It wasn't so much that he cared about fixing the fuse, but he was too
restless for sleep. He disconnected the bad switch with a screwdriver,
stumbled down into the black kitchen, found the flashlight and climbed
gingerly down the cellar stairs. He located a spare fuse, pushed an
empty trunk over to the fuse box to stand on and twisted out the old
fuse.
When the new one was in, he heard the starting click and steady drone
of the refrigerator in the kitchen overhead.
He headed back to the steps, and stopped.
Where the old trunk had been, the cellar floor gleamed oddly bright.
He inspected it in the flashlight beam. It was metal!
"Son of a gun," said Guy Burckhardt. He shook his head unbelievingly.
He peered closer, rubbed the edges of the metallic patch with his
thumb and acquired an annoying cut--the edges were _sharp_.
The stained cement floor of the cellar was a thin shell. He found a
hammer and cracked it off in a dozen spots--everywhere was metal.
The whole cellar was a copper box. Even the cement-brick walls were
false fronts over a metal sheath!
* * * * *
Baffled, he attacked one of the foundation beams. That, at least, was
real wood. The glass in the cellar windows was real glass.
He sucked his bleeding thumb and tried the base of the cellar stairs.
Real wood. He chipped at the bricks under the oil burner. Real bricks.
The retaining walls, the floor--they were faked.
It was as though someone had shored up the house with a frame of metal
and then laboriously concealed the evidence.
The biggest surprise was the upside-down boat hull that blocked the
rear half of the cellar, relic of a brief home workshop period that
Burckhardt had gone through a couple of years before. From above, it
looked perfectly normal. Inside, though, where there should have been
thwarts and seats and lockers, there was a mere tangle of braces,
rough and unfinished.
"But I _built_ that!" Burckhardt exclaimed, forgetting his thumb. He
leaned against the hull dizzily, trying to think this thing through.
For reasons beyond his comprehension, someone had taken his boat and
his cellar away, maybe his whole house, and replaced them with a
clever mock-up of the real thing.
"That's crazy," he said to the empty cellar. He stared around in the
light of the flash. He whispered, "What in the name of Heaven would
anybody do that for?"
Reason refused an answer; there wasn't any reasonable answer. For long
minutes, Burckhardt contemplated the uncertain picture of his own
sanity.
He peered under the boat again, hoping to reassure himself that it was
a mistake, just his imagination. But the sloppy, unfinished bracing
was unchanged. He crawled under for a better look, feeling the rough
wood incredulously. Utterly impossible!
He switched off the flashlight and started to wriggle out. But he
didn't make it. In the moment between the command to his legs to move
and the crawling out, he felt a sudden draining weariness flooding
through him.
Consciousness went--not easily, but as though it were being taken
away, and Guy Burckhardt was asleep.