12

On Friday, in spite of my sister cursing me out in her usual terms, I walked up the road to Inverness Park to Claudia Hambro’s house and attended the meeting of the group.

The house had been built in one of the canyons, halfway up the side, on one of the twisting roads too narrow for cars to pass. The outside of the house had a damp appearance, as if the wood, in spite of paint, had absorbed moisture from the ground and trees. Most of the houses built in the canyons never dried off. Ferns grew on all sides of the Hambro house, some of them so tall and so densely packed in against the sides of the house that they seemed to be consuming the house. Actually the house was big: three stories, with a railed porch running along one side of it. But the foliage caused it to blend back into the canyon wall and become indistinct. I saw several cans parked in front of it, on the shoulder of the road, and that was how I knew where to go.

Mrs. Hambno met me at the front door. She wore Chinese silk trousers and slippers, and her hair, this time, had been tied back in a black, shiny rope, like a pigtail; it hung all the way down to her waist. Her fingernails, I noticed, had been lacquered silver and were long and sharp. She had on quite a bit of make-up; her eyes seemed extra dank and enlarged, and her lips so red as to be almost brown.

Two glass doors, propped back with books, let me into the living room, which had walls and ceiling of black wood, with bookcases everywhere, and chairs and couches, with a fireplace at one end over which the Hambnos had hung a Chinese tapestry showing the branch of a tree and a mountain in the distance. Six on seven people sat about on the chains. As I walked around I noticed a tape recorder and a number of spools of tape, plus quite a few copies of Fate magazine, a magazine devoted to unusual scientific facts.

The people in the room seemed tense, and considering why we had come I could not blame them. Mrs. Hambro introduced me to them. One man, elderly, with rustic-looking clothes, worked at the hardware store in Point Reyes. A second man, she told me , was a carpenter from Inverness. The last man was almost as young as I, a blond-haired man weaning slacks and loafers, his hair cut short. According to Mrs. Hambro he owned a small dairy farm up the coast on the other side of the bay near Marshall. The other people were women. One, huge and well-dressed, in her middle fifties, was the wife of the man who owned the coffee shop in Inverness Park. Another was the wife of a technician from the RCA transmitter out on the Point. Another was the wife of a garage mechanic at Point Reyes Station.

After I had seated myself, a middle-aged couple entered. Mrs. Hambro told us that they had just moved to Inverness; the man was a landscape painter and his wife did dress alterations. They had come up to north west Marin County for reasons of health. That evidently completed the group; Mrs. Hambro closed the glass doors after the couple and seated herself in our midst.

The meeting began. The shades were pulled down and then Mrs. Hambro had the large well-dressed woman—whose name was Mrs. Bruce—lie down on the coach. Mrs. Hambro then hypnotized her and had her recall a number of past lives, for the purpose of establishing contact with an inner personality, that only rarely came out, which had the ability to receive information dealing with the evolved beings that control our lives. It was explained to me and the couple who had arrived after me that through this inner personality of Mrs. Bruce the group had been able to gather exact information on the plans that the beings had for the disposition of the Earth and its inhabitants.

After an interval of sighing and murmuring, Mrs. Bruce said that the evolved beings had definitely decided to put an end to the Earth, and that only those who had established contact with the genuine forces of the universe would be saved. They would be taken off Earth in a flying saucer a day or so before the conflagration. After that, Mrs. Bruce passed into a deep sleep, during which she snored. Finally Mrs. Hambro had her wake up by counting to ten and clapping her hands.

All of us were, naturally, quite keyed-up by this news. If I had had any doubts before, the actual sight—witnessed by myself—of this inner personality of Mrs. Bruce responding to direct transmissions from the superior evolved beings on other planets made up my mind. After all, I now had empirical verification, the best scientific evidence in the world.

The problem before the group was now to decipher the exact date at which the world would be brought to an end. Mrs. Hambro made up twelve slips of paper each with the name of a month of the year, plus thirty-one slips each with a date between one and thirtyone. These she put in two piles on the table. Then she put Mrs. Bruce back into a trance and inquired who should be sent as an instrument of initiate knowledge to select the slips.

Mrs. Bruce stated that the person who should go had just come into the group this day, and that he came alone. Obviously they meant me. When she had awakened Mrs. Bruce, Mrs. Hambro told me to shut my eyes and go to the table and take a slip from each pile.

With everyone watching, I walked to the table and selected two slips. The first said April. The second said twenty-third. So the world, according to the superior evolved beings that control the universe, would end on April twenty-third.

It made me feel strange to realize that I had been picked to select and announce the date on which the world would end. But all along, as I acknowledged, these superior forces had been controlling me; they had brought me from Seville to Drake’s Landing, no doubt for this purpose. So in a sense there was nothing odd about my going to the table and picking out the dates. Actually, we were quite calm at this point. Everyone in the room had his feelings under control. We had coffee and sat in semi-silence, meditating about it.

There was some discussion as to whether we should notify the San Rafael Journal and the Baywood Press. In the end we decided that there was no point in making a public statement, since those to be saved by the superior evolved beings—which we referred to as the SEBs—would be notified by direct mental telepathy.

In a sort of stunned haze, we adjourned the meeting and left Mrs. Hambro’s house, tiptoeing out like the members of a congregation leaving church. One of the group, the man who worked at the hardware stone, gave me a ride home and dropped me off in front of the house. I never did catch his name, and on the drive we were both too occupied with our thoughts to talk.

When I got into the house I found Fay dusting in the living room. I had expected her to ask about the meeting, but she paid no attention to me; by the hectic pace at which she dusted I realized that she was deep in some problem of her own and wasn’t interested in me or what I had to say.

“The hospital called,” she said finally. “They want me to come down; they have something they want to tell me about Charley.”

“Bad news?” I said, thinking that whatever news it was it could scarcely compare with what I had to tell her. And yet, even knowing as I did that we had only a month left, I found myself concerned with the news about Charley. “What did they say?” I demanded, following her into her bedroom.

“Oh,” she said vaguely. “I don’t know. They want to discuss whether he can be brought home.”

“You want me to go down with you?” I said.

Fay said, “I don’t feel like driving. I called the Anteils and they’re going to drive me down. In the state I’m in I couldn’t handle the car.” She disappeared into the bathroom, shutting and locking the door after her. I heard water running; she was taking a shower and changing her clothes.

“It sounds like the news isn’t too bad,” I said, when she reappeared. “If they’re talking about bringing him home—”