been much younger. This was the girl I had
thought of this very afternoon as I'd walked along the river, fleeing from
myself. What was wrong, I asked myself.
     And: 'Brad, what is wrong?' she asked.
     'I don't know,' I said. 'Is there something wrong?
     'Don't be defensive. You know there's something wrong. Something wrong
with us.'
     'I suppose you're right,' I told her. 'It's not the way it should be.
It's not the way I had thought it would be, if you came home again.'
     I wanted to reach out for her, to take her in my arms - but I knew,
even as I wanted it, that it was not the Nancy Sherwood who was sitting here
beside me, but that other girl of long ago I wanted in my arms.
     We sat in silence for a moment, then she said, 'Let's try again some
other time. Let's forget about all this. Some evening I'll dress up my
prettiest and we'll go out for dinner and some drinks.'
     I turned and put out my hand, but she had opened the door and was
halfway out of the car.
     'Good night, Brad,' she sad, and went running up the walk.
     I sat and listened to her running, up the walk and across the porch. I
heard the front door close and I kept on sitting there, with the echo of her
running still sounding in my brain.

        5

     I told myself that I was going home. I told myself that I would not go
near the office or the phone that was waiting on the desk until I'd had some
time to think. For even if I went and picked up the phone and one of the
voices answered, what would I have to tell them? The best that I could do
would be to say that I had seen Gerald Sherwood and had the money, but that
I'd have to know more about what the situation was before I took their job.
And that wasn't good enough, I told myself; that would be talking off the
cuff and it would gain me nothing.
     And then I remembered that early in the morning I'd be going fishing
with Alf Peterson and I told myself, entirely without logic, that in the
morning there'd be no time to go down to the office.
     I don't suppose it would have made any difference if I'd had that
fishing date or not. I don't suppose it would have made any difference, no
matter what I told myself. For even as I swore that I was going home, I
knew, without much question, that I'd wind up at the office.
     Main Street was quiet. Most of the stores were closed and only a few
cars were parked along the kerb. A bunch of farm boys, in for a round of
beers, were standing in front of the Happy Hollow tavern.
     I parked the car in front of the office and got out. Inside I didn't
even bother to turn on the light. Some light was shining through the window
from a street light at the intersection and the office wasn't dark.
     I strode across the office to the desk with my hand already reaching
out to pick up the phone - and there wasn't any phone.
     I stopped beside the desk and stared at the top of it, not believing. I
bent over and, with the flat of my hand, swept back and forth across the
desk, as if I imagined that the phone had somehow become invisible and while
I couldn't see it I could locate it by the sense of touch. But it wasn't
that, exactly. It was simply, I guess, that I could not believe my eyes.
     I straightened up from feeling along the desk top and stood rigid in
the room, while an icy-footed little creature prowled up and down my spine.
Finally I turned my head, slowly, carefully, looking at the corners of the
office, half expecting to find some dark shadow crouching there and waiting.
But there wasn't anything. Nothing had been changed. The place was exactly
as I had left it, except there wasn't any phone.
     Turning on the light, I searched the office. I looked in all the
corners, I looked beneath the desk, I ransacked the desk drawers and went
through the filing cabinet.
     There wasn't any phone.
     For the first time, I felt the touch of panic. Someone, I thought, had
found the phone. Someone had managed to break in, to unlock the door
somehow, and had stolen it. Although, when I thought of it, that didn't make
much sense. There was nothing about the phone that would have attracted
anyone's attention. Of course it had no dial and it was not connected, but
looking through the window, that would not have been apparent.
     More than likely, I told myself, whoever had put it on the desk had
come back and taken it. Perhaps it meant that the ones who had talked to me
had reconsidered and had decided I was not the man they wanted. They had
taken back the phone and, with it, the offer of the job.
     And if that were the case, there was only one thing I could do - forget
about the job and take back the fifteen hundred.
     Although that, I knew, would be rather hard to do. I needed that
fifteen hundred so bad I could taste it.
     Back in the car, I sat for a moment before starting the motor,
wondering what I should do next. And there didn't seem to be anything to do,
so I started the engine and drove slowly up the street.
     Tomorrow morning, I told myself, I'd pick up Alf Peterson and we'd have
our week of fishing. It would be good, I thought, to have old Alf to talk
with. We'd have a lot to talk about -his crazy job down in Mississippi and
my adventure with the phone.
     And maybe, when he left, I'd be going with him. It would be good, I
thought, to get away from Millville.
     I pulled the car into the driveway and left it standing there.
     Before I went to bed, I'd want to get the camping and the fishing gear
together and packed into the car against an early start, come morning. The
garage was small and it would be easier to do the packing with the car
standing in the driveway.
     I got out and stood beside the car. The house was a hunched shadow in
the moonlight and past one corner of it I could see the moonlit glitter of
an unbroken pane or two in the sagging greenhouse. I could just see the tip
of the elm tree, the seedling elm that stood at one corner of the
greenhouse. I remembered the day I had been about to pull the seedling out,
when it was no more that a sprout, and how my dad had stopped me, telling me
that a tree had as much right to live as anybody else. That's exactly what
he'd said as much as anybody else. He'd been a wonderful man, I thought; he
believed, deep inside his heart, that flowers and trees were people.
     And once again I smelled the faint perfume of the purple flowers that
grew in profusion all about the greenhouse, the same perfume I'd smelled at
the foot of the Sherwood porch. But this time there was no circle of
enchantment.
     I walked around the house and as I approached the kitchen door I saw
there was a light inside. More than likely, I thought, I had forgotten it,
although I could not remember that I had turned it on.
     The door was open, too, and I could remember shutting it and pushing on
it with my hand to make sure the latch had caught before I'd gone out to the
car.
     Perhaps, I thought, there was someone in there waiting for me, or
someone had been here and left and the place was looted, although there was,
God knows, little enough to loot. It could be kids, I thought sonic of these
mixed-up kids would do anything for kicks.
     I went through the door fast and then came to a sudden halt in the
middle of the kitchen. There was someone there, all right; there was someone
waiting.
     Stiffy Grant sat in a kitchen chair and he was doubled over, with his
arms wrapped about his middle, and rocking slowly, from side to side, as if
he were in pain.
     'Stiffy!' I shouted, and Stiffy moaned at me.
     Drunk again, I thought. Stiffer than a goat and sick, although how in
the world he could have gotten drunk on the dollar I had given him was more
than I could figure. Maybe, I thought, he had made another touch or two,
waiting to start drinking until he had cash enough to really hang one on.
     'Stiffy,' I said sharply, 'what the hell's the matter?'
     I was plenty sore at him. He could get plastered as often as he liked
and it was all right with me, but he had no right to come busting in on me.
     Stiffy moaned again, then he fell out of the chair and sprawled
untidily on the floor. Something that clattered and jangled flew out of the
pocket of his ragged jacket and skidded across the worn-out linoleum.
     I got down on my knees and tugged and hauled at him and got him
straightened out. I turned him over on his back. His face was splotched and
puffy and his breath was jerky, but there was no smell of liquor. I bent
close over him in an effort to make certain, and there was no smell of
booze.
     'Brad?' he mumbled. 'Is that you, Brad?'
     'Yes,' I told him. 'You can take it easy now. I'll take care of you.'
     'It's getting close,' he whispered. 'The time is coming dose.'
     'What is getting close?'
     But he couldn't answer. He had a wheezing fit. He worked his jaws, but
no words came out. They tried to come, but he choked and strangled on them.
     I left him and ran into the living-room and turned on the light beside
the telephone. I pawed, all fumble-fingered, through the directory, to find
Doc Fabian's number. I found it and dialled and waited while the phone rang
on and on. I hoped to God that Doc was home and not out on a call somewhere.
For when Doc was gone, you couldn't count on Mrs Fabian answering. She was
all crippled up with arthritis and half the time couldn't get around. Doc
always tried to have someone there to watch after her and to take the calls
when he went out, but there were times when he couldn't get anyone to stay.
Old Mrs Fabian was hard to get along with and no one liked to stay.
     When Doc answered, I felt a great surge of relief.
     'Doc,' I said. 'Stiffy Grant is here at my place and there's something
wrong with him.'
     'Drunk, perhaps,' said Doc.
     'No, he isn't drunk. I came home and found him sitting in the kitchen.
He's all twisted up and babbling.'
     'Babbling about what?'
     'I don't know,' I said. 'Just babbling - when he can talk, that is.'
     'All right,' said Doc. 'I'll be right over.'
     That's one thing about Doc. You can count on him. At any time of day or
night, in any kind of weather.
     I went back to the kitchen. Stiffy had rolled over on his side and was
clutching at his belly and breathing hard. I left him where he was. Doc
would be here soon and there wasn't much that I could do for Stiffy except
to try to make him comfortable, and maybe, I told myself, he might be more
comfortable lying on his side than turned over on his back.
     I picked up the object that had fallen out of Stiffy's coat. It was a
key ring, with half a dozen keys. I couldn't imagine what need Stiffy might
have for half a dozen keys. More than likely he just carried them around for
some smug feeling of importance they might give to him.
     I put them on the counter top and went back and squatted down alongside
Stiffy. 'I called Doc,' I told him. 'He'll be here right away.'
     He seemed to hear me. He wheezed and sputtered for a while, then he
said in a broken whisper: 'I can't help no more. You are all alone.' It
didn't go as smooth as that. His words were broken up.
     'What are you talking about?' I asked him, as gently as I could. 'Tell
me what it is.'
     'The bomb,' he said. 'The bomb. They'll want to use the bomb. You must
stop them, boy.'
     I had told Doc that he was babbling and now I knew I had been right.
     I headed for the front door to see if Doc might be in sight and when I
got there he was coming up the walk.
     Doc went ahead of me into the kitchen and stood for a moment, looking
down at Stiffy. Then he set down his bag and hunkered down and rolled Stiffy
on his back.
     'How are you, Stiffy?' he demanded.
     Stiffy didn't answer.
     'He's out cold,' said Doc.
     'He talked to me just before you came in.'
     'Say anything?'
     I shook my bead. 'Just nonsense.'
     Doc hauled a stethoscope out of his pocket and listened to Stiffy's
chest. He rolled Stiffy's eyelids back and beamed a light into his eyes.
Then he got slowly to his feet.
     'What's the matter with him?' I asked.
     'He's in shock,' said Doc. 'I don't know what's the matter. We'd better
get him into the hospital over at Elmore and have a decent look at him.'
     He turned wearily and headed for the living-room.
     'You got a phone in here?' he asked.
     'Over in the corner. Right beside the light.'
     'I'll call Hiram,' he said. 'He'll drive us into Elmore. We'll put
Stiffy in the back seat and I'll ride along and keep an eye on him.'
     He turned in the doorway. 'You got a couple of blankets you could let
us have?'
     'I think I can find some.'
     He nodded at Stiffy. 'We ought to keep him warm.'
     I went to get the blankets. When I came back with them, Doc was in the
kitchen. Between the two of us, we got Stiffy all wrapped up. He was limp as
a kitten and his face was streaked with perspiration.
     'Damn wonder,' said Doc, 'how he keeps alive, living the way he does,
in that shack stuck out beside the swamp. He drinks anything and everything
he can get his hands on and he pays no attention to his food. Eats any kind
of slop he can throw together easy. And I doubt he's had an honest bath in
the last ten years. It does beat hell,' he said with sudden anger, 'how
little care some people ever think to give their bodies.'
     'Where did he come from?' I asked. 'I always figured he wasn't a native
of this place. But he's been here as long as I remember.'
     'Drifted in,' said Doc, 'some thirty years ago, maybe more than that. A
fairly young man then. Did some odd jobs here and there and just sort of
settled down. No one paid attention to him. They figured, I guess, that he
had drifted in and would drift out again. But then, all at once, he seemed
to have become a fixture in the village. I would imagine that he just liked
the place and decided to stay on. Or maybe lacked the gumption to move on.'
     We sat in silence for a while.
     'Why do you suppose he came barging in on you?' asked Doc.
     'I wouldn't know,' I said. 'We always got along. We'd go fishing now
and then. Maybe he was just walking past when he started to get sick.'
     'Maybe so,' said Doc.
     The doorbell rang and I went and let Hiram Martin in. Hiram was a big
man. His face was mean and he kept the constable's badge pinned to his coat
lapel so polished that it shone.
     'Where is he?' he asked.
     'Out in the kitchen,' I said. 'Doc is sitting with him.'
     It was very plain that Hiram did not take to being drafted into the job
of driving Stiffy in to Elmore.
     He strode into the kitchen and stood looking down at the swathed figure
on the floor.
     'Drunk?' he asked.
     'No,' said Doc. 'He's sick.'
     Well, OK,' said Hiram, 'the car is out in front and I left the engine
running. Let's heave him in and be on our way.'
     The three of us carried Stiffy out to the car and propped him in the
back seat.
     I stood on the walk and watched the car go down the street and I
wondered how Stiffy would feel about it when he woke up and found that he
was in a hospital. I rather imagined that he might not care for it.
     I felt bad about Doc. He wasn't a young man any longer and more than
likely he'd had a busy day, and yet he took it for granted that he should
ride with Stiffy.
     Once in the house again, I went into the kitchen and got out the coffee
and went to the sink to fill the coffee pot, and there, lying on the counter
top, was the bunch of keys I had picked up off the floor. I picked them up
again and had a closer look at them. There were two of them that looked like
padlock keys and there was a car key and what looked like a key to a safety
deposit box and two others that might have been any kind of keys. I shuffled
them around, scarcely seeing them, wondering about that car key and that
other one which might have been for a safety box. Stiffy didn't have a car
and it was a good, safe bet that be had nothing for which he'd ever need a
safety deposit box.
     The time is getting close, he'd told me, and they'll want to use the
bomb. I had told Doc that it was babbling, but now, remembering back, I was
not so sure it was. He had wheezed out the words and he'd worked to get them
out. They had been conscious words, words he had managed with some
difficulty. They were words that he had meant to say and had laboured to get
said. They had not been the easy flow of words that one mouths when
babbling. But they had not been enough. He had not had the strength or time.
The few words that he'd managed made no particular sense.
     There was a place where I might be able to get some further information
that might piece out the words, but I shrank from going there. Stiffy Grant
had been a friend of mine for many years, ever since that day he'd gone
fishing with a boy often and had sat beside him on the river bank all the
afternoon, spinning wondrous tales. As I recalled it, standing in the
kitchen, we had caught some fish, but the fish were not important. What had
been important then, what was still important, was that a grown man had the
sort of understanding to treat a ten-year-old as an equal human being. On
that day, in those few hours of an afternoon, I had grown a lot. While we
sat on that river bank I had been as big as he was, and that was the first
time such a thing had ever happened to me.
     There was something that I had to do and yet I shrank from doing it -
and still, I told myself, Stiffy might not mind. He had tried to tell me
something and he had failed because he didn't have the strength. Certainly
he would understand that if I used these keys to get into his shack, that I
had not done it in a spirit of maliciousness, or of idle curiosity, but to
try to attain that knowledge he had tried to share with me.
     No one had ever been in Stiffy's shack. He had built it through the
years, out at the edge of town, beside a swamp in the corner of Jack
Dickson's pasture, and he had built it out of lumber he had picked up and
out of flattened tin cans and all manner of odd junk he had run across. At
first it had been little more than a lean-to, a shelter from the wind and
rain. But bit by bit, year by year, he had added to it until it was a
structure of wondrous shape and angles, but it was a home.
     I made up my mind and gave the keys a final toss and caught them and
put them in my pocket. Then I went out of the house and got into the car.

        6

     A thin fog of ghostly white lay just above the surface of the swamp and
curled about the foot of the tiny knoll on which Stiffy's shack was set.
Across the stretch of whiteness loomed a shadowed mass, the dark shape of a
wooded island that rose out of the marsh.
     I stopped the car and got out of it and as I did, my nostrils caught
the rank odour of the swamp, the scent of old and musty things, the smell of
rotting vegetation, and ochre coloured water. It was not particularly
offensive and yet there was about it an uncleanliness that set one's skin to
crawling. Perhaps, I told myself, a man got used to it. More than likely
Stiffy had lived with it so long that he never noticed it.
     I glanced back toward the village and through the darkness of the
nightmare trees I could catch an occasional glimpse of a swaying street
lamp. No one, I was certain, could have seen me come here. I'd switched off
the headlights before I turned off the highway and had crawled along the
twisting cart track that led in to the shack with no more than a sickly
moonlight to help me on my way.
     Like a thief in the night, I thought. And that, of course, was what I
was - except I had no intent of stealing.
     I walked up the path that led to the crazy door fashioned out of uneven
slabs of salvaged lumber, dosed by a metal hasp guarded by a heavy padlock.
I tried one of the padlock keys and it fitted and the lock snicked back. I
pushed on the door and it creaked open.
     I pulled the flashlight I had taken from the glove compartment of the
car out of my pocket and thumbed its switch. The fan of light thrust out,
spearing through the doorway. There was a table and three chairs, a stove
against one wall, a bed against another.
     The room was clean. There was a wooden floor, covered by scraps of
linoleum carefully patched together. The linoleum was so thoroughly scrubbed
that it fairly shone. The walls had been plastered and then neatly papered
with scraps of wallpaper, and with a complete and cynical disregard for any
colour scheme.
     I moved farther into the room, swinging the light slowly back and
forth. At first it had been the big things I had seen -the stove, the table
and the chairs, the bed. But now I began to become aware of the other things
and the little things.
     And one of these smaller things, which I should have seen at once, but
hadn't, was the telephone that stood on the table.
     I shone the light on it and spent long seconds making sure of what I'd
known to start with - for it was apparent at a glance that the phone was
without a dial and had no connection cord. And it would have done no good if
it had had a cord, for no telephone line had ever been run to this shack
beside the swamp.
     Three of them, I thought - three of them I knew of. The one that had
been in my office and another in Gerald Sherwood's study and now this one in
the shack of the village bum.
     Although, I told myself, not quite so much a bum as the village might
believe. Not the dirty slob most people thought he was. For the floor was
scrubbed and the walls were papered and everything was neat.
     Me and Gerald Sherwood and Stiffy Grant - what kind of common bond
could there be among us? And how many of these dialless phones could there
be in Millville; for how many others of us did that unknown bond exist?
     I moved the light and it crept across the bed with its patterned quilt
- not rumpled, not messed up, and very neatly made. Across the bed and to
another table that stood beyond the bed. Underneath the table were two
cartons. One of them was plain, without any lettering, and the other was a
whisky case with the name of an excellent brand of Scotch writ large across
its face.
     I walked over to the table and pulled the whisky case out from
underneath it. And in it was the last thing in the world I had expected. It
was not an emptied carton packed with personal belongings, not a box of
junk, but a case of whisky.
     Unbelieving, I lifted out a bottle and another and another, all of them
still sealed. I put them back in the case again and lowered myself carefully
to the floor, squatting on my heels. I felt the laughter deep inside of me,
trying to break out - and yet it was, when one came to think of it, not a
laughing matter.
     This very afternoon Stiffy had touched me for a dollar because, he'd
said, he'd not had a drink all day. And all the time there had been this
case of whisky, pushed underneath the table.
     Were all the outward aspects of the village bum no more than
camouflage? The broken, dirty nails; the rumpled, thread-bare clothing; the
unshaven face and the unwashed neck; the begging of money for a drink; the
seeking of dirty little piddling jobs to earn the price of food - was this
all a sham?
     And if it were a masquerade, what purpose could it serve? I pushed the
case back underneath the table and pulled out the other carton. And this one
wasn't whisky and neither was it junk. It was telephones.
     I hunkered, staring at them, and it now was crystal clear how that
telephone had gotten on my desk. Stiffy had put it there and then had waited
for me, propped against the building. Perhaps he had seen me coming down the
street as he came out of the office and had done the one thing that would
seem entirely natural to explain his waiting there. Or it might equally well
have been just plain bravado. And all the time he has been laughing at me
deep inside himself.
     But that must be wrong, I told myself. Stiffy never would have laughed
at me. We were old and trusted friends and he'd never laugh at me, he. would
never do anything to fool me.
     This was a serious business, too serious for any laughing to be done.
     If Stiffy had put the phone there, had he also been the one who had
come back and taken it? Could that have been the reason he had come to my
place - to explain to me why the phone was gone?
     Thinking of it, it didn't seem too likely.
     But if it had not been Stiffy, then there was someone else involved.
     There was no need to lift out the phones, for I knew exactly what I'd
find. But I did lift them out and I wasn't wrong.
     They had no dials and no connection cords.
     I got to my feet and for a moment stood uncertain, staring at the phone
standing on the table, then, making up my mind, strode to the table and
lifted the receiver.
     'Hello,' said the voice of the businessman. 'What have you to report?'
     'This isn't Stiffy,' I said. 'Stiffy is in a hospital. He was taken
sick.'
     There was a moment's hesitation, thenthe voice said, 'Oh, yes, it's Mr Bradshaw Carter, isn't it. So nice that
you could call.'
     'I found the phones,' I said. 'Here in Stiffy's shack. And the phone in
my office has somehow disappeared. And I saw Gerald Sherwood. I think
perhaps, my friend, it's time that you explained.'
     'Of course,' the voice said. 'You, I suppose, have decided that you
will represent us.'
     'Now,' I said, 'just a minute, there. Not until I know about it. Not
until I've had a chance to give it some consideration.'
     'I tell you what,' the voice said, 'you consider it and then you call
us back. What was this you were saying about Stiffy being taken somewhere?'
     'A hospital,' I said. 'He was taken sick.'
     'But he should have called us,' the voice said, aghast. 'We would have
fixed him up. He knew good and well...'
     'He maybe didn't have the time. I found him...'
     Where was this place you say that he was taken?'
     'Elmore. To the hospital at...'
     'Elmore. Of course. We know where Elmore is.'
     'And Greenbriar, too, perhaps.' I hadn't meant to say it; I hadn't even
thought it. It just popped into my mind, a sudden, unconscious linking of
what was happening here and the project that Alf had talked to me about.
     'Greenbriar? Why, certainly. Down in Mississippi. A town very much like
Millville. And you will let us know? When you have decided, you will let us
know?'
     'I'll let you know,' I promised.
     'And thank you very much, sir. We shall be looking forward to your
association with us.'
     And then the line went dead.
     Greenbriar, I thought. It was not only Millville. It might be the
entire world. What the hell, I wondered, could be going on?
     I'd talk to Alf about it. I'd go home and phone him now. Or I could
drive out and see him. He'd probably be in bed, but I would get him up. I'd
take along a bottle and we'd have a drink or two.
     I picked up the phone and tucked it underneath my arm and went outside.
I closed the door behind me. I snapped the padlock shut and then went to the
car. I opened the back door and put the telephone on the floor and covered
it with a raincoat that was folded on the seat. It was a silly thing to do,
but I felt a little better with the phone tucked away and hidden. I got
behind the wheel and sat for a moment, thinking, Perhaps, I told myself; it
would be better if I didn't rush into things too fast. I would see Alf
tomorrow and we'd have a lot of time to talk, an entire week to talk if we
needed it. And that way I'd have some time to try to think the situation
out.
     It was late and I had to pack the camping stuff and the fishing tackle
in the car and Ishould try to get some sleep.
     Be sensible, I told myself. Take a little time. Try to think it out.
     It was good advice. Good for someone else. Good even for myself at
another time and under other circumstances. I should not have taken it,
however. I should have gone out to Johnny's Motor Court and pounded on Alf's
door. Perhaps then things would have worked out differently. But you can't
be sure. You never can be sure.
     But, anyhow, I did go home and I did pack the camping stuff and the
fishing gear into the car and had a few hours of sleep (I wonder now how I
ever got to sleep), then was routed out by the alarm dock early in the
morning.
     And before I could pick up Alf I hit the barrier.

        7

     'Hi, there,' said the naked scarecrow, with jaunty happiness. He
counted on his fingers and slobbered as he counted.
     And there was no mistaking him. He came clear through the years. The
same placid, vacant face, with its frog-like mouth and its misty eyes. It
had been ten years since I had seen him last, since anyone had seen him, and
yet he seemed only slightly older than he had been then. His hair was long,
hanging down his back, but he had no whiskers. He had a heavy growth of
fuzz, but he'd never sprouted whiskers. He was entirely naked except for the
outrageous hat. And he was the same old Tupper. He hadn't changed a bit. I'd
have known him anywhere.
     He quit his finger-counting and sucked in his slobber. He reached up
and took off his hat and held it out so that I could see it better.
     'Made it myself,' he told me, with a wealth of pride.
     'It's very fine,' I said.
     He could have waited, I told myself. No matter where he'd come from, he
could have waited for a while. Millville had enough trouble at this
particular moment without having to contend once again with the likes of
Tupper Tyler.
     'Your papa,' Tupper said. 'Where is your papa, Brad? There is something
I have to tell him.'
     And that voice, I thought. How could I ever have mistaken it? And how
could I ever have forgotten that Tupper was, of all things, an accomplished
mimic? He could be any bird he wanted and he could be a dog or cat and the
kids used to gather round him, making fun of him, while he put on a mimic
show of a dog-and-cat fight or of two neighbours quarrelling.
     'Your papa!' Tupper said.
     'We'd better get inside,' I told him. 'I'll get some clothes and you
climb into them. You can't go on running around naked.'
     He nodded vaguely. 'Flowers,' he said. 'Lots of pretty flowers.'
     He spread his arms wide to show me how many flowers there were. 'Acres
and acres,' he said. 'There is no end to them. They just keep on forever.
Every last one purple. And they are so pretty and they smell so sweet and
they are so good to me.'
     His chin was covered with a dampness from his talking and he wiped it
with a claw-like hand. He wiped his hand upon a thigh.
     I got him by the elbow and got him turned around, headed for the house.
     'But your papa,' he protested. 'I want to tell your papa all about the
flowers.'
     'Later on,' I said.
     I got him on the porch and thrust him through the door and followed
after him. I felt easier. Tupper was no decent sight for the streets of
Millville. And I had had, for a while, about all that I could stand. Old
Stiffy Grant laid out in my kitchen just the night before and now along
comes Tupper, without a stitch upon him. Eccentrics were all right, and in a
little town you get a lot of them, but there came a time when they ran a
little thin.
     I still held tightly to his elbow and marched him to the bedroom.
     'You stand right there,' I told him.
     He stood right there, not moving, gaping at the room with his vacant
stare.
     I found a shirt and a pair of trousers. I got out a pair of shoes and,
after looking at his feet, put them back again. They were, I knew, way too
small. Tupper's feet were all spraddled out and flattened. He'd probably
been going without shoes for years.
     I held out the trousers and the shirt.
     'You get into these,' I said. 'And once you have them on, stay here.
Don't stir out of this room.'
     He didn't answer and he didn't take the clothes. He'd fallen once again
to counting his fingers.
     And now, for the first time, I had a chance to wonder where he'd been.
How could a man drop out of sight, without a trace, stay lost for ten years,
and then pop up again, out of that same thin air into which he had
disappeared?
     It had been my first year in high school that Tupper had turned up
missing and I remembered it most vividly because for a week all of the boys
had been released from school to join the hunt for him. We had combed miles
of fields and woodlands, walking slowly in line an arm's length from one
another, and finally we had been looking for a body rather than a man. The
state police had dragged the river and several nearby ponds. The sheriff and
a posse of townspeople had worked carefully through the swamp below Stiffy's
shack, prodding with long poles. They had found innumerable logs and a
couple of wash boilers that someone had thrown away and on the farther edge
of the swamp an anciently dead dog.
     But no one had found Tupper.
     'Here,' I told him, 'take these clothes and get into them.'
     Tupper finished with his fingers and politely wiped his chin.
     'I must be getting back,' he said. 'The flowers can't wait too long.'
     He reached out a hand and took the clothes from me. 'My other ones wore
out,' he said. 'They just dropped off of me.'
     'I saw your mother just half an hour ago,' I said. 'She was looking for
you.'
     It was a risky thing to say, for Tupper was the kind of jerk that you
handled with kid gloves. But I took the calculated risk and said it, for I
thought that maybe it would jolt some sense into him.
     'Oh,' he said lightly, 'she's always hunting for me. She thinks I ain't
big enough to look out for myself.'
     As if he'd never been away. As if ten years hadn't passed. As if he'd
stepped out of his mother's house no more than an hour ago. As if time had
no meaning for him - and perhaps it hadn't.
     'Put on the clothes,' I told him. 'I'll be right back.'
     I went out into the living-room and picked up the phone. I dialled Doc
Fabian's number. The busy signal blurped at me.
     I put the receiver back and tried to think of someone else to call. I
could call Hiram Martin. Perhaps he was the one to call. But I hesitated.
Doc was the man to handle this; be knew how to handle people. All that Hiram
knew was how to push them around.
     I dialled Doc once more and still got the busy signal. I slammed down
the receiver and hurried toward the bedroom. I couldn't leave Tupper alone
too long. God knows what he might do.
     But I already had waited too long. I never should have left. The
bedroom was empty. The window was open and the screen was broken out and
there was no Tupper.
     I rushed across the room and leaned out of the window and there was no
sign of him.
     Blind panic hit me straight between the eyes. I don't know why it did.
Certainly, at that moment, Tupper's escaping from the bedroom was not all
that important. But it seemed to be important and I knew, without knowing
why, that I must run him down and bring him back, that I must not let him
out of my sight again.
     Without thinking, I stepped back from the window and took a running
jump, diving through the opening. I landed on one shoulder and rolled, then
jumped up to my feet.
     Tupper was not in sight, but now I saw where he had gone.
     His dewy tracks led across the grass, back around the house and down to
the old greenhouse. He had waded out into the patch of purple flowers that
covered the old abandoned area where once my father and, later, I myself had
tended rows of flowers and other plants. He had waded out some twenty feet
or so into the mass of flowers. His trail was clearly shown, for the plants
had been brushed over and had not had time to straighten yet, and they were
a darker hue where the dew had been knocked off them.
     The trail went twenty feet and stopped. All about it and ahead of it
the purple flowers stood straight, silvered by the tiny dewdrops.
     There was no other trail. Tupper had not backed out along the trail and
then gone another way. There was just the single trail that headed straight
into the patch of purple flowers and ended. As if the man might have taken
wing and flown away, or dropped straight into the ground.
     But no matter where he was, I thought, no matter what kind of tricks he
played, he couldn't leave the village. For the village was closed in by some
sort of barrier that ran all the way around it.
     A wailing sound exploded and filled the universe, a shrieking, terrible
sound that reverberated and beat against itself. It came so suddenly that it
made me jump and stiffen. The sound seemed to fill the world and to dog the
sky and it didn't stop, but kept on and on.
     Almost at once I knew what it was, but my body still stayed tense for
long seconds and my mind was curdled with a nameless fear. For there had
been too much happening in too short a time and this metallic yammering had
been the trigger that had slammed it all together and made the world almost
unendurable.
     Gradually I relaxed and started for the house.
     And still the sound kept on, the frantic, full-throated wailing of the
siren down at the village hall.

        8

     By the time I got up to the house there were people running in the
street - a wild-eyed, frantic running with a sense of panic in it, all of
them heading toward that screeching maelstrom of sound, as if the siren were
the monstrous tootling of a latter-day Pied Piper and they were the rats
which must not be left behind.
     There was old Pappy Andrews, hobbling along, cracking his cane on the
surface of the street with unaccustomed vigour and the wind blowing his long
chin whiskers up into his face. There was Grandma Jones, who had her
sunbonnet socked upon her head, but had forgotten to tie the strings, which
floated and bobbed across her shoulders as she stumped along with grim
determination. She was the only woman in all of Millville (perhaps in all
the world) who still owned a sunbonnet and she took a malicious pride in
wearing it, as if the very fact of appearing with it upon her head was a
somehow commendable flaunting of her fuddy-duddyness. And after her came
Pastor Silas Middleton, with a prissy look of distaste fastened on his face,
but going just the same. An old jalopy clattered past with that crazy
Johnson kid crouched behind the wheel and a bunch of his hoodlum pals
yelling, and cat-calling, glad of any kind of excitement and willing to
contribute to it. And a lot of others, including a slew of kids and dogs.
     I opened the gate and stepped into the street. But I didn't run like
all the rest of them, for I knew what it was all about and I was all weighed
down with a lot of things that no one knew as yet. Especially about Tupper
Tyler and what Tupper might have had to do with what was happening. For
insane as it might sound, I had a sneaky sort of hunch that Tupper had
somehow had a hand in it and had made a mess of things.
     I tried to think, but the things I wanted to think about were too big
to get into mind and there were no mental handholds on them for my mind to
grab a hold of. So I didn't hear the car when it came sneaking up beside me.
The first thing I heard was the click of the door as it was coming open.
     I swung around and Nancy Sherwood was there behind the wheel.
     'Come on, Brad,' she yelled, to make herself heard above the siren
noise.
     I jumped in and closed the door and the car slid up the street. It was
a big and powerful thing. The top was down and if felt funny to be riding in
a car that didn't have a top.
     The siren stopped. One moment the world had been filled to bursting
with its brazen howling and then the howling stopped and for a little moment
there was the feeble keening as the siren died. Then the silence came, and
in the weight and mass of silence a little blot of howling still stayed
within one's mind, as if the howling had not gone, but had merely moved
away.
     One felt naked in the coldness of the silence and there was the absurd
feeling that in the noise there had been purpose and direction. And that
now, with the howling gone, there was no purpose or direction.
     'This is a nice car you have,' I said, not knowing what to say, but
knowing that I should say something.
     'Father gave it to me,' she said, 'on my last birthday.'
     It moved along and you couldn't hear the motor. All you could hear was
the faint rumble of the wheels turning on the roadbed.
     'Brad,' she asked, 'what's going on? Someone told me that your car was
wrecked and there was no sign of you. What has your car to do with the siren
blowing? And there were a lot of cars down on the road...'
     I told her. 'There's a fence of some sort built around the town.'
     'Who would build a fence?'
     'It's not that kind of fence. You can't see this fence.'
     We had gotten close to Main Street and there were more people. They
were walking on the sidewalk and walking on the lawns and walking in the
road. Nancy slowed the car to crawling.
     'You said there was a fence.'
     'There is a fence. An empty car can get through it, but it will stop a
man. I have a hunch it will stop all life. It's the kind of fence you'd
expect in fairyland.'
     'Brad,' she said, 'you know there is no fairyland.'
     'An hour ago I knew,' I said. 'I don't know any more.'
     We came out on Main Street and a big crowd was standing out in front of
the village hall and more coming all the time. George Walker, the butcher at
the Red Owl store, was running down the street, with his white apron tucked
up into his belt and his white cap set askew upon his head. Norma Shepard,
the receptionist at Doc Fabian's office, was standing on a box out on the
sidewalk so that she could see what was going on, and Butch Ormsby, the
owner of the service station just across the street from the hall, was
standing at the kerb, wiping and wiping at his greasy hands with a ball of
waste, as if he knew he would never get them clean, but was bound to keep on
trying.
     Nancy pulled the car up into the approach to the filling station and
shut off the motor.
     A man came across the concrete apron and stopped beside the car. He
leaned down and rested his folded arms on the top part of the door.
     'How are things going, pal?' he asked.
     I looked at him for a moment, not remembering him at first, then
suddenly remembering. He must have seen that I remembered him.
     'Yeah,' he said, 'the guy who smacked your car.' He straightened and
reached out his hand. 'Name is Gabriel Thomas,' he said. 'You just call me
Gabe. We never got around to trading names down there.'
     I shook his hand and told him who I was, then introduced Nancy.
     'Mr Thomas,' Nancy said, 'I heard about the accident. Brad won't talk
about it.'
     'Well,' said Gabe, 'it was a strange thing, miss. There was nothing
there and you ran into it and it stopped you as if it had been a wall of
stone. And even when it was stopping you, you could see right through it.'
     'Did you phone your company?' I asked.
     'Yeah. Sure I phoned them. But no one will believe me. They think I'm
drunk. They think I am so drunk I wouldn't dare to drive and I'm holing up
somewhere. They think I dreamed up this crazy story as a cover-up.'
     'Did they say so, Mr Thomas?'
     'No, miss,' he said, 'but I know how them jokers think. And the thing
that hurts me is that they ever should have thought it. I ain't a drinking
man. And I got a good record. Why, I won driving awards, three years in a
row.'
     He said to me, 'I don't know what to do. I can't get out of here.
There's no way to get out. That barrier is all around the town. I live five
hundred miles from here and my wife is all alone. Six kids and the youngest
one a baby. I don't know what she'll do. She's used to it, of course, with
me off on the road. But never for longer than three or four days, the time
it takes for me to make a run. What if I can't get back for two or three
weeks, maybe two or three months? What will she do then? There won't be any
money coming in and there are the house payments to be made and them six
kids to feed.'
     'Maybe you won't be here for long,' I said, doing my best to make him
feel a little better. 'Maybe someone can get it figured out and do something
about it. Maybe it will simply go away. And even if it doesn't, I imagine
that your company will keep your salary going. After all, it's not your...'
     He made an insulting, disgusted noise. 'Not that bunch,' he said. 'Not
that gang of chisellers.'
     'It's too soon to start worrying,' I told him. 'We don't know what has
happened and until we do...'
     'I guess you're right,' he said. 'Of course, I'm not the only one. I
been talking to a lot of people and I'm not the only one.
     I was talking to a guy down in front of the barber shop just a while
ago and his wife is in the hospital over at - what's the name of that town?'
     'Elmore,' Nancy said.
     'Yes, that was it. She's in the hospital at Elmore and he is out of his
mind, afraid he can't go to visit her. Kept saying over and over that maybe
it would be all right in a little while, that he could get out of town.
Sounds like she may be pretty bad off and he goes over every day. She'll be
expecting him, he says, and maybe she won't understand why he doesn't come.
Talked as if a good part of the time she's not in her right mind. And there
was this other fellow. His family is off on a vacation, out to Yellowstone,
and he was expecting them to get home today. Says they'll be all tired out
from travelling and now they can't reach their home after they have
travelled all those miles to get back into it again. Was expecting them home
early in the afternoon. He's planning to go out on the road and wait for
them at the edge of the barrier. Not that it will do any good, meeting them
out there, but he said it was the only thing he could do. And then there are
a lot of people who work out of town and now they can't get to their jobs,
and there was someone telling me about a girl here in town who was going to
marry a fellow from a place called Coon Valley and they were going to get
married tomorrow and now, of course, they can't.'
     'You must have talked to a lot of people,' I said. 'Hush,' said Nancy.
     Across the street Mayor Higgy Morris was standing on the top step of
the flight of stairs that led up to the village hall and he was waving his
arms to get the people quiet.
     'Fellow citizens,' yelled Higgy in that phony political voice that
makes you sick at heart. 'Fellow citizens, if you'll just be quiet.'
     Someone yelled, 'You tell 'em Higgy!' There was a wave of laughter, but
it was a nervous laugh.
     'Friends,' said Higgy, 'we may be in a lot of trouble. You probably
have heard about it. I don't know what you heard, for there are a lot of
stories. I don't know, myself, everything that's happened.'
     'I'm sorry for having to use the siren to call you all together, but it
seemed the quickest way.'
     'Ah, hell,' yelled someone. 'Get on with it, Higgy.'
     No one laughed this time.
     'Well, all right,' said Higgy. 'I'll get on with it. I don't know quite
how to say this, but we've been cut off. There is some sort of fence around
us that won't let anybody in or anybody out. Don't ask me what it is or how
it got there. I have no idea. I don't think, right now, that anybody knows.
There may be nothing for us to get disturbed about. It may be only
temporary; it may go away.'
     'What I do want to say is that we should stay calm. We're all in this
together and we got to work together to get out of it. Right now we haven't
got anything to be afraid of. We are only cut off in the sense that we can't
go anywhere. But we are still in touch with the outside world. Our
telephones are working and so are the gas and electric lines. We have plenty
of food to last for ten days, maybe more than that. And if we should run
short, we can get more food. Trucks loaded with it, or with anything we
need, can be brought up to the barrier and the driver can get out, then the
truck can be pulled or pushed through the barrier. It doesn't stop things
that are not alive.'
     'Just a minute, mayor,' someone shouted.
     'Yes,' the mayor said, looking around to see who had dared to interrupt
him.
     'Was that you, Len?' he asked.
     'Yes, it was,' said the man.
     I could see now that it was Len Streeter, our high school science
teacher.
     'What did you want?' asked Higgy.
     'I suppose you're basing that last statement of yours - about only
non-living matter getting through the barrier - on the car that was parked
on the Coon Valley road.'
     'Why, yes,' said Higgy, condescendingly, 'that is exactly what I was
basing the statement on. What do you know about it?'
     'Nothing,' Len Streeter told him. 'Nothing about the car itself. But I
presume, you do intend to go about the investigation of this phenomenon
within well restricted bounds of logic.'
     'That's right,' said Higgy, sanctimoniously. 'That's exactly what we
intend to do.'
     And you could tell by the way he said it he had no idea of what
Streeter had said or what he was driving at.
     'In that case,' said Streeter. 'I might caution you against accepting
facts at their first face value. Such as presuming that because there was no
human in the car, there was nothing living in it.'
     'Well, there wasn't,' Higgy argued. 'The man who had been driving it
had left and gone away somewhere.'
     'Humans,' said Streeter, patiently, 'aren't the only forms of life. We
can't be certain there was no life in that car. In fact, we can be pretty
sure there was life of some sort in it. There probably was a fly or two shut
up inside of it. There might have been a grasshopper sitting on the hood. It
was absolutely certain that the car had in it and about it and upon it many
different kinds of micro-organisms. And a micro-organism is a form of life,
just the same as we are.'
     Higgy stood up on the steps and he was somewhat flustered. He didn't
know whether Streeter was making a fool of him or not. Probably never in his
life had he heard of such a thing as a micro-organism.
     'You know, Higgy,' said a voice I recognized as DocFabian's, 'our young
friend is right. Of course there would be microorganisms. Some of the rest
of us should have thought of it at once.'
     'Well,' all right, then,' said Higgy. 'If you say so, Doc. Let's say
that Len is right. It don't make any difference, does it?'
     'At the moment, no,' said Doc.
     'The only point I wanted to make,' said Streeter, 'is that life can't
be the entire answer. If we are going to study the situation, we should get
a right start at it. We shouldn't begin with a lot of misconceptions.'
     'I got a question, mayor,' said someone else. I tried to see who it
was, but couldn't.
     'Go ahead,' said Higgy, cordially, happy that someone was about to
break up this Streeter business.
     'Well, it's like this,' said the man. 'I've been working on the highway
job south of town. And now I can't get to it and maybe they'll hold the job
for me for a day or two, but it isn't reasonable to expect the contractor to
hold it very long. He's got a contract he has to meet - a time limit, you
know, and he pays a penalty for every day he's late. So he's got to have men
to do the job. He can't hold no job open for more than a day or two.'
     'I know all that,' said Higgy.
     'I ain't the only one,' said the man, 'There are a lot of other fellows
who work out of town. I don't know about the rest of them, but I got to have
my pay. I ain't got any backlog I can fall back on. What's going to happen
to us if we can't get to our jobs and there isn't any pay cheque and no
money in the bank?'
     'I was coming to that,' said Higgy. 'I know exactly what your situation
is. And the situations of a lot of other men. There isn't enough work in a
little town like this for everyone who lives here, so a great many of our
residents have work outside of town. And I know a lot of you haven't too
much money and that you need your pay cheques. We hope this thing clears up
soon enough that you can go back and your jobs will still be there.'
     'But let me tell you this. Let me make a promise. If it doesn't clear
up, there aren't any of you going to go hungry. There aren't any of you who
are going to be turned out of your homes because you can't make your
payments or can't manage to scrape the rent together. There won't nothing
happen to you. A lot of people are going to be without jobs because of what
has happened, but you'll be taken care of, every one of you. I am going to
name a committee that will talk with the merchants and the bank and we'll
arrange for a line of credit that will see you through. Anyone who needs a
loan or credit can be sure of getting it.'
     Higgy looked down at Daniel Willoughby, who was standing a step or two
below him.
     'Ain't that right, Dan?' he demanded.
     'Yes,' said the banker. 'Yes. Sure, it's quite all right. We'll do
everything we can.'
     But he didn't like it. You could see he didn't. It hurt him to say it
was all right. Daniel liked security, good security, for each dollar he put
out.
     'It's too early yet,' said Higgy, 'to know what has happened to us. By
tonight maybe we'll know a whole lot more about it. The main thing is to
keep calm and not start going off half- cocked.
     'I can't pretend to know what is going to happen. If this barrier stays
in place, there'll be some difficulties. But as it stands right now, it's
not entirely bad. Up until an hour or so ago, we were just a little village
that wasn't too well known. There wasn't, I suppose, much reason that we
should have been well known. But now we're getting publicity over the entire
world. We're in the newspapers and on the radio and TV. I'd like Joe Evans
to come up here and tell you all about it.'
     He looked around and spotted Joe in the crowd.
     'You folks,' he said, 'make way, won't you, so Joe can come up here.'
     The editor climbed the steps and turned around to face the crowd.
     'There isn't much to tell so far,' he said. 'I've had calls from most
of the wire services and from several newspapers. They all wanted to know
what was going on. I told them what I could, but it wasn't much. One of the
TV stations over in Elmore is sending a mobile camera unit. The phone was
still ringing when I left the house and I suppose there are calls coming
into the office, too.
     'I think we can expect that the news media will pay a lot of attention
to the situation here and there's no question in my mind that the state and
federal governments will take a hand in it, and if I understand it rightly,
more than likely the scientific community will have a considerable interest,
as well.'
     The man who had the highway job spoke up again. 'Joe, you think them
science fellows can get it figured out?'
     'I don't know,' said Joe.
     Hiram Martin had pushed his way through the crowd and was crossing the
street. He had a purposeful look about hint and I wondered what he could be
up to. Someone else was asking a question, but the sight of Hiram had
distracted me and I lost the gist of it.
     'Brad,' said someone at my elbow.
     I looked around.
     Hiram was standing there. The trucker, I saw, had left.
     'Yes,' I said. 'What is it?'
     'If you got the time,' said Hiram. 'I'd like to talk with you.'
     'Go ahead,' I said. 'I have the time.'
     He jerked his head toward the village hall.
     'All right,' I said.
     I opened the door and got out.
     'I'll wait for you,' said Nancy.
     Hiram moved off around the crowd, flanking it, heading for the side
door of the hail. I followed close behind him.
     But I didn't like it.

        9

     Hiram's office was a little cubbyhole just off the stall where the fire
engine and ladder rig were housed. There was barely room in it for two
chairs and a desk. On the wall above the desk hung a large and garish
calendar with a naked woman on it.
     And on the desk stood one of the dialless telephones.
     Hiram gestured at it. 'What is that?' he asked.
     'It's a telephone,' I said. 'Since when did you get so important that
you have two phones?'
     'Take another look,' he said.
     'It's still a telephone,' I said.
     'A closer look,' he told me.
     'It's a crazy looking thing. It' hasn't any dial.'
     'Anything else?'
     'No, I guess not. It just doesn't have a dial.'
     'And,' said Hiram, 'it has no connection cord.'
     'I hadn't noticed that.'
     'That's funny,' Hiram said.
     'Why funny?' I demanded. 'What the hell is going on? You didn't get me
in here just to show me a phone.'
     'It's funny,' Hiram said, 'because it was in your office.'
     'It couldn't be. Ed Adler came in yesterday and took out my phone. For
non-payment of my bill.'
     'Sit down, Brad,' he said.
     I sat down and he sat down facing me. His face was still pleasant
enough, but there was that odd glitter in his eyes - the glitter that in the
olden days I'd seen too often in his eyes when he'd cornered me and knew he
had me cornered and was about to force me to fight him, in the course of
which endeavour he would beat the living Jesus out of me.
     'You never saw this phone?' he asked.
     I shook my head. 'When I left the office yesterday I had no telephone.
Not this one or any other.'
     'That's strange,' he said.
     'As strange to me as to you,' I told him. 'I don't know what you're
getting at. Suppose you try to tell me.'
     I knew the lying in the long run would not get me anywhere, but for the
moment it was buying me some time. I was pretty sure that right now he
couldn't tie me to the telephone.
     'All right,' he said, 'I'll tell you. Tom Preston was the man who saw
it. He'd sent Ed to take out your phone, and later in the afternoon he was
walking past your office and he happened to look in and saw the phone
standing on your desk. It made him pretty sore. You can see how it might
have made him sore.'
     'Yes,' I said. 'Knowing Tom, I presume he would be sore.'
     'He'd sent Ed out to get that phone and the first thing he thought of
was that you'd talked Ed out of taking it. Or maybe Ed had just sort of
failed to drop around and get it. He knew you and Ed were friends.'
     'I suppose, he was so sore that he broke in and took it.'
     'No,' said Hiram, 'he never did break in. He went down to the bank and
talked Daniel Willoughby into giving him the key.'
     'Without considering,' I said, 'that I was renting the office.'
     'But you hadn't paid your rent for three solid months. If you ask me,
I'd figure Daniel had the right.'
     'In my book,' I told him, 'Tom and Daniel broke into my place and
robbed me.'
     'I told you. They didn't do any breaking. And Daniel had no part in it.
Except giving Tom the extra key. Tom went back alone. Besides, you say you'd
never seen this phone, that you never owned it.'
     'That's beside the point. No matter what was in my office, he had no
right to take it. Whether it was mine or not. How do I know he didn't walk
away with some other stuff?'
     'You know damn well he didn't,' Hiram told me. 'You said you wanted to
hear about this.'
     'So go ahead and tell me.'
     'Well, Tom got the key and got into your office and he saw right away
that it was a different kind of phone. It didn't have a dial and it wasn't
connected. So he turned around and started to walk out and before he reached
the door, the phone rang.'
     'It what?'
     'It rang.'
     'But it wasn't connected.'
     'I know, but anyhow, it rang.'
     'So he answered it,' I said, 'and there was Santa Claus.'
     'He answered it,' said Hiram, 'and there was Tupper Tyler.'
     'Tupper! But Tupper...'
     'Yeah, I know,' said Hiram. 'Tupper disappeared. Ten years ago or so.
But Tom said it was Tupper's voice. He said he couldn't be mistaken.'
     'And what did Tupper tell him?'
     'Tom said hello and Tupper asked him who he was and Tom told him who he
was. Then Tupper said get off this phone, you're not authorized to use it.
Then the phone went dead.'
     'Look, Hiram, Tom was kidding you.'
     'No, he wasn't. He thought someone was kidding him. He thought you and
Ed had cooked it up. He thought it was a joke. He thought you were trying to
get even with him.'
     'But that's crazy,' I protested. 'Even if Ed and I had fixed up a gag
like that, how could we have known that Tom would come busting in?'
     'I know,' said Hiram.
     'You mean you believe all this?'
     'You bet I believe it. There's something wrong, something awfully
wrong.'
     But his tone of voice was defensive. I had him on the run. He had
hauled me in to pin me to the wall and it hadn't worked that way and now he
was just a little sheepish about the entire matter. But in a little while
he'd start getting sore.
     He was that kind of jerk.
     'When did Tom tell you all of this?'
     'This morning.'
     'Why not last night? If he thought it was so important...'
     "But I told you. He didn't think it was important. He thought it was a
joke. He thought it was you getting back at him. He didn't think it was
important until all hell broke loose this morning. After he answered and
heard Tupper's voice, he took the phone. He thought that might reverse the
joke, you see. He thought you'd gone to a lot of work...'
     'Yes, I see,' I said. 'But now he thinks that it was really Tupper
calling and that the call actually was for me.'
     'Well, yes, I'd say so. He took the phone home and a couple of times
early that evening he picked up the receiver and the phone was alive, but no
one answered. That business about the phone being alive puzzled him. It
bothered him a lot. It wasn't tied into any line, you see.'
     'And now the two of you want to make some sort of case against me.'
     Hiram's face hardened. 'I know you're up to something,' he said. 'I
know you went out to Stiffy's shack last night. After Doc and I had taken
Stiffy in to Elmore.'
     'Yes, I did,' I said. 'I found his keys where they had fallen out of
his pocket. So I went out to his place to see if it was locked and
everything was all right.'
     'You sneaked in,' Hiram said. 'You turned off your lights to go up
Stiffy's lane.'
     'I didn't turn them off. The electrical circuit shorted. I got them
fixed before I left the shack.'
     It was pretty weak. But it was the best I could think of fast. Hiram
didn't press the point.
     'This morning,' he said, 'me and Tom went out to the shack.'
     'So it was Tom who was spying on me.'
     Hiram grunted. 'He was upset about the phone. He got suspicious of
you.'
     'And you broke into the shack. You must have. I locked it when I left.'
     'Yeah,' said Hiram, 'we broke in. And we found more of them telephones.
A whole box full of them.'
     'You can quit looking at me like that,' I said. 'I saw no telephones. I
didn't snoop around.'
     I could see the two of them, Hiram and Tom, roaring out to the shack in
full cry, convinced that there existed some sinister plot which they could
not understand, but that whatever it might be, both Stiffy and myself were
neck-deep in it.
     And there was some sort of plot, I told myself and Stiffy and myself
were both entangled in it and I hoped that Stiffy knew what it was all
about, for certainly I didn't. The little I knew only made it more confused.
And Gerald Sherwood, unless he'd lied to me (and I was inclined to think he
hadn't) knew little more about it than I did.
     Suddenly I was thankful that Hiram did not know about the phone in
Sherwood's study, or all those other phones which must be in the village, in
the hands of those persons who had been employed as readers by whoever used
the phones for communication.
     Although, I told myself, there was little chance that Hiram would ever
know about those phones, for the people who had them certainly would hide
them most securely and would keep very mum about them once this business of
the phones became public knowledge. And I was certain that within a few
hours' time the story of the mystery phones would be known to everyone.
Neither Hiram nor Tom Preston could keep their big mouths shut.
     Who would these other people be, I wondered, the ones who had the
phones - and all at once I knew. They would be the down-and-outers, the poor
unfortunates, the widows who had been left without savings or insurance, the
aged who had not been able to provide for their later years, the failures
and the no-goods and the hard-of-luck.
     For that was the way it had worked with Sherwood and myself. Sherwood
had not been contacted (if that was the word for it) before he faced
financial ruin and they (whoever they might be) had not been concerned with
me until I was a business failure and willing to admit it. And the man who
seemed to have had the most to do with all of it was the village bum.
     'Well?' asked the constable.
     'You want to know what I know about it?'
     'Yes, I do,' said Hiram, 'and if you know what's good for you...'
     'Hiram,' I told him, 'don't you ever threaten me. Don't you even look
as though you meant to threaten me. Because if you do...'
     Floyd Caldwell stuck his head inside the door.
     'It's moving!' he yelled at us. 'The barrier is moving!'
     Both Hiram and I jumped to our feet and headed for the door. Outside
people were running and yelling and Grandma Jones was standing out in the
middle of the street, jumping up and down, with the sunbonnet flapping on
her head. With every jump she uttered little shrieks.
     I saw Nancy in her car across the street and ran straight for it. She
had the motor going and when she saw me, she moved the car out from the
kerb, rolling slowly down the street. I put my hands on the back door and
vaulted into the back, then clambered up in front. By the time I got there
the car had reached the drugstore corner and was picking up some speed.
There were a couple of other cars heading out toward the highway, but Nancy
cut around them with a burst of speed.
     'Do you know what happened?' she asked.
     I shook my head. 'Just that the barrier is moving.'
     We came to the stop sign that guarded the highway, but Nancy didn't
even slow for it. There was no reason that she should, for there was no
traffic on the highway. The highway was cut off.
     She slewed the car out onto the broad slab of pavement and there, up
ahead of us, the eastbound lane was blocked by a mass of jam-packed cars.
And there, as well, was Gabe's truck, its trailer lying in the ditch, with
my car smashed underneath it, and its cab half canted in the air. Beyond the
truck other cars were tangled in the westbound lane, cars which apparently
had crossed the centre strip in an effort to get turned around, in the
process getting caught in another minor traffic jam before the barrier had
moved.
     The barrier was no longer there. You couldn't see, of course, whether
it was there or not, but up the road, a quarter mile or so, there was
evidence of it.
     Up there, a crowd of people was running wildly, fleeing from an
invisible force that advanced upon them. And behind the fleeing people a
long windrow of piled-up vegetation, including, in places, masses of
uprooted trees, marked the edge of the moving barrier. It stretched as far
as the eye could see, on either side of the road, and it seemed to have a
life of its own, rolling and tossing and slowly creeping forward, the masses
of trees tumbling awkwardly on their outstretched, roots and branches.
     The car rolled up to the traffic jam in the westbound lane and stopped.
Nancy turned off the ignition. In the silence one could hear the faint
rustling of that strange windrow that moved along the road, a small whisper
of sound punctuated now and then by the cracking and the popping of the
branches as the uprooted trees toppled in their unseemly tumbling.
     I got out of the car and walked around it and started down the road,
working my way through the tangle of the cars. As I came clear of them the
road stretched out before me and up the road the people still were running -
well, not running exactly, not the way they had been. They would run a ways
and then stand in little groups and look behind them, at the writhing
windrow, then would run a ways and stop to look again. Some of them didn't
run at all, but just kept plodding up the road at a steady walk.
     It was not only people. There was something else, a strange fluttering
in the air, a darting of dark bodies, a cloud of insects and of birds,
retreating before this inexorable force that moved like a wraith across the
surface of the land.
     The land was bare behind the barrier. There was nothing on it except
two leafless trees. And they, I thought - they would be left behind. For
they were lifeless things and for them the barrier had no meaning, for it
was only life that the barrier rejected. Although, if Len Streeter had been
right, then it was not all life, but a certain kind, or a certain size, or a
certain condition of life.
     But aside from the two dead trees, the ground lay bare.
     There was no grass upon it, not a single weed, not a bush or tree. All
that was green was gone.
     I stepped off the roadbed onto the shoulder and knelt down and ran my
fingers along the barren ground. It was not only bare; it was ploughed and
harrowed, as if some giant agricultural rig had gone over it and made it
ready for new seed. The soil, I realized, had been loosened by the uprooting
of its mat of vegetation. In all that ground, I knew, no single root
existed, no fragment of a root, down to the finest rootlet. The land had
been swept clean of everything that grew and all that once had grown here
was now a part of that fantastic windrow that was being swept along before
the barrier.
     Above me a dull rumble of thunder rippled in the sky and rolled along
the air. I glanced backward over my shoulder, and saw that the thunderstorm
which had been threatening all morning now was close upon us, but it was a
ragged storm, with wind-twisted clouds, broken and fragmented, fleeing
through the upper emptiness.
     'Nancy,' I said, but she did not answer.
     I got quickly to my feet and swung around. She had been right behind me
when I'd started through the traffic tangle, but now there was no sign of
her.
     I started back down the road to find her and as I did a blue sedan that
was over on the opposite shoulder rolled off down the shoulder and swung out
on the pavement - and there, behind the wheel, was Nancy. I knew then how
I'd lost her. She had looked among the cars until she had found one that was
not blocked by other cars and with the key still in the lock.
     The car came up beside me, moving slowly, and I trotted along to match
its speed. Through the half-open window came the sound of an excited
commentator on the radio. I got the door open and jumped in and slammed the
door behind me.
     '...called out the national guard and had officially informed
Washington. The first units will move out in another - no, here is word just
now that they have already moved out...'
     'That,' said Nancy, 'is us he's talking about.'
     I reached out and twisted the dial. '... just came in. The barrier is
moving! I repeat, the barrier is moving. There is no information how fast
it's moving or how much distance it has covered. But it is moving outward
from the village. The crowd that had gathered outside of it is fleeing
wildly from it. And here is more - the barrier is moving no faster than a
man may walk. It already has swept almost a mile...'
     And that was wrong, I thought, for it was now less than half a mile
from its starting point.
     '... question, of course, is will it stop? How far will it move? Is
there some way of stopping it? Can it keep on indefinitely; is there any end
to it?'
     'Brad,' Nancy said, 'do you think it will push everyone off the earth?
Everyone but the people here in Millville?'
     'I don't know,' I said, rather stupidly.
     'And if it does, where will it push them'? Where is there to go?'
     '... London and Berlin,' blared the radio speaker. 'Apparently the
Russian people have not as yet been told what is happening. There have been
no official statements. Not from anywhere. Undoubtedly this is something
about which the various governments may have some difficulty deciding if
there should be a statement. It would seem, at first thought, that here is a
situation which came about through no act of any man or any government. But
there is some speculation that this may be a testing of some new kind of
defence. Although it is difficult to imagine why, if it should be such, it
be tested in a place like Millvile. Ordinarily such tests would take place
in a military area and be conducted in the greatest secrecy.'
     The car had been moving slowly down the road all the time we'd been
listening to the radio and now we were no more than a hundred feet or so
behind the barrier. Ahead of us, on either side of the pavement, the great
windrow of vegetation inched itself forward, while further up the road the
people still retreated.
     I twisted around in the seat and glanced through the rear window, back
toward the traffic snarl. A crowd of people stood among the cars and out on
the pavement just beyond the cars. The people from the village had finally
arrived to watch the moving barrier.
     '...sweeping everything before it,' screamed the radio.
     I glanced around and we were almost at the barrier.
     'Careful there,' I warned. 'Don't run into it.'
     'I'll be careful,' said Nancy, just a bit too meekly.
     '... like a wind,' the announcer said, 'blowing a long line of grass
and trees and bushes steadily before it. Like a wind...'
     And there was a wind, first a preliminary gust that raised spinning
dust devils in the stripped and denuded soil behind the barrier, then a
solid wall of wind that slewed the car around and howled against the metal
and glass.
     It was the thunderstorm, I thought, that had stalked the land since
early morning. But there was no lightning and no thunder and when I craned
my neck to look out the windshield at the sky, there still were no more than
ragged clouds, the broken, fleeing tatters of a worn-out storm.
     The wind had swung the car around and now it was skidding down the
road, pushed by the roaring wind, and threatening to tip over. Nancy was
fighting the wheel, trying to bring the car around, to point it into the
direction of the wind.
     'Brad!' she shouted.
     But even as she shouted, the storm hit us with the hard, peppering
sound of raindrops splashing on the car.
     The car began to topple and this time I knew that it was going over,
that there was nothing in the world that could keep it from going over. But
suddenly it slammed into something and swung upright once again and in one
corner of my mind I knew that it had been shoved against the barrier by the
wind and that it was being held there.
     With one corner of my mind, for the greater part of it was filled with
astonishment at the strangest raindrops I had ever seen.
     They weren't raindrops, although they fell like raindrops, in drumming
sheets that filled the inside of the car with the rolling sound of thunder.
     'Hail,' Nancy shouted at me.
     But it wasn't hail.
     Little round, brown pellets hopped and pounded on the car's hood and
danced like crazy buckshot across the hard flatness of the pavement.
     'Seeds!' I shouted back. 'Those things out there are seeds!' It was no
regular storm. It was not the thunderstorm, for there was no thunder and the
storm had lost its punch many miles away. It was a storm of seeds driven by
a mighty wind that blew without regard to any earthly weather;
     There was, I told myself, in a flash of logic that was not, on the face
of it, very logical, no further need for the barrier to move. For it had
ploughed the ground, had ploughed and harrowed it and prepared it for the
seed, and then there'd been the sowing, and everything was over.
     The wind stopped and the last seed fell and we sat in a numbing
silence, with all the sound and fury gone out of the world. In the place of
sound and fury there was a chilling strangeness, as if someone or something
had changed all natural law around, so that seed fell from the sky like rain
and a wind blew out of nowhere.
     'Brad,' said Nancy, 'I think I'm beginning to get scared.'
     She reached out a hand and put it on my arm. Her fingers tightened,
hanging onto me.
     'It makes me mad,' she said, 'I've never been scared, never my life.
Never scared like this.'
      'It's all over now,' I said. 'The storm is ended and the barrier has
stopped moving. Everything's all right.'
     'It's not like that at all,' she told me. 'It's only just beginning.'
     A man was running up the road toward us, but he was the only one in
sight. All the other people who had been around the parked cars were no
longer there. They had run for cover, back to the village, probably, when
the blast of wind had come and the seeds had fallen.
     The running man, I saw, was Ed Adler, and he was shouting something at
us as he run.
     We got out of the car and walked around in front of it and stood there,
waiting for him.
     He came up to us, panting with his running.
     'Brad,' he gasped, 'maybe you don't know this, but Hiram and Tom
Preston are stirring up the people. They think you have something to do with
what's happening. Some talk about a phone or something.'
     'Why, that's crazy!' Nancy cried.
     'Sure it is,' said Ed, 'but the village is on edge. It wouldn't take
too much to get them thinking it. They're ready to think almost anything.
They need an explanation; they'll grab at anything. They won't stop to think
if it's right or wrong.'
     I asked him: 'What do you have in mind?'
     'You better hide out, Brad, until it all blows over. In another day or
two . . .'
     I shook my head. 'I have too many things to do.'
     'But, Brad...'
     'I didn't do it, Ed. I don't know what happened, but I didn't have a
thing to do with it.'
     'That don't make no difference.'
     'Yes, it does,' I said.
     'Hiram and Tom are saying they found these funny phones...'
     Nancy started to say something, but I jumped in ahead of her and cut
her off, so she didn't have a chance to say it. '
     'I know about those phones,' I said. 'Hiram told me all about them. Ed,
take my word for it. The phones are out of it. They are something else
entirely.'
     Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Nancy staring at me.
     'Forget about the phones,' I said.
     I hoped she'd understand and apparently she did, for she didn't say a
thing about the phones. I wasn't actually sure that she'd intended to, for I
had no idea if she knew about the phone in her father's study. But I
couldn't take a chance.
     'Brad,' warned Ed, 'you're walking into it.'
     'I can't run away,' I told him. 'I can't run somewhere and hide. Not
from anyone, especially not from a pair like Tom and Hiram.'
     He looked me up and down.
     'No, I guess you can't,' he said. 'Is there anything I can do?'
     'Maybe,' I said. 'You can see that Nancy gets home safely. I've got a
thing or two to do.'
     I looked at Nancy. She nodded at me. 'It's all right, Brad, but the
car's just down the road. I could drive you home.'
     'I'd better take a short cut. If Ed is right, there's less chance of
being seen.'
     'I'll stay with her,' said Ed, 'until she's inside the house.'
     Already, in two hour's time, I thought, it had come to this - to a
state of mind where one questioned the safety of a girl alone upon the
street.

        10

     Now, finally, I had to do a thing I had intended to do ever since this
morning - a thing I probably should have done last night - get in touch with
Alf. It was more important now than ever that I get in touch with him, for
in the back of my mind was a growing conviction that there must be some
connection between what was happening here in Millville and that strange
research project down in Mississippi.
     I reached a dead-end street and started walking down it. There was not
a soul in sight. Everyone who could either walk or ride would be down in the
business section.
     I got to worrying that maybe I'd not be able to locate Alf, that he
might have checked out of the motel when I failed to get there, or that he
might be out gawping at the barrier with a lot of other people.
     But there was no need to worry, for when I reached my house the phone
was ringing and Alf was on the line.
     'I've been trying for an hour to get you,' he said. 'I wondered how you
were.'
     'You know what happened, Alf?'
     He told me that he did. 'Some of it,' he said.
     'Minutes earlier,' I said, 'and I would have been with you instead of
penned up in the village. I must have hit the barrier when it first
appeared.'
     I went ahead and told him what had happened after I had hit the
barrier. Then I told him about the phones.
     'They told me they had a lot of readers. People who read books to
them...'
     'A way of getting information.'
     'I gathered that was it.'
     'Brad,' he said, 'I've got a terrible hunch.'
     'So have I,' I said.
     'Do you think this Greenbriar project...?'
     'That's what I was thinking, too.'
     I heard him drawing a deep breath, the air whistling in his teeth.'
     'It's not just Millville, then.'
     'Maybe a whole lot more than Millville.'
     'What are you going to do now, Brad?'
     'Go down into my garden and have a hard look at some flowers.'
     'Flowers?'
     'Alf,' I told him, 'it's a long, long story. I'll tell you later. Are
you staying on?'
     'Of course I am,' said All 'The greatest show on earth and me with a
ringside seat.'
     'I'll call you back in an hour or so.'
     'I'll stay close,' he promised. 'I'll be waiting for your call.'
     I put down the phone and stood there, trying to make some head or tail
of it. The flowers, somehow, were important, and so was Tupper Tyler, but
they were all mixed up together and there was no place one could start.
     I went out of the house and down into the garden by the greenhouse. The
trail that Tupper had left was still plain and I was considerably relieved,
for I had been afraid that the wind that brought the seeds might have blown
it away, that the flowers might have been so beaten and so twisted that the
trail could well be lost.
     I stood at the edge of the garden and looked around, as if I were
seeing the place for the first time in my life. It wasn't really a garden.
At one time it had been land on which we'd grown the stuff we sold, but when
I quit the greenhouse business I'd simply let it go wild and the flowers had
taken over. To one side stood the greenhouse, with its door hanging on the
broken hinges and most of the panes gone from the windows. And at one corner
of it stood the elm tree that had grown from seed - the one I'd been about
to pull up when my father stopped me.
     Tupper had talked wildly about flowers growing by the acre. All of
them, he said, had been purple flowers and he had been most emphatic that my
father should be told of them. The mystery voice, or one of the mystery
voices on the phone had been well informed about my father's greenhouse and
had asked if I still ran it. And there had been, less than an hour ago, a
perfect storm of seeds.
     All the little purple flower-heads with their monkey faces seemed to be
nodding at me as if at a secret joke and I jerked my gaze away from them to
stare up at the sky. Broken clouds still streamed across it, shutting out
the sun. Although, once the clouds were gone, the day would be a scorcher.
One could smell the heat in the very air.
     I moved out into the garden, following Tupper's trail. At the end of
the trail I stopped and told myself that it had been a witless thing - this
belief of mine that I would find something in this flower patch that would
make some sense.
     Tupper Tyler had disappeared ten years ago and he'd disappeared today
and how he'd managed it no man might ever know.
     And yet the idea still went on banging in my skull that Tupper was the
key to all this screwy business.
     Yet I couldn't, for the life of me, explain the logic of my thinking.
For Tupper wasn't the only one involved - if he was, in fact, involved.
There was Stiffy Grant as well. And I realized, with a start, that I had not
asked anyone how Stiffy might be doing.
     Doc Fabian's house was on the hill just above the greenhouse and I
could go up there and ask. Doc might not be home, of course, but I could
wait around a while and eventually he'd show up. At the moment there was
nothing else to do. And with Hiram and Tom Preston shooting off their
mouths, it might be a good idea not to be found at home.
     I had been standing at the end of Tupper's trail and now I took a step
beyond it, setting out for Doc's. But I never got to Doc's. I took that
single step and the sun came out and the houses went away. Doc's house and
all the other houses, and the trees as well, and the bushes and the grass.
Everything disappeared and there was nothing left but the purple flowers,
which covered everything, and a sun that was blazing out of a cloudless sky.

        11

     I had taken that one step and everything had happened. So now I took
another one to bring my feet together and I stood there, stiff and scared,
afraid to turn around afraid, perhaps, of what I'd see behind me. Although I
think I knew what I would see behind me. Just more purple flowers.
     For this, I knew, in one dim corner of my curdled mind, was the place
that Tupper had been telling me about.
     Tupper had come out of this place and he'd gone back to this place and
now I'd followed him.
     Nothing happened.
     And that was right, of course. For it seemed to me, somehow, that this
would be the sort of place where nothing ever happened.
     There were just the flowers and the sun blazing in the sky and there
was nothing else. There wasn't a breath of wind and there was no sound. But
there was a fragrance, the almost overpowering, cloying fragrance of all
those little blossoms with their monkey faces.
     At last I dared to move and I slowly turned around. And there was
nothing but the flowers.
     Millville had gone away somewhere, into some other world.
     Although that was wrong, I told myself. For somewhere, in its same old
world, there yet must be a Millville. It had not been Millville, but myself,
that had gone away. I had taken just one step and had walked clear out of
Millville into another place.
     Yet, while it was a different place, the terrain seemed to be identical
with the old terrain. I still was standing in the dip of ground that lay
behind my house and back of me the hill rose steeply to the now non-existent
street where Doc's house had stood and a half a mile away loomed the hill
where the Sherwood house should be.
     This, then, was Tupper's world. It was the world into which he had gone
ten years ago and again this morning. Which meant that, at this very moment,
he must still be here.
     And that meant, I told myself with a sudden rush of hope, that there
was a chance of getting out, of getting back to Millvile. For Tupper had
gotten back again and thus must know the way. Although, I realized, one
never could be sure. You never could be sure of anything with a dope like
Tupper Tyler.
     The first thing to do, of course, was find him. He could not be far
off. It might take a while, but I was fairly confident that I could track
him down.
     I walked slowly up the hill that, back in my home village, would have
taken me to Doc Fabian's place.
     I reached the top of the hill and stopped and there, below me, lay the
far sweep of land clothed by the purple flowers.
     The land looked strange, robbed of all its landmarks, naked of its
trees and roads and houses. But it lay, I saw, as it had lain. If there were
any differences, they were minor ones.
     There, to the east, was the wet and swampy land below the little knoll
where Stiffy's shack had stood - where Stiffy's shack still stood in another
time or place.
     What strange circumstances, or what odd combination of many circumstances, must occur, I wondered, to make it possible for a man to step
from one world to another.
     I stood, a stranger in an unknown land, with the perfume of the flowers
dogging not my nostrils only, but every pore of me, pressing in upon me, as
if the flowers themselves were rolling in great purple waves to bear me down
and bury me for all eternity. The world was quiet; it was the quietest place
I had ever been. There was no sound at all. And I realized that perhaps at
no time in my life had I ever known silence. Always there had been something
that had made some sort of noise - the chirring of a lone insect in the
quiet of a summer noon, or the rustle of a leaf. Even in the dead of night
there would have been the creaking of the timbers in the house, the murmur
of the furnace, the slight keening of a wind that ran along the eaves.
     But there was silence here. There was no sound at all. There was no
sound, I knew, because there was nothing that could make a sound. There were
no trees or bushes; there were no birds or insects. There was nothing here
but the flowers and the soil in which they grew.
     A silence and the emptiness that held the silence in its hand, and the
purpleness that ran to the far horizon to meet the burnished, pale-blue
brightness of a summer sky.
     Now, for the first time, I felt panic stalking me - not a big and burly
panic that would send one fleeing, howling as he fled, but a little, sneaky
panic that circled all about me, like a pesky, yapping dog, bouncing on its
pipestem legs, waiting for a chance to sink its needle teeth in me. Nothing
one could fight, nothing one could stand against - a little yapping panic
that set the nerves on edge.
     There was no fear of danger, for there was no danger. One could see
with half an eye that there was no danger. But there was, perhaps worse than
any danger, the silence and the loneliness and the sameness and the not
knowing where you were.
     Down the slope was the wet and swampy area where Stiffy's shack should
be, and there, a little farther off, the silver track of river that ran at
the edge of town. And at the place where the river bent toward the south, a
plume of smoke rose daintily against the blue wash of the sky - so faint and
far a trickle that one could barely make it out.
     'Tupper!' I shouted, running down the slope, glad of a chance to run,
of some reason I should run, for I had been standing, determined not to run,
determined not to allow the little yapping panic to force me into running,
and all the time I'd stood there I had ached to run.
     I crossed the little ridge that hid the river and the camp lay there
before me - a tiny hut of crudely woven branches, a garden full of growing
things, and all along the river bank little straggling, dying trees, with
most of their branches dead and bearing only a few tassels of green leaves
at their very tops.
     A small campfire burned in front of the hut and squatting by the fire
was Tupper. He wore the shirt and trousers I had given him and he still had
the outrageous hat perched on his head.
     'Tupper!' I shouted and he rose and came gravely up the slope to meet
me. He wiped off his chin and held out his hand in greeting. It still was
wet with slobber, but I didn't mind.
     Tupper wasn't much, but he was another human.
     'Glad you could make it, Brad,' he said. 'Glad you could drop over.'
     As if I'd been dropping over every day, for years.
     'Nice place you have,' I said.
     'They did it all for me,' he said, with a show of pride. 'The Flowers
fixed it up for me. It wasn't like this to start with, but they fixed it up
for me. They have been good to me.'
     'Yes, they have,' I said.
     I didn't know what it was all about, but I went along. I had to go
along. There was just a chance that Tupper could get me back to Millville.
     'They're the best friends I have,' said Tupper, slobbering in his
happiness. 'That is, except for you and your papa. Until I found the
Flowers, you and your papa were the only friends I had. All the rest of them
just made fun of me. I let on I didn't know that they were making fun, but I
knew they were and I didn't like it.'
     'They weren't really unkind,' I assured him. 'They really didn't mean
what they said or did. They were only being thoughtless.'
     'They shouldn't have done it,' Tupper insisted. 'You never made any fun
of me. I like you because you never made any fun of me.'
     And he was right, of course. I'd not made fun of him. But not because I
hadn't wanted to at times; there were times when I could have killed him.
But my father had taken me off to the side one day and warned me that if he
ever caught me making fun of Tupper, like the other kids, he would warm my
bottom.'
     'This is the place you were telling me about,' I said. 'The place with
all the flowers.'
     He grinned delightedly, drooling from both corners of his mouth 'Ain't
it nice?' he said.
     We had been walking down the slope together and now we reached the
fire. A crude clay pot was standing in the ashes and there was something
bubbling in it.
     'You'll stay and eat with me,' invited Tupper. 'Please, Brad, say
you'll stay and eat with me. It's been so long since I've had anyone who
would eat with me.'
     Weak tears were running down his cheeks at the thought of how long it
had been since he'd had someone who would stay and eat with him.
     'I got corn and potatoes roasting in the coals,' he said, 'and I got
peas and beans and carrots all cooked up together. That's them in the pot.
There isn't any meat. You don't mind, do you, if there isn't any meat?'
     'Not at all,' I told him.
     'I miss meat something dreadful,' he confided. 'But they can't do
anything about it. They can't turn themselves into animals.'
     'They?' I asked.
     'The Flowers,' he said, and the way he said it, he made them a proper
noun. 'They can turn themselves into anything at all - plant things, that
is. But they can't make themselves into things like pigs or rabbits. I never
asked them to. That is, I mean I never asked them twice. I asked them once
and they explained to me. I never asked again, for they've done a lot of
things for me and I am grateful to them.'
     'They explained to you? You mean you talk with them.'
     'All the time,' said Tupper.
     He got down on his hands and knees and crawled into the hut, scrabbling
around for something, with his back end sticking out, like a busy dog
digging out a woodchuck.
     He backed out and he brought with him a couple of crude pottery plates,
lopsided and uneven. He put them down upon the ground and laid on each of
them a spoon carved out of wood.
     'Made them myself,' he told me. 'Found some clay down in the river bank
and at first I couldn't seem to do it, but then they found out for me
and...'
     'The Flowers found out for you?'
     'Sure, the Flowers. They do everything for me.'
     'And the spoons?'
     'Used a piece of stone. Flint, I guess. Had a sharp edge on it. Nothing
like a knife, but it did the job. Took a long time, though.'
     I nodded.
     'But that's all right,' he said. 'I had a lot of time.'
     He did a mopping job and wiped his hands meticulously on his trouser
seat.
     'They grew flax for me,' he said, 'so I could make some clothes. But I
couldn't get the hang of it. They told me and they told me, but I couldn't
do it. So they finally quit. I went around without no clothes for quite a
spell. Except for this hat,' he said. 'I did that myself, without no help at
all. They didn't even tell me, I figured it all out and did it by myself.
Afterwards they told me that I'd done real good.'
     'They were right,' I said. 'It's magnificent.' 'You really think so,
Brad?'
     'Of course I do,' I said.
     'I'm glad to hear you say so, Brad. I'm kind of proud of it. It's the
first thing in my life I ever did alone, without no one telling me.'
     'These flowers of yours...'
     'They ain't my flowers,' said Tupper, sharply.
     'You say these flowers can turn themselves into anything they want to.
You mean they turned themselves into garden stuff for you.'
     'They can turn themselves into any kind of plants. All I do is ask
them.'
     'Then, if they can be anything they want to be, why are they all
flowers?'
     'They have to be something, don't they?' Tupper demanded, rather
heatedly. 'They might as well be flowers.'
     'Well, yes,' I said. 'I suppose they might.'
     He raked two ears of corn out of the coals and a couple of potatoes. He
used a pot-lifter that looked as if it were fashioned out of bark to get the
pot off the fire. He dumped the cooked vegetables that were in it out onto
the plates.
     'And the trees?' I asked.
     'Oh, them are things they changed themselves into. I needed them for
wood. There wasn't any wood to start with and I couldn't do no cooking and I
told them how it was. So they made the trees and they made them special for
me. They grow fast and die so that I can break branches off and have dry
wood for fire. Slow burning, though, not like ordinary dry wood. And that's
good, for I have to keep a fire burning all the time. I had a pocket full of
matches when I came here, but I haven't had any for a long, long time.'
     I remembered when he spoke about the pocket full of matches how
entranced he had always been with fire. He always carried matches with him
and he'd sit quietly by himself and light match after match, letting each
burn down until it scorched his fingers, happy with the sight of flame. A
lot of people had been afraid that he might bunt some building down, but he
never did. He was just a little jerk who liked the sight of fire.
     'I haven't any salt; said Tupper. 'The stuff may taste funny to you.
I've got used to it.'
     'But you eat vegetables all the time. You need salt for that kind of
stuff'
     'The Flowers say I don't. They say they put things into the vegetables
that takes the place of salt. Not that you can taste it, but it gives you
the things you need just the same as salt. They studied me to find out what
my body needed and they put in a lot of stuff they said I needed. And just
down the river I have an orchard full of fruit. And I have raspberries and
strawberries that bear almost all the time.'
     I couldn't rightly understand what fruit had to do with the problem of
nutrition if the Flowers could do all he said they could, but I let the
matter stand. One never got anywhere trying to get Tupper straightened out.
If you tried to reason with him, you just made matters worse.
     'We might as well sit down,' said Tupper, 'and get started on this.'
     I sat down on the ground and he handed me a plate, then sat down
opposite me and took the other plate.
     I was hungry and the saltless food didn't go so badly. Flat, of course,
and tasting just a little strange, but it was all right. It took away the
hunger.
     'You like it here? I asked.
     'It is home to me,' said Tupper, solemnly. 'It is where my friends
are.'
     'You don't have anything,' I said. 'You don't have an axe or knife. You
don't have a pot or pan. And there is no one you can turn to. What if you
got sick?'
     Tupper quit wolfing down his food and stared at me, as if I were the
crazy one.
     'I don't need any of those things,' he said. 'I make my dishes out of
clay. I can break off the branches with my hands and I don't need an axe. I
don't need to hoe the garden. There aren't ever any weeds. I don't even need
to plant it. It's always there. While I use up one row of stuff, another row
is growing. And if I got sick, the Flowers would take care of me. They told
me they would.'
     'OK,' I said. 'OK.'
     He went back to his eating. It was a terrible sight to watch. But he
was right about the garden. Now that he had mentioned it, I could see that
it wasn't cultivated. There were rows of growing vegetables - long, neat
rows without the sign of ever being hoed and without a single weed. And
that, of course, was the way it would be, for no weed would dare to grow
here. There was nothing that could grow here except the Flowers themselves,
or the things into which the Flowers had turned themselves, like the
vegetables and trees.
     The garden was a perfect garden. There were no stunted plants and no
disease or blight. The tomatoes, hanging on the vines, were an even red and
all were perfect globes. The corn stood straight and tall.
     'You cooked enough for two,' I said. 'Did you know that I was coming?'
     For I was fast reaching the point where I'd have believed almost
anything. It was just possible, I told myself that he (or the Flowers) had
known that I was coming.
     'I always cook enough for two,' he told me. 'There never is no telling
when someone might drop in.'
     'But no one ever has?'
     'You're the first,' he said. 'I'm glad that you could come.'
      I wondered if time had any meaning for him. Sometimes it seemed it
didn't. And yet he had wept weak tears because it had been so long since
anyone had broken bread with him.
     We ate in silence for a while and then I took a chance. I'd humoured
him long enough and it was time to ask some questions.
     'Where is this place?' I asked. 'What kind of place is it? And if you
want to get out of it, to get back home, how do you go about it?
     I didn't mention the fact that he had gotten out of it and returned to
Millville. I sensed it might be something he would resent, for he'd been in
a hurry to get back again - as if he'd broken some sort of rule or
regulation and was anxious to return before anyone found out.
     Carefully Tupper laid his plate on the ground a