He turned his head.
The marauder stood above him.
His armor was quite golden, blinding in the sunlight.
The intruder gazed down at Ben with an expression so absolutely neutral of emotion that it provoked a pulse of surprise. He doesn’t much care that he’s killed me, Ben thought.
The marauder leveled his wrist weapon one more time, now at Ben’s head.
The weapon was unimpressive, built into the curiously insect-jointed machinery of the armor. Ben looked past it. Saw a flicker of a smile.
The marauder fired his weapon.
Most of the time traveler’s head vanished in a steam of bone and tissue.
Billy Gargullo regarded the time traveler’s body with a new and sudden distaste. Here was not an enemy any longer but something to be disposed of. A messy nuisance.
He took the corpse by its good arm and began to drag it into the wooded land behind the house. This was a long, hot process. The air was cool but the sun bore down mercilessly. Billy followed a narrow path some several yards, unnerved by the lushness of this forest. He stopped where the path curved away to the left. To the right there was a clearing; in the clearing was a slatboard woodshed, ivy-choked and abandoned for years.
He probed the door of the shed. One hinge was missing; the door sagged inward at a cockeyed angle. Sunlight played into the damp interior. There were stacks of mildewed newspapers, a few rusty garden tools, a hovering cloud of gnats.
Billy wrestled the time traveler—the lacerated meat of his body—into the sour, earthy shade of the building. His motion caused a tower of newspapers to tumble over the corpse. The papers thumped wetly down and Billy grimaced at the sudden reek of mold.
He stepped back from the door, satisfied. Possibly the body would be found, but this would deter suspicion at least for a while. He wasn’t planning to spend much time here.
He paused with one hand on the sun-hot wall of the shed.
There was a sound behind him, faint but unsettling—a rustle and chatter in the darkness.
Mice, Billy thought.
Rats.
Well, they can have him. He closed the door.
Billy’s first shot had blown the package of morning glory seeds out of the time traveler’s hand.
A stray corner of his beam sliced into the package and scattered its contents across the lawn. The charred paper—the words Heavenly Blue still brownly legible—drifted to earth not far from the birch stump where the time traveler lost his leg. The seeds were dispersed in a wide curve between the stump and the fence.
Most were eaten by birds and insects. A few, moistened by the next night’s rainfall, rooted in the lawn and were choked by crabgrass before the shoots saw light.
Four of them sprouted in the rich soil alongside the cedar fence.
Three survived into the summer. The few blossoms they produced were gaudy by August, but there was no one to see. The grass had grown tall and the house was empty.
It would be empty for a few summers more.
PART ONE — The Door in the Wall
One
It was a modest three-bedroom frame house with its basement dug a little deeper than was customary in this part of the country, pleasant but overgrown with bush and ivy and miles away from town.
It had been empty for years, the real estate agent said, and the property backed onto a cedar swamp. “Frankly, I don’t see a lot of investment potential here.”
Tom Winter disagreed.
Maybe it was his mood, but this property appealed at once. Perversely, he liked it for its bad points: its isolation, lost in this rainy pinewood—its blunt undesirability, like the frank ugliness of a bulldog. He wondered whether, if he lived here, he would come to resemble the house, the way pet owners were said to resemble their pets. He would be plain. Isolated. Maybe, a little wild.
Which was not, Tom supposed, how he looked to Doug Archer, the real estate agent. Archer was wearing his blue Bell Realty jacket, but the neat faded Levi’s and shaggy haircut betrayed his roots. Local family, working class, maybe some colorful relative still logging out in the bush. Raised to look with suspicion on creased trousers, which Tom happened to be wearing. But appearances were deceptive. Tom paused as they approached the blank pine-slab front door. “Didn’t this used to be the Simmons property?”
Archer shook his head. “Close, though. That’s a little ways up the hill. Peggy Simmons still lives up there—she’s nearly eighty.” He raised an eyebrow. “You know Peggy Simmons?”
“I used to deliver groceries up the Post Road . Came by here sometimes. But that was a long while ago.”
“No kidding! Didn’t you say—”
“I’ve been in Seattle for most of twelve years.”
“Any connection with Tony Winter—up at Arbutus Ford?”
“He’s my brother,” Tom said.
“Hey! Well, hell! This changes things.”
In the city, Tom thought, we learn not to smile so generously.
Archer slid the key into the door. “We had a man out here when the property went up for sale. He said it was in fairly nice shape on the inside, but I’d guess, after it’s been closed up for so long—well, you might take that with a grain of salt.”
Translated from realty-speak, Tom thought, that means it’s a hellacious mess.
But the door eased open on hinges that felt freshly oiled, across a swatch of neat beige broadloom.
“I’ll be damned,” Archer said.
Tom stepped over the threshold. He flicked the wall switch and a ceiling light blinked on, but it wasn’t really necessary; a high south-facing window allowed in a good deal of the watery sunshine. The house had been built with the climate in mind: it would not succumb to gloom even in the rain.
On the right, the living room opened into a kitchen. On the left, a hallway connected the bedrooms and the bath.
A stairway led down to the basement.
“I’ll be damned,” Archer repeated. “Maybe I was wrong about this place.”
The room they faced was meticulously clean, the furniture old but spotless. A mechanical mantel clock ticked away (but who had wound it?) under what looked like a Picasso print. Just slightly kitschy, Tom thought, the glass-topped coffee table, the low Danish Modern sofa; very sixties, but immaculately preserved. It might have popped out of a time capsule.
“Well maintained,” he said.
“You bet. Considering it wasn’t maintained at all, far as I know.”
“Who’s the owner?”
“The property came up for state auction a long time ago. Holding company in Seattle bought it but never did anything with it. They’ve been selling off packets of land all through here for the last year or so.” He shook his head. “To be honest, the house was entirely derelict. We had a man out to evaluate these properties, shingles and foundation and so on, but he never said—I mean, we assumed, all these old frame houses out here—” He put his hands in his pockets and frowned. “The utilities weren’t even switched on till late last week.”
How many cold winters, hot summers had this room been closed and locked? Tom paused and slid his finger along a newel post where the stairs ran down into darkness. His finger came away clean. The wood looked oiled. “Phantom maid service?”
Archer didn’t laugh. “Jack Shackley’s the listed agent on this. Maybe he was in to tidy up. Somebody did a phenomenal job, anyway. The listing is house and contents and it looks like you have some nice pieces here—maybe a little dated. Shall we have a look around?”
“I think we should.”
Tom circled twice through the house—once with Archer, once “to get his own impression” while Archer left his business card on the kitchen counter and stepped outside for a smoke. His impression was the same both times. The kitchen cupboards opened frictionlessly to spotless, uniformly vacant interiors. The linen closet was cedar-lined, fragrant and bare. The bedrooms were empty except for the largest, which contained a modest bed, a chest of drawers, and a mirror— dustless. In the basement, high windows peeked out at the rear lawn; these were covered with white roller blinds, which the sun had turned brittle yellow. (Time passes here after all, he thought.)