Wheeling, he stared across the room. Was it his imagination, or did the lamp on the table blur and begin to fade away?
But as he stared at it, it became clear again, a solid, substantial thing.
For a moment real fear reached out and touched him with chilly fingers. For he knew that this room no longer was proof against the thing that had happened out there on the street.
Or had it really happened? Might not all this exist within his own mind? Might not the street be as it always was, with laughing children and barking dogs? Might not the Red Star confectionery still exist, splashing the street with the red of its neon sign?
Could it be that he was going mad? He had heard whispers when he had passed, whispers the gossiping housewives had not intended him to hear. And he had heard the shouting of boys when he walked by. They thought him mad. Could he be really mad?
But he knew he wasn’t mad. He knew that he perhaps was the sanest of all men who walked the earth. For he, and he alone, had foreseen this very thing. And the others had scoffed at him for it.
Somewhere else the children might be playing on a street. But it would be a different street. And the children undoubtedly would be different too.
For the matter of which the street and everything upon it had been formed would now be cast in a different mold, stolen by different minds in a different dimension.
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.
But there had been no need to wait for that distant day. Scant years after he had written those prophetic words the thing was happening. Man had played unwittingly into the hands of those other minds in the other dimension. Man had waged a war and war had bred a pestilence. And the whole vast cycle of events was but a detail of a cyclopean plan.
He could see it all now. By an insidious mass hypnosis minions from that other dimension … or was it one supreme intelligence … had deliberately sown the seeds of dissension. The reduction of the world’s mental power had been carefully planned with diabolic premeditation.
On impulse he suddenly turned, crossed the room and opened the connecting door to the bedroom. He stopped on the threshold and a sob forced its way to his lips.
There was no bedroom. Where his stolid four poster and dresser had been there was greyish nothingness.
Like an automaton he turned again and paced to the hall door. Here, too, he found what he had expected. There was no hall, no familiar hat rack and umbrella stand.
Nothing. …
Weakly Mr. Chambers moved back to his chair in the corner.
“So here I am,” he said, half aloud.
So there he was. Embattled in the last corner of the world that was left to him.
Perhaps there were other men like him, he thought. Men who stood at bay against the emptiness that marked the transition from one dimension to another. Men who had lived close to the things they loved, who had endowed those things with such substantial form by power of mind alone that they now stood out alone against the power of some greater mind.
The street was gone. The rest of his house was gone. This room still retained its form.
This room, he knew, would stay the longest. And when the rest of the room was gone, this corner with his favorite chair would remain. For this was the spot where he had lived for twenty years. The bedroom was for sleeping, the kitchen for eating. This room was for living. This was his last stand.
These were the walls and floors and prints and lamps that had soaked up his will to make them walls and prints and lamps.
He looked out the window into a blank world. His neighbors’ houses already were gone. They had not lived with them as he had lived with this room. Their interests had been divided, thinly spread; their thoughts had not been concentrated as his upon an area four blocks by three, or a room fourteen by twelve.
Staring through the window, he saw it again. The same vision he had looked upon before and yet different in an indescribable way. There was the city illumined in the sky. There were the elliptical towers and turrets, the cube-shaped domes and battlements. He could see with stereoscopic clarity the aerial bridges, the gleaming avenues sweeping on into infinitude. The vision was nearer this time, but the depth and proportion had changed … as if he were viewing it from two concentric angles at the same time.
And the face … the face of magnitude … of power of cosmic craft and evil. …
Mr. Chambers turned his eyes back into the room. The clock was ticking slowly, steadily. The greyness was stealing into the room.
The table and radio were the first to go. They simply faded away and with them went one corner of the room.
And then the elephant ash tray.
“Oh, well,” said Mr. Chambers, “I never did like that very well.”
Now as he sat there it didn’t seem queer to be without the table or the radio. It was as if it were something quite normal. Something one could expect to happen.
Perhaps, if he thought hard enough, he could bring them back.
But, after all, what was the use? One man, alone, could not stand off the irresistible march of nothingness. One man, all alone, simply couldn’t do it.
He wondered what the elephant ash tray looked like in that other dimension. It certainly wouldn’t be an elephant ash tray nor would the radio be a radio, for perhaps they didn’t have ash trays or radios or elephants in the invading dimension.
He wondered, as a matter of fact, what he himself would look like when he finally slipped into the unknown. For he was matter, too, just as the ash tray and radio were matter.
He wondered if he would retain his individuality … if he still would be a person. Or would he merely be a thing?
There was one answer to all of that. He simply didn’t know.
Nothingness advanced upon him, ate its way across the room, stalking him as he sat in the chair underneath the lamp. And he waited for it.
The room, or what was left of it, plunged into dreadful silence.
Mr. Chambers started. The clock had stopped. Funny … the first time in twenty years.
He leaped from his chair and then sat down again.
The clock hadn’t stopped.
It wasn’t there.
There was a tingling sensation in his feet.
The Ghost of a Model T
This story first appeared in 1975 in the original anthology Epoch, edited by Robert Silverberg and Roger Elwood; and Cliff considered it one of his best. As he said in the afterword to that publication, it was “pure nostalgia” (and he added that people of later times have misinterpreted what the “Roaring Twenties” were all about …).
True eternity may demand both a loss of memory and an ability, a knack, to live in the moment. Eternity, in fact, may be no more than a moment—but a moment without end, without past or future, but only a focus on the right now.
He was walking home when he heard the Model T again. It was not a sound that he could well mistake, and it was not the first time he had heard it running, in the distance, on the road. Although it puzzled him considerably, for so far as he knew, no one in the country had a Model T. He’d read somewhere, in a paper more than likely, that old cars, such as Model T’s, were fetching a good price, although why this should be, he couldn’t figure out. With all the smooth, sleek cars that there were today, who in their right mind would want a Model T? But there was no accounting, in these crazy times, for what people did. It wasn’t like the old days, but the old days were long gone, and a man had to get along the best he could with the way that things were now.