“Somebody’s been writing on your wall,” he observed. “Rotten speller, I must say.”
Freeman raised his eyes from the key ring and looked in the direction the other man indicated. On the wall opposite the door, just under the ceiling, somebody had written horrer howce in what looked like blackish ink.
The effect of the ill-spelled words on Freeman was remarkable. He dropped the key ring with a clatter, and when he straightened from picking it up, his hands were quivering.
“I’ve changed my mind,” he said. He put the key ring back in his pocket. “I always did have the damnedest luck.”
Dickson-Hawes leaned back against the wall and crossed his ankles. “How do you get your ideas, Freeman?”
“Oh, all sorts of ways. Things I read, things people tell me, things I see. All sorts of ways.” Both men were speaking in low tones.
“They’re amazing. And your mechanical effects—I really don’t see how you get machinery to do the things you make it do.”
Freeman smiled meagerly. “I’ve always been good at mechanics. Particularly radio and signaling devices. Relays. Communication problems, you might say. I can communicate with anything. Started when I was a kid.”
There was silence. Dickson-Hawes kept leaning against the wall. A close observer, Freeman noticed almost a tic, a fluttering of his left eyelid.
At last Freeman said, “How much are you paying for the Well?”
Dickson-Hawes closed his eyes and opened them again. He may have been reflecting that while a verbal contract is quite as binding as a written one, it is difficult to prove the existence of a verbal contract to which there are no witnesses.
He answered, “Five thousand in a lump sum, I think, and a prorated share of the net admissions for the first three years.”
There was an even longer silence. Freeman’s face relaxed at the mention of a definite sum. He said, “How are your nerves? I need money so damned bad.”
Dickson-Hawes’s face went so blank that it would seem the other man had touched a vulnerable spot. “Pretty good, I imagine,” he said in a carefully modulated voice. “I saw a good deal of action during the war.”
Cupidity and some other emotion contended in Freeman’s eyes. He fished out the key ring again. “Look, you must not make a noise. No yelling or anything like that, no matter what you see. They’re very—I mean the machinery’s delicate. It’s full of bugs I haven’t got rid of yet. The whole thing will be a lot less ghastly later on. I’m going to keep the basic idea, make it just as exciting as it is now, but tone it down plenty.”
“I understand.”
Freeman looked at him with a frown. Don’t make a noise,” he cautioned again. “Remember, none of this is real.” He fitted the key into the first of the padlocks on the stoutly built door.
The second padlock was a little stiff. Freeman had to fidget with it. Finally he got the door open. The two men stepped through it. They were outside.
There is no other way of expressing it: They were outside. If the illusion had been good in the Well, here it was perfect. They stood in a sort of safety island on the edge of a broad freeway, where traffic poured by in an unending rush eight lanes wide. It was the time of day when, though visibility is really better than at noon, a nervous motorist or two has turned on his parking lights. Besides the two men, the safety island held a new, shiny, egg plant-colored sedan.
Dickson-Hawes turned a bewildered face on his companion. “Freeman,” he said in a whisper, “did you make all this?”
For the first time, Freeman grinned. “Pretty good, isn’t it?” he replied, also in a whisper. He opened the car door and slid into the driver’s seat. “Get in. We’re going for a ride. Remember, no noise.”
The other man obeyed. Freeman started the car—it had a very quiet motor—and watched until a lull in the traffic gave him a chance to swing out from the curb. He stepped on the accelerator. The landscape began to move by.
Cars passed them. They passed some cars. Dickson-Hawes looked for the speedometer on the dashboard and couldn’t find it. A garage, service station, a billboard went by. The sign on the garage read : WE FIX FLATTEDS. The service station had conical pumps. The tomatoes on the billboard were purple and green.
Dickson-Hawes was breathing shallowly. He said, “Freeman—where are we?”
Once more, the other man grinned. “You’re getting just the effect I mean to give,” he retorted in a pleased whisper. “At first, the customer thinks he’s on an ordinary freeway, with ordinary people hurrying home to their dinners. Then he begins to notice all sorts of subtle differences. Everything’s a little off-key. It adds to the uneasiness.”
“Yes, but— what’s the object of all this? What are we trying to do?”
“Get home to our dinners, like everyone else.”
“Where does the—well, difficulty come in?”
“Do you see that car in the outer lane?” They were still conversing in whispers. “Black, bullet shaped, quite small, going very fast?”
“Yes.”
“Keep your eye on it.”
The black car was going very fast. It caught up with a blue sedan in front of it, cut in on it and began to crowd it over to the curb. The blue sedan tried to shake off the black car, but without success. If the driver didn’t want to be wrecked, he had to get over.
For a while, the two cars ran parallel. The black car began to slow down and crowd more aggressively than ever. Suddenly it cut obliquely in front of the sedan and stopped.
There was a frenzied scream of brakes from the sedan. It stopped with its left fender almost against the black bullet-shaped car. The bodies were so close, there was no room for the sedan driver to open his door.
Freeman had let the car he was driving slow down, presumably so Dickson-Hawes could see everything.
For a moment there was nothing to see. Only for a moment. Then two—or was it three?—long,, blackish, extremely thin arms came out from the black car and fumbled with the glass in the window of the sedan. The glass was forced down. The arms entered the sedan.
From the sedan there came a wild burst of shrieking. It was like the flopping, horrified squawks of a chicken at the chopping block. The shrieks were still going on when the very thin arms came out with a—The light hid nothing. The three very thin arms came out with a plucked-off human arm.
They threw it into the interior of the black car. The three arms invaded the sedan once more.
This time, Dickson Hawes had turned neither white nor greenish, but a blotchy gray. His mouth had come open all around his teeth, in the shape of a rigid oblong with raised, corded edges. It was perfectly plain that if he was not screaming, it was solely because his throat was too paralyzed.
Freeman gave his passenger only a momentary glance. He was looking into the rear-view mirror. He began to frown anxiously.
The shrieking from the blue sedan had stopped. Dickson-Hawes covered his face with his hands while Freeman drove past it and the other car. When the group lay behind them, he asked in a shaking whisper, “Freeman, are there any more of them? The black cars, I mean?”
“Yeah. One of them’s coming toward us now.”
Dickson-Hawes’s head swiveled around. Another of the black cars was hurtling toward them through the traffic, though it was still a long way behind.
Dickson-Hawes licked his lips.
“Is it— after us?”
“I think so.”
“But why? Why—us?”
“Part of the game. Wouldn’t be horrid otherwise. Hold on. I’m going to try to shake it off.”
Freeman stepped down on the accelerator. The eggplant-colored sedan shot ahead. It was a very fast car and Freeman was evidently an expert and nerveless driver. They slid through nonexistent holes in the traffic, glanced off from fenders, slipped crazily from lane to lane, a shuttle in a pattern of speed and escape.