Cabin on the Coast Question

Roy C. Lackey · 29 May 2008, 07:23 · from 2008-May.txt.gz

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From: rclackey at stic.net (Roy C. Lackey)
Date: Thu, 29 May 2008 02:23:58 -0500
Subject: (urth) Cabin on the Coast Question
Message-ID: <000a01c8c15c$f92d32a0$dcd14a0c at rclackey.stic.net>

Dave Tallman wrote:
>1) Lissy was awake and sitting up when Tim entered on the day of the damp
>towel.
>
>2) There are five wooden steps leading up to the beach cottage, and they
>creak.
>
>3) The cottage has two windows, opposite each other (early morning light
>from one enters the other).
>
>4) Tim and Lissy apparently went straight to bed the night before without a
>swim. Lissy's clothes were kicked under the bed. No bags were unpacked from
>the car.
>
>5) Lissy didn't swim herself that morning. Her swimsuit was still in the
>car.
>
>It looks like Lissy received another visitor while Tim was swimming. That
>person came from the sea and dried off, leaving the towel damp and sandy.
He
>could have left by the back window when he heard the creaking steps.
>
>That visitor was not Big Tim, because Lissy says "You did come" at the end.
>
>Who else could it be? Why not Daniel O'Donoghue himself? He can take any
>form and might well have seduced Lissy, a preliminary move before her
>abduction. He's not immune to the urge if one of his forms is a satyr. The
>reference to "unwillin' girls" is deceptive.

That's possible, but there is a problem with the timeline. When the King
said that things would be as they were before Lissy was taken, he didn't
specify exactly how long before she was taken. Was it a minute? An hour? A
day? And was the time the same for her as it was for Tim?

Lissy disappeared on their second morning at the cabin. The night before
that, they had built a driftwood fire on the beach and emptied a bottle of
wine. When Tim came back to the real world from the otherworld, the sun was
just coming up. On the beach, he saw the tide-washed remnants of that fire
and the empty wine bottle. So he came back to reality on the second morning
they had been at the cabin, to find Lissy naked but safe in bed, and Tim
himself had aged quite a bit.

Tim was told that Lissy would remember nothing of her abduction, because
there would be nothing to remember; the abduction would never have happened,
just as Tim would never have spoken to the cop. Tim lost a complete
twenty-four hours, from the morning she disappeared to the morning he swam
out to look for her. Was time turned back forty-eight hours for Lissy, to
the first morning at the cabin?

If that is so, then there is no reason she should not remember her
hypothetical fairy lover, because that would have happened a full day before
her abduction. Will she go down to the water the next morning again to seek
him? If the King had the power to turn back the clock for Lissy, why not
turn it back to before his alleged seduction of her and avoid the problem?
In which case he would have no need to leave a used towel behind.

-Roy

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