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