She pulled away. He felt a sudden tension in her body, as if she were bracing herself for some new horror. “What are you talking about?”
“The thing—the man who killed Lawrence—I believe he meant to kill me. He must know about this place by now.”
“I don’t understand this.” She balled her fists. “What are you saying, that you know who killed Lawrence?”
“Joyce, it’s too much to explain.”
“He wasn’t stabbed, Tom. He wasn’t shot. He was burned open. It’s indescribable. There was a big hole burned into him. Do you know about that?”
“We can talk when we’ve found a safe place.”
“There’s no end to this, is there? Oh, shit, Tom. I’ve seen way too much ugliness tonight. Don’t tell me this shit. You don’t have to go inside if you don’t want to. But I need to sleep.”
“Listen, listen to me. If you spend the night in that apartment you could come out like Lawrence. I don’t want it to be that way but that’s the way it is.”
She looked at him fiercely … then her anger seemed to subside, swallowed up in an immense exhaustion. She might have been crying. Tom couldn’t tell, with the rain and all.
She said, “I thought I loved you! I don’t even know what you are!”
“Let me take you somewhere.”
“What do you mean, somewhere?”
“A long way from here. I’ve got a car waiting and I’ve got a friend inside. Please, Joyce.”
Archer put his head out the window of the Ford, shouting against the hiss of the rain—the words were unintelligible— then ducked back inside and revved the engine.
Tom felt his heart bump in his chest. He pulled Joyce toward the car.
She resisted and would have turned back, but a smoking gash opened in the concrete stoop a few inches from her hand. Tom looked at the blackened stone for a few dumb seconds before its significance registered. Some kind of weapon had done this: some kind of ray gun. This was ludicrous but quite terrifying. Archer leaned over the seat and jacked open the rear door of the car; Tom pushed Joyce toward it. She didn’t push back this time but was too shocked to coordinate her legs. She tumbled inside with Tom behind her, a motion that seemed endless, and the rain came down on the metal roof with a sound like gunfire.
Archer lunged his rental Ford into the street before Tom could close the door. He committed a 180-degree turn that left V-shaped skids on the wet asphalt, tires shrieking.
As the car rotated Tom caught a glimpse of the man who had tried to kill him.
If “man” was the word.
Not human, Tom thought.
Or, if human, then buried under some apparatus, a snoutlike headpiece, an old cloth coat humped across his back, oily in the rain and the glare of a streetlight.
His eyes were aimed at Tom through the rear window of the car. Nothing showed of his face except a wide, giddy smile … gone a moment later as Archer fishtailed the Ford around a corner.
They abandoned the car on a desolate street near Tompkins Square.
The sky seemed faintly brighter. The rain had slackened a little but the gutters were running and dark water dripped from the torn awning over the lobby of the tenement building which contained the tunnel.
Tom touched his shoulder, where a ferocious pain had just begun: a reflection or glancing shot from the marauder’s weapon had blistered a wide patch of skin there.
The three of them stood a moment in the empty lobby.
Tom said, “The last time we came this way there was something in the tunnel—”
“A time ghost,” Archer said. “They’re not real dangerous. So I’m told.”
Tom doubted this but let it pass. “Doug, what if he comes after us? There’s nothing stopping him, is there?” He kept an arm around Joyce, who was dazed and passive against his shoulder.
“He might,” Archer admitted. “But we know what to expect now. He can’t take us by surprise. The house is a fortress; be prepared—you might not recognize it.”
“This isn’t over,” Tom interpreted.
“No,” Archer said. “It isn’t over.”
“Then we ought to hurry.”
Tom led the way into the basement, over the heaped rubble and down an empty space into the future.
Seventeen
He slept for twelve hours in a bed he had never really thought of as his own and woke to find a strange woman gazing down at him.
At least, Tom thought, an unfamiliar woman—he had grown a little stingy with the word “strange.”
She occupied a chair next to the bed, a paperback Silhouette romance in her hands; she put the book splayed open on the knee of her jeans. “You’re awake,” she said.
Barely. “Do I know you?”
“No—not yet. I’m your neighbor. Catherine Simmons. I live in the big house up by the highway.”
He collected his thoughts. “Mrs. Simmons, the elderly woman—you’re what, her granddaughter?”
“Right! You knew Gram Peggy?”
“Waved to her once or twice. Delivered her paper when I was twelve years old.”
“She died in June … I came down to take care of business.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
He took a longer look around the room. Same room, same house, not much changed, at least this corner of it. He didn’t remember arriving here. The shoulder wound had gone from painful to incapacitating and he had crossed the last fifty yards of the tunnel with his eyes squeezed shut and Doug Archer propping him up.
The shoulder felt better now … He didn’t check for blisters but the pain was gone.
He focused his attention on Catherine Simmons. “I guess this isn’t the business you meant to take care of.”
“Doug and I sort of stumbled into it.”
“I guess we all did.” He sat up. “Is Joyce around?”
“I think she’s watching TV. But you’ll need to talk to Ben, I think.”
He supposed he would. “The TV’s working?”
“Oh, Ben was very apologetic about that. He says the cybernetics managed to scare you without warning you off. They were dealing with a situation way outside their expertise; they went about it all wrong. He made them fix the TV for you.”
“That’s very thoughtful of Ben.”
“You’ll like him. He’s a nice guy.” She hesitated. “You slept a long time … Are you sure you’re all right?”
“My shoulder—but that’s better now.”
“You don’t seem too pleased to be back.”
“Friend of mine died,” Tom said.
Catherine Simmons nodded. “I know how that is. Gram Peggy was pretty important in my life. It leaves a vacuum, doesn’t it? Let me know if there’s something I can do.”
“You can bring me my clothes,” Tom said.
He reminded himself that he had climbed back out of the well of time and that this was the summer of 1989—the last hot summer of a hot decade, hovering on the brink of a future he couldn’t predict.
The house was a fortress, Archer had told him, and some of that showed in the living room: the furniture had been pushed back against the walls and the walls themselves were covered with a mass of gemlike machine bugs. It looked like a suburban outpost of Aladdin’s Cave.
Tom followed Catherine to the kitchen, where the machine bugs—a smaller mass of them—were dismantling the stove.
A man, evidently human, sat at the kitchen table. He stood up clumsily when Tom entered the room. “This is Ben,” Catherine said.
Ben the time traveler. Ben who had risen, like Lazarus, from the grave. Ben the custodian of this malfunctioning hole in the world.