David repeated a question he had asked Nanette, the one that increasingly seemed to be the key to this mystery. “What are you?”
Approaching slowly, the long-dead contractor spoke of himself in the third person. “Pat Corley was a reader of science fiction.”
“I saw the books in your study. But what—”
Interrupting, Corley said, “He wrote extensively about sci-fi, hundreds of reviews and essays that survived a century in archives on the internet. Will anything you’ve written survive a century?”
“How would I know? How would you? Don’t come any closer.”
The big man halted. “Your writing days are over. There is no literary immortality for David Thorne. We will be your life now, if you’re to have a life.”
“What are you?” David repeated.
Corley said of himself, “Pat Corley was chosen because his reading and writing prepared him to accept us and work with us in spite of our . . . appearance. Which he did. He understood our mission. He helped us until he died. And even after he died.”
“What work?” David demanded.
“We’ve come back in time to change the future,” Corley said, as though their mission was as simple as that of young Mormons going door-to-door to share the message of the Latter-day Saints.
Following Corley’s revelation, something happened akin to what Richard Mathers had lacked the ability to describe adequately. The garage pleated, folded into a brief darkness, then opened like a blooming rose, having reformed into the mold-riddled leaf-littered bone-strewn space from which cabinets had been stripped, where tattered remnants of immense spiderwebs festooned the rafters.
Because of all he’d experienced in the past week, David had become increasingly credulous in matters of the fantastic, possessed of a new willingness to trust that the world was deeply strange.
A new and dire thought came upon him: If this version of the garage with its scattering of large, deformed skeletons of birds wasn’t of his time, if it existed in some grim future, and if it failed to return to normal, he might be condemned to haunt this version of the residence, a phantom without an opera.
Perhaps sensing the nature of David’s fear, Corley said, “The house is a bridge between then and now, two points a hundred years apart. The bridge is always under terrible stress, so we endure moments of temporal dislocation. They pass. The bridge will not collapse.”
Equally in the grip of dread and amazement, David Thorne began to awaken to a previously unthought-of truth, the ramifications of which were devastating and numberless.
The deep throbbing that rose from the cellar and multifrequency electronic wail were perhaps the voice of time as it protested that its fabric had been tortured, the present and the future stitched together by some technological needle.
“What’s in the tote bag?” Corley demanded.
He took a step forward, bird bones crunching under his boots.
“Money,” David lied. “Half a million.” He dared offer it to Corley. “For Maddison’s freedom. I’ll pay more if she’s released.”
Corley’s anger soured to scorn. “In every age, idiots like you think money can solve any problem. But money can’t buy a future without horror. It can’t buy what you want. Emily Carlino is dead.”
“You lie,” David declared, desperately hoping that was true. “Last night, the dream you somehow inserted while I slept, the dream of Emily and Jessup—maybe it was mostly true, what happened to her, but not the end. Jessup didn’t take her away in his van. I found his secret catacomb tonight. Emily wasn’t among those fourteen mummified bodies. Jessup stabbed her, left her for dead. But maybe she made her way here through the storm. Maybe somehow she’s still alive.”
Corley—or whoever he might be—was not a relaxed liar. His hands were fisted at his sides. “She rang the bell that night. We let her in, and she died in the front hall. What little is left of her is the one you know as Maddison.”
As the contractor turned away from David and went into the kitchen, the garage fractured, folded, reshaped, became the neat well-lighted space in which the Mercedes and Ford van were parked.
David returned to the house, but Corley was nowhere to be seen.
He crossed the kitchen, followed the downstairs hallway past rooms where the windows flared as if a revelation were about to melt the world and reveal the reality behind it. The roar of thunder was as loud as an entire mountainside calving off a granite range.
Nanette stood at the front door, as if to bar his exit, though he had no intention of leaving. Her face was white and taut with fury, her stare as sharp as crucifying nails. “I’d kill you now if only I had the authority, if I could be sure killing you wouldn’t have consequences that make the future even darker than it is.”