A Fold in the Tent of the Sky by Michael Hale

of sweet, dry dust.
    A diary, it looked like—with a pebble-grained cover worn at the corners to nubs of brown cardboard, a mended spineof black fabric tape. Hand-scripted on the front of it were the words “James L. Rathburn, Ph.D: Notes and Observations—Seances and Spirit Circles, 1908–1923 . . .”
    Touching it, she felt this little brain-shift thing that happened sometimes, slurring everything—that’s the only way she could explain it. The turned pages tickled her fingers, fluttering against her palm like a caged cricket. She closed the book and then her eyes till the pictures, the smells subsided—the screed of voices. She sat down in the chair and chewed at her thumbnail for a second.
    It all came back to her then, the weird dream—or rather half dream—she’d had the night before, and she knew why she was there. What had drawn her to this place. She had drunk a whole bottle of wine and fell asleep with her headphones on, with her CD player stuck on “repeat,” playing one song over and over again. She remembered, now, how the pulsing beat had pulled her down into a tranced funk, a strangled fitful place on the borders of sleep that had opened up into one of her out-of-body experiences, the kind that took her cruising through the dark eerie place she’d first discovered as a very young child.
    The wine had put her in a goofy shit-disturbing mood and she’d ended up trying to dance to the music flat on her back in the middle of the floor. And float out of her body at the same time—doing a sort of OBE jive. Cruising the “ Never - Ever -Land,” snapping her astral fingers, looking for action.
    That’s the name she had given the place—“ Never - Ever-Land .” When she was about eight years old, right after her mother had said “Never ever do that again!” In response to what, she had no recollection anymore. She liked to justfloat out there and sniff around, lock on to anything that smelled interesting. It was like surfing the Net. Only this Net reached through time as well as space. But only in one direction; she could only go downstream into the past. Cruising the present? That was easy—like doing the dog paddle. But she’d never been able to fight her way upstream and explore the future. She did have flashes of things that could be considered premonitions, but only that: flashes, vague images and sensations that came into her head at the strangest times. Like the other day in that 7-Eleven; all that stuff about the guy behind the counter having a kid some day and the kid drowning in a swimming pool.
    Her latest journey into Never-Ever-Land had taken her back through layers of time and space to somewhere close to the turn of the century. Her astral body had been drawn like a moth to the flame of a phony séance of fumbling spiritualists reaching out into the ethereal void.
    She picked up the book carefully this time, by one page with two fingers, letting it fall onto her knapsack, which was in her lap now. The diary opened on an entry made on the tenth of June, 1919. The pages were dense with a neat longhand; minuscule notations filled the margins. After a time of reading she looked up at the door, at the light from the library coming through the frosted transom. A moment later footsteps passed the door and moved on.
    â€œGod, I did this shit,” she said to herself, her index finger in her mouth now, the nail absently finding its favorite perch. I made this happen—sort of. Karaoke from the inside out.
    Pam looked down at the page again, at the precise italic script, and she found herself reading what had been playing onher CD player the night before—the lyrics right there, neatly recorded, with ink that had dried almost eighty years ago.
    â€œPerfect,” she said to herself. “Credentials.”
    A table: round, bare, its veneer rippled and stained with the faint ghost of an overflowing