Charles Wilson - A Bridge of Years

It was hurt. Well, of course it was hurt—it should have been dead! She had been able to see through its skin, into its insides; through its skull into its brains. What could have done that to a human being, and what human being could have survived?

Go home, Catherine instructed herself. Back to Gram Peggy’s house. Whatever she did—call the police, call an ambulance—she could do from there.

At home, she could think.

At home, she could lock the doors.

She locked the doors and scoured the kitchen shelves for something calming. What she turned up was a cut-glass decanter of peach brandy, two thirds full—“for sleepless nights,” Gram Peggy used to say. Catherine swallowed an ounce or so straight out of the bottle. She felt the liquid inside her like a small furnace, fiery and warming.

In the downstairs bathroom she sponged the blood off her arms and sprayed the lacework cuts with Bactine. Her shirt was torn; she changed it. She washed her face and hands.

Then she wandered through the downstairs checking the doors again, stopped when she passed the telephone. Probably she ought to call someone, Catherine thought.

The Belltower Police Department? But what could she say?

She thought about it a few minutes, paralyzed with indecision, until a new idea occurred to her. An impulse, but sensible. She retrieved Doug Archer’s business card from a bureau drawer and dialed the number written there.

His answering service said he’d call back in about an hour. Catherine was disconcerted by this unexpected delay. She sat at the kitchen table with the peach brandy in front of her, trying to make sense of her experience in the woodshed.

Maybe she’d misinterpreted something. That was possible, wasn’t it? People see odd things, especially in a crisis. Maybe somebody had been badly hurt. Maybe she shouldn’t have run away.

But Catherine had an artist’s eye and she recalled the scene as clearly as if she had sketched it on canvas: dark blur of mold on ancient newsprint, bars of sunlight through green mossy walls, and the centerpiece, all pinks and blues and strange crimsons and yellows, a half-made thing, which pronounced the words Help me while its larynx bobbed in its glassy throat.

Sweet Jesus in a sidecar, Catherine thought. Oh, this is way out of bounds. This is crazy.

She’d finished half the contents of the brandy decanter by the time Doug Archer knocked. Catherine opened the door for him, a little light-headed but still deeply frightened. He said, “I was out in this neighborhood so I thought I’d just drop by instead of calling … Hey, are you all right?”

Then, without meaning to, she was leaning against him. He steadied her and guided her to the couch.

“I found something,” she managed. “Something terrible. Something strange.”

“Found something,” Archer repeated.

“In the woods—downhill south of here.”

“Tell me about it,” Archer said.

Catherine stammered out the story, suddenly embarrassed by what seemed like her own hysteria. How could he possibly understand? Archer sat attentively in Gram Peggy’s easy chair, but he was fundamentally a stranger. Maybe it had been dumb to call him. When he asked her to get in touch if she noticed anything strange, was this what he meant? Maybe it was a conspiracy. Belltower, Washington, occupied by hostile aliens. Maybe, under his neat Levi’s and blue Belltower Realty jacket, Archer was as transparent and strange as the thing in the woodshed.

But when she finished the story she found herself soothed by the telling of it.

Archer said he believed her, but maybe that was politeness. He said, “I want you to take me there.”

The idea revived her fear. “Now?”

“Soon. Today. And before dark.” He hesitated. “You might be mistaken about what you saw. Maybe somebody really does need help.”

“I thought about that. Maybe somebody does. But I know what I saw, Mr. Archer.”

“Doug,” he said absently. “I still think we have to go back. If there’s even a chance somebody’s hurt out there. I don’t think we have any choice.”

Catherine thought about it. “No,” she said unhappily. “I don’t guess we do.”

But it was late afternoon now and the forest was, if anything, spookier. Fortified by the brandy and a great deal of soothing talk, Catherine led Archer downhill past the creek, past the blackberry thickets and the tall Douglas firs, to the edge of the meadow where the woodshed stood.

The woodshed hadn’t changed, except in her imagination. It was mossy, ancient, small and unexceptional. She looked at it and envisioned monsters.

They stood a moment in brittle silence.

“When we met,” Catherine said, “you asked me to watch out for anything strange.” She looked at him. “Did you expect this? Do you have any idea what’s going on here?”

“I didn’t expect anything like this, no.”

He told her a story about a house he’d sold to a man named Tom Winter, its strange history, its perpetual tidiness, Tom Winter’s disappearance.

She said, “Is that near here?”

“A few hundred yards toward the road.”

“Is there some connection?”

Archer shrugged. “It’s getting late, Catherine. We’d better do this while we can.”

They approached the crude door of the woodshed.

Archer reached for the latch handle, but Catherine turned him away. “No. Let me.” You found him, Gram Peggy would have said. He’s your obligation, Catherine.

Already the thing inside was “he,” not “it.” She had shut out the image and concentrated on the voice.

Help me.

Catherine took a deep breath and opened the door.

The sun had edged down toward the treetops; the woodshed was darker than it had been this morning. A green, buzzing, loamy darkness. Catherine wrinkled her nose and waited for her eyesight to adjust. Doug Archer hovered at her shoulder; his presence was at least a little bit reassuring.

For a time she couldn’t hear anything but the quick beat of her heart; couldn’t see anything but dimness and clutter.

Then Archer forced the door to the extremity of its hinges and a new beam of light slanted in.

The monster lay on the pressed-dirt floor, precisely where she had left it this morning.

Catherine blinked. The monster blinked. Behind her, she heard Archer draw a sudden, shocked breath. “Holy Mother of God,” he said.

The monster turned its pale, moist eyes on Archer a moment. Then it looked at Catherine again.

“You came back,” it said. (He said.)

This was the terrible part, she thought dizzily, the truly unendurable, this voice from that throat. He sounded like someone you might meet at a bus stop. He sounded like a friendly grocer.

She forced her eyes to focus somewhere above him, on the pile of moldy newspapers. “You said you needed help.”

“Yes.”

“I brought help.”

It was all she could think of to say.

Archer pushed past her and knelt over the man—if it was a man. Be careful! she thought.

Catherine heard the tremor in his voice: “What happened to you?”

Now Catherine’s gaze drifted back to the man’s head, the caul of translucent tissue where the skull should have been, and the brain beneath it—she presumed this whitish, vague mass must be his brain. The creature spoke. “It would take too long to explain.”

Archer said, “What do you want us to do?”

“If you can, I want you to take me back to the house.”

Archer was silent a moment. Catherine noticed he didn’t say What house? The Tom Winter house, she thought. These things were connected after all. Mysterious events and living dead men.