A Bridge of Years

One

It was a modest three-bedroom frame house with its basement dug a little deeper than was customary in this part of the country, pleasant but overgrown with bush and ivy and miles away from town.

It had been empty for years, the real estate agent said, and the property backed onto a cedar swamp. “Frankly, I don’t see a lot of investment potential here.”

Tom Winter disagreed.

Maybe it was his mood, but this property appealed at once. Perversely, he liked it for its bad points: its isolation, lost in this rainy pinewood—its blunt undesirability, like the frank ugliness of a bulldog. He wondered whether, if he lived here, he would come to resemble the house, the way pet owners were said to resemble their pets. He would be plain. Isolated. Maybe, a little wild.

Which was not, Tom supposed, how he looked to Doug Archer, the real estate agent. Archer was wearing his blue Bell Realty jacket, but the neat faded Levi’s and shaggy haircut betrayed his roots. Local family, working class, maybe some colorful relative still logging out in the bush. Raised to look with suspicion on creased trousers, which Tom happened to be wearing. But appearances were deceptive. Tom paused as they approached the blank pine-slab front door. “Didn’t this used to be the Simmons property?”

Archer shook his head. “Close, though. That’s a little ways up the hill. Peggy Simmons still lives up there—she’s nearly eighty.” He raised an eyebrow. “You know Peggy Simmons?”

“I used to deliver groceries up the Post Road . Came by here sometimes. But that was a long while ago.”

“No kidding! Didn’t you say—”

“I’ve been in Seattle for most of twelve years.”

“Any connection with Tony Winter—up at Arbutus Ford?”

“He’s my brother,” Tom said.

“Hey! Well, hell! This changes things.”

In the city, Tom thought, we learn not to smile so generously.

Archer slid the key into the door. “We had a man out here when the property went up for sale. He said it was in fairly nice shape on the inside, but I’d guess, after it’s been closed up for so long—well, you might take that with a grain of salt.”

Translated from realty-speak, Tom thought, that means it’s a hellacious mess.

But the door eased open on hinges that felt freshly oiled, across a swatch of neat beige broadloom.

“I’ll be damned,” Archer said.

Tom stepped over the threshold. He flicked the wall switch and a ceiling light blinked on, but it wasn’t really necessary; a high south-facing window allowed in a good deal of the watery sunshine. The house had been built with the climate in mind: it would not succumb to gloom even in the rain.

On the right, the living room opened into a kitchen. On the left, a hallway connected the bedrooms and the bath.

A stairway led down to the basement.

“I’ll be damned,” Archer repeated. “Maybe I was wrong about this place.”

The room they faced was meticulously clean, the furniture old but spotless. A mechanical mantel clock ticked away (but who had wound it?) under what looked like a Picasso print. Just slightly kitschy, Tom thought, the glass-topped coffee table, the low Danish Modern sofa; very sixties, but immaculately preserved. It might have popped out of a time capsule.

“Well maintained,” he said.

“You bet. Considering it wasn’t maintained at all, far as I know.”

“Who’s the owner?”

“The property came up for state auction a long time ago. Holding company in Seattle bought it but never did anything with it. They’ve been selling off packets of land all through here for the last year or so.” He shook his head. “To be honest, the house was entirely derelict. We had a man out to evaluate these properties, shingles and foundation and so on, but he never said—I mean, we assumed, all these old frame houses out here—” He put his hands in his pockets and frowned. “The utilities weren’t even switched on till late last week.”

How many cold winters, hot summers had this room been closed and locked? Tom paused and slid his finger along a newel post where the stairs ran down into darkness. His finger came away clean. The wood looked oiled. “Phantom maid service?”

Archer didn’t laugh. “Jack Shackley’s the listed agent on this. Maybe he was in to tidy up. Somebody did a phenomenal job, anyway. The listing is house and contents and it looks like you have some nice pieces here—maybe a little dated. Shall we have a look around?”

“I think we should.”

Tom circled twice through the house—once with Archer, once “to get his own impression” while Archer left his business card on the kitchen counter and stepped outside for a smoke. His impression was the same both times. The kitchen cupboards opened frictionlessly to spotless, uniformly vacant interiors. The linen closet was cedar-lined, fragrant and bare. The bedrooms were empty except for the largest, which contained a modest bed, a chest of drawers, and a mirror— dustless. In the basement, high windows peeked out at the rear lawn; these were covered with white roller blinds, which the sun had turned brittle yellow. (Time passes here after all, he thought.)

The building was sound, functional, and clean.

The fundamental question was, did it feel like home?

No. At least, not yet.

But that might change.

Did he want it to feel like home?

But it was a question he couldn’t answer to his own satisfaction. Maybe what he wanted was not so much a house as a cave: a warm, dry place in which to nurse his wounds until they healed—or at least until the pain was bearable.

But the house was genuinely interesting.

He ran his hand idly along a blank basement wall and was startled to feel … what?

The hum of machinery, carried up through gypsum board and concrete block—instantly stilled?

Faint tingle of electricity?

Or nothing at all.

“Tight as a drum.”

This was Archer, back from his sojourn. “You may have found a bargain here, Tom. We can go back to my office if you want to talk about an offer.”

“Why the hell not,” Tom Winter said.

The town of Belltower occupied the inside curve of a pleasant, foggy Pacific bay on the northwestern coast of the United States .

Its primary industries were fishing and logging. A massive pulp mill had been erected south of town during the boom years of the fifties, and on damp days when the wind came blowing up the coast the town was enveloped in the sulfurous, bitter stench of the mill. Today there had been a stiff offshore breeze; the air was clean. Shortly before sunset, when Tom Winter returned to his room at the Seascape Motel, the cloud stack rolled away and the sun picked out highlights on the hills, the town, the curve of the bay.

He bought himself dinner in the High Tide Dining Room and tipped the waitress too much because her smile seemed genuine. He bought a Newsweek in the gift shop and headed back to his second-floor room as night fell.

Amazing, he thought, to be back in this town. Leaving here had been, in Tom’s mind, an act of demolition. He had ridden the bus north to Seattle pretending that everything behind him had been erased from the map. Strange to find the town still here, stores still open for business, boats still anchored at the marina behind the VFW post.

The only thing that’s been demolished is my life.

But that was self-pity, and he scolded himself for it. The quintessential lonely vice. Like masturbation, it was a parody of something best performed in concert with others.

He was aware, too, of a vast store of pain waiting to be acknowledged … but not here in this room with the ugly harbor paintings on the wall, the complimentary postcards in the bureau, pale rings on the wood veneer where generations had abandoned their vending-machine Cokes to sweat in the dry heat. Here, it would be too much.

He padded down the carpeted hallway, bought a Coke so he could add his own white ring to the furniture.

The phone was buzzing when he got back. He picked it up and popped the ring-tab on the soft-drink can.

“Tom,” his brother said.

“Tony. Hi, Tony.”

“You all by yourself?”

“Hell, no,” Tom said. “The party’s just warming up. Can’t you tell?”

“That’s very funny. Are you drinking something?”

“Soda pop, Tony.”

“Because I don’t think you should be sitting there all by yourself. I think that sets a bad pattern. I don’t want you getting sauced again.”

Sauced, Tom thought, amused. His brother was a well-spring of these antique euphemisms. It was Tony who had once described Brigitte Nielsen as “a red-hot tamale.” Barbara had always relished his brother’s bon mots. She used to call it her “visiting Tony yoga”—making conversation with one hand ready to spring up and disguise a grin.

“If I get sauced,” Tom said, “you’ll be the first to know.”

“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of. I called in a lot of favors to get you this job. Naturally, that leaves my ass somewhat exposed.”

“Is that why you phoned?”

A pause, a confession: “No. Loreen suggested—well, we both thought—she’s got a chicken ready to come out of the oven and there’s more than enough to go around, so if you haven’t eaten—”

“I’m sorry. I had a big meal down at the coffee shop. But thank you. And thank Loreen for me.”

Tony’s relief was exquisitely obvious. “Sure you don’t want to drop by?” Brief chatter in the background: “Loreen’s done up a blueberry pie.”

“Tell Loreen I’m sorely tempted but I want to make it an early night.”

“Well, whatever. Anyway, I’ll call you next week.”

“Good. Great.”

“Night, Tom.” A pause. Tony added, “And welcome back.”

Tom put down the phone and turned to confront his own reflection, gazing dumbly out of the bureau mirror. Here was a haggard man with a receding hairline who looked, at this moment, at least a decade older than his thirty years. He’d put on weight since Barbara left and it was beginning to show —a bulge of belly and a softness around his face. But it was the expression that made the image in the mirror seem so ancient. He had seen it on old men riding buses. A frown that announces surrender, the willing embrace of defeat. Options for tonight?

He could stare out the window, into his past; or into this mirror, the future.

The two had intersected here. Here at the crossroads. This rainy old town.

He turned to the window.

Welcome back.

Doug Archer called in the morning to announce that Tom’s offer on the house—most of his carefully hoarded inheritance, tendered in cash—had been accepted. “Possession is immediate. We can have all the paperwork done by the end of the day. A few signatures and she’s all yours.”

“Would it be possible to get the key today?”

“I don’t see any problem with that.”

Tom drove down to the realty office next to the Harbor Mall. Archer escorted him through paperwork at the in-house Notary Public, then took him across the street for lunch. The restaurant was called El Nino—it was new; the location used to be a Kresge’s, if Tom recalled correctly. The decor was nautical but not screamingly kitschy.

Tom ordered the salmon salad sandwich. Archer smiled at the waitress. “Just coffee, Nance.”

She nodded and smiled back.

“You’re not wearing your realty jacket,” Tom said.

“Technically, it’s my day off. Plus, you’re a solid purchase. And what the hell, you’re a hometown boy, I don’t have to impress anybody here.” He settled back in the vinyl booth, lean in his checkerboard shirt, his long hair a little wilder than he had worn it the day before. He thanked the waitress when the coffee arrived. “I looked into the history of the house, by the way. My own curiosity, mainly.”

“Something interesting?”

“Sort of interesting, yeah.”

“Something you didn’t want to tell me until the papers were signed?”

“Nothing that would change your mind, Tom. Just a little bit odd.”

“So? It’s haunted?”

Archer smiled and leaned over his cup. “Not quite. Though that wouldn’t surprise me. The property has a peculiar history. The lot was purchased in 1963 and the house was finished the next year. From 1964 through 1981 it was occupied by a guy named Ben Collier—lived alone, came into town once in a while, no visible means of support but he paid his bills on time. Friendly when you talked to him, but not real friendly. Solitary.”

“He sold the house?”

“Nope. That’s the interesting part. He disappeared around 1980 and the property came up for nonpayment of taxes. Nobody could locate the gentleman. He had no line of credit, no social security number anybody could dig up, no registered birth—his car wasn’t even licensed. If he died, he didn’t leave a corpse.” Archer sipped his coffee. “Real good coffee here, in my opinion. You know they grind the beans in back? Their own blend. Colombian, Costa Rican—”

Tom said, “You’re enjoying this story.”

“Hell, yes! Aren’t you?”

Tom discovered that he was, as a matter of fact. His interest had been piqued. He looked at Archer across the table— frowned and looked more closely. “Oh, shit, I know who you are! You’re the kid who used to pitch stones at cars down along the coast highway!”

“You were a grade behind me. Tony Winter’s little brother.”

“You cracked a windshield on a guy’s Buick. There were editorials in the paper. Juvenile delinquency on the march.”

Archer grinned. “It was an experiment in ballistics.”

“Now you sell haunted houses to unsuspecting city slickers.

“I think ‘haunted’ is kind of melodramatic. But I did hear another odd story about the house. George Bukowski told me this—George is a Highway Patrol cop, owns a double-wide mobile home down by the marina. He said he was up along the Post Road last year, cruising by, when he saw a light in the house—which he knew was unoccupied ’cause he’d been in on the search for Ben Collier. So he stopped for a look. Turned out a couple of teenagers had broken a basement window. They had a storm lantern up in the kitchen and a case of Kokanee and a ghetto blaster—just having a good old party. He took them in and confiscated maybe an eighth-ounce of dope from the oldest boy, Barry Lindell. Sent ’em all home to their parents. Next day George goes back to the house to check out the damage—the kicker is, it turns out there wasn’t any damage. It was like they’d never been there. No matches on the floor, no empties, everything spit-polished.”

Tom said, “The window where they broke in?”

“It wasn’t broken anymore.”

“Bullshit,” Tom said.

Archer held up his hands. “Sure. But George swears on it. Says the window wasn’t even reputtied, he would have recognized that. It wasn’t fixed—it just wasn’t broken.”

The waitress delivered the sandwich. Tom picked it up and took a thoughtful bite. “This is an obsessively tidy ghost we’re talking about.”

“The phantom handyman.”

“I can’t say I’m frightened.”

“I don’t guess you have any reason to be. Still—”

“I’ll keep my eyes open.”

“And let me know how it goes,” Archer said. “I mean, if that’s okay with you.” He slid his business card across the table. “My home number’s on the back.”

“You’re that curious?”

Archer checked out the next table to make sure nobody was listening. “I’m that fucking bored.”

“Yearning for the old days? A sunny afternoon, a rock in your hand, the smell of a wild convertible?”

Archer grinned. The grin said, Hell, yes, I am that kid, and I don’t much mind admitting it.

This man enjoys life, Tom thought.

Heartening to believe that was still possible.

Before he drove out to the house Tom stopped at the Harbor Mall to pick up supplies. At the A P he assembled a week’s worth of staples and a selection of what Barbara used to call bachelor food: frozen entrees, potato chips, cans of Coke in plastic saddles. At the Radio Shack he picked up a plug-in phone, and at Sears he paid $300 for a portable color TV.

Thus equipped for elementary survival, he drove to the house up along the Post Road.

The sun was setting when he arrived. Did the house look haunted? No, Tom thought. The house looked suburban. Cedar siding a little faded, the boxy structure a little lost in these piney woods, but not dangerous. Haunted, if at all, strictly by Mr. Clean. Or perhaps the Tidy Bowl Man.

The key turned smoothly in the lock.

Stepping over the threshold, he had the brief but disquieting sensation that this was after all somebody else’s house … that he had arrived, like Officer Bukowski’s juvenile delinquents, without credentials. Well, to hell with that. He flicked every light switch he could reach until the room was blisteringly bright. He plugged in the refrigerator—it began to hum at once—and dropped the Cokes inside. He plugged in the TV set and tuned the rabbit ears to a Tacoma station, a little fuzzy but watchable. He cranked the volume up. Noise and light.

He preheated the ancient white enamel stove, watching the elements for a time to make sure everything worked. (Everything did.) The black Bakelite knobs were as slick as ebony; his own fingerprints seemed like an insult to their polished surface. He slipped a TV dinner into the oven and closed the door. Welcome home.

A new life, he thought.

That was why he had come here—or at least that was what he’d told his friends. Looking around this clean, illuminated space, it was possible—almost possible—to believe that.

He took the TV dinner into the living room and poked at the tepid fried chicken with a plastic fork while MacNeil (or Lehrer, he had never quite sorted that out) conducted a round-table discussion of this year’s China crisis. When he was finished he tidied away the foil plate into a plastic bag— he wasn’t ready to offend the Hygiene Spirit just yet—and pulled the tab on a Coke. He watched two nature documentaries and a feature history of Mormonism. Then, suddenly, it was late, and when he switched off the set he heard the wind turning the branches of the pines; he was reminded how far he had come from town and what a large slice of loneliness he might have bought himself, here.

He turned up the heat. The weather was still cool, summer still a ways off. He stepped outside and watched the silhouettes of the tall pines against the sky. The sky was bright with stars. You have to come a long way out, Tom thought, to see a sky like this.

Inside, he locked the door behind him and slid home the security chain.

The bed in the big bedroom belonged to him now …

but he had never slept in it, and he felt the weight of its strangeness. The bed was made in the same Danish Modern style as the rest of the furniture: subdued, almost generic, as if it had been averaged out of a hundred similar designs; not distinctive but solidly made. He tested the mattress; the mattress was firm. The sheets smelled faintly of clean, crisp linen and not at all of dust.

He thought, I’m an intruder here …

But he frowned at himself for the idea. Surely not an intruder, not after the legal divinations and fiscal blessings of the realty office. He was that most hallowed institution now, a Homeowner. Misgivings, at this stage, were strictly beside the point.

He switched off the bedside lamp and closed his eyes in the foreign darkness.

He heard, or thought he heard, a distant humming … barely audible over the whisper of his own breath. The sound of faraway, buried machinery. Night work at a factory underground. Or, more likely, the sound of his imagination. When he tried to focus on it it vanished into the ear’s own night noises, tinnitus and the creaking of small bones. Like every house, Tom thought, this one must move and sigh with the pulse of its heat and the tension of its beams.

Surrounded by the dark and the buzzing of his own thoughts, he fell asleep at last.

The dream came to him after midnight but well before dawn —it was three a.m. when he woke and checked his watch.

The dream began conventionally. He was arguing with Barbara, or bearing the brunt of one of her arguments. She had accused him of complicity in some sweeping, global disaster: the warming of the earth, ocean pollution, nuclear war. He protested his innocence (at least, his ignorance); but her small face, snub-nosed, lips grimly compressed, radiated a disbelief so intense that he could smell the rising odor of his own guilt.

But this was only one more variation of what had become the standard Barbara dream. On another night it might have ended there. He would have come awake drenched in the effluvia of his own doubt; would have rinsed his face with cold tap water and staggered back to bed like a battle-fatigued foot soldier slogging to the trenches.

Tonight, instead, the dream dissolved into a new scenario. Suddenly he was alone; he was in a house that was like this house, but bigger, emptier; he was lying on his back in a room with a single high window. There was a diffuse moonlight that illuminated only his bed and left the margins of the room in cavernous darkness.

Hidden in that darkness, things were moving.

He couldn’t tell what sort of things they were. Their feet ticked like cat’s claws on the hard floor and they seemed to be whispering to one another in a high, buzzing falsetto—a language he had never heard. He imagined elves; he imagined immense, articulate rats.

But the worst thing was their invisibility—compounded by what he recognized suddenly as his own helplessness. He understood that the room had no door; that the window was impossibly high; that his arms and legs were not just stiff but paralyzed.

He strained forward, peering into the darkness …

And they opened their eyes—all at once.

A hundred eyes all around him.

A hundred disks of pure, pupil-less, bone-white light.

The whispering rose in a metallic, clattering crescendo—

And he awoke.

Woke alone in this smaller, brighter, but still moonlit and unfamiliar room. Woke with his heart pounding wildly in his chest.

Woke with the sound still ringing in his ears: The hiss of their voices. The clatter of their nails.

Of course, it was only a dream.

The morning house was clean, hollow, blank, and prosaic. Tom paced from bedroom to kitchen listening to the unfamiliar shush of his feet against the broadloom. He put together breakfast, fried eggs and a bagel, and stacked the dirty dishes in the sink when he was finished. Bachelor housekeeping. Maybe the Genius Loci would clean up.

Yesterday’s overcast had spilled away across the mountains. Tom opened the screen door at the back of the kitchen and stepped out into the yard. The lawn had been slashed down to stubble but was starting to grow back, as much weed as grass. No housekeeping elves out here. A stand of tall pine rose up beyond the margin of the yard, enclosing ferns and fallen needles in its darkness. An overgrown trail led away from the corner of the yard and Tom followed it a few paces in, but the trees closed out the sun and the air was suddenly chill. He listened a moment to the drip of water somewhere in this spongy wilderness. Archer had said the forest ran a long way back, that there was a cedar swamp behind the property. (Archer would know, Tom thought. Archer the car-stalker, trailblazer, rock-climber, truant … these childhood memories had begun to freshen.) A damp breeze tickled the pale hair on his arms. A hummingbird darted up, regarded him querulously, and darted away.

He turned back to the house.

Tony called after lunch with another dinner invitation, which Tom could not gracefully decline. “Come on over,” Tony said. “We’ll stoke up the barbecue.” It was an order as much as an invitation: tribute to be paid.

Tom left the dirty dishes in the sink. At the door he paused and turned back to the empty house.

“You want to clean up, go ahead.” No answer. Oh, well.

It was a long drive to Tony’s place. Tony and Loreen lived in the Seaview district, a terrace of expensive family homes along the scalloped bay hills south of town. The neighborhood was prestigious but the house Tony lived in wasn’t especially flashy—Tony was very Protestant about overt displays of wealth. Tony’s house, in fact, was one of the plainer of these homes, a flat white facade which concealed its real, formidable opulence: the immense plate glass windows and the cedar deck overlooking the water. Tom parked in the driveway behind Loreen’s Aerostar and was welcomed at the door by the entire family: Tony, five-year-old Barry, Loreen with cranky eight-month Tricia squirming against her shoulder. Tom smiled and stepped into the mingled odors of stain-proofed broadloom, Pine-Sol, Pampers.

He would have liked to sit and talk a while with Loreen. (“Poor Loreen,” Barbara used to say. “Playing Tony’s idea of a housewife. All diapers and Barbara Cartland novels.”) But Tony threw an arm over his shoulder and marched him through the spacious living room to the deck, where his propane barbecue hissed and flamed alarmingly.

“Sit,” Tony said, waving a pair of tongs at a deck chair.

Tom sat and watched his brother paint red sauce over steaks. Tony was five years older than Tom, balding but trim, the creases around his eyes defined more by exercise and sunshine than by age. It would be hard, Tom thought, to guess which of us is older.

It was Tony who had come roaring out to Seattle like an angry guardian angel—six months after Barbara moved out; five months after Tom left his job at Aerotech; three months after Tom stopped answering his phone. Tony had cleared the apartment of empty bottles and frozen food wrappers, switched off the TV that had flickered and mumbled for weeks uninterrupted, scolded Tom into showering and shaving—talked him into the move back to Belltower and the job at the car lot.

It was also Tony who had offered, as consolation for the loss of Barbara, the observation “She’s a bitch, little brother. They’re all bitches. Fuck em.”

“She’s not a bitch,” Tom had said.

“They’re all bitches.”

“Don’t call her that,” Tom had said, and he remembered Tony’s look, the arrogance eroding into uncertainty.

“Well … you can’t throw your life away for her, anyhow. There are people out there going on with their business —people with cancer, people whose kids were smeared over the highway by semi trucks. If they can deal with it, you can fucking well deal with it.”

This was both unanswerable and true. Tom accepted the chastisement and had been clinging to it since. Barbara would not have approved; she disliked the appropriation of public grief for private purposes. Tom was more pragmatic. You do what you have to.

But here he was in Tony’s big house beside the bay, and it occurred to him that he was carrying a considerable load of guilt, gratitude, and resentment, mostly directed at his brother.

He made small talk while the steaks charred over the flames. Tony responded with his own chatter. Tony had bought the propane barbecue “practically wholesale” from a guy he knew at a retail hardware outlet. He was considering investing in a couple of rental properties this summer. “You should have talked to me about that house before running off half cocked.” And he had his eye on a new sailboat.

This wasn’t bragging, Tom understood. Barbara had long ago pointed out Tony’s need for physical evidence of his worth, like the validations punched into bus tickets. To his credit, he was at least discreet about it.

The problem was that he, Tom, had no such validation of his own; in Tony’s eyes, this must render him suspicious. A man without a VCR or a sports car might be capable of anything. This nervousness extended to Tom’s job performance, a topic that had not been broached but which hovered over the conversation like a cloud.

Tony’s own reliability, of course, was unquestioned. When their parents died Tony had staked his share of the estate on a junior partnership in an auto dealership out on Commercial Road. The investment was more than financial: Tony had put in a lot of time, sweat, and deferred gratification. And the investment had paid off, handsomely enough that Tom sometimes wondered whether his own use of the same inheritance—for his engineering degree, and now the house—was ultimately frivolous. What had it bought him? A divorce and a job as a car salesman.

But he was not even a salesman, really. “For now,” Tony said, carrying the steaks in to the dining room table—Topic A surfacing at last—“you are strictly a gofer, a lot boy, a floor whore. You don’t write up sales until the manager says you’re ready. Loreen! We’re gettin’ hungry here! Where the hell is the salad?”

Loreen emerged dutifully from the kitchen with a cut-glass bowl filled with iceberg and romaine lettuce, sliced tomatoes, mushrooms, a wooden spoon and fork. She set down the bowl and went about tucking Tricia into a high chair while Barry tugged at her dress. Tony sat down and poured himself iced tea from a sweating jug. “The steaks look wonderful,” Loreen said.

Tom spent the salad course wondering what a “floor whore” was. Loreen fed Tricia from a jar of strained peas, then excused herself long enough to install the baby in a playpen. Barry didn’t want the steak even after she cut it for him; Loreen fixed him a peanut butter sandwich and sent him out into the back yard. When she sat down again her own steak was surely stone cold—Tony had just about finished his.

A floor whore, Tony explained, was a novice salesman, viewed mainly as a nuisance by the older hands at the lot. Tony shook his head. “The thing is,” he said, “I’m already getting some flak over this. Bob Walker—the co-owner—was very much opposed to me putting you in this job. He says it’s nepotism and he says it frankly sucks. And he has a point, because it creates a problem for the sales manager. He knows you’re my brother, so the question becomes, do I handle this guy with kid gloves or do I treat him like any other employee?”

“I don’t want any special treatment,” Tom said.

“I know! Of course! You know that, I know that. But I had to go to the manager—Billy Klein, you’ll meet him tomorrow —I had to go to him and say, Hey, Billy, just do your job. If this guy fucks up then tell him so. If he doesn’t work out, you tell me. This is not a featherbed. I want the maximum from this man.”

“Sure enough,” Tom said, inspecting the greasy remains of the steak on his plate.

“There are basically two things I want to make clear,” Tony said. “One is that if you screw up, I look bad. So as a favor to me, please don’t screw up. The second is that Billy has a free hand as far as I’m concerned. You answer to him from now on. I don’t do his job and I don’t look out for you. And he is not always an easy man to please. Frankly, he wouldn’t piss down your throat if your guts were on fire. If it works out, then fine, but if not—what the hell are you smiling at?”

“ ‘Piss down your throat if your guts were on fire’?”

“It’s a colloquialism. Jesus, Tom, it’s not supposed to be funny!”

“Barbara would have loved it.”

Barbara would have repeated it for weeks. Once, during a phone call, Tony had described the weather as “cold as the tits on a brass monkey.” Barbara laughed so hard she had to pass Tom the receiver. Tom explained patiently that she’d swallowed her gum.

But Tony wasn’t amused. He wiped his mouth and slapped the napkin down on the table. “If you want this job you’d better think a little more about your future and a little less about your hippy-dippy ex-wife, all right?”

Tom flushed. “She wasn’t—”

“No! Spare me the impassioned defense. She’s the one who ran off with her twenty-year-old boyfriend. She doesn’t deserve your loyalty and you sure as shit don’t owe it to her.”

“Tony,” Loreen said. Her tone was pleading. Please, not here.

Barry, the five-year-old, had wandered in from the back yard; he stood with one peanut butter-encrusted hand on the armoire and gazed at the adults with rapt, solemn interest.

Tom desperately wanted to be able to deliver an answer— something fierce and final-—and was shocked to discover he couldn’t produce one.

“It’s a new world,” Tony said. “Get used to it.”

“I’ll serve the dessert,” Loreen said.

After dinner Tony went off to tuck in Barry and read him a story. Tricia was already asleep in her crib, and Tom sat with Loreen in the cooling kitchen. He offered to help with the dishes but his sister-in-law shooed him away: “I’m just rinsing them for later.” So he sat at the big butcher-block table and peered through the window toward the dark water of the bay, where pleasure-boat lights bobbed in the swell.

Loreen dried her hands on a dish towel and sat opposite him. “It’s not such a bad fife,” she said.

Tom gave her a long look. It was the kind of bald statement Loreen was prone to, couched in the slow Ohio Valley cadences of her youth. Her life here, she meant; her life with Tony: not so bad.

“I never said it was,” Tom told her.

“No. But I can tell. I know what you and Barbara thought of us.” She smiled at him. “Don’t be embarrassed. I mean, we might as well talk. It’s all right to talk.”

“You have a good life here.”

“Yes. We do. And Tony is a good man.”

“I know that, Loreen.”

“But we’re nothing special. Tony would never admit it, of course. But that’s the fact. Down deep, he knows. And maybe it makes him a little mean sometimes. And maybe I know it, and I get a little sad—for a little while. But then I get over it.”

“You’re not ordinary. You’re both very lucky.”

“Lucky, but ordinary. The thing is, Tom, what’s hard is that you and Barbara were special. It always tickled me to see you two. Because you were special and you knew it. The way you smiled at each other and the way you talked. The things you talked about. You talked about the world—you know, politics, the environment, whatever—you talked like it mattered. Like it was up to you personally to do something about it. I always felt just a little bigger than life with you two around.”

“I appreciate that,” Tom said. In fact he was unexpectedly grateful to her for saying it—for recognizing what Barbara had meant to him.

“But that’s changed.” Loreen was suddenly serious. Her smile faded. “Now Barbara’s gone, and I think you have to learn how to be ordinary. And I don’t think that’s going to be real easy for you. I think it’s going to be pretty tough.”

Tony didn’t apologize, but he came out of Barry’s room somewhat abashed and eager to please. He said he’d like to see the new house and Tom seized on the offer as an excuse to leave early. He let Tony follow him down the coast in the electric-blue Aerostar. Moving inland, up the Post Road and away from the traffic, Tony became a glare in Tom’s rearview mirror, lost when the car angled around stands of pine. They parked at the house; Tony climbed out of his van and the two of them stood a moment in the starry, frog-creaking night.

“Mistake to buy so far out,” Tony said.

“I like the place,” Tom offered. “The price was right.”

“Bad investment. Even if the market heats up, you’re just too damn far from town.”

“It’s not an investment, Tony. It’s my house. It’s where I five.”

Tony gave him a pitying look. “Come on in,” Tom said.

He showed his brother around. Tony poked into cupboards, dug a fingernail into the window casements, stood up on tiptoe to peer into the fuse box. When they arrived back at the living room Tom poured his brother a Coke. Tony acknowledged with a look that this was good, that there was no liquor handy. “Fairly sound building for its age,” he admitted. “Christ knows it’s clean.”

“Self-cleaning,” Tom said.

“What?”

“No—nothing.”

“You planning to have us out for dinner one of these days?”

“Soon as I get set up. You and Loreen and the whole tribe.”

“Good … that’s good.”

Tony finished his Coke and moved toward the door. This is as hard for him, Tom recognized, as it is for me. “Well,” Tony said. “Good luck, little brother. What can I say?”

“You’ve said it. Thanks, Tony.”

They embraced awkwardly. “I’ll look for you at the lot,” Tony said, and turned away into the cool night air.

Tom listened to the van as it thrummed and faded down the road.

He went back into the house, alone. The silence seemed faintly alive.

“Hello, ghosts,” Tom said. “Bet you didn’t do the dishes after all.” But the thing was, they had.

Two

It wasn’t long before a single question came to occupy his mind almost exclusively: What was madness, and how do you know when it happens to you?

The cliche was that the question contained its own answer. If you’re sane enough to wonder, you must be all right. Tom had trouble with the logic of this. Surely even the most confirmed psychotic must sometimes gaze into the mirror and wonder whether things hadn’t gone just a little bit wrong?

The question wasn’t academic. As far as he could figure, there were only two options. Either he had lost his grip on his sanity—and he wasn’t willing to admit that yet—or something was going on in this house.

Something scary. Something strange.

He shelved the question for three days and was careful to clean up meticulously: no dirty dishes in the sink, no crumbs on the counter, garbage stowed in the back yard bin. The Tidiness Elves had no scope for their work and Tom was able to pretend that he had actually done the dishes himself the night he went to Tony’s: it must have been his memory playing a trick on him.

These were his first days at Arbutus Ford and there was plenty to occupy his mind. He spent most of his daylight hours studying a training manual or bird-dogging the senior salesmen. He learned how to greet buyers; he learned what an offer sheet looked like; he learned how to “T.O.”—how to turn over a buyer to the sales manager, who could eke out a few more dollars on an offer; who would then T.O. the customer to the finance people. (“Which is where the real money’s made,” the sales manager, Billy Klein, cheerfully confided.)

The lot was a new/used operation down along the flat stretch of Commercial Road between Belltower and the suburban malls. Tom sometimes thought of it as a paved farm field where a crop of scrap metal had sprouted but not ripened—everything was still sleek and new. The weather turned hot on Wednesday; the days were long, the customers sparse. Tom drank Cokes from sweating bottles and studied his system manual in the sales lounge. Most of the salesmen took breaks at a bar called Healy’s up the road, but they were a fairly hard-drinking crowd and Tom wasn’t comfortable with that yet. Lunchtimes, he scuffed across the blistering asphalt to a little steak and burger restaurant called The Paradise. He was conserving his money. He might make a respectable income on commissions in an average month, Klein assured him—assuming he started selling soon. But it was a grindingly slow month. Evenings he drove inland through the dense, ancient pine forest and thought about the mystery of the house. Or tried not to.

Two possibilities, his mind kept whispering.

You’re insane.

Or you’re not alone here.

Thursday night, he put three greasy china plates on the counter next to the stainless steel sink and went to bed.

In the morning the dishes were precisely where he had left them—as smooth and clean as optical lenses.

Friday night, he dirtied and abandoned the same three plates. Then he moved into the living room, tuned in the eleven o’clock news and installed himself on the sofa. He left the lights on in both rooms. If he moved his head a few degrees to the right he had a good view of the kitchen counter. Any motion would register in his peripheral vision.

This was scientific, Tom reassured himself. An experiment.

He was pleased with himself for approaching the problem objectively. In a way, it was almost exciting—staying up late waiting for something impossible to happen. He propped his feet on the coffee table and sprang the tab on a soda can.

Half an hour later he was less enthusiastic. He’d been keeping early hours; it was hard not to nod off during commercial breaks. He dozed a moment, sat upright and shot a glance into the kitchen. Nothing had changed.

(Well, what had he expected? Gnomes in Robin Hood hats humming “Whistle While You Work”? Or maybe—some perverse fraction of his mind insisted—creatures like rats. With clackety claws and saucer eyes.)

The “Tonight” show was less than engaging, but he wasn’t stuck with Carson: the local cable company had hooked him up last week. He abused the remote control until it yielded an antique science fiction film: Them, featuring James Whitmore and giant ants in the Mojave. In the movies radiation produced big bugs; in the neighborhood of failed fission reactors it mainly caused cancer and leukemia—the difference, Barbara had once observed, between Art and Life. He was nodding off again by the time the ants took refuge in the storm drains of Los Angeles. He stood up, walked to the kitchen— where nothing had changed—and fixed himself a cup of coffee. Now, mysteriously, it felt late: no traffic down the Post Road, a full moon hanging over the back yard. He carried his coffee into the living room. It occurred to him that this was a fairly spooky activity he had selected here: making odds on his own sanity, sometime after midnight. He had done things like this—well, things this reminded him of—when he was twelve years old, sleeping in the back yard with a flashlight or staying up with the monster flicks all by himself. Except that by now he would have given up and found some reassuring place to spend the night.

Here, there was only the house. Probably safe. Hardly reassuring.

He found an all-night Seattle station showing sitcom reruns. He propped himself up on the sofa, drained the coffee, and hoped the caffeine would help keep him awake. It did, or at least it put him on edge. Edgy, he remembered what he had come to think of as his father’s credo: The world is a cold, thoughtless place and it has no special love for human beings. Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe he should go to bed, let the elves wash up, wake up bright and early and put the house back on the market. No law required him to become the Jacques Cousteau of the supernatural. That wasn’t what he’d signed up for.

But maybe there was nothing supernatural about it. Something odd but entirely explainable might be at work. Some kind of bacteria. Insects (nonmutated). Anything. If he had to bet, that’s where he’d put his money.

It was just that he wanted to know—really know.

He stretched out on the sofa. He meant to rest his head against the padded arm. He had no intention of going to sleep.

He closed his eyes and began to dream.

This time, the dream came without preamble.

In the dream he stood up from the sofa, went to the window and raised the sash.

The moon was low, but it cast a clear fluorescence over the back yard. In the dream, it seemed at first as if nothing had changed; there was the starry sky, the deep shadow of the forest, the bleached cedar fence obscure under ivy. Then he saw the grass moving in the wind, a curious sinewy motion— but there was no wind; and Tom understood that it wasn’t the grass moving, it was something in the grass—something like insects, a hundred or more, moving in a snakelike column from the house into the woods. His heart gave a startled jump and he was suddenly afraid, but he couldn’t look away or leave the window … somehow, that choice had been taken from him. He watched as the line of insect-things slowed to a stop and each one—and there were more of them than he had guessed—turned simultaneously to look at him with tiny saucer-shaped eyes, and they pronounced his name —Tom Winter—somehow inside his head, a voiceless chorus. He woke in a drenching sweat.

The TV was showing fuzz. He stood and switched it off. His watch said 3:45.

In the kitchen, the dishes were flawlessly clean.

He slept four more hours in his bedroom with the door closed, and in the morning he showered and phoned Doug Archer—the number on the back of his business card. “You wanted me to get in touch if I noticed anything strange.”

“That’s right … is it getting weird out there?”

“Just a little weird. You could say that.”

“Well, you called at the right time. I’m on vacation. The beeper gets switched off at noon. I was planning to drive up into the Cascades, but I can put it off a little while. How about if I drop by after lunch?”

“Good,” Tom said, but he was troubled by the note of happy anticipation in Archer’s voice.

If you talk about this, he thought, you’re opening one more door that maybe ought to stay closed—taking one step closer to ratifying your own insanity.

But was silence any better? There were times (last night, for instance) when he felt himself stewing in the sour juice of his own isolation. No: he needed to talk about this, and he needed to talk about it to somebody who wasn’t family— obviously not Tony or Loreen. Archer would do.

Dreams aside, nothing threatening had happened. Some inexpensive dinnerware had been surreptitiously cleaned: not quite Ghostbusters material. But it was the dream that stayed in his mind.

He told Archer he’d expect him soon and replaced the phone in its cradle. The silence of the morning house rang out around him. He walked to the kitchen door, opened it and took a tentative step outside.

The air was bracing; the sky was bright.

Tom had brought home a power mower from Sears on Wednesday but he hadn’t used it yet; the grass was ankle high. He was briefly afraid to put his foot down off the back step—a vagrant image of metallic insects with brightly focused eyes ran through his mind. (They might be there still. They might bite.)

He took a breath and stepped down.

His ankles itched with anticipation … but there was nothing sinister among these weeds, only a few ants and aphids.

He walked to the northern quadrant of the yard where the dream-insects had moved between the house and the woods.

He understood that by looking for their trail he was violating the commonsense assumption that dreams are necessarily separate from the daylight world. But he was past fighting the impulse. Yet another prop kicked from under the edifice of his sanity. (Tom had begun to envision his sanity as one of those southern California hillside houses erected on stilts— the ones that wash into the ocean in a heavy rain.) He examined the deep, seeded grass where the insects had seemed to be, but there was nothing unusual among the dewy grass blades and feathered dandelion heads.

He should have been reassured. Instead, he felt oddly disappointed. Disappointed because on some fundamental level he was convinced last night’s dream had been no ordinary dream. (No—but he couldn’t say exactly how it was different.)

He walked to the verge of the woods. In his dream this was where the broad trail of bright-eyed insects had passed into the moon-shadow of the trees.

The sun, this time of morning, did not much penetrate the deep Pacific Northwest pinewoods. There was a trail leading back through this tangle, but it began at the opposite end of the yard. Here there were only these old trees and this fern-tangle undergrowth, the smell of rotting pine needles and the drip of hoarded rainwater. The barrier between the forest and the sunlit yard could not have been more distinct. He braced his hands on a tree trunk. Leaning forward, he felt the cool, mushroom dampness of the forest on his face.

He turned back to the house.

In his dream, the insects had moved to the forest from the house. Tom paced back to the nearest wall. It was an ordinary frame wall sided with cedar, well preserved—the paint hadn’t blistered or peeled—but hardly unusual. This was the wall at the back of the master bedroom, windowless at this corner.

But if his dream had not been a dream, there must be some sort of opening here.

He sat on his haunches and pulled away handfuls of high, seeded grass from the concrete foundation where it rose some few inches above the soil.

He held his breath, gazing at what he found there.

The concrete was riddled with small, precisely round holes. The holes were all alike, all approximately as wide as the ball of his thumb.

His foot slipped in the wet grass and he sat back with a thump on his tailbone.

They must be bolt holes, he thought. Something must have been attached here. A deck, maybe.

But the holes in the chalky, water-stained concrete were smooth as glass.

“Be damned,” he said.

He plucked a stem of the tall grass and held it to one of the openings.

Like shoving a stick into a hornet’s nest, Tom. Real dumb. You don’t know what might be in there.

But when he pushed the long grass stem inside there was no resistance … no response.

He bent down and peered into the opening. He didn’t put his cheek hard up against the concrete foundation, because he couldn’t shake the belief that one of those tiny saucer-eyed creatures from his dream might be inside—that it might possess claws, teeth, a poison sac, a hostile intent. But he bent close enough to smell the rooty earth odor rising from the damp lawn … close enough to watch a sow bug trundling up the latticework of a thistle. No light radiated from the many holes in the foundation. He thought he felt a breath of air sigh out, oily and faintly metallic.

He stood up and backed off a pace.

What now? Do we call Exterminex? Dynamite the foundation?

Tell Archer?

No, Tom thought. None of the above. Not yet.

He explained everything else—the dishes, the dream—meticulously to Archer, who sat at the kitchen table drinking instant coffee and running his fingernail along the grain of the wood.

The telling of it made Tom feel foolish. Archer was sanity incarnate in his checkerboard cotton shirt and Levi’s: rooted to the earth right through the soles of his high-top sneakers. Archer listened patiently, then grinned. “This has to be the most interesting thing to happen around here since Chuck Nixon saw a UFO over the waste treatment plant.”

He would say that, Tom thought. Archer had been a legend at Sea View Elementary—“a world-class shit disturber,” as the gym teacher had declared on one memorable occasion. Maybe that’s why I called him, Tom thought: I still think of him as fearless.

“I mean it,” Archer said. “You’re obviously upset by this. But it’s wonderful. I mean, here’s this mundane little house in the woods, one more shitty frame house out along the Post Road—pardon me—then suddenly it’s more than that. You know the quote from Kipling? ‘There was a crack in his head and a little bit of the Dark World came through…’ ”

Tom winced. “Thanks a lot.” Kipling?

“Don’t misunderstand. I would be disappointed,” Archer said, “if you were crazy. Craziness is very common. Very—” He struggled for a word. “Very K-mart. I’m hoping for something a little classier.”

“You’re enjoying this too much.”

“It’s my hobby,” Archer said.

Tom blinked. “It’s what?”

“Well, it’s hard to explain. The supernatural: it’s like a hobby with me. I’m a skeptic, you understand. I don’t believe in ghosts, I don’t believe in UFOs. I’m not that kind of enthusiast. But I’ve read all the books. Charles Fort, Jacques Vallee. I don’t believe in it, but I decided a long time ago that I wanted it to be true. I want there to be rains of frogs. I want statues to bleed. I want it because—please don’t repeat this —it would be like God saying, ‘Fuck Belltower, Washington, here’s a miracle.’ It would mean the asphalt down by the car lots might break out in crocuses and morning glories and tie up traffic for a week. It would mean we might all wake up one morning and find the pulp mill crumbled into sand. Half the town would be out of work, of course. But we could all live on manna and red wine. And nobody—absolutely nobody —would sell real estate.”

Tom said, “When I was twelve years old I used to pray for nuclear war. Not so that millions of people would die. So that I wouldn’t have to go to school in the morning.”

“Exactly! Everything would be rubble. Life would be transformed.”

“Life would be easier.”

“More fun! Yes.”

“Sure. But would it? I’m thirty years old, Doug. I don’t pray for war anymore.”

Archer met his gaze. “I’m thirty-two and I still pray for magic.”

“Is that what we’re talking about here?”

“Something extraordinary, anyhow. Unless you are crazy.”

“It’s a possibility,” Tom said. “Crazy people see things sometimes. I had an aunt Emily who used to talk to Jesus. Jesus lived in the attic. Once in a while he’d move over to the bedroom and they’d have a chat while she combed her hair. Everybody in the family thought this was terrifically funny. Then one day Aunt Emily sliced open her wrists in a warm bath. Her landlord found her a week later. She left a note saying Jesus told her to do it.”

Archer reflected on this a moment. “You’re saying there are serious things at stake.”

“Either way, it seems to me. My sanity. Or sanity in general.”

“Screw sanity in general.”

“My own in particular, then.”

“You want me to take this seriously,” Archer said. “Okay. Fine. But I don’t know you. You’re somebody I sold a house to. Somebody who was a year behind me at Sea View Elementary. You seem like a fairly reasonable guy. But let’s be clear, Tom. You called me because you want credentials for your sanity. I want more than that.”

Tom leaned back in his chair, considering this. Obviously time had not much tamed Douglas Archer. Maybe it was important to remember you could pull a jail sentence and a stiff fine for throwing stones at Buicks, especially if you were old enough to know better. Tom had no love for Belltower, but neither did he especially want to see morning glories tying up traffic down by the car lots (though it would piss Tony off no end).

Still, there was something seductive about Archer’s attitude, especially after a night of nervous hysteria. He said, “You know some of the old trails up through here?”

Archer nodded.

“Let’s scout the territory behind the house.” Tom stood up. “Then we’ll talk about what to do.”

They followed an old, nearly overgrown foot trail into the dense woods behind the back yard.

Tom had forgotten what it was like to walk through these big Pacific Northwest pinewoods, this density of moss and fern and dripping water. He followed the broad back of Archer’s checkerboard shirt along the trail, bending under branches or stepping over small, glossy freshets of rainwater. The sound of cars passing on the Post Road faded as they climbed a gentle slope westward. All this talk of magic—his own and Archer’s—seemed much more plausible here.

Archer said, “There were Indians living in through here a hundred years ago. Used to be an old totem pole in among the cedars, but they dragged that off to the town museum.”

“Who uses this trail?”

“The Hopfner kids down the road, but they moved away a long time ago. Hikers sometimes. There are trails all the way up from the housing development along Poplar. It’s mostly overgrown down by your place—I don’t suppose anybody goes through that way these days.”

He paused behind Archer where the trail banked away through an open meadow full of thistles and fireweed, past an old tin shack overgrown with ivy: someone’s long-abandoned store of firewood, Tom guessed, the structure obscured and sagging moss-thick to the ground. Archer pushed ahead into the deeper forest and Tom followed until the tree shadows closed around him again.

They hiked for more than an hour, uphill through pine forest until they reached a rocky knoll. Archer clambered up the pinnacle, turned back and extended a hand to Tom. “We’ve come up a good height,” he said, and Tom turned back and was surprised by a sweeping view not just to the Post Road but all the way to the coast—the town of Belltower clustered around the bay, the pulp mill lofting a gray plume of smoke.

“This is why people come up here,” Archer said. “It’s not a well-known trail. If we’d followed the other branch we would have ended up in some serious swamp. Up this way, it gets nice.”

“Is there a name for this place?”

“Somebody must call it something. Everything’s got a name, I guess.”

“You come here a lot?”

“Once in a while. I come for the perspective. From here— on a nice day—everything looks good. The fucking parking lots look good.”

“You hate this town,” Tom said.

Archer shrugged. “If I hated it, I’d leave. Though from what I’ve seen I doubt I could find anything significantly better. Hate is a strong word. But I dislike it a whole lot— sometimes.” He paused and looked sidelong at Tom, shading his face against the sun. “I do admit to wondering what brought you back here.”

“You never asked.”

“It’s not polite. Specially when someone obviously doesn’t want to talk about it.” He turned back to the view. The sunlight was intense. “So are we still being polite?”

“My wife left me,” Tom said. “I lost my job. I was drinking for therapy.”

Archer scrutinized him more closely now.

Tom said, “You’re wondering whether an alcoholic can be trusted when he sees strange things at night. Fair enough. But it’s been more than a month since I touched any kind of liquor. As an explanation, a good case of DTs would be almost comforting.”

“How long were you drinking?”

“Seriously? Since the job fell through. Maybe three months.”

Archer said, “I can think of a couple of tough questions.”

“Such as?”

“Lots of people lose their jobs. Lots of people go through divorce. They don’t all jump down a bottle.”

There were lots of ways to answer that. The most succinct would be, It’s none of your business. But maybe he had made it Archer’s business; he had raised the issue of his own stability. It wasn’t a hostile question.

He could say, I was married for ten years to a bright, thoughtful woman whom I loved intensely, and whose mistrust grew until it was. like a knife between us.

He could explain about Barbara’s political activism, her conviction that the world was teetering on the brink of ecological catastrophe. He could explain that his engineering work at Aerotech had divided them, tell Archer that she’d come to see him as a living example of the technological juggernaut: all his schooling and all his ingenuity plugged into a military-industrial machine so hydra-headed in its aspects and so single-minded in its goals that the earth itself was being strip-mined and forested into a global desert.

He could replay, perhaps, one of their arguments. He could reiterate his endless, patient assertion that the engines he designed were fuel-efficient; that his work, while not exactly a pursuit of the ecological Grail, might help clear the air around major cities. Band-Aid thinking, Barbara called this, a piddling solution to an overwhelming problem. A better combustion engine wouldn’t restore the rain forests to Brazil or the redwoods to California. To which Tom would reply that it was a damn sight more productive than chaining himself to the gate of a paper mill or sneaking off with some long-haired anarchists to spike trees in the Cascades. At which point— more often in their last year—the conversation would decline into insult. Barbara would begin on his “complacent hick family,” particularly Tony; and Tom, if he was drunk or angry enough, would explore the possible reasons for her recent loss of sexual appetite. (“It’s not too complicated,” she once told him. “Take a look in the mirror sometime.”)

But there was no way to explain any of this. No way to explain his nagging suspicion that she was, after all, right; no way to explain the fundamental upwelling of love he still felt, even after their battles, when she was kneeling in the garden or brushing her hair before bed. He loved her with a loyalty that was animal in its mute persistence. He loved her even when he opened his mouth and called her frigid.

He blinked against the fierce blue sky, the curve of the distant bay.

He said, “I loved my wife a lot. I hated it when she left.”

“So why’d she leave?” Archer added, “You’re allowed to tell me to fuck off at this point.”

“It was a political disagreement. I was doing engineering for a little R and D company out of Seattle. Barbara was into the peace movement, among other things. She came home one day and told me the company was about to be handed a big federal grant for weapons research, something connected with SDI. I told her there was no truth to the rumor. The people I worked for were scrupulous, small-scale, community-minded—I knew these guys. I checked out the possibility, asked a few questions, came up totally blank. Stood my ground. Really, it was just one more argument. There’d been more than a few. But it turned out this was the last one. She couldn’t bear the idea of being married to a war-economy engineer. As far as Barbara was concerned it was dirty money.”

“That’s what broke you up?”

“That and the fact that she was seeing somebody else.”

“Somebody in the movement,” Archer guessed. “Somebody who was feeding her a line about government grants.” Tom nodded.

“Pretty fucking raw deal. So you started drinking—that’s how you lost your job?”

“I started drinking later. I lost my job because the rumor turned out to be true. The company had been asked to bid on a satellite contract—a little bit of congressional pork for the Pacific Northwest. There was a lot of secrecy, a lot of paranoia about corporate espionage. It was all those questions I asked when I wanted to reassure Barbara. They figured I was a security risk.”

Tom stood up and brushed the dirt off his jeans.

“Offhand,” Archer said, “I would guess you’re as sane as the next guy. A little bit bruised, maybe. Aside from what we’ve talked about, you hear voices?”

“Nope.”

“Are you suicidal?”

“Three a.m. on a bad night—maybe. Otherwise no.”

“Well, I’m no shrink. But it sounds like you’re a long way ‹ from crazy. I think we ought to check out what’s been happening in that house you bought.”

“Good,” Tom said.

He shook hands with Archer and smiled at him, but a new and unwelcome thought had formed at the back of his mind: If I’m not insane, then maybe I ought to be scared.

Three

The next morning, Sunday morning, Tom recalled that he hadn’t told Archer about the holes in the foundation of the house.

Maybe it was a mistake to withhold this, the only physical evidence that what he’d experienced wasn’t an illusion.

But he had held back on purpose, salvaging some fragment of the experience as his own. It was an odd idea: that he should feel possessive about a haunting (or whatever was happening here). But hadn’t Archer been possessive, in his own way? All that talk about magic, as if this were his own personal miracle.

But it wasn’t Archer who had been called by name in a dream. It wasn’t Archer who had stood at the window and watched the shadows of the pines and heard a voice among their sighing voices. Tom Winter, the voice had said; and it seemed to him now, after a sounder sleep, that there had been another message, less obvious then but clarified somehow by memory:

Help us, the voices had said.

Help us, Tom Winter. Please help us.

Archer arrived that afternoon with a VCR, a Sony video camera, and a tripod packed into the trunk of his car.

Tom helped him unload and erect all this paraphernalia in the living room, where it loomed like a selection of props from a science fiction movie. He said so to Archer, who shrugged. “That’s what we’re playing at, isn’t it?”

“I don’t think of this as playing. I live here.”

“You live here. I’m playing.”

“This is not a Huck Finn adventure, Doug. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not enjoying it.”

“Something happen during the night, or are you just in a bad mood?”

“No, nothing happened.” The question made him uncomfortable. “What’s all this for?”

“Surveillance. The unsleeping eye. Take a look.”

Tom peered into the eyepiece of the video camera. It was aimed into the kitchen and captured a fairly wide angle of the room, including the stainless steel sink and the tile counter-top. A digital clock in the corner of the display read out the date, the hour, the minute, and the second.

Archer said, “The camera’s hooked into the VCR and I just set the timer for midnight. At the slowest speed, we’ve got approximately eight hours of tape. You leave everything alone, you sleep soundly, and in the morning you see what we’ve got.”

Tom shook his head. “They won’t stand for this.” Archer regarded him curiously.

Tom pulled back from the eyepiece. “So what do we do in the meantime?”

“I think the logical thing would be to mess up the kitchen.”

Archer had brought more than electronics. From the back seat of his car he produced two six-packs of beer, a bag of potato chips and a quart of sour cream and avocado dip his girlfriend had made.

“You eat like an undergraduate,” Tom said.

“Is there any other way?” Archer opened the six-pack and popped the tab on a can. “We can order a pizza for dinner.” He handed a can to Tom, then looked suddenly dubious. “Oh, hey, are you AA or anything like that? I don’t want to make life difficult.”

“I was a hobby drinker,” Tom said, “not a professional.” But he left the beer alone.

The afternoon droned on. It was a sunny, warm day and Tom opened the front and back doors to let a breeze sweep through the house. The air smelled of hot, tarry pine.

Archer kicked back and put his Reeboks on the kitchen table. “You went to Sea View Elementary. Then the high school over on Jackson, I guess, just like everybody else. Shit-awful schools, both of them,” and then they were off on a round of skewed nostalgia—what Barbara had once called “the hideous past, relived at leisure.” It turned out that the trouble Archer had gotten into in high school had been more serious and more personal than preadolescent rock throwing. He had waged a war of attrition against his high school principal and his father—two staunch disciplinarians who happened to be poker buddies. Archer had spent plenty of nights listening to them vent their hatred of children over pretzels and a well-shuffled pack of Bicycle playing cards. His father was an appliance repairman who hated kids, Archer explained, out of some fundamental quirk of personality; the principal, Mr. Mayhew, had professional reasons and was deemed to be an expert on the matter. Jackson Archer, belt-whipping his only son, liked to explain that Mr. Mayhew did this for a living and could probably do a better job of it. In fact Mr. Mayhew confined himself to the use of a ruler on the back of the hand, which was painful without incurring the kind of visible injuries that brought mothers howling down to the school—maybe this was what made him an expert. Archer had a theory that they took out their poker losses on him; he learned to avoid whoever had lost money on Sunday night.

“Didn’t stop you from getting in trouble,” Tom observed.

“Didn’t stop me from drinking, smoking, and riding in fast cars. Nope. But I never figured they really wanted to stop me. They were having too much fun.”

“Does this story have a punch line?”

“When I was sixteen I drove my father’s Pontiac into a tree. Totaled it. I wasn’t hurt, but I was driving without a license. They sent me to a so-called military school upstate, with the happy consent of the Juvenile Court. What it was, of course, was a concentration camp for adolescent psychotics.”

“What did you do there?”

Archer ceased smiling. “I ate shit, like every other inmate. These institutions live up to their rep, Tom. They can turn a sullen, rebellious teenager into a sullen, submissive one—like that. I ate shit for a couple of semesters and came back when my dad died. My mother said, ‘I couldn’t leave you in that place.’ I thanked her politely, and when she marched me past the casket—in full parade dress, for Christ’s sake—I looked down and said, ‘Screw you and your poker game and your cardiac arrest too.’”

The silence rang out in the kitchen for a few awkward moments. Tom said, “You never forgave him?”

“He was a lonely, hostile man who never forgave me for being born and complicating his fife. Maybe I’ll be more generous than that. One of these days.” He took a long pull from his beer. “So how about you? Another casualty of childhood?”

“I had a reasonably happy childhood. Nobody sent me to military school, anyway.”

“That’s not the only way to suffer.”

“I can’t say I did suffer. Not substantially. Dad wouldn’t have stood for it.”

“Ah—wait a minute. Winter? Doctor Winter? Used to have a practice over on Poplar Street?”

1 hat s us.

“Shit, I knew Doc Winter! I went there with a ruptured appendix when I was ten years old. My father said, ‘The kid’s complaining about a bellyache.’ Of course, I had a raging fever, my abdomen was hard as a rock, I was convulsing from the pain. Your dad took a look at me and phoned the hospital for an ambulance. When he put down the phone he turned to my old man and said, ‘You nearly killed your child by waiting this long. If there was a license for fatherhood, I would have yours revoked.’ Sick as I was, I remembered that. It felt good. My God, Doc Winter’s son! But didn’t he—?”

“Both my parents died in a car accident,” Tom said. “It was about twelve years ago. A log truck sides wiped them coming around a turn on the coast highway.”

“You were how old?”

“Just finishing high school.”

“Tough situation,” Archer said.

“I lived. The insurance paid for my engineering degree. Much good it’s doing me. But, you know, it was kind of ironic. I always figured Dad got into medicine because he believed the world was a bad, dangerous place. He had a real sense of human vulnerability—the basic fragility of a human body. He once told me the human body was a sack of skin containing the vital organs and something even more fragile, which was life.”

“Maybe not a good attitude to grow up with,” Archer said.

“But he was right. I understood that when the police showed up at the door, the night the truck accordioned his car. There’s no forgiveness built into the system. I told Barbara so, dozens of times. She was always marching off to save the whales, save the trees, save some goddamn thing. It was endearing. But in the back of my head I always heard Dad’s voice: This is only a holding action. Nothing is ever really saved.’ Barbara thought the greenhouse effect was like a virus, something you could stop if you came up with the right vaccine. I told her it was a cancer—the cancer of humanity on the vital organs of the earth. You can’t stop that by marching.”

“Isn’t that a little like giving up?”

“I think it’s called acceptance.”

Archer stood and walked to the door, where his silhouette obscured the motion of the trees. “Very bleak attitude, Tom.”

“Experience bears it out.”

Around six, when the sun began to slant through the window over the sink and the kitchen bloomed with summer heat, they moved into the cooler dimness of the living room. Tom phoned Deluxe Pizza in Belltower and was assessed a five dollar delivery charge, “ ’Cause we don’t ordinarily come out that far.” The order arrived an hour later—pepperoni pizza with anchovies, room temperature. After he paid the delivery driver Tom opened the curtains onto a view of the back yard, shadows lengthening among the pines. His appetite had vanished. He ate a little and took his plate to the kitchen. Coming back he negotiated around the video camera looming on its tripod like an alien sentinel. “They won’t stand for it,” he said again.

Archer looked up from his intense involvement with the pizza. “Yeah, you said that before. Who’s they?”

“I don’t know.” Tom shrugged. “But don’t you get a sense of it—a sort of intelligence at work?”

“I didn’t think we’d admitted that much. Maybe you just have exceptionally tidy roaches.”

“I’m beginning to think otherwise.”

“For any particular reason?”

The dreams, Tom thought. The dreams, the holes in the foundation of the house … and a feeling, an intuition. “No, no particular reason.”

“What you’ve described,” Archer said, “sounds less like intelligence than it does like a machine. The kind of idiot machine that keeps running when the owner’s on vacation.”

“Its owner being who? The guy who lived here—Ben Collier?”

“Maybe. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to find out anything about him. Totally anonymous. Joan Fricker at the grocery store up at the highway must have seen him more than anybody else, and I doubt she could give you a good description. He never participated in public affairs, never held office, never wrote letters to the editor—never said more than hello, as far as anybody can remember. The only person with a special memory of Ben Collier is Jered Smith, who delivered his mail.”

“He had memorable mail?”

“According to Jered, Ben Collier subscribed to every magazine published, or it seemed that way. Some not even in English. Every business day Jered delivered five or ten magazines and newspapers to this address. Magazines, he says, are heavy—and he was delivering on foot back then, though the Postal Service gave him a truck last year. That was the first hint that Ben Collier had vanished: Jered complained that there was a stack of magazines deep enough to block the mail slot.”

“What kind of magazines?”

“Everything from Time to the Manchester Guardian. Heavy on current events, but not exclusively.” Tom was bemused. “It’s an eccentricity, but—”

“Not just eccentricity. There’s some pattern here. It’s not a random set—more like a linear equation.” Tom raised his eyebrows; Archer added, “Math is my other hobby. Math was the only high school class I never cut—you remember Mr. Foster? Tall guy, gray hair? Said I had a talent for it. I’m the guy who always reads the puzzles column in Scientific American. ”

Douglas Archer, JD mathematician. Don’t underestimate this man. “It’s not much to go on.”

“It’s absolutely nothing. Nothing at all. Just kind of interesting.” Archer put his plate aside and stood up. “Well, anyway. Don’t touch the equipment—it’ll turn itself on. But you might want to play back the tape in the morning.”

“Count on it. Can you stay for coffee?”

“I have a date for a late movie. But let me know what shows.” His smile was mischievous. “Or what doesn’t.”

Archer closed the door behind him, and suddenly the house was hollow and empty.

That night, Tom made the disturbing discovery that he was afraid to go to sleep.

He showered and wrapped himself in a bathrobe and tuned in the “Tonight” show. The chatter was tedious, but he left it on for the sound of human voices. That’s why we all own these boxes, he thought: because they talk to us when there’s no one else home.

But maybe “afraid to sleep” was overstating the case: he wasn’t jittery. It was more like a reluctance to close his eyes in the midst of these curious events. He had convinced himself something was happening here, a kind of subterranean industry, maybe something (if Archer’s history was accurate) that had been happening for a hundred years or more on this spot. Something insectile, something out of the ground; something that loved holes and hidden places. He was developing a sense of it that was almost frighteningly precise. The eyes that regarded him in his dreams were the eyes—not of machines, Archer was wrong; but of something nearly mechanistic in its single-mindedness. A builder’s eyes. But what exactly were they building?

Not something dangerous. Tom felt this to be true; the insects in his dreams weren’t hostile or deadly. But they were fundamentally, utterly strange. It was as if he had reached into a tide pool and touched something that lived there: a variegated, many-limbed polyp so unlike himself that it might have been extraterrestrial.

And of course there was Archer’s video machinery, almost as alien, already whirring away. It had recorded no event and probably wouldn’t. Or maybe—here was a disturbing thought —he would wake up and find the camera dismantled, its useful parts carried away and its carapace open and gutted on the carpet.

He made himself go to bed before the end credits rolled on the “Tonight” show. He lay in the darkness a long time and imagined he could hear the camera whirring in the next room —but surely that was impossible? It was the whirring, more likely, of his own nerves. His own blood pulsing through his ears. He could not stop turning over these questions in his mind, of machines and intelligence and what might have been a faint cry for help; but in time his thoughts tumbled away in odd, skewed directions and he was asleep.

For a second night Tom Winter slept dreamlessly. He woke to the noise of the clock radio, a Seattle AM station emitting prophecies about weather and traffic. Sunlight streamed in through the margin of the curtains, but he felt as if he had just gone to bed. Nothing remained of the night in his memory—except, dimly, the echo of a pervasive hum. It was the sound he imagined a buried dynamo might make.

The sound of his thoughts.

Possibly, the sound of their thoughts.

But he put that idea away.

The kitchen was clean again.

This trick was familiar enough by now that it had ceased to impress him. It was the small details that fascinated. For instance, every minor dot of organic matter had been cleansed from the cardboard pizza sleeve but the box itself was still open at a random angle on the table. Decisions had been made: this is refuse, this is not. And not simple mechanical decisions. Food in the refrigerator was never disturbed. Unopened packages were off limits. There was a logic in it. Repetitive, maybe, but complex and odd. A maid would have tidied away the empty box. A robot would not. But a robot wouldn’t care whether it was caught in the act; a robot wouldn’t wait for the small hours of the night.

The video recorder was still running, still minutes away from eight o’clock. Tom bent past the camera lens and switched it off.

He ejected the tape and discovered his hand was trembling. It took him a good fifteen minutes to hook up the VCR to his TV set … a minute more to rewind the cassette.

He switched on the monitor and when the screen brightened he punched the Play button of the VCR. An image formed and stabilized—the kitchen, rendered odd and sterile by the static camera angle. The phantom numbers at the top left of the screen ticked off 12:01, 12:02—he had still been awake then and when he turned up the sound he could hear the Carson show playing in the background. Somewhere behind the picture tube he was watching the “Tonight” show in his bathrobe. A sort of time loop—but then they’d know all about that.

This was another phantom thought, unbidden and peculiar. He shook it off.

He punched the Fast Forward key.

A noise bar rolled up the screen; the picture flickered. Minutes rolled by too fast to read. But it was the same messy kitchen he had abandoned last night.

1:00 a.m. blinked past.

2:00.

3:00. Nothing happened. Then—

3:45.

He stabbed the Pause key, too late, and backed up.

3:40:01.

3:39:10.

3:38:27.

At exactly 3:37:16 a.m., the kitchen lights had gone off. “Goddamn!” Tom said.

The camera was built to function in ordinary house light but not absolute darkness. The screen remained a gray, impenetrable blank. It was so obvious as to be painful. They had fucking turned the lights out.

He hit Rewind and watched the sequence in real time. But there was nothing to see: only the static picture … and, faintly, the sound of the switch being thrown.

Tock.

Darkness.

And in the background … buried in tape hiss, elusive and barely audible … something that might have been their sound.

A chitinous whisper. The brush of metallic cilia on cold linoleum. The sound of a razor blade stroking a feather.

He didn’t even try to call Archer. He was already late; he locked the front door and climbed into his car.

Leaving the house was like shaking off the influence of a long, hypnotic dream. It lingered at the edge of perception and it influenced his decisions. Because he was late he attempted a shortcut through Belltower, only to discover that the through street he remembered (Newcastle down past Brierley) had been widened and diverted to the highway. He hadn’t come this way before and the trip was disorienting, a journey through the familiar to the jarringly new. Here was Sea View Elementary on its green hillside, and the high school a quarter mile south, similar buildings of salmon-colored brick so substantial and so immediate in memory that it would not have surprised him to see nine-year-old Doug Archer rush out to launch a fusillade at the car. But the neighborhood newsstand had become a video arcade and the Woolworth’s had evolved into a Cineplex. Once again, the world had changed while his back was turned.

Declined, his father might have said. Like the earth itself, Barbara would have reminded him. Debris clouding the atmosphere and melting the icecaps. Barbara was one of the few individuals Tom had met who both believed in the greenhouse effect and believed it could be stopped: the precarious balance of the activist. Bad thermodynamics, his father would have told her. You can delay a death but not make a man immortal. The same was surely true for a planet: it didn’t improve with use. Things decline; the evidence was all around him. The evidence was his life.

Maybe so, Barbara would have said, but we can go down fighting. She had believed that half measures were better than none; that even an ineffectual morality was useful in the decade of Reaganomics, the homeless, and the video church. Her voice rang out in his memory.

She was your conscience, Tom thought.

But morality—the morality of weapons research or the morality of selling cars—had a way of twisting out of his grasp. He was twenty minutes late when he arrived at the lot, but there were no buyers waiting and nobody seemed to notice the time; the salesmen were clustered around the Coke machine telling jokes. Tom had clocked in and was standing helplessly on the lot watching cars roar past—thinking about Barbara, thinking about the house—when Billy Klein, the manager, eased up behind him and draped an arm over his shoulder. Klein was wide all over his body, big shouldered and big hipped and broad in the face; his smile radiated predatory vigor and automatic, fake heartiness—an entirely carnivorous smile. Tom turned and took a blast of Tic-Tac-scented breath. “Come with me,” Klein said. “I’ll show you what selling really means.”

It was the first time since his interview that he had been allowed into Klein’s sanctuary, a glass-walled room that looked into three sales offices where contracts were written up. Tom sat nervously in what Klein called the customer chair, which was cut an inch or two lower than an ordinary office chair; troublesome deals were often T.O.’d to Klein, who felt he benefited from the psychological edge of gazing down from a height. “Strange, but it works. The salespeople call me ‘sir’ and practically shit themselves bowing out of the room. The customer looks up and he sees me frowning at him—” He frowned. “How do I look?”

Like a constipated pit bull, Tom thought. “Very imposing.”

“You bet. And that’s the point I want to make. If you’re going to work out in sales, Tom, you need an edge. You understand what I’m saying? Any kind of edge. Maybe a different edge with different customers. They come in and they’re nervous, or they come in and they’re practically swaggering— they’re going to make a killer deal and fuck over this salesman —but either way, deep down, some part of them is just a little bit scared. That’s where your edge is. You find that part and you work on it. If you can convince them you’re their friend, that’s one way of doing it, because then they’re thinking, Great, I’ve got a guy on my side in this terrifying place. Or if they’re scared of you, you work on that. You say stuff like ‘I don’t think we can do business with that offer, we’d be losing money,’ and they swallow hard and jack up their bid. Simple! But you need the edge. Otherwise you’re leaving money on the table every time. Listen.”

Klein punched a button on his desktop intercom. Tinny voices radiated from it. Tom was bemused until he realized they were eavesdropping on the salesroom behind him, where Chuck Alberni was writing up a deal for a middle-aged man and his wife.

The customer was protesting that he hadn’t been offered enough on his trade-in, an ’87 Colt. Alberni said, “We’re being as generous as we can afford to be—I know you appreciate that. We’re a little overstocked right now and lot space is at a premium. But let’s look at the bright side. You can’t beat the options package, and our service contract is practically a model for the industry.”

And so on. Focusing the customer’s attention on the car he obviously wants, Klein said. “Of course, we’ll make money on the financing no matter what happens here. We could practically give him the fucking car. His trade-in is very, very nice. But the point is that you don’t leave money on the table.”

The customer tendered another offer—“The best we can do right now,” he said. “That’s pretty much my final bid.”

Alberni inspected the figure and said, “I’ll tell you what. I’ll take this to the sales manager and see what he says. It might take some luck, but I think we’re getting close.”

Alberni stood up and left the room.

“You see?” Klein said. “He’s talking them up, but the impression he gives is that he’s doing them a favor. Always look for the edge.”

Alberni came into Klein’s office and sat down. He gave Tom a long, appraising look. “Toilet training this one?”

“Tom has a lot of potential,” Klein said. “I can tell.”

“He’s the owner’s brother. That’s a whole lot of potential right there.”

“Hey, Chuck,” Klein said disapprovingly. But Alberni was very hot in sales right now and he could get away with things like that.

Tom said nothing.

The intercom was still live. In the next room, the customer took the hand of his nervous wife. “If we put off the cedar deck till next year,” he said, “maybe we can ante up another thousand.”

“Bingo,” Alberni said.

“See?” Klein said. “Nothing is left on the table. Absolutely nothing at all.”

Tom said, “You eavesdrop on them? When they think they’re alone?”

“Sometimes,” Klein said, “it’s the only way to know.”

“Isn’t that unethical?”

Alberni laughed out loud. Klein said, “Unethical? What the hell? Who are you all of a sudden, Mother Teresa?”

He clocked out at quitting time and took the highway to the Harbor Mall. At the hardware store he picked up a crowbar, a tape measure, a chisel, and a hammer. He paid for them with his credit card and drove the rest of the way home with the tools rattling in his trunk.

The northeastern end of the house, Tom thought. In the basement. That’s where they live.

He microwaved a frozen dinner and ate it without paying attention: flash-fried chicken, glutinous mashed potatoes, a lump of “dessert.”

He rinsed the container and threw it away.

Nothing for them tonight.

He changed into a faded pair of Levi’s and a torn cotton shirt and took his new tools into the basement.

He identified a dividing wall that ran across the basement and certified by measuring its distance from the stairs that it was directly beneath a similar wall that divided the living room from the bedroom. Upstairs, he measured the width of the bedroom to its northeastern extremity: fifteen feet, give or take a couple of inches.

In the basement the equivalent measurement was harder to take; he had to kneel behind the dented backplate of the Kenmore washing machine and wedge the tape measure in place with a brick. He took three runs at it and came up with the same answer each time:

The northeastern wall of the basement was set in at least three feet from the foundation.

He pulled away storage boxes and a shelf of laundry soap and bleach, then the two-by-four shelves themselves. When he was finished the laundry room looked like Beirut, but the entire wall was exposed. It appeared to be an ordinary gypsum wall erected against studs, painted flat white. Appearances can be deceptive, Tom thought. But it would be simple enough to find out.

He used the chisel and hammer to peel away a chunk of the wallboard. The wallboard was indeed gypsum; the chalk showered over him as he worked, mingling with his sweat until he was pasty white. Equally unmistakable was the hollow space behind the wall, too deep for the overhead light to penetrate. He used the crowbar to lever out larger chunks of wallboard until he was ankle-deep in floury rubble.

He had opened up a hole roughly three feet in diameter and he was about to go hunting for a flashlight for the purpose of peering inside when the telephone buzzed.

He mistook it at first for some angry reaction by the house itself, a cry of outrage at this assault he had committed. His ears were ringing with the effort of his work and it was easy to imagine the air full of insect buzzing, the sound of a violated hive. He shook his head to clear away the thought and jogged upstairs to the phone.

He picked up the receiver and heard Doug Archer’s voice. “Tom? I was about to hang up. What’s going on?”

“Nothing … I was in the shower.”

“What about the videotape? I spent the day waiting to hear from you, buddy. What did we get?”

“Nothing,” Tom said.

“Nothing? Nada? Zip?”

“Not a thing. Very embarrassing. Look, I’m sorry I got you involved in this. Maybe we ought to just let it ride for a while.”

There was a silence. Archer said, “I can’t believe I’m hearing this from you.”

“I think we’ve been overreacting, is all.”

“Tom, is something wrong up there? Some kind of problem?”

“No problem at all.”

“I should at least drop by to pick up the video equipment—”

“Maybe on the weekend,” Tom said.

“If that’s what you want—”

“That’s what I want.”

He hung up the phone.

If there’s treasure here, he thought, it’s mine.

He turned back to the basement.

The house hummed and buzzed around him.

Four

Because it was Monday, because she had lost her job at Macy’s, because it was a raw and intermittently rainy spring day—and maybe because the stars or Kismet or karma had declared it so—-Joyce stopped to say hello to the strange man shivering on a bench in Washington Square Park.

The gray, wet dusk had chased away everybody but the pigeons. Even the nameless bearded octogenarian who had appeared last week selling “poetry” on cardboard box bottoms had moved on, or died, or ascended to heaven. Some other day the square might be thronged with guitar strummers, NYU kids, teenage girls from uptown private schools making (what they imagined was) The Scene; but for now the park belonged to Joyce and to this odd, quiet man who looked at her with startled eyes.

Of course, it was silly and maybe even dangerous to stop and talk. This was New York, after all. Strange men were hardly in short supply; their strangeness was seldom subtle or interesting. But Joyce had good intuition about people. “Sharp-eyed Joyce” Lawrence had called her. “The Florence Nightingale of love.” She rejected the implication (though here she was again, perhaps: taking in strays), but accepted the judgment. She knew who to trust. “You’re lost,” she said.

He looked up at her and managed a smile. A certain effort there, she thought.

“No,” he said. “Not really. I figured it out. New York City. I’m in New York. But the date …” He held out his hands in a helpless gesture.

Oh, Joyce thought. But he wasn’t an alcoholic. His eyes were bright and clear. He might have been schizophrenic, but his face didn’t radiate the pained perplexity Joyce had seen in the faces of the schizophrenics she’d met. (There had been a few, including her uncle Teddy, who was in a “care home” upstate.) Not an alcoholic, not a schizo—maybe he had taken something. There were some odd pills circulating around the Village these days. Dexadril was popular, LSD-25 was easy to come by. An out-of-towner who had picked up something at the Remo: that was possible. But not really a tourist. The man was dressed in jeans and a cotton shirt open at the collar, and he wore the clothes comfortably; they weren’t some outfit he had cobbled together for an afternoon of slumming. So perhaps he is One of Us after all, Joyce thought, and this fraternal possibility moved her to sit down next to him. The bench was wet and the rainwater soaked through her skirt; but she was already wet from dashing out of the West Fourth Street station of the IND. Okay to be wet on a cold afternoon at dusk because eventually you’d find a comfortable place to get dry and warm and then it was all worth it. “You look like you could use a cup of coffee.”

The man nodded. “Sure could.”

“You have money?”

He touched his left hip. Joyce heard the change jingle in his pocket. But his face was suddenly doubtful. “I don’t believe I do.”

She said cautiously, “How do you feel?”

He looked at her again. Now there was focus in his eyes— he understood the drift of the question.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know how this must seem. I’m sorry I can’t explain it. Did you ever have an experience you just couldn’t take in all at once—something so enormous you just can’t comprehend it?”

The LSD, she thought. Down the rabbit hole for sure. A naif in chemical wonderland. Be nice, she instructed herself. “I think coffee would probably help.”

He said, “I have money. But I don’t think it’s legal tender.”

“Foreign currency?”

“You could say that.”

“You’ve been traveling?”

“I guess I have.” He stood up abruptly. “You don’t have to buy me a coffee, but if you want to I’d be grateful.”

“My name is Joyce,” she said. “Joyce Casella.”

“Tom Winter,” he said. Early in the month of May 1962.

She bought coffee at an unfashionable deli where no one would recognize her: not because she was embarrassed but because she didn’t want a crowd chasing this man—Tom Winter—away. He was dazed, numbed, and not entirely coherent; but beneath that she was beginning to sense a curious edge, perhaps the legacy of whatever journey had brought him here, or some ordeal, a tempering fire. She talked about her life, the job she’d lost at Macy’s book department, her music, relieving him of the need to make conversation and at the same time letting her eyes take him in. Here was a man maybe thirty years old, wearing clothes that were vaguely bohemian but not ragged, a traveler with traveler’s eyes, who wasn’t skinny but had the gauntness of someone who had ignored meals for too long.

He didn’t want to talk about himself or how he’d arrived here. Joyce respected that. She’d met a lot of folks who didn’t care to talk about themselves. People with a past they wanted to hide; or people with no past, refugees from the suburbs with grandiose visions of the Village inferred from television and all those self-righteous articles in Time and Life. Joyce herself had been one of these, an NYU undergraduate in a dirndl skirt, and she respected Tom’s silence even though his secrets might be less prosaic than hers.

He did say where he was from: a little coastal town in Washington State called Belltower. She was encouraged by this fracture in his reticence and ventured to ask what he did there.

“Lots of things,” he said. “Sold cars.”

“It’s hard to picture you as a car salesman.”

“I guess other people thought so, too. I wasn’t very good at it.”

“You lost your job?”

“I—well, I don’t know. Maybe I still have it. If I go back.”

“Long way to go back.”

He smiled a little. “Long way to come here.”

“So what brought you to the city?”

“A time machine,” he said. “Apparently.”

He had hitchhiked or ridden boxcars, Joyce guessed, a sort of Woody Guthrie thing; maybe that was what he meant. “Well,” she said, “Mr. Car Salesman, are you planning to stay awhile?”

He shook his head no, then seemed to hesitate. “I’m not sure. My travel arrangements are kind of vague.”

“You need a place to stay?”

He glanced through the window of the deli (STRICTLY KOSHER, like the sign in the Peace Eye Bookstore over at 10th and Avenue C). Evening now. Traffic labored through the shiny wet darkness.

“I’ve got a place,” he said, “but I’m not sure I can find the way back.”

Joyce suspected he was right. Coming down off some towering LSD kick, he’d probably bounce around Manhattan like the little steel ball in a pachinko machine. Joyce asked herself whether she was convinced of his harmlessness; she decided she was. Taking in strangers, she scolded herself—but it was one of those acts Lawrence had called “blinks of connection” in a poem. The grace of an unexpected contact. A kind of touch. “You can sleep on my sofa if you want. It’s not much of a sofa.”

The offer seemed to provoke fatigue in him. “I would be very happy to sleep on your sofa. I’m sure it’s a wonderful sofa.”

“Very courtly,” she said. “It came from the Salvation Army. It’s purple. It’s an ugly sofa, Tom.”

“Then I’ll sleep with my eyes closed,” he said.

She lived in a little railroad apartment in the East Village where she had moved from the dorm at NYU. It was two flights up in a tenement building and furnished on no budget at all: the ugly purple sofa, some folding chairs, a Sally Ann standing lamp from the Progressive Era. The bookcases were made of raw pineboard and paving bricks.

Tom stood awhile looking at the books. They were nothing special, her college English texts plus whatever she’d picked up at secondhand stores since then. Some C. Wright Mills, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Aldous Huxley— but he handled them as if they were specimens in a display case.

“Read anything you want,” she said.

He shook his head. “I don’t think I could concentrate.”

Probably not. And he was shivering. She brought him a big bath towel and a cotton shirt Lawrence had left behind. “Dry off and change,” she said. “Sleep if you want.” She left him stretched out on the sofa and went into the “kitchen”—a corner of the room, really, with a sink and a reconditioned Hotpoint and a cheap partition—and rinsed a few dishes. Her rent was due and the severance check from her department store job would cover it; but that would leave her (she calculated) about seven dollars to live on until she picked up some music work or another job. Neither was impossible, but she would have to find a gig or go hungry. But that was tomorrow’s problem—today was today.

She left the kitchen passably clean. By the time she’d finished Tom was asleep on the sofa—stark stone unconscious, snoring a little. She picked up his watch from the wooden crate table where he’d left it, thinking, It must be late.

Then she did a double-take at the face of the watch, which wasn’t a watch face at all but a kind of miniature signboard where the time was written in black numerals over a smoke-gray background.

9:35, it said, and then dissolved to 9:36. The little black colon winked continuously.

Joyce had never seen such a watch and she assumed it must be very expensive—surely not a car salesman’s watch. But it wasn’t a foreign watch, either. It said “Timex” and “Quartz Lithium” (whatever that was) and “Water Resistant.”

Very very strange, she thought. Tom Winter, Man of Mystery.

She left him snoring on the couch and moved into the bedroom. She undressed with the fight off and stretched out on the narrow spring-creaking bed, relishing the cold air and the clank of the radiator, the rattle of rainwater on the fire escape. Then she climbed under the scratchy brown blanket and waited for sleep.

Mornings and evenings, she loved this city.

Sometimes she slept five hours or less at a time, so she could have more morning and more night.

Nights, especially when she was out with Lawrence and that crowd, she would simply let herself be swept up in the urgency of their conversation, talking desegregation or the arms race in some guitar cafe; swept up by the music, too, legions of folk singers arrowing in on Bleecker and MacDougal from all over the country these days; in sawdust-floored rooms filled with her poet friends and folk friends and “beat” friends, earnest Trotskyites and junkies and jazz musicians and eighteen-year-old runaways from dingy Midwest Levit-towns, all these crosscurrents so fiercely focused that on some nights she believed the pitch-black sky might open in a rapture of the dispossessed and they would all ascend bodily into heaven. Nights like that had been common enough this winter and spring that she was eager for summer, when the pace would double and redouble again. Maybe Lawrence would publish his poetry or she would find an audience for her music. And they would be at the eye, then, of this luminous vortex.

But mornings were good, too. This was a good morning. It was good to wake up and feel the city waking up around her. Since she had lived in New York the rhythm of the city had become a stabilizing pattern. She had learned to distinguish the sound of morning traffic from the sound of afternoon traffic, both distinct from the lonelier siren sound of the traffic late at night. Morning traffic woke her with promises. She did not dislike the city until noon; at noon it was coarse, loud, unruly, plain, and chokingly dull. Lunch hours at Macy’s she had written songs about the night and morning city, little spells against the crudity of midday.

Tom was still asleep on the sofa. Joyce was faintly surprised by this. She had imagined him vanished in the morning, like a dream, like smoke. But here he was: substantial in his rumpled clothes. She heard the clank and moan of the bathroom plumbing; he stepped into the kitchen with his face freshly washed and his eyes as wide and dazed as they had been the day before.

“New York,” he said. “Nineteen sixty-two.”

“Congratulations.”

“It’s amazing,” he said.

“You really are from out of town.”

“You could say that.” His grin was big and a little silly. “Feeling better this morning?”

“Better. Giddy, in fact.”

“Uh-huh. Well, don’t get too giddy. You probably need breakfast.”

“Probably.” He added, “I’m still broke.”

“Well—I can buy us breakfast. But I have to meet Lawrence at noon. Lawrence might not appreciate knowing you slept here.” Tom nodded his acceptance without asking who Lawrence might be—very courteous, Joyce thought.

She locked up and they descended to the street. The sky was bright and the air was almost warm—which was good, because Tom didn’t have a coat to throw over his cotton shirt. She started to recommend a thrift shop she knew about —“Once you get some cash.” But he shrugged off the problem. “I’ll worry about money later.”

“That’s a good attitude.”

“First I have to see about getting home.”

“You don’t need money for that?”

“Money’s not the problem.”

“So what is the problem?”

“The laws of physics. Mechanical mice.” Joyce smiled in spite of herself. He went on, “I can’t explain. Maybe I will someday. If I find my way back here.”

She met his eyes. “Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

She ordered up a coffee-shop breakfast for both of them. Cutting into her budget a little—but what was money for? Tom insisted on buying a newspaper and then he sat marveling at it, turning the pages reverently … not reading it so much as inspecting it, Joyce thought. Personally, she hadn’t picked up a paper since the John Glenn launch in February. She said, “Are you just a car salesman or are you a poet too?”

“I’ve never been accused of poetry before.”

“What you said about mechanical mice. And, hey, this is the Village. Poets are like cockroaches around here.”

“My God, it is, isn’t it? ‘The Village.’ ” He looked up from the paper. “You play music?”

“Sometimes,” Joyce allowed.

“I noticed your guitar back at the apartment. Twelve-string Hohner. Not too shabby.”

“You play?”

“A little bit. From college. It’s been a few years, though.”

“We should play sometime. If you come back.”

“Guitar players must be as common as poets around here.”

“Well, they’re like snowflakes. No two the same.” She smiled. “Seriously, if you come around this way again …”

“Thank you.” He looked at his watch and stood up. “You’ve been awesomely generous.”

“De nada. Besides, I like you.”

He touched her hand for a moment. The touch was fleeting but warm, and she felt a little internal tingle—mysterious, unexpected.

“I might be back,” he said.

“Goodbye, Tom Winter.”

He walked into the pale sunlight, wavered a moment in the doorway, then headed unsteadily east.

Find what you’re looking for, she thought. A parting wish. Though it didn’t seem too likely.

Probably, she thought, I’ll never see him again.

She sipped her coffee and glanced at the paper, but it was all bad news: two men had been murdered in an alley not a block from her apartment. While she slept, Death had been out walking the streets.

This was a shivery thought and she looked up once more, craned her neck to spot Tom down the street; but he was already gone, lost in the morning traffic and out of reach.

Five

The desk clerk glanced at the ledger as he handed her the key. “Room 312, Mrs. Winter.”

Barbara was startled. Had she really signed that name? She took the key and shot a sidelong glance at the page where she had, yes, written Mrs. Barbara Winter in neat script.

The motel was a three-story brick bivouac set back from a dismal stretch of highway maybe an hour’s drive from Belltower. She had considered driving straight through; but Tony’s call had reached her this afternoon at a conference in Victoria, B.C., and it was late now; she was tired; her car was tired, too. So she had stopped at this bleak roadside place at 10:30 p.m. in a light rain and signed her married name to the register.

Room 312 smelled of dry heat and disinfectant. The bed creaked and the window blinds opened on a view of the neon vacancy sign reflected in the slick wet parking lot. Cars and trucks passed on the highway in clusters of three or four, their tires hissing in the rain.

Maybe it’s stupid to see him.

The thought was unavoidable. She’d been having it intermittently since she climbed into the car. It echoed as she shrugged out of her jeans and blouse and stepped into the shower stall, washing away road dirt.

Maybe it was stupid to see him; maybe useless, too. Rafe had taken it well, with a minimum of pouting; but Rafe, twenty-three years old, saw the six-year gap between them as a chasm, was threatened by the notion of her lingering affection for Tom. She had obliged him by keeping contacts to a minimum … until now.

It was stupid to risk her relationship with Rafe—which was all the relationship she had at the moment, and one she was desperate not to lose. But she remembered what Tony had said on the phone:

I can’t do anything for him this time.

The words had gone through her like a shot of cold air.

“Please,” she said out loud. “Please, Tom, you dumb bastard, please be okay.”

Then she climbed under the cold motel sheets and slept till dawn.

In the morning, she tried the phone. He didn’t answer.

She panicked at first. Scolded herself for having spent the night here: it wouldn’t have been that much farther to drive. She could have gone on, could have knocked at his door, saved him from—

What?

Well, that was the question, wasn’t it? The great unanswered question.

She checked out, stowed her luggage in the trunk of the car, pulled into the sparse dawn traffic droning down the highway.

Since she left Tom she had spoken to his brother Tony exactly twice. On both occasions he had asked for her help with Tom.

The first call had been months ago. Tom had been drinking, the job had fallen through, he owed back rent on his apartment. If Barbara had known she might have tried to help … but by the time Tony put in his call the situation was nearly resolved; Tony had arranged for a job in Belltower and Tom had dried out. “I don’t think there’s anything I could do to help,” she’d said.

“You could come back to him,” Tony had said. “Much as it pains me to say so. I think that would help.”

“Tony, you know I can’t do that.”

“Why the hell not? For Tom’s sake, I mean.”

“We broke up for a reason. I have another relationship.”

“You’re shacked up with some teenage anarchist. I heard about it.”

“This isn’t helping, Tony.”

And Tony responded, “You must be the best cooze in Washington State, Barbara, because I can’t figure out why else my brother would be racked up over you,” and hung up. Barbara hadn’t expected to hear from him after that. Surely only desperation would lead him to call again.

Presumably, desperation had. Tony’s second call—yesterday’s call—had been routed up to the Conference on Forestry and the Environment in Victoria by one of the board members at World Watch, an advocacy group Barbara worked for. First came a warning call from Rachel, her coworker: “Barb, do you really know this guy? He says he’s related to your ex. He says, ‘I know she works for this pinko organization and I need to talk to her now.’ Some family thing. He said it was urgent so I gave him the hotel number, but I wondered—”

“It’s okay,” Barbara said. “That’s fine, Rachel. You did the right thing.”

She waited ten minutes by the phone, standing up Rafe at the Jobs or Oxygen seminar. Then Tony’s call came up from the switchboard. “It’s about Tom,” he said.

Barbara felt a sudden weight at the back of her neck: a headache beginning. She said, “Tony … didn’t we have this conversation once?”

“It’s different this time.”

“What’s changed?”

“Just listen to me, Barbara, will you do that? Save up all the psychological crap until I’m finished?”

Barbara bit her Up but said nothing. Underneath the insult was some urgency: from Tony, a new thing.

“Better,” he said. “Thank you. I’m calling about Tom, and the reason I’m calling is that I think he’s going off the deep end in a serious way and this time I don’t know what to do about it.”

Urgency and this confession. Barbara said, “Is he drinking again?”

“That’s the weird thing. I don’t think he is. He’ll disappear for days at a time—but he comes back clean and he’s not hung over. He’s holed up in this house he bought out on the Post Road. Hardly sees anybody. Reclusive. And it’s cutting into his life. He’s missed time at the lot and the sales manager is seriously pissed at him. Plus, it’s things I don’t know how to explain. Did you ever meet somebody who just didn’t give a fuck? You could say hello, you could tell them your uncle died, and maybe they say something sympathetic, but you can tell they just don’t care?”

“I’ve met people like that,” Barbara said. Like you, you asshole, she thought.

“Tom ever strike you as one of those?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s what he is now. He has no friends, he has no money, he’s on the brink of losing his job—and none of this matters. He’s out in some other dimension.”

Didn’t sound like Tom at all. Tom had always been a second-guesser—obsessed with consequences. Because of the way his parents had died, she guessed, or maybe it came from some deeper chamber of his personality, but Tom had always feared and distrusted the future. “It could still be alcohol.”

“I’m not stupid,” Tony said. “I don’t care how subtle he is about it, I know when my brother is juicing. This is something altogether else. Last time I went to the house, you know what happened? He wouldn’t let me in. He opened the door, flashed me a big smile and said, ‘Go away, Tony.’ ”

“He’s happy, though?”

“Happy isn’t the word. Detached. You want me to say what I think? I think he might be suicidal.”

Barbara swallowed hard. “That’s a big leap.”

“He’s signing off, Barbara. He won’t even talk to me, but that’s the impression I have. He doesn’t care what happens in the world because he already said goodbye to it.”

The phone was a dead weight in her hand. “What does Loreen think about this?”

“It was Loreen who convinced me to call you.”

Then it was serious. Loreen was no genius but she had a feeling for people. Barbara said, “Tony, why? What brought this on?”

“Who knows? Maybe Tom could tell you.”

“You want me to talk to him?”

“I can’t tell anybody what to do anymore. I’m way past that. If you’re worried, you know where to find him.”

Buzz and hum after Tony hung up.

Her marriage was over. She didn’t owe Tom anything. Unfair, to have this dumped in her lap.

She packed her bag and took it to the lobby, found Rafe and explained the situation as kindly as possible. He said he understood. He was probably lying.

Her hand shook when she put the key in the ignition.

She had to pull over a couple of times to check the gas station map of Belltower. By the time she found Tom’s house it was almost ten o’clock, Sunday morning. Peaceful out here along the Post Road, clear skies and summer coming on fast. Barbara stepped out of the car and took a deep lungful of cedar-scented air.

The house looked peaceful, too. Very clean, almost pristine. The roof was moss-free and the siding looked practically scrubbed. Tom had let the lawn go a little bit, however.

She put her car keys in her purse. I didn’t think I’d be this nervous.

But there was no turning away. Up the walk, knock on the door. Primly, tap-tap-tap. Then, when no answer came, harder.

The sound echoed and died in the Sunday morning air. No response but the shushing of the trees.

She had bolstered herself for every eventuality but this. Maybe he went out somewhere. The garage door was down and locked—no way to tell if his car was inside.

No way to tell if he was still alive. Tony’s words came back like a curse: I think he’s suicidal. Maybe she had come too late. But that thought was gruesome and unwarranted, a product of her own fears; she put it firmly out of mind. Probably he had gone out for a while. She decided to wait in the car.

After half an hour trying to find a comfortable place on the upholstery—and getting a little hungry around the edge of her nerves—she caught a glimpse of motion in the nearest window of the house.

Angry at him for ignoring her knock—but maybe he hadn’t heard it—she ran to the window and peered up over the sill.

Into the kitchen. She cupped her hand against the window and saw Tom with his back to her. His shirt was untucked and he was wearing a ragged pair of jeans. He bent down toward something on the floor; she saw it dash away—a cat, perhaps? But that was odd: Tom had never liked pets.

People change, she told herself.

She knocked at the door again, as hard as she could.

Moments later, Tom answered.

His smile faded when he saw her. He said, “My God.”

“I’ve been here a little while,” she said. “I knocked—”

“I must have been downstairs. My God. Come in.”

She entered the house almost apologetically—cowed by his astonishment. I should have phoned. “I didn’t mean to surprise you like this, but—”

He waved his hand. “It’s all right. I’ve been out of the house—I don’t always pick up the phone.”

She allowed this excuse, disturbing as it was. He gestured at the sofa. She sat down.

The room was neutrally furnished, almost impersonal. Barbara recognized a few items from the old Seattle apartment—a rack of jazz LPs, the stereo amplifier Tom had put together during his electronics-hobbyist phase. But the furniture was old-fashioned, styleless, and spotlessly clean; she guessed it came with the house.

“I ought to tell you why I came.”

Tom shook his head. “I can guess. Tony called you, right?” She nodded; he said, “I should have expected it. I’m sorry, Barbara. Not sorry to see you again. Sorry you dragged yourself all the way out here for nothing.”

“Tony’s worried. He has a decent impulse now and then. Loreen’s worried, too, he says.”

“They shouldn’t be.”

She didn’t want to press the subject. She said, “It’s a nice house.”

“I guess I ought to show you around.”

He showed her the kitchen, the bedroom, the spare room, the bath—all immaculate, old-fashioned, and a little bit sterile. She hovered at the stairs but Tom hung back. “That’s just the basement. Nothing of interest.”

She sat at the kitchen table while he brewed a pot of coffee. “This doesn’t look like bachelor housekeeping.”

His smile was secretive. “Guess I’ve learned a few things since the college dorm.”

“Tony said you’re working down at his lot.”

“Yup.”

“How’s it going?”

He brought two cups of coffee to the table and passed one to her. “Lousy. Maybe Tony mentioned that, too. I don’t have a knack for taking people’s money.”

“You were always a rotten card player, too. Are you going to quit?”

He said, “I’m thinking of leaving.”

This distinction—not “quitting” but “leaving”—struck an odd chord. “So you don’t answer the phone, the job’s no good … Are you moving?”

“I don’t have any firm plans.”

“You mean you don’t want to talk about it.”

He shrugged.

She said, “Well, I can’t blame Tony and Loreen for worrying. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you like this.”

His mood, she meant, but it was the way he looked, too. All his flabbiness had been stripped away. He moved as if he’d tapped some secret well of energy. She considered checking his medicine cabinet for stimulants—but this wasn’t a chemical nerviness. Something deeper, she thought: a purposeful energy.

“I’m not sick,” he said. “And I’m not crazy.”

“Can you tell me what’s going on?”

He hesitated a long time. Finally he said, “I chose not to talk about this with Tony or Loreen or anyone else. I think I have that right.”

“And you don’t want to talk about it with me.”

A longer pause. He wasn’t smiling anymore.

“I waited a long time to see you,” he said. “I wanted you to come back. I wanted to see you come through that door. To come and to stay. But that’s not why you’re here.”

“No,” she said.

“We don’t share secrets anymore. I think that’s a fact of life.”

“I suppose so. But you understand why I came?”

“Yes.”

“You would have done the same—right?”

“Yes. I would.”

They sipped coffee in the silence of the kitchen. A breeze lifted the curtains over the sink.

By noon, Barbara understood that, yes, he was preparing to go away for a long time; that he was secretive but probably not suicidal; that she might not see him again.

Adjusting to this last nugget of information was harder than she’d anticipated. She had left him months ago, and the break had been final; she had never made plans to meet him again. The separation had been difficult but not traumatic. But maybe that was because, at the back of her mind, he was still there, as solid and invulnerable as a monument, a part of her life cast in stone.

His bout with alcoholism had disturbed that complacency and now it had been shaken to the roots. This wasn’t Tom as she’d left him. This was some new Tom. A wilder Tom, deep in some enterprise he wouldn’t explain.

Selfish, of course, to want him never to change. But she was afraid for him, too.

He fixed a little lunch, omelettes, ham and onion—“I don’t live entirely on TV dinners.” She accepted gratefully but understood that the meal was a gesture; she would have to leave soon.

“Whatever it is you’re doing,” she said, “I hope it’s good for you. I mean that.”

He thanked her; then he put down his fork. His face was solemn. “Barbara,” he said, “how much do you love the year 1989?”

It was a weird question. “I think it sucks,” she said. “Why?”

“It’s bad because—well, why?”

“I don’t know. Where do you start? It’s a bad time for the world because people are starving, because the climate is tough, because we’ve stripped away the ozone layer—all kinds of reasons. And it’s a bad time in America because everybody is very, very nervous and very, very careful. Except the bad guys. Remember Yeats? ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.’ Why do you ask?”

“What if you had a choice?”

“What?”

“I’m serious. What if you could step out of the world? What if you knew a place—not a perfect place, but a place where you could live without some of the uncertainties? A place where you knew for sure there wouldn’t be a nuclear exchange in the next thirty years. Where there was disease, but not AIDS. All the human agony—repression, pain, ugliness—but on a slightly less massive scale. And suppose you could predict some of it. Maybe not stop it, but at least stay away from it—floods, plane crashes, terrorist raids. What do you think, Barb, is that a good offer?”

She said, “I don’t know. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“It’s a hypothetical question.”

“Even hypothetically, it doesn’t make sense.”

“But if there were such a place. If you could go there.”

She thought about it. She meant to answer carefully: the question might be hypothetical but it certainly wasn’t casual. She read the intensity in Tom’s face. “I might be tempted,” she said. “Well, hell. I would be tempted. Who wouldn’t? But in the end—no, I don’t think I’d go.”

He seemed disappointed. “Why not?”

“Lots of reasons. I have business here.”

“Saving the world?”

A small vein of sarcasm. She ignored it. “Maybe doing my share. And there are people—”

“Rafe, for instance?”

“Rafe. Among others, yes. I have a lot to live for, Tom.”

“I wasn’t talking about dying.” I hope not, she thought. But then, what?

Had somebody made him such an offer?

Too weird, she thought. Absolutely too weird. “I would stay here,” she said firmly.

Tom looked at her a long time. She guessed he was weighing the claim, turning it over, judging it. Finally he nodded. “Maybe you would.”

“Is that the wrong answer?”

“No … not really.”

“But it’s not your answer.”

He smiled. “No.”

She stood up. “Tell me again. Before I leave. Tell me you’re all right.”

He walked her to the door. “I’m fine. Just going away for a while.”

“You mean that?”

“I mean that.”

She inspected his face. He was holding something back; but he meant what he said. Her fear had retreated a little— he wasn’t suicidal—but a small nugget of anxiety remained firmly lodged, because something had got hold of him, obviously—some strange tide carrying him beyond her reach.

Maybe forever beyond her reach.

He touched her arm, tentatively. She accepted the gesture and they hugged. The hard part was remembering how much she had loved being held by him. How much she missed it.

She said, “Don’t forget to feed the cat.”

“I don’t have a cat.”

“Dog, then? When I looked in the window—I thought I saw—”

“You must have been mistaken.”

His first real he, Barbara thought. He’d always been a truly lousy liar.

In the corner of the room his TV set flickered into life—by itself, apparently. She guessed he had a timer on it. He said, “You’d better go.”

“Well, what can I say?”

He held her just a little tighter. “I think all we can say is goodbye.”

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. “Fucking 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, I could have come that far in forty-five minutes. But he suspected—well, fuck 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 fucking 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 fucking 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, I 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 fucking 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 fuck-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 fucked 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 fucking 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.