A Bridge of Years

Eleven


How did it feel to begin life over again, thirty years in the past?

Giddy, Tom thought. Strange. Exhilarating.

And—more often now—frightening.

It wasn't clear to him when or why the fear had started. Maybe it had been there all along, a subtler presence than now. Maybe it had started when he moved into the house on the Post Road, a steady counterpoint to all the raucous events since. Maybe he'd been born with it.

But it wasn't fear, exactly; it was a kind of systematic disquiet . . . and he felt it most profoundly on a hot Thursday afternoon in July, when he could have sworn, but couldn't prove, that somebody followed him from Lindner's Radio Supply to Larry Millstein's apartment.



The day had gone well. Since he'd taken this job Tom had turned in enough reliable work that Max mainly left him alone. The cavernous back room of Lindner's had begun to feel homey and familiar. Hot days like this, he tipped open the high leaded windows to let the alley breezes through. He was working on a Fisher amplifier a customer had brought in; the output tube had flashed over and one of the power-supply electrolytics was leaking. The capacitors were oil-filled, the kind eliminated under an EPA edict—some years in the future—for their PCB content. The danger, at least at this end of the manufacturing process, was far from mortal. At lunch, Max asked him why he kept the fan so close to his work. "I don't like the smell," Tom said.

Toxins aside, Tom had developed a respect for these old American radios and amplifiers. The up-market models were simple, well built, and substantial—the sheer weight of them was sometimes astonishing. Iron-core transformers, steel chassis, oak cabinets, a pleasure to work with. The job was underpaid and offered absolutely no opportunity for advancement, but for Tom it functioned as therapy: something pleasant to do with his hands and a paycheck at the end of the week.

And still—long since the novelty should have worn off— he would look up from his soldering at the calendar on the wall, where the year 1962 was inscribed over a picture of a chunky woman in a lime-green one-piece bathing suit, and he would feel a dizzy urge to laugh out loud.

What was time, after all, except a lead-footed march from the precincts of youth into the country of the grave? Time was the force that crumbled granite, devoured memory, and seduced infants into senility—as implacable as a hanging judge and as poetic as a tank. And yet, here he was—almost thirty years down a road that shouldn't exist; in the past, where nobody can visit.


He was no younger than he had been and he was nothing like immortal. But time had been suborned and that made him happy.

"You're always looking at that calendar," Max said. "I think you're in love with that girl." "Head over heels," Tom said.

"That's the calendar from Mirvish's. They use the same picture every year. Every summer since 1947, the same girl in the same bathing suit. She's probably an old lady now."

"She's a time traveler," Tom said. "She's always young." "And you're a fruitcake," Max explained. "Please, go back to work."



Certain other implications of this time travel business had not escaped him.

It was 1962 in New York. Therefore it was 1962 all over the country—all over the world, in fact; therefore it was 1962 in Belltower, Washington, and both his parents were alive.

Somewhere in the Great Unwinding—perhaps at step number forty-eight or sixty-three or one hundred twenty-one in the tunnel between the Post Road and Manhattan—a log truck had swerved backward up a mountain road; a bright blue sedan had vaulted an escarpment onto the highway; two bodies had shuddered to life as the dashboard peeled away from the seats and the engine sprang back beneath the hood.

In 1962, in Belltower, a young GP named Winter had recently opened a residential practice serving the middle-class neighborhood north of town. His wife had borne him two sons; the younger, Tommy, had his fourth birthday coming up in November.

They are all living in the big house on Poplar Street, Tom thought, with Daddy's offices downstairs and living quarters up. If I went there, I could see them. Big as fife.

He pictured them: his father in a black Sunday suit or medical whites, his mother in a floral print dress, and between them, maybe a yard high in baby Keds, something unimaginable: himself.

One morning when Joyce was off doing restaurant work and he was home feeling a little lonely, he picked up the telephone and dialed the long-distance operator. He said he wanted to place a call to Belltower, Washington, to Dr. Winter's office on Poplar Street. The phone rang three times, a distant buzzing, and a woman answered. My mother's voice. It was a paralyzing thought. What could he possibly say?

But it wasn't his mother. It was his father's nurse, Miss Trudy Valasquez, whom he dimly remembered: an immense Hispanic woman with orthopedic shoes and peppermint breath. Dr. Winter was out on call, she said, and who was this, anyway?

"It's nothing urgent," Tom said. "I'll try again later."

Much later. Maybe never. There was something perverse about the act. It felt wrong, to disturb that innocent household with even as much as an anonymous call—too tangled and Oedipal, too entirely strange.

Then he thought, But I have to call them. I have to warn them.

Warn them not to go traveling up the coast highway on a certain date some fifteen years from now.

Warn them, in order to save their lives. So that Tom could go to med school, as his father had insisted; so that he wouldn't meet Barbara, wouldn't marry her, wouldn't divorce her, wouldn't buy a house up the Post Road, wouldn't travel into the past, wouldn't make a phone call, wouldn't warn them, wouldn't save their lives.

Would, perhaps, loop infinitely between these possibilities, as ghostly as Schroedinger's cat.

This was the past, Tom told himself, and the past must be immutable—including the death of his parents. Nothing else made sense. If the past was fluid and could be changed, then it was up to Tom to change it: warn airliners about bombs, waylay Oswald at the Book Depository, clear the airport lobbies before the gunmen arrived ... an impossible, unbearable burden of moral responsibility.

For the sake of sense and for the sake of sanity, the past must be a static landscape. If he told Pan Am a plane was going to go down, they wouldn't believe him. If he flew to Dallas to warn the President, he'd miss his plane or suffer a heart attack at the luggage carousel. He didn't know what unseen hand would orchestrate these events, only that the alternative was even less plausible. If he tried to change history, he would fail . . . that was all there was to it. Dangerous even to experiment.

But he thought about that call often. Thought about warning them. Thought about saving their lives.

It was hardly urgent. For now and for many years to come they were alive, happy, young, safer than they knew.

But as the date drew closer—if he stayed here, if he lived that long—then, Tom thought, he might have to make the call, risk or no risk ... or know they had died when he could have saved them.

Maybe that was when the fear began.



He slept with these thoughts, woke chastened, and rode the bus to Lindner's. He regarded the girl on the calendar with a new sobriety. Today her expression seemed enigmatic, clouded.

"You're still in love with her," Max observed. "Look at her face, Max. She knows something." "She knows you're a lunatic," Max said.



He lost himself in his work. The day's biggest surprise was a call from Larry Millstein: apologies for the incident at the party and would he come over that afternoon? Meet Joyce at the apartment, the three of them could go to dinner, make peace. Tom accepted, then phoned Joyce to make sure she was free. "I already talked to Lawrence," she said. "I think he's reasonably sincere. Plus, you're too popular these days. Avoiding you is beginning to interfere with his social life."

"Should I be nice? Is it worth the trouble?"

"Be nice. He's neurotic and he can be mean sometimes. But if he were a total loss I would never have slept with him in the first place."

"That's reassuring."

"You both like jazz. Talk about music. On second thought, don't."

He left the shop at six. It was a warm afternoon, the buses were crowded; he decided to walk. The weather had been fine for days. The sky was blue, the air was reasonably clean, and he had no reason to feel uneasy.

Nevertheless, the uneasiness began as soon as he stepped out of Lindner's front door and it intensified with every step he took.

At first he dismissed it. He'd been through some novel experiences in the last few months and a little paranoia, at this stage, was perhaps not too surprising. But he couldn't dismiss the uneasiness or the thoughts it provoked, memories he had neglected: of the tunnel, of the machine bugs, of their warning.

He recalled the rubble in the sub-basement of the building near Tompkins Square. Someone had been there before him, someone dangerous. But Tom had passed that way safely, and his anonymity would be guaranteed in a city as vast as New York—wouldn't it?

He told himself so. Nevertheless, as he walked east on Eighth toward Millstein's shabby East Village neighborhood, his vague anxiety resolved into a solid conviction that he was being followed. He paused across the street from Millstein's tenement building and turned back. Puerto Rican women moved between the stoops and storefronts; three children crossed the street at a fight. There were two Anglos visible: a large, pale woman steering a baby stroller and a middle-aged man with a brown paper bag tucked under his arm. So who in this tableau was stalking him?

Probably no one. Bad case of coffee nerves, Tom thought. And maybe a little guilt. Guilt about what he'd left behind. Guilt about what he'd found. Guilt about falling in love in this strange place.

He stepped off the curb and into the path of an oncoming cab. The driver leaned into his horn and swerved left, passing him by inches, unidentified man killed on city street—maybe that was history, too.



After some nervous overtures they adjourned to Stanley's, where Millstein drank and relaxed.


They talked about music in spite of Joyce's warning. It turned out Millstein had been an avid jazz fan since he arrived here, "a callow youth from Brooklyn," at the end of the forties. He was an old Village hand; he'd met Kerouac once or twice—an observation which plunged Tom into one more "time travel" epiphany. Giants had walked here, he thought. "Though of course," Millstein added, "that scene is long dead."

Joyce mentioned her friend Susan. Susan had written another letter from the South, where she was getting death threats because of her affiliation with the SNCC. One enterprising recidivist had delivered a neatly wrapped package of horse manure to the door of her motel room.

Millstein shrugged. "Everybody's too political. It's tiresome. I'm tired of protest songs, Joyce."

"And I'm tired of passive pseudo-Zen navel-gazing," Joyce said. "There's a world out there."

"A world run by men in limousines who don't much listen to music. As far as the world is concerned, guitar playing is a minor-league activity."

Joyce inspected the depths of her beer. "Maybe Susan's right, then. I should be doing something more direct."

"Like what? Freedom riding? Picketing? Essentially, you know, it's still guitar playing. It'll be tolerated as long as it serves some purpose among the powerful—federalism, in the present instance. And tidied up when they're done with it."

"That's about the most cynical thing I've heard you say, Lawrence. Which covers some territory. Didn't Gandhi make a remark about 'speaking truth to power'?"

"Power doesn't give a flying f*ck, Joyce. That should be obvious."

"So what's the alternative?"

"Il faut cultiver notre jardin. Or write a poem."

"Like Ginsberg? Ferlinghetti? That's pretty political stuff."

"You miss the point. They're saying, here's the ugliness, and here's my revulsion—and here's the mystery buried in it."

"Mystery?"

"Beauty, if you like."

"Making art out of junk," Joyce interpreted. "You could say that."

"While people starve? While people are beaten?"

"Before / starve," Millstein said. "Before I'm beaten. Yes, I'll make these beautiful objects."

"And the world is better for it?"

"The world is more beautiful for it."

"You sound like the Parks Commission." She turned to Tom. "How about you? Do you believe in poetry or politics?"

"Never gave much thought to either one," Tom said.

"Behold," Lawrence said. "The Noble Savage." ? Tom considered the question. "I suppose you do what you have to. But we're all pretty much impotent in the long run. I don't make national policy. At most, I vote. When it's convenient. Henry Kissinger doesn't drop in and say, 'Hey, Tom, what about this China thing?' "

Millstein looked up from his drink. "Who the hell is Henry Kissinger?"

Joyce was a little drunk and very intense, frowning at him across the table. "You're saying we don't make a difference?"

"Maybe some people make a difference. Martin Luther King, maybe. Khrushchev. Kennedy."

"People whose names begin with K," Millstein supplied.

"But not us," Joyce insisted. "We don't make a difference. Is that what you mean?"

"Christ, Joyce, I don't know what I mean. I'm not a philosopher."

"No. You're not a repairman, either." She shook her head. "I wish I knew what the hell you were."

"There's your mistake," Millstein said. "Dear Joyce. Next time you go to bed with somebody, make sure you're formally introduced."



Millstein drank until he loved the world. This was his plan. He told them so. "It doesn't always work. Well, you know that. But sometimes. Drink until the world is lovable. Good advice." The evening wore on.

They parted around midnight, on the sidewalk, Avenue B. Millstein braced himself against Tom's breastbone. "I'm sorry," he said. "I mean, about before. I was an a*shole!"

"It's okay," Tom said.

Millstein looked at Joyce. "You be good to her, Tom." "I will. Of course I will."

"She doesn't know why we love her and hate her. But it's for the same reason, of course. Because she's this ... this pocket of faith. She believes in virtue! She comes to this city and sings songs about courage. My God! She has the courage of a saint. It's her element. Even her vices are meticulous. She's not merely good in bed, she's good—in bed!"

"Shut up," Joyce said. "Lawrence, you shit! Everybody can hear you."

Millstein turned to her and took her face between his hands, drunkenly but gently. "This is not an insult, dear. We love you because you're better than we are. But we're jealous of your goodness and we will scour it out of you if we possibly can."

"Go home, Lawrence."

He wheeled away. "Good night!"

"Good night," Tom said. But it didn't feel like such a good night. It was hot. It was dark. He was sweating.



He walked home with Joyce leaning into his shoulder. She was still somewhat drunk; he was somewhat less so. The conversation had made her sad. She paused under a streetlight and looked at him mournfully.

She said, "You're not immortal anymore!"

"Sorry to disappoint you."

"No, no! When you came here, Tom, you were immortal. I was sure of it. The way you walked. The way you looked at everything. Like this was all some fine, wonderful place where nothing could hurt you. I thought you must be immortal—the only explanation."

He said, "I'm sorry I'm not immortal."

She fumbled her key into the front door of the building.

The apartment was hot. Tom stripped down to his T-shirt and briefs; Joyce ducked out of her shirt. The sight of her in the dim light provoked a flash of pleasure. He had lived in this apartment for more than a month and familiarity only seemed to intensify his feelings about her. When he met her she had been emblematic, Joyce who lived in the Village in 1962; now she was Joyce Casella from Minneapolis whose father owned Casella's Shoe Store, whose mother phoned twice monthly to plead with her to find a husband or at least a better job; whose sister had borne two children by a decent practicing Catholic named Tosello. Joyce who was shy about her thick prescription lenses and the birthmark on her right shoulder. Joyce who carried a wonderful singing voice concealed inside her, like a delicate wild bird allowed to fly on rare and special occasions. This ordinary, daily Joyce was superior to the emblematic Joyce and it was this Joyce he had come to love.

But she was ignoring him. She rummaged through a stack of papers by the bookcase, mainly phone bills; Tom asked her what she was looking for.

"Susan's letter. The one I was telling Lawrence about. She said I could call. 'Call anytime,' she said. She wants me to go down there. There's so much work to do! Jesus, Tom, what time is it? Midnight? Hey, Tom, is it midnight in Georgia?"

He felt a ripple of worry. "What do you mean—you want to call her tonight?"

"That's the idea."

"What for?"

"Make arrangements."

"What arrangements?"

She stood up. "What I said wasn't just bullshit. I meant it. What good am I here? I should be down there with Susan doing some real work."

He was astonished. He hadn't anticipated this.

"You're drunk," he said.

"Yeah, I'm a little drunk. I'm not too drunk to think about the future."

Maybe Tom was a little drunk, too. The future! This was both funny and alarming. "You want the future? I can give you the future."


She frowned and set aside the papers. "What?"

"It's dangerous, Joyce. People get killed, for Christ's sake." He thought about the civil rights movement circa 1962. What he recalled was a jumble of headlines filtered through books and TV documentaries. Bombs in churches, mobs attacking buses, Klansmen with riot sticks and sawed-off shotguns. He pictured Joyce in the midst of this. The thought was intolerable. "You can't."

She held out the letter, postmarked Augusta.

"They need me."

"The hell they do. One more earnest white college graduate isn't going to turn the tide, for Christ's sake. They have TV. They have pinheaded southern sheriffs beating women on all three networks. They have friends in the Kennedy administration. After the assassination—" He was drunker than he'd realized. He was giving away secrets. But that didn't matter. "After the assassination they'll have Lyndon Johnson signing civil rights legislation while Vietnam escalates. You want the future? Vietnam, Woodstock, Nixon, Watergate, Jimmy Carter, Ayatollah Khomeini, the whole f*cking parade of cliches, with or without the help of Joyce Casella. Please," he said. "Please don't go get killed before we know each other better."

"Sometimes I wonder if I know you at all. What's all this shit about the future?"

"That's where I'm from."

She looked at him fiercely. "Tell me the truth or get out of my apartment."



He described in broad and clumsy outline the train of events that had carried him here.

Joyce listened with focused patience but didn't begin to believe him until he brought out his wallet and unpacked his ID from the card windows—his Washington State driver's license, his Visa card, an expired American Express card, a card to access bank machines; from the billfold, a couple of tens bearing a mint date twenty years in the future.

Joyce examined all these things solemnly. Finally she said, "Your watch."

He hadn't worn it since his first visit; it was in the left-hand pocket of his jeans. She must have seen it. "It's just a cheap digital watch. But you're right. You can't buy those here."

He backed off and let her contemplate these things. He was a little more sober for the telling of it and he wondered whether this had been a terrible mistake. It must be frightening. God knows, it had frightened him.

But she fingered the cards and the money, then sighed and looked at him fearlessly.

"I'll make coffee," she said. "I guess we don't sleep tonight."

"I guess we don't," Tom said.



She held the cup in both hands as if it were anchoring her to the earth.

"Tell me again," she said. "Tell me how you came here." He rubbed his eyes. "Again?" "Again. Slower."

He took a deep breath and began.



By the time he finished it was past two a.m. The street outside was quiet, the light of the room seemed strange and sterile. He was dazed, sleepy, hung over. Joyce, however, was wide awake.

"It doesn't make sense," she said. "Why a tunnel between here and—what's it called? Bellfountain?"

"Belltower," Tom said. "I don't know. I didn't build it, Joyce. I found it."

"Anybody could have found it?"

"I suppose so."

"And no one else used it?"

"Someone must have. At least once. Used it and, I guess, abandoned it. But I don't know that for a fact."

She shook her head firmly. "I don't believe it."

He felt helpless. He had shown her all the evidence he possessed, explained it as calmly as possible—

"No, I mean—I know it's true. The cards, the money, the watch—maybe somebody could fake all that, but I doubt it. It's true, Tom, but I don't believe it. You understand what I'm saying? It's hard to look at you and tell myself this is a guy from the year 1989."

"What more can I do?"

"Show me," Joyce said. "Show me the tunnel." This wasn't the way he had meant it to happen.

He walked with her—it wasn't far—to the building near Tompkins Square.

"This place?" Joyce said. Meaning: a miracle—here? He nodded.

The street was silent and empty. Tom took his watch out of his pocket and checked it: three-fifteen, and he was dizzy with fatigue, already regretting this decision.

Later Tom would decide that the visit to the tunnel marked a dividing line; it was here that events had begun to spiral out of control. Maybe he sensed it already—an echo of his own future leaking through zones of fractured time.

He was reluctant to take her inside, suddenly certain it was a mistake to have brought her here at all. If he hadn't been drunk . . . and then weary beyond resistance . . .

She tugged his hand. "Show me."

And there was no plausible way to turn back. He took one more look at the bulk of the building, all those rooms and corridors he had never explored, a single window illuminated in the darkness.

He led her inside. The lobby was vacant, silent except for the buzzing of a defective fluorescent lamp. He grasped the handle of the door that led to the basement.

It wouldn't turn.

"Trouble?" Joyce inquired.

He nodded, frowning. "It wasn't locked before. I don't think it had a lock." He bent over the mechanism. "This looks new."

"Somebody installed a new lock?" "I think so."

"What does that mean?"

"I don't know. Could mean somebody knows I've been here. Could mean the janitor found some kids in the basement and decided it was time for new hardware."

“Is there a janitor?"

He shrugged.

She said, "But somebody must own the building. It's a matter of record, right? You could look it up at City Hall."

"I suppose so." It hadn't occurred to him. "Might be dangerous. This isn't a Nancy Drew mystery. I don't think we should draw attention to ourselves."

"If we don't open that door," Joyce pointed out, "you can never go home again."

"If we do open it, maybe they'll put in a better lock next time. Or post a guard." This was a chilling thought and he couldn't help looking past her, through the cracked glass of the outer door. But the street was empty.

"Maybe we can open it without being too obvious," Joyce said.

"We shouldn't even try. We should get the f*ck out of here."

"Hey, no! I'm not backing out now." Her grip on his hand tightened. "If this is true ... I want to see."

Tom looked at the lock more closely. Cheap lock. He took out his Visa card and slipped it between the door and the jamb. This worked on television but apparently not in real life; the card bumped into the bolt but failed to move it. "Give me your keys," he said.

Joyce handed him her key ring.

He tried several of the keys until he found one that slid into the lock. By twisting it until it caught some of the tumblers he was able to edge the bolt fractionally inward; then he forced the card up until the door sprang open an inch.

A gust of cool, dank air spilled through the opening.



He felt the change in Joyce as they descended. She had been cocky and reckless, daring him on; now she was silent, both hands clamped on his arm.

In the first sub-basement he tugged the cord attached to the naked forty-watt bulb overhead—it cast a cheerless pale circle across the floor. "We should have brought a flashlight."

"We probably should have brought an elephant gun. It's scary down here." She frowned at him. "This is real, isn't it?"

"As real as it gets."

The second lock, on the wooden door in the lowest sub-basement, had also been replaced. Joyce lit a series of matches while Tom examined the mechanism. Whoever had installed the lock had been in a hurry; the padlock was new and sturdy but the hasp was not. It was attached with three wood screws to the framing of the door; Tom levered the screws out with the edge of a dime and put them in his pocket.


Down into darkness.

They climbed over rubble. Joyce continued striking matches until Tom told her to stop; the fight was too feeble to be useful and he was worried about the flammable debris underfoot. She let the last match flicker out but flinched when the darkness closed over them. She said, "Are you sure—?

But then they were in the tunnel itself. A sourceless light illuminated the slow, precise curve of the walls ahead.



Joyce took a few steps forward. Tom hung back.

"It's really all true," she said. "My God, Tom! We could walk into the future, couldn't we? Just stroll a few decades down the road." She faced him. "Will you take me sometime?" Her cheeks were flushed. She looked fragile and feverish against these blunt white walls.

"I don't know if I can promise that. We're playing with something dangerous and we don't know how it works. I can't guarantee we're safe even just standing here. Maybe we're exposed to radiation. Maybe the air is toxic."

"None of that stopped you from coming here."

But that was before, Tom thought. When I had nothing to lose.

She touched the walls—smooth, slightly resilient, utterly seamless. "I wonder who built it? Haven't you thought about it?"

"Often," he said. "It must have been here at least ten years. Maybe longer." Maybe since the Indians occupied Manhattan. Maybe since Wouter van Twiller operated the Bossen Bouwerie in this district. Maybe Wouter had had a tunnel under his cowshed hereabouts. Maybe he knew it and maybe he didn't.

"People from the future," Joyce said. "Or Martians or something like that. It's like a 'Twilight Zone' episode, isn't it?" She drew a line in the dust with the point of her shoe. "How come it's broken at this end?"

"I don't know."

She said, "Maybe it was hijacked."

He blinked at the idea. Joyce went on, "The people who are supposed to use it aren't here. So somebody used it who wasn't supposed to . . . maybe fixed it so nobody could find him."

Tom considered it. "I suppose that's possible."

"There must be other tunnels. Otherwise it doesn't make sense. So maybe this one used to be connected somewhere— a junction. But somebody hijacked it, somebody sealed it off."

This was plausible; he couldn't formulate a better explanation. "But we don't really know."

"Hey," she said. "Nancy Drew is on the case."

Maybe, Tom thought, this would turn out all right. He had convinced her to turn around and go back—but then the strange thing happened.

Joyce saw it first.

"Look," she said. "Tom? What is that?"

He turned where she was pointing, already afraid.

What he saw was only a vague blur of luminescence against the uniform brightness of the tunnel, far away. He thought at first it might be some malfunction of the lights. Then Joyce squeezed his hand. "It's moving," she said.

Slowly but perceptibly, it was. It was moving toward them.

He guessed it might be a hundred yards away—maybe more.

He turned back to the rubble at the near end of the tunnel. They had wandered maybe thirty feet from it. Sprinting distance, Tom thought.

Joyce repeated, "What is that?" There was only a tremor of uncertainty in her voice—she wasn't frightened yet.

"I've never seen anything like it," Tom said. "Maybe we should get out while we can."



What he felt was not quite awe, not yet fear. The luminescence was bright and had taken on the suggestion of a shape. Tom hustled Joyce toward the exit, aware that he was in the presence of something he didn't understand, something akin to the tunnel itself: strange, powerful, beyond his comprehension.

This was the tunnel under the world, where demons and angels lived.



He paused at the place where the broken brick and old lathing and plaster had collapsed, because it was impossible to resist the urge to turn and look. Joyce did the same.

But the phenomenon had moved much faster than he'd guessed. It was almost on top of them.

He drew a breath, stepped back instinctively—and caught his heel on a brick, and fell. Joyce said, "Tom!" and tried to drag him up. The creature hovered over them both.



Tom couldn't find a word for the thing suspended in the air above him, almost close enough now to touch. Briefly, his fear was crowded out by a kind of abject wonder.

The shape of the apparition was indistinct—blurred at the edges—but approximately human.

Later, Tom reviewed his memory of the event and tried to reconstruct the creature in his mind. If you took a map of the human nervous system, he thought, modeled it in blue neon and surrounded it with a halo of opalescent light—that might come close.

It was translucent but not ghostly. There was no mistaking its physical presence. He felt the heat of it on his face. Joyce crouched beside him.

The creature had stopped moving. It was watching them, he thought—perhaps with the two opaque spots which occupied the position of eyes; perhaps in some other fashion.

This was terrifying—bearable only because the creature was utterly motionless.

Tom counted silently to ten, then backed up the piled rubble an inch or so.

The creature's attention followed him. But only that.

Joyce looked at him. He could tell by the grip of her hand that she was deeply frightened but still in control. He whispered, "Back up slowly. If it moves, stand still."

He didn't doubt the creature's immense power; he felt it all around him, felt it in the radiant heat on his exposed skin.

Joyce nodded tightly and they began to inch up the rubble and out of the tunnel. It occurred to Tom that this was the instinctive response to a dangerous large animal, no doubt wildly inappropriate here. He stared into the creature's eyespots and knew—absolutely wordlessly—that its interest in them was intense but momentary; that it could kill them if it wished; that it hadn't decided yet. This wasn't the random indecision of an animal but something much more focused, more intimate. A judgment.

Gazing into that pale blankness, he felt naked and small.

They had almost reached the welcome darkness of the basement when the creature vanished.



Later, he argued with Joyce about the way it had disappeared. Tom maintained that it simply blinked out of existence; Joyce said it had turned sideways in some way she couldn't describe—"Turned some corner we couldn't see."

They agreed that its absence was as sudden, absolute, and soundless as its appearance.



Joyce scrambled through the dark basement, pulling Tom up the stairs. He felt her trembling. This is my fault, he thought.

He made her wait while he put the hasp of the lock back on the wooden door. He fumbled in his pocket for the three screws and the dime to drive them with, sank the first two home and then dropped the last. Joyce said, "Christ, Tom!" —but held a match in one unsteady hand while he groped on his knees. The screw had rolled under the edge of the door and for one sinking moment he thought he'd have to pry off the hasp a second time to get the last screw back, which would be next to impossible in this dark bad-smelling basement full of who-knows-what-kind-of-impossible-monsters— but then he caught the head of the screw with his fingernail and managed to retrieve it.

He was as meticulous as his shaking hands would allow. He didn't want anyone to know he'd been here—though maybe that was impossible. But the idea of one more barrier between himself and the tunnel, no matter how flimsy, was reassuring.

He tightened the last screw and pocketed the dime. They climbed the stairs toward the lobby, Joyce leading now.


He pictured the top door, the one he'd opened with a credit card and Joyce's key. A terrifying thought: what if it had slipped shut? What if the bolt had slammed home and he couldn't open it again?

Then he saw the crack of light from the lobby, saw Joyce groping for the door, saw it open; and they tumbled out together, unsteady in the light, holding each other.





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