There was a pause again, and what came then hardly seemed an answer
to his question. The princess was very weak, Miss Green indicated; he
might have to help.
He was still wondering about that--and wondering, too, whether he'd
really had something like a warning from her--when a sudden wavering
glare lit up the room behind them!
For a moment, he thought the fireball was inside the building. But the
light was pouring in through the living room window; its source was in
the opposite court, out of his line of sight. There was a crackling,
hissing sound, and the light faded.
Miss Green came darting at him. Mel put his hand up instinctively and
felt her thrust the basket into it. Almost instantly, she had picked up
the princess and was outside the screen--
Then the cat attacked from below in a silent, terrible leap, a long,
twisting shadow in the air, and they seemed to drop out of sight
together.
* * * * *
Mel was out in the court, staring wildly around. In the swimming
grayness nothing stirred or made sound. A cool, moist wind thrust at
his face and faded. Except for the toy basket of twigs in his hand, he
might have been awakening from a meaningless dream.
Then a lurid round of light like a big, wavering moon came out over the
top of the building, and a sharp humming sound drove down through the
air at him. Instinctively again, he held out the basket and felt it
plucked away. He thought it was Miss Green, but the shape had come and
gone much too swiftly to be sure of that.
The light grew brilliant, a solid white--intolerable--and he backed
hurriedly into the shelter of the garage, his heart hammering in
excitement and alarm. He heard voices from the other court; a window
slammed somewhere. He couldn't guess what was happening, but he didn't
need Miss Green's warning now. He had an overwhelming urge to keep out
of sight until the unearthly visitor would be gone--
And then, running like a rabbit, the gray cat appeared from behind
a box halfway down the court and came streaking for the garage. Mel
watched its approach with a sort of silent horror, partly because it
might be attracting undesirable attention to him--and partly because he
seemed to know in that instant exactly what was going to be done to it.
It wasn't more than twenty feet away when something like a twisting
string of fiery white reached down from above. The animal leaped
sideways, blazed and died. There was a sound very like a gunshot, and
the court was instantly dark.
Mel stayed where he was. For half a minute or so, he was shaking much
too violently to have left his retreat. By the end of that time, he
knew better. It wasn't over yet!
Pictures forming in the moist, dark air ... delicate, unstable outlines
sliding through the court, changing as they moved. Elfin castles swayed
up out of grayness and vanished again. Near the edge of his vision
other shapes showed, more beautiful than human...
Muttering to himself, between terror and delight, Mel closed his
eyes as tightly as he could, which helped for a moment. But then the
impressions began drifting through his mind. The visitors were still
nearby, hanging somewhere outside the limits of human sight in their
monstrous fireball, in the windy sky. They were talking to him in their
way.
Mel asked in his mind what they wanted, and the answer showed
immediately. The table in his living room with the pattern of glassy
sand and pebbles Miss Green had constructed. The pattern was glowing
again now under the cloth he had thrown over it. He was to go in and
look at the pattern ...
"No!" he said aloud. It was all terror now.
"_Go look at the pattern ... Go look at the pattern ..._"
The pictures burst round him in a soundless wild flowering of beauty,
flickering rains of color, a fountain of melting, shifting forms. His
mind drowned in happiness. He was sinking through a warmth of kindness,
gratitude and love...
* * * * *
A drift of rain touched his cheek coldly--and Mel found himself outside
the garage, moving drunkenly toward the apartment door. Then, just for
a moment, a picture of Miss Green printed itself on his mind.
She seemed to be standing before him, as tall now as he was,
motionless, the strange wings half spread. The golden unhuman eyes were
looking past him, watching something with cold malice and contempt--and
with a concentration of purpose that made a death's mask of the
perfectly chiseled green face!
In that second, Mel understood the purpose as clearly as if she had
told him. In the next, the image disappeared with a jerky, complete
abruptness--
As if somebody were belatedly trying to wipe it out of his memory as
well! But he knew he had seen her somehow--somewhere--as she actually
was at that moment. And he knew what she had been watching. Himself,
Mel Armstrong, staggering blindly about in his other-dimension, down in
the court!
He hadn't stayed in the court. He was back in the garage, backed
trembling against a wall. She--_they_--weren't trying to show him
gratitude, or reward him somehow; before they left, they simply wanted
to destroy the human being who had found out about them, and whom
they had used. The table and the pattern were some sort of trap! What
he couldn't understand was why they didn't simply come down in their
fireball and kill him as they had the cat.
They were still pouring their pictures at him, but he knew now how
to counteract that. He stared out through the garage window at the
lightening sky--looked at, listened to, what was there, filling his
mind with Earth shapes and sounds!
And he promptly discovered an ally he hadn't been counting on. He
hadn't really been aware of the thumping wind before, and the sketchy
pattering of raindrops, like a sweeping fall of leaves here and there.
He hadn't even heard, beyond the continuous dim roar of surf from the
beach, the gathering mutter of thunder!
They couldn't stay here long. The storm was ready to break. They
weren't willing to risk coming out fully into the Earth dimension to
hunt him down. And he didn't have to go to their trap ...
Rain spattered louder and closer. The sweat chilled on Mel's body as
his breathing grew quieter. They hadn't left him yet. If he relaxed
his eyes and his mind, there was an instant faint recurrence of the
swirling unearthly patterns. But he could keep them out by looking at
what was really here. He only had to wait--
Then the rain came down in a great, rushing tide, and he knew they were
gone.
* * * * *
For a few seconds, he remained where he was, weak with relief. Over
the noise of the storm, he heard human voices faintly from the other
court and from neighboring houses. That final crash must have awakened
everybody--and someone had seen the great globe of fire when it first
appeared.
There should be some interesting gossip in the morning!
Which concerned Mel not at all. After drinking in the sweet certainty
of being still alive and safe, he had become aware of an entirely
unexpected emotion, which was, curiously, a brief but sharp pang of
grief at Miss Green's betrayal. Why, he must have been practically in
love with that other-dimensional, human-shaped rattlesnake! Mulling it
over in moody amazement at himself, it struck Mel suddenly then that
one could interpret her final action somewhat differently, too.
Because she could have planted that apparently revealing picture of
herself deliberately in his mind, to stop him from stumbling into the
trap the others had set for him! She might have been planning to save
him from the beginning, or merely relented at the last moment. There
was no way of ever really knowing now, but Mel found he preferred to
believe that Miss Green's intention was good.
In the driving rain, he hesitated a moment beside the blackened lump
that had been the cat, but he couldn't force himself to pick it up and
remove it. If someone else found it, it might add to the gossip, but
that wasn't any business of his any more. Everyone knew that lightning
did funny, selective things. So far as he was concerned, the matter was
all over.
He opened the duplex door and stood staring.
His apartment door was open and the room beyond was dark, as he had
left it. But down the little stairway and out of Maria's upstairs
apartment, light poured in a quiet flood.
* * * * *
She must have returned during the night while he was sleeping, probably
drunk as a hoot-owl. The commotion downstairs hadn't been enough to
arouse her. But something else had--she'd come down following swirling,
beautiful, unearthly pictures, hunting the pattern that would guide her
straight into a promised delight!
Mel didn't have to reach into the apartment to switch on the light.
Lightning did funny, selective things, all right, and from where he
stood, he could smell what had happened. They hadn't wasted that final
bolt, after all!
Oddly enough, what was uppermost in his mind in those seconds, while he
continued to put off seeing what he was going to have to look at very
soon, was the final awareness of how he must have appeared in their
eyes:
A stupid native, barely capable of receiving training and instruction
enough to be a useful servant. Beyond that, they had simply had no
interest in him.
It was Maria they had worried about. The mental impressions he'd picked
up in the court had been directed at her. Miss Green had been obliged
to stop him finally from springing a trap which was set for another.
For Maria, who might have endangered their leaving.