A Bridge of Years

by Robert Charles Wilson

  If you talk about this, he thought, you're opening one more door that maybe ought to stay closed—taking one step closer to ratifying your own insanity.

  But was silence any better? There were times (last night, for instance) when he felt himself stewing in the sour juice of his own isolation. No: he needed to talk about this, and he needed to talk about it to somebody who wasn't family— obviously not Tony or Loreen. Archer would do.

  Dreams aside, nothing threatening had happened. Some inexpensive dinnerware had been surreptitiously cleaned: not quite Ghostbusters material. But it was the dream that stayed in his mind.

  He told Archer he'd expect him soon and replaced the phone in its cradle. The silence of the morning house rang out around him. He walked to the kitchen door, opened it and took a tentative step outside.

  The air was bracing; the sky was bright.

  Tom had brought home a power mower from Sears on Wednesday but he hadn't used it yet; the grass was ankle high. He was briefly afraid to put his foot down off the back step—a vagrant image of metallic insects with brightly focused eyes ran through his mind. (They might be there still. They might bite.)

  He took a breath and stepped down.

  His ankles itched with anticipation . . . but there was nothing sinister among these weeds, only a few ants and aphids.

  He walked to the northern quadrant of the yard where the dream-insects had moved between the house and the woods.

  He understood that by looking for their trail he was violating the commonsense assumption that dreams are necessarily separate from the daylight world. But he was past fighting the impulse. Yet another prop kicked from under the edifice of his sanity. (Tom had begun to envision his sanity as one of those southern California hillside houses erected on stilts— the ones that wash into the ocean in a heavy rain.) He examined the deep, seeded grass where the insects had seemed to be, but there was nothing unusual among the dewy grass blades and feathered dandelion heads.

  He should have been reassured. Instead, he felt oddly disappointed. Disappointed because on some fundamental level he was convinced last night's dream had been no ordinary dream. (No—but he couldn't say exactly how it was different.)

  He walked to the verge of the woods. In his dream this was where the broad trail of bright-eyed insects had passed into the moon-shadow of the trees.

  The sun, this time of morning, did not much penetrate the deep Pacific Northwest pinewoods. There was a trail leading back through this tangle, but it began at the opposite end of the yard. Here there were only these old trees and this fern-tangle undergrowth, the smell of rotting pine needles and the drip of hoarded rainwater. The barrier between the forest and the sunlit yard could not have been more distinct. He braced his hands on a tree trunk. Leaning forward, he felt the cool, mushroom dampness of the forest on his face.

  He turned back to the house.

  In his dream, the insects had moved to the forest from the house. Tom paced back to the nearest wall. It was an ordinary frame wall sided with cedar, well preserved—the paint hadn't blistered or peeled—but hardly unusual. This was the wall at the back of the master bedroom, windowless at this corner.

  But if his dream had not been a dream, there must be some sort of opening here.

  He sat on his haunches and pulled away handfuls of high, seeded grass from the concrete foundation where it rose some few inches above the soil.

  He held his breath, gazing at what he found there.

  The concrete was riddled with small, precisely round holes. The holes were all alike, all approximately as wide as the ball of his thumb.

  His foot slipped in the wet grass and he sat back with a thump on his tailbone.

  They must be bolt holes, he thought. Something must have been attached here. A deck, maybe.

  But the holes in the chalky, water-stained concrete were smooth as glass.

  "Be damned," he said.

  He plucked a stem of the tall grass and held it to one of the openings.

  Like shoving a stick into a hornet's nest, Tom. Real dumb. You don't know what might be in there.

  But when he pushed the long grass stem inside there was no resistance ... no response.

  He bent down and peered into the opening. He didn't put his cheek hard up against the concrete foundation, because he couldn't shake the belief that one of those tiny saucer-eyed creatures from his dream might be inside—that it might possess claws, teeth, a poison sac, a hostile intent. But he bent close enough to smell the rooty earth odor rising from the damp lawn . . . close enough to watch a sow bug trundling up the latticework of a thistle. No light radiated from the many holes in the foundation. He thought he felt a breath of air sigh out, oily and faintly metallic.

  He stood up and backed off a pace.

  What now? Do we call Exterminex? Dynamite the foundation?

  Tell Archer?

  No, Tom thought. None of the above. Not yet.

  He explained everything else—the dishes, the dream—meticulously to Archer, who sat at the kitchen table drinking instant coffee and running his fingernail along the grain of the wood.

  The telling of it made Tom feel foolish. Archer was sanity incarnate in his checkerboard cotton shirt and Levi's: rooted to the earth right through the soles of his high-top sneakers. Archer listened patiently, then grinned. "This has to be the most interesting thing to happen around here since Chuck Nixon saw a UFO over the waste treatment plant."

  He would say that, Tom thought. Archer had been a legend at Sea View Elementary—"a world-class shit disturber," as the gym teacher had declared on one memorable occasion. Maybe that's why I called him, Tom thought: I still think of him as fearless.

  "I mean it," Archer said. "You're obviously upset by this. But it's wonderful. I mean, here's this mundane little house in the woods, one more shitty frame house out along the Post Road—pardon me—then suddenly it's more than that. You know the quote from Kipling? 'There was a crack in his head and a little bit of the Dark World came through . .

  Tom winced. "Thanks a lot." Kipling?

  "Don't misunderstand. I would be disappointed," Archer said, "if you were crazy. Craziness is very common. Very—" He struggled for a word. "Very K-mart. I'm hoping for something a little classier."

  "You're enjoying this too much."

  "It's my hobby," Archer said.

  Tom blinked. "It's what?"

  "Well, it's hard to explain. The supernatural: it's like a hobby with me. I'm a skeptic, you understand. I don't believe in ghosts, I don't believe in UFOs. I'm not that kind of enthusiast. But I've read all the books. Charles Fort, Jacques Vallee. I don't believe in it, but I decided a long time ago that I wanted it to be true. I want there to be rains of frogs. I want statues to bleed. I want it because—please don't repeat this —it would be like God saying, 'Fuck Belltower, Washington, here's a miracle.' It would mean the asphalt down by the car lots might break out in crocuses and morning glories and tie up traffic for a week. It would mean we might all wake up one morning and find the pulp mill crumbled into sand. Half the town would be out of work, of course. But we could all live on manna and red wine. And nobody—absolutely nobody —would sell real estate."

  Tom said, "When I was twelve years old I used to pray for nuclear war. Not so that millions of people would die. So that I wouldn't have to go to school in the morning."

  "Exactly! Everything would be rubble. Life would be transformed."

  "Life would be easier."

  "More fun! Yes."

  "Sure. But would it? I'm thirty years old, Doug. I don't pray for war anymore."

  Archer met his gaze. "I'm thirty-two and I still pray for magic."

  "Is that what we're talking about here?"

  "Something extraordinary, anyhow. Unless you are crazy."

  "It's a possibility," Tom said. "Crazy people see things sometimes. I had an aunt Emily who used to talk to Jesus. Jesus lived in the attic. Once in a while he'd move over to the bedroom and they'd have a chat while she combed he
r hair. Everybody in the family thought this was terrifically funny. Then one day Aunt Emily sliced open her wrists in a warm bath. Her landlord found her a week later. She left a note saying Jesus told her to do it."

  Archer reflected on this a moment. "You're saying there are serious things at stake."

  "Either way, it seems to me. My sanity. Or sanity in general."

  "Screw sanity in general." "My own in particular, then."

  "You want me to take this seriously," Archer said. "Okay. Fine. But I don't know you. You're somebody I sold a house to. Somebody who was a year behind me at Sea View Elementary. You seem like a fairly reasonable guy. But let's be clear, Tom. You called me because you want credentials for your sanity. I want more than that."

  Tom leaned back in his chair, considering this. Obviously time had not much tamed Douglas Archer. Maybe it was important to remember you could pull a jail sentence and a stiff fine for throwing stones at Buicks, especially if you were old enough to know better. Tom had no love for Belltower, but neither did he especially want to see morning glories tying up traffic down by the car lots (though it would piss Tony off no end).

  Still, there was something seductive about Archer's attitude, especially after a night of nervous hysteria. He said, "You know some of the old trails up through here?"

  Archer nodded.

  "Let's scout the territory behind the house." Tom stood up. "Then we'll talk about what to do."

  They followed an old, nearly overgrown foot trail into the dense woods behind the back yard.

  Tom had forgotten what it was like to walk through these big Pacific Northwest pinewoods, this density of moss and fern and dripping water. He followed the broad back of Archer's checkerboard shirt along the trail, bending under branches or stepping over small, glossy freshets of rainwater. The sound of cars passing on the Post Road faded as they climbed a gentle slope westward. All this talk of magic—his own and Archer's—seemed much more plausible here.

  Archer said, "There were Indians living in through here a hundred years ago. Used to be an old totem pole in among the cedars, but they dragged that off to the town museum."

  "Who uses this trail?"

  "The Hopfner kids down the road, but they moved away a long time ago. Hikers sometimes. There are trails all the way up from the housing development along Poplar. It's mostly overgrown down by your place—I don't suppose anybody goes through that way these days."

  He paused behind Archer where the trail banked away through an open meadow full of thistles and fireweed, past an old tin shack overgrown with ivy: someone's long-abandoned store of firewood, Tom guessed, the structure obscured and sagging moss-thick to the ground. Archer pushed ahead into the deeper forest and Tom followed until the tree shadows closed around him again.

  They hiked for more than an hour, uphill through pine forest until they reached a rocky knoll. Archer clambered up the pinnacle, turned back and extended a hand to Tom. "We've come up a good height," he said, and Tom turned back and was surprised by a sweeping view not just to the Post Road but all the way to the coast—the town of Belltower clustered around the bay, the pulp mill lofting a gray plume of smoke.

  "This is why people come up here," Archer said. "It's not a well-known trail. If we'd followed the other branch we would have ended up in some serious swamp. Up this way, it gets nice."

  "Is there a name for this place?"

  "Somebody must call it something. Everything's got a name, I guess."

  "You come here a lot?"

  "Once in a while. I come for the perspective. From here— on a nice day—everything looks good. The fucking parking lots look good."

  "You hate this town," Tom said.

  Archer shrugged. "If I hated it, I'd leave. Though from what I've seen I doubt I could find anything significantly better. Hate is a strong word. But I dislike it a whole lot— sometimes." He paused and looked sidelong at Tom, shading his face against the sun. "I do admit to wondering what brought you back here."

  "You never asked."

  "It's not polite. Specially when someone obviously doesn't want to talk about it." He turned back to the view. The sunlight was intense. "So are we still being polite?"

  "My wife left me," Tom said. "I lost my job. I was drinking for therapy."

  Archer scrutinized him more closely now.

  Tom said, "You're wondering whether an alcoholic can be trusted when he sees strange things at night. Fair enough. But it's been more than a month since I touched any kind of liquor. As an explanation, a good case of DTs would be almost comforting."

  "How long were you drinking?"

  "Seriously? Since the job fell through. Maybe three months."

  Archer said, "I can think of a couple of tough questions." "Such as?"

  "Lots of people lose their jobs. Lots of people go through divorce. They don't all jump down a bottle."

  There were lots of ways to answer that. The most succinct would be, It's none of your business. But maybe he had made it Archer's business; he had raised the issue of his own stability. It wasn't a hostile question.

  He could say, / was married for ten years to a bright, thoughtful woman whom I loved intensely, and whose mistrust grew until it was. like a knife between us.

  He could explain about Barbara's political activism, her conviction that the world was teetering on the brink of ecological catastrophe. He could explain that his engineering work at Aerotech had divided them, tell Archer that she'd come to see him as a living example of the technological juggernaut: all his schooling and all his ingenuity plugged into a military-industrial machine so hydra-headed in its aspects and so single-minded in its goals that the earth itself was being strip-mined and forested into a global desert.

  He could replay, perhaps, one of their arguments. He could reiterate his endless, patient assertion that the engines he designed were fuel-efficient; that his work, while not exactly a pursuit of the ecological Grail, might help clear the air around major cities. Band-Aid thinking, Barbara called this, a piddling solution to an overwhelming problem. A better combustion engine wouldn't restore the rain forests to Brazil or the redwoods to California. To which Tom would reply that it was a damn sight more productive than chaining himself to the gate of a paper mill or sneaking off with some long-haired anarchists to spike trees in the Cascades. At which point— more often in their last year—the conversation would decline into insult. Barbara would begin on his "complacent hick family," particularly Tony; and Tom, if he was drunk or angry enough, would explore the possible reasons for her recent loss of sexual appetite. ("It's not too complicated," she once told him. "Take a look in the mirror sometime.")

  But there was no way to explain any of this. No way to explain his nagging suspicion that she was, after all, right; no way to explain the fundamental upwelling of love he still felt, even after their battles, when she was kneeling in the garden or brushing her hair before bed. He loved her with a loyalty that was animal in its mute persistence. He loved her even when he opened his mouth and called her frigid.

  He blinked against the fierce blue sky, the curve of the distant bay.

  He said, "I loved my wife a lot. I hated it when she left."

  "So why'd she leave?" Archer added, "You're allowed to tell me to fuck off at this point."

  "It was a political disagreement. I was doing engineering for a little R and D company out of Seattle. Barbara was into the peace movement, among other things. She came home one day and told me the company was about to be handed a big federal grant for weapons research, something connected with SDI. I told her there was no truth to the rumor. The people I worked for were scrupulous, small-scale, community-minded—I knew these guys. I checked out the possibility, asked a few questions, came up totally blank. Stood my ground. Really, it was just one more argument. There'd been more than a few. But it turned out this was the last one. She couldn't bear the idea of being married to a war-economy engineer. As far as Barbara was concerned it was dirty money."

  "That's what bro
ke you up?"

  "That and the fact that she was seeing somebody else." "Somebody in the movement," Archer guessed. "Somebody who was feeding her a line about government grants." Tom nodded.

  "Pretty fucking raw deal. So you started drinking—that's how you lost your job?"

  "I started drinking later. I lost my job because the rumor turned out to be true. The company had been asked to bid on a satellite contract—a little bit of congressional pork for the Pacific Northwest. There was a lot of secrecy, a lot of paranoia about corporate espionage. It was all those questions I asked when I wanted to reassure Barbara. They figured I was a security risk."

  Tom stood up and brushed the dirt off his jeans.

  "Offhand," Archer said, "I would guess you're as sane as the next guy. A little bit bruised, maybe. Aside from what we've talked about, you hear voices?"

  "Nope."

  "Are you suicidal?"

  "Three a.m. on a bad night—maybe. Otherwise no."

  "Well, I'm no shrink. But it sounds like you're a long way < from crazy. I think we ought to check out what's been happening in that house you bought."

  "Good," Tom said.

  He shook hands with Archer and smiled at him, but a new and unwelcome thought had formed at the back of his mind: If I'm not insane, then maybe I ought to be scared.

  Three

  The next morning, Sunday morning, Tom recalled that he hadn't told Archer about the holes in the foundation of the house.

  Maybe it was a mistake to withhold this, the only physical evidence that what he'd experienced wasn't an illusion.

  But he had held back on purpose, salvaging some fragment of the experience as his own. It was an odd idea: that he should feel possessive about a haunting (or whatever was happening here). But hadn't Archer been possessive, in his own way? All that talk about magic, as if this were his own personal miracle.

  But it wasn't Archer who had been called by name in a dream. It wasn't Archer who had stood at the window and watched the shadows of the pines and heard a voice among their sighing voices. Tom Winter, the voice had said; and it seemed to him now, after a sounder sleep, that there had been another message, less obvious then but clarified somehow by memory: