A Bridge of Years by Robert Charles Wilson

been forced to
usher her out before she could see more; they were real events,
however inexplicable.
    Barbara
wouldn't have understood. No, that was the wrong word—Tom couldn't
say he understood these events, either; enormous mysteries remained.
But he accepted them.
    His
acceptance of the evidently impossible was almost complete. Had been
sealed, probably, since the night he broke through the basement wall.
    He
thought about that night and the days and nights after: bright, lucid
memories, polished with use.
    □ □
    □ □
    He
pried away big, dusty slabs of gypsum board until the hole was big
enough to step through.
    The
space behind it was dark. He probed with the beam of his flashlight,
but the batteries must have been low—he couldn't find a far wall.
There didn't seem to be one.
    What
it looked like . . .
    Well,
what it looked like was that he had broken into a tunnel
approximately as wide as this basement room, running an indefinite
distance away under the side yard into the slope of the Post Road
hill.
    He
took another step forward. The walls of the tunnel were a slick,
featureless gray; as was the ceiling; as was the floor. It wasn't a
clammy subterranean chamber. It was dry, clean, and dustless—except
for the mess he'd made with his crowbar.
    And,
increasingly, it was light. The
tunnel began to brighten as he stood in it. The fight was sourceless,
though it seemed to radiate generally from above. Tom glanced down,
switched off his flashlight, discovered he was casting a diffuse
shadow around his feet.
    The
fight expanded down the corridor, which began at the back of his
basement and swept in a gentle leftward curve— paralleling the Post
Road for some yards and then veering westward somewhere in the area
of the highway, if he was any judge of distance. Maybe a quarter mile
away.
    Tom
stood a long time regarding this vista.
    His
first reaction was a giddy, nervous elation. By God, he'd been right!
There was something
down here. Something mysterious, strange, large scale, possibly
magical. Something he had never read about in a newspaper, never
witnessed on TV, never heard about from a friend, never experienced
or expected to experience. Something from the deep well of myth,
fairy tale, and wild surmise.
    Maybe
ogres lived here. Maybe angels.
    His
second reaction, nearly as immediate, was a deep shiver of fear.
Whoever had made this place—the machine bugs or whatever force
operated them—must be immensely powerful. A powerful force that
preferred to remain hidden. A powerful force he might have disturbed
with his prybar and his hammer.
    He
backed out of the corridor through the hole in the basement
wall—slowly and silently, though discretion at this stage was
fairly ridiculous. If he hadn't alarmed any Mysterious Beings by
breaking into their lair with a tire iron, what was the point of
holding his breath now? But
he couldn't fight the instinctive urge to creep quietly away.
    He
stepped back into the somewhat less mysterious environment of
the basement of his house.
    The
house he owned—but it wasn't his. The lesson? It wasn't his when he
bought it; it wasn't his now; and it wouldn't be his when he left.
    He
wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his shirt. The cloth came away
chalky and wet.
    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