“Well,” said Cartwright, “we’re getting awfully short-handed. Belden’s dead and Darling’s dead and if Robertson isn’t dead by now he will be very shortly. For after he took Stella to Earth, he tried to desert, tried to run away. And that would never do, of course. He might tell folks about us and we can’t let anyone do that. For we are dead, you see. …”
He chuckled, the chuckle rolling through the darkness.
“It was a masterpiece, West, that broadcast. I was the last man alive and I told them what had happened. I told them the spacetime continuum had ruptured and things were coming through. And I gurgled. … I gurgled just before I died.”
“You didn’t really die, of course,” West said, innocently.
“Hell, no. But they think I did. And they still wake up screaming, thinking how I must have died.”
Ham, thought West. Pure, unadulterated ham. A jokester who would maroon a man to die on a lonely moon. A man who held a gun in his fist while he bragged about the things he’d done … about how he had outwitted Earth.
“You see,” said Cartwright, “I had to make them believe that it really happened. I had to make it so horrible that the government would never make it public, so horrible they’d close the planet with an iron-tight ban.”
“You had to be alone,” said West.
“That’s right, West. We had to be alone.”
“Well,” said West. “You’ve almost got it now. There’s only two of you alive.”
“The two of us,” Cartwright said, “and you.”
“You forget, Cartwright,” said West. “You’re going to kill me. You’ve got a gun pointed at me and you’re all set to pull the trigger.”
“Not necessarily,” said Cartwright. “We might make a deal.”
I’ve got him now, thought West. I know exactly where he is. I can’t see him, but I know where he is. And the pay-off is in a minute. It’ll be one of us or the other.
“You aren’t much use to us,” said Cartwright, “but we might need you later. You remember Langdon?”
“The one that got lost,” said West.
Cartwright chuckled. “That’s it, West. But he wasn’t lost. We gave him away. You see there was a—a—well, something, that could use him for a pet and so we made it a present of Langdon.”
He chuckled again. “Langdon didn’t like the idea too well, but what were we to do?”
“Cartwright,” West said, evenly, “I’m going for my gun.”
“What’s that—” said Cartwright, but the other words were blotted out by the hissing of his gun, firing even as he talked.
The beam hissed into the wall at the foot of the staircase, a spot that had been covered only a split second before by West’s head.
But West had dropped to a crouch almost as he spoke and now his own gun was in his fist, tilting up, solid in his hand. His thumb pressed the activator and then slid off.
Something dragged itself with heavy thumps across the floor and in the stillness between the bumps, West heard the rasp of heavy breaths.
“Damn you, West,” said Cartwright. “Damn you …”
“It’s an old trick, Cartwright,” said West, “that business of talking to a man just before you kill him. Throwing him off guard, practically ambushing him.”
Came a sound of cloth dragging over cloth, the whistling of painful breath, the thump of knees and elbows on the floor.
Then there was silence.
And a moment later something in some far corner squeaked and ran on pattering, rat-sounding feet. Then the silence again.
The rat-feet were still, but there was another sound, a faint shout as if someone far away were shouting … from somewhere outside the building, from somewhere outside … from outside.
West crouched close against the floor, huddling there, the muzzle of the gun resting on the carpet.
Outside … outside … outside …
The words hammered in his head.
Outside of what, he asked, but he knew the answer now. He knew where he had seen the picture of the thing that had slept in the chair and the other thing that squatted on the bedpost. And he knew the sound of chirping and of chittering and of running feet.
Outside … outside … outside …
Outside this world, of course.
He raised his head and looked at the painting, and the tree still glowed softly with its inner light, and from within it came a sound, a faint thudding sound, the sound of running feet.
The shout came again and the man was running down the path inside the painting. A man who ran and waved his arms and shouted.
The man was Nevin.
Nevin was in the painting, running down the path, his padding feet raising little puffs of dust along the pebbled path.
West raised the pistol and his hand was trembling so that the muzzle weaved back and forth and then described a circle.
“Buck fever,” said West.
He said it through chattering teeth.
For now he knew … now he knew the answer.
He put up his other hand and grasped the wrist of the hand that held the gun, and the muzzle steadied. West gritted his teeth together to stop their chattering.
His thumb went down against the activator and held it there and the flame from the gun’s muzzle spat out and mushroomed upon the painting. Mushroomed until the entire canvas was a maelstrom of blue brilliance that hissed and roared and licked with hungry tongues.
Slowly the tree ran together, as if one’s eyes might have blurred and gone slightly out of focus. The landscape dimmed and jigged and ran in little wavering lines. And through the wavering lines could be seen a twisted and distorted man whose mouth seemed open in a howl of rage. But there was no sound of howling, just the purring of the gun.
With a tired little puff the mushrooming brilliance and the painting were gone and the gun’s pencil of flame was hissing through an empty steel frame still filled with tiny glowing wires, spattering against the wall behind it.
West lifted his thumb and silence clamped down upon him, clamped down and held the room … as it held leagues of space stretching on all sides.
“No painting,” said West.
An echo seemed to run all around the room.
“No painting,” the echo said, but West knew it was no echo, just his brain clicking off endlessly the words his lips had said.
“No painting,” the echo said, but West knew it had been a machine that led to some other world, some other place, some otherwhere. A machine that broke down the spacetime continuum or whatever it was that separated Man’s universe from other, stranger universes.
No wonder the fruit upon the tree had looked like the fruit upon the table. No wonder he had thought that he heard the wind in the leaves.
West stood up and moved to the wall behind him. He found a tumbler and thumbed it up and the lights came on.
In the light the smashed other-world machine was a sagging piece of wreckage. Cartwright’s body lay in the center of the room. A chittering thing ran across the floor and ducked into the dark beneath a table. A grinning face peeped out from behind a chair and squalled at West in cold-boned savagery.
And it was nothing new, for he had seen those faces before. Pictures of them in old books and in magazines that published tales of soul-shaking horror, tales of things that come from beyond, of entities that broke in from outside.
Just tales to send one shivering to bed. Just stories that should not be read at midnight. Stories that made one a little nervous when a tree squeaked in the wind outside the window or the rain walked along the shingles.