Taine dropped the shovel and the pick and they clattered on the driveway gravel. He put his hand up to his face and wiped it across his eyes, as if to clear his eyes of something that could not possibly be there.
And when he took the hand away it had not changed a bit.
There was no front to the house.
Then he was running around the house, hardly knowing he was running, and there was a fear inside of him at what had happened to the house.
But the back of the house was all right. It was exactly as it had always been.
He clattered up the stoop with Beasly and Towser running close behind him. He pushed open the door and burst into the entry and scrambled up the stairs into the kitchen and went across the kitchen in three strides to see what had happened to the front of the house.
At the door between the kitchen and the living room he stopped and his hands went out to grasp the door jamb as he stared in disbelief at the windows of the living room.
It was night outside. There could be no doubt of that. He had seen the fireflies flickering in the brush and weeds and the street lamps had been lit and the stars were out.
But a flood of sunlight was pouring through the windows of the living room and out beyond the windows lay a land that was not Willow Bend.
“Beasly,” he gasped, “look out there in front!”
Beasly looked.
“What place is that?” he asked.
“That’s what I’d like to know.”
Towser had found his dish and was pushing it around the kitchen floor with his nose, by way of telling Taine that it was time to eat.
Taine went across the living room and opened the front door. The garage, he saw, was there. The pickup stood with its nose against the open garage door and the car was safe inside.
There was nothing wrong with the front of the house at all.
But if the front of the house was all right, that was all that was.
For the driveway was chopped off just a few feet beyond the tail end of the pickup and there was no yard or woods or road. There was just a desert – a flat, far-reaching desert, level as a floor, with occasional boulder piles and haphazard clumps of vegetation and all of the ground covered with sand and pebbles. A big blinding sun hung just above a horizon that seemed much too far away and a funny thing about it was that the sun was in the north, where no proper sun should be. It had a peculiar whiteness, too.
Beasly stepped out on the porch and Taine saw that he was shivering like a frightened dog.
“Maybe,” Taine told him, kindly, “you’d better go back in and start making us some supper.”
“But, Hiram –”
“It’s all right,” said Taine. “It’s bound to be all right.”
“If you say so, Hiram.”
He went in and the screen door banged behind him and in a minute Taine heard him in the kitchen.
He didn’t blame Beasly for shivering, he admitted to himself. It was a sort of shock to step out of your front door into an unknown land. A man might eventually get used to it, of course, but it would take some doing.
He stepped down off the porch and walked around the truck and around the garage corner and when he rounded the corner he was half prepared to walk back into familiar Willow Bend – for when he had gone in the back door the village had been there.
There was no Willow Bend. There was more of the desert, a great deal more of it.
He walked around the house and there was no back to the house. The back of the house now was just the same as the front had been before – the same smooth curve pulling the sides of the house together.
He walked on around the house to the front again and there was desert all the way. And the front was still all right. It hadn’t changed at all. The truck was there on the chopped-off driveway and the garage was open and the car inside.
Taine walked out a ways into the desert and hunkered down and scooped up a handful of the pebbles and the pebbles were just pebbles.
He squatted there and let the pebbles trickle through his fingers.
In Willow Bend there was a back door and there wasn’t any front. Here, wherever here might be, there was a front door, but there wasn’t any back.
He stood up and tossed the rest of the pebbles away and wiped his dusty hands upon his britches.
Out of the corner of his eye he caught a sense of movement on the porch and there they were.
A line of tiny animals, if animals they were, came marching down the steps, one behind the other. They were four inches high or so and they went on all four feet, although it was plain to see that their front feet were really hands, not feet. They had ratlike faces that were vaguely human, with noses long and pointed. They looked like they might have scales instead of hide, for their bodies glistened with a rippling motion as they walked. And all of them had tails that looked very much like the coiled-wire tails one finds on certain toys and the tails stuck straight up above them, quivering as they walked.
They came down the steps in single file, in perfect military order, with half a foot or so of spacing between each one of them.
They came down the steps and walked out into the desert in a straight, undeviating line as if they knew exactly where they might be bound. There was something deadly purposeful about them and yet they didn’t hurry.
Taine counted sixteen of them and he watched them go out into the desert until they were almost lost to sight.
There go the ones, he thought, who came to live with me. They are the ones who fixed up the ceiling and who repaired Abbie’s television set and jiggered up the stove and radio. And more than likely, too, they were the ones who had come to Earth in the strange milk-glass contraption out there in the woods.
And if they had come to Earth in that deal out in the woods, then what sort of place was this?
He climbed the porch and opened the screen door and saw the neat, six-inch circle his departing guests had achieved in the screen to get out of the house. He made a mental note that some day, when he had the time, he would have to fix it.
He went in and slammed the door behind him.
“Beasly,” he shouted.
There was no answer.
Towser crawled from beneath the love seat and apologized.
“It’s all right, pal,” said Taine. “That outfit scared me, too.”
He went into the kitchen. The dim ceiling light shone on the overturned coffee pot, the broken cup in the center of the floor, the upset bowl of eggs. One broken egg was a white and yellow gob on the linoleum.
He stepped down on the landing and saw that the screen door in the back was wrecked beyond repair. Its rusty mesh was broken – exploded might have been a better word – and a part of the frame was smashed.
Taine looked at it in wondering admiration.
“The poor fool,” he said. “He went straight through it without opening it at all.”
He snapped on the light and went down the basement stairs. Halfway down he stopped in utter wonderment.
To his left was a wall – a wall of the same sort of material as had been used to put in the ceiling.
He stooped and saw that the wall ran clear across the basement, floor to ceiling, shutting off the workshop area.
And inside the workshop, what?
For one thing, he remembered, the computer that Henry had sent over just this morning. Three trucks, Beasly had said – three truckloads of equipment delivered straight into their paws!
Taine sat down weakly on the steps.
They must have thought, he told himself, that he was co-operating! Maybe they had figured that he knew what they were about and so went along with them. Or perhaps they thought he was paying them for fixing up the TV set and the stove and radio.