A fingering tendril of wind, startlingly chill, made him shiver.
But was the shiver from the wind alone? Staring uphill, straining his eyes at the dim bulk of the house, he saw a small greenish glow moving behind the windows of the second floor, while halfway between him and the house there stood a dark pale-headed figure. White-haired Cassius? Or a white crash helmet?
A flare of lightning brighter than those preceding it showed the swollen hillside empty and the windows blank.
Imagination! he told himself.
Thunder crashed loudly. The storm was getting nearer again, coming back.
He switched on the flashlight and by its reassuringly bright beam rapidly mounted the hill, stamping each step firmly into the soggy ground.
The front door was ajar. He thrust it open and was in the short hall that held the stairs to the second floor and led back to the living room.
As he moved forward between stairs and wall, he became aware of a deep and profound vibration that gave the whole house a heavy tremor; it was in the floor under his feet, the wall his hand groped, even in the thick air he breathed. While his ears were assaulted by a faint thin screaming, as of a sound too shrill to be quite heard, a sound to drive dogs mad and murder bats.
Midway in his short journey the house lurched sharply once, so he was staggered, then held steady. The deep vibration and the shrill whatever-it-was continued unchanging.
He paused in the doorway to the living room. From where he stood he had a clear view of the fireplace midway in the far wall, the mantelpiece above it, the two windows to either side of it that opened on the hill behind the house, a small coffee table in front of the fireplace, and in front of that an easy chair facing away from him. Barely showing above the back of the last was the crown of a white-haired head.
The bottles on the mantelpiece had been transferred to the coffee table, where one of them lay on its side, so that the mantelpiece itself was occupied only by the stubby black cylinder of Esteban’s sonic generator and by his painting of Helen, which seemed strangely to have a pale grey rag plastered closely across it.
Wolf at first saw all these things not so much by the beam of his flashlight, which was directed at the floor from where his hand hung at his side, as by the green and blue glow of the ghost light beneath the oddly obscured painting.
Then the white glare of a lightning flash flooded in briefly from behind him through the open door and a window above the stairs, though strangely no ray of it showed through the windows to either side of the fireplace, followed almost immediately by a crash of thunder.
As though that great sound had been a word of command, Wolf strode rapidly toward the fireplace, directing the flashlight ahead of him. With every step forward the deep vibration and the super-shrill whine increased in intensity, almost unbearably.
He stopped by the coffee table and shone his flashlight at Esteban’s invention. Torn-away friction tape dangled from the switch, which had been thrown on.
He shifted the beam to the painting and saw that what he had thought grey rag was the central area of bare canvas from which every last flake of paint had vanished, or rather been shaken by the vibrations from the cylinder beside it. For he could see now that the stripped canvas was quivering rapidly and incessantly like an invisibly beaten drumhead.
But the mantelpiece beneath the painting was bare. It showed no trace of fallen flakes.
As he swung the bright beam around to the easy chair, flashing in his mind on how the slim pinkish-green witch mask had swooped and buzzed through Cassius’ and Tommy’s dreams, it passed slowly across the nearest window, revealing why the lightning flash hadn’t shone through it. Beyond the glass, close against it from top to bottom, was wet dirt packed solid.
The beam moved on to the easy chair. Cassius’ hands gripping its arms and his head, pressed in frozen terror into the angle between back and side, were all purplish, while the whites of his bulging eyes were shot with a lacework of purple.
The reason for his suffocation was not far to seek. Stuffing his nostrils and plastered intrusively across his grimacing lips were tight-packed dry flakes of greenish-pink oil paint.
With a muted high-pitched crackle the two windows gave way to huge dark-faced thrusts of mud.
Wolf took off at speed, his flashlight held before him, raced down the lurching hall, out the open front door, down the splashing hill toward the lights of the Volks, and through its door into the driver’s seat.
Simultaneously releasing the hand-brake, shifting the gear lever, and giving her throttle, he got away in a growling first that soon changed to a roaring second. A last sideways glimpse showed the house rushing down toward him in the grip of a great moving earth-wall in which uprooted trees rode like logs in a breaking-up river jam.
For critical seconds the end of the earth-wave seemed to Wolf’s eye on a collision course with the hurtling Volks, but then rapidly fell behind the escaping car. He’d actually begun to slow down when he started to hear the profound, long-drawn rumbling roar of the hill burying forever Goodland Valley and all its secrets.
Copyright
Copyright © 2004 the Estate of Fritz Leiber
Published by E-Reads. All rights reserved.
Introduction © 2004 John Pelan
“Horrible Imaginings” originally appeared in Death, 1982 Playboy Publishing
“The Automatic Pistol” originally appeared in Weird Tales, May 1940
“Crazy Annaoj” originally appeared in Galaxy, February 1968
“The Hound” originally appeared in Weird Tales, November 1942
“Alice and the Allergy” originally appeared in Weird Tales, September 1946
“Skinny’s Wonderful” original to this collection
“Answering Service” originally appeared in Worlds of If, December 1967
“Scream Wolf” originally appeared in Mike Shayne’s Mystery Magazine, February 1961
“Mysterious Doings in the Metropolitan Museum” originally appeared in Universe 5, 1974 Random House
“When Brahma Wakes” originally appeared in Fantastic, January 1968
“The Glove” originally appeared in Whispers, June 1975
“The Girl With Hungry Eyes” originally appeared in The Girl With Hungry Eyes 1949 Avon Books
“While Set Fled” originally appeared in Amra #15, 1961
“Diary in the Snow” originally appeared in Night’s Black Agents 1947 Arkham House
“The Ghost Light” originally appeared in The Ghost Light 1984 Berkley Books