The Street That Wasn't There Read online

mad?

  But he knew he wasn't mad. He knew that he perhaps was the sanestof all men who walked the earth. For he, and he alone, hadforeseen this very thing. And the others had scoffed at him forit.

  Somewhere else the children might be playing on a street. But itwould be a different street. And the children undoubtedly wouldbe different too.

  For the matter of which the street and everything upon it hadbeen formed would now be cast in a different mold, stolen bydifferent minds in a different dimension.

  _Perhaps we shall come upon a day, far distant, when our plane,our world will dissolve beneath our feet and before our eyes assome stronger intelligence reaches out from the dimensionalshadows of the very space we live in and wrests from us thematter which we know to be our own._

  But there had been no need to wait for that distant day. Scantyears after he had written those prophetic words the thing washappening. Man had played unwittingly into the hands of thoseother minds in the other dimension. Man had waged a war and warhad bred a pestilence. And the whole vast cycle of events was buta detail of a cyclopean plan.

  He could see it all now. By an insidious mass hypnosis minions fromthat other dimension ... or was it one supreme intelligence ... haddeliberately sown the seeds of dissension. The reduction of theworld's mental power had been carefully planned with diabolicpremeditation.

  On impulse he suddenly turned, crossed the room and opened theconnecting door to the bedroom. He stopped on the threshold and asob forced its way to his lips.

  There was no bedroom. Where his stolid four poster and dresserhad been there was greyish nothingness.

  Like an automaton he turned again and paced to the hall door.Here, too, he found what he had expected. There was no hall, nofamiliar hat rack and umbrella stand.

  Nothing....

  Weakly Mr. Chambers moved back to his chair in the corner.

  "So here I am," he said, half aloud.

  So there he was. Embattled in the last corner of the world thatwas left to him.

  Perhaps there were other men like him, he thought. Men who stoodat bay against the emptiness that marked the transition from onedimension to another. Men who had lived close to the things theyloved, who had endowed those things with such substantial form bypower of mind alone that they now stood out alone against thepower of some greater mind.

  The street was gone. The rest of his house was gone. This roomstill retained its form.

  This room, he knew, would stay the longest. And when the rest ofthe room was gone, this corner with his favorite chair wouldremain. For this was the spot where he had lived for twentyyears. The bedroom was for sleeping, the kitchen for eating. Thisroom was for living. This was his last stand.

  These were the walls and floors and prints and lamps that hadsoaked up his will to make them walls and prints and lamps.

  He looked out the window into a blank world. His neighbors'houses already were gone. They had not lived with them as he hadlived with this room. Their interests had been divided, thinlyspread; their thoughts had not been concentrated as his upon anarea four blocks by three, or a room fourteen by twelve.

  * * * * *

  Staring through the window, he saw it again. The same vision hehad looked upon before and yet different in an indescribable way.There was the city illumined in the sky. There were theelliptical towers and turrets, the cube-shaped domes andbattlements. He could see with stereoscopic clarity the aerialbridges, the gleaming avenues sweeping on into infinitude. Thevision was nearer this time, but the depth and proportion hadchanged ... as if he were viewing it from two concentric anglesat the same time.

  And the face ... the face of magnitude ... of power of cosmiccraft and evil....

  Mr. Chambers turned his eyes back into the room. The clock wasticking slowly, steadily. The greyness was stealing into theroom.

  The table and radio were the first to go. They simply faded awayand with them went one corner of the room.

  And then the elephant ash tray.

  "Oh, well," said Mr. Chambers, "I never did like that very well."

  Now as he sat there it didn't seem queer to be without the tableor the radio. It was as if it were something quite normal.Something one could expect to happen.

  Perhaps, if he thought hard enough, he could bring them back.

  But, after all, what was the use? One man, alone, could not standoff the irresistible march of nothingness. One man, all alone,simply couldn't do it.

  He wondered what the elephant ash tray looked like in that otherdimension. It certainly wouldn't be an elephant ash tray norwould the radio be a radio, for perhaps they didn't have ashtrays or radios or elephants in the invading dimension.

  He wondered, as a matter of fact, what he himself would look likewhen he finally slipped into the unknown. For he was matter, too,just as the ash tray and radio were matter.

  He wondered if he would retain his individuality ... if he stillwould be a person. Or would he merely be a thing?

  There was one answer to all of that. He simply didn't know.

  Nothingness advanced upon him, ate its way across the room,stalking him as he sat in the chair underneath the lamp. And hewaited for it.

  The room, or what was left of it, plunged into dreadful silence.

  Mr. Chambers started. The clock had stopped. Funny ... the firsttime in twenty years.

  He leaped from his chair and then sat down again.

  The clock hadn't stopped.

  It wasn't there.

  There was a tingling sensation in his feet.

  * * * * *