Avon Fantasy Reader No. 13 — page 122: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Now he understood why he had missed the store on the night before, why he had arrived home fifteen minutes early. On shaky legs he stumbled back to his home. He slammed and locked the door behind him and made his way unsteadily to his chair in the corner. What was this? What did it mean? By what inconceivable necromancy could a paved street with houses, trees and buildings be spirited away and the space it had occupied be closed up? Was something. happening in the world which he, in his secluded life, knew nothing about? Say Mr. Chambers shivered, reached to turn up the collar of his coat, then stopped as he realized the room must be warm. A fire blazed merrily in the grate. The cold he felt came from something, somewhere else. The cold of fear and horror, the chill of a half whispered thought. A deathly silence had fallen, a silence still measured by the pendulum clock, and yet one that held a different tenor from any he had ever sensed before. Not a homey, comfortable silence—but a silence that hinted at empti- ness and nothingness. There was something back of this, Mr. Chambers told himself. Something that reached far back into one corner of his brain and demanded recogni- tion. Something tied up with the fragments of talk he had heard on the - drugstore corner, bits of news broadcasts he had heard as he walked along the street, the shrieking of the newsboy calling his papers. Something to do with the happenings in the world from which he had excluded himself. He brought them back to mind now and lingered over the one central theme of the talk he overheard: the wars and plagues. Hints of a Europe and Asia swept almost clean of human life, of the plague ravaging Africa, of its appearance in South America, of the frantic efforts of the United States to prevent its spread into that nation’s boundaries. ) Millions of people were dead in Europe and Asia, Africa and South America. And soméhow those gruesome statistics seemed tied up with his own experience. Something, somewhere, some ‘part of his earlier life, seemed to hold an explanation. ) The pendulum clock struck slowly, its every other chime as usual setting up a sympathetic vibration in the pewter vase that stood upon the mantel. Mr. Chambers got to his feet, strode to the door, opened it and looked out. Moonlight tessellated the street in black and silver, etching the chim- neys and trees against a silvered sky. But the house directly across the street was not the same. It was strangely lop-sided, its dimensions out of propor- tion, like a house that suddenly had gone mad. : He stared at it in amazement, trying to determine what was wrong with it. He recalled how it had always stood, foursquare, a solid piece of mid- Victorian architecture. Then, before his eyes, the house righted itself again. Slowly it drew together, ironed out its queer angles, readjusted its dimensions, became once again the stodgy house he knew it had to be. With a sigh of relief, Mr. Chambers turned back into the hall. But before he closed the door, he looked again. The house was lop-sided—as bad as; perhaps worse than before! a | 120 conn CIOOKSaCO me