The Street That Wasnt There | Page 7

here.
This room would stay. It must stay on ... it must....
He rose from his chair and walked across the room to the book case,
stood staring at the second shelf with its single volume. His eyes
shifted to the top shelf and swift terror gripped him.
For all the books weren't there. A lot of books weren't there! Only the
most beloved, the most familiar ones.
So the change already had started here! The unfamiliar books were
gone and that fitted in the pattern ... for it would be the least familiar
things that would go first.
Wheeling, he stared across the room. Was it his imagination, or did the
lamp on the table blur and begin to fade away?
But as he stared at it, it became clear again, a solid, substantial thing.
For a moment real fear reached out and touched him with chilly fingers.
For he knew that this room no longer was proof against the thing that
had happened out there on the street.
Or had it really happened? Might not all this exist within his own mind?
Might not the street be as it always was, with laughing children and
barking dogs? Might not the Red Star confectionery still exist,
splashing the street with the red of its neon sign?
Could it be that he was going mad? He had heard whispers when he
had passed, whispers the gossiping housewives had not intended him to
hear. And he had heard the shouting of boys when he walked by. They
thought him mad. Could he be really mad?
But he knew he wasn't mad. He knew that he perhaps was the sanest of

all men who walked the earth. For he, and he alone, had foreseen this
very thing. And the others had scoffed at him for it.
Somewhere else the children might be playing on a street. But it would
be a different street. And the children undoubtedly would be different
too.
For the matter of which the street and everything upon it had been
formed would now be cast in a different mold, stolen by different
minds in a different dimension.
Perhaps we shall come upon a day, far distant, when our plane, our
world will dissolve beneath our feet and before our eyes as some
stronger intelligence reaches out from the dimensional shadows of the
very space we live in and wrests from us the matter which we know to
be our own.
But there had been no need to wait for that distant day. Scant years
after he had written those prophetic words the thing was happening.
Man had played unwittingly into the hands of those other minds in the
other dimension. Man had waged a war and war had bred a pestilence.
And the whole vast cycle of events was but a detail of a cyclopean plan.
He could see it all now. By an insidious mass hypnosis minions from
that other dimension ... or was it one supreme intelligence ... had
deliberately sown the seeds of dissension. The reduction of the world's
mental power had been carefully planned with diabolic premeditation.
On impulse he suddenly turned, crossed the room and opened the
connecting door to the bedroom. He stopped on the threshold and a sob
forced its way to his lips.
There was no bedroom. Where his stolid four poster and dresser had
been there was greyish nothingness.
Like an automaton he turned again and paced to the hall door. Here, too,
he found what he had expected. There was no hall, no familiar hat rack
and umbrella stand.

Nothing....
Weakly Mr. Chambers moved back to his chair in the corner.
"So here I am," he said, half aloud.
So there he was. Embattled in the last corner of the world that was left
to him.
Perhaps there were other men like him, he thought. Men who stood at
bay against the emptiness that marked the transition from one
dimension to another. Men who had lived close to the things they loved,
who had endowed those things with such substantial form by power of
mind alone that they now stood out alone against the power of some
greater mind.
The street was gone. The rest of his house was gone. This room still
retained its form.
This room, he knew, would stay the longest. And when the rest of the
room was gone, this corner with his favorite chair would remain. For
this was the spot where he had lived for twenty years. The bedroom
was for sleeping, the kitchen for eating. This room was for living. This
was his last stand.
These were the walls and floors and prints and lamps that had soaked
up his will to make them walls and prints and lamps.
He looked out the