Текст книги "A Bridge of Years"

Автор книги: Robert Charles Wilson

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

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.