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knee with the point of its daggerlike muzzle.
    It had bit him!
    He screamed and kicked. He wanted a tool to pry the monster off himself, a stick, a knife, but there was nothing to hand except these brittle, useless weeds.
    Then the creature abruptly uncoiled — as if, Buckley thought, it had tasted something unpleasant — and writhed away into the undergrowth.
    Buckley regained his composure and turned to face the horrified sailors. The pain in his leg was not great. He took a series of deep, lung-filling breaths. He meant to say something reassuring, to tell the men not to be frightened. But he fainted before he could muster the words.
    The seamen dragged him back to the launch and sailed for the Oregon . They were careful not to touch his leg, which had already begun to swell.
     
    That afternoon five Second-Class passengers stormed the bridge demanding to be allowed to leave the ship. They were Irishmen and they recognized Cork Harbor even in this altered guise; they had families inland and meant to go searching for survivors.
    Captain Davies had taken the landing party’s report. He doubted these men would get more than a few yards inland before fear and superstition, if not the wildlife, turned them back. He stared them down and persuaded them to go belowdecks, but it was a near thing and it worried him. He distributed pistols to his chief officers and asked the wireless operator how soon they might expect to see another ship.
    “Not long, sir. There’s a Canadian Pacific freighter less than an hour away.”
    “Very well. You might tell them we’re waiting… and give them some warning what to expect.”
    “Yes, sir. But—”
    “But what?”
    “I don’t know how to say it, sir. It’s all so strange.”
    Davies put his hand on the radioman’s shoulder. “No one understands it. I’ll write a message myself.”
     
    Rafe Buckley was running a fever, but by dinner the swelling in his leg had gone down, he was ambulatory, and he insisted on accepting Davies’ offer to join him at the captain’s table for dinner.
    Buckley ate sparingly, sweated profusely, and to Davies’ disappointment, spoke little. Davies had wanted to hear about what the ship’s officers were already calling “the New World.” Buckley had not only set foot on that alien soil, he had been sampled by the wildlife.
    But Buckley had not finished his roast beef before he stood uncertainly and made his way back to the infirmary, where, to the Captain’s astonishment, he died abruptly at half past midnight. Damage to the liver, the ship’s surgeon speculated. Perhaps a new toxin. Difficult to say, prior to the autopsy.
    It was like a dream, Davies thought, a strange and terrible dream. He cabled the ships that had begun to arrive at Queenstown, Liverpool, the French ports, with news of the death and a warning not to go ashore without, at least, hip boots and a sidearm.
    White Star dispatched colliers and supply ships from Halifax and New York as the sheer enormity of what had happened began to emerge from the welter of cables and alarms. It was not just Queenstown that had gone missing; there was no Ireland, no England, no France or Germany or Italy… nothing but wilderness north from Cairo and west at least as far as the Russian steppes, as if the planet had been sliced apart and some foreign organism grafted into the wound.
    Davies wrote a cable to Rafe Buckley’s father in Maine. A terrible thing to have to do, he thought, but the mourning would be far from singular. Before long, he thought, the whole world would be mourning.
     
1912: August
    Later — during the troubled times, when the numbers of the poor and the homeless rose so dramatically, when coal and oil grew so expensive, when there were bread riots in the Common and Guilford’s mother and sister left town to stay (who could say for how long?) with an aunt in Minnesota — Guilford often accompanied his father to the print shop. He couldn’t be left at home, and his school