'Mr. Corman,' Molson said, with barely disguised animosity, 'what time did you leave?'
'It was approximately eight o'clock.'
'And did you see Ms. Abigail Smyth before you left?'
I hesitated, then said, 'Yes. I saw her walk up the hill from the administration building and enter the greenhouse.'
'How were you able to see that?'
'The moon was just rising. I saw her silhouetted against it.'
'Administrator Reed,' Detective Molson said, turning to Marsha, 'did Ms. Smyth report for work this morning?'
'She did not. She normally comes in early, at seven-thirty or so.'
'And did you check with her boarding house when she didn't show up?'
'I did. And I was told that she never came home last evening.'
Again Molson addressed me.
'You saw Ms. Smyth enter the greenhouse, Mr. Corman?'
'Yes.'
'Did you see her leave the greenhouse?'
'No. I went home before she came out.'
I registered the fury in Molson's eyes a scant second before the back of his hand hit me across the mouth.
'I don't like what you're telling me, Mr. Corman. I think you've murdered two people, and we're going to find them.'
Blood flowed, and as the pain of the blow spread through me, my eyes observed shock on Marsha Reed's face. Even the uniformed policemen looked momentarily shocked, before Willie guffawed.
'Get your shovels,' Molson said to the two officers, who went to the boot of Molson's car; to Administrator Reed and Eagleton he said, 'You don't have to come in there with us.'
Administrator Reed said, 'I think we should. In fact, I insist.'
It was Molson's turn to shrug. 'If you insist, Administrator Reed. But I must warn you that what we find in there might be quite gruesome.'
In a near-whisper, Eagleton said to his shoes, 'I'll stay outside, if you don't mind.'
Impatiently, Administrator Reed said, 'All right, Eagleton. But don't go away. We may need you again.'
Willie and Jack stood ready with their shovels, and Detective Molson said, 'Let's go in, then.'
The metal door was opened, letting out the hot, sickly sweet odor of perfumed flowers and decay. Willie and Jack went in first, with myself between the two officers and Molson behind me. Administrator Reed brought up the rear.
'Try anything in here, Corman,' Detective Molson whispered close by my ear, 'and I'll tear you to pieces myself. Better yet, I'll let the two lads at you.'
Ahead of us, Willie and Jack had reached the thickets of vines about halfway through the building.
'Same place as last time, guy?' Willie said.
'This is strange,' Marsha Reed said behind us. She sounded genuinely puzzled. 'Everything in here seems to have been rearranged.'
I glanced back and saw her studying the place where my former experiments had been.
'All of this was clear—'
It grew very dark, and things happened very fast.
First, there were hands on me, but not human ones. The sky overhead blotted out as vines crawled up and overhead, making an artificial jungle of green vines. In the midst of the vines I saw two shapes, one of them vaguely that of Abigail Smyth, only now she was green and her limbs flowed like liquid. Things closed in around us. I heard Marsha Reed cry out, and then Detective Molson was no longer standing close behind me but was overhead, being both lifted and absorbed by a carpet of purple violets which covered him simultaneously from head to foot. In front, both Jack and Willie lifted their shovels but the weapons were pulled from their grips as flowers covered them also. They disappeared into the thicket before us in a gargle of swallowed cries.
I heard my own screams, and felt the floor pull away, but it was not an unpleasant sensation. As through cotton wool, I heard glass breaking and Eagleton's own distant call for help.
And then, for a while, there was silence—until I felt Lonnigan' s slim hand on my own, which was a beautiful limb to behold.
The Quiet Ones
The first case was reported to the police around June 28th. A man, who was later found to be intoxicated, swore that a newspaper vendor who had been standing not ten feet in front of him was suddenly yanked into nowhere. The man who claimed to have seen this was not that intoxicated though, so two rookie policemen were sent to investigate. They found nothing.
The next case occurred outside the city limits, in a nearby suburb. A young girl ran in screaming to her mother, saying that she had been playing jacks with a friend on the sidewalk, when one of the slabs of concrete suddenly lifted like a trap door and a hand snaked out, grabbing her companion and pulling her underneath.
There was a lot more attention paid to this report, since what the police ended up with was a missing child case; the surrounding sixty miles were combed over the next weeks but nothing of the child turned up. It reached the point that even her playmate's story was taken into account and a half-block of sidewalk churned up; but all that was found here was, predictably, dirt and worms. The playmate stuck to her story and was eventually taken to a child psychiatrist.
The first week of July brought, as I recall, three more cases, and now one of the yellow newspapers started to pick up on the 'Sidewalk Snatcher' angle—though it was buried in the back of the paper. The one link in all these occurrences was that one or more witnesses swore that a person was literally stolen off the sidewalk by something reaching up out of holes which appeared and then disappeared again.
When a politician running for re-election disappeared in front of twenty witnesses, including two newspaper people and a TV cameraman, things began to heat up. The cameraman was able to shoot two very controversial feet of film which may or may not have shown the congressman being pulled downward into the ground; there were a lot of milling bodies in the way. But there was no doubt that he was there from the waist up in front of the camera one second, and then not there the next. The Associated Press ran a still photo produced from the footage; UPI refused to pick up the story. Most papers ran the AP picture, and though a hundred different conspiracy theories were set forth, at the bottom line they all came to the conclusion that there was absolutely no possible criminal link among the twenty witnesses, and that something out of the ordinary had happened.
The following week, after the Fourth of July weekend, there were over a hundred incidents.
Now something had to be done about it. The sheer weight of eyewitnesses (and the concurrent political clout they could command) forced the city government to declare war on the 'Sidewalk Snatcher' and a special task force was set up. A high police official was named head of the operation, and was answerable directly to the mayor.
He disappeared off the sidewalk the following day.
The sidewalks were becoming much cleaner of pedestrian traffic these days, with most people either walking down the center of the street or staying in as much as possible: one man had gained a bit of instant celebrity by walking the streets in a pair of overlarge, floppy clown shoes—his smiling picture was seen in many papers the following days—but the levity disappeared when he too was whisked off the concrete, floppy footwear and all: he had been walking across a particularly wide walkway at the time, it was noted.
The mayor himself barely escaped kidnap on his way to a press conference following the latest snatch. On stepping out of his limousine and placing his foot on the sidewalk, the mayor suddenly found his foot in what he later described as a 'bear trap of vise-like grip'—but he instantly jumped backward, his two aides helping him, and he escaped. Nothing was seen of the perpetrator, and when the section of walkway from which the attack came was pulled up, nothing was found underneath that was out of the ordinary.
