And there was this other thing: How had it gotten there to start with?
I was all tied up in knots with my worrying when Dobby came trundling around the corner of the house and sat down on the steps beside me.
“Lots of extraordinary things going on,” he said. “I hear you have an agate boulder in the garden.”
“That’s what Tommy Henderson tells me. I suppose that he should know. Billy tells me he’s a rockhound.”
Dobby scratched at his whiskers. “Great things, hobbies,” he said. “Especially for kids. They learn a lot from them,”
“Yeah,” I said without enthusiasm.
“Your son brought me an insect for identification after breakfast this morning.”
“I told him not to bother you.”
“I am glad he brought it,” Dobby said. “It was one I’d never seen before.”
“It looked like a ladybug.”
“Yes,” Dobby agreed, “there is _some_ resemblance. But I’m not entirely certain–well, fact of the matter is, I’m not even sure that it is an insect. To tell the truth, it resembles a turtle in many ways more than it does an insect. There is an utter lack of bodily segmentation, such as you’d find in any insect. The exoskeleton is extremely hard and the head and legs are retractible and it has no antennae.”
He shook his head in some perplexity. “I can’t be sure, of course. Much more extensive examination would be necessary before an attempt could be made at classifying it You didn’t happen to find any more of them, did your’
“I saw one running on the floor not so long ago.”
“Would you mind, next time you see one, grabbing it for me?”
“Not at all,” I said. “I’ll try to get you one.”
I kept my word. After he left I went down into the basement to look up a bug for him. I saw several of them, but couldn’t catch a one. I gave up in disgust.
After supper, Arthur Belsen came popping from across the alley. He was in a dither, but that was not unusual. He is a birdlike, nervous man and it doesn’t take too much to get him all upset.
“I hear that boulder in your garden is an agate,” he said to me. “What do you intend to do with it?”
“Why, I don’t know. Sell it, I suppose, if anyone wants to buy it.”
“It might be valuable,” said Belsen. “You can’t just leave it out there. Someone might come along and pinch it.”
“Guess there’s nothing else to do,” I told him. “I certainly can’t move it and I’m not going to sit up all night to guard it.”
“You don’t need to sit up all night,” said Belsen. “I can fix it for you. We can rig up a nest of trip wires and hook up an alarm.”
I wasn’t too impressed and tried to discourage him, but he was like a beagle on a rabbit trail. He went back to his basement and came out with a batch of wire and a kit of tools and we fell to work.
We worked until almost bedtime getting the wires rigged up and an alarm bell installed just inside the kitchen door. Helen took a sour view of it. She didn’t like the idea of messing up her kitchen, agate or no agate.
In the middle of the night the clamor of the bell jerked me out of bed, wondering what all the racket was. Then I remembered and went rushing for the stairs. On the third step from the bottom I stepped on something that rolled beneath my foot and sent me pitching down the stairs into the living room. I fell sprawling and skidded into a lamp, which landed on top and me and hit me on the head. I brought up against a chair, tangled with the lamp.
A marble, I thought. That damn kid has been strewing marbles all over the house again! He’s too big for that. He knows better than to leave marbles on the stairs.
In the bright moonlight pouring through the picture window I saw the marble and it was moving rapidly– _not rolling, moving!_ And there were a lot of other marbles, racing across the floor. Sparkling golden marbles running in the moonlight.
And that wasn’t all–in the center of the living room stood the refrigerator!
The alarm bell was still clanging loudly and I picked myself up and got loose from the lamp and rushed for the kitchen door. Behind me I heard Helen yelling at me from the landing.
I got the door open and went racing in bare feet through the dew-soaked grass around the corner of the house.
A puzzled dog was standing by the boulder. He had managed to get one foot caught in one of Belsen’s silly wires and he was standing there, three-legged, trying to get loose.
I yelled at him and bent over, scrabbling in the grass, trying to find something I could throw at him. He made a sudden lurch and freed himself. He took off up the alley, ears flapping in the breeze.
Behind me the clanging bell fell silent.
I turned around and trailed back to the house, feeling like a fool.
I suddenly remembered that I had seen the refrigerator standing in the living room. But, I told myself, that must be wrong. The refrigerator was in the kitchen and no one would have moved it. There was, first of all, no reason for a refrigerator to be in the living room; its place was in the kitchen. No one would have wanted to move it, and even if they did, they’d have made noise enough to wake the house if they’d tried to do it.
I was imagining things, I told myself. The boulder and the bugs had got me all upset and I was seeing things.
But I wasn’t.
The refrigerator still stood in the center of the living room. The plug had been pulled out of the outlet and the cord trailed across the floor. A puddle of water from the slowly-thawing box had soaked into the carpet.
“It’s ruining the carpet!” Helen shrieked at me, standing in a corner and staring at the errant refrigerator. “And the food will all be spoiled and…”
Billy came stumbling down the stairs, still half asleep.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
I almost told him about the bugs I’d seen running in the house, but caught myself in time. There was no use upsetting Helen any more than she was right then.
“Let’s get that box back where it belongs,” I suggested, as matter-of-factly as I could. “The three of us can do it.”
We tugged and shoved and hauled and lifted and got it back in its proper place and plugged it in again. Helen found some rags and started to mop up the sopping carpet.
“Was there something at the boulder, Dad?” asked Billy.
“A dog,” I told him. “Nothing but a dog.”
“I was against it–from the start,” declared Helen, on her knees, angrily mopping the carpet. “It was a lot of foolishness. No one would have stolen the boulder. It isn’t something you can just pick up and carry off. That Arthur Belsen’s crazy.”
“I agree with you,” I told her, ruefully. “But he is a conscientious sort of fellow and a determined cuss and he thinks in terms of gadgets…”
“We won’t get a wink of sleep,” she said. “We’ll be up a dozen times a night, chasing off stray dogs and cats. And I don’t believe the boulder is an agate. All we have to go on is Tommy Henderson.”
“Tommy is a rockhound,” Billy told her, staunchly defending his pal. “He knows an agate when he sees one. He’s got a big shoe box full of ones he’s found.”
And here we were, I thought, arguing about the boulder, when the thing that should most concern us–the happening with the most brain-twisting implications–was the refrigerator.
And a thought came to me–a floating, random thought that came bumbling out of nowhere and glanced against my mind.
I shivered at the thought and it came back again and burrowed into me and I was stuck with it:
_What if there was some connection between the refrigerator and the bugs?_
Helen got up from the floor. “There,” she said accusingly, “that is the best I can do. I hope the carpet isn’t ruined.”
But a bug, I told myself–no bug could move a refrigerator. No bug, nor a thousand bugs. And what was more and final, no bug would want to move one. No bug would care whether a refrigerator was in the living room or kitchen.
Helen was very businesslike. She spread the wet cloth out on the sink to dry. She went into the living room and turned out the lights.
“We might as well get back to bed,” she said. “If we are lucky, we can get some sleep.”