《The_House_on_Maple_Street》(7)

Like the cables in the attic crawlspace, whatever was forming here - growing, to use Laurie's word - hadn't finished yet. It spun itself into being in sheens of light that hurt Trent's eyes and made him feel a little sick to his stomach.

No cables here, however, and no curved struts. What was growing in his real father's forgotten wine-cellar looked like cabinets and consoles and instrument panels. And, as he looked, vague shapes humped themselves up in the metal like the heads of excited snakes, gained focus, became dials and levers and read-outs. There were a few blinking lights. Some of these actually began to blink as he looked at them.

A low sighing sound accompanied this act of creation.

Trent took one cautious step farther into the little room; an especially bright red light, or series of them, had caught his eye. He sneezed as he stepped forward - the machines and consoles pushing across the old concrete had stirred up a great deal of dust. The lights which had snagged his attention were numbers. They were under a glass strip on a metal construct which was spinning its way out of a console. This new thing looked like some sort of chair, although no one sitting in it would have been very comfortable. At least, no one with a human shape, Trent thought with a little shiver.

The glass strip was in one of the arms of this twisted chair - if it was a chair. And the numbers had perhaps caught his eye because they were moving.

72:34:18

became

72:34:17

and then

72:34:16


Chapter Six

Trent looked at his watch, which had a sweep second hand, and used it to confirm what his eyes had already told him. The chair might or might not really be a chair, but the numbers under the glass strip were a digital clock. It was running backward. Counting down, to be perfectly accurate. And what would happen when that read-out finally went from

00:00:01

to

00:00:00

some three days from this very afternoon?

He was pretty sure he knew. Every American boy knows one of two things happen when a backward-running clock finally reads zeros across the board: an explosion or a lift-off. Trent thought there was too much equipment, too many gadgets, for it to be an explosion. He thought something had gotten into the house while they were in England. Some sort of spore, perhaps, that had drifted through space for a billion years before being caught in the gravitational pull of the earth, spiraling down through the atmosphere like a bit of milkweed fluff caught in a mild breeze, and finally falling into the chimney of a house in Titusville, Indiana. Into the Bradburys' house in Titusville, Indiana.

It might have been something else entirely, of course, but the spore idea felt right to Trent, and although he was the oldest of the Bradbury kids, he was still young enough to sleep well after eating a pepperoni pizza at 9:00 P.M., and to believe completely in his own perceptions and intuitions. And in the end, it didn't really matter, did it? What mattered was what had happened. And, of course, what was going to happen. When Trent left the wine-cellar this time, he not only snapped the padlock's arm closed, he took the key as well.

Something terrible happened at Lew's faculty party. It happened at quarter of nine, only forty-five minutes or so after the first guests arrived, and Trent and Laurie later heard Lew shouting at their mother that the only goddam consideration she had shown him was getting up to her foolishness early - if she'd waited until ten o'clock or so, there would have been fifty or more people circulating through the living room, dining room, kitchen, and back parlor. 'What the hell's the matter with you?' Trent and Laurie heard him yelling at her, and when Trent felt Laurie's hand creep into his like a small cold mouse, he held it tightly. 'Don't you know what people are going to say about this? Don't you know how people in the department talk? I mean, really, Catherine - it was like something out of the Three Stooges!' Their mother's only reply was soft, helpless sobbing, and for just one moment Trent felt a horrible, unwilling burst of hate for her. Why had she married him in the first place? Didn't she deserve this for being such a fool?

Ashamed of himself, he pushed the thought away, made it gone, and turned to Laurie. He was appalled to see tears pouring down her cheeks, and the mute sorrow in her eyes went to his heart like a knife-blade.

'Great party, huh?' she whispered, scrubbing at her cheeks with the heels of her palms. 'Right, Sprat,' he said, and hugged her so she could cry against his shoulder without being heard. 'It'll make my top-ten list at the end of the year, no sweat.'

It seemed that Catherine Evans (who had never wished more bitterly to be Catherine Bradbury again) had been lying to everyone. She had been in the grip of a screaming-blue migraine for not just a day or two days this time but for the last two weeks. During that time she had eaten next to nothing and lost fifteen pounds. She had been serving canapes to Stephen Krutchmer, the head of the History Department, and his wife when the colors went out of everything and the world suddenly swam away from her. She had rolled bonelessly forward, spilling a whole tray of Chinese pork rolls onto the front of Mrs. Krutchmer's expensive Norma Kamali dress, which had been purchased for just this occasion.

Brian and Lissa had heard the commotion and had come creeping down the stairs in their pajamas to see what was going on, although both of them - all four children, for that matter - had been strictly forbidden by Daddy Lew to leave the upper floors of the house once the party began. 'University people don't like to see children at faculty parties,' Lew had explained brusquely that afternoon. 'It sends all sorts of mixed signals.' When they saw their mother on the floor in a circle of kneeling, concerned faculty members (Mrs. Krutchmer was not there; she had run for the kitchen, wanting to get some cold water on the front of her dress before the sauce-stains could set) they had forgotten their stepfather's firm order and had run in, Lissa crying, Brian bellowing in excited dismay. Lissa managed to kick the head of Asian Studies in the left kidney. Brian, who was two years older and thirty pounds heavier, did even better: he knocked the fall semester's guest lecturer, a plump babe in a pink dress and curly-toed evening slippers, smack into the fireplace. She sat there, dazed, in a large puff of gray-black ashes.