A Bridge of Years

by Robert Charles Wilson

  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 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

  The front page had yellowed—but only a little.

  "Check out the notebook," Archer prompted.

  She leafed through it. The entries were brief scrawls and occupied the first three pages; the rest of the book was blank.

  Troubling Questions, it said at the top.

  You could walk away from this, it said.

  This is dangerous, and you could walk away.

  Everybody else on the face of the earth is being dragged into the future an hour at a time, but you can walk out. You found the back door.

  Thirty years ago, she read. They have the Bomb. Think about it. They have industrial pollution. They have racism, ignorance, crime, starvation—

  Are you really so frightened of the future?

  I'll go back one more time. At least to look. To really be there. At least once.

  She looked up at Doug Archer. "It's a sort of diary." "A short one." "Tom Winter's?" "I'd bet on it." "What did he do?"

  "Walked into a shitload of trouble, it looks like. But that remains to be seen."

  Only later did the obvious next thought occur to Catherine: Maybe we walked into a shitload of trouble, too.

  Archer slept on the sofa. In the morning he phoned the Belltower Realty office and told them he was sick—"Death's door," he said into the phone. "That's right. Yup. I know. I know. Yeah, I hope so too. Thanks."

  Catherine said, "Won't you get into trouble?"

  "Lose some commissions, for sure."

  "Is that all right?"

  "It's all right with me. I have other business." He grinned —a little wildly, in Catherine's opinion. "Hey, there are miracles happening. Aren't you a little bit excited by that?"

  She allowed a guilty smile. "I guess I am."

  Then they drove down to the Safeway and bought five frozen T-bone steaks for Ben, the time traveler.

  □ □

  □ □

  Archer visited the house every day for a week, sometimes with Catherine and sometimes without her. He brought food, which the time traveler never ate in his presence—maybe the machine bugs absorbed it and fed it to him in some more direct fashion; he didn't care to know the details.

  Every day, he exchanged some words with Ben.

  It was getting easier to think of him as "Ben," as something human rather than monstrous. The bedclothes disguised most of his deformities; and the white, sebaceous caul where his skull should have been had acquired enough pigmentation, by the third day, to pass for human skin. Archer had been scared at first by the machine bugs all over the house, but they never approached him and never presented any kind of threat. So Archer began to ask questions.

  Simple ones at first: "How long were you in the shed?"

  "Ten years, more or less."

  "You were injured all that time?"

  "I was dead most of that time."

  "Clinically dead?"

  Ben smiled. "At least." .

  "What happened to you?"

  "I was murdered."

  "What saved you?"

  "They did." The machine bugs.

  Or he asked about Tom Winter: "What happened to him?" "He went somewhere he shouldn't have gone." This was ominous. "He traveled in time?" "Yes."

  "Is he still alive?" "I don't know."

  Brief questions, brief answers. Archer let it rest at that. He was trying to get a sense of who this person really was—how
dangerous, how trustworthy. And he sensed Ben making similar judgments about him, perhaps in some more subtle or certain way.

  Catherine didn't seem surprised by this. She let Archer sleep in her living room some nights; they ate dinner and breakfast together, talked about these strange events sometimes and sometimes not. Like Archer, she stopped by the Winter house every day or so. "We're like church deacons," Archer said. "Visiting the sick." And she answered, "That's what it feels like, doesn't it? How strange."

  It was that, Archer thought. Very strange indeed. And the strangeness of it bolstered his courage. He remembered telling Tom Winter about this, his conviction that one day the clouds would open and rain frogs and marigolds over Belltower. (Or something like that.) And now, in a small way, that had happened, and it was a secret he shared only with Catherine Simmons and perhaps Tom Winter, wherever Tom had gone: absolute proof that the ordinary world wasn't ordinary at all . . . that Belltower itself was a kind of mass hallucination, a reassuring stage set erected over a wild, mutable landscape.

  "But dangerous, too," Catherine objected when he told her this. "We don't really know. Something terrible happened to Ben. He was almost killed."

  "Probably dangerous," Archer admitted. "You can get out of this if you want. Sell the house, move on back to Seattle. Most likely, you'll be perfectly safe."

  She shook her head with a firmness he found charming. "I can't do that, Doug. It feels like a kind of contract. He asked me for help. Maybe I could have walked away then. But I didn't. I came back. It's like saying, Okay, I'll help."

  "You did help."

  "But not just carrying him back to the house. That's not all the help he needs. Don't you feel that?"

  "Yes," Archer admitted. "I do feel that."

  He let her fix him a meal of crab legs and salad. Archer hated crab legs—his mother used to buy cheap crab and lobster from a fishing boat down by the VFW outpost—but he smiled at the effort she made. He said, "You should let me cook for you sometime."