“Now,” I said, “just a minute, there. Not until I know about it. Not until I’ve had a chance to give it some consideration.”
“I tell you what,” the voice said, “you consider it and then you call us back. What was this you were saying about Stiffy being taken somewhere?”
“A hospital,” I said. “He was taken sick.”
“But he should have called us,” the voice said, aghast. “We would have fixed him up. He knew good and well…”
“He maybe didn’t have the time. I found him…”
“Where was this place you say that he was taken?”
“Elmore. To the hospital at…”
“Elmore. Of course. We know where Elmore is.”
“And Greenbriar, too, perhaps.” I hadn’t meant to say it; I hadn’t even thought it. It just popped into my mind, a sudden, unconscious linking of what was happening here and the project that Alf had talked to me about.
“Greenbriar? Why, certainly. Down in Mississippi. A town very much like Millville. And you will let us know? When you have decided, you will let us know?”
“I’ll let you know,” I promised.
“And thank you very much, sir. We shall be looking forward to your association with us.”
And then the line went dead.
Greenbriar, I thought. It was not only Millville. It might be the entire world. What the hell, I wondered, could be going on?
I’d talk to Alf about it. I’d go home and phone him now. Or I could drive out and see him. He’d probably be in bed, but I would get him up. I’d take along a bottle and we’d have a drink or two.
I picked up the phone and tucked it underneath my arm and went outside. I closed the door behind me. I snapped the padlock shut and then went to the car. I opened the back door and put the telephone on the floor and covered it with a raincoat that was folded on the seat. It was a silly thing to do, but I felt a little better with the phone tucked away and hidden.
I got behind the wheel and sat for a moment, thinking. Perhaps, I told myself, it would be better if I didn’t rush into things too fast. I would see Alf tomorrow and we’d have a lot of time to talk, an entire week to talk if we needed it. And that way I’d have some time to try to think the situation out.
It was late and I had to pack the camping stuff and the fishing tackle in the car and I should try to get some sleep.
Be sensible, I told myself. Take a little time. Try to think it out.
It was good advice. Good for someone else. Good even for myself at another time and under other circumstances. I should not have taken it, however. I should have gone out to Johnny’s Motor Court and pounded on Alf s door. Perhaps then things would have worked out differently. But you can’t be sure. You never can be sure.
But, anyhow, I did go home and I did pack the camping stuff and the fishing gear into the car and had a few hours of sleep (I wonder now how I ever got to sleep), then was routed out by the alarm clock early in the morning.
And before I could pick up Alf I hit the barrier.
7
“Hi, there,” said the naked scarecrow, with jaunty happiness. He counted on his fingers and slobbered as he counted.
And there was no mistaking him. He came clear through the years. The same placid, vacant face, with its frog-like mouth and its misty eyes. It had been ten years since I had seen him last, since anyone had seen him, and yet he seemed only slightly older than he had been then. His hair was long, hanging down his back, but he had no whiskers. He had a heavy growth of fuzz, but he’d never sprouted whiskers. He was entirely naked except for the outrageous hat. And he was the same old Tupper. He hadn’t changed a bit. I’d have known him anywhere.
He quit his finger-counting and sucked in his slobber. He reached up and took off his hat and held it out so that I could see it better.
“Made it myself,” he told me, with a wealth of pride.
“It’s very fine,” I said.
He could have waited, I told myself. No matter where he’d come from, he could have waited for a while. Millville had enough trouble at this particular moment without having to contend once again with the likes of Tupper Tyler.
“Your papa,” Tupper said. “Where is your papa, Brad? There is something I have to tell him.”
And that voice, I thought. How could I ever have mistaken it? And how could I ever have forgotten that Tupper was, of all things, an accomplished mimic? He could be any bird he wanted and he could be a dog or cat and the kids used to gather round him, making fun of him, while he put on a mimic show of a dog-and-cat fight or of two neighbors quarreling.
“Your papa!” Tupper said.
“We’d better get inside,” I told him. “I’ll get some clothes and you climb into them. You can’t go on running around naked.”
He nodded vaguely. “Flowers,” he said. “Lots of pretty flowers.”
He spread his arms wide to show me how many flowers there were. “Acres and acres,” he said. “There is no end to them. They just keep on forever. Every last one purple. And they are so pretty and they smell so sweet and they are so good to me.”
His chin was covered with a dampness from his talking and he wiped it with a claw-like hand. He wiped his hand upon a thigh.
I got him by the elbow and got him turned around, headed for the house.
“But your papa,” he protested. “I want to tell your papa all about the flowers.”
“Later on,” I said.
I got him on the porch and thrust him through the door and followed after him. I felt easier. Tupper was no decent sight for the streets of Millville. And I had had, for a while, about all that I could stand. Old Stiffy Grant laid out in my kitchen just the night before and now along comes Tupper, without a stitch upon him. Eccentrics were all right, and in a little town you get a lot of them, but there came a time when they ran a little thin.
I still held tightly to his elbow and marched him to the bedroom.
“You stand right there,” I told him.
He stood right there, not moving, gaping at the room with his vacant stare.
I found a shirt and a pair of trousers. I got out a pair of shoes and, after looking at his feet, put them back again. They were, I knew, way too small. Tupper’s feet were all spraddled out and flattened. He’d probably been going without shoes for years.
I held out the trousers and the shirt.
“You get into these,” I said. “And once you have them on, stay here. Don’t stir out of this room.”
He didn’t answer and he didn’t take the clothes. He’d fallen once again to counting his fingers.
And now, for the first time, I had a chance to wonder where he’d been. How could a man drop out of sight, without a trace, stay lost for ten years, and then pop up again, out of that same thin air into which he had disappeared?
It had been my first year in high school that Tupper had turned up missing and I remembered it most vividly because for a week all of the boys had been released from school to join the hunt for him. We had combed miles of fields and woodlands, walking slowly in line an arm’s length from one another, and finally we had been looking for a body rather than a man. The state police had dragged the river and several nearby ponds. The sheriff and a posse of townspeople had worked carefully through the swamp below Stiffy’s shack, prodding with long poles. They had found innumerable logs and a couple of wash boilers that someone had thrown away and on the further edge of the swamp an anciently dead dog. But no one had found Tupper.
“Here,” I told him, “take these clothes and get into them.”
Tupper finished with his fingers and politely wiped his chin.
“I must be getting back,” he said. “The flowers can’t wait too long.”
He reached out a hand and took the clothes from me.
“My other ones wore out,” he said. “They just dropped off of me.”
“I saw your mother just half an hour ago,” I said. “She was looking for you.”
It was a risky th
ing to say, for Tupper was the kind of jerk that you handled with kid gloves. But I took the calculated risk and said it, for I thought that maybe it would jolt some sense into him.
“Oh,” he said lightly, “she’s always hunting for me. She thinks I ain’t big enough to look out for myself.”
As if he’d never been away. As if ten years hadn’t passed. As if he’d stepped out of his mother’s house no more than an hour ago. As if time had no meaning for him—and perhaps it hadn’t.
“Put on the clothes,” I told him. “I’ll be right back.”
I went out into the living room and picked up the phone. I dialed Doc Fabian’s number. The busy signal blurped at me.
I put the receiver back and tried to think of someone else to call. I could call Hiram Martin. Perhaps he was the one to call. But I hesitated. Doc was the man to handle this; he knew how to handle people. All that Hiram knew was how to push them round.
I dialed Doc once more and still got the busy signal.
I slammed down the receiver and hurried toward the bedroom. I couldn’t leave Tupper alone too long. God knows what he might do.
But I already had waited too long. I never should have left him.
The bedroom was empty. The window was open and the screen was broken out and there was no Tupper.
I rushed across the room and leaned out of the window and there was no sign of him.
Blind panic hit me straight between the eyes. I don’t know why it did. Certainly, at that moment, Tupper’s escaping from the bedroom was not all that important. But it seemed to be important and I knew, without knowing why, that I must run him down and bring him back, that I must not let him out of my sight again.
Without thinking, I stepped back from the window and took a running jump, diving through the opening. I landed on one shoulder and rolled, then jumped up to my feet.
Tupper was not in sight, but now I saw where he had gone. His dewy tracks led across the grass, back around the house and down to the old greenhouse. He had waded out into the patch of purple flowers that covered the old abandoned area where once my father and, later, I myself had tended rows of flowers and other plants. He had waded out some twenty feet or so into the mass of flowers. His trail was clearly shown, for the plants had been brushed over and had not had time to straighten yet, and they were a darker hue where the dew had been knocked off them.
The trail went twenty feet and stopped. All about it and ahead of it the purple flowers stood straight, silvered by the tiny dewdrops.
There was no other trail. Tupper had not backed out along the trail and then gone another way. There was just the single trail that headed straight into the patch of purple flowers and ended. As if the man might have taken wing and flown away, or dropped straight into the ground.
But no matter where he was, I thought, no matter what kind of tricks he played, he couldn’t leave the village. For the village was closed in by some sort of barrier that ran all the way around it.
A wailing sound exploded and filled the universe, a shrieking, terrible sound that reverberated and beat against itself. It came so suddenly that it made me jump and stiffen. The sound seemed to fill the world and to clog the sky and it didn’t stop, but kept on and on.
Almost at once I knew what it was, but my body still stayed tense for long seconds and my mind was curdled with a nameless fear. For there had been too much happening in too short a time and this metallic yammering had been the trigger that had slammed it all together and made the world almost unendurable.
Gradually I relaxed and started for the house.
And still the sound kept on, the frantic, full-throated wailing of the siren down at the village hall.
8
By the time I got up to the house there were people running in the street—a wild-eyed, frantic running with a sense of panic in it, all of them heading toward that screeching maelstrom of sound, as if the siren were the monstrous tootling of a latter-day Pied Piper and they were the rats which must not be left behind.
There was old Pappy Andrews, hobbling along, cracking his cane on the surface of the street with unaccustomed vigor and the wind blowing his long chin whiskers up into his face. There was Grandma Jones, who had her sunbonnet socked upon her head, but had forgotten to tie the strings, which floated and bobbed across her shoulders as she stumped along with grim determination. She was the only woman in all of Millville (perhaps in all the world) who still owned a sun-bonnet and she took a malicious pride in wearing it, as if the very fact of appearing with it upon her head was a somehow commendable flaunting of her fuddy-duddyness. And after her came Pastor Silas Middleton, with a prissy look of distaste fastened on his face, but going just the same. An old jalopy clattered past with that crazy Johnson kid crouched behind the wheel and a bunch of his hoodlum pals yelling and catcalling, glad of any kind of excitement and willing to contribute to it. And a lot of others, including a slew of kids and dogs.
I opened the gate and stepped into the street. But I didn’t run like all the rest of them, for I knew what it was all about and I was all weighed down with a lot of things that no one knew as yet. Especially about Tupper Tyler and what Tupper might have had to do with what was happening. For insane as it might sound, I had a sneaky sort of hunch that Tupper had somehow had a hand in it and had made a mess of things.
I tried to think, but the things I wanted to think about were too big to get into mind and there were no mental handholds on them for my mind to grab ahold of. So I didn’t hear the car when it came sneaking up beside me. The first thing I heard was the click of the door as it was coming open.
I swung around and Nancy Sherwood was there behind the wheel.
“Come on, Brad,” she yelled, to make herself heard above the siren noise.
I jumped in and closed the door and the car slid up the street. It was a big and powerful thing. The top was down and it felt funny to be riding in a car that didn’t have a top.
The siren stopped. One moment the world had been filled to bursting with its brazen howling and then the howling stopped and for a little moment there was the feeble keening as the siren died. Then the silence came, and in the weight and mass of silence a little blot of howling still stayed within one’s mind, as if the howling had not gone, but had merely moved away.
One felt naked in the coldness of the silence and there was the absurd feeling that in the noise there had been purpose and direction. And that now, with the howling gone, there was no purpose or direction.
“This is a nice car you have,” I said, not knowing what to say, but knowing that I should say something.
“Father gave it to me,” she said, “on my last birthday.”
It moved along and you couldn’t hear the motor. All you could hear was the faint rumble of the wheels turning on the roadbed.
“Brad,” she asked, “what’s going on? Someone told me that your car was wrecked and there was no sign of you. What has your car to do with the siren blowing? And there were a lot of cars down on the road…”
I told her: “There’s a fence of some sort built around the town.”
“Who would build a fence?”
“It’s not that kind of fence. You can’t see this fence.”
We had gotten close to Main Street and there were more people. They were walking on the sidewalk and walking on the lawns and walking in the road. Nancy slowed the car to crawling.
“You said there was a fence.”
“There is a fence. An empty car can get through it, but it will stop a man. I have a hunch it will stop all life. It’s the kind of fence you’d expect in fairyland.”
“Brad,” she said, “you know there is no fairyland.”
“An hour ago I knew,” I said. “I don’t know any more.”
We came out on Main Street and a big crowd was standing out in front of the village hall and more coming all the time. George Walker, the butcher at the Red Owl store, was running down the street, with his white apron tucked up into his belt and his white cap
set askew upon his head. Norma Shepard, the receptionist at Doc Fabian’s office, was standing on a box out on the sidewalk so that she could see what was going on, and Butch Ormsby, the owner of the service station just across the street from the hall, was standing at the curb, wiping and wiping at his greasy hands with a ball of waste, as if he knew he would never get them clean, but was bound to keep on trying.
Nancy pulled the car up into the approach to the filling station and shut off the motor.
A man came across the concrete apron and stopped beside the car. He leaned down and rested his folded arms on the top part of the door.
“How are things going, pal?” he asked.
I looked at him for a moment, not remembering him at first, then suddenly remembering. He must have seen that I remembered him.
“Yeah,” he said, “the guy who smacked your car.”
He straightened and reached out his hand. “Name is Gabriel Thomas,” he said. “You just call me Gabe. We never got around to trading names down there.”
I shook his hand and told him who I was, then introduced Nancy.
“Mr. Thomas,” Nancy said, “I heard about the accident. Brad won’t talk about it.”
“Well,” said Gabe, “it was a strange thing, miss. There was nothing there and you ran into it and it stopped you as if it had been a wall of stone. And even when it was stopping you, you could see right through it.”
“Did you phone your company?” I asked.
“Yeah. Sure I phoned them. But no one will believe me. They think I’m drunk. They think I am so drunk I wouldn’t dare to drive and I’m holing up somewhere. They think I dreamed up this crazy story as a cover-up.”
“Did they say so, Mr. Thomas?”
“No, miss,” he said, “but I know how them jokers think. And the thing that hurts me is that they ever should have thought it. I ain’t a drinking man. And I got a good record. Why, I won driving awards, three years in a row.”
He said to me, “I don’t know what to do. I can’t get out of here. There’s no way to get out. That barrier is all around the town. I live five hundred miles from here and my wife is all alone. Six kids and the youngest one a baby. I don’t know what she’ll do. She’s used to it, of course, with me off on the road. But never for longer than three or four days, the time it takes for me to make a run. What if I can’t get back for two or three weeks, maybe two or three months? What will she do then? There won’t be any money coming in and there are the house payments to be made and them six kids to feed.”