It was then that Murray Jensen thought of the one thing that had never occurred to Sandra Corlani’s Time Class students, but might have been possible for the ones who had time travelled by this mental consciousness method that he had used to reach Trudi Northumberland in the past. He had already tried to mentally reverse the process and return to the time from which he’d come, in the hopes of restoring his size too. That hadn’t worked. However, there was still one thing he might be able to do in order to extricate himself from his current dire predicament. What was to stop him from a course of action that involved, not reversing the journey to the past, but instead repeating it? If he could use the same technique to travel into the past again, further into the past, he could arrive at a point before Trudi had captured him in her back garden, with the knowledge that he should not reveal his presence to her. That would have saved him from being eaten by either the giant widow or 24 year old Trudi.

He was more than halfway down her throat, and he felt her neck muscles flexing and preparing to make the final gulp. He could hear her stomach acids rumbling and gurgling below him in the darkness. He knew that he probably had only seconds to make his move.

He concentrated on travelling further back in time, and closed his eyes.

Suddenly the feeling of being surrounded by her gulping throat went away, but he did feel a familiar and more pleasant sensation. Murray opened his eyes and looked around to see how far back he had come. He realised that the familiar pleasantness was in fact Trudi’s sleeping cheek. He wondered if having been heated up had reduced the range of his time travelling capacity. Then he dismissed that theory, as he recalled how heated up he’d been in the giant widow’s oven just before he successfully travelled back 15 years.

Perhaps it was the reduction in his size that had proportionately reduced his ability to time travel. He tried again, but couldn’t manage another journey into his own past. Here he was, less than 24 hours before the moment when he had been gulped most of the way down Trudi’s throat, lying right beside her on her pillow, with the knowledge that she would announce the renewal of her plan to eat him not long after waking up in the morning.

He remembered exactly what she had told him that morning, which in his memory was many hours earlier, but in real time would be coming up after she had slept for a few more hours.

He was lying against her cheek, not the top of her upper arm. So she had already woken up, gone to the bathroom, talked to him for a while, asked him to move off her neck, talked a little more, and then fallen asleep again. She said that she had decided to eat him after all only after she had woken up in the morning.