The guard grunted as he pushed open the door.

Giles wrenched open the Camry’s front door, the realized that there was nothing but silence behind him.

Heart slamming, he risked a quick glance. The guard had vanished.

It was as if he’d stepped through the door and into …

His own time.

Giles had been right. When he himself had exited the building, he’d come back to his own time. But the guard would be sprinting into the parking lot as it was in 1975, full of cars in a town which wasn’t dying yet. And “Ed” would be gone.

What was the guard doing right now?

“Right now?” That was 45 years ago!

But what would have happened to Ed Begley? Ed Begley had died on Cloud Rock. Giles had killed him and taken over his body.

A shadow darkened the doorway and there the guard was, stumbling wildly back to his desk and scooping up the heavy plastic receiver. Mary, still sobbing on the floor, poured out a babble of words in a screaming sob and at the same time, surreptitiously made a shooing gesture at Giles.

Could she see a ghost of him from the future, or did she simply know he would still be watching?

Anyway, she was right. He had to go. In case she could still see him, he waved his fingers and blew a kiss as he got behind the wheel of the Camry, heart filled with admiration for the fierce woman who had raised him. He could almost hear her telling the guard, “It was Ed, oh that bastard, he raped me and then he used me to get the Boss to show him the control room and he koshed the boss and dragged me out to his car but I fought him off and see what the bastard did to me!”

In the rear-view mirror, he got a final look: the guard ran for the control room. Yes, that was what she’d told him.

Under Chaos skies Giles turned onto the busy main road, which turned out to be US 285.

He’d thought of this dark red Camry as “Ed’s car” but this was 45 years later. It couldn’t be Ed’s car. How did he come to have the keys to it in his pocket?

It certainly wasn’t his own car magically transported to New Mexico to be ready when he needed it, like Shadowfax in The Lord of the Rings – or no, it was the horse in the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever who sensed in advance when you’d need him and came before you called.

Who was he now?

He glanced at the rear view mirror and saw his own face. And he hadn’t felt the presence of “Robby” since he exited the building. He was just himself again, not Robby, who had followed the old woman to the mountain top, nor Ed who had been thrown through time to Cloud Rock and pulled back to report to a madman.

Himself. Giles, son of Mary Hammond.

He thought of the silver-haired grand dame and the beautiful black-haired young woman he had just met who pulled so at all his childhood memories and he wept as he drove on and on.

When he thought at last to fish in his pockets, he found his own phone and his own wallet. He checked the date.

It was just exactly the day and time when the real Killington had injected him with “sleepy dark.” Right now in Sonoma, CA, his body lay in a room in the city hall building, maybe dead, maybe simply in a coma.

He pulled to the edge of the arrow-straight highway through flat dry grasslands so that he could figure out what to do. Killington couldn’t come after him, could he? He was miles away in space and 45 years later in time.

But the real Killington existed in this time too, as one of the Planners of the storytelling festival. That madman back there had reminded Giles of Killington but he had been a subtly different person.

He could drive anywhere and get lost in this big country.

He snapped open the glove compartment and found Hertz brochure with people too sunny and golden to be real, and a rental contract (with $200-300 of extra charges lurking coyly).

This car had been rented three days ago to Giles Hammond. And the rental agency was about ten blocks from Hiyako and RJ’s.

He had every reason to go back to them. His heart melted like the chocolate in his mouth. He would go to RJ and Hiyako, tell them everything he had learned. Of course he still hadn’t learned the core secret but he would hide from the Festival and live in that sweet haven.

He accelerated smoothly onto the highway again. Amazing that all the details worked out. It was like he’d stumbled into a new story. Instead of going back to the festival from the Miyazuki’s wonderful old building, he left his car there and rented a car for an expedition to New Mexico.

The storyteller in him tried to match up all the threads. Robby Baker had received a mysterious warning from his ex-wife Mary Hammond, had investigated and found old Mrs. Benz. She had led him to the top of the mountain just as the sky ripped open and had thrown him into the sky. He had lived on Cloud Rock for a while, then gone back through time to that laboratory, where he’d helped his ex-wife learn some of the things she would later tell him. What had happened to him right after Giles zipped into the future? Was he running frantically through the small town with the guard and the police on his tail? Had he gone back to Cloud Rock? Had he gone back to the mountain top? Had he simply ceased to exist?

Ed Begley had sat his scrawny ass in a chair, been hypnotized and gone to Cloud Rock in spirit. But there he’d been somehow squished out of existence when Robby had landed on Cloud Rock. His soul was gone, leaving only black and white traces, and Robby had inhabited his body for an hour or more in the lab. What had happened to Ed’s body? Was Robby still in it, gasping with the pain of a bad back and sore feet, wheezing as he tried to escape? Or had the guard, running out the door, stumbled over Ed’s dead body lying in the entryway when Robby’s spirit went somewhere else and Giles went back to the future?

Mary Hammond had come over from Ireland, gotten this job, found out her boss was engaged in some evil project, had betrayed and attacked him. She planned to tell him that Ed had forced her but would it work? The boss had known somehow about Tiffany and her silver hands, wouldn’t he screw more information from Mary?

And if all this had happened back in 1975 – his hands jerked on the wheel – then how could Robby have witnessed the sky being torn open two years ago? Robby had gone to the mountain top 45 years ago.

In fact, now that he thought about it, he saw a basic flaw in his story from the beginning: Mrs. Benz had been an attractive young woman when her husband took the photo of her naked. If that was “ten years ago” to Robby as he spoke to her, how on earth could she be so old?

Maybe the “evil thing that had happened ten years ago” had nothing to do with Mrs. Benz and her foolish husband, backing up until he fell over a cliff because that father of his in his head wouldn’t let him take a picture that had only a naked woman in it. But this was a story in a story. How could anything not be significant?

His eyes went wide until the Chaos felt like it would burn them out. He’d trained himself not to look at it but he couldn’t help himself as his hands gripped the wheel and he braked to a halt again, tires screaming this time.

The key he’d been handed in the control room had slipped at last into its lock.

Everything fit together and made sense. The real Killington was at the storytelling festival, thinking he had killed Giles for all time. And Giles had to go back there. There was no escaping it. When he mapped the drive on the GPS, it seemed predestined. Allowing for rest stops and some sleep, he would arrive just before the evening telling, where he was supposed to finish this story.

How could he have thought he’d get away with anything else? He stood on the stage and told the crowd the story now. He was in that story now, living it like a dream from which you can’t pull yourself awake.

How long had this story lasted? Was the crowd really hearing all these details that had so little to do with the story he had started? Why did he dread so deeply what he would do when he reached the festival?

He started driving again, setting cruise control to the exact speed limit and not one inch per hour faster.

A sweet day and a half separated him from what he would have to do.