Mel asked in his mind what they wanted, and the answer showed
immediately. The table in his living room with the pattern of glassy
sand and pebbles Miss Green had constructed. The pattern was glowing
again now under the cloth he had thrown over it. He was to go in and
look at the pattern ...
"No!" he said aloud. It was all terror now.
"_Go look at the pattern ... Go look at the pattern ..._"
The pictures burst round him in a soundless wild flowering of beauty,
flickering rains of color, a fountain of melting, shifting forms. His
mind drowned in happiness. He was sinking through a warmth of kindness,
gratitude and love...
* * * * *
A drift of rain touched his cheek coldly--and Mel found himself outside
the garage, moving drunkenly toward the apartment door. Then, just for
a moment, a picture of Miss Green printed itself on his mind.
She seemed to be standing before him, as tall now as he was,
motionless, the strange wings half spread. The golden unhuman eyes were
looking past him, watching something with cold malice and contempt--and
with a concentration of purpose that made a death's mask of the
perfectly chiseled green face!
In that second, Mel understood the purpose as clearly as if she had
told him. In the next, the image disappeared with a jerky, complete
abruptness--
As if somebody were belatedly trying to wipe it out of his memory as
well! But he knew he had seen her somehow--somewhere--as she actually
was at that moment. And he knew what she had been watching. Himself,
Mel Armstrong, staggering blindly about in his other-dimension, down in
the court!
He hadn't stayed in the court. He was back in the garage, backed
trembling against a wall. She--_they_--weren't trying to show him
gratitude, or reward him somehow; before they left, they simply wanted
to destroy the human being who had found out about them, and whom
they had used. The table and the pattern were some sort of trap! What
he couldn't understand was why they didn't simply come down in their
fireball and kill him as they had the cat.
They were still pouring their pictures at him, but he knew now how
to counteract that. He stared out through the garage window at the
lightening sky--looked at, listened to, what was there, filling his
mind with Earth shapes and sounds!
And he promptly discovered an ally he hadn't been counting on. He
hadn't really been aware of the thumping wind before, and the sketchy
pattering of raindrops, like a sweeping fall of leaves here and there.
He hadn't even heard, beyond the continuous dim roar of surf from the
beach, the gathering mutter of thunder!
They couldn't stay here long. The storm was ready to break. They
weren't willing to risk coming out fully into the Earth dimension to
hunt him down. And he didn't have to go to their trap ...
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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