'Okay, but we stick together,' Peter said.
'We could cover the house faster if we split up.'
'No way.'
Jim shrugged. 'Whatever you want.' He led Peter down the hall into the living room. This was even bleaker than they had been able to see from the outside. The walls, dotted here and there by children's crayons, also showed the pale rectangles where pictures had hung. Paint flaked off in chips and patches. Jim was going around the room, knocking on the walls, lighting one match after another.
'Look at the suitcase.'
'Oh yeah, the suitcase.'
Jim knelt down and opened the case. 'Nothing.' Peter watched over his shoulder as Jim turned the suitcase over, shook it, and replaced it on the bare floor.
He whispered, 'We're not going to find anything.'
'Christ, we look in two rooms and you're ready to give up.' Jim stood up abruptly, and his match went out.
For a moment pure blackness enveloped them. 'Light another one,' Peter whispered.
'Better this way. No one outside can see a light. Your eyes'll adjust.'
They stood in silence and darkness for five or six seconds, letting the image of flame fade from their eyes, become a pinpoint in sheer black; then waited longer seconds while the features of the house took shape around them.
Peter heard a noise from somewhere in the house and jumped.
'For God's sake, calm down.'
'What was that?' Peter whispered, and heard the hysteria rising in his voice.
'A stair creaked. The back door clicked shut. Nothing.'
Peter touched his forehead with his fingers and felt them trembling against his skin.
'Listen. We've been talking, pounding walls, we broke a window-don't you think she'd come out if she was here?'
'I guess so.'
'Okay, let's try the next floor.'
Jim grabbed the sleeve of his jacket and pulled him out of the living room back into the hall. Then he let go and led Peter down the hall to the foot of the stairs.
Up there it was dark-up there it was new territory. Peter felt more profoundly uneasy, looking at the stairs, then he had since entering the house.
'You go up and I'll stay here.'
'You want to hang around in the dark by yourself?'
Peter tried to swallow, but could not. He shook his head.
'All right. It's got to be up there, whatever it is.'
Jim put his foot on the second of the unpainted steps. Here too the carpet had been removed. He lifted himself up; looked back. 'Coming?' Then he began to mount the stairs, taking them by twos. Peter watched: when Jim was halfway up, he willed himself to follow.
The lights snapped on again when Jim was at the top and Peter was two-thirds of the way up.
'Hello, boys,' said a deep unruffled voice from the bottom of the stairs.
Jim Hardie shrieked.
Peter fell backward on the stairs and, half-paralyzed with fright, thought he'd slide right down into the grasp of the man looking up at them.
'Let me take you to your hostess,' he said, giving them a dead smile. He was the strangest-looking man Peter had ever seen-a blue knit cap was shoved down over blond curly hair like Harpo Marx's, sunglasses rode on his nose; he wore overalls but no shirt, and his face was white as ivory. It was the man from the square. 'She will be delighted to see you again,' the man said. 'As her first visitors, you can count on an especially warm welcome.' The man's smile broadened as he began to come up the stairs after them.
When he had come up only a few of the steps he lifted a hand and pulled the blue cap off his head. The Harpo curls, a wig, came off with it.
When he took off the dark glasses his eyes shone a uniform golden yellow.
9
Standing at his window in the hotel and looking out over the darkened section of Milburn, Don heard the far off convolutions of saxophones and trombones blaring on the cold air and thought:
Sears was facing his library door, listening for footsteps padding on his stairs, when his telephone rang.
Ignoring it, he unlocked his door; opened it. The staircase was empty.
He went to answer his phone.
Lewis Benedikt, whose mansion was on the furthest periphery of the area affected by the power failure, heard neither music nor childish footsteps. What he heard, blown on the wind or from inside his own mind or drifting on a draft through his dining room and winding around a newel post on its way toward him, was the most despairing sound he knew: the languishing, nearly inaudible voice of his dead wife, calling over and over again, 'Lewis. Lewis.' He had been hearing it, on and off, for days. When his telephone rang he turned to it with relief.
And with relief too heard Ricky Hawthorne's voice: 'I'm going batty sitting here in the dark. I've spoken to Sears and Edward's nephew and Sears graciously said that we can get together at this short notice at his house. I'd say we need to. Do you agree? We'll break a rule and just come as we are, shall we?'
Ricky thought that the young man was getting to look like a true member of the Chowder Society. Beneath the mask of sociability anyone would expect from a nephew of Edward's, he had the jim-jams. He leaned back in one of Sears's wonderful leather chairs, he sipped his whiskey and looked (with his uncle's reflex amusement) around the cherished interior of the library (did it look as old-fashioned to him as Edward had said it was?), he spoke at intervals, but there was an undercurrent of tension in all of it.
Maybe that makes him one of us, Ricky thought: and he saw that Don was the sort of person they would have befriended, years and years back; if he had been born forty years earlier, he would have been one of them as if by birthright.
Still, there was a streak of secrecy in him. Ricky could not imagine what he had meant by asking if any of them had heard music during the early evening.
Pressed about this, he had evaded explanations; pressed further, he had said, 'I was just getting the feeling that everything happening has a direct relationship to my writing.'
This remark, which would have seemed egotistical at any other time, was given density by the candlelight; each of the men stirred in his chair.
'Isn't that why we asked you here?' Sears said.
And then he had explained: Ricky listened puzzled to Don's account of his idea for a new book and the description of the Dr. Rabbitfoot character, and how he had heard the showman's music just before Ricky's call.
'Are you saying that events in this town are occurrences from an unwritten book?' Sears asked incredulously. 'That's sheer poppycock.'
'Unless,' Ricky said, thinking, 'unless… well, I'm not really sure how to put this. Unless things here in Milburn have focused lately-have come to a focus they did not have before.'
'You mean that I'm the focus,' Don said.
'I don't know.'
'This is nonsense,' Sears interjected. 'Focused, unfocused-all that's happened is that we are managing to frighten ourselves even more. That's your focus. The daydreams of a novelist can't have anything to do with it.'
Lewis sat apart from all this, wrapped in some private misery. Ricky asked him what he thought, and Lewis
