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 draw in 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 Alf. “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 Millville. 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 t
he 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 clogging 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 o
ut 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 potlifter 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 burn some building down, but he never did. He was just a little jerk who liked the sight of fire.