flat of his hand-no depression, no hidden door, nothing but a flat sealed surface.
The invisible lights dimmed, as did the imitation stars. Two men took him, one holding an arm, the other a shoulder. They forcibly turned him to face the stage, on which a single spotlight shone. In the middle of the spot stood a placard board. The first placard read:
RABBITFOOT DE PEYSER PRODUCTIONS
TAKES PRIDE IN
PRESENTING
A hand dipped into the light and removed the sign.
A SHORT WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR
The curtain went up to reveal a television set. Don thought it was blank until he noticed details on the white screen-the red brick of a chimney, the 'snow' which was real snow. Then the picture jumped into life for him.
It was a high-angled shot of Montgomery Street, taken from over the roof of Anna Mostyn's house. Immediately after he recognized the setting, the characters appeared. He, Sears James and Ricky Hawthorne struggled up the middle of Montgomery Street: he and Ricky looking at the house for as long as they were in frame, Sears looking down as if consciously to give contrast to the shot. There was no sound, and Don could not remember what they had said to each other before marching toward the house. Three faces in fast-cut closeups: their eyebrows crusted with white, they looked like soldiers conducting a mopping-up operation in some Arctic war. Ricky's tired face was obviously that of a man with a bad cold. He was suffering: it was much clearer to Don now than it had been outside the house.
Then a shot of his reaching in through the broken window. An exterior camera followed the three men into the house, tracking them through the kitchen and into the dark hallway. More unheard conversation; a third camera picked up Don and Ricky climbing the stairs, Ricky pointing to the bloodstain. On Ricky's civilized face was the expression of pain he had seen. They parted, and the camera left Don just as he pushed at the door to Anna Mostyn's bedroom.
Don uneasily watched the camera following Ricky up the stairs. A jump-cut to the end of an empty corridor: Ricky seen in silhouette pausing on a landing, then going up to the top floor. Another jump cut: Ricky entering the top floor, trying the first door and entering a room.
Inside the room now: Ricky came through the door with the camera watching him like a hidden assailant. Ricky breathing heavily, looking at the room with open mouth and widening eyes-the room of the nightmare, then, as he had guessed. The camera began to creep toward him. Then it, or the creature it represented, sprang.
Two hands gripped Ricky's neck, choking him. Ricky fought, pushing at his murderer's wrists, but was too weak to break his grip. The hands tightened, and Ricky began to die: not cleanly, as on the television programs this 'commercial' imitated, but messily, with streaming eyes and bleeding tongue. His back arched helplessly, fluids streamed from his eyes and nose, his face began to turn black.
Ricky Hawthorne died in front of him, in color on a twenty-six inch screen.
4
Ricky forced himself to open the door of the first bedroom on the top floor of the house. He wished he were home with Stella. She had been very shaken by Lewis's death, though she knew nothing of Peter Barnes's story.
Maybe this is where it ends, he thought, and went through into the bedroom.
And forced himself to stand still: even the breath in his body wanted to flee. It was the room of the dream, and every atom of it seemed pervaded with the Chowder Society's misery. Here they had each sweated and gone cold with fear; on this bed-now with a single gray blanket thrown over the bare mattress-each had struggled helplessly to move. In the prison of that wretched bed they had waited for life to end. The room stood only for death: it was an emblem of death, and its bare cold bleakness was its image.
He remembered that Sears was, or soon would be, in the cellar. But there was no cellar-beast: just as there was no sweating Ricky Hawthorne pinned to the bed. He turned around slowly, taking in all of the room.
On a side wall hung the only anomaly, a small mirror.
(
(
Ricky went around the bed to approach the mirror. Set opposite the window, it reflected a white section of sky. Tiny flakes of snow drifted across its surface and disappeared at the bottom of the frame.
When Ricky got closer to the mirror a whisper of breeze slid against his face. He bent forward and a sparse handful of snowflakes spun out to touch his cheek.
He made the mistake of looking directly into what he now confusedly thought must be a small window open directly to the weather.
A face appeared before him, a face he knew, wild and lost; then he glimpsed Elmer Scales moving clumsily through the snow; carrying a shotgun. Like the first apparition, the farmer was splashed with blood; the jug-eared face had starved down to skin-covered bone, but in Scales's fierce gauntness was something which forced Ricky to think
Then Elmer and his target blew away and he was looking at Lewis's back. A naked woman stood in front of Lewis, soundlessly mouthing words.
Just when the woman closed on Lewis, both she and he melting into unrecognizable forms, Ricky saw Peter Barnes crouching in a corner of the storm. No-in a building, some building he knew but could not recognize. Some long-familiar corner, a worn carpet, a curved tan wall with a dim light in a sconce… a man like a wolf was bending over terrified Peter Barnes, grinning at him with white prominent teeth. This time there was no melting, merciful snowfall to hide the dreadful thing from Ricky Hawthorne: the creature leaned over cowering Peter Barnes, picked him up and like a lion killing a gazelle, broke his back. Lionlike, it bit into the boy's skin and began to eat.
5
Sears James had inspected the front rooms of the house and found nothing; and nothing, he thought, was what they were most likely to find in all the rest of the house. One empty suitcase scarcely justified going even a foot beyond one's door, in weather like this. He came back into the hall, heard Don walking aimlessly about in a bedroom at the top of the stairs, and made a quick check through the kitchen. Wet footprints, their own, dirtied the floor. A single bleary water glass sat on a dusty counter. An empty sink, empty shelves. Sears chafed his cold hands together and came back out into the dark hallway.
Now Don was banging the walls upstairs-looking for a secret panel, Sears imagined, and shook his head. That all three of them were still alive and prowling through the house proved to Sears that Eva had moved on and left nothing behind.
He opened the door to the cellar. Wooden steps led down into complete blackness. Sears flicked the switch, and a bulb at the top of the steps went on. Its light revealed the steps and concrete floor at their bottom, but seemed to extend only seven or eight feet from the bottom of the steps. Apparently it was the only light; which meant, Sears realized, that the cellar was unused. The Robinsons had never turned the basement into a den or family room.
He went down a few steps and peered into the murk. What he could see looked like any Milburn cellar: extending under the whole of the house, about seven feet high, with walls of painted concrete block. The old furnace sat near the wall at the far end, casting a deep many-armed shadow which met and melted smoothly into the gloom; on one side stood the tall tubular cylinder for hot water and two disconnected iron sinks.
Sears heard a thump from upstairs, and his heart leaped: he was vastly more nervous than he wished to acknowledge. Tilting his head back toward the top of the stairs, he listened for further noises or sounds of distress, but heard none: probably no more than a slamming door.
