A Bridge of Years (16 page)

But
what on God's green earth did he have to live for, at this moment?

Back
at the house—back in the real world—he was a lonesome,
ordinary man leading a disfigured and purposeless life. He had lived
for his work and for Barbara. But his work was finished and Barbara
was living in Seattle with an anarchist named Rafe.

If
he opened that door and a dragon swallowed him up— well, it would
be an
interesting
death.
The world would not much notice, not much mourn. "What the
hell," Tom said, and scrambled forward.

Beyond
the door, stone steps led upward.

Tom
followed them. His sneakers squealed against damp concrete.

The
flashlight revealed a landing barely wide enough to stand on, and a
second door.

This
door was padlocked—from the other side.

He
remembered his crowbar, reached for it, then cursed: he had left it
at the excavation.

He
climbed down the stairs, through the first door, out across the
rubble; he retrieved the iron bar and his knapsack and turned back.
By the time he reached the door at the top of the stairs he was
winded, his breath gusting out in pale clouds in the cold wet air.

He
wasn't frightened now, nor even cautious. He simply wanted this job
done. He inserted the crowbar between the door and its stone jamb and
leaned on it until he heard the gunshot crack of a broken hasp. The
door swung inward—

On
one more dark stone room.

"Christ!"
Tom exclaimed. Maybe it went on forever, room after ugly little
chamber. Maybe he
was
in
hell.

But
this room wasn't entirely empty. He swept the flashlight before
him and spotted two canisters on the floor, next to a flight of
wooden stairs leading (again) upward.

Some
clue here, he thought.

The
canisters were about a hand high; and one of them had a wire handle
attached to it at the rim.

He
stood above them and shone the flashlight down.

The
label on the can on the left said
varsol.

The
label on the can on the right said
evertint
paint
.
In smaller print,
Eggshell
Blue.

Tom
turned and was startled by a string dangling in front of his face. He
tugged it, and above his head a naked forty-watt bulb flared on.

Ahead
of him—up the stairs—he heard a whisper of traffic and rain.

This
was so disorienting—so
disenchanting-
—
that
he stood motionless for a long while in the glare of the overhead
light. If anyone had seen him they might have said he was stunned. He
looked like a man who had taken a powerful blow to the skull—still
standing, but barely.

Let's
see, he thought, I headed south from the basement and then circled
back, walked half an hour or so . . . maybe as far as the mall or the
shops down by the highway. He climbed the stairs expecting nothing,
passed another door into a seedy lobby he didn't recognize; then a
thought struck him:

It
wasn't raining when I left the house.

Well,
that was a good long time ago now, wasn't it? Plenty of time for some
weather to roll in from the sea.

But
he recalled the weekend weather forecast: sunshine all the way to
Tuesday.

Wouldn't
be the first time they'd made a bad call; coastal weather could be
unpredictable.

Still,
it was coming down pretty hard out there.

Tom
had emerged into what seemed to be the lobby of an apartment
building: peeling linoleum, a row of buzzers, an inner and outer
door—the outer door cracked in a starry pattern. He fixed the lobby
in his mind as a landmark, then stepped outside.

Into
the rain.

Into
another world.

Tom's
first groping thought was that he had walked into a movie set—this
was the most coherent explanation his fumbling mind could
produce. Professional set dressing: a period piece.

All
the cars in the street were antiques, though some appeared
virtually new. Must have cost a fortune, he thought dazedly,
assembling all this collectible transportation and parking it in a
part of town that wasn't familiar
(that
isn't Belltower,
one
agitated fraction of self insisted), where all the buildings were
period buildings and where the people were period
people,
or
actors, or extras, dozens of them, scurrying through the rain. And no
cameras. And no lights.

He
cowered back into the rain shadow of this grubby building.

It
was very difficult to think. A part of him was giddy, elated. He had
arrived at this unimaginable destination by unimaginable means, he
had fucking
done
it.
Magic!
Elation meanwhile doing battle with its partner, stark animal fear of
the unknown. One step in the wrong direction and he would be lost, as
lost as it was possible to be. All he really knew was that he had
arrived somewhere where the shiniest vehicle on the street was what
appeared to be a '61 Buick—or something like it—and all the
men braving the rain this cold evening were wearing for Christ's
sake
hats,
not
rain hats but dress hats—trilbies or fedoras or whatever they were
called —the kind of hats you saw in old Cary Grant comedies. Planet
of the Hats!

It
was very, very strange but also very, very real. A cold wind gusted
rain into his face. Real rain. A woman bent under her umbrella shot
him a sidelong glance as she passed, and Tom understood that
she
was
at home here,
he
was
the intruder—a strange, distraught, disheveled man wearing a
packsack. He glanced down at himself. His jeans were gray with dust,
streaked where the rain had penetrated the dirt. His hands were
almost completely black.

The
thought persisted:
I'm
the stranger here.

And,
on some even deeper level, he knew exactly what this place was. He
had traveled a mile or so down a featureless tunnel (
machine
,
the
television had called it)—and maybe thirty-odd years into the past.

Not
the past of Belltower, Washington. It was a dark night, but he knew
at once this was a bigger and busier city than Belltower had ever
been. But an American city. The cars were American. The people
looked
American.
An American city ...
in
or around the year of his birth.

He
didn't accept this explanation, not entirely. Logic objected.
Sanity was outraged. But logic and sanity had been forced into the
back seat quite a while ago, hadn't they? He wouldn't have been too
surprised if the tunnel had opened onto the surface of Mars. Was a
thirty-year-old rainstorm really such a surprise?

Well,
yes.
It
was. A surprise and a shock. But he was beginning to get a
handle on it.

He
thought, /
can't
stay here.
In
fact, the feeling was more urgent.
You're
a long way from home and it's a long, dark crawl back to the tunnel.
What if somebody seals up one of those doors? What if the Machine
doesn't work anymore? What if—
and
here was a truly chilling thought—
what
if it's a
one-way
Machine?

Anxiety
veered toward panic.

Lots
here to figure out, Tom thought, lots of possibilities, lots to
absorb, but the
wise
thing
would be to turn back and contemplate his options.

Before
he did that, however, he took three long steps out into the frigid
rain—past a miserable man with umbrella, unlit pipe, dog on a
leash—to a newspaper box occupying curb space next to the shiny-wet
Buick. He put three dimes into the paper box and pulled out the
New
York Times.
Paused
to inspect the date. May 13, 1962.

Raindrops
spattered across the front page.

"It's
a fucking miracle," he said out loud. "You were right all
along, Doug. Miracles up along the Post Road."

He
turned and saw the dog-walker regarding him a little suspiciously, a
little fearfully, while the dog, a springer spaniel, left its
scent on a gray lamp standard. Tom smiled. "Nice weather!"

"For
lunatics," the man offered.

Tom
retreated past him into the sad lobby of this old building, its smell
of mildew and ancient plaster and the unimaginable secret in its
foundation. Still
my
secret,
he thought. He turned away from the man on the street, away from the
rain and the traffic, clutching his souvenir newspaper in one
hand, down and away and home; or, if not home, at least
back.

Back,
as they say, to the future.

One
more thing caught his attention before he began the long, fatiguing
hike back to the basement. As he clambered over the stacked rubble
into the tunnel, his flashlight reflected from an object half
buried under the masonry and turned up, no doubt, by his movement: a
machine bug.

It
was inert. He picked it up. The device had lost its shine; it wasn't
just dusty, but dull, somehow empty.

Dead,
he
thought. What it is, is
dead.

So
the machine bugs must have been here, too, in the building behind
him, cleaning and maintaining it . . . but something had killed them.
At least, something had killed this one. And the wall had never been
repaired, unlike the wall in Tom's basement.

He
put the broken creature in his pocket—in a strange way, the gesture
was respectful—and took a deep breath, bracing himself for the long
walk back.

Home,
he slept for twelve hours straight. He woke up to a sunny afternoon.
He had missed a day at the lot; Klein would be, in Tony's immortal
phrase, shitting bricks—but he dismissed the thought as soon
as it came to him; he had other things to think about. He fixed
himself a huge meal, bacon and fried eggs and buttered toast and a
fresh pot of coffee. And sat down at the kitchen table, where the
New
York Times
waited
for him.

He
read it meticulously. He read the headline story: Laos had declared a
state of emergency and eighteen hundred marines were en route to
Indochina. Troops of the South Vietnamese Seventy-fifth Infantry
had ambushed some guerrillas in Kien Phong Province, and President
Kennedy had addressed a Democratic Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner
in Milwaukee, mainly about the economy. The Mets had won both
games of a doubleheader, defeating the Braves at the Polo Grounds.
The weather? Cloudy, cool, occasional rain.

He
read the fashion ads, the movie ads, the sports pages. Then he folded
the paper and set it neatly aside.