"You don't say."
"I do say! And the look he gave me with those bleary eyes was enough to kill! So I'd never go back there even if everything was free."
Tom thought about this and took a last swallow of his now-cold coffee.
They sat together in companionable silence for a while, then Phil took up the tale once more.
"And you know, my granddaddy once told me about that place and the story he'd heard about a strange cult that held its meetings at night under the Dome, usually about midnight around May Eve or Halloween. When granddaddy said that, he'd spit into the dust. It was the kind of thing that didn't set well with him, seeing that he was raised a Baptist."
Tom sat there, engrossed.
"'Course, that was after the seed was gone and they'd turned it into that junk store," Phil went on. "Don't think it's changed much, even to this day."
Tom had gone home then, stopping at the local country market. Being a fairly good cook, he enjoyed being able to buy freshly roasted chiles and local spices, and he produced some very tasty meals. Usually after dinner, coffee cup in hand, he would sit in his rocker on the cement patio and listen to the birds and locusts. Sometimes he'd walk back onto his property and survey his few pecan trees. In the distance, ever present, was the silver dome jutting into the sky. The structure seemed to him a blight on the town, a gigantic metallic blister, as it squatted there, silent and forbidding, and he'd turn his back on it and concentrate on the nearby beauty that surrounded him.
It was near the end of July that he received a note from his granddaughter telling him that she'd be passing through town soon and wondering if he could put her up for a night. He was overjoyed at the news, for he loved his pretty little granddaughter who had just graduated from high school and was heading west to a college near Phoenix.
But there was a problem. Although he had two bedrooms, only one was furnished. He'd have to go to town and find a bed for her. It wouldn't be too great an expense if he bought it second hand, and, he could use it for unexpected guests in the future.
So, the next morning after breakfast, he got into his truck and headed for the used furniture store in town, a real store without domed roof or surly proprietor. But, as luck would have it, there was no bed suitable for his granddaughter and none priced to fit his meager budget. He squared his shoulders. There was nothing for it but to try out the silver dome again. He seemed to recall a fairly good selection of used beds when he last was in the store, and what harm could an old building and a crusty owner do?
The building was the same as before, huge and unpleasantly warm and slightly humid, even though the humidity was in the teens. There seemed to be an indefinable odor to the place, something reminiscent of the salt flats near the east coast of Maine. As he wandered the uneven and cluttered aisles, his footsteps and the voices of two other customers speaking to each other, echoed eerily off the walls. Almost as if they were underground. Or under the sea.
Now where had that idea come from? Under the sea, in the desert southwest! Strangely enough, Tom had read a little about the area in which he lived and had been surprised to learn that the hundreds of miles that stretched from west Texas to where he now lived had once been the bottom of a great Permian sea. Shallow, but still a sea.
The other two customers left and it was oddly still, except for his own echoing footsteps. There was an eerie sense of being dwarfed by the immensity of the place, and an almost claustrophobic feeling even though it was so huge. A panicky feeling came over him and he wanted to run. To get out of the place. To reach safety. Foolish! He got control of himself and went on looking.
Finding the assortment of beds for sale, he bent over, examining closely the quality of one of them. It wasn't bad at all, white with pink flowers on the headboard, and the price was only one hundred dollars, including mattress and box spring. And best of all, it was clean.
He reared up in surprise then as he heard a terrific screeching from above and saw the «eye» of the dome slowly opening like the lens of a camera. The sky, seen from the interior of the dome was black, a roiling, churning fathomless black, and he imagined he could see something moving within the ropy coils of cloud. He knew that the sky couldn't be black. It was only eleven in the morning and the sky outside was its usual vivid blue.
He cried out then and as he did, the old man appeared out of nowhere and scuttled beetlelike to the wall, where he manipulated some dials or controls, thereby closing the aperture.
Tom, shaking and ashen, stood looking upwards at the nowclosed opening when the old man sidled up to him, grinning a broken-toothed smile, and looking, for the first time, actually affable. And talkative. He told Tom that the bed was on sale for fifty dollars. Even shaken as he was, Tom knew a bargain when he saw one, and he hastily paid the man and with his help loaded the bed and mattress onto his truck. As he did so, he noticed the man's hands — or what appeared to be hands. Dark and leathery and webbed! Webbed! Surely that was a trick of his eye or a condition caused from a rare disease. Everything about the man appeared strange and diseased. Tom shuddered.
That evening, as Tom sat in his yard, he pondered what he had seen or thought he had seen at the top of the dome. It had probably been some aberration — the sun had been high and somehow the rays hit the silvery metal, blinding him for an instant. That's what it had been. He shivered and wrapped his arms around himself, though the temperature was in the nineties.
His granddaughter came on that Friday and they had a grand time together, enjoying some of his hot and spicy burritos and reminiscing on the patio. When she left the next morning he felt alone, more alone than he had ever felt before.
That night he had awful dreams, dreams about black skies, twisting snakelike arms, and the smell of sea bottom. He awoke in a sweat and went to the refrigerator for a cold glass of water. Now why should he dream such dreams? It had to be that experience he'd had in the dome. A mere trick of the eye and his subconscious had added the gory and frightening details.
The next day he spent puttering around in his shed, mending a few things and then watering his pecans. He went to the senior center and played a few hands of pinochle. Phil wasn't around. No one seemed to know where he was. Tom enjoyed the game, but still, at the back of his mind dwelled his experience and his terrible dreams.
He spent another fright-filled night, tossing and turning, dreaming of things ancient and horrible and of a writhing, twisting thing wrapping itself around his throat. He woke up screaming and found his sheet twined around his neck. In the morning he decided to put an end to the awful fears he had of the dome and what he thought he saw there, high up in the eye. After dressing and downing a cup of coffee, he got into his truck and headed for that bloated sphere.
He parked his truck and noticed that though it was after nine a.m. there was no other vehicle in the lot. He climbed out and closed the door, being careful not to slam it. He quietly made his way to the doors of the building and walked inside. He had purposely worn his sneakers so that his footsteps wouldn't be heard. There appeared to be no one around, no customers, no old man. He went inside and looked upward toward the ceiling. The eye was closed. And then he heard some strange ululating sounds, as if from someone chanting in a strange language. Louder and louder the voice called, higher and higher in pitch. The language was some guttural tongue with impossible vowels and consonants. Along with the strident tones, the screeching that he had heard before began again — this time, ear-deafening in volume. He looked up to see the black and roiling sky above, the sky of his nightmares. And appearing through the inky darkness was something moving, something sinuous in motion, which seemed to come through the eye and snake downward toward the interior of the dome.