Free Time's Echo by Pamela Hartshorne Page A

together,
and I left them on my finger. I would wear them in memory of Lucy.
    For a while I sat by the fire, listening to the guttering hiss of the gas flames and turning my hand idly to admire the rings, but it wasn’t long before Hawise was back. I could feel her
knocking on my mind, wanting to come in, wanting me to remember, and I found myself looking at Lucy’s altar. I found myself wondering what she had stirred up there.
    Hawise was persistent, but I was stubborn too. I didn’t want to remember.
    I settled myself back on the sofa, opened my laptop and logged onto Facebook. My friends had been on, leaving each other jokey messages, grinning in photos, the way I usually did, but that day I
felt detached from it all. They seemed to belong to another world, one that had nothing to do with me any more. Right then, sixteenth-century York seemed more real to me than the cyberworld where
we could all keep in touch, no matter how far-flung we were.
    For a while I sat with my fingers on the keyboard, wondering what to write, but in the end I just posted a short note saying that I was in York and that it was cold. I couldn’t think of
anything else to say.
    Staring at the screen, I thought about my message hurtling through space, bouncing off some satellite and then zooming back down to my friends’ computers around the world. At least, I
assumed it went via a satellite. The truth was that I had no idea how the Internet worked. How was it that the words I had just typed could appear in Jakarta or Sydney or Mexico City at the same
time as they popped up here in York? And when messages went astray, as they sometimes did, where did they go?
    I toyed with my pendant. When it came down to it, was slipping through time any more mysterious than the Internet? Could Hawise’s experiences be messages that had been lost in time, rather
than cyberspace? I played with the idea, my lips pursed as my eyes rested unseeingly on my Facebook page. I imagined her memories circling endlessly like some strange video or jpeg, waiting for a
mind that could download it.
    I could think of those experiences as mere blips on some weird circuit. I was on my own in a strange place. Perhaps that made me more susceptible than usual? I sat up straighter. Why not treat
Hawise just as I would a computer virus that struck equally mysteriously, but which was ultimately controllable?
    I’ve always had a straightforward approach to computers. If it doesn’t work, I turn it off and hope the problem will go away by itself. It’s amazing how often ignoring it
works. I would do the same now, I decided. All I had to do was keep busy, keep focused on the present, and I would be fine. I would sort out this creepy house, sell it to the first bidder and
leave.
    Mel had a whole album of her Mexican photos on Facebook. I clicked through every one, needing the distraction. She was obviously having a great time.
    She’d left me a message.
R u ok?
Mel knew perfectly well that I had an old-fashioned loathing of abbreviations, and deliberately peppered any message to me with as many as
possible. In return, mine were always perfectly punctuated.
What r u up to?
    How could I tell Mel what it was like here? She couldn’t possibly understand about York, with its strange, shifting streets and the unnerving feeling that if you turned a corner or slipped
down a little alley you’d find yourself in a different world. Mel wouldn’t understand if I tried to tell her about the dizzying sense that time was warped and buckling, about the
feeling that was part-horror, part-fascination as the present tipped into the past and back again. She wouldn’t know what I meant if I told her how it felt when the present was siphoned away
by a force stronger than reason. It made me think of standing on a beach in my bare feet, feeling the tide suck the sand from beneath my toes.
    Off to Yucatan @ weekend
, Mel’s message continued.
Check out pics! U should be here.
    She was