[Verse 1] The brass door buckled when the clock struck nine, A ticket in my pocket said, “One stop: Salem, ’92.” I stepped through the furnace smoke and found the road gone still, A girl in a black wool coat stood watching from the hill. She asked what year I’d come from; I said, “Far enough away.” She studied my strange coat, then turned and walked away. I carried no bright promise, no gift beneath my arm, Just one bad map and a machine that hummed its warning charm. [Chorus] Past the iron gate, where the old names sleep, One wrong turn and the roots run deep. The pages curl; the bell rope sways, We walked out strangers through a borrowed age. [Verse 2] The meetinghouse was shuttered; the square was hard with frost, Each witness held a different truth, each truth a thing they’d lost. She showed me where the river cut the edge of town, Then asked if every story ends with someone hunted down. I said, “Not every one,” but the gears began to grind, A thin red warning crossed the face of borrowed time. We ran past split-rail fences as the courthouse windows flared, The machine was waiting by the road; nobody else was there. [Chorus] Past the iron gate, where the old names sleep, One wrong turn and the roots run deep. The pages curl; the bell rope sways, We walked out strangers through a borrowed age. [Bridge] At the doorway she stopped, with the dawn at her back, “Take your year with you. Don’t come looking back.” I turned the brass key; the whole field went white, Then a hand touched the glass from the far side of night. [Outro] My own street waited, quiet and plain, But the clock in the kitchen had stopped again. A folded note lay where the gears had been: “Next stop: the place where it all begins.”
