More numbers appeared, chiefly pressure readings. But Billy understood what these misplaced decimal points implied: a blood clot had lodged in the reedlike lancet.
Billy climbed out of his armor.
He hadn’t powered all the way up, though he had worn the armor a great deal in the last week, and maybe that was good—a full power-up would have placed greater demands on the gland in the elytra, perhaps thrown the clot into an artery. He might have died.
But the Need was still very great.
The armor was limp in his hand. He turned the flexible elytra inside out and deployed the lancet—a long, narrow microtube still wet with blood.
Here was where the clot had lodged.
Billy went to the kitchen and put a pot of water on the stove. As it boiled, he shook in a handful of Morton salt to approximate the salinity of human blood. This was “emergency field service,” a technique he had never tried, though he remembered it from training.
When the water was cool enough to touch, Billy dipped the lancet in.
Micropumps responded to the heat. Threads of dark blood oozed into the pot.
He couldn’t tell whether the clot had dissolved.
He cleaned the lancet and retracted it. Then he wrapped the elytra around his body, sealed them, and ran the diagnostics again.
The numbers looked better. Not perfect—but of course it was hard to tell until he plugged the lancet into his body and allowed his own blood to course through it.
Billy activated that system.
He felt the lancet slide under his skin. It stung a little— perhaps some salt still clinging to the microtube in spite of its own sterilants and anesthetics. But at least—
Ah.
—it seemed to be working.
Billy experienced a dizzy sense of triumph. He set out from the apartment at once.
He had lost a lot of time. It was late now. A street-cleaning truck had passed this way and Billy caught the reflection of a fingernail moon in the empty, wet asphalt.
Only an interruption, he told himself. How childish to have been so frightened of a minor malfunction. But understandable: all his courage came from the armor.
He thought about the secret gland hidden in the folds of the elytra.
It was dormant when the armor was folded away, tissues bathed in life-suspending chemicals. But the gland was a living thing—grown, he supposed, in a factory somewhere, a critically altered mutation of a thalamus or thyroid. When it lived, it lived on Billy’s blood—pumped in from an artery through the stylet, processed and pumped back through the lancet. The gland secreted the chemicals that made Billy the fine hunter he was tonight.
But because the gland was alive it might age, might be susceptible to disease, tumors, toxins—Billy simply didn’t know. For all the armor’s inbuilt diagnostics, such problems were necessarily the business of the infantry doctors.
No infantry doctors here.
He wondered whether his gland had been damaged by the blood clot. Whether it would clot again. Maybe it would … maybe this last episode had been a token of his own mortality.
But no, Billy thought, that’s wrong. I am Death. That’s what I am tonight. And Death can’t die.
He laughed out loud, an overflow of joy. It felt good to be hunting again.
He went to the place his prey had gone, where the hunt had been interrupted. He adjusted the bandwidth on his eyepiece and saw a dust of blue light in the doorway, very faint. And up the stairs.
Tonight, Billy thought, it would all come together.
Tonight, at last, he would kill someone.
Thirteen
Catherine backed out of the woodshed, turned and ran, stumbling over the berry-bush runners and scratching herself on the thorns. She didn’t feel any of this. She was too frightened.
The thing in the shed was— Was unnameable. Was not human.
Was a pulsating travesty of a human being.
She ran until she was breathless, then braced herself against a tree trunk, gasping and coughing. Her lungs ached and her unprotected arms were bloody from the nettles. The forest around her was silent, large, and absurdly sunny. Tree-tops moved in the breeze.
She sat down among the pine needles, hugging herself.
Be sensible, Catherine thought. Whatever it is, it can’t hurt you. It can’t move.
It had been bloody and helpless. Maybe not a monster, she thought; maybe a human being in some terrible kind of distress, skinned, mutilated …
But a mutilated human being would not have said “Help me” in that calm and earnest voice.
It was hurt. Well, of course it was hurt—it should have been dead! She had been able to see through its skin, into its insides; through its skull into its brains. What could have done that to a human being, and what human being could have survived?
Go home, Catherine instructed herself. Back to Gram Peggy’s house. Whatever she did—call the police, call an ambulance—she could do from there.
At home, she could think.
At home, she could lock the doors.
She locked the doors and scoured the kitchen shelves for something calming. What she turned up was a cut-glass decanter of peach brandy, two thirds full—“for sleepless nights,” Gram Peggy used to say. Catherine swallowed an ounce or so straight out of the bottle. She felt the liquid inside her like a small furnace, fiery and warming.
In the downstairs bathroom she sponged the blood off her arms and sprayed the lacework cuts with Bactine. Her shirt was torn; she changed it. She washed her face and hands.
Then she wandered through the downstairs checking the doors again, stopped when she passed the telephone. Probably she ought to call someone, Catherine thought.
911?
The Belltower Police Department? But what could she say?
She thought about it a few minutes, paralyzed with indecision, until a new idea occurred to her. An impulse, but sensible. She retrieved Doug Archer’s business card from a bureau drawer and dialed the number written there.
His answering service said he’d call back in about an hour. Catherine was disconcerted by this unexpected delay. She sat at the kitchen table with the peach brandy in front of her, trying to make sense of her experience in the woodshed.
Maybe she’d misinterpreted something. That was possible, wasn’t it? People see odd things, especially in a crisis. Maybe somebody had been badly hurt. Maybe she shouldn’t have run away.
But Catherine had an artist’s eye and she recalled the scene as clearly as if she had sketched it on canvas: dark blur of mold on ancient newsprint, bars of sunlight through green mossy walls, and the centerpiece, all pinks and blues and strange crimsons and yellows, a half-made thing, which pronounced the words Help me while its larynx bobbed in its glassy throat.
Sweet Jesus in a sidecar, Catherine thought. Oh, this is way out of bounds. This is crazy.
She’d finished half the contents of the brandy decanter by the time Doug Archer knocked. Catherine opened the door for him, a little light-headed but still deeply frightened. He said, “I was out in this neighborhood so I thought I’d just drop by instead of calling … Hey, are you all right?”
Then, without meaning to, she was leaning against him. He steadied her and guided her to the couch.
“I found something,” she managed. “Something terrible. Something strange.”
“Found something,” Archer repeated.
“In the woods—downhill south of here.”
“Tell me about it,” Archer said.
Catherine stammered out the story, suddenly embarrassed by what seemed like her own hysteria. How could he possibly understand? Archer sat attentively in Gram Peggy’s easy chair, but he was fundamentally a stranger. Maybe it had been dumb to call him. When he asked her to get in touch if she noticed anything strange, was this what he meant? Maybe it was a conspiracy. Belltower, Washington, occupied by hostile aliens. Maybe, under his neat Levi’s and blue Belltower Realty jacket, Archer was as transparent and str
ange as the thing in the woodshed.
But when she finished the story she found herself soothed by the telling of it.
Archer said he believed her, but maybe that was politeness. He said, “I want you to take me there.”
The idea revived her fear. “Now?”
“Soon. Today. And before dark.” He hesitated. “You might be mistaken about what you saw. Maybe somebody really does need help.”
“I thought about that. Maybe somebody does. But I know what I saw, Mr. Archer.”
“Doug,” he said absently. “I still think we have to go back. If there’s even a chance somebody’s hurt out there. I don’t think we have any choice.”
Catherine thought about it. “No,” she said unhappily. “I don’t guess we do.”
But it was late afternoon now and the forest was, if anything, spookier. Fortified by the brandy and a great deal of soothing talk, Catherine led Archer downhill past the creek, past the blackberry thickets and the tall Douglas firs, to the edge of the meadow where the woodshed stood.
The woodshed hadn’t changed, except in her imagination. It was mossy, ancient, small and unexceptional. She looked at it and envisioned monsters.
They stood a moment in brittle silence.
“When we met,” Catherine said, “you asked me to watch out for anything strange.” She looked at him. “Did you expect this? Do you have any idea what’s going on here?”
“I didn’t expect anything like this, no.”
He told her a story about a house he’d sold to a man named Tom Winter, its strange history, its perpetual tidiness, Tom Winter’s disappearance.
She said, “Is that near here?”
“A few hundred yards toward the road.”
“Is there some connection?”
Archer shrugged. “It’s getting late, Catherine. We’d better do this while we can.”
They approached the crude door of the woodshed.
Archer reached for the latch handle, but Catherine turned him away. “No. Let me.” You found him, Gram Peggy would have said. He’s your obligation, Catherine.
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 w
orld 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.)
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