House construction -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories; World War, 1939-1945 -- United States -- Fiction
"Mr. Kermit, pleeeease listen to me! I beg of you, come out here at
once. It's terribly important!"
I didn't say a word this time. I just hung right up.
In another half minute the telephone was jangling again. I was purple
when I picked it up this time.
"Listen," I bellowed. "I don't care what noises you're hearing now--"
Stoddard cut in desperately, shouting at the top of his lungs to do so.
"I'm not only hearing the noises, Kermit," he yelled, "I'm _seeing_ the
people who cause them!"
* * * * *
This caught me off balance.
"Huh?" I gulped.
"The belfry," he yelled, "I went up in the belfry, and you can see the
people who's voices we heard!" There was a pause, while he found breath,
then he shouted, "You have to come over. You're the only one I can think
of to show this to!"
Stoddard was an eccentric, but only so far as his tastes in architecture
were concerned. I realized this, as I sat there gaping foolishly at the
still vibrating telephone in my hand.
"Okay," I said, for no earthly reason that I could think of, "okay, hang
on. I'll be there in twenty minutes."
Mrs. Stoddard met me at the door this time. She was worried, almost
frightened, and very bewildered.
"George is upstairs, Mr. Kermit. He won't let me come up there. He told
me to send you up the minute you arrived. He's up in the attic."
"What on earth," I began.
"I don't know," his wife said. "I was down in the basement drying some
clothes, when I heard this terrible yelling from George. Then he was
calling you on the telephone. I don't know what it's all about."
I raced up to the attic in nothing flat, almost knocking my teeth out on
the bottom step of the attic stairs.
Then I stumbled into the darkness of the attic, and saw Stoddard's
flashlight bobbing around in a corner.
"Kermit?"
It was Stoddard's voice.
"Yes," I answered. "What in the hell is up? It had better be goo--."
"Hurry," Stoddard said. "Over here, quickly!"
I stumbled across the board spacings until I was standing beside
Stoddard and peering up at what the beam of his flashlight revealed on
the ceiling--a ragged, open hole, which he'd made by tearing several
coatings of insulation from the spot.
For a minute, I couldn't make out anything in that flash beam glare.
Stoddard had hold of my arm, and was saying one word over and over,
urgently.
"Look. Look. Look!"
Then my eyes got adjusted to the light change, and I was aware that I
was gazing up into the interior of the crazy belfry atop the monstrous
house. Gazing up into the interior, while voices, quite loud and clearly
distinguishable, were talking in a language which I didn't recognize
immediately. As far as my vision was concerned, I might as well have
been looking at a sort of grayish vaporish screen of some sort, that was
all I saw.
"Shhhh!" Stoddard hissed now. "Don't say a word. Just listen to them!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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