He balled up his empty lunch bag and plastic wrap and tucked them into his knapsack.
He worked steadily and without much conscious thought for another three hours, by which time there was enough room for him to wedge his body over the pile of rubble.
It was late afternoon back at the house. But the word was meaningless here.
Tom straddled the rubble and probed the inner darkness with his flashlight. In the dim space beyond:
A room. A small, cold, damp, unpleasant stone room with a door at one end.
Ploughing through this barricade had not required much courage. But at the thought of opening that ugly wooden door just beyond it—that, Tom thought, was an altogether different kettle of fish.
The tunnel itself was antiseptic, very Star Wars; this cinderblock room was much more Dungeons and Dragons.
You could pile all these stones back up, Tom told himself. Pile them up and maybe add a little concrete to buttress everything. Seal the wall at your end. Sell the fucking house.
Never look back.
But he would look back. He’d look back for the rest of his life and wonder about that door. He would look back, he would wonder, and the wonder would be a maddening and unscratchable itch.
Still, he thought, this was serious business. Whatever had destroyed and barricaded this wall could surely destroy him.
THAT POSSIBILITY EXISTS, the TV had said.
Life or death.
But what on God’s green earth did he have to live for, at this moment?
Back at the house—back in the real world—he was a lonesome, ordinary man leading a disfigured and purposeless life. He had lived for his work and for Barbara. But his work was finished and Barbara was living in Seattle with an anarchist named Rafe.
If he opened that door and a dragon swallowed him up— well, it would be an interesting death. The world would not much notice, not much mourn. “What the hell,” Tom said, and scrambled forward.
Beyond the door, stone steps led upward.
Tom followed them. His sneakers squealed against damp concrete.
The flashlight revealed a landing barely wide enough to stand on, and a second door.
This door was padlocked—from the other side.
He remembered his crowbar, reached for it, then cursed: he had left it at the excavation.
He climbed down the stairs, through the first door, out across the rubble; he retrieved the iron bar and his knapsack and turned back. By the time he reached the door at the top of the stairs he was winded, his breath gusting out in pale clouds in the cold wet air.
He wasn’t frightened now, nor even cautious. He simply wanted this job done. He inserted the crowbar between the door and its stone jamb and leaned on it until he heard the gunshot crack of a broken hasp. The door swung inward—
On one more dark stone room.
“Christ!” Tom exclaimed. Maybe it went on forever, room after ugly little chamber. Maybe he was in hell.
But this room wasn’t entirely empty. He swept the flashlight before him and spotted two canisters on the floor, next to a flight of wooden stairs leading (again) upward.
Some clue here, he thought.
The canisters were about a hand high; and one of them had a wire handle attached to it at the rim.
He stood above them and shone the flashlight down.
The label on the can on the left said VARSOL.
The label on the can on the right said EVERTINT PAINT. In smaller print, Eggshell Blue.
Tom turned and was startled by a string dangling in front of his face. He tugged it, and above his head a naked forty-watt bulb flared on.
Ahead of him—up the stairs—he heard a whisper of traffic and rain.
This was so disorienting—so disenchanting-—that he stood motionless for a long while in the glare of the overhead light. If anyone had seen him they might have said he was stunned. He looked like a man who had taken a powerful blow to the skull—still standing, but barely.
Let’s see, he thought, I headed south from the basement and then circled back, walked half an hour or so … maybe as far as the mall or the shops down by the highway. He climbed the stairs expecting nothing, passed another door into a seedy lobby he didn’t recognize; then a thought struck him:
It wasn’t raining when I left the house.
Well, that was a good long time ago now, wasn’t it? Plenty of time for some weather to roll in from the sea.
But he recalled the weekend weather forecast: sunshine all the way to Tuesday.
Wouldn’t be the first time they’d made a bad call; coastal weather could be unpredictable.
Still, it was coming down pretty hard out there.
Tom had emerged into what seemed to be the lobby of an apartment building: peeling linoleum, a row of buzzers, an inner and outer door—the outer door cracked in a starry pattern. He fixed the lobby in his mind as a landmark, then stepped outside.
Into the rain.
Into another world.
Tom’s first groping thought was that he had walked into a movie set—this was the most coherent explanation his fumbling mind could produce. Professional set dressing: a period piece.
All the cars in the street were antiques, though some appeared virtually new. Must have cost a fortune, he thought dazedly, assembling all this collectible transportation and parking it in a part of town that wasn’t familiar (that isn’t Belltower, one agitated fraction of self insisted), where all the buildings were period buildings and where the people were period people, or actors, or extras, dozens of them, scurrying through the rain. And no cameras. And no lights.
He cowered back into the rain shadow of this grubby building.
It was very difficult to think. A part of him was giddy, elated. He had arrived at this unimaginable destination by unimaginable means, he had fucking done it. Magic! Elation meanwhile doing battle with its partner, stark animal fear of the unknown. One step in the wrong direction and he would be lost, as lost as it was possible to be. All he really knew was that he had arrived somewhere where the shiniest vehicle on the street was what appeared to be a ’61 Buick—or something like it—and all the men braving the rain this cold evening were wearing for Christ’s sake hats, not rain hats but dress hats—trilbies or fedoras or whatever they were called —the kind of hats you saw in old Cary Grant comedies. Planet of the Hats!
It was very, very strange but also very, very real. A cold wind gusted rain into his face. Real rain. A woman bent under her umbrella shot him a sidelong glance as she passed, and Tom understood that she was at home here, he was the intruder—a strange, distraught, disheveled man wearing a packsack. He glanced down at himself. His jeans were gray with dust, streaked where the rain had penetrated the dirt. His hands were almost completely black.
The thought persisted: I’m the stranger here.
And, on some even deeper level, he knew exactly what this place was. He had traveled a mile or so down a featureless tunnel (MACHINE, the television had called it)—and maybe thirty-odd years into the past.
Not the past of Belltower, Washington. It was a dark night, but he knew at once this was a bigger and busier city than Belltower had ever been. But an American city. The cars were American. The people looked American. An American city … in or around the year of his birth.
He didn’t accept this explanation, not entirely. Logic objected. Sanity was outraged. But logic and sanity had been forced into the back seat quite a while ago, hadn’t they? He wouldn’t have been too surprised if the tunnel had opened onto the surface of Mars. Was a thirty-year-old rainstorm really such a surprise?