Miller opened his eyes with a start. As plain as black on white, he'd
heard a bell ring--the most familiar sound in the world, too. It was the
unmistakable tinkle of his cash register.
"Now, how in hell--" The thought began in his mind; and then he saw
where he was.
The cash register was right in front of him! It was open, and on the
marble slab lay a customer's five-spot. Miller's glance strayed up and
around him.
He was behind the drug counter, all right. There were a man and a girl
sipping cokes at the fountain, to his right; the magazine racks by the
open door; the tobacco counter across from the fountain. And right
before him was a customer.
Good Lord! he thought. Was all this a--a dream?
Sweat oozed out on his clammy forehead. That stuff of Herman's that he
had drunk during the game--it had had a rank taste, but he wouldn't have
thought anything short of marihuana could produce such hallucinations as
he had just had. Wild conjectures came boiling up from the bottom of
Miller's being.
How did he get behind the counter? Who was the woman he was waiting on?
What--
The woman's curious stare was what jarred him completely into the
present. Get rid of her! was his one thought. Then sit down behind the
scenes and try to figure it all out.
His hand poised over the cash drawer. Then he remembered he didn't know
how much he was to take out of the five. Avoiding the woman's glance, he
muttered:
"Let's see, now, that was--uh--how much did I say?"
The woman made no answer. Miller cleared his throat, said uncertainly:
"I beg your pardon, ma'am--did I say--seventy-five cents?"
It was just a feeler, but the woman didn't even answer to that. And it
was right then that Dave Miller noticed the deep silence that brooded in
the store.
Slowly his head came up and he looked straight into the woman's eyes.
She returned him a cool, half-smiling glance. But her eyes neither
blinked nor moved. Her features were frozen. Lips parted, teeth showing
a little, the tip of her tongue was between her even white teeth as
though she had started to say "this" and stopped with the syllable
unspoken.
Muscles began to rise behind Miller's ears. He could feel his hair
stiffen like filings drawn to a magnet. His glance struggled to the soda
fountain. What he saw there shook him to the core of his being.
The girl who was drinking a coke had the glass to her lips, but
apparently she wasn't sipping the liquid. Her boy friend's glass was on
the counter. He had drawn on a cigarette and exhaled the gray smoke.
That smoke hung in the air like a large, elongated balloon with the
small end disappearing between his lips. While Miller stared, the smoke
did not stir in the slightest.
There was something unholy, something supernatural, about this scene!
With apprehension rippling down his spine, Dave Miller reached across
the cash register and touched the woman on the cheek. The flesh was
warm, but as hard as flint. Tentatively, the young druggist pushed
harder; finally, shoved with all his might. For all the result, the
woman might have been a two-ton bronze statue. She neither budged nor
changed expression.
Panic seized Miller. His voice hit a high hysterical tenor as he called
to his soda-jerker.
"Pete! _Pete!_" he shouted. "What in God's name is wrong here!"
The blond youngster, with a towel wadded in a glass, did not stir.
Miller rushed from the back of the store, seized the boy by the
shoulders, tried to shake him. But Pete was rooted to the spot.
Miller knew, now, that what was wrong was something greater than a
hallucination or a hangover. He was in some kind of trap. His first
thought was to rush home and see if Helen was there. There was a great
sense of relief when he thought of her. Helen, with her grave blue eyes
and understanding manner, would listen to him and know what was the
matter.
* * * * *
He left the haunted drug store at a run, darted around the corner and up
the street to his car. But, though he had not locked the car, the door
resisted his twisting grasp. Shaking, pounding, swearing, Miller
wrestled with each of the doors.
Abruptly he stiffened, as a horrible thought leaped into his being. His
gaze left the car and wandered up the street. Past the intersection,
past the one beyond that, on up the thoroughfare until the gray haze of
the city dimmed everything. And as far as Dave Miller could see, there
was no trace of motion.
Cars were poised in the street, some passing other machines, some
turning corners. A street car stood at a safety zone; a man who had
leaped from the bottom step hung in space a foot above the pavement.
Pedestrians paused with one foot up. A bird hovered above a telephone
pole, its wings glued to the blue vault of the sky.
With a choked sound, Miller began to run. He did not slacken his pace
for fifteen minutes, until around him were the familiar, reassuring
trees and shrub-bordered houses of his own street. But yet how strange
to him!
The season was autumn, and the air filled with brown and golden leaves
that tossed on a frozen wind. Miller ran by two boys lying on a lawn,
petrified into a modern counterpart of the sculptor's "The Wrestlers."
The sweetish tang of burning leaves brought a thrill of terror to him;
for, looking down an alley from whence the smoke drifted, he saw a man
tending a fire whose leaping flames were red tongues that did not move.
Sobbing with relief, the young druggist darted up his own walk. He tried
the front door, found it locked, and jammed a thumb against the
doorbell. But of course the little metal button was as immovable as a
mountain. So in the end, after convincing himself that the key could not
be inserted into the lock, he sprang toward the back.
The screen door was not latched, but it might as well have been the
steel door of a bank vault. Miller began to pound on it, shouting:
"Helen! Helen, are you in there? My God, dear, there's something wrong!
You've got to--"
The silence that flowed in again when his voice choked off was the dead
stillness of the tomb. He could hear his voice rustling through the
empty rooms, and at last it came back to him like a taunt: "_Helen!
Helen!_"