The Street That Wasn't There Read online

himselfsuccumbing to weariness. He undressed and went to bed. For anhour he lay awake, assailed by vague fears he could neitherdefine nor understand.

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

  In another dream he was pursued by a horror which he couldneither see nor hear, but only could imagine. And as he sought toflee he stayed in the one place. His legs worked frantically,pumping like pistons, but he could make no progress. It was as ifhe ran upon a treadway.

  Then again the terror descended on him, a black, unimagined thingand he tried to scream and couldn't. He opened his mouth andstrained his vocal cords and filled his lungs to bursting withthe 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: "You mustnot forget tonight! You must remember to stop and get yourcigar!"

  The street light at the corner of Jefferson was still out and infront 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 thenext block. I must not forget tonight. To forget twice in a rowwould be just too much.

  He grasped that thought firmly in his mind, strode just a bitmore rapidly down the street.

  But at the corner he stopped in consternation. Bewildered, hestared down the next block. There was no neon sign, no splash offriendly light upon the sidewalk to mark the little store tuckedaway in this residential section.

  He stared at the street marker and read the word slowly: GRANT. Heread it again, unbelieving, for this shouldn't be Grant Street, butMarshall. He had walked two blocks and the confectionery was betweenMarshall and Grant. He hadn't come to Marshall yet ... and here wasGrant.

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

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

  _There wasn't any confectionery! The block from Marshall to Granthad disappeared!_

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

  On legs that were dead things he stumbled back to his home. Heslammed and locked the door behind him and made his wayunsteadily to his chair in the corner.

  What was this? What did it mean? By what inconceivablenecromancy could a paved street with houses, trees and buildingsbe spirited away and the space it had occupied be closed up?

  Was something happening in the world which he, in his secludedlife, 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 blazedmerrily in the grate. The cold he felt came from something ...somewhere else. The cold of fear and horror, the chill of a halfwhispered thought.

  A deathly silence had fallen, a silence still measured by thependulum clock. And yet a silence that held a different tenor thanhe had ever sensed before. Not a homey, comfortable silence ... buta 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 anddemanded recognition. Something tied up with the fragments oftalk he had heard on the drugstore corner, bits of newsbroadcasts he had heard as he walked along the street, theshrieking of the newsboy calling his papers. Something to do withthe happenings in the world from which he had excluded himself.

  * * * * *

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

  Millions of people were dead in Europe and Asia, Africa and SouthAmerica. Billions, perhaps.

  And somehow those gruesome statistics seemed tied up with his ownexperience. Something, somewhere, some part of his earlier life,seemed to hold an explanation. But try as he would his befuddledbrain failed to find the answer.

  The pendulum clock struck slowly, its every other chime as usualsetting up a sympathetic vibration in the pewter vase that stoodupon the mantel.

  Mr. Chambers got to his feet, strode to the door, opened it andlooked out.

  Moonlight tesselated the street in black and silver, etching thechimneys and trees against a silvered sky.

  But the house directly across the street was not the same. It wasstrangely lop-sided, its dimensions out of proportion, like ahouse that suddenly had gone mad.

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

  Then, before his eyes, the house righted itself again. Slowly itdrew together, ironed out its queer angles, readjusted itsdimensions, became once again the stodgy house he knew it hadto be.

  With a sigh of relief, Mr. Chambers turned back into the hall.

  But before he closed the door, he looked again. The house waslop-sided ... as bad, perhaps worse than before!

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

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

  He awoke, body drenched with perspiration. Vague light of earlydawn filtered through the window. The clock on the bedside tableshowed 7:30. For a long time he lay there motionless.

  Again the fantastic happenings of the night before came back tohaunt him and as he lay there, staring at the windows, heremembered them, one by one. But his mind, still fogged by sleepand astonishment, took the happenings in its stride, mulled overthem, lost the keen edge of fantastic terror that lurked aroundthem.

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

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

  But the tree was there ... shadowy, indistinct in the gray, witha few withered apples still clinging to its boughs, a fewshriveled leaves reluctant to leave the parent branch.

  The tree was there now. But it hadn't been when he first hadlooked. Mr. Chambers was sure of that.

  * * * * *

  And now he saw the faint outlines of his neighbor's house ... butthose outlines were all wrong. They didn't jibe and fit together ...they were out of plumb. As if some giant hand had grasped the houseand wrenched it out of true. Like the house he had seen across thestreet the night before, the house that had painfully righted itselfwhen he thought of how it should look.

  Perhaps if he thought of how his neighbor's house should look, ittoo might right itself. But Mr. Chambers was very weary. Tooweary to think about the house.

  He turned from the window and dressed slowly. In the living roomhe slumped into his chair, put his feet on the old crackedottoman. For a long time he sat, trying to think.

  And then, abruptly, something like an electric shock ran throughhim. Rigid, he sat there, limp inside at the thought. Minuteslater he arose and almost ran acro
ss the room to the old mahoganybookcase that stood against the wall.

  There were many volumes in the case: his beloved classics on thefirst shelf, his many scientific works on the lower shelves. Thesecond shelf contained but one book. And it was around this bookthat Mr. Chambers' entire life was centered.

  Twenty years ago he had written it and foolishly attempted to teachits philosophy to a class of undergraduates. The newspapers, heremembered, had made a great deal of it at the time. Tongues hadbeen set to wagging. Narrow-minded townsfolk, failing to understandeither his philosophy or his aim, but seeing in him another exponentof some anti-rational cult, had forced his expulsion from theschool.

  It was a simple book, really, dismissed by most authorities asmerely the vagaries of an over-zealous mind.

  Mr. Chambers took it down now, opened its cover and beganthumbing slowly through the pages. For a moment the memory ofhappier days swept over him.

  Then his eyes focused on the paragraph, a paragraph written solong ago the very words seemed strange and unreal:

  _Man himself, by the power of mass suggestion, holds the