Fantastic Stories Presents the Weird Tales Super Pack #1. Pearl Norton SwetЧитать онлайн книгу.
check for her and left it on the sink-board, and got his hat. He had an appointment for lunch with Rathbone, and just time enough to get to the magazine office to pick him up.
Hanrahan let himself out and down in the elevator. At the corner where the bus stopped realization struck him like a blow on the solar plexus.
There were no autos, no buses, no pedestrians. The street was absolutely empty.
He stood staring, fighting panic. With an effort he choked his terror down.
There was a drugstore on the corner. He opened the door and went in. The place was deserted—no clerks, no customers, the goods piled unguarded on the counters. Shaking, Hanrahan made it to a phone booth. He put in his dime, heard the dial tone, dialed Rathbone’s number, heard two rings. Then the ringing stopped.
There was no sound of a receiver’s being lifted, no voice, just silence. He waited a long time, then he hung up slowly. His money was not returned.
Stealthily, as if he were committing a crime, Hanrahan left the booth and moved to the next one. He looked up the number of the public library and dialed it. The same thing happened— three rings this time, then utter silence, no answer to his queries.
He would give it one more chance. All the phones couldn’t be out of order. This time he would call the police.
There had been three phone booths in a row when he went in to call Rathbone.
Now there was only the middle one from which he had just emerged. The two on either side of it had vanished.
*
Weak with fear, Hanrahan rushed from the store out into the unpopulated street, and stumbled back to his apartment.
The living room had been tidied and his bed had been made. Almost afraid to look, he went to the kitchen to see if Mrs. Beck was there. She wasn’t. Had she come and already gone again? He glanced at the sink-board to see if she had taken the check.
The check was gone. But so was the sink. There wasn’t any sink there anymore.
As he stared, the sink suddenly reappeared, with no check lying on the board. And the stove vanished instead. Then the stove popped into sight, and it was the refrigerator which disappeared. Hanrahan waited to see no more; he staggered into his bedroom and locked the door behind him. All the furniture was in its usual place, and stayed there.
For hours he sat by the window, unable to collect his thoughts. The window looked out on the back of another apartment house on the next street. Nobody showed his presence there, even through binoculars.
There was not a sound in his own apartment, or in the one next door through the thin connecting wall.
At three o’clock a thought struck him. He forced himself to unlock the door and go into the empty living room. He found a radio station with a news broadcast and tuned it in.
It was on, all right. The announcer was giving a baseball score.
So there was no unguessable calamity abroad. If anything was wrong, it must be with Hanrahan himself. He went back to his bedroom. He had had no lunch, but he could not make himself enter the kitchen again.
Seaforth was nearly always in by six, if only to get ready for a date. At six Hanrahan left his bedroom once more.
There was still no one in the living room. He decided to try the radio again; perhaps some incomprehensible disaster had been kept off the air so as not to alarm the listeners, but by this time it might be over and ready to be explained.
Halfway across the room he stopped. He fought down nausea.
The radio and the chair beside it had both gone.
Back in his bedroom Hanrahan had the thing out with himself.
There was his maternal grandmother who had heard the banshee and could see ghosts. There was his father’s cousin who had died after years in a mental hospital. There were the two months he himself had spent in a hospital, after Okinawa; “combat fatigue,” they called it now, and he had been discharged with a 30 per cent disability.
“So that’s that,” said Hanrahan grimly, and reached into the bureau drawer for his revolver.
The last thing he ever sensed was the shocking roar.
Seaforth searched for a while up and down the street, that Sunday night, and then decided Hanrahan had simply left and gone home. Hanrahan was getting too damned temperamental, he reflected; what innocent tiling had he said to set him off this time? Seaforth shrugged and walked leisurely homeward himself. The kitten scampered away.
Hanrahan wasn’t in the apartment. Walking off his peeve, presumably. Let him. Seaforth went straight to bed.
He overslept and barely had time in the morning to make himself some breakfast and get to his class. Hanrahan’s bedroom door was closed, and he was probably still asleep. Seaforth was in too much of a hurry to find out.
He got back about 12:30, and Mrs. Beck was there. She called to him from the kitchen, where she was washing dishes.
“Mr. Hanrahan left me my check, Mr. Seaforth,” she said.
“O.K.,” Seaforth answered. It was Hanrahan’s week to pay her. Doubtless he’d gone out by now.
The phone rang. It was Rathbone. “Seaforth?” he asked. “You know what’s happened to Hanrahan? He’s half an hour late for a luncheon date.”
“I haven’t seen him today,” Seaforth said. He felt a little uneasy. But he had an appointment himself, and he had to leave.
He returned shortly before six, mixed himself a highball, and sat down by the radio for the six o’clock news. Then he dressed and went out again. There was still no sign of Hanrahan.
He got home late and didn’t bother to see if Hanrahan was there. They were both busy and often went a day without meeting. But in the morning he decided he’d better checkup.
Hanrahan’s bedroom door was locked. There was no answer to knocking or calls. After ten minutes Seaforth began to feel scared. He got out a hammer and broke the lock.
There was no one in the room.
*
Very late that same Sunday night when Hanrahan had looked in vain for Seaforth and Seaforth for Hanrahan, the kitten’s mother slipped out through a basement window and found her young one wandering down the block. She was a sleek, handsome cat, black as Hades. When she caught up with her offspring she cuffed him expertly.
“You little devil!” she meowed. “Where have you been? I told you not to run away again.”
The fluffy kitten whimpered.
“I haven’t done anything,” he whined.
The old cat growled deep in her throat.
“You been fooling around with any humans?” she asked menacingly.
“No, honest I haven’t!” said the kitten. “I’ve just been walking up and down outside here.”
“You didn’t let a human touch you? Are you sure?”
“Just one, mamma, and all he did was pat me. I remembered what you told me.”
“All he did!” The black cat swelled with rage. “The minute I turn my back! You’re the stupidest kitten I ever had—you make me wonder who your father could have been. Haven’t you any sense at all?”
“He was a nice man, mamma. And I didn’t ask him to. He saw me and came right up to me himself.”
“Oh, Lord! Go on, get into the house with you. What our old lady will do to you I can’t imagine!”
“But why, mamma?” The kitten scuttled away from his mother’s claws. “I see all the other cats in the neighborhood being petted by humans—why can’t I be? It feels good when you rub against them and they stroke your fur.”