Джек Макдевитт - A Voice in the Night

He pushed in immediately after Arnold had unlocked and opened the door. “Damnedest thing I ever saw,” he said.

Arnold grinned. “What’s that?”

“You been over to Floyd’s?” Rob’s eyes were wide, and he looked thoroughly rattled. Rob never looked upset. Not ever.

“No,” he said. “Why?”

“Go see it.” He never quite got out of the doorway.

“Go see what?”

“Floyd’s house. It’s devil’s work.” He banged out, crossed the street with long, sure strides, and crashed into Ed’s Supermarket. Arnold stared after him. It was the only time he’d ever heard Rob mention the devil.

There was a fair amount of traffic in the street: People were boiling out of the Downtown Cafe and the Federal Building. Some were pointing in his general direction. Or toward Fifth Street. Then, the supermarket began to empty. Ep Colley, wearing a long gray woolen sweater twice his size, hurried out of the bank next door to the Lock ‘n’ Bolt. Maude Everson, the teller, was right behind him. Arnold leaned out the door. “Hey, Maude, what’s going on?”

“Something about Floyd being buried.” She threw the words over her shoulder and kept walking.

He heard sirens.

Arnold never considered simply leaving the store. Tradition weighed far too heavily. Instead, he called Janet and invited her to come in early “if you can manage that.” When she arrived, thirty minutes later and out of breath, she looked frightened.

“Something really strange happened at Floyd’s,” she said. But her explanation was too garbled to understand easily, so he left her in mid-sentence and hurried outside. The sirens, by then, had stopped. Cars were moving, but an out-of-uniform Border Patrolman had taken up traffic duty at the Fifth Street intersection, and was letting no one turn in there. Large numbers of people were coming out of the side streets from the south side of town, and were running and walking, collecting into a steady stream that moved past the Jefferson School and flowed north past the Border Patrolman.

Devil’s work.

Floyd.

A chill worked its way up Arnold’s back. He had complained bitterly to the Traveler about Floyd. Had suggested joint action aimed at him.

But the wind creature was not human. Had he forgotten that essential point? And spurred it on to commit some terrible atrocity?

He crossed the Jefferson school grounds and joined the small army moving up Fifth Street. Arnold’s minimum stature prevented his getting a good look until he’d gotten to within about a block. Then his blood froze. The crowd was thick around Floyd’s property, and vehicles cluttered the street, but that wasn’t what had drawn his eye: something dark and enormous, some Mesozoic thing had attached itself to the front of the modest frame house. Emergency lights blinked, and a couple of the volunteer firemen tried to maintain control in the absence of police. Fort Moxie had no police. Arnold assumed that a deputy would by now be on his way over from Cavalier.

He got closer, and the Mesozoic thing gradually resolved itself into an enormous pile of dead leaves. Floyd’s once-exquisite front yard was piled high with them. They rose in vast mounds, spilled across the top of his porch, buried the upstairs windows, buried the box elders, buried the driveway and maybe the Nissan. They spilled into the street, and washed across the property on either side.

Arnold looked nervously for Floyd, and was relieved to see him off to one side, gesturing to an EMT. The EMT was there with the rescue unit, all of whom had joined the crowd gawking at the spectacle. Floyd was alternately jabbing with both hands and throwing his palms out, imploring the skies to open up and drown someone.

Some spectators were pointing off in various other directions, and talking with considerable excitement. They had noticed that, with the exception of Floyd’s immediate neighbors, who had suffered by their proximity to his house, every visible lawn, every piece of open ground, including the library and the high school, was immaculate. It appeared that something had swept every stray leaf within several blocks, and dumped it all on Floyd. And Floyd’s place was engulfed with a mountain of vegetable debris.

A child came from nowhere, dashed among the rescue workers, and leaped onto one of the mounds. Its mother was right behind her, pulled her out, and dragged her kicking and screaming away.

Someone snickered. The volunteers grinned. The Border Patrol laughed. The people from the Federal Building roared. The crowd hooted. And cheered. It was as if a wave had broken: Gales of laughter swept through the street. Arnold joined in.

Abruptly, Floyd was standing in front of him, his face squeezed into a brick-red snarl. He pointed a trembling finger at Arnold. “You did this,” he shrieked. And then, to the entire baffled assemblage: “It was Whitaker.”

Linda was seated on the middle bench with a book when Arnold arrived at a few minutes after five that afternoon. He had traded in his sweatsuit for slacks, a tennis shirt, and a yellow sweater that didn’t quite fit anymore.

He posted himself about fifteen yards away, on another bench, pretending to read a Russian novel. But his heart pounded, and his juices flowed, and his level of terror mounted. He held onto his book, gripped it with white fingers, as if it were the only thing anchoring him to his secure, predictable existence. She was the loveliest woman he had ever seen.

He could not make out the title of her book. As he watched, she turned a page and he thought, for a moment, she would look up. But it did not happen. An empty plastic bag, from which she had been feeding the squirrels (O, happy beasts!), lay beside her. She was not actually looking at the open book, but seemed instead to be gazing off into the distance, and Arnold noted with satisfaction that she paid no attention to the admiring glances she drew from all who passed, both male and female.

He tried to catch her eye, to see whether he might elicit some faint encouragement. But she never looked his way.

He was going to have to get up and walk over. What would he say?

Hello. My name’s Arnold Whitaker. May I join you?

No. He might have tried that when he first arrived. It was too late now. Too much a blatant attempt at a pickup.

He could stroll in her general direction. Casually. Put his hands in his pockets, and pretend to admire the oak tree behind her, or the Greek pillars fronting the library. Nice columns. Doric, aren’t they? Or maybe show some interest in her book.

His pulse hammered in his ears. He clung to the arms of the bench.

There was more traffic than normal on Fifth Street, but they were all headed for Floyd’s house, to gawk and take pictures.

He tried to surprise himself, and threw a quick command to his muscles: Get up.

No response.

Go on over. Say hello.

A passing breeze stirred her hair. With an achingly feminine gesture, she brushed it back. He tried to imagine that hand touching his wrist. Holding his cheek while those lambent eyes poured themselves into his own.

Do it.

The breeze lifted Linda’s skirt. And while he sat, desperately aware of the hard surface of his bench, of the individual planks and the spaces between, and of the texture of the paved walkway, she closed her book, got up, brushed her skirt with a graceful left-handed movement, and without (as far as he could tell) ever having seen him, strode off.

“What happened?” The sky smelled of coming rain.