“Tom, I don’t know if that’s a real good idea.” He opened the door. “I don’t have a better one.”

He rang the buzzer.

Nobody answered. Then he climbed the stairs—these old, dirty boards complaining under his feet. It must be four a.m., Tom calculated. The light from the incandescent bulb over the landing was stale and fierce.

He opened the door and knew at once the apartment was empty.

He switched on the lights. Joyce wasn’t home and he guessed—prayed—she hadn’t been. Nothing had been disturbed since this morning. Two coffee cups stood on the kitchen table, brown puddles inside. He walked into the bedroom. The bed was unmade. The rain beat against the window, a lonesome sound.

Yesterday’s paper lay open on the arm of the sofa, and Tom regarded it with a stab of longing: if he could step back even a day he could turn this around, keep Joyce safe, maybe even keep Lawrence Millstein alive—he would have a handle on what was happening.

But the thought was ludicrous. Hadn’t he proved that already? My God, here he was armed with nearly thirty years of foresight and he couldn’t even help himself. It had all been a dream. A dream about something called “the past,” a fiction; it didn’t exist. Nothing was predictable, nothing played the same way twice, every certainty dissolved at the touch.

History was a place where dramas were played out on a ghost stage, the way Joyce’s old boyfriend had imagined D-day. But that’s not true, Tom thought. This was history: an address, a locality, a place where people lived. History was this room. Not emblematic, merely specific; merely this vacant space, which he had come to love.

He thought about Barbara, who had never much cared about the past but had longed for the future … the uncreated future in which there were no certainties, only possibilities.

Everywhere the same, Tom thought. 1962 or 1862 or 2062. Every acre of the world littered with bones and hope. He was indescribably tired.

He stepped into the hallway and sealed the apartment, which had contained a fair portion of his happiness, but which was empty now. He would be better off waiting with Doug in the car.

He was leaving the building when a taxi pulled up at the curb.

He watched Joyce pay the driver and step out into the rain.

Her clothes were instantly wet and her hair matted against her forehead. Her eyes were obscure behind rain-fogged lenses.

It was raining when they met, Tom recalled, a couple of months ago in the park. She had looked different then. Less tired. Less frightened.

She regarded him warily, then crossed the pavement.

He touched her wet shoulders.

She hesitated, then came into his arms.

“He was dead, Tom,” she said. “He was just lying there dead.”

“I know.”

“Oh, God. I need to sleep. I need to sleep a long, long time.”

She moved toward the lobby; he restrained her with his hands. “Joyce, you can’t. It’s not safe in there.”

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?”