And—perhaps even more fundamentally—he wasn’t ready to share these discoveries. They were his; they belonged to him. He didn’t have Barbara, he didn’t have a meaningful job, he had abandoned even the rough comfort of alcohol. But he had this secret … this dangerous, compulsive, utterly strange, and sometimes very frightening secret.

This still unfolding, incomplete secret.

He stayed out of the basement for a few days and contemplated his next step.

His dream about the machine bugs hadn’t been a dream, or not entirely. Breaching the wall, he had stepped inside their magic circle. They stopped hiding from him.

For two nights he watched them with rapt attention. The smallest of them were the most numerous. They moved singly or in pairs, usually along the wallboards, sometimes venturing across the carpet or into the kitchen cabinets, moving in straight lines or elegant, precise curves. They were tiny, colorful, and remorseless in their clean-up duty; they stood absolutely still when he touched them.

Friday night, after he came home from the car lot, he discovered a line of them disappearing into the back panel of his TV set. With his ear next to the screen he could hear them working inside: a faint metallic clatter and hiss.

He left them alone.

Larger and less numerous was a variation Tom thought of as “machine mice.” These were rodent sized and roughly rodent shaped: bodies scarab blue and shiny metallic, heads the color of dull ink. They moved with startling speed, though they seemed to lack legs or feet. Tom supposed they hovered an eighth of an inch or so over the floor, but that was only a guess; they scooted away when he tried to touch or hold them. He saw them sometimes herding the smaller variety across the floor; or alone, pursuing duties more mysterious.

Saturday—another moonlit night—he dosed himself with hot black coffee and sat up watching a late movie. He switched off the lights at one a.m. and stepped cautiously into the damp grass of the back yard, with a heavy-duty flashlight in his hand and a pair of wading boots to protect his ankles.

The machine bugs were there in great numbers—as they had been in his not-a-dream—fluorescing in the moonlight, a tide of them flowing from the foundation holes into the deep woods. In pursuit of what?

Tom debated following them, but decided not to: not now. Not in the dark.

They wanted his help. They had asked for it.

Disturbing, that he knew this. It was a form of communication, one he didn’t understand or control, HELP US TOM WINTER, they had said, and they were saying it now. But it wasn’t a message he heard or interpreted, simply a silent understanding that this was what they wanted. They didn’t mean to hurt him. Simply wanted his help. What help, where? But the only answer was a sort of beckoning, as deeply understood as their other message: FOLLOW US INTO THE WOODS.

He backed away in the darkness, alarmed. He recalled with sudden vividness the experience of reading Christina Rossetti’s “The Goblin Market,” years ago, in one of his mother’s books, a leather-bound volume of Victorian poetry. Reading it and shivering in his summer bedroom, terrified by the spidery silhouette of the arbutus outside his window and by the possibilities of nighttime invitations too eagerly accepted. No thank you, he thought, I believe I’ll stay out of the forest for now.

The machine bugs conveyed no response—except perhaps the dim mental equivalent of a shrug—and carried on their strange commerce between the house and the depths of the woods.

The next morning, when he turned on the TV set, it emitted a crackle of static, flared suddenly brighter, and displayed a message:

HELP US TOM WINTER

Tom had just stepped out of the shower; he was wearing a bathrobe and carrying a cup of coffee. He failed to notice when the coffee splashed over his hand and onto the carpet, though the skin around the web of his thumb was red for the rest of the day.

The letters blinked and steadied.

“Jesus Christ!” he said.

The TV responded,

HELP US

His first instinct was to get the holy hell out of the house and bolt the door behind him. He forced himself to resist it.

He knew the machine bugs had been inside his set; this, he supposed, was why.

He took a large step backward and sat down, not quite voluntarily, on the sofa.

He licked his lips.

He said, “Who are you?”

HELP US faded out. The screen was blank a few seconds; then new letters emerged:

WE ARE ALMOST COMPLETE

Communication, Tom thought. His heart was still battering against his ribs. He remembered a toy he’d once owned—a Magic 8-Ball; you asked it a question and when you turned it over a message appeared in a little window: yes or no or some cryptic proverb. The letters on his TV screen appeared the same way, welling up from shadowy depths. The memory was peculiar but comforting.

He set aside his coffee cup and thought a moment.

“What do you want from me?”

Pause.

PROTEINS

COMPLEX CARBOHYDRATES

Food, he thought. “What for?”

TO FINISH BUILDING US

“What do you mean—you’re not finished?”

TO FINISH US

Apparently, it was the only answer they meant to give. He considered his next question. “Tell me where you come from.” The pause was longer this time.

TOM WINTER YOU DON’T NEED TO KNOW

“I’m curious. I want to know.”

TOM WINTER YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW

Well, maybe not.

He sat back, managed a sip of coffee, and tried to assemble in his mind all the questions that had been vexing him since he moved in.

“What happened to the man who used to live here?”

BROKEN

It was an odd word, Tom thought. “What do you mean, broken?”

NEEDS TO BE REPAIRED

“Is he here? Where is he?”

FOLLOW US

Into the woods, they meant. “No. I don’t want to do that yet. Are you—repairing him?”

NOT FINISHED

“I found the tunnel behind the wall,” Tom said. “Tell me what it is. Tell me where it goes.”

The pause now was very long indeed—he began to think they’d given up. Then more letters appeared:

TOM WINTER A MACHINE

“The tunnel is a machine? I don’t understand.”

THE TUNNEL IS A MACHINE

“Where does it go? Does it go anywhere?”

IT GOES WHERE IT IS

“No, I mean—where does it lead?”

WHERE IT WAS AIMED

This was wonderfully uninformative. They couldn’t hide from him; they wanted his help; but they weren’t willing—or weren’t able—to answer his most basic questions.

Not a good deal, he thought. No bargain.

He said, “I’ll think it over.”

HELP US TOM WINTER

Which reminded him. One more question. He said, “When you talked to me before—when we communicated— how did you do that? Before this, I mean.”

HELP US faded out and the new message appeared moments later—stark, vivid, matter-of-fact.

WE WERE INSIDE YOU

He sat sharply upright, horrified.

“What do you mean—those little bug machines, like inside the TV? They were inside me?”

He pictured them performing secret surgery in the night. Cutting him open—crawling around. Changing him.

SMALLER

“There are smaller ones?”

TOO SMALL TO PERCEIVE

Microscopic, Tom interpreted. Still—! “They went inside me? Doing what?”

TO TALK

“Inside my head?”

TO COMMUNICATE OUR NEEDS

Pause.

NOT VERY SUCCESSFUL

He was cold, sweating—he needed to understand this. “Are they inside me now?”

NO