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Tom turned and was startled by a string dangling in front of his face. He tugged it, and above his head a naked forty-watt bulb flared on.
Ahead of him—up the stairs—he heard a whisper of traffic and rain.
This was so disorienting—so disenchanting-—that he stood motionless for a long while in the glare of the overhead light. If anyone had seen him they might have said he was stu
Let’s see, he thought, I headed south from the basement and then circled back, walked half an hour or so … maybe as far as the mall or the shops down by the highway. He climbed the stairs expecting nothing, passed another door into a seedy lobby he didn’t recognize; then a thought struck him:
It wasn’t raining when I left the house.
Well, that was a good long time ago now, wasn’t it? Plenty of time for some weather to roll in from the sea.
But he recalled the weekend weather forecast: sunshine all the way to Tuesday.
Wouldn’t be the first time they’d made a bad call; coastal weather could be unpredictable.
Still, it was coming down pretty hard out there.
Tom had emerged into what seemed to be the lobby of an apartment building: peeling linoleum, a row of buzzers, an i
Into the rain.
Into another world.
Tom’s first groping thought was that he had walked into a movie set—this was the most coherent explanation his fumbling mind could produce. Professional set dressing: a period piece.
All the cars in the street were antiques, though some appeared virtually new. Must have cost a fortune, he thought dazedly, assembling all this collectible transportation and parking it in a part of town that wasn’t familiar (that isn’t Belltower, one agitated fraction of self insisted), where all the buildings were period buildings and where the people were period people, or actors, or extras, dozens of them, scurrying through the rain. And no cameras. And no lights.
He cowered back into the rain shadow of this grubby building.
It was very difficult to think. A part of him was giddy, elated. He had arrived at this unimaginable destination by unimaginable means, he had fucking done it. Magic! Elation meanwhile doing battle with its partner, stark animal fear of the unknown. One step in the wrong direction and he would be lost, as lost as it was possible to be. All he really knew was that he had arrived somewhere where the shiniest vehicle on the street was what appeared to be a ’61 Buick—or something like it—and all the men braving the rain this cold evening were wearing for Christ’s sake hats, not rain hats but dress hats—trilbies or fedoras or whatever they were called —the kind of hats you saw in old Cary Grant comedies. Planet of the Hats!
It was very, very strange but also very, very real. A cold wind gusted rain into his face. Real rain. A woman bent under her umbrella shot him a sidelong glance as she passed, and Tom understood that she was at home here, he was the intruder—a strange, distraught, disheveled man wearing a packsack. He glanced down at himself. His jeans were gray with dust, streaked where the rain had penetrated the dirt. His hands were almost completely black.
The thought persisted: I’m the stranger here.
And, on some even deeper level, he knew exactly what this place was. He had traveled a mile or so down a featureless tu
Not the past of Belltower, Washington. It was a dark night, but he knew at once this was a bigger and busier city than Belltower had ever been. But an American city. The cars were American. The people looked American. An American city … in or around the year of his birth.
He didn’t accept this explanation, not entirely. Logic objected. Sanity was outraged. But logic and sanity had been forced into the back seat quite a while ago, hadn’t they? He wouldn’t have been too surprised if the tu
Well, yes. It was. A surprise and a shock. But he was begi
He thought, I can’t stay here. In fact, the feeling was more urgent. You’re a long way from home and it’s a long, dark crawl back to the tu
Anxiety veered toward panic.
Lots here to figure out, Tom thought, lots of possibilities, lots to absorb, but the wise thing would be to turn back and contemplate his options.
Before he did that, however, he took three long steps out into the frigid rain—past a miserable man with umbrella, unlit pipe, dog on a leash—to a newspaper box occupying curb space next to the shiny-wet Buick. He put three dimes into the paper box and pulled out the New York Times. Paused to inspect the date. May 13, 1962.
Raindrops spattered across the front page.
“It’s a fucking miracle,” he said out loud. “You were right all along, Doug. Miracles up along the Post Road.”
He turned and saw the dog-walker regarding him a little suspiciously, a little fearfully, while the dog, a springer spaniel, left its scent on a gray lamp standard. Tom smiled. “Nice weather!”
“For lunatics,” the man offered.
Tom retreated past him into the sad lobby of this old building, its smell of mildew and ancient plaster and the unimaginable secret in its foundation. Still my secret, he thought. He turned away from the man on the street, away from the rain and the traffic, clutching his souvenir newspaper in one hand, down and away and home; or, if not home, at least back.
Back, as they say, to the future.
One more thing caught his attention before he began the long, fatiguing hike back to the basement. As he clambered over the stacked rubble into the tu
It was inert. He picked it up. The device had lost its shine; it wasn’t just dusty, but dull, somehow empty.
Dead, he thought. What it is, is dead.
So the machine bugs must have been here, too, in the building behind him, cleaning and maintaining it … but something had killed them. At least, something had killed this one. And the wall had never been repaired, unlike the wall in Tom’s basement.
He put the broken creature in his pocket—in a strange way, the gesture was respectful—and took a deep breath, bracing himself for the long walk back.
Home, he slept for twelve hours straight. He woke up to a su
He read it meticulously. He read the headline story: Laos had declared a state of emergency and eighteen hundred marines were en route to Indochina. Troops of the South Vietnamese Seventy-fifth Infantry had ambushed some guerrillas in Kien Phong Province, and President Ke