"Don't blame them," he said, "for leaving. They were embarrassed and uneasy. They took their chance to get away."

"And you?" I asked. "You're not embarrassed?"

"Why, not at all," he told me. "Although I am a bit uneasy. The whole thing, I don't mind telling you, has a whiff of heresy about it."

"Next," I said, bitterly, "you'll be telling me you think I told the truth."

"I had my doubts," he said, "and I'm not entirely rid of them. But that hole in your roof is a powerful argument against wholesale scepticism. And I do not hold with the modern cynicism that seems so fashionable. There is still, I think, much room in the world today for a dash of mysticism." I could have told him it wasn't mysticism, that the other world had been a solid, factual world, that the stars and sun and moon had shown there, that I had walked its soil and drunk its water, that I had breathed its air and that even now I had its dirt beneath my fingernails from having dug a human skull from the slope above the stream.

"The others will be back," said Father Flanagan. "They had to get away for a little time to think, to get a chance to digest some of this evidence. It was too much to handle in one gulp. They will be back, and so will I, but at the moment I have a mass to think of." A gang of boys came running down the street. They stopped a half a block away and pointed at the roof. They milled around and pushed one another playfully and hollered.

The first edge of the sun had come above the horizon and the trees were the burnished green of summer.

I gestured at the boys. "The word has gotten out," I said.

"In another thirty minutes we'll have everyone in town out in the street, gawking at the roof."

17

The crowd outside had grown.

No one was doing anything. They just stood there and looked gaping at the hole in the roof, and talking quietly among themselves — not screaming, not shouting, but talking, as if they knew something else was about to happen and were passing away the time, waiting for it to happen. Sherwood kept pacing up and down the floor.

"Gibbs should be phoning soon," he said. "I don't know what has happened to him. He should have called by now."

"Maybe," Nancy said, "he got held up — maybe his plane was late. Maybe there was trouble on the road." I stood at the window watching the crowd. I knew almost all of them.

They were friends and neighbours and there was not a thing to stop them, if they wanted to, from coming up the walk and knocking at the door and coming in to see me.

But now, instead, they stood outside and watched and waited. It was, I thought, as if the house were a cage and I was some new, strange animal from some far-off land.

Twenty-four hours ago I had been another villager, a man who had lived and grown up with those people watching in the street. But now I was a freak, an oddity — perhaps, in the minds of some of them, a sinister figure that threatened, if not their lives, their comfort and their peace of mind.

For this village could never be the same again — and perhaps the world could never be the same again. For even if the barrier now should disappear and the Flowers withdraw their attention from our Earth, we still would have been shaken from the comfortable little rut which assumed that life as we knew it was the only kind of life and that our road of knowledge was the only one that was broad and straight and paved.

There had been ogres in the past, but finally the ogres had been banished. The trolls and ghouls and imps and all the others of the tribe had been pushed out of our lives, for they could survive only on the misty shores of ignorance and in the land of superstition. Now, I thought, we'd know an ignorance again (but a different kind of ignorance) and superstition; too, for superstition fed upon the lack of knowledge. With this hint of another world — even if its denizens should decide not to flaunt themselves, even if we should find a way to stop them — the trolls and ghouls and goblins would be back with us again. There'd be chimney corner gossip of this other place and a frantic, desperate search to rationalize the implied horror of its vast and unknown reaches, and out of this very search would rise a horror greater than any true other world could hold. We'd be afraid, as we had been before, of the darkness that lay beyond the little circle of our campfire.

There were more people in the Street; they kept coming all the time.

There was Pappy Andrews, cracking his cane upon the sidewalk, and Grandma Jones, with her sunbonnet socked upon her head, and Charley Hutton, who owned the Happy Hollow tavern. Bill Donovan, the garbage man, was in the front ranks of the crowd, but I didn't see his wife, and I wondered if Myrt and Jake had come to get the kids. And just as big and mouthy as if he'd lived in Millville all his life and known these folks from babyhood, was Gabe Thomas, the trucker who, after me, had been the first man to find out about the barrier.

Someone stirred beside me and I saw that it was Nancy. I knew now that she had been standing there for some little time.

"Look at them," I said. "It's a holiday for them. Any minute now the parade will be along."

"They're just ordinary people," Nancy said. "You can't expect too much of them. Brad, I'm afraid you do expect too much of them. You even expected that the men who were here would take what you told them at face value, immediately and unquestioningly."

"Your father did," I said.

"Father's different. He's not an ordinary man. And, besides, he had some prior knowledge, he had a little warning. He had one of those telephones. He knew a little bit about it."

"Some," I said. "Not much."

"I haven't talked with him. There's been no chance for us to talk. And I couldn't ask him in front of all those people. But I know that he's involved. Is it dangerous, Brad?"

"I don't think so. Not from out there or back there or wherever that other world may be. No danger from the alien world — not now, not yet. Any danger that we have to face lies in this world of ours. We have a decision we must make and it has to be the right one."

"How can we tell," she "asked, "what is the right decision? We have no precedent." And that was it, of course, I thought. There was no way in which a decision — any decision — could be justified.

There was a shouting from outside and I moved closer to the window to see farther up the street. Striding down the centre of it came Hiram Martin and in one hand he carried a cordless telephone.

Nancy caught sight of him and said, "He's bringing back our phone. Funny, I never thought he would." It was Hiram shouting and he was shouting in a chant, a deliberate, mocking chant.

"All right, come out and get your phone. Come on out and get your God damn phone." Nancy caught her breath and I brushed past her to the door. I jerked it open and stepped out on the porch.

Hiram reached the gate and he quit his chanting. The two of us stood there, watching one another. The crowd was getting noisy and surging closer.

Then Hiram raised his arm, with the phone held above his head.

"All right," he yelled, "here's your phone, you dirty…" Whatever else he said was drowned out by the howling of the crowd.

Then Hiram threw the phone. It was an unhandy thing to throw and the throw was not too good. The receiver flew out to one side, with its trailing cord looping in the air behind it. When the cord jerked taut, the flying phone skidded out of its trajectory and came crashing to the concrete walk, falling about halfway between the gate and porch. Pieces of shattered plastic sprayed across the lawn.

Scarcely aware that I was doing it, acting not by any thought or consideration, but on pure emotion, I came down off the porch and headed for the gate. Hiram backed away to give me room and I came charging through the gate and stood facing him.