the turn. The first car was stopping at my house, skidding on the pavement
as the brakes spun it to a halt.
‘Brad!’ said the soft and fearful voice. ‘Are you out there, Brad?’
‘Nancy,’ I said. ‘Nancy, over here.’
There was something wrong, I knew, something terribly wrong. There was
a tenseness in her voice, as if she were speaking through a haze of terror.
And there was a wrongness, too, about those speeding cars stopping at the
house.
‘I thought I heard you talking,’ Nancy said, ‘but I couldn’t see you.
You weren’t in the house and…’
A man was running around the back of the house, a dark shadow outlined
briefly by the street lamp at the corner. Out in front were other men; I
could hear their running and the angry mumble of them.
‘Brad,’ said Nancy.
‘Hold it,’ I cautioned. ‘There’s something wrong.’
I could see her now. She was stumbling toward me through the darkness.
Up by the house a voice yelled: ‘We know you’re in there, Carter! We’re
coming in to get you if you don’t come out!’
I turned and ran toward Nancy and caught her in my arms. She was
shivering.
‘Those men,’ she said.
‘Hiram and his pals,’ I said.
Glass crashed and a streak of fire went arcing through the night.
‘Now, damn it,’ someone yelled, triumphantly, ‘maybe you’ll come out.’
‘Run,’ I said to Nancy. ‘Up the hill. Get in among the trees…’
‘It’s Stiffy,’ she whispered back. ‘I saw him and he sent me…’
A sudden glow of fire leaped up inside the house. The windows in the
dining-room flared like gleaming eyes. And in the light cast by the flame I
saw the dark figures gambolling, screaming now in a mindless frenzy.
Nancy turned and ran and I pelted after her, and behind us a voice
boomed above the bawling of the mob.
‘There he goes!’ the voice shouted. ‘Down there in the garden!’
Something caught my foot and tripped me and I fell, sprawling among the
money bushes. The scraggly branches raked across my face and clawed at my
clothes as I struggled to my feet.
A tongue of whipping flame leaped above the house, funnelled through
the hole the time machine had punched in the roof, and the windows all were
glowing now. In the sudden silence I could hear the sucking roar of fire
eating through the structure.
They were running down the slope toward the garden a silent group of
men. The pounding of their feet and the ugly gasping of their breath came
across the space between us.
I stooped and ran my hand along the ground and in the darkness found
the thing that tripped me. My fingers closed about it and I brought it up, a
four foot length of two-by-four, old and beginning to rot along its edges,
but still sound in the core.
A club, I thought, and this was the end of it. But one of them would
die perhaps two of them while they were killing me.
‘Run!’ I screamed at Nancy, knowing she was out there somewhere,
although I could not see her.
There was just one thing left, I told myself one thing more that I must
do. And that was to get Hiram Martin with the club before the mob closed
over me.
They had reached the bottom of the slope and were charging across the
flat ground of the garden, with Hiram in the lead. I stood and waited for
them, with the club half raised, watching Hiram run toward me, with the
white gash of his teeth shining in the darkness of his face.
Right between the eyes, I told myself, and split his skull wide open.
And after that get another of them if there were time to do it.
The fire was roaring now, racing through the dryness of the house, and
even where I stood the heat reached out to touch me.
The men were closing in and I raised the club a little higher, working
my fingers to get a better grip upon it.
But in that last instant before they came within my reach, they skidded
to a milling halt, some of them half turning to run back up the slope, the
others simply staring, with their mouths wide open in astonishment and
horror. Staring, not at me, but at something that was beyond me.
Then they broke and ran, back toward the slope, and above the roaring
of the burning house, I could hear their bellowing – like stampeded cattle
racing before a prairie fire, bawling out their terror as they ran.
I swung around to look behind me and there stood those other things
from that other world, their ebon hides gleaming in the flicker of the
firelight, their silver plumes stirring gently in the breeze. And as they
moved toward me, they twittered in their weird bird-song.
My God, I thought, they couldn’t wait! They came a little early so they
wouldn’t miss a single tremor of this terror-stricken place.
And not only on this night, but on other nights to come, rolling back
the time to this present instant. A new place for them to stand and wait for
it to commence, a new ghost house with gaping windows through which they’d
glimpse the awfulness of another earth.
They were moving toward me and I was standing there with the club
gripped in my hands and there was the smell of purpleness again and a
soundless voice I recognized.
Go back, the voice said. Go back. You’ve come too soon. This world
isn’t open.
Someone was calling from far away, the call lest in the thundering and
the crackling of the fire and the high, excited, liquid trilling of these
ghouls from the purple world of Tupper Tyler.
Go back, said the elm tree, and its voiceless words cracked like a
snapped whiplash.
And they were going back – or, at least, they were disappearing,
melting into some strange darkness that was blacker than the night.
One elm tree that talked, I thought, and how many other trees? How much
of this place still was Millville and how much purple world? I lifted my
head so that I could see the treetops that rimmed the garden and they were
there, ghosts against the sky, fluttering in some strange wind that blew
from an unknown quarter. Fluttering – or were they talking, too? The old,
dumb, stupid trees of earth, or a different kind of tree from a different
earth?
We’d never know, I told myself, and perhaps it did not matter, for from
the very start we’d never had a chance. We were licked before we started. We
had been lost on that long-gone day when my father brought home the purple
flowers.
From far off someone was calling and the name was mine.
I dropped the two-by-four and started across the garden, wondering who
it was. Not Nancy, but someone that I knew.
Nancy came running down the hill. ‘Hurry, Brad,’ she called.
‘Where were you?’ I asked. ‘What’s going on?’
‘It’s Stuffy. I told you it was Stuffy. He’s waiting at the barrier. He
sneaked through the guards. He says he has to see you.’
‘But Stiffy…’
‘He’s here, I tell you. And he wants to talk with you. No one else will
do.’
She turned and trotted up the hill and I lumbered after her. We went
through Doc’s yard and across the street and through another yard and there,
just ahead of us, I knew, was the barrier.
A gnome-like figure rose from the ground.
‘That you, lad?’ he asked.
I hunkered down at the edge of the barrier and stared across at him.
‘Yes, it’s me,’ I said, ‘but you…’
‘Later. We haven’t got much time. The guards know I got through the
lines. They’re hunting for me.’
‘What do you want?’ I asked.
‘Not what I want,’ he said. What everybody wants. Something that you
need. You’re in a jam.’
‘Everyone’s in a jam,’ I said.
‘That’s what I mean,’ said Stuffy. ‘Some damn fool in the Pentagon is
set to drop a bomb. I heard some of the ruckus on a car radio when I was
sneaking through. Just a snatch of it,
‘So, all right,’ I said. ‘The human race is sunk.’
‘Not sunk,’ insisted Stuffy. ‘I tell you there’s a way. If Washington
just understood, if…’
‘If you know a way,’ I asked, ‘why waste time in reaching me? You could
have told…’
‘Who would I tell?’ asked Stuffy. ‘Who would believe me, even if I
told? I’m just a lousy bum and I ran off from that hospital and…’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘All right.’
‘You were the man to tell,’ said Stiffy. ‘You’re accredited, it seems
like. Someone will listen to you. You can get in touch with someone and
they’ll listen to you.’
‘If it was good enough,’ I said.