I don't know how long we stood looking up at the sky. Presently the tiny dots became specks and a moment later, blinking my eyes against the strain, I stared again, and they were gone.

For a time I simply held Becky close, squeezing her to me so hard I realized I could hurt her. Then I was aware of the murmur again – quieter now, and more subdued – of the voices around us. We looked up, and they were moving, past us and beyond us, on up the hill back to the doomed town they had come from. They straggled by, their faces bland and emotionless, a few of them glancing at us as they passed, most of them not even interested now. Then Becky and I walked down the hill, passing through them, each of us dirty, our clothes smeared and wrinkled, and we limped, shuffling through the grass and weeds, one shoe off, one shoe on, in awkward and stumbling victory. Silently we passed the last of the figures around us, and then we were walking across the empty barren fields, toward the highway and the rest of our kind.

We stayed, that night, with the Belicecs. We found them in their home, where they'd been held, fighting sleep to the end – released now and free. Theodora was asleep in a chair; Jack sat staring out of his great front window, waiting for us. There wasn't actually much to be said, though we said it, grinning with weary elation. Then, within twenty minutes, we were each of us lying in exhausted sleep.

It didn't even reach the papers, this particular story. Drive across Golden Gate bridge into Marin County today, make your way to Santa Mira, California, and you'll simply see a town, shabbier and more run-down than most others, but – not startlingly so. The people, some of them, may seem to you listless and uncommunicative, and the town may impress you as unfriendly. You'll see more homes empty and for sale than can quite be accounted for; the death rate here is rather higher than the county average, and sometimes it's hard to know just what to write down on a death certificate. On and around certain farms west of town, clumps of trees, patches of vegetation, and occasional farm animals sometimes die from no apparent cause.

But all in all, there's nothing much to see in, or say about, Santa Mira. The empty houses are filling quickly – it's a crowded county and state – and there are new people, most of them young and with children, in town. There's a young couple from Nevada living next door to Becky and me, and another – we don't know their name yet – just across the street in the old Greeson place. In a year, maybe two, or three, Santa Mira will seem no different to the eye firm any other small town. In five years, perhaps less, it will be no different. And what once happened here will have faded into final unbelievability.

Even now – so soon – there are times, and they come more frequently, when I'm no longer certain in my mind of just what we did see, or of what really happened here. I think it's perfectly possible that we didn't actually see, or correctly interpret, everything that happened, or that we thought had happened. I don't know, I can't say; the human mind exaggerates and deceives itself. And I don't much care; we're together, Becky and I, for better or worse.

But… showers of small frogs, tiny fish, and mysterious rains of pebbles sometimes fall from out of the skies. Here and there, with no possible explanation, men are burned to death inside their clothes. And once in a while, the orderly, immutable sequences of time itself are inexplicably shifted and altered. You read these occasional queer little stories, humorously written, tongue-in-cheek, most of the time; or you hear vague distorted rumours of them. And this much I know. Some of them – some of them – are quite true.

Jack Finney