A Bridge of Years

“A few hundred yards toward the road.”

“Is there some co

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 co

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.