While she had showered, two tiny kittens had been born and cleaned, and now were both nursing, their minuscule forepaws treading at the straining belly of their mother. Having cleaned her offspring, bitten through the umbilicals, and eaten the afterbirths, consumption of which stimulated her lactation, the brownish tabby now was in a third bout of labor.
Kneeling by the tub, Krystal gently stroked the head and back of the queen, “Good girl That’s a good little girl. And your kittens are just as beautiful as you are.” Then, standing, she called, “Meg, Bella, is the mead cold yet?”
When she received no answer, she opened the door to the master bedroom and repeated the question, raising her voice a bit louder. Still not being answered, she shook her head and proceeded out into the third-level hallway. Her mouth open to shout once more, she reeled instead against the doorframe, her eyes wide in horror.
The living room and entrance foyer on the second level were filled to within a foot or less of the very ceiling with muddy brown water! Capped with grayish-yellow scum, the water was lapping perceptibly higher on the stairs; even in the brief moment she watched, yet another tread went under the dirty, opaque water, leaving only two steps between her and the water.
Snapping out of her momentary paralysis, Krystal stepped across the hallway and opened the door to what had been Bass’ office, strode across the bare room, and raised the Venetian blind, then the window. Only then could she dearly hear the terrified screaming of her maidservants.
The three women, two of them stark naked, their wet hair flopping about their backs and shoulders, were racing through the formal garden and up toward the front of the hall, screaming their lungs out the while. Already, their wailings had attracted the attention of some of the hall servants and a couple of off-duty artillerymen from the remaining garrison, but not one of these was making any move to meet the running women; rather did they, one and all, seem to be staring down at the trilevel house.
Abruptly, the sun-dappled hall facade, garden, running women, gawking servants, and soldiers, everything, seemed to waver before KrystaTs eyes, to go out of focus. She blinked, hard, once or twice, and when she again opened her eyes, the scene that lay before them set her heart to pounding in sudden terror.
Gone was Whyffler Hall and all its grounds; before her lay a seemingly endless expanse of tossing, swirling, gray-brown water, rushing from her left to her right, its surface dotted with uprooted trees and other assorted flotsam, including the roof of what had been a smallish house or largish shed. Then, in another eyeblink, there again was Whyffler Hall, up at the head of the garden, with the group on the stairs grown by a dozen or more, their shouts and shrieks drowning out those of her maidservants.
“Oh, my dear, sweet God,” she thought, recalling suddenly Bass’ recountals of his last few hours in this house before he awakened here, in this world. “The … the house is going back! Back to … to that other world, to the same time, the same place, in the middle of a flood!”
Turning from the window, Krystal went out into the hall. The stairs and the hardwood floors below were visible and dry with no trace of water anywhere. But before she was half down the steps, the cold, filthy water again was covering them, swirling about her legs at mid-thigh level. Whimpering, she retreated back to the upper hallway.
After a moment or two of blind, sobbing terror, she pulled herself together. She must get out of the house before it ceased to flicker back and forth between worlds/times and returned to a watery doom in the world it had once escaped But how? In the moments when it was in that other world, the house was her only safe abode, although the creakings and groanings as it shifted on its foundation gave ample warning that it would soon collapse, be ripped apart by the surging waters.
‘Think, Krystal, think\” That was what her papa used to say; he had been the only member of her family who ever had addressed her by her self-chosen name, rather than by the name Rebecca, which appeared on her birth certificate. “You are a woman, yes, Krystal, but nowhere I know does any law say that a woman must not use the brain God gave her. Emotions are fine, as long as you don’t let them rule you. You have a fine mind, girl, use it.”
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