"Gus, come on in!" said Mr. Read as he enthusiastically shook the rabbit man's hand. "I haven't seen you in years! What've you been doing?"

"You shouldn't need to ask that," replied the smirking Winslow. Mrs. Read rose politely to her feet as the man stepped into the kitchen. "I'm Witch Boy Winslow, remember?"

"I'm, uh, pleased to meet you," said Mrs. Read, extending a hand.

"This is my wife, Jane," Mr. Read told Winslow, who greeted the woman warmly. "Jane, this is Angus Winslow. We went to high school together in Newhaven."

"You picked a good one, Dave," said Winslow, admiring Mrs. Read's attractive face. "I wasn't so lucky. We fought for a year, then we split up."

"Sorry to hear that," said Mr. Read. "So you've been in Salem all this time, working at the witch museum?"

"I'm curator now," Winslow informed him.

Mr. Read turned to his wife. "Gus gave up a basketball scholarship from Chapel Hill to go into the family business," he explained. "They own a witch museum in Salem. We used to call him Witch Boy Winslow because he talked about witchcraft and witch trials all the time."

"I'm quite knowledgeable about the subject," Winslow boasted. "I can recite the entire text of the Malleus Maleficarum, in either English or Latin."

"The what?" Mr. Read became confused.

"The Hammer of Witches," Winslow translated. "An anti-witch guide for inquisitors. It came out in 1486."

"That's very interesting," said Mrs. Read insincerely. "Now why don't we go into the living room where we can sit and chat?"

"An excellent idea," Winslow agreed.

He followed the Read parents into the living room, where D.W. and Nadine were still on the couch, engrossed in their children's TV show. "Girls," Mrs. Read said to them, "we have a guest in the house, so it's time to turn off the TV."

"But, Mom!" D.W. whined. "We're watching New Moo Revue!"

Winslow turned to Mr. Read and complimented him. "What lovely girls. The one with the tail is yours, I take it."

"You and Nadine can go upstairs and play with your toys," Mrs. Read told D.W.

"But I wanna watch New Moo Revue!" D.W. complained bitterly.

While the two argued, Nadine jumped down from the couch and stood in front of Winslow, looking up and down at the man in wonder. "Wow, you're really tall, mister," she remarked.

"You can call me Gus," said Winslow, bending over to pat the girl on the head.

"My name's Nadine Harris," said Nadine, giggling bashfully.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Read was making no headway with the obstinate D.W. "Why do you have to turn off the TV when one of your friends comes over?" the girl protested.

"Because when one of our friends comes over, we like to talk instead of watching..." Mrs. Read began, but Winslow put up a hand to cut her off.

"Let me deal with this," offered the rabbit man. "Now, D.W., be a good little girl, and do what your mother says." As he spoke, he waved his right hand, on which he wore the jade-colored ring, back and forth in front of D.W.'s face.

A strange feeling came over D.W., and she began to realize that she was misbehaving, and should respect and obey her mother. A dopey smile spread over her face. "Yes, sir," she said cheerfully. Hopping down from the couch, she led Nadine up the stairs and into her bedroom.

Mrs. Read watched in astonishment as the girls made their exit, then turned to Winslow. "You're very good with children," she observed. "We should bring you on as a babysitter."

She turned off the television, then sat in a chair opposite her husband and Winslow, who had occupied the warm spots on the couch. "I think you'll find her easier to deal with now," Winslow told her. "For a little while, anyway."

----

At the same time, Alan and Prunella were seated on opposite ends of a small table in Prunella's bedroom, writing down ideas for their history report.

"Alvin Matheson was the reverend at the time," Prunella related. "Nobody really knows what his motivations were. The trials in Salem had a lot to do with politics and established local families, but Reverend Matheson had no connections when he moved to Davenport. He just showed up and started preaching against witches."

"Uh-huh," said Alan, who appeared to be gazing into the distance instead of paying attention.

"Charity Proctor had four sons," Prunella went on. "Their names were Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. They were all born within five years of each other. My dad's a descendant of Luke Proctor. For some reason they used their mother's last name instead of their father's. We still don't know who Charity's husband was."

"Right," mumbled Alan.

"Are you okay?" asked Prunella, noticing that the boy seemed almost to be in a trance.

Alan shook his head in frustration. "Oh, I'm sorry. I...I just can't get my mind off that locket."

"I don't think my mom's gonna sell it," Prunella opinionated. "I think she should. It's a lot of money, and I think it would be better to put the locket in a glass case and let everybody see it, than to just stow it in a trunk."

"It's in a trunk?" Alan suddenly looked startled. "Where?"

"In the attic," Prunella answered.

Moments later, Prunella was leading Alan up the stairway into the darkened attic of the Prufrock house. She pulled on a string that was hanging from the ceiling, causing a lightbulb to switch on. "I wonder if we should get my mom's permission first," she said to Alan as she made her way to a row of three old trunks sitting against the back wall.

"You don't have to let me touch it," Alan replied. "I just want to see what it looks like inside."

With a little effort, Prunella pushed open the lid of the center trunk. Alan secretly hoped that Mrs. Prufrock hadn't noticed the creaking sound (of course, rat people, with their tiny ears, didn't have very sensitive hearing).

Eagerness filled Alan's heart as Prunella reached into the ancient trunk. He had never felt so curious about anything in his life, not even cellular mitosis. It seemed as if the locket had some strange power over him...

"Here it is," Prunella announced quietly. She had one hand placed over the other as she withdrew her arms from the trunk. As she raised one arm to close the lid of the trunk, Alan gazed upon the gold-colored locket in her other hand and felt his self-control weakening. He lifted his hands in spite of himself. "Must...touch..." he said monotonically, unable to refrain from reaching for the precious keepsake...

...but as soon as he laid his fingers on the locket, it burst into flames.

"Argh!" cried Prunella in terror. The top half of the locket had flown off, hit the ceiling, and rebounded onto the floor; now both halves were belching fire. She quickly tossed away the part of the locket in her hand before it could singe her fingers. Snapped out of his trance by the sudden conflagration, Alan looked back and forth between his fingers and the two locket portions that lay erupting on the floor.

"Fire!" Prunella shouted, and raced toward the stairway leading down from the attic. Alan, too confused and frightened to follow, watched as the flames pouring from the locket halves gradually died down. Soon only wisps of smoke rose from them, and then those were quenched as well.

As he looked over the scorched remains of the locket, Alan realized he had done something seriously wrong. The heirloom had been quite valuable, both to the Prufrocks and Mr. Winslow, due to its historicity. He hadn't just broken a window or knocked over a scientific display--he had ruined something irreplaceable. The only thing he couldn't figure out was, how had he done it? Neither he nor Prunella had anything in their possession that might have started a blaze.

"Uh, pardon me," came a girl's voice from a few feet away.

At first Alan assumed that Prunella had returned with an extinguisher. He looked up from the damaged locket...and gasped in surprise.

Standing before him was not Prunella, but a girl the likes of which he had never seen before. She was a rat girl, a few inches shorter than Alan, wearing a pink, ruffled colonial dress that went all the way to the floor, and a white bonnet over her waist-length brown hair. She was glancing around the room with an expression of dizzy wonder, as if she had just arrived from another planet.

I've gone back in time, was the first thought to enter Alan's mind. A quick look around at his surroundings reassured him that he was still in Prunella's attic.

The strange, anachronistically dressed girl looked at Alan and spoke. "Young lad, wilt thou kindly tell me what year this is?" Her accent was similar to Beat Simon's, only less refined.

Feeling uneasy about the destruction of the locket and the sudden appearance of a girl who seemed to have wandered in from the set of Little House on the Prairie, Alan took a few seconds to gather his courage. "It's 2004," he finally told her.

The girl's eyes went wide. "Good heavens!" she exclaimed. "Is it truly the year of our Lord two thousand and four?"

Alan nodded.

The colonially-dressed girl shook her head in disbelief. "Three hundred years," she muttered. Bending over, she laid her hand on one of the locket segments, only to withdraw her fingers and grimace when she felt the still-hot metal.

"Who are you?" asked Alan.

The girl straightened herself, grasped her skirt, lifted it up slightly, and curtsied. "My name is Dolores Maria Proctor," she told him. "Thou mayest call me Dolly."

TBC