"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." / 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 phenom
ena 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 t
hey 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.