Bobby turned, startled by the voice and shocked by the sound of that word coming out of a woman’s mouth. It was Alanna Files. The door to the living-room area behind the desk was just swinging shut behind her. Tonight she was wearing a white silk blouse that showed her shoulders — pretty shoulders, creamy-white and as round as breasts — and the top of her prodigious bosom. Below the white blouse were the largest pair of red slacks Bobby had ever seen. Yesterday, Alanna had been kind, smiling . . . almost laughing at him, in fact, although in a way Bobby hadn’t minded. Tonight she looked scared to death.
‘I’m sorry . . . I know I’m not supposed to be in here, but I need to find my friend Ted and I thought . . . thought that . . . ‘ He heard his voice shrinking like a balloon that’s been let loose to fly around the room.
Something was horribly wrong. It was like a dream he sometimes had where he was at his desk studying spelling or science or just reading a story and everyone started laughing at him and he realized he had forgotten to put his pants on before coming to school, he was sitting at his desk with everything hanging out for everyone to look at, girls and teachers and just everyone.
The beat of the bells in the gameroom hadn’t completely quit, but it had slowed down. The flood of conversation and laughter from the bar had dried up almost entirely. The click of pool and billiard balls had ceased. Bobby looked around, feeling those snakes in his stomach again.
They weren’t all looking at him, but most were. Old Gee was staring with eyes that looked like holes burned in dirty paper. And although the window in Bobby’s mind was almost opaque now — soaped over — he felt that a lot of the people in here had sort of been expecting him. He doubted if they knew it, and even if they did they wouldn’t know why.
They were kind of asleep, like the people of Midwich. The low men had been in. The low men had —
‘Get out, Randy,’ Alanna said in a dry little whisper. In her distress she had called Bobby by his father’s name. ‘Get out while you still can.’
Old Gee had slid out of the shoeshine chair. His wrinkled seersucker jacket caught on one of the foot-pedestals and tore as he started forward, but he paid no attention as the silk lining floated down beside his knee like a toy parachute. His eyes looked more like burned holes than ever. ‘Get him,’ Old Gee said in a wavery voice. ‘Get that kid.’
Bobby had seen enough. There was no help here. He scrambled for the door and tore it open. Behind him he had the sense of people starting to move, but slowly. Too slowly.
Bobby Garfield ran out into the night.
He ran almost two full blocks before a stitch in his side forced him to first slow down, then stop. No one was following and that was good, but if Ted went into The Corner Pocket to collect his money he was finished, done, kaput. It wasn’t just the low men he had to worry about; now there was Old Gee and the rest of them to worry about, too, and Ted didn’t know it. The question was, what could Bobby do about it?
He looked around and saw the storefronts were gone; he’d come to an area of warehouses.
They loomed like giant faces from which most of the features had been erased. There was a smell of fish and sawdust and some vague rotted perfume that might have been old meat.
There was nothing he could do about it. He was just a kid and it was out of his hands.
Bobby realized that, but he also realized he couldn’t let Ted walk into The Corner Pocket
without at least trying to warn him. There was nothing Hardy Boys-heroic about this, either; he simply couldn’t leave without making the effort. And it was his mother who had put him in this position. His own mother.
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