The Between-Time

The Between-Time is the uncanny passage through which Mike Noonan and Kyra Devore move inside the Ghost House at the Fryeburg Fair, a space that joins the fairground to other moments in Mike’s life. Its corridors exceed the building’s plausible dimensions, and its doors divide paths marked by personal objects and historical memory. When Kyra passes through one and vanishes, Mike must navigate the labyrinth alone; the ribbon from her hat and the smell of pine remain as material evidence that the passage was not merely a dream.

A passage beyond the fair

The transition begins after Mike and Kyra have walked so far into the attraction that the fair’s ordinary sounds disappear. The calliope, the Test Your Strength bell, and Sara and the Red-Tops fade away. Mike estimates that they have gone a quarter of a mile, an impossible distance for a county-fair Ghost House. The attractions no longer feel like a sequence of staged scares: the familiar fair has fallen out of earshot, and the architecture has become a route into somewhere else.

The passage is built from narrow corridors and wooden walls, with the fragrant smell of pine recurring as Mike proceeds. Its mixture of mechanical theatricality and inexplicable geography makes it both recognizably a fair attraction and something that exceeds one. Even the Ghost House’s apparent hauntings belong to an ordinary performance: behind a wall, two ghosts clank chains and talk about their evening plans. But that mundane spectacle gives way to a maze whose length and destinations cannot be accounted for by the attraction around them.

Doors bearing personal histories

At a junction, three doors present a compact map of different lives. One bears a red tricycle; the door opposite shows Mike’s green IBM typewriter; the last, faded and dowdy, depicts a child’s sled. Mike recognizes the sled as Scooter Larribee’s, the one Devore stole. These are not interchangeable decorations. The doors connect childhood, Mike’s writing life, and a specific wrong from the past, placing private memory and history side by side inside the same corridor.

Kyra treats the pictures as toys belonging to her and Mike. She lifts Strickland so the stuffed dog can see the tricycle, then thanks Mike for taking her away from the frightening men and says that the spooky house has been fun. Her easy delight contrasts with the threatening significance the doors hold for Mike. She opens the tricycle door and steps through before he can answer. It snaps shut behind her, leaving him alone in the passage.

The ribbon from Kyra’s straw hat is hanging from the bib pocket of Mike’s overalls. He tries the door she has just used, but its knob will not turn; when he strikes the wood, it feels like dense metal. The vanished child and the sealed exit establish the passage’s central danger: a door can be a way forward for one person and an absolute boundary for another. The small ribbon, left behind on Mike, also ties their separate routes together.

Choosing a way out

Mike understands his predicament as being in the between-time, a place reached by slipping through the cracks. He recalls Jo’s warning that he must keep going if he does not want to be trapped there, perhaps forever. With no route back through Kyra’s door and no other way forward, he tries the door marked with his typewriter. Its knob turns, opening onto another pine-smelling corridor that makes him think of a long coffin. He enters, and the door slams shut behind him.

The corridors turn seemingly at random. At a pair of arched doorways, Mike hears the bell on Bunter faintly through the opening to his left and chooses that way. The bell grows louder as he walks; thunder joins it, and the air changes from autumn cool to stifling heat. His clothes change too: the bib overalls and clodhopper shoes are gone, replaced by thermal underwear and itchy socks. At a later fork, another voice from the dark speaks about the President’s wife and blood on her stockings, suggesting that other times or scenes press into the same route.

Twice more Mike chooses the opening through which Bunter’s bell can be heard. The sound functions as a guide through a place without a reliable map, drawing him toward his own life even as the surroundings shift. The passage is navigable, but only through partial clues: a familiar bell, changing air, changed clothes, and the reappearance of recognizable domestic space.

Return, with evidence

Mike eventually realizes that his feet and ankles no longer itch and that his thighs are no longer sweating inside the long underwear. He is in his living room, threading around the furniture in the dark. Faint light comes through the windows, and the waggy-cat clock in the kitchen reads five past five. He goes to the sink for water, then moves down the north-wing corridor by the bathroom nightlight and returns to bed. The sudden domestic specificity of the clock, furniture, and nightlight makes the return tangible after the corridor’s unstable geography.

At first, Mike calls the experience an extraordinarily vivid dream of the Fryeburg Fair. But he rejects that explanation: he still has the blue silk ribbon from Kyra’s hat, and when he breathes into his cupped hands he smells pine. He also sees a smear of sap on his finger. Those physical details carry the passage across the boundary with him, resisting the easy division between dream and waking life. The ribbon is no longer simply a keepsake: it is evidence that Kyra’s route through the door and Mike’s journey through the corridors had consequences beyond his sleep.

The experience ends not in calm certainty but in an abrupt return to danger. As Mike lies down, thunder rumbles; then a scream tears through the house. He recognizes it as Jo’s and cries out for whoever is hurting her to stop. The Between-Time has delivered him back to the house, but not to safety. Its narrative force lies in that incomplete return: Mike has crossed an impossible space and brought back proof, yet the ordinary world he re-enters is itself under threat.