The pendulum clock struck slowly, its every other chime as usual setting up a sympathetic vibration in the pewter vase that stood upon the mantel.
Mr. Chambers got to his feet, strode to the door, opened it and looked out. Moonlight tessellated the street in black and silver, etching the chimneys and trees against a silvered sky. But the house directly across the street was not the same. It was strangely lopsided, its dimensions out of proportion, like a house that suddenly had gone mad.
He stared at it in amazement, trying to determine what was wrong with it. He recalled how it had always stood, foursquare, a solid piece of mid-Victorian architecture.
Then, before his eyes, the house righted itself again. Slowly it drew together, ironed out its queer angles, readjusted its dimensions, became once again the stodgy house he knew it had to be.
With a sigh of relief, Mr. Chambers turned back into the hall. But before he closed the door, he looked again. The house was lopsided—as bad as, perhaps worse than before!
Gulping in fright, Mr. Chambers slammed the door shut, locked it and double-bolted it. Then he went to his bedroom and took sleeping powders.
His dreams that night were the same as on the night before. Again there was the islet in mid-ocean. Again he was alone upon it. Again the squirming hydrophinnae were eating his foothold piece by piece.
He awoke, body drenched with perspiration. Vague light of early dawn filtered through the window. The clock on the bedside table showed seven-thirty. For a long time he lay there motionless.
Again the fantastic happenings of the night before came back to haunt him and, as he lay there staring at the windows, he remembered them, one by one. But his mind, still fogged by sleep and astonishment, took the happenings in its stride, mulled over them, lost the keen edge of fantastic terror that lurked around them.
The light through the windows slowly grew brighter. Mr. Chambers slid out of bed and crossed to the window, the cold of the floor biting into his bare feet. He forced himself to look out.
There was nothing outside the window. No shadows. As if there might be a fog. But no fog, however thick, could hide the apple tree that grew close against the house.
But the tree was there—shadowy, indistinct in the gray, with a few withered apples still clinging to its boughs, a few shriveled leaves reluctant to leave the parent branch. The tree was there now. But it had not been there when he first had looked. Mr. Chambers was sure of that.
And now he saw the faint outlines of his neighbor’s house —but those outlines were all wrong. They didn’t jibe and fit together, they were out of plumb, as if some giant hand had grasped the house and wrenched it out of true, like the house he had seen across the street the night before, the house that had painfully righted itself when he thought of how it should look.
Perhaps if he thought of how his neighbor’s house should look, it too might right itself. But Mr. Chambers was very weary. Too weary to think about the house. He turned from the window and dressed slowly. In the living room he slumped into his chair, put his feet on the old cracked ottoman. For a long time he sat, trying to think.
And then, abruptly, something like an electric shock ran through him. Rigid, he sat there, limp inside at the thought. Minutes later he crossed the room to the old mahogany bookcase that stood against the wall. There were many volumes in the case: his beloved classics on the first shelf, his many scientific works on the lower shelves. The second shelf contained but one book around which Mr. Chambers’ entire life was centered.
Twenty years ago he had written it and foolishly attempted to teach its philosophy to a class of undergraduates. The newspapers, he remembered, had made a great deal of it at the time. Tongues had been set to wagging. Narrow-minded townsfolk failing to understand either his philosophy or his aim, but seeing in him another exponent of some antirational cult, had forced his expulsion from the school.
It was a simple book, really, dismissed by most authorities as merely the vagaries of an overzealous mind. Mr. Chambers took it down now, opened its cover and began thumbing through the pages. For a moment the memory of happier days swept over him.
Then his eyes found the paragraph, a paragraph written so long ago that the very words seemed strange and unreaclass="underline"
Man himself, by the power of mass suggestion, holds the physical fate of this earth, yes, even of the universe. Millions of minds seeing trees as trees, houses as houses, streets as streets, and not as something else. Minds that see things as they are and have kept things as they were… Destroy those minds and the entire foundation of matter, robbed of its regenerative power, will crumple and slip away like a column of sand.
His eyes followed down the page:
Yet this would have nothing to do with matter itself, but only with matter’s form. For while the mind of man through long ages may have molded an imagery of that space in which he lives, mind would have little conceivable influence upon the existence of that matter. What exists in our known universe shall exist always and can never be destroyed, only altered or transformed.
But in modern astrophysics and mathematics we gain an insight into the possibility and probability that there are other dimensions, other brackets of time and space impinging on the one we occupy. If a pin is thrust into a shadow, would that shadow have any knowledge of the pin? It would not, for in this case the shadow is two-dimensional, the pin three-dimensional. Yet both occupy the same space.
Granting then that the power of men’s minds alone holds this universe, or at least this world in its present form, may we not go farther and envision other minds on some other plane watching us, waiting, waiting craftily for the time they can take over the domination of matter? Such a concept is not impossible. It is a natural conclusion if we accept the double hypothesis: that mind does control the formation of all matter; and that other worlds lie in juxtaposition with ours.
Perhaps we shall come upon a day, far distant, when our plane, our world will dissolve beneath our feet and before our eyes as some stronger intelligence reaches out from the dimensional shadows of the very space we live in and wrests from us the matter which we know to be our own.
He stood astounded beside the bookcase, his eyes staring unseeing into the fire upon the hearth. He had written that. And because of those words he had been called a heretic, had been compelled to resign his position at the University, had been forced into this hermit life.
A tumultuous idea hammered at him. Men had died by the millions all over the world. Where there had been thousands of minds there now were one or two. A feeble force to hold the form of matter intact. The plague had swept Europe and Asia almost clean of life, had blighted Africa, had reached South America—might even have come to the United States. He remembered the whispers he had heard, the words of the men at the drugstore corner, the buildings disappearing. Something scientists could not explain. But those were merely scraps of information. He did not know the whole story … he could not know. He never listened to the radio, never read a newspaper.
But abruptly the whole thing fitted together in his brain like the missing piece of a puzzle into its slot. The significance of it all gripped him with damning clarity. There were not sufficient minds in existence to retain the material world in its mundane form. Some other power from another dimension was fighting to supersede man’s control and take his universe into its own plane!
Abruptly Mr. Chambers closed the book, shoved it back in the, case and picked up his hat and coat. He had to know more. He had to find someone who could tell him. He moved through the hall to the door, emerged into the street. On the walk he looked skyward, trying to make out the sun. But there was no sun—only an all-pervading grayness that shrouded everything, not a fog, but a gray emptiness that seemed devoid of life, of any movement.