The Multitude, стр. 42
Carla spent the morning in the local towns, shopping for antiques and making small talk with gabby storekeepers, many of whom she’d known since early childhood.
“Your head barely came over that counter the first time your parents brought you here.” The comment by an old woman selling leather goods triggered the fond memory of a gumball machine that used to stand sentinel in the doorway of her shop.
Later, in a haberdashery, the bearded owner came up to her while she tried on a hat. “What happened to that fella on your arm last time?” His question summoned a twinge of longing for the missing fella’s recent replacement, Brewster.
“The weather’s picking up tonight.” Almost every shopkeeper expressed that notion one way or another, stirring a tingle of anticipation each time. The dusting of snow in Syracuse the day before had ushered in a remarkably early brush of winter. Heavier squalls were expected to blow off the lake and across the plateau later in the evening when the wind shifted.
She hoped so. A snowstorm’s ability to hide the world’s worries beneath a pristine blanket of white had always enchanted her.
She enjoyed lunch in an old diner with a wonderful outdoorsy atmosphere, shopped some more—mostly just browsing—and later spent an hour or so hiking a trail half-hidden by fallen leaves near the cabin. She zoned into a fantasy of Brewster at her side. Her vapory breath became his, and the frozen twigs crackling beneath their feet comforted her.
Just before twilight, Carla found her way back to the cabin. She took a stab at working on the dolls until the confinement of lonely spaces pressed down on her again, forcing her attention to a bookshelf for possible diversion. She went over and flipped through a few dog-eared paperbacks, but she’d read most of them during previous stays, and the others just didn’t pull her in. That didn’t leave much. The cabin had never seen a TV, having always been intended as a place where one might take a breather from modern life. In this case, she would have welcomed the distraction of a bad sitcom. She’d left her laptop home, another device that might have helped her while away the time, but she wasn’t on speaking terms with the thing after nearly being driven up a wall setting up the software for her silly webcam two nights earlier.
The webcam.
A question tickled the back of her mind but not loudly enough to make its concern be heard. She went back to the dolls and eventually got lost in her craft. The project kept her busy and worry free until the evening wore on to a late enough hour for a woman to go to bed without feeling guilty she had no life—not that such a notion should have concerned her in any event. She had more lives than she could handle!
Carla retired to the bedroom and had a shivering fit once she undressed. The wood-burning stove struggled gallantly to heat the place, but sweaters and heavy blankets had always been the rule. She slipped a cotton nightgown on, added a terrycloth robe, got back into bed, pulled the covers to her chin, and gave herself up to the stream of random thoughts that invade a person’s mind when all other distractions have been removed.
The webcam.
Presuming she’d traveled a year forward in time to meet Brewster, how had they been able to see the live feed from her apartment? Did she somehow snatch the man from his date on the calendar and flip the pages backwards twelve months, or did her camera shoot its signal through a time warp? She puzzled over the mystery until she reached the pre-dozing stage when clarity makes one final burst before giving things up for the night. The answer came in a flash.
The morning before, after being swept out of Brewster’s bedroom back into her own, Carla awakened to discover the power had gone out at 2:32 a.m. according to the clock on her nightstand and the microwave in the kitchen. The webcam went down along with everything else, and the last signal it sent must have frozen on her website. Evidently, that image hadn’t refreshed for a full year!
Why would she leave the camera off for so long? On the other hand, why not? That stupid camera and its interactive website had been too sophisticated for her simple mind to handle, and she didn’t care to play with it ever again.
But wait. Did fate now preclude her from turning the webcam on again if she did get the notion to try? The possibility sent a tingle of dread down her spine, although she couldn’t quite put her finger on why a simple metaphysical question might trigger any emotional response at all.
Rather than spiral into a chasm of unanswerable questions and escalating anxiety, Carla steered her thoughts to a more whimsical mystery. Assuming she’d been bouncing out of her dreams and into one alternate universe after another, how did she always arrive fully clothed? She’d recently read a novel about a time traveler, and he always showed up naked wherever he went. And who was in charge of costuming? She usually came dressed for the occasion—a summer outfit in Manhattan, a peasant frock for Sanctimonia—but not always. In her two meetings with Brewster, she’d been suited up like some dark-haired slut Barbie not available on any toy store shelf she’d ever seen. She had to admit the brazenness had been titillating, but a vague sense of manipulation unnerved her as much as the earlier question about trying to change her fate.
A draft hummed into the cabin in a spooky, Halloween sort of way. Carla’s mental meanderings had left her vulnerable to the kind of fear a dark, lonely atmosphere was great at creating. She cuddled the blankets around her