But, the point is, I never did ask her much of anything about her past, nor she about mine.
Arlene laughed, breaking into my reverie. “Gramp Wheeler isn’t my grandfather, Bob. That’s just what everyone calls him.”
I turned my attention back to the road, because there was a big curve ahead. In a moment, I saw why. A side road led straight ahead; there were big “Road Closed” signs there. Of course, this was the road that led fifteen miles into the swamp, then came to a stop.
“Why do you think they built that?” I asked Arlene.
“Maybe their money ran out, or something happened to make them stop.”
“But why would they attempt it in the first place. The project itself is insane.”
I remembered other things Harvey had told me. They’d gone ahead with remaking the old road, all right. No kick there. But their very attitude was such as to give the unmistakable impression that it was the swamp road wherein their interests really lay, that the main road was just an auxiliary project.
Why? Why, if their main idea was to build a highway through the swamp, did they bother with a not-too-necessary project like re making the old road? In fact, and this just struck me with a dull thud, if the swamp road had been completed, then this highway we were: now riding would have been superfluous.
No matter how I looked at it, it all became more mystifying. They’d built the toll bridge where the old road cut across the narrower neck of the swamp. But the only conclusion to which I could come was that they never intended to finish the swamp road at all. It had been planned that way, to be unfinished and never used.
Beside me, Arlene hummed gaily. “Slow down, pet; they enforce speed laws here.”
I .shot a glance at her. “Darling, are you a native of Stamphis?”
She stretched lazily. “It’s nice,” she murmured, “but I never lived there.”
“But—look, have you ever noticed anything queer about it—or the people?”
“No, Bob,” was the definite reply. “Turn right here and slow down; it’s easy to miss the house.”
. Grandfather Wheeler was all Arlene had claimed and then some. Picture Charles Coburn with a George Bernard Shaw heard and a Lionel Barrymore voice, and you had Gramp. He had two main topics of discussion: strange -and fearsome creatures of field and forest, and Stamphis, its past, present and future. I am ready to swear that all his Bunyanesque stories were originated on the spur of the moment, but that didn’t make them any the less superb.
- We spent the evening listening to his tales, and looking over his album of clippings from the Stamphis Guardian, a seven-volume file which went back to 1868. I couldn’t see any difference between these clippings and the kind you would find in other small-town newspapers. The outstanding thing was that the Guardian had been run by the same family, passing from son to grandson since its inception.
We walked around town a bit—Gramp wanted to show me everything, since I hadn’t been there before. It was all strangely familiar. Not a single thing about Stamphis was what I would call peculiar to the town alone; the buildings, houses, layouts, newspaper, political setup—all were just like other towns I’d seen. Even the people were like replicas of others in other parts of the country. I’d met Gramp Wheeler before—I was sure of that. I met him in a little town in Maine, only he didn’t look quite so much like a composite of Coburn, Shaw and Barrymore.
And I hadn’t forgotten that this town was precisely where Waterloo, Indiana, should have been.
In fact, I began to wonder why Gramp Wheeler was so anxious to pile up first hand evidence to the fact that Stamphis was there. Slicing away the friendly, inoffensive approach, that was what the evening’s activity amounted to. We were bombarded with the propaganda, all of which could be reduced to one sentence: Stamphis had been in existence, on this site, since 1865.
I asked a few guarded questions and found that no one around the town had ever heard of Waterloo. Arlene couldn’t understand what I meant; Waterloo, she maintained, was a place in Europe, but there wasn’t any such location in this state. Not wanting to get into an argument, I dropped the subject for the nonce, and let Gramp Wheeler shoot the bull to me.
The next day I started in on my very quiet campaign. First of all, the matter of road maps. I drove across the state, collecting maps at every gas station I passed, then cut into Illinois before coming back by a different route. By the time I returned, there was a nice collection of maps in the back of the car.
One by one I opened them and one by one the evidence hit me between the eyes. Not one of these toad maps showed Waterloo; not one listed it. They all indicated and listed Stamphis.
Next thing, I checked up through the post office—wrote to Washington— and got a reply from some official with very complete data from ancient files. Yes, Stamphis obtained its post office in 1869, just as Gramp Wheeler had claimed. And there was no post office at Waterloo—in fact, the person who answered my inquiry vehemently denied that such a place existed.
A carefully worded letter to the State Senator, whom I had met, elicited a reply to the effect that he had spent many happy days in Stamphis, and was I joking about this Waterloo?
By this time, I must admit that I had begun to question my own sanity. After all, you can’t argue with government files running back over fifty years, I reasoned. It must be some sort of delusion on my part. Yet—Harvey and others had suffered from the same malady, if delusion it were.
But a day or so after receiving the Senator’s reply, I found some old 1948 and 1949 road maps in a trunk. They all listed Waterloo; not one mentioned Stamphis. And a Decatur newspaper, dated 1946, carried Waterloo credit lines on a couple of minor stories.
I started another campaign, checking up with almanacs and gazetteers. The results convinced me that I was not insane, but that something unpleasant was afoot. First of all, almanacs and gazetteers I had bought at the time of their appearance, up to 1950, listed Waterloo. 1950 found Stamphis nosing it out. But almanacs obtained through shops, or ordered directly from publishers, whatever date was on them, were all out for Stamphis.
It’s rather strange that it took me so long to think of looking into the closed swamp highway. In fact, I doubt if I would have thought of it at all had not Harvey mentioned, around this time, that cars were obviously going in, despite signs. Ordinarily, I would have dismissed it all as unimportant— a deserted road is very convenient if you have a car and a girl—but it struck me that more serious matters than surreptitious necking was afoot. On a sudden hunch I told Arlene that I had to go to Stamphis on business and set out for the fools’ highway.
Even in the hushed glow of my dimmed lights it was clear that the fools’ highway was a road in constant use. Yet, no one in town seemed ever to have seen any cars either going in or coming out. I’d talked about it to the patrolmen, and they’d said they passed by the entrance any number of times each night, but the signs were always there, the obstructions undisturbed.
Now I had to disturb them myself and get in, put them back, and get away before the lads came by. Fortunately, my investigation had given me rather exact data on matters such as precisely what times the patrol passed fools’ highway. I had, I estimated, a good twenty minutes before they’d be due by. Unless something went wrong, I should be able to drag enough obstruction away to get my buggy in, shove it back, and be out of sight before they happened along. _
That’s the way it was, too. Only the obstructions were not the formidable, heavy-timbered affairs they seemed; they were light enough so that I could
easily carry them to one side without any real exertion—and I don’t get enough exercise. I slid the car in, then moved them back.
So this was the fools’ highway, the road to nowhere built by the men from nowhere, the road which came to a dead end fifteen miles out. This was the highway designed to give the appearance that it had been unfinished, and was not in use. A clever dodge. But the false obstruction work made me decide that the swamp road was not t
he innocent piece of rich man’s folly it seemed. And I hadn’t driven far before first hand evidence began to show itself.
First of all, the texture was decidedly different. Not that I’m anything of an authority on road construction, but I know when a road seems resilient beneath the wheels, and this one did all of that. My chariot seemed to leap ahead with little or no effort; finally I shut off the motor and coasted.
For about ten minutes I coasted at a good rate—though not letting myself hit over thirty in this territory—as if there were a steady downward slope, belying what was clearly before my eyes. The scenery was not unusual— until I passed between what looked like a set of caution signals, facing each other across the road.
The change was as abrupt as a roughcut closeup in the movies. It just leaped up at me. The whole scene became a dismal grey, through which a few distant shapes were discernible, but nothing else. The edges of the highway on either side ran into the grey and were swallowed up by it. It wasn’t fog; you got the feeling that it was probably solid enough, and that it would stay put, but there it was none the less, and a gloomier looking scene I never saw.
Gloomy? Did I say that? The word is anticlimactic. That grey land was dismal and desolate beyond description. It .was as if desolation itself had despaired and cut its bloodless throat, to fall and disintegrate into the grey. It would not color it by calling it a hungry grey, or a gaping void, or the like. No, I would say only that it was too frightful for horror.
And with the numbing effect of it, there came weariness.
My first desire, after a spasm of yawning, was merely to stop, get out and stretch a bit. It was almost impossible to judge as to whether or not I was really making any speed here. The grey on either side of me was unchanging, and for all I knew, the car might have been standing still for all the purr of the motor and the shiver of the speedometer needle. But something deep inside me warned against getting out of the car here. Then the ripples of weariness began to splash over me, until I found myself falling asleep -innumerable times, and waking just in time to keep from going off the road.
Something told me that any delay here was deadly, despite the almost overwhelming desire now merely to stop and curl up on the front seat for a nap. I tried to concentrate on something to keep awake.
What was it Harvey had said about the three strangers? I’d meant to ask him more about it. Oh, yes—they flickered. He’d amplified it a bit last time I’d seen him, but I still hadn’t had the chance to look into the matter very deeply.
According to Harvey, you could only see the flicker in a particularly bright light—it took full sunlight to bring out the effect. The shadows of these three seemed to have shadows within their general outlines that weaved and moved about like tongues of flame.
And I wondered if most of the population—perhaps all of it—of Stamphis were not like the three clever fools in this regard.
My meditations were cut short as the car seemed to leap ahead, almost rearing up off the road, front wheels spinning in the air. I must have fallen asleep and pressed the accelerator down to the floor. But that was what saved me. Before the weariness could carry me away again, I saw another set of seeming caution signals ahead; there came a jolt similar to that I had experienced upon the first transition and the weariness and the grey were both gone.
- Bolt awake I stared about me, mouth agape. This was no swamp, nor was it the strange facsimile that was Stamphis, nor again, I am sure, was it any part of the world I knew.
I think I murmured something impressively dramatic to myself, like: “The road to nowhere—leads outside!”
I don’t think it is possible to give a clear picture of what that “outside” at the end of fools’ highway was like, because I’m sure that no human being could see enough of it. Every second I was there, the hairs on my neck bristled and I felt something like a growl in my throat; everywhere I looked I knew there was more here than met my senses, and I was afraid of what was beyond my comprehension. Just because I couldn’t see, hear, touch, taste, or smell it didn’t mean that it couldn’t hurt me.
The outstanding aspect was a shifting. Nothing seemed to be the same for any length of time. It was like the well-known optical illusions of the cubes. You look at them and, at first, it may appear that you are looking down at them, but for no reason at all, the perspective alters suddenly, and it seems you are looking at their under sides. That’s a rough idea of how it was here. ‘
There was color here—the general aspect of it was a sort of orange. But the sky was dotted with blank spots. Not black—just blank, sort of underwater effect when there’s nothing to see but water. I could sense motions at times, but they were vague, and I could never quite get distances. Things which seemed at first to be far away suddenly appeared close at hand, and that which was within grasp would apparently be flickered far into the distance without any movement on its part. I could never be sure whether moving objects were coming or going.
There was a sort of buildings and shapes in and around them. The buildings, outside of the warped distance effects, were about the only reasonably stable things I saw; they were a jet black set against the orange of the sky— the light itself seemed be a tapering yellow—and I can only describe them as fearsome. They were not built for anything like human shapes or tastes and it was a constant struggle not to imagine that they were themselves monsters.
And the beings of outside? They were of various colors and sizes. Fantastic colored beings, often incomplete to my eyes where the colors were outside of my vision. I do not think what I saw were their true shapes; I’m positive I never saw a complete one. But, judging by the shapes of the openings in the buildings, I would say that they were generally cylindrical, for the most part much taller than a human.
If at any time they were aware of my presence, they gave no sign of it. And the implications of that, I think, were far more devastating to my peace of mind than had I been the object of pursuit, capture, or even attempted destruction. Their total indifference to and apparent contempt of the human, spy in their midst is a thing I must not permit myself to dwell upon. That way lies madness.
I entered buildings and saw machinery, or what appeared to be machinery, which was partly impressive, partly indistinct, and wholly fantastic. There were some simple things, such as vehicles—which always avoided me—and what I imagine were common objects. Perhaps a scientifically minded person could find a great deal more that is understandable in “outside” than I did; my whole being was saturated with dread and I did not stay in any one place long.
There were some things I saw which were far too familiar. One was a model of a man, a woman, and a child; really amazing imitations in what I suppose were plastics and wires. They existed as complete unities, as bare frameworks and cross-sections. The other was what appeared to be a library on our world. It was complete to an appalling degree—and, filling one entire side of a building was what looked like a master chart, with diagrams, a few figures I could read, and samples of alphabets now in existence.
And, finally, there was a complete model, built to scale of Stamphis.
I have read stories about menaces from other worlds and planes of existence, and read how humans managed to go to the alien world and there successfully sabotage, combat, and finally wipe out the danger. These had always afforded me amusement, but never had I realized how completely ridiculous they were—how completely helpless one man, or even a group of men would be in the alien world.
Yes, I suppose I could have smashed the models, set fire to the books— if indeed they were constructed of inflammable material, but what would have been accomplished? How could I hope successfully to fight against beings I could see but in part, and what chance had I of getting back to warn my fellow humans?
There is a great deal which I am pretty sure I’ve forgotten. The unconscious censor which either colors or obliterates the unbearable has done its work upon me—otherwise I would be a raving lunatic, and how could I hope to warn the world?
I do not know how long I stayed in that world. Perhaps had there not been the threat overhanging the whole business, I might have found some measure of beauty and wonder in its strangeness. Perhaps truly the outsiders mean no harm to us, and are merely studying us, taking care to behave in such a manner as to rouse the least possible suspicion.
I would like to believe this. The fact that I was not harmed while outside would lend support to such a conclusion.
Last week, I had occasion to drive from New York to Boston and back. I’ve made the trip a number of times before, and I have never come across a town called Dorcax. I am sure there was no such town before this year, because, as with Stamphis, I have checked upon almanacs, road maps, and gazetteers I purchased some years back, at the time of publication.
But inquiry reveals that Dorcax was founded in 1883, has a post office since that year, and since 1890 has had a weekly publication called the Dorcax Independent. It is a typical town and looks just like any other small town. A few people in neighboring towns—old people—seem a bit confused about it, but have decided that their memories are beginning to slip.
Both Stamphis and Dorcax are mentioned now and then in metropolitan newspapers and I find a surprisingly large number of professional men throughout the country, political figures, government employees—a number of them in Washington—and businessmen either come from these towns, have made their residence there, or have married into families native to these towns.
And yesterday the sun was very bright. I just noticed something for the first time.
Arlene’s shadow seems to flicker.
When the Flame-Flowers Blossomed
by Leslie F. Stone
- It is hard to imagine a civilization whose basic constituents are vegetables. Though we ourselves live in a world which has more vegetable life on it than animal life, and though that life surrounds us in a myriad shapes and sizes, we cannot put ourselves psychologically en rapport with any plant. The “mind” of a plant, if such could exist, is something that cannot be conceived, so utterly different is their mode of life and their anatomical construction. Therefore it was with great daring that Leslie F. Stone ventured to depict a world whose dominating intelligent species is a vegetable one. It seems to us that she did rather well.
Avon Science Fiction Reader 2 Page 16
