Bass turned and slammed his knotted fist against the wall. The pain helped. Massaging his bruised knuckles, he turned again and looked around him.
Beginning where he stood, a bleak wasteland stretched for fifty yards ahead—a wilderness of hummocks and boulders, furred over with the brittle black skeletons of burnt underbrush, At his feet, and all along the wall in either direction, lay a sparse litter: soaked and wadded papers, a faded rubber ball, the fragments of a kite, broken glass, broken wood, broken plastic. There was even, Bass saw with a queer absence of shock, an occasional reclaimable article —a tin can, a spike, a tangled mass of wire. Children below the angel must have done that.
The wasteland ended at another wall, convex as the first one was concave. To right and left, the burnt strip disappeared around the curve, but Bass knew that if he set out along it in either direction, the curve would turn the other way after a mile or so, and eventually he would come back to his starting point. Glenbrook was an island.
Beyond the second wall was—terra incognita.
On the maps, Glenbrook and its suburbs were enclosed in a wavering outline, shaped roughly like a lopsided kidney bean, or a fat boomerang. Around it was a blank area approximately three times as large; then, to the northeast, came Norwalk, minutely detailed, with all its rivers and roads; and to the west, White Plains. The whole map of the continent was like that: islands of civilization in an ocean of blankness, or in some places, large civilized tracts with blobs of white in them, like the spots of leprosy. To north and south, civilization dwindled away; the map became all white.
It was disconcerting to see the other wall so near. Somewhere, long ago, he had heard a story passed on from someone who had glanced through when a section of the Glenbrook wall was being repaired; and the story was that the wasteland went on and on, indefinitely.
But of course it couldn’t be so; now that he thought of it, Bass realized that he had often looked over from the top of the hill, and seen the Others’ phantom rooftops, looking almost near enough to touch. Anyhow, Glenbrook was larger now than it had been when he was a child; three or four new streets had been added on the periphery to house the growing population. Perhaps the Others had been doing the same on their side; until now there was hardly room left in between for one more block of houses.
The Others: the bat-winged monsters, who dressed in clothes of iron that never wore out; and ate their own children; and lived in caves that they scraped out of rock with the tines of their terrible hands …
Bass hesitated, suspended between one motion and the next. For a moment it seemed incredible that he was here at all; what was the known terror of the Guard compared to the marrow-chilling emptiness that lay ahead of him?
His body had tensed itself, as if he were standing at the edge of an abyss, nerving himself to jump. Deliberately, he took the first step forward. Then the next. Gray flaky ash puffed up around his feet as he walked; black char grimed his shoes and the cuffs of his trousers.
HALFWAY across the ground began to slope upwards as he climbed, a gray triangle appeared over the wall ahead. More and more of the thing rose into view as he approached it; he was watching it so intently that he did not notice the other things to right and left of it until he had almost reached the wall. They were tilted brown planes—like the roofs of houses. The triangle in the middle might easily be another house, seen end-on; but Bass was not deceived.
These appearances were part of the screen of illusion the Others had set up; evidently they were not simply pictures painted on a roof of canvas, as Bass had always half-consciously assumed ; they might be wickerwork structures; painted to resemble houses from a distance ; but that was not important. In a moment he would be over the wall, under that screen, however it was made; and he would see things that men were never meant to see.
The base of this wall, too, was strewn with discarded objects. Bass did not let himself hesitate again. He climbed recklessly onto the sagging ruin of a barrel hoisted himself to the top of the wall and dropped over.
He was in a yard.
Yellowed grass straggled over bare earth, worn hard and smooth under the clothesline. Beyond that, a house: screened back porch with hoe-and rake-handles leaning against it, blank upper story—no windows facing the Wall—garden hose coiled around a standpipe al the corner.
It was a replica, in all but the smallest details, of the house it faced across the Wall in Glenbrook. To left and right across the low hedges, Bass saw other houses, equally prosaic, equally familiar.
An orange tiger-striped cat got up from under a bush, stretching lazily, Bass started convulsively and backed up against the Wall. The cat hesitated a moment, one forepaw lifted, then came over and rubbed itself against his legs, purring raucously.
Bass stared at it. Cats, he realized abruptly, had no angels; and it was a poor tom that couldn’t leap a six-foot wall. It was odd to think that he might have seen this very animal in the streets of Glenbrook, never dreaming where it had come from… .
Or was it a cat?
If that house was not a house, then the garden hose might be a serpent, and the cat might be—
He backed away from it cautiously. It followed him for a couple of steps, then sat down and began licking its chest.
Bass worked his way out to the front of the house, pausing after every step to listen. He heard nothing. Through a kitchen window he saw a long bare table with chairs of a vaguely disturbing pat tern ranked around it. In the dark room were the angular bulks of a sofa and easy chairs, the pale gleam of a mounted picture on the wall. There was no footfall or murmur of voices; the house was empty.
So was the street. House after identical house, down the long declining perspective into the last sunlight in one direction, the gathering twilight in the other.
Bass turned left and followed his endless shadow toward the darkness. It seemed incredible, but. if it was going to be like this all the way, why couldn’t he work his way around Glenbrook to the eastward and then head north up the coast—stealing food, sleeping in ditches —until he reached Boston? It wouldn’t be as good as Los Angeles, of course, but surely he could find a ship bound for some Central American port, then cross the Isthmus to the Pacific.
In his excitement, Bass forgot that there would be no food to steal in the Others’ territory—that the Others, being demons incarnate, ate nothing but dirt, rusty iron, stones and their own offspring. He strode along faster and faster down the empty street; the darkness and the silence and the unburdened motion of his own body made him feel so secure that, by the time he reached the end of the street, where it ran into the curving wall, he had lost all caution.
He turned to his right up another dim, vacant street. He was actually whistling when, just before he reached the fifth corner, two things happened simultaneously:
The street lights flared up.
Three grotesque travesties of human beings walked into view from the cross-street, looked over their shoulders, and saw him… .
THERE was an unmeasured, and, for Bass, immeasurable period of time when he couldn’t move. He saw the goggle-eyed parchment faces of the three etched sharply under the street-lamp. He saw their mouths bulge into tall black O’s; he heard their screams. Then, unaccountably, two of them were running away—jumping-jack figures trundling their oval black shadows far down the street—and the third was lying quietly on the pavement at the corner.
The two running figures were gone. Bass heard their shrieks, faint and fainter down the street, then silence.