In another half minute the telephone was jangling again. I was purple
when I picked it up this time.
"Listen," I bellowed. "I don't care what noises you're hearing now--"
Stoddard cut in desperately, shouting at the top of his lungs to do so.
"I'm not only hearing the noises, Kermit," he yelled, "I'm _seeing_ the
people who cause them!"
* * * * *
This caught me off balance.
"Huh?" I gulped.
"The belfry," he yelled, "I went up in the belfry, and you can see the
people who's voices we heard!" There was a pause, while he found breath,
then he shouted, "You have to come over. You're the only one I can think
of to show this to!"
Stoddard was an eccentric, but only so far as his tastes in architecture
were concerned. I realized this, as I sat there gaping foolishly at the
still vibrating telephone in my hand.
"Okay," I said, for no earthly reason that I could think of, "okay, hang
on. I'll be there in twenty minutes."
Mrs. Stoddard met me at the door this time. She was worried, almost
frightened, and very bewildered.
"George is upstairs, Mr. Kermit. He won't let me come up there. He told
me to send you up the minute you arrived. He's up in the attic."
"What on earth," I began.
"I don't know," his wife said. "I was down in the basement drying some
clothes, when I heard this terrible yelling from George. Then he was
calling you on the telephone. I don't know what it's all about."
I raced up to the attic in nothing flat, almost knocking my teeth out on
the bottom step of the attic stairs.
Then I stumbled into the darkness of the attic, and saw Stoddard's
flashlight bobbing around in a corner.
"Kermit?"
It was Stoddard's voice.
"Yes," I answered. "What in the hell is up? It had better be goo--."
"Hurry," Stoddard said. "Over here, quickly!"
I stumbled across the board spacings until I was standing beside
Stoddard and peering up at what the beam of his flashlight revealed on
the ceiling--a ragged, open hole, which he'd made by tearing several
coatings of insulation from the spot.
For a minute, I couldn't make out anything in that flash beam glare.
Stoddard had hold of my arm, and was saying one word over and over,
urgently.
"Look. Look. Look!"
Then my eyes got adjusted to the light change, and I was aware that I
was gazing up into the interior of the crazy belfry atop the monstrous
house. Gazing up into the interior, while voices, quite loud and clearly
distinguishable, were talking in a language which I didn't recognize
immediately. As far as my vision was concerned, I might as well have
been looking at a sort of grayish vaporish screen of some sort, that was
all I saw.
"Shhhh!" Stoddard hissed now. "Don't say a word. Just listen to them!"
I held my breath, although it wasn't necessary. As I said, the voices
coming down from that belfry were audible enough to have been a scant
ten or twelve feet away. But I held my breath anyway, meanwhile
straining my eyes to pierce that gray screen of vapor on which the light
was focused.
And then I got it. The voices were talking in German, two of them, both
harsh, masculine.
"What in the hell," I began. "Is there a short wave set up there or--"
Stoddard cut me off. "Can't you see it yet?" he hissed.
* * * * *
The voices went on talking, while I strained my eyes even more in an
effort to pierce that gray fog covering the rent in the ceiling. And
then I saw. Saw at first, as if through a thin gray screen of gauze.
I was looking up into a room of some sort. A big room. An incredibly big
room. A room so big that two dozen belfry rooms would have fit into it!
And then it got even clearer. There was a desk at the end of the room. A
tremendously ornate desk. A desk behind which was sitting a small, gray
uniformed, moustached man.
There was another uniformed person of porcine girth standing beside that
desk and pointing to a map on the wall in front of him. He was jabbering
excitedly to the little man at the desk, and he wore a uniform that was
so plushily gaudy it was almost ridiculous.
The two kept chattering back and forth to each other in German,
obviously talking about the map at which the fat, plush-clad one was
pointing.