I stepped out from the wall and started for the stairs. I had just reached the top of them when something made me turn around. I don’t think I heard anything. I’m fairly sure I didn’t. But the effect was the same as if I had.
There was something said for me to turn around, and I turned around so fast my feet got tangled up and threw me to the floor.
And even as I fell I saw the trap was wilting.
I tried to ease my fall by putting out my hands, but I didn’t do so well. I hit with quite a thud and banged my head, and my brain was full of stars.
I got my hands under me and hoisted up my front and shook the stars away and the trap had gone on wilting.
The jaws were limp and the whole contraption was humped up in a most peculiar way. I watched it in some wonder, not doing anything, just lying there, with the front of me propped up on my arms.
The trap got limper and limper and began to hump together. It was as if a piece of mashed-out, mangled plastic putty was trying to put itself into shape again. And it did put itself into shape. It made itself into a ball. All this time that it has been humping itself together, it had been changing color, and when it finally was a ball it was as black as pitch.
It lay there for a moment in front of the door and then it began rolling slowly, as if it took a lot of effort to get itself to rolling.
And it rolled straight for me!
I tried to get out of its way, but it built its speed up fast and I thought for an instant it would crash straight into me. It was about the size of a bowling ball, maybe just a little bigger, and I had no way of knowing how heavy it might be.
But it didn’t hit me. It brushed me, that was all.
I twisted to watch it go down the stairs, and that was a funny thing. It bounced down the steps, but not the way a normal ball would bounce. It bounced short and fast, not high and lazy—as if there were a law which said it must hit every tread but make the best speed that it could. It went down the flight, hitting every tread, and it went around the corner post so fast you could almost see the smoke.
I scrambled to my feet and got to the banister and leaned over to see the flight below. But the ball was out of sight. There was no sign of it.
I went back down the hail and there, underneath the light, lay the bunch of keys, and there was the three-foot semicircle cut out of the carpet.
I got down on my knees and picked up the keys and found the right one finally and got over to the door. I unlocked it and went into the apartment and locked the door, real fast, behind me before I even took the time to turn on a light.
I got the light turned on and made it to the kitchen. I sat down at the breakfast table and remembered there was a pitcher almost half full of tomato juice in the refrigerator and that I should drink some of.
But I couldn’t stand the thought of it. I gagged just thinking of it. What I really needed was another slug of booze, but I’d had too much of that already.
I sat there, thinking about the trap and why anyone would set a trap for me. It was the craziest thing I had ever heard of. If I hadn’t seen that trap myself, I’d never have believed it.
It was no trap, of course—no regular trap, that is. For regular traps do not wilt and roil into a ball and go rolling away when they’ve failed to catch their quarry.
I tried to reason it all out, but my brain was fuzzy and I was sleepy and I was safe at home and tomorrow was another day. So I gave up everything and staggered off to bed.
Something jerked me out of sleep.
I came up straight, not knowing where I was, not knowing who I was—entirely disoriented, not fuzzy, not sleepy, not con- fused, but with that terrible, cold clarity of mind that makes an emptiness of everything in its sudden flash of being.
I was in a silence, in an emptiness, in a lightless nowhere, and that clear, cold mind speared out like a striking snake, seeking, finding nothing, and horrified at the nothingness.
Then the clamor came—the high, shrill, insistent, insane clamor, which was entirely mindless in that it was not meant for me or for anything but clamored solely for itself.
The silence fell again and there were shadows that were shapes—a square of half-light that turned out to be a window, a faint gleam from the kitchen where the light still burned, a crouched, dark monstrosity that was an easy chair.
The phone screamed again through the morning darkness and I tumbled out of bed, heading blindly for a door that I could not see. Groping, I found it, and the phone was silent now.
I went across the living room, stumbling in the darkness, and was putting out my hand when it began to ring again.
I jerked it from the cradle viciously and mumbled into it. There was something the matter with my tongue. It didn’t want to work.
“Parker?”
“Who else?”
“This is Joe—Joe Newman.”
“Joe?” Then I remembered. Joe Newman was the dogwatch man on the night desk at the paper.
“Hate to get you up,” said Joe. I mumbled at him wrathfully. “Something funny happened. Thought you ought to know.”
“Look, Joe,” I said. “Call Gavin. He’s the city editor. He gets paid for being gotten out of bed.”
“But this is down your alley, Parker. This is—”
“Yeah, I know,” I told him. “A flying Saucer landed.”
“Not that. You ever hear of Timber Lane?”
“Out by the lake,” I said. “Way out west of town.”
“That’s it. The old Belmont place is at the end of it. House closed up. Ever since the Belmont family moved out to Arizona. Kids use the road as a lovers’ lane.”
“Now, look, Joe . .
“I was getting to it, Parker. Some kids were parked out there tonight. They saw a bunch of balls rolling down the road. Like bowling balls, one behind the other.”
I’m afraid I yelled at him: “They what?”
“They saw these things in the headlights when they were driving out and got panicky. Put a call in to the cops.”
I got myself in hand and made my voice calm. “Cops find anything?”
“Just tracks,” said Joe.
“Bowling ball tracks?”
“Yeah, I guess you could call them that.” I told him: “Kids been drinking, maybe.” “Cops didn’t say so. They talked with these kids. They just saw the balls rolling down the road. They didn’t stop to investigate. They just got out of there.”
I didn’t say anything. I was trying to figure out what I ought to say. And I was scared. Scared stiff.
“What do you think of it, Parker?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Imaginationmaybe. Or ribbing the cops.”
“The cops found tracks.”
“Kids could have made them. Could have rolled some bowling balls up and down the road, picking out the dusty places. Figured they’d get their names into the papers. They get bored and crazy. . .”
“You wouldn’t use it, then?”
“Look, Joe—I’m not the city editor. It’s not up to me. Ask Gavin. He’s the man who decides what we publish.”
“And you don’t think there’s anything to it? Maybe it’s a hoax?”
“How the hell would I know?” I yelled at him.
He got sore at me. I don’t blame him much.
“Thanks, Parker. Sorry that I troubled you,” he said, and then hung up, and the phone began its steady drone.
“Good night, Joe,” I said into the drone. “I’m sorry that I yelled.”
It helped, saying it, even if he wasn’t there to hear.
And I wondered why I’d tried to downgrade the story, why I’d tried to suggest it Was no more than some teen-age prank.
Because, you slob, you’re scared, said that inner man who sometimes talks to You. Because you’d give almost anything to make yourself believe there is nothing to it. Because you don’t want to be reminded of that trap out in the hail.