Soothed and sweetly alive in the dark of his apartment, Billy relaxed his armor and folded it into its box. By dawn, the clouds had rolled away. A winter sun rose over the snowbound city. Billy showered and raided the refrigerator. He had lost a lot of weight in the last few months, but now his appetite had returned with a vengeance. Now he was very hungry indeed.
He went to bed at noon and woke in the dark. Waking, he discovered something new in himself. He discovered remorse.
He found his thoughts circling back to the man he’d killed. Who had he been? Had he lived alone? Were the police investigating the murder?
Billy had watched police investigations on TV. On TV, the police always found the killer. Billy knew this was a social fiction; in real life the opposite was probably nearer to the truth. Still, fiction or not, the possibility nagged at him.
He developed new phobias. The tunnel in the sub-basement was suddenly on his mind. He had sealed that tunnel at both ends: according to Ann Heath, the dead woman with the wedge of glass in her skull, that act would guarantee his safety. No one would come hunting him from the future; no time ghost would carry him off. The tunnel, after all, was only a machine. A strange and nearly incomprehensible machine, Billy admitted privately, but a powerless machine, too —inaccessible.
Nevertheless, it made him nervous.
He patrolled the sub-basement daily. He thought of this as “checking the exits.” The city of New York and the meridian of the twentieth century had become in Billy’s mind a private place, a welcoming shelter. The natives might be a nuisance, but they weren’t gravely dangerous; the real dangers lay elsewhere, beyond the rubble where the tunnel had been. Billy piled the rubble higher and installed a door at the foot of the stairs; on the door he installed an expensive padlock. If—by some magic—the tunnel repaired itself, any intruder would have to disturb these barricades. If Billy found the lock broken or the door splintered it would mean his sanctuary had been invaded … it would mean the twentieth century wasn’t his own anymore.
The effort reassured him. Still, his proximity to the gateway made him nervous. It was hard to sleep some nights with the thought of that temporal fracture buried in the bedrock some few yards under the floor. By the summer of 1953 Billy decided that this building didn’t need his nightly presence— that he could move a few streets away without harming anything.
He rented an apartment on the other side of Tompkins Square, three streets uptown. It was not much different from his first apartment. The floor was a crumbling, ancient parquet; Billy covered it with a cheap rug. The windows were concealed by yellow roll blinds and dust. Cockroaches lived in the gaps in the wallboard and they came out at night. And there was a deep closet, where Billy kept his armor in its box.
His life fell into a series of simple routines. Every week, sometimes more often, Billy walked the short distance between the two buildings—or, when he was restless, took a long night walk uptown and back—to collect his rent money and check the exits.
The rent was often late and sometimes his few tenants failed to pay at all. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that the padlock in the basement was never disturbed—a fact more reassuring as the years began to stack up behind him.
Time, Billy often thought, tasting the word in his mind. Time: small circles of days and the great wheel of the seasons. Seasons passed. Engrossed in television news—watching his small Westinghouse TV set the way Nathan had monitored the immensely larger screen in the civic center— he learned a parade of names: Eisenhower, Oppenheimer, Nixon; and places: Suez, Formosa, Little Rock. He numbered the years although the numbers still seemed implausible, one-nine-five-four, one-nine-five-five, one thousand nine hundred and fifty-six years in the wake of a crucifixion which seemed to Billy just as ludicrously unreal as the fall of Rome, the treaty of Ghent, or the Army-McCarthy hearings.
His armor continued to call to him from its hiding place, a small voice which sometimes grew shrill and unbearable. The need seemed to follow the seasons, an irony Billy failed to appreciate: if time was a wheel then in some sense he had been broken on it. Two killings per annum, winter and summer, dark nights or moonlit, as irresistible as the tides. And each killing was followed by a grinding remorse, then numbness, then weeks of dull torpor … and the Need again.
Nineteen fifty-eight, ’fifty-nine, ’sixty.
Nixon in Moscow, sit-ins in Greensboro, Kennedy in the White House by a fraction of the vote.
Billy grew older. So did the armor—but he tried not to think about that.
Tried not to think about a lot of things, especially tonight, as he was checking the exits: early summer of Anno Domini 1962, a hot night that reminded him of Ohio.
Billy entered the groaning front door of the old building near Tompkins Square where the time traveler had once lived and where nobody lived now except a few aging relics.
He had developed a perverse fondness for these people, human detritus too fragile or tenacious to abandon a building he had allowed to crumble around them. Two of them had been there long before Billy arrived—an arthritic old man named Shank on the fourth floor and a diabetic pensioner on the second. Mrs. Korzybski, the pensioner, sometimes forgot her medication and would stumble out to the street in insulin-shock delirium. This had happened once when he was checking the exits, and Billy had helped the woman inside, using his passkey to open the apartment door she had somehow locked behind her. He didn’t like the police or an ambulance coming to the building, so he rummaged in the kitchen drawers among her cat-food cans and cutlery and fading photographs until he found her diabetic kit. He used the syringe to inject a measured dose of insulin solution into the crook of her flabby arm. When she came to, she thanked him. “You’re nice,” she said. “You’re nicer than you look. How come you know how to use that needle?”
“I was in the army,” Billy said.
“Korea?”
“That’s right. Korea.”
He had seen Korea on television.
She said she was glad now that she paid her rent on time, and how come nobody had moved in for such a long while? “Since that Mr. Allen was the manager. It gets kind of lonely these days.”
“Nobody wants to rent, I guess.”
“That’s funny. That’s not what I hear. Maybe if you painted?”
“One day,” Billy explained solemnly, “all this will be under water.”
Nowadays, when he came, he came at night, when Mrs. Korzybski was asleep. Her apartment was dark tonight. All the apartments were dark except for 403: Amos Shank, who lived on his retirement fund from the H. J. Heinz Company in Pittsburgh. Mr. Shank had come to New York to find a publisher for his epic poem Ulysses at the Elbe. The publishing industry had disappointed him, but Mr. Shank still liked to talk about the work—three massive volumes of vellum paper bound with rubber bands, still not entirely finished.
Mr. Shank left the light on in case inspiration struck in the depths of the night … but Mr. Shank was probably asleep by now too. Everyone in Billy’s building was lonely and asleep. Everyone but Billy.
He whistled a formless tune between his teeth and stepped into the entranceway. The paint on the walls had faded to gray a long time ago. The mirrored wall by the stairs was fogged and chipped and some of the floor tiles had turned up at the corners, like leaves.
Billy went directly to the basement.
The stairway leading down smelled hot and stale. These old wooden steps had grown leathery in the humid air. Silent in the dim light, Billy passed the bizarre and inefficient oil furnace with its many arms, the groaning water heater; through an unmarked access door and deeper, past the storage cellar with its lime-green calcinated walls and its crusted cans of paint, to the door he had sealed with a sturdy Yale padlock. The light was dim—the light here was always dim. Billy took a chrome Zippo lighter out of his hip pocket.
He felt strange down here so close to the tunnel. He had been deeply frightened when he first understood how vast this warren of temporal frac
tures really was—what it implied and what that might mean to him. He couldn’t think about the tunnel without considering the creatures who had made it … beings, Billy understood, so nearly omnipotent that they might as well be called gods. And he remembered what he’d seen in this tunnel the day he arrived here, something even stranger than the godlike time travelers, a creature as bright and hot as a living flame.
He flicked the igniter on the Zippo. Time for a new flint, Billy told himself.
He brought the light down closer to the padlock—then drew a sharp breath and stepped back.
Dear God! After all these years—! The lock had been broken open.
Billy’s first thought was of Krakow gazing down at him through another door, the night he was recruited. He had the same feeling now: discovered in hiding.
He was defenseless, weaponless, and the walls were much too close.
He touched his throat, instinctively reaching for the touch-plate that would trigger his armor—but the armor was at home.
He backed away from the door.
Someone had been here! Someone had come for him!
He considered going upstairs, dragging Mrs. Korzybski out of her sleep, Amos Shank from his senile slumber, beating them until they told him who had come and who had gone. But they might not know. Probably didn’t. Maybe no one had seen.
I need help, Billy told himself. The sense of imminent danger had closed around him like a noose. (Not alone anymore!) He pocketed his lighter, climbed the stairs, and left the building.
He stood alone in the sweaty darkness of the street, his eyes patrolling the sawtooth shadows between the tenement stoops.
He hurried away, avoiding streetlights. The armor, Billy thought. The armor would know what to do.
Ten
Catherine Simmons drove into Belltower after the cremation of her grandmother, Peggy Simmons, who had lived out along the Post Road for many years and who had died a week ago in her sleep.
Summer made Belltower a pretty little town, at least when the wind wasn’t blowing from the mill. Catherine knew the town from her many visits; she didn’t have any trouble finding the Carstairs Funeral Home on a side street off Brierley, between an antique shop and a marine electronics store. She parked and sat in her Honda a few minutes—she was early for her appointment.
Gram Peggy’s fatal stroke had been unexpected and the news of her death still seemed fresh and unreasonable. Of all Catherine’s family, Gram Peggy had seemed most like a fixture—the solidest and most fun of the sorry lot. But Gram Peggy was dead and Catherine supposed she would have to adjust to that fact.
She sighed and climbed out of the car. The afternoon was sunny and the air carried a whiff of ocean. Pretty little dumb little smelly little town, Catherine thought.
There was no ceremony planned and no other Simmonses at the funeral home. Catherine’s father—Gram Peggy’s only son—had died in 1983, of liver cancer, and the rest of the family was hopelessly scattered. Only Catherine had ever come to visit these last several years. Apparently Gram Peggy had appreciated those visits. Her lawyer, Dick Parsons, had phoned to say that the entire estate, including the house, had been left to Catherine: another stunning piece of news, still somewhat indigestible.
The funeral director at Carstairs turned out not to be the unctuous vulture Catherine was expecting; he was a big-shouldered man who looked a little like a football coach. He handed Catherine the bronze urn containing Gram Peggy’s ashes in a gesture that was almost apologetic. “This is the way your grandmother wanted it, Miss Simmons. No ceremony, nothing solemn. She arranged all this in advance.”
“Gram Peggy was very practical,” Catherine said.
“That she was.” He managed a sympathetic smile. “Everything’s been paid for through her lawyer. I hope we’ve been of some small help?”
“You did fine,” Catherine said. “Thank you.”
There was a woman in the lobby as Catherine left, a gray-haired woman roughly Gram Peggy’s age; she stepped forward and said, “I’m Nancy Horton—a friend of your grandmother’s. I just want to say how sorry I am.”
“Thank you,” Catherine said. Apparently death involved thanking people a lot.
“I knew Peggy from the shopping trips we took. She still drove, you see. I don’t drive if I can help it. She used to drive me down to the mall on the highway, Wednesday mornings usually. We’d talk. Though she was never a big talker. I liked her a lot, though. You must be Catherine.”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to be staying in the house?”
“Gram’s house? For a little while. Maybe for the summer.”
“Well, I’m not far away if you need anything.” She glanced at the urn in Catherine’s hand. “I don’t know about cremation. It seems—oh, I’m sorry! I shouldn’t be saying this, should I? But it seems like so little to leave behind.”
“That’s okay,” Catherine said. “This isn’t Gram Peggy. We talked about that before she died. These are just some ashes.”
“Of course,” Nancy Horton said. “Will you keep them? Oh, my curiosity! I’m sorry—”
“Gram loved the forest out in back of her property,” Catherine said. “She once asked me to scatter her ashes there.” She took the urn protectively into the crook of her left arm. “That’s what I’ll do.”
Of course, she couldn’t keep the house. It was a big old house up along the Post Road and a long way from anywhere Catherine wanted to live, as much as she sometimes liked Belltower. Once the will was probated, she would probably try to sell the property. She had said as much to Dick Parsons, who had given her the number of the local realty company. One of their agents was supposed to meet her outside the funeral home.
The agent turned out to be the man lounging against a mailbox by the front steps—he straightened up and announced himself as Doug Archer. Catherine smiled and shook his hand. “Everybody’s running against type,” she said. I m sorry?
“The funeral director doesn’t look like a funeral director. You don’t look much like a real estate agent.”
“I’ll take that as flattery,” Archer said.
But it was true, Catherine thought. He was a little too young, a little too careless about his clothes. He wore floppy high-top Reeboks tied too low, and he grinned like an eight-year-old. He said, “Are you still thinking about putting the house on the market?”
“It’s a firm decision,” Catherine said. “I’m just not sure about when. I’m thinking of spending the rest of the summer here.”
“It may not be a quick sale in any case. The market’s a little slow, and those houses out on the Post Road are kind of lonely. But I’m sure we can find a buyer for it.”
“I’m in no hurry. Dick Parsons said you’d probably want to look at the house?”
“It’ll help when we’re thinking about setting a price. If you want to make an appointment? Or I can drive out today—”
“Today is fine. I have to stop by Mr. Parsons’ office and pick up the keys, but you can come by later if you like.”
“If that’s all right.” He looked at his watch. “Around three?” Sure.
“I’m sorry about your grandmother, Miss Simmons. I handle a lot of those houses up the Post Road, so I had the occasion to meet her once or twice. She was a unique woman.”
Catherine smiled. “I don’t imagine she had much patience with real estate agents.”
“Not too damn much patience at all,” Doug Archer said.
Catherine picked up the keys, signed papers, said another round of thanks, then braced herself for the drive to Gram Peggy’s house.
The word “holiday,” in Catherine’s memory, was associated with this road. When she was little they would drive down from Bellingham in her father’s station wagon, circle through Belltower to the bottom of the Post Road hill, then up a long corridor of fragrant pines to the door of Gram Peggy’s house. Gram Peggy who cooked wonderful meals, who said wonderful and irreverent things, and whose presence imposed a ma
gical truce between Catherine’s mother and father. At Gram Peggy’s house, nobody was allowed to smoke and nobody was allowed to fight. “Everything else is permitted. But I will not have the house stinking of tobacco smoke and I will not allow bickering—both of which poison the air. Isn’t that right, Catherine?”
The Post Road hadn’t changed much. It was still this green, dark, faintly magical corridor—the highway and the malls might have been a thousand miles away. Houses on the Post Road were barely more than outposts in the wilderness, Catherine thought, set in their little plots of landscape, some grand and many humble, but always overshadowed by the lush Douglas firs.
Gram Peggy’s house, at the crest of the hill, was the only one of these homes with a view. The house was an old and grandly Victorian wood frame structure, two stories high with a gabled attic above that. Gram Peggy had always been meticulous about having it painted and touched up; otherwise, she said, the weeds would think they had an open invitation. The house had been built by Gram Peggy’s father, a piano maker, whom Catherine had never met. The idea of selling the property—of never coming back here—felt like the worst kind of sacrilege. But of course she’d be lost in it herself.
She parked and unlocked the big front door. For now, she left her paints and supplies in the trunk of the Civic. If she stayed for the summer—the idea was steadily more attractive —she could set up a studio in the sunny room facing the woods out back. Or in the guest room, where the bay window allowed glimpses of the distant ocean.
But for now it was still Gram Peggy’s house, left untidied at the end of what must have been a tiring day. Crumbs on the kitchen counter, the ficus wilting in a dry pot. Catherine wandered aimlessly through some of these rooms, then dropped into the overstuffed sofa in front of the TV set. Gram Peggy’s TV Guide was splayed open on the side table —a week out of date.
Of course I’ll be here all summer, Catherine thought; it would take that long to sort out Gram Peggy’s possessions and arrange to have them sold. None of this had occurred to her. She had assumed, by some wordless logic, that Gram Peggy’s things would have vanished like Gram Peggy herself, into the urn now resting by the front door. But maybe this was where the real mourning started: the disposition of these letters, clocks, clothes, dentures—a last, brutal intimacy.
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