Every so often, she would look over her shoulder, oh so discreetly, trying to distract herself from the whirling mess going on.

He catches up.  She runs faster.  He pulls her arm and angrily looks at her.  ”Where are you going?”

She stiffens.  

“I think you should come back.”  His voice was soothing, calming, no hypnotic is what it was.  She had to resist it, she had to.   He lets go of her.  ”Come back.  Home.”

She thinks about it  Come back home, where the plantation was, where she would be whipped again, it was all too displeasing a thought.  Yet his voice… it was so magical and promising.  She feels as though she is being drawn in to the master with his honeyed way of speaking and his long empty promises.  

“Let’s go”, he whispers.

“Let’s go”, she whispers back.  He starts down the trail, and she follows after him, towards her home.  

He smiles, his job done, and that evil, dark feeling twists inside of him, thinking of the terrible punishments that will await this little runaway slave.

She seems to sense this change in mood too, and is awakened from her sleeping beauty sleep.  This is wrong, she senses, and ever oh so quietly slips onto the secret path to the Railroad.

He walks for a bit, weighed down by his own thoughts.  The footsteps have stopped.  Did they stop a longer time ago, he wonders angrily.  He roars with frustration.

The catcher roars, and she darts faster, her breath heavy with indecision and adrenaline.

She has gone too far, he realizes, even more furious.  He will never get her back.  ”What about home?!”  He spits into the darkness.  Almost tantalizingly, the voice inside his head answers for her.

“I am home.”