Almost too lovely to leave. Almost.

He wasn’t really afraid of the machine bugs anymore, and they weren’t afraid of him. Familiarity had set in on both sides. He spotted one now—one of the tiny ones, no bigger than a thumbnail—moving along the crevice where the tile met the wall. He bent down and watched idly as it worked. It looked like a centipede someone had assembled out of agate, emerald, and ruby—a Christmas ornament in miniature. It discovered a fragment of toast, angled toward it, touched it with a threadlike antenna. The crumb vanished. Vaporized or somehow ingested—Tom didn’t know which.

Carefully, he picked up the machine bug and cradled it in the palm of his hand.

It ceased all motion at his touch. Inert, it was prickly and warm against his skin. It looked, Tom thought, like a curio from a roadside gem shop somewhere in Arizona—an earring or a cuff link.

He put it back on the kitchen counter. After a moment it righted itself and scuttled away, taking up its task where he’d interrupted it.

A few nights ago the machine bugs had crawled inside his little Sony TV set, modifying and rebuilding it. He moved into the living room and switched the set on now, sipping coffee, but there was only a glimpse of the “Today” show— thirty seconds of news about a near miss over O’Hare International—and then the picture blanked. The screen turned an eerie phosphorescent blue; white letters faded in.

HELP US TOM WINTER, the TV set said.

He switched it off and left the room.

The TV had almost caught Barbara’s attention yesterday. And his “cat”—one of the bigger bug machines.

In a way, he was grateful to her for seeing these things. The idea still lingered—and was sometimes overwhelming— that he had stepped across the line into outright lunacy; or at least into a lunacy confined to the property line of this house, a focal lunacy. But Barbara had glimpsed these phenomena and he’d 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 between the rubble on the floor and the wall Tom had torn up last night. They moved around the ragged opening in a slow circle, maybe as many as a hundred of them, somehow knitting it up—restoring the wall to its original condition.

They were the insect machines he had seen moving from the foundation to the forest across the moonlit back yard. Tom recognized them and was, strangely, unsurprised by their presence here. Of course they were here. They simply weren’t hiding anymore.

The work they were performing on the wall wasn’t a patch; it was a full-scale reconstruction, clean and seamless. He understood intuitively that if he scratched away the paint he’d find the original brand names stamped in blue ink on the gypsum panels, the drywall nails restored in every atom to their original place in the two-by-fours, the studs themselves patched where he’d gouged them with the butt of his prybar —wood fiber and knot and dry sap all restored.

He took a step closer. The machine bugs paused. He sensed their attention briefly focused on him.

Silent moving clockwork jewels.

“You were here all along,” Tom whispered. “You did the goddamn dishes.”

Then they resumed their patient work. The hole grew smaller as he watched.

He said—his voice trembling only a little—“I’ll open it up again. You know that?”

They ignored him.

But he didn’t open it up—not until a week had passed.

He felt poised between two worlds, unsure of himself and unsure of his options. The immensity of what he had discovered was staggering. But it was composed of relatively small, incremental events—the insects cleaning his kitchen, his dreams, the tunnel behind the wall. He tried to imagine scenarios in which he explained all this to the proper authorities —whoever they were. (The realty board? The local police? The CIA, NASA, the National Geographic Society?) Fundamentally, none of this was even remotely possible. Stories like his made the back pages of the Enquirer at best.