A Bridge of Years

Six


Tom Winter woke refreshed and ready for the last day he meant to endure in the decade of the 1980s.

It occurred to him that he was checking out only a little ahead of schedule. A few more months, January 1, the ball would drop, the crowds would cheer in the nineties. It was a kind of mass exodus, rats deserting the sinking ship of this decade for the shark-infested waters of the next. He was no different. Only more prudent.

Assuming, of course, the machine bugs would allow him to go.

But he wasn't afraid of the machine bugs anymore.



He showered, dressed, and fixed himself a hearty meal in the kitchen. It was a fine early-summer day. The breeze through the screen door was just cool enough to refresh, the sky blue enough to promise a lazy afternoon. When he switched off the coffee machine he heard a woodpecker tocking on one of the tall trees out back. Sweet smell of pine and cedar and fresh grass. He'd mown the lawn yesterday.

Almost too lovely to leave. Almost.

He wasn't really afraid of the machine bugs anymore, and they weren't afraid of him. Familiarity had set in on both sides. He spotted one now—one of the tiny ones, no bigger than a thumbnail—moving along the crevice where the tile met the wall. He bent down and watched idly as it worked. It looked like a centipede someone had assembled out of agate, emerald, and ruby—a Christmas ornament in miniature. It discovered a fragment of toast, angled toward it, touched it with a threadlike antenna. The crumb vanished. Vaporized or somehow ingested—Tom didn't know which.

Carefully, he picked up the machine bug and cradled it in the palm of his hand.

It ceased all motion at his touch. Inert, it was prickly and warm against his skin. It looked, Tom thought, like a curio from a roadside gem shop somewhere in Arizona—an earring or a cuff link.

He put it back on the kitchen counter. After a moment it righted itself and scuttled away, taking up its task where he'd interrupted it.

A few nights ago the machine bugs had crawled inside his little Sony TV set, modifying and rebuilding it. He moved into the living room and switched the set on now, sipping coffee, but there was only a glimpse of the "Today" show— thirty seconds of news about a near miss over O'Hare International—and then the picture blanked. The screen turned an eerie phosphorescent blue; white letters faded in.

help us tom winter, the TV set said.

He switched it off and left the room.



The TV had almost caught Barbara's attention yesterday. And his "cat"—one of the bigger bug machines.

In a way, he was grateful to her for seeing these things. The idea still lingered—and was sometimes overwhelming— that he had stepped across the line into outright lunacy; or at least into a lunacy confined to the property line of this house, a focal lunacy. But Barbara had glimpsed these phenomena and he'd been forced to usher her out before she could see more; they were real events, however inexplicable.

Barbara wouldn't have understood. No, that was the wrong word—Tom couldn't say he understood these events, either; enormous mysteries remained. But he accepted them.

His acceptance of the evidently impossible was almost complete. Had been sealed, probably, since the night he broke through the basement wall.

He thought about that night and the days and nights after: bright, lucid memories, polished with use.

□ □

□ □

He pried away big, dusty slabs of gypsum board until the hole was big enough to step through.

The space behind it was dark. He probed with the beam of his flashlight, but the batteries must have been low—he couldn't find a far wall. There didn't seem to be one.

What it looked like . . .

Well, what it looked like was that he had broken into a tunnel approximately as wide as this basement room, running an indefinite distance away under the side yard into the slope of the Post Road hill.

He took another step forward. The walls of the tunnel were a slick, featureless gray; as was the ceiling; as was the floor. It wasn't a clammy subterranean chamber. It was dry, clean, and dustless—except for the mess he'd made with his crowbar.

And, increasingly, it was light. The tunnel began to brighten as he stood in it. The fight was sourceless, though it seemed to radiate generally from above. Tom glanced down, switched off his flashlight, discovered he was casting a diffuse shadow around his feet.

The fight expanded down the corridor, which began at the back of his basement and swept in a gentle leftward curve— paralleling the Post Road for some yards and then veering westward somewhere in the area of the highway, if he was any judge of distance. Maybe a quarter mile away.


Tom stood a long time regarding this vista.

His first reaction was a giddy, nervous elation. By God, he'd been right! There was something down here. Something mysterious, strange, large scale, possibly magical. Something he had never read about in a newspaper, never witnessed on TV, never heard about from a friend, never experienced or expected to experience. Something from the deep well of myth, fairy tale, and wild surmise.

Maybe ogres lived here. Maybe angels.

His second reaction, nearly as immediate, was a deep shiver of fear. Whoever had made this place—the machine bugs or whatever force operated them—must be immensely powerful. A powerful force that preferred to remain hidden. A powerful force he might have disturbed with his prybar and his hammer.

He backed out of the corridor through the hole in the basement wall—slowly and silently, though discretion at this stage was fairly ridiculous. If he hadn't alarmed any Mysterious Beings by breaking into their lair with a tire iron, what was the point of holding his breath now? But he couldn't fight the instinctive urge to creep quietly away.

He stepped back into the somewhat less mysterious environment of the basement of his house.

The house he owned—but it wasn't his. The lesson? It wasn't his when he bought it; it wasn't his now; and it wouldn't be his when he left.

He wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his shirt. The cloth came away chalky and wet.

I can't sleep here tonight.

But the fear was already beginning to fade. He had slept here lots of nights, knowing something odd was going on, knowing it didn't mean to hurt him. The tunnel and his dreams were part of a single phenomenon, after all. Help us, his dreams had pleaded. It wasn't the message of an omnipotent force.

Beyond the hole in the wall, the empty corridor grew dark and still again.



He managed to fall asleep a little after four a.m., woke up an hour before work. His sleep had been dreamless and tense. He changed—he had slept in his clothes—and padded down to the basement.

Where he received a second shock:

The hole in the wall was almost sealed.

A line of tiny insectile machines moved between the rubble on the floor and the wall Tom had torn up last night. They moved around the ragged opening in a slow circle, maybe as many as a hundred of them, somehow knitting it up—restoring the wall to its original condition.

They were the insect machines he had seen moving from the foundation to the forest across the moonlit back yard. Tom recognized them and was, strangely, unsurprised by their presence here. Of course they were here. They simply weren't hiding anymore.

The work they were performing on the wall wasn't a patch; it was a full-scale reconstruction, clean and seamless. He understood intuitively that if he scratched away the paint he'd find the original brand names stamped in blue ink on the gypsum panels, the drywall nails restored in every atom to their original place in the two-by-fours, the studs themselves patched where he'd gouged them with the butt of his prybar —wood fiber and knot and dry sap all restored.

He took a step closer. The machine bugs paused. He sensed their attention briefly focused on him.

Silent moving clockwork jewels.

"You were here all along," Tom whispered. "You did the goddamn dishes."

Then they resumed their patient work. The hole grew smaller as he watched.

He said—his voice trembling only a little—“I'll open it up again. You know that?"

They ignored him.



But he didn't open it up—not until a week had passed.

He felt poised between two worlds, unsure of himself and unsure of his options. The immensity of what he had discovered was staggering. But it was composed of relatively small, incremental events—the insects cleaning his kitchen, his dreams, the tunnel behind the wall. He tried to imagine scenarios in which he explained all this to the proper authorities —whoever they were. (The realty board? The local police? The CIA, NASA, the National Geographic Society?) Fundamentally, none of this was even remotely possible. Stories like his made the back pages of the Enquirer at best.

And—perhaps even more fundamentally—he wasn't ready to share these discoveries. They were his; they belonged to him. He didn't have Barbara, he didn't have a meaningful job, he had abandoned even the rough comfort of alcohol. But he had this secret . . . this dangerous, compulsive, utterly strange, and sometimes very frightening secret.

This still unfolding, incomplete secret.

He stayed out of the basement for a few days and contemplated his next step.



His dream about the machine bugs hadn't been a dream, or not entirely. Breaching the wall, he had stepped inside their magic circle. They stopped hiding from him.

For two nights he watched them with rapt attention. The smallest of them were the most numerous. They moved singly or in pairs, usually along the wallboards, sometimes venturing across the carpet or into the kitchen cabinets, moving in straight lines or elegant, precise curves. They were tiny, colorful, and remorseless in their clean-up duty; they stood absolutely still when he touched them.

Friday night, after he came home from the car lot, he discovered a line of them disappearing into the back panel of his TV set. With his ear next to the screen he could hear them working inside: a faint metallic clatter and hiss.

He left them alone.

Larger and less numerous was a variation Tom thought of as "machine mice." These were rodent sized and roughly rodent shaped: bodies scarab blue and shiny metallic, heads the color of dull ink. They moved with startling speed, though they seemed to lack legs or feet. Tom supposed they hovered an eighth of an inch or so over the floor, but that was only a guess; they scooted away when he tried to touch or hold them. He saw them sometimes herding the smaller variety across the floor; or alone, pursuing duties more mysterious.

Saturday—another moonlit night—he dosed himself with hot black coffee and sat up watching a late movie. He switched off the lights at one a.m. and stepped cautiously into the damp grass of the back yard, with a heavy-duty flashlight in his hand and a pair of wading boots to protect his ankles.

The machine bugs were there in great numbers—as they had been in his not-a-dream—fluorescing in the moonlight, a tide of them flowing from the foundation holes into the deep woods. In pursuit of what?

Tom debated following them, but decided not to: not now. Not in the dark.

They wanted his help. They had asked for it.

Disturbing, that he knew this. It was a form of communication, one he didn't understand or control, help us tom winter, they had said, and they were saying it now. But it wasn't a message he heard or interpreted, simply a silent understanding that this was what they wanted. They didn't mean to hurt him. Simply wanted his help. What help, where? But the only answer was a sort of beckoning, as deeply understood as their other message: follow us into the woods.

He backed away in the darkness, alarmed. He recalled with sudden vividness the experience of reading Christina Rossetti's "The Goblin Market," years ago, in one of his mother's books, a leather-bound volume of Victorian poetry. Reading it and shivering in his summer bedroom, terrified by the spidery silhouette of the arbutus outside his window and by the possibilities of nighttime invitations too eagerly accepted. No thank you, he thought, I believe I'll stay out of the forest for now.

The machine bugs conveyed no response—except perhaps the dim mental equivalent of a shrug—and carried on their strange commerce between the house and the depths of the woods.

The next morning, when he turned on the TV set, it emitted a crackle of static, flared suddenly brighter, and displayed a message:


help us tom winter

Tom had just stepped out of the shower; he was wearing a bathrobe and carrying a cup of coffee. He failed to notice when the coffee splashed over his hand and onto the carpet, though the skin around the web of his thumb was red for the rest of the day.

The letters blinked and steadied.

"Jesus Christ!" he said.

The TV responded,

help us

His first instinct was to get the holy hell out of the house and bolt the door behind him. He forced himself to resist it.

He knew the machine bugs had been inside his set; this, he supposed, was why.

He took a large step backward and sat down, not quite voluntarily, on the sofa.

He licked his lips.

He said, "Who are you?"

help us faded out. The screen was blank a few seconds; then new letters emerged:

we are almost complete

Communication, Tom thought. His heart was still battering against his ribs. He remembered a toy he'd once owned—a Magic 8-Ball; you asked it a question and when you turned it over a message appeared in a little window: yes or no or some cryptic proverb. The letters on his TV screen appeared the same way, welling up from shadowy depths. The memory was peculiar but comforting.

He set aside his coffee cup and thought a moment.

"What do you want from me?"

Pause.

proteins

complex carbohydrates

Food, he thought. "What for?"

to finish building us

"What do you mean—you're not finished?"

to finish us

Apparently, it was the only answer they meant to give. He considered his next question. "Tell me where you come from." The pause was longer this time.

tom winter you don't need to know

"I'm curious. I want to know."

tom winter you don't want to know

Well, maybe not.

He sat back, managed a sip of coffee, and tried to assemble in his mind all the questions that had been vexing him since he moved in.

"What happened to the man who used to live here?"

broken

It was an odd word, Tom thought. "What do you mean, broken?"

needs to be repaired

"Is he here? Where is he?"

follow us

Into the woods, they meant. "No. I don't want to do that yet. Are you—repairing him?"

not finished

"I found the tunnel behind the wall," Tom said. "Tell me what it is. Tell me where it goes."

The pause now was very long indeed—he began to think they'd given up. Then more letters appeared:

tom winter a machine

"The tunnel is a machine? I don't understand."

the tunnel is a machine

"Where does it go? Does it go anywhere?"

it goes where it is

"No, I mean—where does it lead?"

where it was aimed

This was wonderfully uninformative. They couldn't hide from him; they wanted his help; but they weren't willing—or weren't able—to answer his most basic questions.

Not a good deal, he thought. No bargain.

He said, "I'll think it over."

help us tom winter

Which reminded him. One more question. He said, "When you talked to me before—when we communicated— how did you do that? Before this, I mean."

help us faded out and the new message appeared moments later—stark, vivid, matter-of-fact.

we were inside you

He sat sharply upright, horrified.

"What do you mean—those little bug machines, like inside the TV? They were inside me?"

He pictured them performing secret surgery in the night. Cutting him open—crawling around. Changing him.

smaller

"There are smaller ones?"

too small to perceive

Microscopic, Tom interpreted. Still—! "They went inside me? Doing what?"

to talk

"Inside my head?"

to communicate our needs

Pause.

not very successful

He was cold, sweating—he needed to understand this. "Are they inside me now?"

no

"Am I different? Did they change something?"

nothing changed

not very successful

Pause.

we can change you if you like

talk more directly

"No! Jesus, no thank you!" Empty screen.

Tom ran his hand over his face. Too much information to absorb, here. He thought about machine bugs small enough to slip into his bloodstream. Machine germs. It was a terrifying concept.

He conceived another question . . .then wondered whether it would be wise to ask.

He said, "If you could have changed me—changed me so we could talk—why didn't you?"

The TV set hummed faintly.

too intrusive

"What are you saying, that it's unethical?"

need permission

"Permission not granted!"

help us

Tom stood and approached the television in small, cautious sidesteps. Pushing the power switch, he felt like a man trying to disarm a potent, unfamiliar bomb. His hands were still shaking when the screen faded to black.

He stood staring at it a long, frozen moment; then—an afterthought—he reached down and pulled out the plug.



The invasion of his television set left him shaken and ambivalent. On three different occasions he picked up the phone and began dialing Doug Archer's number. He wanted to talk to someone about this—but "wanted" was too pallid a word. The need he felt was physical, almost violent. But so was its parallel urge: the urge to keep silent. The urge to play these strange cards very close to his chest.

He dialed Archer's number three times, and once he let it ring a couple of times; but he ended up dropping the receiver in its cradle and turning away. His motives were mixed, and he didn't want to examine them too closely, but he reasoned that Archer—desperate for some kind of metaphysical revenge on Belltower, Washington—would intrude on what had been exclusively Tom's magical playground.

He liked Archer. Liked him instinctively. But—and here was a thought he didn't want to consider too closely—maybe that was another reason for not calling him up. He liked Archer, and he sensed that getting him involved in all this wouldn't be doing him a favor. Help us, the machine bugs had said. Broken, they had said. Need to be repaired. The implication? Something was wrong here. Something had gone wrong with some very powerful machinery. Tom couldn't turn away; he'd made his choice. But if he liked Archer—the unwelcome thought persisted—then maybe he ought to keep him well away from this house up along the Post Road.

He went to work during this time—he was even punctual— but his performance suffered; he couldn't deny it, couldn't help it. The act of selling secondhand automobiles to even the most willing customer had begun to seem nonsensical, ludicrous. Tom noticed Klein watching him on the lot, his face screwed up into something like The Frown, but this was another irrelevancy. During the hot afternoons Tom achieved a sort of Zen quiescence, as if he were surveying all this bustle from a hot-air balloon. Abstractly, he understood that he needed this job to eat; but he could coast awhile even if he lost it, and there were other jobs. Above all, there was an impossible tunnel hidden behind the sheetrock in his basement; his home was full of gemlike creatures the size of his thumb; his bloodstream carried benign microscopic robots and his TV had begun to talk to him. In the face of which, it was extremely difficult not to smile cheerfully and suggest some alternative ways of disposing of that troublesome 76 Coronet.

At home, he kept the TV unplugged most of the time. He called it the TV, but he supposed it wasn't that anymore; it was a private phone line for the creatures (or devices) with whom he shared the house. He resolved to use it only when he had a specific question—not that the answers were likely to be helpful.

He plugged it in one evening and asked what was at the other end of the tunnel in the basement—what he would find if he went there, destruction, the machine replied. The answer was chilling and it prompted Tom to ask, "For me? You mean I would be destroyed?"


the terminal has been destroyed

not you

although that possibility exists

The tunnel continued to occupy his thoughts. He guessed it was inevitable that he would reopen that passage, enter it, follow its distant curve. He had been postponing the act, fearing it—but wanting it, too, with a ferocity that was sometimes alarming. It had gone past curiosity. Buying this house had been the beginning of a tide of events which wouldn't be complete until he followed the tunnel as far as it would take him.

But that was frightening, and this razor-thin balance of fear and obsession kept him out of the basement—postponing what he couldn't resist.

His dreams had ceased to beg for help . . . but when he came home Friday night and found the clock radio on his bedside table pronouncing the words "Help us, Tom Winter" in the voice of a popular Seattle AM radio announcer, he yanked the appliance's wall cord and went looking for his crowbar. He had waited too long already. It was time to live out this peculiar dream his life had become, to ride it down to its conclusion.

He opened the healed wallboard. A line of machine bugs sat watching him from the lid of the automatic dryer, with wide, blank eyes and no perceptible expression. He supposed he only imagined their patient, grim disapproval of what he was doing.



Events began to happen quickly then.

Within the next week, he made three separate journeys down the tunnel.

The first—that night—was exploratory. His doubts came flooding back when he saw the tunnel again, as its illumination flowed around him. He took a few tentative steps into its luminous white space, then stopped and looked back. Here was the frame wall of his basement standing exposed and absurd, as if it had interrupted this continuous flow of space almost by accident—as incongruous as Dorothy's farmhouse in Munchkinland. (But the tunnel couldn't have been here when the house was erected, could it? The contractors would have had a word or two to say.) The tunnel itself was broadly rectangular; its walls were smooth and warm to the touch; the air felt pleasant and not at all stale. He took a tentative step, then began to walk with more confidence. The floor was faintly elastic and gave back no echo of his footsteps. Every few yards, Tom turned and tried to gauge the distance he had come.

By his own estimate he had traveled several hundred yards —well under the Post Road hill and presumably deep in the earth—when the curve of the tunnel was finally great enough to hide any glimpse of home. As strange as that sight had been, it had also been a comfort. He stood a moment while fresh uncertainties crowded his mind. "F*cking crazy place to be," he said aloud—expecting an echo; but the tunnel absorbed the sound. There was nothing in either direction now but this bland curve of wall.

He walked on. He had no way to measure the angle of the tunnel's ellipse, but the curve was remorseless—he could swear in fact, that he had turned a full 180 degrees. He should have carried a compass . . . but he had a notion that a compass might not work here; that its needle would swing wildly, or perhaps point consistently forward. The idea was spooky and he thought again about turning back. He was way out of his depth in this pale, featureless artery. A cold sweat began to bead out on his forehead. He was taking tiny silent cat-steps, straining to hear any sound ahead of him—the fear setting in again, with a strong rider of claustrophobia. The tunnel was a few feet higher than his head with as much as a yard's clearance on each side: not much room to turn around. And nowhere to run, except that long circle back.

But then the curve eased ahead of him and within a couple of minutes he saw what appeared to be the end of the line: a gray obstructing mass rendered obscure by distance. He picked up his pace a little.

The wall, when he reached it, was not a wall but a ruin. It was a tumble of masonry, concrete blocks and dust spilling over the pristine white floor. There seemed to be no way through.

destruction, the machine bugs had said.

But not, at least, recent destruction. This collapse had scattered dust in a broad fan across the tunnel floor—Tom's runners left distinct prints in it—the only prints, he was relieved to note. Nothing had come this way for a long time. Not since the destruction.

Experimentally—and still with that prickly sensation of playing at the feet of a sleeping giant—he pulled away a chunk of concrete from the collapse. A haze of dust rose up; new rubble trickled in to fill the vacancy. Some of this was the stuff of which the tunnel itself was made; but some of it appeared to be commonplace concrete block.

And on the other side—what?

Another basement? Somebody else's basement? He might be as far away as Wyndham Lane or even the shopping center near the bypass. He checked his watch and thought, / could have come that far in forty-five minutes. But he suspected—well, f*ck it, he pretty much knew—that this tunnel didn't lead to the storeroom under the Safeway. You don't build a tunnel like this unless you have a destination somewhat more exotic than Belltower, Washington.

Gnomeland, maybe. The pits of Moria. Some inner circle of heaven or hell.

Tom pulled away another fragment of brick and listened to the dusty trickle behind it. No way through . . . although he felt, or imagined he felt, a whisper of cooler and wetter air through the tangle of masonry.

Speculation was beside the point: he knew what he had to do.

He had to leave here, to begin with. He was tired, he was thirsty—he hadn't had the foresight to bring so much as a can of Coke. He would have to leave, and sleep; and when he was ready he would have to come back. He would have to bring a picnic lunch, which he would pack in a knapsack along with some tools—his trusty crowbar—and maybe one of those paper masks they sell in paint stores, to keep the dust out of his nose.

Then he would pick and pry at this obstruction until he found out what was behind it—and God help him if it was something bad.

Which was possible, because something bad had definitely happened here: some destruction. But the matter had passed beyond curiosity. He had clasped both hands around the tiger's tail and braced himself for the ride.



He came back the next day fully equipped.

Tom decided he must look more than a little strange, hiking down this luminous mineshaft with his prybar and thermos bottle and his sack of ham-and-cheese sandwiches, like one of the dwarfs in Disney's Snow White. Of course, there was no one to see him. With the front door locked, the house a mile away, and this end of the tunnel securely barricaded, he was about as alone as it was possible to get. He could take off his clothes and sing an aria from Fidelio if the spirit so moved him, and no one would be the wiser.

After three hours of dirty, sweaty work he managed to open a gap between the piled rubble and the abraded ceiling of the tunnel. The space was approximately as large as his fist and when he aimed the flashlight into it the beam disclosed a mass of vacant, cool air. He could see dust motes moving in the light; and farther on he could distinguish what appeared to be a cinderblock wall . . . but he couldn't be certain. He forced himself to stop and sit down with a sandwich and a plastic thermos-top of coffee. The coffee was gritty with dust.

He ticked off the discoveries he had made. One, this tunnel had a destination. Two, that destination had been violently closed. Three, there was nothing on the other side waiting to jump him—nothing obvious, anyhow.

All this would have been much more frightening except for his conviction that whatever happened here had happened long ago. How many years since the last tenant had vanished from the house on the Post Road? Almost ten—if what Archer had told him was true. A decade. And that felt about right. Ten years of dust on this floor. Ten quiet years.


He balled up his empty lunch bag and plastic wrap and tucked them into his knapsack.

He worked steadily and without much conscious thought for another three hours, by which time there was enough room for him to wedge his body over the pile of rubble.

It was late afternoon back at the house. But the word was meaningless here.

Tom straddled the rubble and probed the inner darkness with his flashlight. In the dim space beyond:

A room. A small, cold, damp, unpleasant stone room with a door at one end.

Ploughing through this barricade had not required much courage. But at the thought of opening that ugly wooden door just beyond it—that, Tom thought, was an altogether different kettle of fish.

The tunnel itself was antiseptic, very Star Wars; this cinderblock room was much more Dungeons and Dragons.

You could pile all these stones back up, Tom told himself. Pile them up and maybe add a little concrete to buttress everything. Seal the wall at your end. Sell the f*cking house.

Never look back.

But he would look back. He'd look back for the rest of his life and wonder about that door. He would look back, he would wonder, and the wonder would be a maddening and unscratchable itch.

Still, he thought, this was serious business. Whatever had destroyed and barricaded this wall could surely destroy him.

that possibility exists, the TV had said.

Life or death.

But what on God's green earth did he have to live for, at this moment?

Back at the house—back in the real world—he was a lonesome, ordinary man leading a disfigured and purposeless life. He had lived for his work and for Barbara. But his work was finished and Barbara was living in Seattle with an anarchist named Rafe.

If he opened that door and a dragon swallowed him up— well, it would be an interesting death. The world would not much notice, not much mourn. "What the hell," Tom said, and scrambled forward.



Beyond the door, stone steps led upward.

Tom followed them. His sneakers squealed against damp concrete.

The flashlight revealed a landing barely wide enough to stand on, and a second door.

This door was padlocked—from the other side.

He remembered his crowbar, reached for it, then cursed: he had left it at the excavation.

He climbed down the stairs, through the first door, out across the rubble; he retrieved the iron bar and his knapsack and turned back. By the time he reached the door at the top of the stairs he was winded, his breath gusting out in pale clouds in the cold wet air.

He wasn't frightened now, nor even cautious. He simply wanted this job done. He inserted the crowbar between the door and its stone jamb and leaned on it until he heard the gunshot crack of a broken hasp. The door swung inward—

On one more dark stone room.

"Christ!" Tom exclaimed. Maybe it went on forever, room after ugly little chamber. Maybe he was in hell.

But this room wasn't entirely empty. He swept the flashlight before him and spotted two canisters on the floor, next to a flight of wooden stairs leading (again) upward.

Some clue here, he thought.

The canisters were about a hand high; and one of them had a wire handle attached to it at the rim.

He stood above them and shone the flashlight down.

The label on the can on the left said varsol.

The label on the can on the right said evertint paint. In smaller print, Eggshell Blue.

Tom turned and was startled by a string dangling in front of his face. He tugged it, and above his head a naked forty-watt bulb flared on.

Ahead of him—up the stairs—he heard a whisper of traffic and rain.



This was so disorienting—so disenchanting-—that he stood motionless for a long while in the glare of the overhead light. If anyone had seen him they might have said he was stunned. He looked like a man who had taken a powerful blow to the skull—still standing, but barely.

Let's see, he thought, I headed south from the basement and then circled back, walked half an hour or so . . . maybe as far as the mall or the shops down by the highway. He climbed the stairs expecting nothing, passed another door into a seedy lobby he didn't recognize; then a thought struck him:

It wasn't raining when I left the house.

Well, that was a good long time ago now, wasn't it? Plenty of time for some weather to roll in from the sea.

But he recalled the weekend weather forecast: sunshine all the way to Tuesday.

Wouldn't be the first time they'd made a bad call; coastal weather could be unpredictable.

Still, it was coming down pretty hard out there.

Tom had emerged into what seemed to be the lobby of an apartment building: peeling linoleum, a row of buzzers, an inner and outer door—the outer door cracked in a starry pattern. He fixed the lobby in his mind as a landmark, then stepped outside.

Into the rain.

Into another world.



Tom's first groping thought was that he had walked into a movie set—this was the most coherent explanation his fumbling mind could produce. Professional set dressing: a period piece.

All the cars in the street were antiques, though some appeared virtually new. Must have cost a fortune, he thought dazedly, assembling all this collectible transportation and parking it in a part of town that wasn't familiar (that isn't Belltower, one agitated fraction of self insisted), where all the buildings were period buildings and where the people were period people, or actors, or extras, dozens of them, scurrying through the rain. And no cameras. And no lights.

He cowered back into the rain shadow of this grubby building.

It was very difficult to think. A part of him was giddy, elated. He had arrived at this unimaginable destination by unimaginable means, he had f*cking done it. Magic! Elation meanwhile doing battle with its partner, stark animal fear of the unknown. One step in the wrong direction and he would be lost, as lost as it was possible to be. All he really knew was that he had arrived somewhere where the shiniest vehicle on the street was what appeared to be a '61 Buick—or something like it—and all the men braving the rain this cold evening were wearing for Christ's sake hats, not rain hats but dress hats—trilbies or fedoras or whatever they were called —the kind of hats you saw in old Cary Grant comedies. Planet of the Hats!

It was very, very strange but also very, very real. A cold wind gusted rain into his face. Real rain. A woman bent under her umbrella shot him a sidelong glance as she passed, and Tom understood that she was at home here, he was the intruder—a strange, distraught, disheveled man wearing a packsack. He glanced down at himself. His jeans were gray with dust, streaked where the rain had penetrated the dirt. His hands were almost completely black.

The thought persisted: I'm the stranger here.

And, on some even deeper level, he knew exactly what this place was. He had traveled a mile or so down a featureless tunnel (machine, the television had called it)—and maybe thirty-odd years into the past.

Not the past of Belltower, Washington. It was a dark night, but he knew at once this was a bigger and busier city than Belltower had ever been. But an American city. The cars were American. The people looked American. An American city ... in or around the year of his birth.

He didn't accept this explanation, not entirely. Logic objected. Sanity was outraged. But logic and sanity had been forced into the back seat quite a while ago, hadn't they? He wouldn't have been too surprised if the tunnel had opened onto the surface of Mars. Was a thirty-year-old rainstorm really such a surprise?

Well, yes. It was. A surprise and a shock. But he was beginning to get a handle on it.

He thought, / can't stay here. In fact, the feeling was more urgent. You're a long way from home and it's a long, dark crawl back to the tunnel. What if somebody seals up one of those doors? What if the Machine doesn't work anymore? What if— and here was a truly chilling thought—what if it's a one-way Machine?


Anxiety veered toward panic.

Lots here to figure out, Tom thought, lots of possibilities, lots to absorb, but the wise thing would be to turn back and contemplate his options.

Before he did that, however, he took three long steps out into the frigid rain—past a miserable man with umbrella, unlit pipe, dog on a leash—to a newspaper box occupying curb space next to the shiny-wet Buick. He put three dimes into the paper box and pulled out the New York Times. Paused to inspect the date. May 13, 1962.

Raindrops spattered across the front page.

"It's a f*cking miracle," he said out loud. "You were right all along, Doug. Miracles up along the Post Road."

He turned and saw the dog-walker regarding him a little suspiciously, a little fearfully, while the dog, a springer spaniel, left its scent on a gray lamp standard. Tom smiled. "Nice weather!"

"For lunatics," the man offered.

Tom retreated past him into the sad lobby of this old building, its smell of mildew and ancient plaster and the unimaginable secret in its foundation. Still my secret, he thought. He turned away from the man on the street, away from the rain and the traffic, clutching his souvenir newspaper in one hand, down and away and home; or, if not home, at least back.

Back, as they say, to the future.



One more thing caught his attention before he began the long, fatiguing hike back to the basement. As he clambered over the stacked rubble into the tunnel, his flashlight reflected from an object half buried under the masonry and turned up, no doubt, by his movement: a machine bug.

It was inert. He picked it up. The device had lost its shine; it wasn't just dusty, but dull, somehow empty.

Dead, he thought. What it is, is dead.

So the machine bugs must have been here, too, in the building behind him, cleaning and maintaining it . . . but something had killed them. At least, something had killed this one. And the wall had never been repaired, unlike the wall in Tom's basement.

He put the broken creature in his pocket—in a strange way, the gesture was respectful—and took a deep breath, bracing himself for the long walk back.



Home, he slept for twelve hours straight. He woke up to a sunny afternoon. He had missed a day at the lot; Klein would be, in Tony's immortal phrase, shitting bricks—but he dismissed the thought as soon as it came to him; he had other things to think about. He fixed himself a huge meal, bacon and fried eggs and buttered toast and a fresh pot of coffee. And sat down at the kitchen table, where the New York Times waited for him.

He read it meticulously. He read the headline story: Laos had declared a state of emergency and eighteen hundred marines were en route to Indochina. Troops of the South Vietnamese Seventy-fifth Infantry had ambushed some guerrillas in Kien Phong Province, and President Kennedy had addressed a Democratic Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Milwaukee, mainly about the economy. The Mets had won both games of a doubleheader, defeating the Braves at the Polo Grounds. The weather? Cloudy, cool, occasional rain.

He read the fashion ads, the movie ads, the sports pages. Then he folded the paper and set it neatly aside.

He took a pad of paper and a pencil from a kitchen drawer and opened the pad to its first fresh page.

At the top he wrote, Troubling Questions. He underlined it twice.

He paused, sipped coffee, then picked up the pencil.

Something is wrong here, he wrote.

Something is wrong or I would never have found the tunnel. The previous owner vanished. The machine bugs talked about "repairing" him/it. The machine bugs are running on autopilot, I think. The lights left on but the premises empty.

Question of rubble at the end of the tunnel. "Destruction." But why, and committed by whom or what?

Well, that was the real question, wasn't it?

He wrote, The tunnel is an artifact. The tunnel is a time machine. It was built by someone. Someone owns it.

Which would imply someone from the future, since they weren't assembling time tunnels down at General Dynamics these days. It was hard to come to grips with that idea, in part because of the echo of too much juvenile fantasy, too many comic books and bad movies. People from the future, very familiar: bald guys in pastel tights.

The trouble was that such thinking was dangerously useless. He would have to think about these numbingly strange events with as much sobriety and clarity as he could muster. The stakes—he remembered destruction—might be very high.

Some destructive force caused problems at this end of the tunnel, he wrote, bad enough that the owners bugged out and left the property running on automatic. The same force, presumably, did an even better job at the Manhattan end.

But there was so much he still didn't know. Why a tunnel between Belltower and New York City? Were there more tunnels to other places? Did the tunnels always go to the same place? When they functioned normally, what were they for? Who used them?

He wrote these questions down.

Then paused, refilled his coffee cup and sat down again. He reached into his pocket and took out the dead machine bug.

It lay pallid and empty-seeming on the inky front page of the Times.

Death by misadventure. Most likely, he thought, it had been murdered.

Ten years have passed, he wrote. If the passing of time means anything at all, under the circumstances.

Chewed his pencil.

You could walk away from this.

After all: what was he really doing here? Tempting himself? Daring himself?

This is dangerous, and you could walk away. It was undeniable.

Maybe the only question is which way to walk.

Because he had a choice now, didn't he? He felt a tingle of excitement, the pleasure of this secret option, this new ace that had been dealt him. He hadn't dared to consider it. He considered it now.

You could leave it all behind.

You could leave the car lot and the divorce and the polite pink slip and the greenhouse effect all behind. The sensation of writing the words made him dizzy. You could walk out on it. Everybody else on the face of the earth is being dragged into the future an hour at a time but you can walk out. You found the back door. Forcing some rationality here: Not the door to paradise. Thirty years ago. They have the Bomb. Think about it. They have industrial pollution. They have racism, ignorance, crime, starvation—

They have the Bomb, he thought, but maybe the important thing was, they didn't use it He could live three decades, if he wanted to, knowing for a stone fact that the air-raid siren wouldn't go off. He could laugh at the newspapers. If he was diligent, if he did his homework, he'd know the plane he stepped onto wasn't going to fall out of the sky; he'd be out of town when the earthquake hit . . .

And even if someone died, it would be a death already entered into the history books. No graves would be filled that weren't already full. The tragedy of the world would march on, but at least he would have its measure.

He heard an echo of Barbara from that chamber in his head where memories lived and sometimes spoke: Are you really so frightened of the future?

After Chernobyl, after Tiananmen Square, after his divorce? In a world where tritium regularly disappeared from scheduled shipments, where the national debt was coming due, where the stock market resembled an Olympic high-dive competition? Scared of the future, here in the world of teen suicide and the cost-effective assault rifle? Scared?—while the Brazilian rain forests clouded the atmosphere with their burning and the skin cancer rate had become an artifact of the evening news? What, frightened? Who, me?

I'll go back one more time, he wrote. At least to look. To be there. At least once. Any other questions?

Yes, he thought. Many. But he chose not to write them down.




When Tom glanced up from the paper he saw that several of the larger machine bugs had climbed the table leg and were carrying their dead compatriot away.

Maybe to replace it, Tom thought. Maybe to repair it: they were big on repairing things. Or maybe to bury it, to inter it in some metallic grave while they gathered around and sang electromagnetic hymns.

They made a bright, glassy line against the kitchen tiles as they marched away. He didn't interfere.



One more time, he promised himself, at least to see—all decisions postponed until then. He decided he'd provision himself for a weekend trip and in the meantime lead a normal life, as impossible as that sounded.

Astonishingly, the charade was a success. He put in good hours at work. Tony invited him for a family dinner and that worked out well, too, with Tony and Loreen making casual but pointed inquiries about his health and his "attitude," Tom fending them off with carefully fuzzy answers. Time passed easily except at night, when his doubts came sneaking back like guilty prodigals. He installed a hardware store deadbolt on the door leading into the back basement—not that this would stop any serious traffic coming up the tunnel, but it was a useful psychological prop, a sleeping aid, like the small white pills he bought at the Valu-Save Pharmacy. He found some popular histories of the 1960s in the library and invested some study in the first third of that decade, everything up to the Kennedy assassination. It struck him as an oddly quiescent time, large events jostling in the wings but not quite ready to put in an appearance on stage. Call it a nervous appendage of the fifties. He began to recognize names: Gagarin, Khrushchev, John Glenn, Billie Sol Estes— but history paled in the face of this enormity, his secret shortcut through the maze of years and death. The week wheeled on.

He woke up before dawn Saturday morning, marked the space between the wall studs and carved an opening with a keyhole saw—he was getting good at this.

At the opposite end of the tunnel he noted with relief that the rubble had not been disturbed—only his own footprints in the dust—and that the broken lock on the adjoining door had not been replaced.

No one knows yet.

He was safe here still.

He left the tunnel and ventured into the street on a cool and cloudy spring morning. Time passed at the same rate, he noted, here and at home, though the seasons were out of synchronization by a couple of months. He wrote down the street number of the tenement building he emerged from and then the street as he passed the sign at an intersection. Then simply walked. He was a tourist. That was what he'd say if anyone asked. I'm from out of town. Basic and quite true.

Of course, he got lost.

He had been to New York on business trips for Aerotech but his grasp of the city's geography was vague at best. He walked across Fourteenth Street to Fifth Avenue with the notion that he might find some familiar landmarks . . . but he didn't want to stray that far from the tunnel.

Not that he would have a hard time finding his way back; the address was there in his pocket. But he couldn't hail a cab and he couldn't even buy a tourist map in a dimestore; his money was useless—or at least ran the risk of being mistaken for counterfeit—unless he put it in a vending machine. He told himself that getting lost wasn't such a bad thing; that he had planned to spend the day wandering—aimlessly or otherwise.

But it was hard to navigate coherently. He walked in a daze, blinded by the miraculous. The most prosaic object—a woman's hat in a milliner's window, a billboard, a chromium hood ornament—would suddenly capture all his attention. They were tokens of the commutation of time, bodies risen from the grave. He could not say which was stranger, his own numbing awareness of the transiency of these things or the nonchalance of the people he passed—people for whom this was merely the present, solid as houses.

It made him grin. It made him shiver.

Of the people he passed, many must have died by 1989. These are the lives of the dead, Tom thought. These are their ghost-lives, and I've entered into them. If they'd known, they might have looked at him twice. He was a cold wind from the land of their children . . . one more cold wind on a cold afternoon.

It was afternoon now, and colder than it had been, and the rain started again; a bitter, squalling rain that ran down his collar and seemed to pool, somehow, at the base of his spine. From Fifth Avenue he crossed Washington Square North into the park. He recognized the arch from one of his visits to the city, but that arch had been a canvas for spray-paint graffiti; this arch was visibly marble, if not pristine. He found a bench (the rain had subsided a little) and occupied it while he calculated his route home; then a young woman in harlequin-rimmed glasses and a black sweater stopped and looked at him—really looked—and asked him his name, and wondered whether he had anywhere to go.

Her name was Joyce Casella. She bought him coffee.



She took him home.

He woke once in the night. Waking, he unfolded his memory of the day and examined it—read it like a text, for clues. The mystery was what he ought to do next. He had come a great distance without a compass.

A siren wailed in the outer darkness. He stood up, here in this shabby room in the city of New York in the Year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Sixty-two, stumbled through a dim wash of streetlight to the bathroom and pissed into the rusty porcelain bowl. He was embedded in a miracle, he thought, not just the miracle of 1962 but the miracle of its dailiness, of this toothpaste-stained 1962 medicine cabinet, this 1962 bottle of aspirin, this leaky 1962 faucet ...

He rinsed his face and shook off a little sleep. Three forty-five in the morning, according to the digital watch he'd bought at a Kresge's a quarter century or so in the future. He leaned against the tiled wall and listened to the rain beat against a narrow window. He was full of thoughts he hadn't allowed himself for a long, long time.

How much he missed sharing his home with a woman, for instance.

He liked Joyce and he liked the sensation of being in her apartment, of seeing—for the first time in nearly a year—a bathroom shelf stocked with Midol and a tampon box; seeing her hairbrush, her toothpaste (neatly rolled from the bottom), a Sloan Wilson novel splayed open on the back of the toilet tank. Sharing these small, quotidian intimacies reminded him how thirsty he had been for intimacy in general. This tiny oasis. Such a dry and formidable desert.

"Thank you, Joyce," he said—aloud, but not loud enough that she might hear him in her bedroom. "Shelter from the storm. That's really nice."

Cold rain spattered against the window. The radiator clanked and moaned. Outside, in the dark, the wind was picking up.



In the morning he found his way home.

"I might be back," he told Joyce. It wasn't a promise, but it startled him when he said it. Would he be back? This was a miracle; but was it possible to inhabit a miracle? Miracles, like Brigadoon, had a way of disappearing.

Later, he would think that perhaps it had been a promise, if only to himself . . . that he had known the answer to these questions all along.

□ □

□ □

His last day in Belltower. His last day in the 1980s.

He drove to work prepared to quit, but Klein finessed that by handing him a pink slip. "You're a f*ck-up in general," Klein informed him, "but what made up my mind was that deal you wrote on Wednesday."

The Wednesday deal had been a retired County Court judge. The customer might have had an illustrious career on the bench, but he suffered from what Tom had learned to recognize as a common malady: big-purchase panic. The judge regarded the offer form as if it were a writ of execution and offered full sticker price for a car he'd barely looked at. "Let's write up a lower offer," Tom said, "and see what the sales manager has to say."


He told Klein, "We made money on that deal."

"I know the son of a bitch," Klein said. "He comes in every other year. He just toddles in and pays list."

"Nobody pays list"

"If they're giving away money," Klein said, "it's not your job to turn it down. But I don't want to argue with you. I just want you off the lot." He added, "I cleared this with your brother, so don't go running off to him and expect any help. He told me, 'Hey, if Tom f*cked up, he's history. That's all there is to it.' "

Tom couldn't help smiling. "I guess that's right," he said. "I guess I'm history."

He phoned Tony and said he was going away for a while. Tony wanted to talk—about the job, about the future. Tom said, "I have to get things sorted out by myself. Thank you for everything, though, Tony. Don't expect to hear from me for a while."

"You're acting crazy," Tony said.

"This is something I have to do."



He packed a change of clothes into his knapsack. Money was a problem, but he was bringing along some items he thought he might be able to pawn: the guitar he'd owned since college (bulky but potentially valuable, a Gibson); a set of silver spoons. By Friday noon he was ready to go.

He hesitated when he noticed the TV had been plugged in again. It seemed to sense his presence; as he watched, it flickered to life.

"You're too late," he said. "I'm leaving."

tom winter, we don't think you should go.

Their punctuation had improved. He considered the statement, considered its source. "You can't stop me," he said. Probably this was true.

it's not safe where you're going.

"It's not safe where I am."

you want it too badly. it isn't what you think.

"You don't know what I want. You don't know what I think."

Of course, maybe they did—it was entirely possible. But they didn't contradict him.

you can help us.

"We talked about that."

we need proteins.

"I don't know what you mean by that."

meat.

"Meat?" Here was an unforeseen development. "Ordinary meat? Grocery store meat?"

yes, tom.

"What are you building out in the woods that needs meat?"

we're building us.

He wanted to dismiss the whole disturbing notion; but it occurred to him that he owed these creatures something. It was their territory he was about to trespass through. And more than that: he'd been in their power for a long time. They had implied that they could have changed him; if they'd wanted a slave they could have made him one. They hadn't. He owed them.

Nevertheless—"building us"? And they wanted meat?

He said, "I have some steaks in the freezer—"

that would be fine, tom.

"Maybe I can leave them on the counter."

thank you.

"How come you can talk so much better now?"

we're almost repaired. things are much clearer.

the end of the work is very close.

Something ominous about that, Tom thought. When the sleeping giant woke, this might not be a safe place to be. The implication? Get out now.

He tried to pull the plug on the TV set but it wouldn't come out of the wall—they must have welded it there. But the screen remained blank. He hurried to the kitchen, left a stack of frozen steaks and ground beef on the countertop—a little queasy at the thought of them wanting it—then gathered up his baggage.

The phone rang once more. He debated letting it ring, then relented and picked up the handset. He expected Tony with some last-minute badgering, but it was Doug Archer's voice he heard.

"I heard you got fired."

"News travels fast," Tom said.

"It's a small town. I've done business with a lot of these people. Yeah, everybody talks." "Keeping tabs on me?"

"Hell, no. If I had been, I would have noticed you aren't looking for another job. So are you taking a vacation, Tom, or just bugging out?"

"The property's not for sale."

"I'm not calling as your f*cking realtor. Are things okay up there?"

"Things are okay."

"You know what I'm talking about."

He sighed. He liked Doug, he didn't want to hurt Doug's feelings—but he didn't want Doug involved, not at this stage. "I'll be out of town for a while."

"Son of a bitch," Archer said. "You found something, didn't you? You don't want to talk about it, but you found something."

Or something found me. "You're right ... I don't want to talk about it." "How long are you gone for?" "I honestly don't know."

"The guy who lived there before—you're going where he went, right?" "No, I don't think so."

"When you come back," Archer said, "will you talk to me about this?"

Tom relented a little. "Maybe I will."

"Maybe I should drive by while you're gone—make sure the place is in reasonable shape."

"I don't think that's necessary." A thought occurred. "Doug, promise me you won't try to get in." He lied, "I had the locks changed."

"I promise I won't try to get in if you promise you'll explain this one day."

"Deal," Tom said. "When I get back." If I get hack.

"I mean to hold you to that," Archer said. There was a pause. He added, "Well, good luck. If you need luck."

"I might need a little," Tom admitted.



He hung up the phone, pulled the shades, turned off the lights, and left the world behind.