I can’t sleep here tonight.
But the fear was already beginning to fade. He had slept here lots of nights, knowing something odd was going on, knowing it didn’t mean to hurt him. The tunnel and his dreams were part of a single phenomenon, after all. Help us, his dreams had pleaded. It wasn’t the message of an omnipotent force.
Beyond the hole in the wall, the empty corridor grew dark and still again.
He managed to fall asleep a little after four a.m., woke up an hour before work. His sleep had been dreamless and tense. He changed—he had slept in his clothes—and padded down to the basement.
Where he received a second shock:
The hole in the wall was almost sealed.
A line of tiny insectile machines moved between the rubble on the floor and the wall Tom had torn up last night. They moved around the ragged opening in a slow circle, maybe as many as a hundred of them, somehow knitting it up—restoring the wall to its original condition.
They were the insect machines he had seen moving from the foundation to the forest across the moonlit back yard. Tom recognized them and was, strangely, unsurprised by their presence here. Of course they were here. They simply weren’t hiding anymore.
The work they were performing on the wall wasn’t a patch; it was a full-scale reconstruction, clean and seamless. He understood intuitively that if he scratched away the paint he’d find the original brand names stamped in blue ink on the gypsum panels, the drywall nails restored in every atom to their original place in the two-by-fours, the studs themselves patched where he’d gouged them with the butt of his prybar —wood fiber and knot and dry sap all restored.
He took a step closer. The machine bugs paused. He sensed their attention briefly focused on him.
Silent moving clockwork jewels.
“You were here all along,” Tom whispered. “You did the goddamn dishes.”
Then they resumed their patient work. The hole grew smaller as he watched.
He said—his voice trembling only a little—“I’ll open it up again. You know that?”
They ignored him.
But he didn’t open it up—not until a week had passed.
He felt poised between two worlds, unsure of himself and unsure of his options. The immensity of what he had discovered was staggering. But it was composed of relatively small, incremental events—the insects cleaning his kitchen, his dreams, the tunnel behind the wall. He tried to imagine scenarios in which he explained all this to the proper authorities —whoever they were. (The realty board? The local police? The CIA, NASA, the National Geographic Society?) Fundamentally, none of this was even remotely possible. Stories like his made the back pages of the Enquirer at best.
And—perhaps even more fundamentally—he wasn’t ready to share these discoveries. They were his; they belonged to him. He didn’t have Barbara, he didn’t have a meaningful job, he had abandoned even the rough comfort of alcohol. But he had this secret … this dangerous, compulsive, utterly strange, and sometimes very frightening secret.
This still unfolding, incomplete secret.
He stayed out of the basement for a few days and contemplated his next step.
His dream about the machine bugs hadn’t been a dream, or not entirely. Breaching the wall, he had stepped inside their magic circle. They stopped hiding from him.
For two nights he watched them with rapt attention. The smallest of them were the most numerous. They moved singly or in pairs, usually along the wallboards, sometimes venturing across the carpet or into the kitchen cabinets, moving in straight lines or elegant, precise curves. They were tiny, colorful, and remorseless in their clean-up duty; they stood absolutely still when he touched them.
Friday night, after he came home from the car lot, he discovered a line of them disappearing into the back panel of his TV set. With his ear next to the screen he could hear them working inside: a faint metallic clatter and hiss.
He left them alone.
Larger and less numerous was a variation Tom thought of as “machine mice.” These were rodent sized and roughly rodent shaped: bodies scarab blue and shiny metallic, heads the color of dull ink. They moved with startling speed, though they seemed to lack legs or feet. Tom supposed they hovered an eighth of an inch or so over the floor, but that was only a guess; they scooted away when he tried to touch or hold them. He saw them sometimes herding the smaller variety across the floor; or alone, pursuing duties more mysterious.
Saturday—another moonlit night—he dosed himself with hot black coffee and sat up watching a late movie. He switched off the lights at one a.m. and stepped cautiously into the damp grass of the back yard, with a heavy-duty flashlight in his hand and a pair of wading boots to protect his ankles.
The machine bugs were there in great numbers—as they had been in his not-a-dream—fluorescing in the moonlight, a tide of them flowing from the foundation holes into the deep woods. In pursuit of what?
Tom debated following them, but decided not to: not now. Not in the dark.
They wanted his help. They had asked for it.
Disturbing, that he knew this. It was a form of communication, one he didn’t understand or control, HELP US TOM WINTER, they had said, and they were saying it now. But it wasn’t a message he heard or interpreted, simply a silent understanding that this was what they wanted. They didn’t mean to hurt him. Simply wanted his help. What help, where? But the only answer was a sort of beckoning, as deeply understood as their other message: FOLLOW US INTO THE WOODS.
He backed away in the darkness, alarmed. He recalled with sudden vividness the experience of reading Christina Rossetti’s “The Goblin Market,” years ago, in one of his mother’s books, a leather-bound volume of Victorian poetry. Reading it and shivering in his summer bedroom, terrified by the spidery silhouette of the arbutus outside his window and by the possibilities of nighttime invitations too eagerly accepted. No thank you, he thought, I believe I’ll stay out of the forest for now.
The machine bugs conveyed no response—except perhaps the dim mental equivalent of a shrug—and carried on their strange commerce between the house and the depths of the woods.
The next morning, when he turned on the TV set, it emitted a crackle of static, flared suddenly brighter, and displayed a message:
HELP US TOM WINTER
Tom had just stepped out of the shower; he was wearing a bathrobe and carrying a cup of coffee. He failed to notice when the coffee splashed over his hand and onto the carpet, though the skin around the web of his thumb was red for the rest of the day.
The letters blinked and steadied.
“Jesus Christ!” he said.
The TV responded,
HELP US
His first instinct was to get the holy hell out of the house and bolt the door behind him. He forced himself to resist it.
He knew the machine bugs had been inside his set; this, he supposed, was why.
He took a large step backward and sat down, not quite voluntarily, on the sofa.
He licked his lips.
He said, “Who are you?”
HELP US faded out. The screen was blank a few seconds; then new letters emerged:
WE ARE ALMOST COMPLETE
Communication, Tom thought. His heart was still battering against his ribs. He remembered a toy he’d once owned—a Magic 8-Ball; you asked it a question and when you turned it over a message appeared in a little window: yes or no or some cryptic proverb. The letters on his TV screen appeared the same way, welling up from shadowy depths. The memory was peculiar but comforting.