The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction Novel

by Frank Belknap Long

  A moment later she was returning down the long hall to the bedroom her husband had left long ago—surely a full century had swept past by now—to expose himself to a risk she had pleaded with him not to take.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The telephone had rung twenty times, or more and she found herself hoping it would stop before she could get to it. Answering it made little sense, for it was likely to be a neighbor calling about some trivial matter—Mrs. Jackson perhaps or Sally Crafton at the other end of the lane. Mrs. Jackson was a real night owl, and when she had some recent item of local gossip to discuss, it was hard for her to restrain her impatience, even when a glance at the clock should have given her pause.

  But ignoring a persistently ringing phone is always difficult and great tension and strain increase that difficulty. When she reached her room she darted to the bedside table and uncradled the receiver, her hand trembling a little, feeling herself to be under a compulsion she was powerless to resist.

  “Yes?” she said. “Who is this, please?”

  There was a brief droning sound, followed by what sounded like a faint click. Then a voice came over the wire in reply—a voice that gave her so great a shock that she gasped and the receiver slipped from her hand and went clattering to the floor.

  The same voice continued to come from it, sounding genuinely alarmed. “Darling, I heard something fall. Are you all right? Can you hear me? Is there something wrong with the phone?”

  Helen picked up the receiver and spoke into it, trying desperately to keep her voice from rising to an hysterical pitch but not quite succeeding. “I…I just dropped the phone,” she said. “George, you gave me a terrible scare. Where are you? What has happened? Are you all right?”

  “I’m right next door, in Mrs. Jackson’s house,” George Wentworth said. His voice sounded as strained as her own and it was hoarse, as if the dampness of the garden had brought back the slight touch of laryngitis which had been troubling him for a fortnight.

  Before she could do more than gasp he went on quickly: “Listen to me, darling. Listen carefully. I want you to come right over here and bring the children. Don’t light a match, don’t let them out of your sight for a moment. There’s a dangerous gas seepage right under the house. It’s just a seepage now, but at any moment it will be a great burst of gas flooding the house. There’s something wrong with the main gas line and pressure is building up. The gas company has construction blueprints—they can pinpoint the exact location where the pipeline is going to burst.”

  “George, I don’t understand!” Helen was clasping the receiver so tightly that her fingers had gone numb. “How did you find out about it? You couldn’t possibly—”

  “The sheriff phoned Mrs. Jackson a few minutes ago. He tried our phone first, but no one answered. I guess you didn’t hear it ring—or maybe he got the wrong number. Mrs. Jackson was coming over to warn us when she saw me moving about in the garden and called down to me.”

  “But why didn’t you come right back and tell me. Why are you phoning from next door?”

  “There simply isn’t time. This way, don’t you see, there’ll be less confusion, less trouble with the children. Just get them over here as quickly as you can. I don’t want to lose you…and Bobby and Susan.”

  “But if I don’t light a match?”

  “You’ll be overcome by the gas in two or three minutes—before you can get out of the house. Please do as I say. There’s not a moment to lose. I love you, darling.”

  The instant she hung up, a wave of incredulity swept over her. Nothing that she had been told made sense. Why would a man desperately concerned about the safety of his wife and children rush into a neighbor’s house instead of his own and phone from there? Wouldn’t it have been more natural for him to have run to her side, bundled the children up and carried them in his arms as far from the house as he could get before it was shaken by an explosion? And how could the gas company, blueprints or not, determine with absolute accuracy just when and where such a disaster was about to take place? A gas main bursting from pressure. Did that ever happen? Perhaps it did, but it was certainly not one of the everyday hazards of rural life. Gas leakages were common enough, but the instant, lethal flooding of an entire house with fumes from a shattered basement pipeline—

  She caught herself up abruptly. No matter how incredible it sounded, the most dangerous thing she could have done would have been to ignore so urgent a warning. It was a plea as well, a desperate plea, by a man she’d have loved and trusted even if she hadn’t been married to him for ten years.

  And the children…if just her own life had been at stake she might have decided that something was terribly wrong and phoned the sheriff to find out if he was a little confused as to just what the gas company had told him. But there was no time for that now, no time at all. She must hurry…hurry.

  She was afraid that it might be difficult to get the children out of the house fast, for Bobby could be stubborn and resort to delaying tactics when he was confronted with something new and startling that called for an explanation. And Susan would follow his lead.

  There would be time only for the briefest of explanations and as she left the bedroom and started down the hall, a chill foreboding came upon her. How terrible it would be if the house became flooded with gas before she could get them calmed down and convinced of the danger that they would be cooperative.

  It was not as difficult as she had feared it might be. Bobby protested for a moment, but when she took him by the shoulder and shook him vigorously the fright in her eyes seemed to communicate to him.

  “You’re going just as you are, in your pajamas.” she told him. “Right this minute. We’re not taking anything with us.”

  It was Susan who displayed defiance, snatching up her favorite calico doll as her mother herded them toward the door and waited for them to pass into the hallway ahead of her. Then they were hurrying down the hall, with Susan stumbling a little, because the doll was almost as big as she was. Helen snatched it from her when they reached the bottom of the stairs and tossed it into a far corner of the living room.

  “I’ll buy you a new one!” she said, with maternal harshness. “If the house explodes, it would be better for a doll to burn up than you and Bobby.”

  “I don’t want Sally to burn up, Mama!” Susan cried.

  She started across the living room to pick up the doll. Helen grabbed her firmly by the wrist and fairly dragged her into the kitchen to the screen door that was banging a little now in a wind that had just arisen.

  “All she ever thinks about is herself,” Bobby said as they passed out into the cool night. “Every time you tell her that, Mom, she thinks it’s funny. I bet if the house caught fire—”

  Although it was one time when Bobby deserved praise, Helen Wentworth’s relief at finding herself in the garden with the children at her side was so overwhelming that she said the first thing that came into her mind.

  “You both think it’s funny,” she complained. “You’re no better than Susan. I don’t know why I was ever cursed with such stubborn, self-centered children.”

  Bobby seemed to realize that the best reply to an unjust accusation was a stony silence, for he waited until they were at the back door of Mrs. Jackson’s cottage and she was tugging at the knob in an impatient effort to get it open before he spoke again.

  “It’s not locked,” he said. “If you push on it hard you can get it open. You just have to reach in and twist the catch around. Mrs. Jackson always leaves it like that.”

  Helen pushed on the door and it opened an inch or two, just as her son had predicted. But she quickly found that her hand was too large to go completely through the opening.

  “All right, Bobby, you try,” she said, stepping back. “Why have all the lights been turned off? I don’t understand it.”

  “You said Dad expected us to be right over,” Bobby said. “
You told me—”

  “Never mind what I told you. If you can’t get the door open I’ll pound on it until he comes down and lets us in. Why does he have to put me through such an ordeal?”

  For some unaccountable reason, her feeling of relief had totally vanished. Not only was she becoming almost as alarmed as she had been when the phone had dropped from her hand a few minutes earlier, but there was something about the completely dark-silent house that chilled her. Probably it wasn’t as dark as it seemed, she told herself quickly. If there was a light in one of the front room upstairs she couldn’t have seen it from where she was standing.

  A tiny fraction of her alarm was dispelled when Bobby said: “I got the door open, Mom.”

  “All right, don’t just stand there. Go in, and turn on the light in the kitchen. It’s just to the left of the stove.”

  It was a crazy thing to say, because both of the children had been in Mrs. Jackson’s house more often than she had, and knew where everything was, including the cookie jar.

  She followed Bobby into the kitchen without waiting for him to switch on the light, holding Susan tightly by the hand. She heard Bobby moving about close to the stove, but the light didn’t come on.

  “The bulb doesn’t light,” Bobby said. “It must be burned out.”

  Why she hadn’t pounded on the door and shouted was something she couldn’t explain. Seemingly, deep in her nature, there were gentile impulses which even chill apprehension could not instantly overcome. She was the kind of woman who seldom raised her voice, even to her husband during a marital dispute. But she raised it now, in anger and alarm, and it went echoing through the silent house.

  “George, we’re here! In the kitchen! Where are you? It’s so dark we can’t see a thing!”

  Silence. Upstairs and down not the slightest sound came to her ears.

  She knew that Bobby could seldom remain silent for long and was not surprised when his seven-year-old voice came out of the darkness close to where she was standing, still keeping a tight grip on Susan’s hand.

  It was much shriller than her voice had been, and it echoed vibrantly through the house.

  “Dad, the light bulb doesn’t work! But you don’t have to come down. I can find the stairs in the dark!”

  “Oh, you can, can you? And what will we find at the top of the stairs?” It seemed to her that she was virtually screaming the words. But she knew as well that her lips hadn’t moved, and that it was an inward screaming which Bobby couldn’t possibly have heard.

  It happened so suddenly that for an instant she could not believe that it had become impossible for her to move. Not only her lips, but her entire body seemed suddenly to have congealed, to have become frozen solid, as if an icy blast of wind had swept over her and stopped her blood from circulating, the very air she had been breathing from moving in and out of her lungs.

  She felt Susan’s small hand slip from her clasp and knew her own hand had turned cold. She could feel the coldness, the numbness, creeping up her arms and spreading across her shoulders.

  She found, after a moment, that she could still breathe and open and close her hands. But so great a weight of inertia rested upon her that if Susan had gone spinning into the darkness in a circle of blinding light she could not have cried out in stricken protest or moved a foot from where she was standing.

  A circle of blinding light! The room was still in darkness. But for the barest instant a vision of Susan vanishing in just that way had flashed across her mind—a vision so totally inexplicable that it terrified her even more than the paralysis.

  Her terror increased when she saw that the darkness on the opposite side of the kitchen was disappearing and a circle of radiance was actually forming in the half-light a few feet from the stove. It was faint at first, but it grew swiftly brighter, dazzling her eyes and pulsing with many swiftly changing colors—blue, green, purple, yellow, red.

  It grew so bright that she was afraid that it would endanger her sight. But she continued to stare at it, determined not to shut her eyes, even for a moment. She knew that she would die inwardly if the light swirled down over Susan and she vanished as swiftly as she had done in the terrifying vision which had preceded the coming of the light. But she did not want it to happen while her eyes were closed.

  As she continued to stare, the light became less dazzling. She was later to realize that what she had seen in the vision was a wild distortion, brought about by her fear that she would lose Susan if sane reality was shattered in a terrifying way. Having seen the light before it appeared, in a flash that seemed clairvoyant, she had anticipated the worst.

  She was later to realize all that and more. But now, when the light became less bright and the changing colors coalesced into a steady, intense, but almost hueless glow she experienced only relief—a relief so overwhelming that even Bobby’s frightened voice coming out of the edge of the darkness failed to bridge the gap between the way she felt, and a fear that should not have been thrust aside, even for an instant.

  “Dad’s not here! If he was somewhere upstairs he’d come down and save us. I can’t move, Mom!”

  Susan hadn’t cried out at all. But suddenly her small hand was clutching frantically at her mother’s skirt and she was sobbing the only way a child of six can, with a wrenching intensity.

  Nothing could have brought Helen more quickly back to reality. Her fears returned and she drew Susan closer to her, whispering words of reassurance.

  “It’s all right, darling. Nothing bad is going to happen. Some things are real all the time, but other things are only real for a short time and they don’t stay real.”

  The fact that she could move her arms had surprised her. Was the paralysis wearing off? She tried to take a short step forward but her legs remained frozen.

  She drew Susan even closer, burying her head in the loose folds of the light fall jacket she had snatched up before taking the children from a house that was in danger of going up in flames to a house where something terrifying had come out of the unknown to make their security just as uncertain. But she was determined not to give way to panic.

  “Just stay where you are, Bobby!” she pleaded. “Your father may still be in the house. I don’t know why we can’t move or where that light is coming from. But if we let ourselves become frightened—”

  “Dad’s not here!” Bobby’s voice rose in shrill protest. I know he’s not here. If he was he’d have come right downstairs when I shouted.”

  She said nothing in reply, because what her son had said would have been difficult to refute. In fact, she was by now convinced that he was right.

  She was stroking Susan’s hair and whispering to her again in an effort to quiet her when the light changed for the second time, taking on more depth and clarity, and she saw that Bobby had been mistaken.

  Not only was her husband in Mrs. Jackson’s cottage, he was right there in the kitchen staring out at them from the depths of the glow with a look in his face that made her cry out in stricken disbelief.

  “Helen,” came in a halting voice. “Listen…listen to me.

  Never had she imagined that anyone could look quite so haggard-eyed and tormented or display in his gaze, his gestures, the very way he held himself, so desperate a need for compassionate understanding. She would have been moved to tears by a stranger speaking to her, with the same hopeless appeal in his eyes, the same wild insistence that he needed, a passage back to life and hope.

  A word, a handclasp, a look which communicated thoughts too deeply rooted in compassion to be spoken aloud might have sufficed—if the man had not been her husband. But him she longed to shield with an outflowing of love that would heal what she hardly dared to dwell upon—some wound that had left him broken, if not completely crushed in spirit, though his body had been spared.

  She could not be certain that he had not been wounded in body as well as in mind, for he w
as firmly clasping his right shoulder and his lips twitched several times, as if he were in great physical pain.

  She forgot for a moment that he could not possibly be physically present in the room, that it could only be a visual projection, with no more substance than an image on a TV screen, and that the tormented eyes that returned her stare were somewhere else, perhaps a great many miles away. She forgot, too, the fear which had come upon her when the circle of radiance had first appeared in the room. It had seemed terrifying and mysterious beyond belief, but she suddenly found herself thinking of it as a miraculously bestowed means of communication between her husband and herself.

  Her first impulse was to ask him where he was and what had happened. But there was something more important that she had to know first. Could he see her as clearly as she could see him? The circle of radiance must be quite different from a TV screen, because it had materialized out of the darkness, and he had spoken directly to her, with his eyes on her face. She was sure that he could see her, but how clearly? Was every movement that she made visible to him? And could he hear her as well? And the children—could he see them, could he see every part of the kitchen? Was the circle of radiance a marvelous two-way communicating device that brought him actually in the house with them, if only in a mechanical sense?

  She clung to the possibility with a feverish kind of desperation. It would be a comfort, a joy even, despite the torment which looked out of his eyes—a torment which she shared—to know they were together, even though he would be powerless to defend her physically against whatever it was that had taken him away from her.

  Then, out of the darkness a boy’s voice cried out: “Dad!”—One word, followed by silence. She thought of the terror and confusion being endured by her children.

  “Yes, son—it’s all right,” George Wentworth said. “You’ll be able to move about again in a moment—and so will your mother and sister. I’m proud of you, son—more proud than I can say. You’re a brave boy and you’re going to continue being brave, right?”