“Me?” said Fortnum.
They had stopped now by an empty lot near the market. There was a moment of great stillness, in which Fortnum turned to survey his friend. Willis’s voice had suddenly made him cold.
“I’m afraid for everybody,” said Willis. “Your friends, mine, and their friends, on out of sight. Pretty silly, eh?”
Willis opened the door, got out, and peered in at Fortnum. Fortnum felt he had to speak.
“Well—what do we do about it?”
Willis looked up at the sun burning blind in the great, remote sky.
“Be aware,” he said, slowly. “Watch everything for a few days.”
“Everything?”
“We don’t use half what God gave us, ten percent of the time. We ought to hear more, feel more, smell more, taste more. Maybe there’s something wrong with the way the wind blows these weeds there in the lot. Maybe it’s the sun up on those telephone wires or the cicadas singing in the elm trees. If only we could stop, look, listen, a few days, a few nights, and compare notes. Tell me to shut up then, and I will.”
“Good enough,” said Fortnum, playing it lighter than he felt. “I’ll look around. But how do I know the thing I’m looking for when I see it?”
Willis peered in at him sincerely. “You’ll know. You’ve got to know. Or we’re done for, all of us,” he said quietly.
Fortnum shut the door, and didn’t know what to say. He felt a flush of embarrassment creeping up his face. Willis sensed this.
“Hugh, do you think I’m—off my rocker?”
“Nonsense!” said Fortnum, too quickly. “You’re just nervous, is all. You should take a couple of weeks off.”
Willis nodded. “See you Monday night?”
“Any time. Drop around.”
“I hope I will, Hugh. I really hope I will.”
Then Willis was gone, hurrying across the dry weed-grown lot, toward the side entrance of the market.
Watching him go, Fortnum suddenly did not want to move. He discovered that very slowly he was taking deep breaths, weighing the silence. He licked his lips, tasting the salt. He looked at his arm on the doorsill, the sunlight burning the golden hairs. In the empty lot the wind moved all alone to itself. He leaned out to look at the sun, which stared back with one massive stunning blow of intense power that made him jerk his head in.
He exhaled. Then he laughed out loud. Then he drove away.
The lemonade glass was cool and deliciously sweaty. The ice made music inside the glass, and the lemonade was just sour enough, just sweet enough on his tongue. He sipped, he savored, he tilted back in the wicker rocking chair on the twilight front porch, his eyes closed. The crickets were chirping out on the lawn. Cynthia, knitting across from him on the porch, eyed him curiously. He could feel the pressure of her attention.
“What are you up to?” she said at last.
“Cynthia,” he said, “is your intuition in running order? Is this earthquake weather? Is the land going to sink? Will war be declared? Or is it only that our delphinium will die of the blight?”
“Hold on. Let me feel my bones.”
He opened his eyes and watched Cynthia in turn closing hers and sitting absolutely statue-still, her hands on her knees. Finally she shook her head and smiled.
“No. No war declared. No land sinking. Not even a blight. Why?”
“I’ve met a lot of Doom Talkers today. Well, two, anyway, and—”
The screen door burst wide. Fortnum’s body jerked as if he had been struck. “What!”
Tom, a gardener’s wooden flat in his arms, stepped out on the porch.
“Sorry,” he said. “What’s wrong, Dad?”
“Nothing,” Fortnum stood up, glad to be moving. “Is that the crop?”
Tom moved forward, eagerly. “Part of it. Boy, they’re doing great. In just seven hours, with lots of water, look how big the darn things are!” He set the flat on the table between his parents.
The crop was indeed plentiful. Hundreds of small grayish brown mushrooms were sprouting up in the damp soil.
“I’ll bek....” said Fortnum, impressed.
Cynthia put out her hand to touch the flat, then took it away uneasily.
“I hate to be a spoilsport, but … there’s no way for these to be anything else but mushrooms, is there?”
Tom looked as if he had been insulted. “What do you think I’m going to feed you? Poison fungoids?”
“That’s just it,” said Cynthia quickly. “How do you tell them apart?”
“Eat ’em,” said Tom. “If you live, they’re mushrooms. If you drop dead—well!”
He gave a great guffaw, which amused Fortnum, but only made his mother wince. She sat back in her chair.
“I—I don’t like them,” she said.
“Boy, oh, boy.” Tom seized the flat angrily. “When are we going to have the next Wet Blanket Sale in this house!?”
He shuffled morosely away.
“Tom—” said Fortnum.
“Never mind,” said Tom. “Everyone figures they’ll be ruined by the boy entrepreneur. To heck with it!”
Fortnum got inside just as Tom heaved the mushrooms, flat and all, down the cellar stairs. He slammed the cellar door and ran angrily out the back door.
Fortnum turned back to his wife, who, stricken, glanced away.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know why, I just had to say that to Tom.”
The phone rang. Fortnum brought the phone outside on its extension cord.
“Hugh?” It was Dorothy Willis’s voice. She sounded suddenly very old and very frightened. “Hugh … Roger isn’t there, is he?”
“Dorothy? No.”
“He’s gone!” said Dorothy. “All his clothes were taken from the closet.” She began to cry softly.
“Dorothy, hold on, I’ll be there in a minute.”
“You must help, oh, you must. Something’s happened to him, I know it,” she wailed. “Unless you do something, we’ll never see him alive again.”
Very slowly, he put the receiver back on its hook, her voice weeping inside it. The night crickets, quite suddenly, were very loud. He felt the hairs, one by one, go up on the back of his neck.
Hair can’t do that, he thought. Silly, silly. It can’t do that, not in real life, it can’t!
But, one by slow pricking one, his hair did.
The wire hangers were indeed empty. With a clatter, Fortnum shoved them aside and down along the rod, then turned and looked out of the closet at Dorothy Willis and her son, Joe.
“I was just walking by,” said Joe, “and saw the closet empty, all Dad’s clothes gone!”
“Everything was fine,” said Dorothy. “We’ve had a wonderful life. I don’t understand it, I don’t, I don’t!” She began to cry again, putting her hands to her face.
Fortnum stepped out of the closet.
“You didn’t hear him leave the house?”
“We were playing catch out front,” said Joe. “Dad said he had to go in for a minute. I went around back. Then—he was gone!”
“He must have packed quickly and walked wherever he was going, so we wouldn’t hear a cab pull up front of the house.”
They were moving out through the hall now.
“I’ll check the train depot and the airport.” Fortnum hesitated. “Dorothy, is there anything in Roger’s background—”
“It wasn’t insanity took him.” She hesitated. “I feel—somehow—he was kidnapped.”
Fortnum shook his head. “It doesn’t seem reasonable he would arrange to pack, walk out of the house, and go meet his abductors.”
Dorothy opened the door as if to let the night or the night wind move down the hall as she turned to stare back through the rooms, her voice wandering.
“No. Somehow they came into the house. Right in front of us, they stole him away.”
And then:
“… a terrible thing has happened.”
Fortnum stepped out into the night of crickets and rustling trees. The Doom Talkers, he thought, talking their Dooms. Mrs. Goodbody. Roger. And now Roger’s wife. Something terrible has happened. But what, in God’s name? And how?