Страница 47 из 67
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 di
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 di
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 di
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 fu
“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 gri
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 di
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.