My interests were in travel and history. I never did much about either. I went to Yucatan one summer, and I read a lot of history books. Neither of those is very interesting.
It would be great to be able to say I was special, but I wasn't. I'm thirty-one years old, and I'm just plain damned average, damn it, I'm average, so stop it, stop your damned badgering! I'm a nothing, a nobody, you never even saw my face through the wicket when I gave you your stamps, you arrogant swine! You never paid me the least attention and you never asked me if I'd had a good day and you never noticed that I trimmed the borders of the stamps I sold you, if they weren't full sheets, because many people collect full sheets, but you never even noticed that little service!
That's how I was special. I cared about the little things. And you never paid any attention…
I don't care to tell you any more about myself. Listen, this is about what happened, not about me, and you don't care about me anyhow, so there's no need to carry on like that about myself.
Please excuse what I wrote just now. It was an outburst. I'm sorry. And I'm sorry I cursed. I didn't mean to do that. I am a Lutheran. I attended Our Redeemer Lutheran Church in White Sulphur Springs. I was raised not to curse.
I'm going on now to what happened.
I walked all around the edge of the chunk of the world. It wasn't chopped off neatly. Whatever had done it, made the world vanish, had done it sloppily. The streets came to ragged ends, telephone lines trailed off where they'd dropped and some of them hung off into the emptiness, just floating like fishlines in water.
I should tell you what it looked like out there beyond the edge. It looked like a Winter snowfall, murky and with falling motes of light like snowflakes, but it was dark, too. I could see through the dark. That was what made it frightening: one shouldn't be able to see through the darkness. There was a wind out there, but it didn't blow. I can't describe that any better. You'll have to imagine it. And it wasn't cold or hot. It was just pleasant.
So I spent my days in what had been Hanover; I spent them all alone. And there was nothing heroic about me. Except that during the first week I saved my town from invasion about fifty times.
That will sound remarkable, but I assure you it wasn't. The first time it happened I was coming out of the Dartmouth Co-Op on the main street, carrying several paperbacks I had taken to read, when this Viking came screaming down the street. He was enormous, well over six feet tall, with a double-bitted axe in his hand, and a helmet with two horns, and a fierce orange beard, wearing furs and thongs and a bear skin cape, and he came right at me, shrieking in some barbarian language, with blood in his eyes and certain as God determined to hack me to bits.
I was terrified. I threw the paperbacks at him and would have run if I had been able to run, but I knew he'd catch me.
Except, what he did was: he threw up his free hand to ward off the paperbacks, and swerved around me and started running away from me down a side street. I couldn't understand what was happening, but I picked up the paperbacks and took off after him. I ran as fast as I could, which was pretty fast, and I started to catch up to him. When he looked over his shoulder and saw me coming, he screamed and ran like a madman.
I chased him right off the edge of the world.
He kept on running, right out into that darkness with the snowstorm in it, and he disappeared after a while, but I saw him still running at top speed till he was out of sight. I was afraid to go after him.
Later that day I turned back an attack by a German Stuka that strafed the main street, an attack by a Samurai warrior, an attack by a Moro with a huge batangas knife, an attack by a knight on a black horse-he carried a couched lance-and attacks by a Hun, a Visigoth, a Vandal, a Viet Cong with a machine gun, an Amazon with a mace, a Puerto Rican street mugger, a Teddy Boy with a cosh, a deranged and drugged disciple of Kali with a knotted silk rope, a Venetian swordsman with a left-hand dagger, and I forget which all that first day.
It went on that way all that week. It was all I could do to get any reading done.
Then they stopped, and I went about my business. But none of that was heroic. It was just part of the new order of things. At first I thought I was being tested, then I decided that was wrong. Actually, it got annoying, and I stood on the steps of the hospital and yelled at whoever it was responsible, “Look, I don't want to know about any more of this. It's just nonsense, so knock it off!”
And it stopped just like that. I was relieved.
I had no television or movies (the movie house was gone) or radio, but the electricity worked fine and I had music and some talking records. I listened to Dylan Thomas reading Under Milk Wood and Erroll Flynn telling the story of Robin Hood and Basil Rathbone telling the story of The Three Musketeers. That was very entertaining.
The water worked, and the gas, and the telephones didn't work. I was comfortable. There was no sun in the sky, or moon at night, but I could always see as if it were daylight in the daytime, and clear enough to get around by night.
I saw her sitting on the front steps of the Post Office, I guess it was about a year after I'd died, and I hadn't seen anyone else after the invaders stopped doing their crazy screaming thing in the streets. She was just sitting there with her elbow propped on her knee and her chin resting in her palm.
I walked down the street to her, and stopped right in front of the Post Office. I was waiting for her to leap up and scream, “Amok! Amok!” or something, but she didn't. She just stared at me for a while.
She was awfully pretty. I'm not good at describing what people look like, but you can take it from me, she was very pretty. She was wearing a thin white gown that I could see through, and she was pretty all over. Her hair was long and gray, but not old gray; it was gray as if she liked it that way, the fashionable young person kind of gray. If you know what I'm getting at.
“How do you feel?” she asked, finally.
“I'm all right, thank you.”
“Have you healed up nicely?”
“I knitted real well. Who are you? Where did you come from?”
She waved toward the end of the world, and around the street, and shrugged. “I don't know. I just sort of woke up here. Everybody else's gone, is that right?”
“That's right. They've been gone for about a year. Well, uh, where did you wake up?”
“Right here. I've been sitting here for about an hour. I was just starting to get my bearings. I thought I might be all alone here.”
“Do you remember your name?”
She seemed annoyed at that. “Yes, of course, I remember my name. It's Opal Sellers. I'm from Boston.”
“This was Hanover, New Hampshire.”
“Who are you?”
“Eugene Harrison. From White Sulphur Springs.”
She looked very pale. I didn't say it, but that was the first thing about her I noticed. It wasn't the dress I could see through, really; it was the paleness. Just very white, as if she had been left out too long in the snow. I thought I could see the blood rushing along under the skin, but that was probably my imagination.
Now I know someone is going to think she was a ghost, or a vampire, or some alien creature dressed up to look like a human being, but as Nero Wolfe says in the mysteries, that is just flummery. She was a person, nothing more than that, and you can forget that sort of stuff, even with what comes next. She was as real as I was.
“How did you know I'd been sick?” I asked.
She shrugged again. “I don't know, I suppose I just knew, that's all. But I saw you coming out of the hospital up the street.”