A Bridge of Years

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 ru

The thing in the shed was— Was u

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 su

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, ski

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 strange 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?”