Nineteen fifty-eight, ’fifty-nine, ’sixty.
Nixon in Moscow, sit-ins in Greensboro, Kennedy in the White House by a fraction of the vote.
Billy grew older. So did the armor—but he tried not to think about that.
Tried not to think about a lot of things, especially tonight, as he was checking the exits: early summer of Anno Domini 1962, a hot night that reminded him of Ohio.
Billy entered the groaning front door of the old building near Tompkins Square where the time traveler had once lived and where nobody lived now except a few aging relics.
He had developed a perverse fondness for these people, human detritus too fragile or tenacious to abandon a building he had allowed to crumble around them. Two of them had been there long before Billy arrived—an arthritic old man named Shank on the fourth floor and a diabetic pensioner on the second. Mrs. Korzybski, the pensioner, sometimes forgot her medication and would stumble out to the street in insulin-shock delirium. This had happened once when he was checking the exits, and Billy had helped the woman inside, using his passkey to open the apartment door she had somehow locked behind her. He didn’t like the police or an ambulance coming to the building, so he rummaged in the kitchen drawers among her cat-food cans and cutlery and fading photographs until he found her diabetic kit. He used the syringe to inject a measured dose of insulin solution into the crook of her flabby arm. When she came to, she thanked him. “You’re nice,” she said. “You’re nicer than you look. How come you know how to use that needle?”
“I was in the army,” Billy said.
“Korea?”
“That’s right. Korea.”
He had seen Korea on television.
She said she was glad now that she paid her rent on time, and how come nobody had moved in for such a long while? “Since that Mr. Allen was the manager. It gets kind of lonely these days.”
“Nobody wants to rent, I guess.”
“That’s funny. That’s not what I hear. Maybe if you painted?”
“One day,” Billy explained solemnly, “all this will be under water.”
Nowadays, when he came, he came at night, when Mrs. Korzybski was asleep. Her apartment was dark tonight. All the apartments were dark except for 403: Amos Shank, who lived on his retirement fund from the H. J. Heinz Company in Pittsburgh. Mr. Shank had come to New York to find a publisher for his epic poem Ulysses at the Elbe. The publishing industry had disappointed him, but Mr. Shank still liked to talk about the work—three massive volumes of vellum paper bound with rubber bands, still not entirely finished.
Mr. Shank left the light on in case inspiration struck in the depths of the night … but Mr. Shank was probably asleep by now too. Everyone in Billy’s building was lonely and asleep. Everyone but Billy.
He whistled a formless tune between his teeth and stepped into the entranceway. The paint on the walls had faded to gray a long time ago. The mirrored wall by the stairs was fogged and chipped and some of the floor tiles had turned up at the corners, like leaves.
Billy went directly to the basement.
The stairway leading down smelled hot and stale. These old wooden steps had grown leathery in the humid air. Silent in the dim light, Billy passed the bizarre and inefficient oil furnace with its many arms, the groaning water heater; through an unmarked access door and deeper, past the storage cellar with its lime-green calcinated walls and its crusted cans of paint, to the door he had sealed with a sturdy Yale padlock. The light was dim—the light here was always dim. Billy took a chrome Zippo lighter out of his hip pocket.
He felt strange down here so close to the tunnel. He had been deeply frightened when he first understood how vast this warren of temporal fractures really was—what it implied and what that might mean to him. He couldn’t think about the tunnel without considering the creatures who had made it … beings, Billy understood, so nearly omnipotent that they might as well be called gods. And he remembered what he’d seen in this tunnel the day he arrived here, something even stranger than the godlike time travelers, a creature as bright and hot as a living flame.
He flicked the igniter on the Zippo. Time for a new flint, Billy told himself.
He brought the light down closer to the padlock—then drew a sharp breath and stepped back.
Dear God! After all these years—! The lock had been broken open.
Billy’s first thought was of Krakow gazing down at him through another door, the night he was recruited. He had the same feeling now: discovered in hiding.
He was defenseless, weaponless, and the walls were much too close.
He touched his throat, instinctively reaching for the touch-plate that would trigger his armor—but the armor was at home.
He backed away from the door.
Someone had been here! Someone had come for him!
He considered going upstairs, dragging Mrs. Korzybski out of her sleep, Amos Shank from his senile slumber, beating them until they told him who had come and who had gone. But they might not know. Probably didn’t. Maybe no one had seen.
I need help, Billy told himself. The sense of imminent danger had closed around him like a noose. (Not alone anymore!) He pocketed his lighter, climbed the stairs, and left the building.
He stood alone in the sweaty darkness of the street, his eyes patrolling the sawtooth shadows between the tenement stoops.
He hurried away, avoiding streetlights. The armor, Billy thought. The armor would know what to do.
Ten
Catherine Simmons drove into Belltower after the cremation of her grandmother, Peggy Simmons, who had lived out along the Post Road for many years and who had died a week ago in her sleep.
Summer made Belltower a pretty little town, at least when the wind wasn’t blowing from the mill. Catherine knew the town from her many visits; she didn’t have any trouble finding the Carstairs Funeral Home on a side street off Brierley, between an antique shop and a marine electronics store. She parked and sat in her Honda a few minutes—she was early for her appointment.
Gram Peggy’s fatal stroke had been unexpected and the news of her death still seemed fresh and unreasonable. Of all Catherine’s family, Gram Peggy had seemed most like a fixture—the solidest and most fun of the sorry lot. But Gram Peggy was dead and Catherine supposed she would have to adjust to that fact.
She sighed and climbed out of the car. The afternoon was sunny and the air carried a whiff of ocean. Pretty little dumb little smelly little town, Catherine thought.
There was no ceremony planned and no other Simmonses at the funeral home. Catherine’s father—Gram Peggy’s only son—had died in 1983, of liver cancer, and the rest of the family was hopelessly scattered. Only Catherine had ever come to visit these last several years. Apparently Gram Peggy had appreciated those visits. Her lawyer, Dick Parsons, had phoned to say that the entire estate, including the house, had been left to Catherine: another stunning piece of news, still somewhat indigestible.
The funeral director at Carstairs turned out not to be the unctuous vulture Catherine was expecting; he was a big-shouldered man who looked a little like a football coach. He handed Catherine the bronze urn containing Gram Peggy’s ashes in a gesture that was almost apologetic. “This is the way your grandmother wanted it, Miss Simmons. No ceremony, nothing solemn. She arranged all this in advance.”
“Gram Peggy was very practical,” Catherine said.
“That she was.” He managed a sympathetic smile. “Everything’s been paid for through her lawyer. I hope we’ve been of some small help?”
“You did fine,” Catherine said. “Thank you.”