“Come on,” I yelled at her, running for the door that led onto the porch.
The rest of them were grouped outside, between the porch and hedge, staring up into the sky, where a light winked off and on, going very rapidly.
I glanced at the roof and saw the hole the thing had made, edged by the ragged, broken shingles that had been displaced when the machine broke through.
“There it goes,” said Gerald Sherwood, standing at my side. “I wonder what it is.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “They slipped one over on me. They played me for a fool.”
I was shaken up and angry, and considerably ashamed. They had used me back there in that other world. They had fooled me into carrying back to my own world something they couldn’t get there by themselves.
There was no way of knowing what it was meant to do, although in a little while, I feared, we would all find out.
Hiram turned to me in disgust and anger. “You’ve done it now,” he blurted. “Don’t tell us you didn’t mean to do it, don’t pretend you don’t know what it is. Whatever may be out there, you’re hand in glove with them.”
I didn’t try to answer him. There was no way I could.
Hiram took a step toward me.
“Cut it out!” cried Higgy. “Don’t lay a hand on him.”
“We ought to shake it out of him,” yelled Hiram. “If we found out what it was, then we might be able…”
“I said cut it out,” said Higgy.
“I’ve had about enough of you,” I said to Hiram. “I’ve had enough of you all your whole damn life. All I want from you is that phone of mine. And I want it fast.”
“Why, you little squirt!” Hiram bellowed, and he took another step toward me.
Higgy hauled off and kicked him in the shin. “God damn it,” Higgy said, “I said for you to stop it.”
Hiram jigged on one leg, lifting up the other so he could rub his shin.
“Mayor,” he complained, “you shouldn’t have done that.”
“Go and get him his phone,” Tom Preston said. “Let him have it back. Then he can call them up and report how good a job he did.”
I wanted to clobber all three of them, especially Hiram and Tom Preston. But, of course, I knew I couldn’t. Hiram had beaten me often enough when we were kids for me to know I couldn’t.
Higgy grabbed hold of Hiram and tugged him toward the gate. Hiram limped a little as the mayor led him off. Tom Preston held the gate for them and then the three of them went stalking up the street, never looking back.
And now I noticed that the rest had left as well—all of them except Father Flanagan and Gerald Sherwood, and Nancy, standing on the porch. The priest was standing to one side and when I looked at him, he made an apologetic gesture.
“Don’t blame them,” he said, “for leaving. They were embarrassed and uneasy. They took their chance to get away.”
“And you?” I asked. “You’re not embarrassed?”
“Why, not at all,” he told me. “Although I am a bit uneasy. The whole thing, I don’t mind telling you, has a whiff of heresy about it.”
“Next,” I said, bitterly, “you’ll be telling me you think I told the truth.”
“I had my doubts,” he said, “and I’m not entirely rid of them. But that hole in your roof is a powerful argument against wholesale skepticism. And I do not hold with the modern cynicism that seems so fashionable. There is still, I think, much room in the world today for a dash of mysticism.”
I could have told him it wasn’t mysticism, that the other world had been a solid, factual world, that the stars and sun and moon had shown there, that I had walked its soil and drunk its water, that I had breathed its air and that even now I had its dirt beneath my fingernails from having dug a human skull from the slope above the stream.
“The others will be back,” said Father Flanagan. “They had to get away for a little time to think, to get a chance to digest some of this evidence. It was too much to handle in one gulp. They will be back, and so will I, but at the moment I have a mass to think of.”
A gang of boys came running down the street. They stopped a half a block away and pointed at the roof. They milled around and pushed one another playfully and hollered.
The first edge of the sun had come above the horizon and the trees were the burnished green of summer.
I gestured at the boys. “The word has gotten out,” I said. “In another thirty minutes we’ll have everyone in town out in the street, gawking at the roof.”
17
The crowd outside had grown.
No one was doing anything. They just stood there and looked, gaping at the hole in the roof, and talking quietly among themselves—not screaming, not shouting, but talking, as if they knew something else was about to happen and were passing away the time, waiting for it to happen.
Sherwood kept pacing up and down the floor.
“Gibbs should be phoning soon,” he said. “I don’t know what has happened to him. He should have called by now.”
“Maybe,” Nancy said, “he got held up—maybe his plane was late. Maybe there was trouble on the road.”
I stood at the window watching the crowd. I knew almost all of them. They were friends and neighbors and there was not a thing to stop them, if they wanted to, from coming up the walk and knocking at the door and coming in to see me. But now, instead, they stood outside and watched and waited. It was, I thought, as if the house were a cage and I was some new, strange animal from some far-off land.
Twenty-four hours ago I had been another villager, a man who had lived and grown up with those people watching in the street. But now I was a freak, an oddity—perhaps, in the minds of some of them, a sinister figure that threatened, if not their lives, their comfort and their peace of mind.
For this village could never be the same again—and perhaps the world could never be the same again. For even if the barrier now should disappear and the Flowers withdraw their attention from our Earth, we still would have been shaken from the comfortable little rut which assumed that life as we knew it was the only kind of life and that our road of knowledge was the only one that was broad and straight and paved.
There had been ogres in the past, but finally the ogres had been banished. The trolls and ghouls and imps and all the others of the tribe had been pushed out of our lives, for they could survive only on the misty shores of ignorance and in the land of superstition. Now, I thought, we’d know an ignorance again (but a different kind of ignorance) and superstition, too, for superstition fed upon the lack of knowledge. With this hint of another world—even if its denizens should decide not to flaunt themselves, even if we should find a way to stop them—the trolls and ghouls and goblins would be back with us again. There’d be chimney corner gossip of this other place and a frantic, desperate search to rationalize the implied horror of its vast and unknown reaches, and out of this very search would rise a horror greater than any the other world could hold. We’d be afraid, as we had been before, of the darkness that lay beyond the little circle of our campfire.
There were more people in the street; they kept coming all the time. There was Pappy Andrews, cracking his cane upon the sidewalk, and Grandma Jones, with her sunbonnet socked upon her head, and Charley Hutton, who owned the Happy Hollow tavern. Bill Donovan, the garbage man, was in the front ranks of the crowd, but I didn’t see his wife, and I wondered if Myrt and Jake had come to get the kids. And just as big and mouthy as if he’d lived in Millville all his life and known these folks from babyhood, was Gabe Thomas, the trucker who, after me, had been the first man to find out about the barrier.
Someone stirred beside me and I saw that it was Nancy. I knew now that she had been standing there for some little time.
“Look at them,” I said. “It’s a holiday for them. Any minute now the parade will be along.”
“They’re just ordinary people,” Nancy said. “You can’t expect too much of them. Brad, I’m afraid you do expect too much of them
. You even expected that the men who were here would take what you told them at face value, immediately and unquestioningly.”
“Your father did,” I said.
“Father’s different. He’s not an ordinary man. And, besides, he had some prior knowledge, he had a little warning. He had one of those telephones. He knew a little bit about it.”
“Some,” I said. “Not much.”
“I haven’t talked with him. There’s been no chance for us to talk. And I couldn’t ask him in front of all those people. But I know that he’s involved. Is it dangerous, Brad?”
“I don’t think so. Not from out there or back there or wherever that other world may be. No danger from the alien world—not now, not yet. Any danger that we have to face lies in this world of ours. We have a decision we must make and it has to be the right one.”
“How can we tell,” she asked, “what is the right decision? We have no precedent.”
And that was it, of course, I thought. There was no way in which a decision—any decision—could be justified.
There was a shouting from outside and I moved closer to the window to see farther up the street. Striding down the center of it came Hiram Martin and in one hand he carried a cordless telephone.
Nancy caught sight of him and said, “He’s bringing back your phone. Funny, I never thought he would.”
It was Hiram shouting and he was shouting in a chant, a deliberate, mocking chant.
“All right, come out and get your phone. Come on out and get your God damn phone.”
Nancy caught her breath and I brushed past her to the door. I jerked it open and stepped out on the porch.
Hiram reached the gate and he quit his chanting. The two of us stood there, watching one another. The crowd was getting noisy and surging closer.
Then Hiram raised his arm, with the phone held above his head.
“All right,” he yelled, “here’s your phone, you dirty…”
Whatever else he said was drowned out by the howling of the crowd.
Then Hiram threw the phone. It was an unhandy thing to throw and the throw was not too good. The receiver flew out to one side, with its trailing cord looping in the air behind it. When the cord jerked taut, the flying phone skidded out of its trajectory and came crashing to the concrete walk, falling about halfway between the gate and porch. Pieces of shattered plastic sprayed across the lawn.
Scarcely aware that I was doing it, acting not by any thought or consideration, but on pure emotion, I came down off the porch and headed for the gate. Hiram backed away to give me room and I came charging through the gate and stood facing him.
I’d had enough of Hiram Martin. I was filled up to here with him. He’d been in my hair for the last two days and I was sick to death of him. There was just one thought—to tear the man apart, to pound him to a pulp, to make certain he’d never sneer at me again, never mock me, never try again to bully me by the sole virtue of sheer size.
I was back in the days of childhood—seeing through the stubborn and red-shot veil of hatred that I had known then, hating this man I knew would lick me, as he had many times before, but ready, willing, anxious to inflict whatever hurt I could while he was licking me.
Someone bawled, “Give ’em room!” Then I was charging at him and he hit me. He didn’t have the time or room to take much of a swing at me, but his fist caught me on the side of the head and it staggered me and hurt. He hit me again almost immediately, but this one also was a glancing blow and didn’t hurt at all—and this time I connected. I got my left into his belly just above his belt and when he doubled over I caught him in the mouth and felt the smart of bruised, cut knuckles as they smashed against his teeth. I was swinging again when a fist came out of nowhere and slammed into my head and my head exploded into a pinwheel of screaming stars. I knew that I was down, for I could feel the hardness of the street against my knees, but I struggled up and my vision cleared. I couldn’t feel my legs. I seemed to be moving and bobbing in the air with nothing under me. I saw Hiram’s face just a foot or so away and his mouth was a gash of red and there was blood on his shirt. So I hit his mouth again—not very hard, perhaps, for there wasn’t much steam left behind my punches. But he grunted and he ducked away and I came boring in.
And that was when he hit me for keeps.
I felt myself going down, falling backwards and it seemed that it took a long time for me to fall. Then I hit and the street was harder than I thought it would be and hitting the street hurt me more than the punch that put me there.
I groped around, trying to get my hands in position to hoist myself erect, although I wondered vaguely why I bothered. For if I got up, Hiram would belt me another one and I’d be back down again. But I knew I had to get up, that I had to get up each time I was able. For that was the kind of game Hiram and I had always played. He knocked me down each time I got up and I kept on getting up until I couldn’t any more and I never cried for quarter and I never admitted I was licked. And if, for the rest of my life, I could keep on doing that, then I’d be the one who won, not Hiram.
But I wasn’t doing so well. I wasn’t getting up. Maybe, I thought, this is the time I don’t get up.
I still kept pawing with my hands, trying to lift myself, and that’s how I got the rock. Some kid, perhaps, had thrown it, maybe days before—maybe at a bird, maybe at a dog, maybe just for the fun of throwing rocks. And it had landed in the street and stayed there and now the fingers of my right hand found it and closed around it and it fitted comfortably into my palm, for it was exactly fist size.
A hand, a great meaty paw of a hand, came down from above and grabbed my shirt front and hauled me to my feet.
“So,” screamed a voice, “assault an officer, would you!”
His face swam in front of me, a red-smeared face twisted with his hatred, heavy with its meanness, gloating at the physical power he held over me.
I could feel my legs again and the face came clearer and the clot of faces in the background—the faces of the crowd, pressing close to be in at the kill.
One did not give up, I told myself, remembering back to all those other times I had not given up. As long as one was on his feet, he fought, and even when he was down and could not get up, he did not admit defeat.
Both of his hands were clutching at my shirt front, his face pushed close toward mine, I clenched my fist and my fingers closed hard around the rock and then I swung. I swung with everything I had, putting every ounce of strength I could muster behind the swinging fist—swinging from the waist in a jolting upward jab, and I caught him on the chin.
His head snapped back, pivoting on the thick, bull neck. He staggered and his fingers loosened and he crumpled, sprawling in the street.
I stepped back a pace and stood looking down at him and everything was clearer now and I knew I had a body, a bruised and beaten body that ached, it seemed, in every joint and muscle. But that didn’t matter; it didn’t mean a thing—for the first time in my life I’d knocked Hiram Martin down. I’d used a rock to do it and I didn’t give a damn. I hadn’t meant to pick up that rock—I’d just found it and closed my fingers on it. I had not planned to use it, but now that I had it made no difference to me. If I’d had time to plan, I’d probably have planned to use it.
Someone leaped out from the crowd toward me and I saw it was Tom Preston.
“You going to let him get away with it?” Preston was screaming at the crowd. “He hit an officer! He hit him with a rock! He picked up a rock!”
Another man pushed out of the crowd and grabbed Preston by the shoulder, lifting him and setting him back in the forefront of the crowd.
“You keep out of this,” Gabe Thomas said.
“But he used a rock!” screamed Preston.
“He should have used a club,” said Gabe. “He should have beat his brains out.”
Hiram was stirring, sitting up. His hand reached for his gun.
“Touch that gun,” I told him. “Just one finger on it and, so help me,
I’ll kill you.”
Hiram stared at me. I must have been a sight. He’d worked me over good and he’d mussed me up a lot and still I’d knocked him down and was standing on my feet.
“He hit you with a rock,” yelped Preston. “He hit…”
Gabe reached out and his fingers fitted neatly around Preston’s skinny throat. He squeezed and Preston’s mouth flapped open and his tongue came out.
“You keep out of it,” said Gabe.
“But Hiram’s an officer of the law,” protested Charley Hutton. “Brad shouldn’t have hit an officer.”
“Friend,” Gabe told the tavern owner, “he’s a damn poor officer. No officer worth his salt goes picking fights with people.”
I’d never taken my eyes off Hiram and he’d been watching me, but now he flicked his eyes to one side and his hand dropped to the ground.
And in that moment I knew that I had won—not because I was the stronger, not because I fought the better (for I wasn’t and I hadn’t) but because Hiram was a coward, because he had no guts, because, once hurt, he didn’t have the courage to chance being hurt again. And I knew, too, that I need not fear the gun he carried, for Hiram Martin didn’t have it in him to face another man and kill him.
Hiram got slowly to his feet and stood there for a moment. His hand came up and felt his jaw. Then he turned his back and walked away. The crowd, watching silently, parted to make a path for him.
I stared at his retreating back and a fierce, bloodthirsty satisfaction rose up inside of me. After more than twenty years, I’d beaten this childhood enemy. But, I told myself, I had not beat him fair—I’d had to play dirty to triumph over him. But I found it made no difference. Dirty fight or fair, I had finally licked him.
The crowd moved slowly back. No one spoke to me. No one spoke to anyone.
“I guess,” said Gabe, “there are no other takers. If there were, they’d have to fight me, too.”
“Thanks, Gabe,” I said.