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.
A Bridge of Years Page 9