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."
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.