Then he heard it. It was Thome’s voice. It was Thome’s voice raised in a thin faint cry, almost a wail, coming from somewhere outside the house.
He was out of bed and at the window in his bare feet in one leap. But Thorne was not visible at this side of the house, upon which the dead woods encroached directly; so he scrambled back to slip shoes on his feet and his gown over his pajamas, darted toward the footrail and snatched his revolver out of the hip pocket of his trousers, and ran out into the corridor, heading for the stairs, the revolver in his hand.
“What’s the matter?” grumbled someone, and he turned to see Dr. Reinach’s vast skull protruding nakedly from the room next to his.
“Don’t know. I heard Thorne cry out,” and Ellery pounded down the stairs and flung open the front door.
He stopped within the doorway, gaping.
Thorne, fully dressed, was standing ten yards in front of the house, facing Ellery obliquely, staring at something outside the range of Ellery’s vision with the most acute expression of terror on his gaunt face Ellery had ever seen on a human countenance. Beside him crouched Nicholas Keith, only half-dressed; the young man’s jaws gaped foolishly and his eyes were enormous glaring discs.
Dr. Reinach shoved Ellery roughly aside and growled: “What’s the matter? What’s wrong?” The fat man’s feet were encased in carpet slippers and he had pulled a raccoon coat over his night-shirt, so that he looked like a particularly obese bear.
Thome’s Adam’s-apple bobbed nervously. The ground, the trees, the world were blanketed with snow of a peculiarly unreal texture; and the air was saturated with warm woolen flakes, falling softly. Deep drifts curved upwards to clamp the boles of trees.
“Don’t move,” croaked Thorne as Ellery and the fat man stirred. “Don’t move, for the love of God. Stay where you are.” Ellery’s grip tightened on the revolver and he tried perversely to get past the doctor; but he might have been trying to budge a stone wall. Thorne stumbled through the snow to the porch, paler than his background, leaving two deep ruts behind him. “Look at me,” he shouted. “Look at me. Do I seem all right? Have I gone mad?”
“Pull yourself together, Thorne,” said Ellery sharply. “What’s the matter with you? I don’t see anything wrong.”
“Nick!” bellowed Dr. Reinach. “Have you gone crazy, too?”
The young man covered his sunburnt face suddenly with his hands; then he dropped his hands and looked again.
He said in a strangled voice: “Maybe we all have. This is the most— Take a look yourself.”
Reinach moved then, and Ellery squirmed by him to land in the soft snow beside Thorne, who was trembling violently. Dr. Reinach came lurching after. They ploughed through the snow toward Keith, squinting, straining to see.
They need not have strained. What was to be seen was plain for any seeing eye to see. Ellery felt his scalp crawl as he looked; and at the same instant he was aware of the sharp conviction that this was inevitable, this was the only possible climax to the insane events of the previous day. The world had turned topsy-turvy. Nothing in it meant anything reasonable or sane.
Dr. Reinach gasped once; and then he stood blinking like a huge owl. A window rattled on the second floor of the White House. None of them looked up. It was Alice Mayhew in a wrapper, staring from the window of her bedroom, which was on the side of the house facing the driveway. She screamed once; and then she, too, fell silent.
There was the house from which they had just emerged, the house Dr. Reinach had dubbed the White House, with its front door quietly swinging open and Alice Mayhew at an upper side window. Substantial, solid, an edifice of stone and wood and plaster and glass and the patina of age. It was everything a house should be. That much was real, a thing to be grasped.
But beyond it, beyond the driveway and the garage, where the Black House had stood, the house in which Ellery himself had set foot only the afternoon before, the house of the filth and the stench, the house of the equally stone walls, wooden facings, glass windows, chimneys, gargoyles, porch; the house of the blackened look; the old Victorian house built during the Civil War where Sylvester Mayhew had died, where Thorne had barricaded himself with a cutlass for a week; the house which they had all seen, touched, smelled... there, there stood nothing.
No walls. No chimney. No roof. No ruins. No debris. No house. Nothing. Nothing but empty space covered smoothly and warmly with snow.
The house had vanished during the night.
Chapter II
Magic or miracle?
“There’s even,” thought Mr. Ellery Queen dully, “a character named Alice.”
He looked again. The only reason he did not rub his eyes was that it would have made him feel ridiculous; besides, his sight, all his senses, had never been keener.
He simply stood there in the snow and looked and looked and looked at the empty space where a three-story stone house seventy-five years old had stood the night before.
“Why, it isn’t there,” said Alice feebly from the upper window. “It... isn’t... there.”
“Then I’m not insane.” Thorne stumbled toward them. Ellery watched the old man’s feet sloughing through the snow, leaving long tracks. A man’s weight still counted for something in the universe, then. Yes, and there was his own shadow; so material objects still cast shadows. Absurdly, the discovery brought a certain faint relief.
“It is gone!” said Thorne in a cracked voice.
“Apparently.” Ellery found his own voice thick and slow; he watched the words curl out on the air and become nothing. “Apparently, Thorne.” It was all he could find to say.
Dr. Reinach arched his fat neck, his wattles quivering like a gobbler’s. “Incredible. Incredible!”
“Incredible,” said Thorne in a whisper.
“Unscientific. It can’t be. I’m a man of sense. Of senses. My mind is clear. Things like this — damn it, they just don’t happen!”
“As the man said who saw a giraffe for the first time,” sighed Ellery. “And yet... there it was.”
Thorne began wandering helplessly about in a circle. Alice stared, bewitched into stone, from the upper window. And Keith cursed and began to run across the snow-covered driveway toward the invisible house, his hands outstretched before him like a blind man’s.
“Hold on,” said Ellery. “Stop where you are.”
The giant halted, scowling. “What d’ye want?”
Ellery slipped his revolver back into his pocket and sloshed through the snow to pause beside the young man in the driveway. “I don’t know precisely. Something’s wrong. Something’s out of kilter either with us or with the world. It isn’t the world as we know it. It’s almost... almost a matter of transposed dimensions. Do you suppose the solar system has slipped out of its niche in the universe and gone stark crazy in the uncharted depths of space-time? I suppose I’m talking nonsense.”
“You know best,” shouted Keith. “I’m not going to let this screwy business stampede me. There was a solid house on that plot last night, by God, and nobody can convince me it still isn’t there. Not even my own eyes. We’ve — we’ve been hypnotized! The hippo could do it here — he could do anything. Hypnotized. You hypnotized us, Reinach!”
The doctor mumbled: “What?” and kept glaring at the empty lot.
“I tell you it’s there!” cried Keith angrily.
Ellery sighed and dropped to his knees in the snow; he began to brush aside the white, soft blanket with chilled palms. When he had laid the ground bare, he saw wet gravel and a rut. “This is the driveway, isn’t it?” he asked without looking up.