10

Now, finally, I had to do a thing I had intended to do ever since this morning - a thing I probably should have done last night - get in touch with Alf. It was more important now than ever that I get in touch with him, for in the back of my mind was a growing conviction that there must be some connection between what was happening here in Millville and that strange research project down in Mississippi.

I reached a dead-end street and started walking down it. There was not a soul in sight. Everyone who could either walk or ride would be down in the business section.

I got to worrying that maybe I’d not be able to locate Alf, that he might have checked out of the motel when I failed to get there, or that he might be out gawping at the barrier with a lot of other people.

But there was no need to worry, for when I reached my house the phone was ringing and Alf was on the line.

‘I’ve been trying for an hour to get you,’ he said. ‘I wondered how you were.’

‘You know what happened, Alf?’

He told me that he did. ‘Some of it,’ he said.

‘Minutes earlier,’ I said, ‘and I would have been with you instead of penned up in the village. I must have hit the barrier when it first appeared.’

I went ahead and told him what had happened after I had hit the barrier. Then I told him about the phones.

‘They told me they had a lot of readers. People who read books to them…’

‘A way of getting information.’

‘I gathered that was it.’

‘Brad,’ he said, ‘I’ve got a terrible hunch.’

‘So have I,’ I said.

‘Do you think this Greenbriar project…?’

‘That’s what I was thinking, too.’

I heard him drawing a deep breath, the air whistling in his teeth.’

‘It’s not just Millville, then.’

‘Maybe a whole lot more than Millville.’

‘What are you going to do now, Brad?’

‘Go down into my garden and have a hard look at some flowers.’

‘Flowers?’

‘Alf,’ I told him, ‘it’s a long, long story. I’ll tell you later. Are you staying on?’

‘Of course I am,’ said All ‘The greatest show on earth and me with a ringside seat.’

‘I’ll call you back in an hour or so.’

‘I’ll stay close,’ he promised. ‘I’ll be waiting for your call.’

I put down the phone and stood there, trying to make some head or tail of it. The flowers, somehow, were important, and so was Tupper Tyler, but they were all mixed up together and there was no place one could start.

I went out of the house and down into the garden by the greenhouse. The trail that Tupper had left was still plain and I was considerably relieved, for I had been afraid that the wind that brought the seeds might have blown it away, that the flowers might have been so beaten and so twisted that the trail could well be lost.

I stood at the edge of the garden and looked around, as if I were seeing the place for the first time in my life. It wasn’t really a garden. At one time it had been land on which we’d grown the stuff we sold, but when I quit the greenhouse business I’d simply let it go wild and the flowers had taken over. To one side stood the greenhouse, with its door hanging on the broken hinges and most of the panes gone from the windows. And at one corner of it stood the elm tree that had grown from seed - the one I’d been about to pull up when my father stopped me.

Tupper had talked wildly about flowers growing by the acre. All of them, he said, had been purple flowers and he had been most emphatic that my father should be told of them. The mystery voice, or one of the mystery voices on the phone had been well informed about my father’s greenhouse and had asked if I still ran it. And there had been, less than an hour ago, a perfect storm of seeds.

All the little purple flower-heads with their monkey faces seemed to be nodding at me as if at a secret joke and I jerked my gaze away from them to stare up at the sky. Broken clouds still streamed across it, shutting out the sun. Although, once the clouds were gone, the day would be a scorcher. One could smell the heat in the very air.

I moved out into the garden, following Tupper’s trail. At the end of the trail I stopped and told myself that it had been a witless thing - this belief of mine that I would find something in this flower patch that would make some sense.

Tupper Tyler had disappeared ten years ago and he’d disappeared today and how he’d managed it no man might ever know.

And yet the idea still went on banging in my skull that Tupper was the key to all this screwy business.

Yet I couldn’t, for the life of me, explain the logic of my thinking. For Tupper wasn’t the only one involved - if he was, in fact, involved. There was Stiffy Grant as well. And I realized, with a start, that I had not asked anyone how Stiffy might be doing.

Doc Fabian’s house was on the hill just above the greenhouse and I could go up there and ask. Doc might not be home, of course, but I could wait around a while and eventually he’d show up. At the moment there was nothing else to do. And with Hiram and Tom Preston shooting off their mouths, it might be a good idea not to be found at home.

I had been standing at the end of Tupper’s trail and now I took a step beyond it, setting out for Doc’s. But I never got to Doc’s. I took that single step and the sun came out and the houses went away. Doc’s house and all the other houses, and the trees as well, and the bushes and the grass. Everything disappeared and there was nothing left but the purple flowers, which covered everything, and a sun that was blazing out of a cloudless sky.