A Bridge of Years (33 page)

Already
the thing inside was "he," not "it." She had shut
out the image and concentrated on the voice.

Help
me.

Catherine
took a deep breath and opened the door.

The
sun had edged down toward the treetops; the woodshed was darker
than it had been this morning. A green, buzzing, loamy darkness.
Catherine wrinkled her nose and waited for her eyesight to adjust.
Doug Archer hovered at her shoulder; his presence was at least a
little bit reassuring.

For
a time she couldn't hear anything but the quick beat of her heart;
couldn't see anything but dimness and clutter.

Then
Archer forced the door to the extremity of its hinges and a new beam
of light slanted in.

The
monster lay on the pressed-dirt floor, precisely where she had left
it this morning.

Catherine
blinked. The monster blinked. Behind her, she heard Archer draw a
sudden, shocked breath. "Holy Mother of God," he said.

The
monster turned its pale, moist eyes on Archer a moment. Then it
looked at Catherine again.

"You
came back," it said.
(He
said.)

This
was the terrible part, she thought dizzily, the truly unendurable,
this voice from that throat. He sounded like someone you might meet
at a bus stop. He sounded like a friendly grocer.

She
forced her eyes to focus somewhere above him, on the pile of moldy
newspapers. "You said you needed help."

"Yes."

"I
brought help."

It
was all she could think of to say.

Archer
pushed past her and knelt over the man—if it
was
a
man.
Be
careful!
she
thought.

Catherine
heard the tremor in his voice: "What happened to you?"

Now
Catherine's gaze drifted back to the man's head, the caul of
translucent tissue where the skull should have been, and the brain
beneath it—she presumed this whitish, vague mass must be his brain.
The creature spoke. "It would take too long to explain."

Archer
said, "What do you want us to do?"

"If
you can, I want you to take me back to the house."

Archer
was silent a moment. Catherine noticed he didn't say
What
house?
The
Tom Winter house, she thought. These things were connected after all.
Mysterious events and living dead men.

She
felt like Alice, hopelessly lost down some unpleasant rabbit hole.

But
it was at least a thing to do, carrying this monster back to the Tom
Winter house, and deciding how to do it brought her back to the level
of the prosaic. There was an old camp cot Gram Peggy had kept in the
cellar; she hurried and fetched it back with Doug Archer beside her,
neither of them talking much. They wanted to be finished before
nightfall: already the shadows were long and threatening.

We'll
have to touch that thing,
Catherine
thought.
We'll
have to lift it up onto this old cot.
She
imagined the injured thing would feel cool and wet to the touch, like
the jellyfish lumps that washed up on the beach along Puget Sound.
She shuddered, thinking about it.

Archer
propped open the door of the shed and did most of the lifting. He
supported the thing (the man) with his hands under its arms and
brought it out into the fading daylight, where it looked even more
horrific. Some of its skin was dark and scabbed over; some was merely
flesh colored. But whole chunks of it were translucent or pale, fishy
gray. It blinked gray eyelids against the light. It looked like
something that had been underwater a long time. One leg was missing.
The stump ended in a pink, porous mass of tissue. At least there was
no blood.

Catherine
took a deep breath and did what she could to help, lifting the leg
end onto the army cot. Here was more pale skin and a fine webbing of
blood vessels underneath, like an illustration from an anatomy
textbook. But the flesh wasn't cool or slimy. It was warm and felt
like normal skin.

Archer
took the head end of the army cot and Catherine lifted the back. The
injured man was heavy, as heavy as a normal man. His strangeness had
not made him light. This was good, too. A creature with this much
weight, she reasoned, could not be ghostly.

It
was hard to hold the pipe legs of the army cot without spilling the
man off, and she was sweating and her hands were cramped and sore by
the time they passed out of the deep forest, down a trail nearly
overgrown with moss and horsetail fern, into the back yard of what
must be the house Archer had described. It was a very
ordinary-looking house.

They
put the army cot down on the overgrown lawn for a minute. Archer
wiped his face with a handkerchief; Catherine kneaded her aching
palms. She avoided his look. We don't want to acknowledge what we're
doing, she thought; we want to pretend this is a regular kind of job.

The
thing on the cot said, "You should be prepared for what's
inside."

Archer
looked down sharply. "What
is
inside?"

"Machines.
A lot of very small machines. They won't hurt you."

"Oh,"
Archer said. He looked at the house again. "Machines."
He frowned. "I don't have a key." "You don't need
one," the monster said.

The
door opened at a touch.

They
carried the army cot inside, through an ordinary kitchen, into the
big living room, which was not ordinary because the walls were
covered with the machines the monster had warned them about.

The
machines—
there
must he thousands of them,
Catherine
thought—were like tiny jewels, brightly colored, segmented,
insectile, eyes and attention all aimed at the man on the cot. They
were motionless; but she imagined them, for some reason,
quivering with excitement.

It's
like a homecoming, Catherine thought dazedly. That's what it's like.

None
of this was possible.

She
understood that she had reached an unexpected turning point in
her life. She felt the way people must feel in a plane crash, or when
their house goes up in flames. Now everything was different; nothing
would be the same ever again. In the wake of these events, it wasn't
possible to construct an ordinary idea of the world and how it
worked. There was no way to make any of this fit.

But
she was calm. Outside the context of the decaying woodshed—outside
of the woods—even the monster had ceased to be frightening. He
wasn't a monster after all; only a strange kind of man who had had
some strange kind of accident. Maybe a curse had been placed on
him.

They
carried him into the bedroom, where there were more of the machine
insects. She helped Archer lift him onto the bed. Archer asked in a
small voice what else the man needed. The man said, "Time.
Please don't tell anyone else about this."

"All
right," Archer said. And Catherine nodded.

"And
food," the man said. "Anything rich in protein. Meat would
be good."

"I'll
bring something," Catherine volunteered, surprising herself.
"Would tomorrow be all right?"

"That
would be fine."

And
Archer added, "Who are you?"

The
man smiled, but only a little. He must know how he looks, Catherine
thought. When your lips are nearly transparent, you shouldn't
smile too much. It creates a different effect. "My name is Ben
Collier," he said.

"Ben,"
Archer repeated. "Ben, I would like to know what kind of thing
you are exactly."

"I'm
a time traveler," Ben said.

They
left Ben Collier the time traveler alone with his machine bugs.
On the way out of the house Catherine saw Archer pick up two items
from the kitchen table: a blue spiral-bound notebook and a copy
of the
New
York Times.

Back
at Gram Peggy's house, Archer pored over the two documents.
Catherine felt mysteriously vacant, lost: what was next? There was no
etiquette for this situation. She said to Archer, "Shall I make
us some dinner?" He looked up briefly, nodded.

It
had never occurred to her that people who had shared experiences like
this—people who were kidnapped by flying saucers or visited by
ghosts—would have to deal with anything as prosaic as dinner.
An encounter with the numinous, followed by, say, linguine. It was
impossible. (That word again.)

Step
by step, she thought. One thing at a time. She heated the frying pan,
located a chicken breast she'd been thawing since morning, took a
second one from the freezer and quick-defrosted it in the
microwave—she would eat this one herself; Catherine didn't
believe in nuked food, especially for guests. She didn't much believe
in pan-fried chicken, either, but it was quick and available.

She
set two places at the dinner table. The dining room was large and
Victorian, Gram Peggy's cuckoo clock presiding over a cabinet stocked
with blue Wedgwood. Catherine started coffee perking and served
dinner on the Petalware she'd picked up at a thrift shop in
Belltower—because it seemed somehow wrong or impertinent to be
eating from Gram Peggy's china when Gram Peggy wasn't home. Archer
carried his two souvenirs, the notebook and the
New
York Times,
to
the table with him. But he set them aside and complimented her on the
food.

Catherine
picked at her chicken. It tasted irrelevant.

She
said, "Well, what have we got ourselves into?"

Archer
managed a smile. "Something absolutely unexpected.
Something we don't understand."

"You
sound pleased about that."

"Do
I? I guess I am, in a way. It kind of confirms this suspicion I've
had." "Suspicion?"

"That
the world is stranger than it looks."

Catherine
considered this. "I think I know what you mean. When I was
eighteen, I took up jogging. I used to go out after dark, winter
nights. I liked all the yellow lighted-up windows of the houses. It
felt funny being the only person out on the street, just, you know,
running and breathing steam. I used to get an idea that anything
could happen, that I'd turn a corner and I'd be in Oz and nobody
would be the wiser—none of those people sleepwalking behind those
yellow windows would have the slightest idea. I knew what kind of
world it was. They didn't."

"Exactly,"
Archer said.

"But
there was never Oz. Only one more dark street." "Until
now."

"Is
this Oz?"

"It
might as well be."

She
supposed that was true. "I guess we can't tell anyone."

"I
don't think we should, no."

"And
we have to go back in the morning."

"Yes."

"We
can't forget about it and we can't walk away. He needs our help."
"I think so." "But what
is
he?"

"Well,
I think maybe he told us the truth, Catherine. I think he's a time
traveler." "Is that possible?"

"I
don't know. Maybe. I'm past making odds on what's possible and what
isn't."

She
gestured at the notebook, the newspaper. "So what did you find?"

"They
belonged to Tom Winter, I believe. Look." She pushed aside her
chicken and examined the paper. Sunday, May 13, 1962. The Late City
Edition.

u.s
ships and 1,800 marines on way to indochina area; laos decrees
emergency . . . doctors transplant human heart valve . . . church in
spain backs workers on strike rights