped forward, as it so often seems to have done when one awakens from an unplanned doze. Her arms were a little colder, she thought, but no more or less numb than they had been. She hadn’t been asleep and she hadn’t been dreaming… but she had been doing something.

I can do it again, too, she thought, and closed her eyes. She was back on the improbably huge town common the moment she did. The girl with the big yellow exclamation point sprouting UP between her small breasts was looking at her gravely and sweetly.

There’s one thing you haven’t tried, Jessie.

That’s not true, she told Punkin. I’ve tried everything, believe me. And you know what? I think that if I hadn’t dropped that damned jar of face cream when the dog scared me, I might have been able to squeak out of the left cuff, It was bad luck, that dog coming in when it did. Or had karma. Bad something, anyway.

The girl drifted closer, the grass whispering beneath her bare feet.

Not the left cuff, Jessie. It’s the right one you can squeak out of. It’s an outside shot, I’ll grant you that, hut it’s possible. The real question now, I think, is whether you really want to live.

Of course I want to live!

Closer still. Those eyes-a smoke color that tried to be blue and didn’t quite make it-now seemed to peer right through her skin and into the heart of her.

Do you? I wonder.

What are you, crazy? Do you think I want to still be here, handcuffed to this bed, when-

Jessie’s eyes-still trying to be blue after all these years and still not quite making it-slowly opened again. They gazed around the room with an expression of terrified solemnity. Saw her husband, now lying in an impossibly twisted position, glaring UP at the ceiling.

“I don’t want to still be handcuffed to this bed when it gets dark and the boogeyman comes back,” she told the empty room.

Close your eyes, Jessie.

She closed them. Punkin stood there in her old flannel nightie, gazing at her calmly, and Jessie could now see the other girl as well-the fat one with the pimply skin. The fat girl hadn’t been as lucky as Punkin; there had been no escape for her, unless death itself was an escape in certain cases-a hypothesis Jessie had become quite willing to accept. The fat girl had either choked to death or suffered some sort of seizure. Her face was the purpleblack color of summer thunderheads. One eye bulged from its socket; the other had burst like a squeezed grape. Her tongue, bloody where she had bitten it repeatedly in her last extremity, protruded between her lips.

Jessie turned back to Punkin with a shudder.

I don’t want to end up like that. Whatever else may be wrong with me, I don’t want to end up like that. How did you get out?

Slid out, Punkin replied promptly. Slid out of the devil’s hand; oozed on over to the Promised Land.

Jessie felt a throb of anger through her exhaustion.

Haven’t you heard a single word I’ve said? I dropped the goddam jar of Nivea! The dog came in and startled me and I dropped it! How can I-

Also, I remembered the eclipse. Punkin spoke abruptly, with the air of one who has become impatient with some complex but meaningless social formula; you curtsey, I bow, we all join hands. That’s how I really got out; I remembered the eclipse and what happened on the deck while the eclipse was going on, And you’ll have to remember, too. I think it’s the only chance you have to get free. You can’t run away anymore, Jessie. You have to turn and face the truth.

That again? Only that? Jessie felt a deep wave of exhaustion and disappointment. For a moment or two, hope had almost returned, but there was nothing here for her. Nothing at all.

You don’t understand, she told Punkin. We’ve been down this path before-all the way down. Yes, I suppose that what my father did to me then might have something to do with what’s happening to me now, I suppose that’s at least possible, but why go through all that pain again when there’s so much other pain to go through before God finally gets tired of torturing me and decides to pull down the blinds?

There was no answer. The little girl in the blue nightie, the little girl who had once been her, was gone. Now there was only darkness behind Jessie’s closed lids, like the darkness of a movie screen after the show has ended, so she opened her eyes again and took a long look around the room where she was going to die. She looked from the bathroom door to the framed batik butterfly to the bureau to her husband’s body, lying beneath its noxious throw-rug of sluggish autumn flies.

“Quit it, Jess. Go back to the eclipse.”

Her eyes widened. That actually did sound real-a real voice coming not from the bathroom or the hall or from inside her own head, but seeming to seep out of the very air itself.

“Punkin?” Her voice was only a croak now. She tried to sit up a little more, but another ferocious cramp threatened her midsection and she lay back against the headboard at once, waiting for it to pass. “Punkin, is that you? Is it, dear?”