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Beasly finally came back. He carried three inexpertly-made sandwiches wrapped in an old newspaper and a quart bottle almost full of milk.
“You certainly took your time,” said Taine, slightly irritated.
“I got interested,” Beasly explained.
“Interested in what?”
“Well, there were three big trucks and they were lugging a lot of heavy stuff down into the basement. Two or three big cabinets and a lot of other junk. And you know Abbie’s television set? Well, they took the set away. I told them that they shouldn’t, but they took it anyway.”
“I forgot,” said Taine. “Henry said he’d send the computer over and I plumb forgot.”
Taine ate the sandwiches, sharing them with Towser, who was very grateful in a muddy way.
Finished, Taine rose and picked up his shovel.
“Let’s get to work,” he said.
“But you got all that stuff down in the basement.”
“That can wait,” said Taine. “This job we have to finish.”
It was getting dusk by the time they finished.
Taine leaned wearily on his shovel.
Twelve feet by twenty across the top and ten feet deep—and all of it, every bit of it, made of the milk-glass stuff that sounded like a bell when you whacked it with a shovel.
They’d have to be small, he thought, if there were many of them, to live in a space that size, especially if they had to stay there very long. And that fitted in, of course, for it they weren’t small they couldn’t now be living in the space between the basement joists.
If they were really living there, thought Taine. If it wasn’t all just a lot of supposition.
Maybe, he thought, even if they had been living in the house, they might be there no longer—for Towser had smelled or heard or somehow sensed them in the morning, but by that very night he’d paid them no attention.
Taine slung his shovel across his shoulder and hoisted the pick.
“Come on,” he said, “let’s go. We’ve put in a long, hard day.”
They tramped out through the brush and reached the road. Fireflies were flickering off and on in the woody darkness and the street lamps were swaying in the summer breeze. The stars were hard and bright.
Maybe they still were in the house, thought Taine. Maybe when they found out that Towser had objected to them, they had fixed it so he’d be aware of them no longer.
They probably were highly adaptive. It stood to good reason they would have to be. It hadn’t taken them too long, he told himself grimly, to adapt to a human house.
He and Beasly went up the gravel driveway in the dark to put the tools away in the garage and there was something fu
There was no garage and there was no front on the house and the driveway was cut off abruptly and there was nothing but the curving wall of what apparently had been the end of the garage.
They came up to the curving wall and stopped, squinting unbelieving in the summer dark.
There was no garage, no porch, no front of the house at all. It was as if someone had taken the opposite corners of the front of the house and bent them together until they touched, folding the entire front of the building inside the curvature of the bent-together corners.
Taine now had a curved-front house. Although it was, actually, not as simple as all that, for the curvature was not in proportion to what actually would have happened in case of such a feat. The curve was long and graceful and somehow not quite apparent. It was as if the front of the house had been eliminated and an illusion of the rest of the house had been summoned to mask the disappearance.
Taine dropped the shovel and the pick and they clattered on the driveway gravel. He put his hand up to his face and wiped it across his eyes, as if to clear his eyes of something that could not possibly be there.
And when he took the hand away it had not changed a bit.
There was no front to the house.
Then he was ru
But the back of the house was all right. It was exactly as it had always been.
He clattered up the stoop with Beasly and Towser ru
At the door between the kitchen and the living room he stopped and his hands went out to grasp the door jamb as he stared in disbelief at the windows of the living room.
It was night outside. There could be no doubt of that. He had seen the fireflies flickering in the brush and weeds and the street lamps had been lit and the stars were out.
But a flood of sunlight was pouring through the windows of the living room and out beyond the windows lay a land that was not Willow Bend.
“Beasly,” he gasped, “look out there in front!”
Beasly looked.
“What place is that?” he asked.
“That’s what I’d like to know.”
Towser had found his dish and was pushing it around the kitchen floor with his nose, by way of telling Taine that it was time to eat.
Taine went across the living room and opened the front door. The garage, he saw, was there. The pickup stood with its nose against the open garage door and the car was safe inside.
There was nothing wrong with the front of the house at all.
But if the front of the house was all right, that was all that was.
For the driveway was chopped off just a few feet beyond the tail end of the pickup and there was no yard or woods or road. There was just a desert—a flat, far-reaching desert, level as a floor, with occasional boulder piles and haphazard clumps of vegetation and all of the ground covered with sand and pebbles. A big blinding sun hung just above a horizon that seemed much too far away and a fu
Beasly stepped out on the porch and Taine saw that he was shivering like a frightened dog.
“Maybe,” Taine told him, kindly, “you’d better go back in and start making us some supper.”
“But, Hiram—”
“It’s all right,” said Taine. “It’s bound to be all right.”
“If you say so, Hiram.”
He went in and the screen door banged behind him and in a minute Taine heard him in the kitchen.
He didn’t blame Beasly for shivering, he admitted to himself. It was a sort of shock to step out of your front door into an unknown land. A man might eventually get used to it, of course, but it would take some doing.
He stepped down off the porch and walked around the truck and around the garage comer and when he rounded the comer he was half prepared to walk back into familiar Willow Bend—for when he had gone in the back door the village had been there.
There was no Willow Bend. There was more of the desert, a great deal more of it.
He walked around the house and there was no back to the house. The back of the house now was just the same as the front had been before—the same smooth curve pulling the sides of the house together.
He walked on around the house to the front again and there was desert all the way. And the front was still all right. It hadn’t changed at all. The truck was there on the chopped-off driveway and the garage was open and the car inside.
Taine walked out a way into the desert and hunkered down and scooped up a handful of the pebbles and the pebbles were just pebbles.
He squatted there and let the pebbles trickle through his fingers.
In Willow Bend there was a back door and there wasn’t any front. Here, wherever here might be, there was a front door, but there wasn’t any back.
He stood up and tossed the rest of the pebbles away and wiped his dusty hands upon his breeches.