“For the love of God, come in,” said Maxwell sharply, “before someone sees you here.”
The Shrimp came in and Maxwell closed the door, wondering what it was that had caused him to urge it in.
“You need no apprehension,” said the Shrimp, “about news harvesters. I was careful and I noticed. No one followed me. I’m such a foolish-looking creature no one ever follows me. No one ever accords to me any purpose whatsoever.”
“That is a fortunate thing to have,” said Maxwell. “I think that it is called protective coloration.”
“I appear again,” said Shrimp, “on behalf of Miss Nancy Clayton. She knows you carried little on your trip, have had no chance to shop or have laundry done. No wish to embarrass-charging me to say this with goodly emphasis-but wish to send you clothes to wear.”
He took the bundle from underneath his arm and handed it to Maxwell.
“That is nice of Nancy.”
“She is thoughtful person. She commissioned me to say further.”
“Go ahead,” said Maxwell.
“There will be wheeled vehicle to take you to the house.”
“There is no need of that,” said Maxwell. “The roadway runs right past her place.”
“Once again apology,” said the Shrimp, with firmness, “but she thinks it best. There is much hithering and thithering, by many types of creatures, to learn your whereabouts.”
“Can you tell me,” asked Maxwell, “how Miss Clayton knows my whereabouts?”
Said the Shrimp, “I truly do not know.”
“All right, then. You’ll thank Miss Clayton for me?”
“With gladness,” said the Shrimp.
“I’ll take you around to the back,” the driver said. “There is a swarm of newsmen hanging around out front. They’ll be gone later on, but now they’re there in droves. Miss Clayton suggested you might not want to meet them.”
“Thank you,” Maxwell said. “It is thoughtful of you.” Nancy, he told himself, had taken over, as was her usual practice, viewing it as her prerogative to order people’s lives.
Her house stood on the low bluff that hemmed in the western edge of the lake. Off to the left the water gleamed softly in the early moonlight. The front of the house was ablaze with light, but the back was dark.
The car turned off the highway and climbed slowly along a narrow driveway lined by massive oaks. A startled bird flew, squawking, across the roadway, a flurry of desperately beating wings caught for a moment in the headlights. A pair of dogs came raging down the hollow tunnel of the drive, split and swung on either side of the car.
The driver chuckled. “If you were walking, they’d eat you alive.”
“But why?” asked Maxwell. “Why, all at once, must Nancy be guarded by a dog pack?”
“Not Miss Clayton,” the driver said. “It is someone else.”
The question came to Maxwell’s tongue, but he choked it back.
The driver swung the car into a curved driveway that ran beneath an open portico, and pulled up to a halt.
“In the back door,” the driver said. “You don’t need to knock. Then straight down the hall past the curved staircase. The party’s up in front.”
Maxwell started to open the car door, then hesitated.
“You need not mind the dogs,” the driver told him. “They recognize the car. Anyone who steps out of it is OK with them.”
There was, in fact, no sign of the dogs, and Maxwell went swiftly up the three steps of the stoop, opened the back door, and stepped into the hall.
The hall was dark, A little light filtered down the winding staircase-someone apparently had left on a light on the second story. But that was all; there were no other lights. From somewhere in the front of the house came the muffled sound of revelry.
He stood for a moment without moving and as his eyes became accustomed to the darkness, he could see that the hall ran for some distance toward the center of the house, past the foot of the winding stairs and beyond. There was a door back there, or perhaps an abrupt turn in the hall, that would take him party-ward.
It was strange, he told himself. If Nancy had instructed the driver to bring him to the back, she would have had someone there to greet him, or at least she would have seen that there was a light so he could find his way.
Strange, and very awkward, to arrive this way, to grope his way along the hall in search of the others who were there. For a moment he considered turning about and leaving, making his way back to Oop’s place. Then he remembered the dogs. They would be out there and waiting and they looked like vicious brutes.
This whole business, he told himself, was not at all like Nancy. Nancy wouldn’t do a thing like this. There was something very wrong and he did not like it.
He moved cautiously down the hall, alert for chair or table that might be there to trip him up. He could see a little better now, but the hall was still a tunnel without any details.
He passed the stairs, skirting around their base, and now, with the light from the stairway partially cut off, the hall became darker than it was before.
A voice asked, “Professor Maxwell? Is that you, Professor?”
Maxwell stopped in mid-stride, balancing on one leg, then carefully put his lifted foot down against the floor and stood, not stirring, while goose bumps prickled on his skin.
“Professor Maxwell,” said the voice, “I know that you are out there.” It was not a voice, actually, or it didn’t seem to be. There had been no sound, Maxwell could have sworn, yet he had heard the words, not so much, perhaps, in his ear, as somewhere in his brain.
He felt the terror mounting in him and he tried to fight it off, but it didn’t go away. It stayed, crouched somewhere out there in the dark, ready to rush in.
He tried to speak and gulped instead. The voice said, “I’ve waited here for you, Professor. I want to communicate with you. It is to your interest as much as it is to mine.”
“Where are you?” Maxwell asked.
“Through the door just to your left.”
“I do not see a door.”
Good common sense hammered hard at Maxwell. Break and run, it said. Get out of here as fast as you can go.
But he couldn’t break and run. He couldn’t bring himself to do it. And if he ran, which way should he run? Not back to the door, for the dogs were waiting out there. Not clattering down the darkened hall, more than likely to bump into something and raise a terrible clatter, to alert the guests up there in front and to be found, when they investigated, disheveled and bruised and sweating with his fear. For if he ran, he knew, fear would pounce upon him and he’d give way to it.
It was bad enough sneaking in from the back door on a party without being found in a condition such as that.
If it had been just a voice, any kind of voice, it would not have been so frightening, but it was a strange kind of voice-there was no intonation to it and there was about it a certain raw, mechanical, almost rasping quality. It was not a. human voice, Maxwell told himself. There was an alien in that room.
“There is a door,” the flat, hard voice said. “Step slightly to your left and push against it.”
The whole thing was becoming ridiculous, Maxwell told himself. Either he went through the door or he broke and ran. He might try to simply walk away, but he knew that the minute he turned his back upon that hidden door, he would run-not because he wanted to, but because he had to, running from the fear he had turned his back upon.
He stepped to the left, found the door, and pushed. The room was dark, but from a lamp somewhere in the yard outside, some light filtered through the windows, falling on a roly-poly creature that stood in the center of the room, its pudgy belly gleaming with a writhing phosphorescence, as if a group of luminescent sea-dwellers had been imprisoned in a bowl.
“Yes,” the creature said, “you are quite right. I am one of those beings that you call a Wheeler. For my visit here I have given myself a designation that falls easy on your mind. You may call be Mr. Marmaduke. For convenience only, I suspect you understand, for it’s not my name. In fact, none of us have names. They are unnecessary. Our personal identity is achieved in another way.”