A Bridge of Years

by Robert Charles Wilson

  He was aware, too, of a vast store of pain waiting to be acknowledged . . . but not here in this room with the ugly harbor paintings on the wall, the complimentary postcards in the bureau, pale rings on the wood veneer where generations had abandoned their vending-machine Cokes to sweat in the dry heat. Here, it would be too much.

  He padded down the carpeted hallway, bought a Coke so he could add his own white ring to the furniture.

  The phone was buzzing when he got back. He picked it up and popped the ring-tab on the soft-drink can.

  "Tom," his brother said.

  "Tony. Hi, Tony."

  "You all by yourself?"

  "Hell, no," Tom said. "The party's just warming up. Can't you tell?"

  "That's very funny. Are you drinking something?" "Soda pop, Tony."

  "Because I don't think you should be sitting there all by yourself. I think that sets a bad pattern. I don't want you getting sauced again."

  Sauced, Tom thought, amused. His brother was a well-spring of these antique euphemisms. It was Tony who had once described Brigitte Nielsen as "a red-hot tamale." Barbara had always relished his brother's bon mots. She used to call it her "visiting Tony yoga"—making conversation with one hand ready to spring up and disguise a grin.

  "If I get sauced," Tom said, "you'll be the first to know."

  "That's exactly what I'm afraid of. I called in a lot of favors to get you this job. Naturally, that leaves my ass somewhat exposed."

  "Is that why you phoned?"

  A pause, a confession: "No. Loreen suggested—well, we both thought—she's got a chicken ready to come out of the oven and there's more than enough to go around, so if you haven't eaten—"

  "I'm sorry. I had a big meal down at the coffee shop. But thank you. And thank Loreen for me."

  Tony's relief was exquisitely obvious. "Sure you don't want to drop by?" Brief chatter in the background: "Loreen's done up a blueberry pie."

  "Tell Loreen I'm sorely tempted but I want to make it an early night."

  "Well, whatever. Anyway, I'll call you next week." "Good. Great."

  "Night, Tom." A pause. Tony added, "And welcome back."

  Tom put down the phone and turned to confront his own reflection, gazing dumbly out of the bureau mirror. Here was a haggard man with a receding hairline who looked, at this moment, at least a decade older than his thirty years. He'd put on weight since Barbara left and it was beginning to show —a bulge of belly and a softness around his face. But it was the expression that made the image in the mirror seem so ancient. He had seen it on old men riding buses. A frown that announces surrender, the willing embrace of defeat. Options for tonight?

  He could stare out the window, into his past; or into this mirror, the future.

  The two had intersected here. Here at the crossroads. This rainy old town.

  He turned to the window.

  Welcome back.

  Doug Archer called in the morning to announce that Tom's offer on the house—most of his carefully hoarded inheritance, tendered in cash—had been accepted. "Possession is immediate. We can have all the paperwork done by the end of the day. A few signatures and she's all yours."

  "Would it be possible to get the key today?"

  "I don't see any problem with that."

  Tom drove down to the realty office next to the Harbor Mall. Archer escorted him through paperwork at the in-house Notary Public, then took him across the street for lunch. The restaurant was called El Nino—it was new; the location used to be a Kresge's, if Tom recalled correctly. The decor was nautical but not screamingly kitschy.

  Tom ordered the salmon salad sandwich. Archer smiled at the waitress. "Just coffee, Nance."

  She nodded and smiled back.

  "You're not wearing your realty jacket," Tom said.

  "Technically, it's my day off. Plus, you're a solid purchase. And what the hell, you're a hometown boy, I don't have to impress anybody here." He settled back in the vinyl booth, lean in his checkerboard shirt, his long hair a little wilder than he had worn it the day before. He thanked the waitress when the coffee arrived. "I looked into the history of the house, by the way. My own curiosity, mainly."

  "Something interesting?"

  "Sort of interesting, yeah."

  "Something you didn't want to tell me until the papers were signed?"

  "Nothing that would change your mind, Tom. Just a little bit odd." "So? It's haunted?"

  Archer smiled and leaned over his cup. "Not quite. Though that wouldn't surprise me. The property has a peculiar history. The lot was purchased in 1963 and the house was finished the next year. From 1964 through 1981 it was occupied by a guy named Ben Collier—lived alone, came into town once in a while, no visible means of support but he paid his bills on time. Friendly when you talked to him, but not real friendly. Solitary."

  "He sold the house?"

  "Nope. That's the interesting part. He disappeared around 1980 and the property came up for nonpayment of taxes. Nobody could locate the gentleman. He had no line of credit, no social security number anybody could dig up, no registered birth—his car wasn't even licensed. If he died, he didn't leave a corpse." Archer sipped his coffee. "Real good coffee here, in my opinion. You know they grind the beans in back? Their own blend. Colombian, Costa Rican—"

  Tom said, "You're enjoying this story."

  "Hell, yes! Aren't you?"

  Tom discovered that he was, as a matter of fact. His interest had been piqued. He looked at Archer across the table— frowned and looked more closely. "Oh, shit, I know who you are! You're the kid who used to pitch stones at cars down along the coast highway!"

  "You were a grade behind me. Tony Winter's little brother."

  "You cracked a windshield on a guy's Buick. There were editorials in the paper. Juvenile delinquency on the march."

  Archer grinned. "It was an experiment in ballistics."

  "Now you sell haunted houses to unsuspecting city slickers.

  "I think 'haunted* is kind of melodramatic. But I did hear another odd story about the house. George Bukowski told me this—George is a Highway Patrol cop, owns a double-wide mobile home down by the marina. He said he was up along the Post Road last year, cruising by, when he saw a light in the house—which he knew was unoccupied 'cause he'd been in on the search for Ben Collier. So he stopped for a look. Turned out a couple of teenagers had broken a basement window. They had a storm lantern up in the kitchen and a case of Kokanee and a ghetto blaster—just having a good old party. He took them in and confiscated maybe an eighth-ounce of dope from the oldest boy, Barry Lindell. Sent 'em all home to their parents. Next day George goes back to the house to check out the damage—the kicker is, it turns out there wasn't any damage. It was like they'd never been there. No matches on the floor, no empties, everything spit-polished."

  Tom said, "The window where they broke in?" "It wasn't broken anymore." "Bullshit," Tom said.

  Archer held up his hands. "Sure. But George swears on it. Says the window wasn't even reputtied, he would have recognized that. It wasn't fixed—it just wasn't broken."

  The waitress delivered the sandwich. Tom picked it up and took a thoughtful bite. "This is an obsessively tidy ghost we're talking about."

  "The phantom handyman."

  "I can't say I'm frightened."

  "I don't guess you have any reason to be. Still—" "I'll keep my eyes open."

  "And let me know how it goes," Archer said. "I mean, if that's okay with you." He slid his business card across the table. "My home number's on the back."

  "You're that curious?"

  Archer checked out the next table to make sure nobody was listening. "I'm that fucking bored."

  "Yearning for the old days? A sunny afternoon, a rock in your hand, the smell of a wild convertible?"

  Archer grinned. The grin said, Hell, yes, I am that kid, and I don't much mind admitting it.

  This man enjoys life, Tom thought.

  Heartening to believe that was still possible.
<
br />   Before he drove out to the house Tom stopped at the Harbor Mall to pick up supplies. At the A&P he assembled a week's worth of staples and a selection of what Barbara used to call bachelor food: frozen entrees, potato chips, cans of Coke in plastic saddles. At the Radio Shack he picked up a plug-in phone, and at Sears he paid $300 for a portable color TV.

  Thus equipped for elementary survival, he drove to the house up along the Post Road.

  The sun was setting when he arrived. Did the house look haunted? No, Tom thought. The house looked suburban. Cedar siding a little faded, the boxy structure a little lost in these piney woods, but not dangerous. Haunted, if at all, strictly by Mr. Clean. Or perhaps the Tidy Bowl Man.

  The key turned smoothly in the lock.

  Stepping over the threshold, he had the brief but disquieting sensation that this was after all somebody else's house . . . that he had arrived, like Officer Bukowski's juvenile delinquents, without credentials. Well, to hell with that. He flicked every light switch he could reach until the room was blisteringly bright. He plugged in the refrigerator—it began to hum at once—and dropped the Cokes inside. He plugged in the TV set and tuned the rabbit ears to a Tacoma station, a little fuzzy but watchable. He cranked the volume up. Noise and light.

  He preheated the ancient white enamel stove, watching the elements for a time to make sure everything worked. (Everything did.) The black Bakelite knobs were as slick as ebony; his own fingerprints seemed like an insult to their polished surface. He slipped a TV dinner into the oven and closed the door. Welcome home.

  A new life, he thought.

  That was why he had come here—or at least that was what he'd told his friends. Looking around this clean, illuminated space, it was possible—almost possible—to believe that.

  He took the TV dinner into the living room and poked at the tepid fried chicken with a plastic fork while MacNeil (or Lehrer, he had never quite sorted that out) conducted a round-table discussion of this year's China crisis. When he was finished he tidied away the foil plate into a plastic bag— he wasn't ready to offend the Hygiene Spirit just yet—and pulled the tab on a Coke. He watched two nature documentaries and a feature history of Mormonism. Then, suddenly, it was late, and when he switched off the set he heard the wind turning the branches of the pines; he was reminded how far he had come from town and what a large slice of loneliness he might have bought himself, here.

  He turned up the heat. The weather was still cool, summer still a ways off. He stepped outside and watched the silhouettes of the tall pines against the sky. The sky was bright with stars. You have to come a long way out, Tom thought, to see a sky like this.

  Inside, he locked the door behind him and slid home the security chain.

  The bed in the big bedroom belonged to him now . . .

  but he had never slept in it, and he felt the weight of its strangeness. The bed was made in the same Danish Modern style as the rest of the furniture: subdued, almost generic, as if it had been averaged out of a hundred similar designs; not distinctive but solidly made. He tested the mattress; the mattress was firm. The sheets smelled faintly of clean, crisp linen and not at all of dust.

  He thought, I'm an intruder here . . .

  But he frowned at himself for the idea. Surely not an intruder, not after the legal divinations and fiscal blessings of the realty office. He was that most hallowed institution now, a Homeowner. Misgivings, at this stage, were strictly beside the point.

  He switched off the bedside lamp and closed his eyes in the foreign darkness.

  He heard, or thought he heard, a distant humming . . . barely audible over the whisper of his own breath. The sound of faraway, buried machinery. Night work at a factory underground. Or, more likely, the sound of his imagination. When he tried to focus on it it vanished into the ear's own night noises, tinnitus and the creaking of small bones. Like every house, Tom thought, this one must move and sigh with the pulse of its heat and the tension of its beams.

  Surrounded by the dark and the buzzing of his own thoughts, he fell asleep at last.

  The dream came to him after midnight but well before dawn —it was three a.m. when he woke and checked his watch.

  The dream began conventionally. He was arguing with Barbara, or bearing the brunt of one of her arguments. She had accused him of complicity in some sweeping, global disaster: the warming of the earth, ocean pollution, nuclear war. He protested his innocence (at least, his ignorance); but her small face, snub-nosed, lips grimly compressed, radiated a disbelief so intense that he could smell the rising odor of his own guilt.

  But this was only one more variation of what had become the standard Barbara dream. On another night it might have ended there. He would have come awake drenched in the effluvia of his own doubt; would have rinsed his face with cold tap water and staggered back to bed like a battle-fatigued foot soldier slogging to the trenches.

  Tonight, instead, the dream dissolved into a new scenario. Suddenly he was alone; he was in a house that was like this house, but bigger, emptier; he was lying on his back in a room with a single high window. There was a diffuse moonlight that illuminated only his bed and left the margins of the room in cavernous darkness.

  Hidden in that darkness, things were moving.

  He couldn't tell what sort of things they were. Their feet ticked like cat's claws on the hard floor and they seemed to be whispering to one another in a high, buzzing falsetto—a language he had never heard. He imagined elves; he imagined immense, articulate rats.

  But the worst thing was their invisibility—compounded by what he recognized suddenly as his own helplessness. He understood that the room had no door; that the window was impossibly high; that his arms and legs were not just stiff but paralyzed.

  He strained forward, peering into the darkness . . .

  And they opened their eyes—all at once.

  A hundred eyes all around him.

  A hundred disks of pure, pupil-less, bone-white light.

  The whispering rose in a metallic, clattering crescendo—

  And he awoke.

  Woke alone in this smaller, brighter, but still moonlit and unfamiliar room. Woke with his heart pounding wildly in his chest.

  Woke with the sound still ringing in his ears: The hiss of their voices. The clatter of their nails.

  Of course, it was only a dream.

  The morning house was clean, hollow, blank, and prosaic. Tom paced from bedroom to kitchen listening to the unfamiliar shush of his feet against the broadloom. He put together breakfast, fried eggs and a bagel, and stacked the dirty dishes in the sink when he was finished. Bachelor housekeeping. Maybe the Genius Loci would clean up.

  Yesterday's overcast had spilled away across the mountains. Tom opened the screen door at the back of the kitchen and stepped out into the yard. The lawn had been slashed down to stubble but was starting to grow back, as much weed as grass. No housekeeping elves out here. A stand of tall pine rose up beyond the margin of the yard, enclosing ferns and fallen needles in its darkness. An overgrown trail led away from the corner of the yard and Tom followed it a few paces in, but the trees closed out the sun and the air was suddenly chill. He listened a moment to the drip of water somewhere in this spongy wilderness. Archer had said the forest ran a long way back, that there was a cedar swamp behind the property. (Archer would know, Tom thought. Archer the car-stalker, trailblazer, rock-climber, truant . . . these childhood memories had begun to freshen.) A damp breeze tickled the pale hair on his arms. A hummingbird darted up, regarded him querulously, and darted away.

  He turned back to the house.

  Tony called after lunch with another dinner invitation, which Tom could not gracefully decline. "Come on over," Tony said. "We'll stoke up the barbecue." It was an order as much as an invitation: tribute to be paid.

  Tom left the dirty dishes in the sink. At the door he paused and turned back to the empty house.

  "You want to clean up, go ahead." No answer. Oh, well.

  It was a long
drive to Tony's place. Tony and Loreen lived in the Seaview district, a terrace of expensive family homes along the scalloped bay hills south of town. The neighborhood was prestigious but the house Tony lived in wasn't especially flashy—Tony was very Protestant about overt displays of wealth. Tony's house, in fact, was one of the plainer of these homes, a flat white facade which concealed its real, formidable opulence: the immense plate glass windows and the cedar deck overlooking the water. Tom parked in the driveway behind Loreen's Aerostar and was welcomed at the door by the entire family: Tony, five-year-old Barry, Loreen with cranky eight-month Tricia squirming against her shoulder. Tom smiled and stepped into the mingled odors of stain-proofed broadloom, Pine-Sol, Pampers.

  He would have liked to sit and talk a while with Loreen. ("Poor Loreen," Barbara used to say. "Playing Tony's idea of a housewife. All diapers and Barbara Cartland novels.") But Tony threw an arm over his shoulder and marched him through the spacious living room to the deck, where his propane barbecue hissed and flamed alarmingly.

  "Sit," Tony said, waving a pair of tongs at a deck chair.

  Tom sat and watched his brother paint red sauce over steaks. Tony was five years older than Tom, balding but trim, the creases around his eyes defined more by exercise and sunshine than by age. It would be hard, Tom thought, to guess which of us is older.

  It was Tony who had come roaring out to Seattle like an angry guardian angel—six months after Barbara moved out; five months after Tom left his job at Aerotech; three months after Tom stopped answering his phone. Tony had cleared the apartment of empty bottles and frozen food wrappers, switched off the TV that had flickered and mumbled for weeks uninterrupted, scolded Tom into showering and shaving—talked him into the move back to Belltower and the job at the car lot.

  It was also Tony who had offered, as consolation for the loss of Barbara, the observation "She's a bitch, little brother. They're all bitches. Fuck em."