Who Is Frances Rain? by Margaret Buffie Page B

glasses shift in my shirt pocket and pulled them out for another look.
    I buffed them on the tail of my shirt and put them on. At first, because they were someone else’s glasses, I figured they were blurring my vision. But the thing was, my eyesight wasn’t blurred — something else had happened. The summer sunlight and clear blue sky were gone. It was dull and misty, with low hanging clouds barely skimming the tops of the trees. And the distant shoreline had somehow changed to the hazy khaki and yellow of late autumn. Many of the trees were bare. Here and there a flash of red shone through.
    When I pulled off the spectacles, another sudden wave of dizziness ran through my head like an electric jolt. I had to sit down.
    â€œI must be dozing off like Alice,” I thought, shaking my head. “I’ll be seeing the White Rabbit next.”
    As soon as my head cleared, I scrambled to my feet and picked my way cautiously to the site. I stood a little way off, peering suspiciously around. It looked so peaceful.
    I slid the specs out of my pocket, opened their thin arms and stared at them. The sensible Elizabeth side of me was telling the reckless Lizzie side of me that I was simply imagining things — a mood, a feeling that wasn’t really there. But the reckless side, as usual, wasn’t listening. She never does.
    I put them on.

Chapter Thirteen
    NOTHING happened. I looked all around. Then, I happened to glance down. Far, far in the distance, I could see my sneakers. I wiggled my toes and the tips of the sneakers moved. The path, just to my left, was well worn and hardened, as if it hadn’t rained the day before.
    Path? There was no path on the island. Yet I stepped over onto it and my feet, distances away, lifted themselves and carried me along. I thought I could see the vague outline of blueberry bushes beneath the flat greyness of the path. Behind me, it stretched to the sloping shore. I turned and faced the cabin.
    It was lower and wider than I’d imagined. I had just finished digging up a place of rotting, mildewed logs. The logs in front of me were pale grey and silvery smooth, the roof over them covered in the green roll roofing that I’d found in bits a pieces a foot under the soil.
    As I stumbled towards it, the scene shimmered, like a home movie on a hanging bedsheet screen. The cabin was there and yet it wasn’t. The background of my own world wasn’t really there and yet it was. If you’d asked me later how I’d felt at that moment, I’d have told you how surprised I was I didn’t drop dead from shock. But, in fact, I only remember shutting my open mouth and taking a few hard gulps. The glasses stayed on though. My bump of curiosity has always been much larger than my bump of self-preservation.
    I mean, I knew that what I was seeing wasn’t real, but I was also sure that I was seeing the cabin as it had once been. The path drew me forward and I walked along it, my feet now and again getting tangled up in the small plants behind its shadow. Once I tripped on a log that wasn’t there. Or was it?
    What I’d do when I reached the cabin that was wavering in front of me, I didn’t know. As I walked closer, everything seemed to become clearer, more solid and more attractive, as if it was a magnet and I was a bit of metal.
    The door of the cabin was made of rough boards, the door handle a simple carved block of wood with a metal latch. I could make out the coarse grain of the boards and the rust spots that had dripped down from the nails. But the weird thing was, I could also still see the outline of the trees that ringed the clearing behind.
    A pain that had started at the back of my head when I’d first put on the glasses suddenly grew stronger. I shook it away before reaching towards the latch. When the pain came again, harder this time, I moved back a few steps from the cabin. Pressure seemed to be building up inside my brain. I could