Strange Ports of Call

by August Derleth (ed)

  Papenek seemed to be having trouble with his face. It kept darkening and whitening in patches, and—his jaw had begun to twitch.

  “If the house returns as fast as it came, we should be back in time for lunch,” Shevlin said. “Give me five minutes, Junior. Then notch in the thingamajig and let the straining blade . . . aw, shucks, I don’t have to tell you how to handle a machine. The Los Alamos radiations took care of that.”

  “Just leave everything to me, Pop. I won’t even get grease on my hands.”

  Shevlin flourished the tube a trifle menacingly.

  “Start moving, Papanek,” he said.

  Up the cellar stairs Papenek stumbled, his face a twitching mask. Down the lower hallway into the living room, and then out through the living room to the front porch. The permeable patch was just wide enough to enable Shevlin to pass through in Papenek’s wake. He had to stoop a little, but he didn’t mind because he knew that another ten seconds would see the last of Papenek.

  Out on the porch he spoke sharply. “All right, jump!” he ordered. “Get on with you! Right out into the mist, little man!”

  Papenek jumped from the porch.

  Shevlin waited until he’d disappeared in the mist before he turned and went striding back into the house.

  It was curious, but he’d grown quite fond of the house just in the last fifteen minutes. No—it went back further than that. The house, too, had gone through a lot, and like a faithful old collie dog that has shared a man’s trials and tribulations—

  He was suddenly aware that Elsie was standing in the living room door, her facc distraught.

  “Roger, I’ve searched everywhere for Junior,” she said. “Do you suppose—”

  Shevlin smiled and crossed to her side in three long strides.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, kissing her. “Junior’s at the helm and everything’s under control. In just about five seconds now—”

  There was a sudden, dazzling flash of light.

  Clifford Simak (1904- ), Wisconsin-born, now lives near Minneapolis, where he is telegraph editor of the Minneapolis Star. Though he has written for many magazines, Astounding Science-Fiction has published most of his work. He was represented in The Best in Science-Fiction.

  Carl Jacobi (1908—) has had one collection of short stories published by Arkham House—Revelations in Black, 1947. Not a prolific writer, but a steady one, Mr. Jacobi has been published in Ghost Stories, Amazing Stories, Complete Stories, Railroad Magazine, Short Stories, MacLean’s Magazine, Weird Tales, and others. He lives and works in Minneapolis.

  THE LOST STREET

  Clifford Simak and Carl Jacobi

  MR. JONATHAN CHAMBERS LEFT HIS HOUSE on Maple Street at exactly seven o’clock in the evening and set out on the daily walk he had taken, at the same time, come rain or snow, for twenty solid years.

  The walk never varied. He paced two blocks down Maple Street, stopped at the Red Star confectionery to buy a Rosa Trofero perfecto, then walked to the end of the fourth block on Maple. There he turned right on Lexington, followed Lexington to Oak, down Oak and so by way of Lincoln back to Maple again and to his home.

  He took his time. He always returned to his front door at exactly seven-forty-five. No one ever stopped to talk with him. Even the man at the Red Star confectionery, where he bought his cigar, remained silent while the purchase was being made. Mr. Chambers merely tapped on the glass top of the counter with a coin, the man reached in and brought forth the box, and Mr. Chambers took his cigar. That was all.

  For people long ago had gathered that Mr. Chambers desired to be left alone. The newer generation of townsfolk called it eccentricity. Certain uncouth persons had a different word for it. The oldsters remembered that this queer-looking individual with his black silk muffler, rosewood cane and bowler hat once had been a professor at State University.

  A professor of metaphysics, they seemed to recall, or some such outlandish subject. At any rate a furore of some sort was connected with his name—at the time an academic scandal. He had written a book, and he had taught the subject matter of that volume to his classes. What that subject matter was had been long forgotten, but it had been considered sufficiently revolutionary to cost Mr. Chambers his post at the University.

  A silver moon shone over the chimney tops and a chill, impish October wind was rustling the dead leaves when Mr. Chambers started out at seven o’clock. It was a good night, he told himself, smelling the clean, crisp air of autumn and the faint pungence of distant wood smoke.

  He walked unhurriedly, swinging his cane a bit less jauntily than twenty years ago. He tucked the muffler more securely under the rusty old topcoat and pulled his bowler hat more firmly on his head. He noticed that the street light at the corner of Maple and Jefferson was out, and he grumbled a little to himself when he was forced to step off the walk to encircle a boarded-off section of newly laid concrete work before the driveway of 816.

  It seemed that he reached the corner of Lexington and Maple just a bit too quickly, but he told himself that this couldn’t be. For he had never done that. For twenty years, since the year following his expulsion from the University, he had lived by the clock. The same thing, at the same time, day after day. He had not deliberately set upon such a life of routine. A bachelor, living alone with sufficient money to supply his humble needs, the timed existence had grown on him gradually.

  So he turned on Lexington and back on Oak. The dog at the corner of Oak and Jefferson was waiting for him once again and came out snarling and growling, snapping at his heels. But Mr. Chambers pretended not to notice and the beast gave up the chase.

  A radio blared down the street and faint phrases floated to Mr. Chambers.

  “. . . still taking place . . . Empire State building disappeared . . . thin air… famed scientist, Dr. Edmund Harcourt . . .”

  The wind whipped the muted words away and Mr. Chambers grumbled to himself. Another one of those fantastic radio dramas, probably. He remembered one from many years before, something about the Martians. And Harcourt! What did Harcourt have to do with it? He was one of the men who had ridiculed the book Mr. Chambers had written.

  But he pushed speculation away, sniffed the clean, crisp air again, looked at the familiar things that materialized out of the late autumn darkness as he walked along. For there was nothing, absolutely nothing in the world, that he would let upset him. That was a tenet he had laid down twenty years ago.

  There was a crowd of men talking excitedly in front of the drugstore at the corner of Oak and Lincoln. Mr. Chambers caught sentences: “It’s happening everywhere. What do you think it is . . . The scientists can’t explain . . .

  But as Mr. Chambers neared them they fell into what seemed an abashed silence and watched him pass. He, on his part, gave them no sign of recognition. That was the way it had been for many years, ever since the people had become convinced that he did not wish to talk. One of the men half started forward as if to speak to him, but then stepped back and Mr. Chambers continued on his walk.

  Back at his own front door he stopped and, as he had done a thousand times before, drew forth the heavy gold watch from his pocket.

  He started violently. It was only seven-thirty!

  For long minutes he stood there staring at the watch in accusation. The timepiece had not stopped, for it still ticked audibly. But fifteen minutes too soon! For twenty years, day in, day out, he had started out at seven and returned at quarter of eight.

  It was not until then that he realized something else was wrong. He had no cigar. For the first time he had neglected to purchase his evening smoke.

  Shaken, muttering to himself, Mr. Chambers let himself into his house and locked the door behind him. He hung his hat and coat on the rack in the hall and walked into the living room. Dropping into his favorite chair, he shook his head in bewilderment.

  Silence filled the room, a silence measured by the ticking of the old fashioned pendulum clock on the mantelpiece. But silence was no strange thing to
Mr. Chambers. Once he had loved music, the kind of music he could get by tuning in symphonic orchestras on the radio. But the radio stood silent in the corner, the cord out of its socket. Mr. Chambers had pulled it out many years before, on the night when the symphonic broadcast had been interrupted to give a news flash.

  He had stopped reading newspapers and magazines, too, had exiled himself to a few city blocks. And as the years flowed by, that self-exile had become a prison, an intangible, impassable wall bounded by four city blocks by three. Beyond them lay utter, unexplainable terror. Beyond them he never went.

  But recluse though he was, he could not on occasion escape from hearing things the newsboy shouted on the streets, things the men talked about on the drugstore corner when they failed to see him coming. And so he knew that this was the year 1960 and that the wars in Europe and Asia had flamed to an end to be followed by a terrible plague, a plague that even now was sweeping through country after country like wild fire, decimating populations, a plague undoubtedly induced by hunger and privation and the miseries of war.

  Those things he put away as items far removed from his own small world. He disregarded them. He pretended he had never heard of them. Others might discuss and worry over them if they wished. To him they simply did not matter. But there were two things tonight that did matter. Two curious, incredible events. He had arrived home fifteen minutes early. He had forgotten his cigar.

  Huddled in the chair, he frowned slowly. It was disquieting to have something like that happen. There must be something wrong. Had his long exile finally turned his mind—perhaps just a very little—enough to make him queer? Had he lost his sense of proportion, of perspective?

  No, he had not. Take this room, for example. After twenty years, it had come to be as much a part of him as the clothes he wore. Every detail of the room was engraved in his mind with clarity: the old center leg table with its green covering and stained glass lamp; the mantelpiece with the dusty bric-a-brac; the pendulum clock that told the time of day as well as the day of the week and month; the elephant ash tray on the tabaret and, most important of all, the marine print.

  Mr. Chambers loved that picture. It had depth, he always said. It showed an old sailing ship in the foreground on a placid sea. Far in the distance, almost on the horizon line, was the vague outline of a larger vessel. There were other pictures, too. The forest scene above the fireplace, the old English prints in the corner where he sat, the Currier and Ives above the radio. But the ship print was directly in his line of vision. He could see it without turning his head. He had put it there because he liked it best.

  Further reverie became an effort as Mr. Chambers felt himself succumbing to weariness. He undressed and went to bed. For an hour he lay awake, assailed by vague fears he could neither define nor understand.

  When finally he dozed off it was to lose himself in a series of horrific dreams. He dreamed first that he was a castaway on a tiny islet in mid-ocean, that the waters around the island teemed with huge poisonous sea snakes, hydrophinnae, and that steadily those serpents were devouring the island.

  In another dream he was pursued by a horror which he could neither see nor hear, but only could imagine. And as he sought to flee he stayed in the one place. His legs worked frantically, pumping like pistons, but he could make no progress. It was as if he ran upon a treadway.

  Then again the terror descended on him, a black, unimagined thing and he tried to scream and could not. He opened his mouth and strained his vocal cords and filled his lungs to bursting with the urge to shriek, but not a sound came from his lips.

  All next day he was uneasy and, as he left the house that evening at precisely seven o’clock, he kept saying to himself: “I must not forget tonight! I must remember to stop and get my cigar!”

  The street light at the corner of Jefferson was still out and in front of 816 the cemented driveway was still boarded off. Everything was the same as the night before. And now, he told himself, the Red Star confectionery is in the next block. I must not forget tonight. To forget twice in a row would be just too much. He grasped that thought firmly in his mind, strode just a bit more rapidly down the street.

  But at the corner he stopped in consternation, and stared down the next block. There was no neon sign, no splash of friendly light upon the sidewalk to mark the little store tucked away in this residential section.

  He stared at the street marker and read the word slowly: GRANT. He read it again, unbelieving, for this should not be Grant Street, but Marshall. He had walked two blocks and the confectionery was between Marshall and Grant. He hadn’t come to Marshall yet—and here was Grant.

  Or had he, absent-mindedly, come one block farther than he thought, passed the store as on the night before?

  For the first time in twenty years, Mr. Chambers retraced his steps. He walked back to Jefferson, then turned around and went back to Grant again and on to Lexington. Then back to Grant again, where he stood astounded while a single, incredible fact grew slowly in his brain:

  There was no confectionery! The block from Marshall to Grant had disappeared!

  Now he understood why he had missed the store on the night before, why he had arrived home fifteen minutes early.

  On shaky legs he stumbled back to his home. He slammed and locked the door behind him and made his way unsteadily to his chair in the corner.

  What was this? What did it mean? By what inconceivable necromancy could a paved street with houses, trees and buildings be spirited away and the space it had occupied be closed up? Was something happening in the world which he, in his secluded life, knew nothing about?

  Mr. Chambers shivered, reached to turn up the collar of his coat, then stopped as he realized the room must be warm. A fire blazed merrily in the grate. The cold he felt came from something, somewhere else. The cold of fear and horror, the chill of a half whispered thought.

  A deathly silence had fallen, a silence still measured by the pendulum clock, and yet one that held a different tenor from any he had ever sensed before. Not a homey, comfortable silence—but a silence that hinted at emptiness and nothingness.

  There was something back of this, Mr. Chambers told himself. Something that reached far back into one corner of his brain and demanded recognition. Something tied up with the fragments of talk he had heard on the drugstore corner, bits of news broadcasts he had heard as he walked along the street, the shrieking of the newsboy calling his papers. Something to do with the happenings in the world from which he had excluded himself.

  He brought them back to mind now and lingered over the one central theme of the talk he overheard: the wars and plagues. Hints of a Europe and Asia swept almost clean of human life, of the plague ravaging Africa, of its appearance in South America, of the frantic efforts of the United States to prevent its spread into that nation’s boundaries.

  Millions of people were dead in Europe and Asia, Africa and South America. And somehow those gruesome statistics seemed tied up with his own experience. Something, somewhere, some part of his earlier life, seemed to hold an explanation. But try as he would, his befuddled brain failed to find the answer.

  The pendulum clock struck slowly, its every other chime as usual setting up a sympathetic vibration in the pewter vase that stood upon the mantel.

  Mr. Chambers got to his feet, strode to the door, opened it and looked out. Moonlight tessellated the street in black and silver, etching the chimneys and trees against a silvered sky. But the house directly across the street was not the same. It was strangely lop-sided, its dimensions out of proportion, like a house that suddenly had gone mad.

  He stared at it in amazement, trying to determine what was wrong with it. He recalled how it had always stood, foursquare, a solid piece of mid-Victorian architecture.

  Then, before his eyes, the house righted itself again. Slowly it drew together, ironed out its queer angles, readjusted its dimensions, became once again the stodgy house he knew it had to be.

  With a sigh of relief, Mr. Chambers
turned back into the hall. But before he closed the door, he looked again. The house was lop-sided—as bad as, perhaps worse than before!

  Gulping in fright, Mr. Chambers slammed the door shut, locked it and double bolted it. Then he went to his bedroom and took sleeping powders.

  His dreams that night were the same as on the night before. Again there was the islet in mid-ocean. Again he was alone upon it. Again the squirming hydrophinnae were eating his foothold piece by piece.

  He awoke, body drenched with perspiration. Vague light of early dawn filtered through the window. The clock on the bedside table showed seven-thirty. For a long time he lay there motionless.

  Again the fantastic happenings of the night before came back to haunt him and, as he lay there staring at the windows, he remembered them, one by one. But his mind, still fogged by sleep and astonishment, took the happenings in its stride, mulled over them, lost the keen edge of fantastic terror that lurked around them.

  The light through the windows slowly grew brighter. Mr. Chambers slid out of bed and crossed to the window, the cold of the floor biting into his bare feet. He forced himself to look out.

  There was nothing outside the window. No shadows. As if there might be a fog. But no fog, however thick, could hide the apple tree that grew close against the house.

  But the tree was there—shadowy, indistinct in the gray, with a few withered apples still clinging to its boughs, a few shriveled leaves reluctant to leave the parent branch. The tree was there now. But it had not been there when he first had looked. Mr. Chambers was sure of that.

  And now he saw the faint outlines of his neighbor’s house—but those outlines were all wrong. They didn’t jibe and fit together, they were out of plumb, as if some giant hand had grasped the house and wrenched it out of true, like the house he had seen across the street the night before, the house that had painfully righted itself when he thought of how it should look.