“Oh, I . . . I didn’t mean . . . !” Jean floundered. “It’s only that . . .”
“Yes!” Tom came to her rescue. “This aunt of my wife’s—she’s expecting us. And if we don’t come rolling in sometime tonight, she’s liable to think . . . uh . . .”
“. . . that you’ve joined my . . . my ‘overnight guests?’” the old lady finished, with a sly wink. “You may have noticed my sign as you drove in,” she added, with girlish giggle of mirth. “Did you look at it closely? You know, I sometimes wonder if it isn’t the reason they use Faraday House as a . . . a sort of way station, I call it. I wonder if there are other way stations, like this one? Places where they . . . ? If I were sure it wasn’t what brings them here, I’d take it down—that sign.” She smiled. “We really don’t take overnight guests anymore. At least, not the kind who expect A-l accommodations! I’m too old . . . and it makes too much work for Saul, cleaning and carrying luggage and the like. Besides,” Miss Addie said complacently, “I manage to get along without money, in this little halfway house of mine!
Halfway between life and death, one might say. . . . Oh! You leaving now? I’ll see you to the door. . .”
Steering down the winding gravel drive a few moments later, Tom and Jean looked back through the rain at the big white-columned house. They had left, they realized, in rather an abrupt hurry—without even a glance into that peaceful, firelit parlor, where had been assembled such an unusual assortment of people. Bidding Miss Addie good-bye hastily, they had dashed out to the little car standing in the rain—almost tripping over a friendly-looking Irish setter, which trotted back into the house at a whistle from the butler. The great front door had not even closed before Tom started the motor and took off in second- gear.
But now, at the end of the driveway, Tom braked the car, strangely loathe to lose sight of that hospitable old mansion, with its quaint bird-like hostess and childlike black genie of a servant. They turned, looking back for a long thoughtful moment. Then Tom laughed shortly, patting his young bride on the knee.
“Of course you know,” he chuckled, “those . . . guests weren’t there at all. We’ve been victims of mass-hypnosis. What with that old lady’s insane playacting, and our own exhaustion . . . why, we were a push-over!” Jean laughed shakily, snuggling against him. “Hypnosis?” she echoed obediently. “She believed so firmly, she made us believe? Naturally—” Her tone became brisk and matter-of-fact, if still a bit quavery—“there is no such thing as a . . . a . . .” She broke off abruptly, pointing up at Miss Addie’s gatepost, now more visible since the rain had slacked to a drizzle. “Tom!” she whispered. “That sign of hers. . . . Look at it! That’s what she was talking about: that maybe it was what drew them here! . . . See what the wind and rain have done to those letters, the u and the e in Guests . . . ?”
Her husband craned to see . . . and gave a yelp of mirth. Jean giggled. They were still laughing—gaily, intimately, somehow no longer afraid of being parted by a grim shadow called Death—as they drove on down the highway through the rain-swept night.
For, what the sign on the gatepost, on closer inspection, had seemed rakishly to advertise was:
FARADAY HOUSE
Miss Adelaide Faraday, Prop.
Overnight Ghosts
Never Stop to Pat a Kitten
By Miriam Allen deFord
Everything seemed normal—except that one man, and the kitten, had vanished.
Hanrahan did. Then he disappeared. When Seaforth went back to find out what was keeping him, there was no Hanrahan. The street was light enough to show the fluffy black kitten, its eyes bright, its back still arched to rub against Hanrahan’s leg. Its purr was still on the air.
But no Hanrahan.
Seaforth went to the corner, looked both ways. Nobody at all was in sight except a couple arm in arm, and an old gentleman with a cane. “He walked around the horses,” Seaforth murmured; he was a science fiction writer. But Hanrahan hadn’t. He had just stopped to pat a kitten.
To Hanrahan, it was the kitten and Seaforth who had disappeared. He looked everywhere for them, but they just weren’t there anymore. The street was otherwise exactly the same, except that it was deserted.
Hanrahan was one to accept strangeness. He walked on, thinking of possible improbabilities, learned from Seaforth. Of teleportation—but he was not somewhere else, he was here in his own city. Of another space-time continuum—but at a corner was a stand full of tomorrow morning’s papers, and he remembered the headlines he had read an hour before. Of death—but in his abstraction he walked into a traffic signal, and it was hard and hurt his knee. Of insanity, which was the most disturbing—but everything seemed perfectly clear and normal to his mind, except that Seaforth and the kitten had vanished.
He had mentally painted himself into a corner; he decided to give up and go home. He and Seaforth had only been taking a late walk, because it was hot in the apartment and they wanted some fresh air and exercise after a lazy Sunday. Probably when he got home he would find Seaforth and there would be some simple explanation. Even the kitten might be there—it had seemed to have no owner and to be interested in being adopted.
Only, why were the streets so curiously empty, even for late on a Sunday night? He saw not one living creature in the mile or so back to the apartment, and not a single car passed him or could be heard on nearby streets.
He let himself into the apartment house, and his key worked. The downstairs hall was lighted but vacant. That was natural, at such an hour; there was no desk or lobby. The automatic elevator worked too, and so did the key to his apartment.
Seaforth wasn’t there. Neither, needless to say, was the kitten. Hanrahan went out to the kitchen, switched on the light, and got himself a can of beer out of the refrigerator. He took it back to the living room, and sat down to think things over. He could make no sense out of what had happened.
He picked up the book he had been reading when Seaforth suggested a walk, and opened it a few pages past the place he had marked. Bronowski, “The Common Sense of Science.”
“There is not a fact and an observer,” he read, “but a joining of the two in an observation.” And then: “Event and observer are not separable.”
But he, as observer, was now apparently separable from all events.
*
He sat brooding until almost dawn, but he did not see or hear anything of Seaforth. At last, worn out, he undressed and went to bed. A moment later he was deep in sleep.
Hanrahan woke to a silent world. The only sound he could hear was the one he himself made by sitting up in bed. Instantly he remembered the night before. He put on slippers and a dressing-gown, and knocked on Seaforth’s door. There was no answer. He turned the knob. The room was empty.
In the mirror over the chest of drawers he saw his worried face. “Steady, you fool,” he scolded himself. He glanced at the clock; it was ten minutes past ten. He grinned in relief. Monday mornings at ten Seaforth had a class in creative writing at State.
He wandered into the kitchen. Seaforth had been there, sure enough; the dishes from his breakfast were in the sink, and the pot was half full of cold coffee. Mrs. Beck would be in at eleven, to clean up; he’d better get himself shaved and dressed and have his own breakfast before she arrived. At 50, and with her face, she was still jittery about working in a bachelor apartment; it would never do to let her find him in his pajamas.
“Lord, what a nightmare that was!” he thought as he heated coffee and made toast. He tried to remember how much he had had to drink the night before.