Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 9, No. 3, March 1964

The Glass Wall by Mitchell F. Jayne

Long have scholars wondered over where has gone the past. For some, who think in cycles, all the past is future; while for others the past is but the present become invisible.

The chill, electric silence of a November night hung over the woods and crept up to the edge of the campfire. Two men, facing each other across the flames, sat sipping hot coffee while they observed the night.

“Do you have the feeling,” asked Clayton Warner suddenly, “that you’ve been here before?” He had a young, serious face, and mild, scholarly eyes.

The other man was older, with a bearded, apple-cheeked face that caught the firelight, and an ancient, tattered great-coat that made him look grotesque in the flickering firelight.

“Yes,” he said musingly, “but that ain’t surprisin’, seein’ that I’ve deer hunted in these woods many a year.”

Far off, an owl called eerily in the quiet night, and the forest listened. In the glow of a pale moon, just beginning its climb through clawlike branches of trees on the ridge, the two men saw the woods move closer. Clayton Warner shivered a little and wrapped both hands about his cup to warm them.

“That’s not what I meant,” he said. “Have you ever entered a room, and somehow known that whatever you saw next would be familiar to you? That for the next few minutes everything would fall into a familiar pattern you couldn’t do anything about?”

The old man grunted, and getting a coal from the fire, began to puff life into his pipe.

“Hit’s natural,” he said, with the calm satisfaction of age. “Happens to everybody now and then. My old grandma claimed it was tokens left over from another life, or some kind of spirit message from the other world.”

“What would you think,” asked Clayton carefully, “if I told you that this happens to me all the time lately?”

“Why, I’d say,” said the old man drily, “that I’d suppose that kind of thing would begin to taste of the keg after a while.”

“I just don’t understand it,” sighed Clayton. “I don’t have a runaway imagination at all. As a matter of fact, I’m afraid lots of people think I’m dull as lead, just a small town schoolteacher plugging along on the way to nowhere.”

He looked past the old man to the shimmering woods and the faint redness of the firelight on the near trees.

“And yet, ever since I came to this town, these things have been happening,” he continued, “and it’s weird. Not so much people as places. I come to a place, and I’m mortally sure I’ve been there before. I can even tell what the inside of some of those old houses on Tulliver Street look like, though I’ve never been in them.”

“How do you know you’re right then?” asked the old man mildly. His eyes twinkled in the firelight as he puffed away at the pipe.

“I’ve checked myself,” answered Clayton. “Store buildings and such. I even went in that old ramshackle mill building that’s been empty for years. I had a feeling I’d know just what it looked like inside, including that old wooden machinery, and I was right. It was as familiar as my own home town.”

He lit a cigarette and snapped the lighter shut angrily. “And then there’s this other thing I’ve told nobody about.” He paused, a bit anxiously, and peered into the shadows that flickered over the old man’s face, but his companion remained inscrutable.

Clayton knew he ought to get back to town. This was deer season, and the schools were closed, but he had papers to grade and he was already very tired. He had met this old man, a stranger to him, late that afternoon at a deer stand, where the leaves went scudding down a long hollow in the wind, and the woods were brown and open. The old man had been standing by a tree, and so well did his colorless clothing and brindle-grey beard fit into the pattern of the woods, that Clayton had not seen him until he spoke.

Neither had seen a deer, but they fell into conversation, and Clayton, who was an ardent deer hunter, was so arrested by something, perhaps the old man’s knowledge and his stories of the seasons past, that he had stayed with him and came here to the old man’s camp to share a pot of coffee. The old man too was hunting alone.

“I don’t reckon,” said his companion in the silence, “that you’d ever been to town sometime when you were just a tad and maybe didn’t know it.”

“Never,” said Clayton firmly. “I was born in Indiana, six hundred miles from here, and I was never out of the state until I went to college. My family always hated to travel.”

The owl called again, from a dark hollow, and another answered, and then another. For a moment the woods were alive with the laughing, hooting cry of owls, and then the silence descended again, like ominous frost.

Clayton wondered if he should tell the old man the whole story. Normally a quiet, systematic man, he had found his life nearly derailed by the strange manifestations his mind had forced on him. He knew no one well enough to tell these things, or perhaps he knew everyone too well to tell them. He made up his mind abruptly, with customary finality.

“I’m not a storyteller,” he said with a sigh, “but I want to tell somebody about this. It’s a kind of ghost story,” he added apologetically.

The old man hunched over his crossed legs and picked the coffeepot gingerly from the fire. He poured his cup full and blew at the rim to cool the hot tin.

“It’s a fine night for a tale, or a fox race,” he said encouragingly, “and I’m partial to both. We’ll have a drop of the horn to make it better.”

He took an old flask from his coat and passed it over. They each had a long draught from the bottle and the old man put it away with a satisfied sigh.

“You can smell the feet of the boys that plowed the corn,” he said with gusto.

The fiery moonshine coursed through Clayton’s veins like electricity, and he felt warm with it immediately. He lit a cigarette and began talking, as the old man cleaned his ancient rifle in the firelight.

“I’ve always hunted, since I was a boy,” said Clayton, “anything you could hunt, any time of the year you could hunt it. I didn’t do any deer hunting until I came to this part of the country, and I guess I tried to make up for all the years I hadn’t hunted deer.

“It was last spring when Joe Coppard, down at the post office, told me about the old Reese place north of town. The deer were so thick in there, he said, that they kept the grass mowed like a lawn, I went out there, and he was right. The place looks like something the world forgot.” He broke off. “Have you ever seen it?”

The old man nodded.

“Well, then, you know how it looks, the house falling in, briar thickets and wild fruit trees in the yard, and the orchard, with all of those gnarled, ancient apple trees in a sea of bluegrass. The place chilled my blood, sort of. It’s so completely abandoned and lonely, with the empty windows of the house looking over those barren fields, and the quiet over everything. As if everything there were waiting.”

“It didn’t always look like that,” said the other man.

“Yes, I know that now,” said Clayton. “I saw it first in the late afternoon, with the evening light on it. The trunks of the trees we: e gray and weathered, and the boards of the house were the same way, and all through the yard and orchard the growing things were that odd, lifeless color that very old things take on, waiting for spring. I knew just what the house looked like inside, the way the rooms were laid out, and the placement of the furniture. I didn’t go in, though, because somehow the place was so lonely and silent I didn’t want to disturb its quiet. I made a circle out through the orchard and found more deer signs than I’d ever seen in one place and I decided that the deer came in at night and fed on the bluegrass.”

Clayton watched as the old man opened the breech of his rifle and, placing a finger in it to reflect the light, peered down the barrel.

“I made up my mind,” he continued, “to come back one night when the moon was shining and hide in a tree in the orchard. There was something about the old place that fascinated me. Does that make sense to you?”

The old man shrugged and spat in the fire.

“Night huntin’s the best they are,” he said laconically. “When I was a young man, I spent many a night under the stars, listenin’ to the dogs run mostly in the dark woods.”

“Then you know the attraction of it,” said Clayton, “the mystery of not being able to see very far, and not knowing what it is that’s coming through the leaves toward you. I got started hunting with a wounded rabbit call, and that’s the weirdest kind of thrill I know, realizing that after you’ve called, and you’re waiting there in the dark, you’re being hunted by something you don’t know about. Have you ever hunted like that?”

“I have been the hunter and the hunted at the same time,” answered the old man.

“Game wardens?” Clayton surmised briefly, and the old fellow chuckled as he squatted in the firelight, wiping each of his cartridges with an oily rag and inserting them one at a time in the rifle. “Go on with your tale,” he said.

Clayton stared into the fire a moment. “It was April before I got back there,” he said, “and it was amazing how the place had changed. I left my car on an old woods road, so no one would wonder about it, and walked through the woods. I came up in back of the house, just about dusk, and stood there in a little cedar grove looking over the orchard. Every single tree was in bloom, and it was like looking down on a bank of clouds, nearly, to look over the tops of those trees. Up in the house yard the firebush was blooming too, and a big cherry tree that I had thought was dead was swelled out like cotton candy with pink blossoms. It was beautiful, but it was sad, too. All those trees, planted and pruned and cultivated by somebody, and now they were blooming here for no one, in the stillness of that forgotten place.

“I walked through the orchard, and saw fresh deer tracks again. I looked around until I found a tree that was right for sitting in, where I could see everything fairly well and pulled myself up in it. I had a gun with me, an old shotgun. I always carry a gun in the woods, because I’d have felt naked without it, but I didn’t intend to kill, a deer. I got comfortable in the broad fork of the tree with a limb to rest my back against, and tested my view. I could see the old cart track coming to the house, grown over with weeds two feet high, and the moonlit house itself behind the rotten palings that were more honeysuckle than fence. I could see where a little hollow came into the orchard field, and I was sure that this was where the deer had been coming in.”

He lit another cigarette with a stick from the fire, and blew the smoke upward. The old man sat like an Indian, hugging his knees in thoughtful contemplation of the rising moon. There was no sound but the slight hissing of the fire.

“I sat there,” Clayton went on, “for a long time before anything happened. The whippoorwills were calling, and the night was full of sounds, but I couldn’t see much until the moon got up. The smell of all those blossoms was overpowering in the still air, and in the moonlight the trees hardly looked real around me. They were like clouds of vapor, and after a while I lost my sense of distance and couldn’t tell for sure where the ground was. Then I saw a movement, and there was a deer feeding in the grass a few yards away. After a few minutes I saw another one move into my view, and then another. I couldn’t tell much about size and I never could pick out antlers for sure, but I could see their white patches plainly, and after I stared a minute or two, their outlines. It was quite a sensation. I knew that I could kill one with the shotgun, but I didn’t want to. It was as if I were invisible, with the power to watch them for hours without being detected, and it wouldn’t have been right to take advantage of it. I just sat there, listening to my heart pound, and watched them move about the orchard.”

He paused, and the old man took the opportunity to pass the flask over. They both drank in silence, and washed down the liquor with hot coffee. The fire was dying down to coals, but neither made any effort to refuel it.

“I have no idea how long I’d watched, but I was beginning to get stiff in the back,” said Clayton. “You know how it is, sitting in a tree. I was just easing myself into a more bearable position, when I heard something coming from the direction of the road. At first I thought it was a deer running, but I soon realized it couldn’t be that. It was the sound of a horse galloping on the road, and you could hear his shoes clopping in the hard gravel. Then I heard the hoofs leave the hard road and take the cart track to the house, and a thousand things went through my mind before I noticed that the deer hadn’t even raised their heads. I think I had just decided that it must be a range horse the deer were used to, and relaxed a little, when I heard the door to the house swing open with a sound of unoiled hinges, and I swiveled my eyes toward the house. The moonlight was slanting in across the porch, and I could see the black patch that was the open door. I fastened my eyes to it, listening at the same time to the horse.

“Then, as if in a dream, I saw a man step out onto the porch, and I saw the blue gleam of a rifle barrel.”

Clayton put his cup down, and his hand trembled a little. “I heard the creak of a saddle and the clink of metal from the road, and I saw the man on the porch duck off to the side and kneel behind a big leafy bush near the yard fence.”

He took a long stick and poked aimlessly at the fire.

“Then the horse came over the hill and I saw that it had a rider. I couldn’t see his face well, but he was tall, and had on a slouch hat, and a military jacket of some kind, with buttons that winked in the moonlight. I think he had a mustache too, but I’m not sure. I sat there in the tree and watched him ride up to the gate and stop, and for the life of me, I could neither move, nor think clearly enough to imagine what could be happening, or what I should do. I was like a man watching a play, sure that what I was watching couldn’t be real, and that I could have no effect on the outcome, whatever I did. Then the gun roared behind the bush with a noise that was loud, but more like the echo of a shot than the actual report. I saw the tall man jerk back in the saddle, stiffen and finally topple to the ground, his hand still gripping the reins.”

Clayton threw the stump of his cigarette into the fire. “You might think,” he said slowly, “that these things I have told you would have scared me out of my wits, but that part was yet to come.” He looked fixedly at the old man, who returned his gaze across the fire.

“I was sitting there, half frozen with shock, wondering what I should do, when I glanced down, and saw that the deer were still peacefully cropping the grass below me. Neither the sound of the horse, the grating of the door, the sight of the men nor the sound of the shot had disturbed them in the least, and yet, in the minutes that I had watched them, I had seen them put up their ears and stand rigid at the rustle of a rabbit in the honeysuckle vines, and twice bolt and run a few yards when some slight sound disturbed them.

“I knew then that what I had seen couldn’t be real, but was part of these hallucinations that have plagued me since I came to this place. There was no horse, although I could see him as clearly as I see you; prancing about skittishly there at the gate, still held by his dead master’s hand, and snorting with fear at the smell of blood. There was no man in the yard, although I saw him, watched him stand up and lever a shell into his gun before he walked out to look at his handiwork. There had been no shot, although the ring of it was still in my ears.

“I clung to the tree like a man in a dream and watched the ghost with the rifle come out the yard gate and free the reins from the dead man’s clutch, and I saw him send the horse off with a slap on the rump. I was still watching, as he dragged the dead man into the yard, and I saw him bury the body beneath the bush. The moon was right overhead as he leveled the ground over the grave and tamped it with his feet, and I got an idea that I could get down now and sneak away under the shadow of the apple trees. I had nearly forgotten the deer but as my foot scraped on the bark of the tree, I saw their heads come up, staring toward me, bodies poised for flight.

“I sat there a moment, unsure of what to do, but I knew I couldn’t stay in the tree any longer, whatever happened, and I grasped a branch and slid to the ground.”

The old man had not said a word, but the smoke from his pipe had risen in puffs as regular as smoke signals, and Clayton knew that his eyes were open and watching.

“The instant I moved, the deer were gone. I saw white tails leaping and heard the shrill whistling of the bucks. There seemed to be deer in every direction, and as I looked toward the house, one leaped the yard fence and ran by the murderer’s bush; and I saw the flash of his flag as he cleared the back fence. I stood silent a moment, waiting for something to happen, but nothing did, and at last, gathering my courage, I walked to the gate and looked in.”

Clayton paused to get out his cigarettes again and lit one slowly, listening to the cries of the whippoorwills with obvious enjoyment.

“And you saw nothing?” asked the old man. Something in the old man’s tone made Clayton wonder whether the old fellow fully believed him, yet he felt his companion would not be satisfied if he left anything out of his story.

“I saw the murderer cleaning his shovel in the moonlight,” he replied, “and a mound of fresh dirt. I stared at him a moment. He was a big man, with a mustache and sideburns, nearly bald. He had on suspenders and boots. I was so close I could see his jowls quiver with the fatigue of the work he’d just done, but he didn’t see me at all. And then, as I was looking at him, horrified, he just disappeared.”

It seemed the end of the story, and the old man sat for a moment in silence.

“What do you mean, disappeared?” he asked.

“Just that,” said Clayton. “I don’t mean that he faded away, or dissolved; he just wasn’t there any more, neither he nor the shovel nor the mound of dirt. I was standing by the gate in the moonlight, alone, and the whippoorwills were calling, as they are now. I looked around me, and there was no sign of a horse, no bloodstains or dragmarks in the dirt. Only a set of deer tracks where the deer had leaped the fence. And the old house with its vacant windows staring out over the moonlit orchard. I don’t know exactly how I made it back to my car,” he said after a moment of contemplation, “but I made it there, frightened half out of my wits. I drove home, and I said nothing to anyone about what I had seen.”

“I’m not surprised,” said his companion with a grunt. “Most folks would figure you’d need to be tapped for the simples. But that ain’t all, is it?”

“No,” said Clayton, “it isn’t.” He waited while the old man dragged up a dead limb to give new life to the fire. For a moment the flames illuminated them both, and the old man’s face glowed like porcelain in the red light.

“Time is a barrier people can’t cross,” Clayton said, after a while, “a wall you can’t break down or get over. I teach my school children about the Emperor Charlemagne, or Paul Revere, and they memorize the things I want them to, but they don’t know that these people existed. It’s like the theory that nothing exists except while you’re looking at it. You might say that a man only exists while there is still a man alive who has seen him, and after that he becomes a legend, a thing of the past, and as far from reality as the times he lived in. So it seems to me.”

He looked at the old man, as if not sure what he was saying was getting across.

“I think what’s happened to me is some sort of distortion in this wall of time, as if the material of the wall had turned to glass, so that I alone could look through, but not touch the things on the other side.”

The old man scratched his head and set his cap back straight.

“You mean you can see things like you just told me, but you can’t do anything about them,” he said reflectively.

“Yes,” said Clayton, “I have that feeling. I went back to the Reese place the next day, in the middle of the afternoon. I’d left my shotgun in the orchard, and since it was Saturday, I was afraid some hunter would find it. I got the gun and walked up to the house, almost despite myself, not knowing what I expected to see. The house was grey and forsaken in the sunlight, and smelled of rot and mildew. Wasps buzzed in and out of its crevices and the weeds in the yard were so thickly tangled I had to step carefully to get to the porch. Most of the porch had fallen in, but I got close enough to see that the door hadn’t been opened in at least a year. There was a rusty chain which ran through a hole in the door and one in the doorframe, and a padlock on it. By this time I wasn’t surprised. That left me only one thing to do to test my sanity.”

“You had to look under the lilac bush,” said the old man calmly.

“That’s exactly what I had to do,” nodded Clayton, glancing at him briefly. “I carry a trench shovel in the car along with my chains, and I got it and started digging. I only had to dig a few feet, but I never want to work like that again, with the old house brooding over my shoulder, and every creak of its old timbers and every sound in the grass behind me making me stand up to look. I’d spent most of the afternoon, and the light was failing, and the roots of the lilac bush were like iron. I chopped and hacked and scooped dirt like a madman, and suddenly the shovel came up with what I was looking for: a brass button, green with mold. Then I found a bone. Another five minutes’ work, and I’d found a skull.”

For a moment the two men sat in silence, as if each were lost in thoughts of his own. Then the old man spoke.

“What did you do then?”

“I filled in the grave,” replied Clayton, “and went home.”

A shower of sparks climbed suddenly from the fire and whirled up among the tree branches, and the dark woods seemed to move again to the undulation of the flames.

“That’s quite a tale,” said the old man finally, chewing his pipe.

“It’s a true one,” said Clayton simply. “You know about the old Reese place. Can you tell me anything of it that would help to explain it?”

The old man stared into the fire and brushed at the silver edges of his whiskers.

“Well,” he said, “some says one thing, some another, and it’s all been a good while back.” He worked the cork from his bottle, took a comfortable swallow, and replaced the cork carefully, his eyes never leaving the fire.

“Sam Reese, they say, was an easy-come, easy-go sort of devil, and he looked a lot like your tall man on the horse. His brother Burl was a hard worker, not as smart as Sam, nor as forward, but he was a plodder, and they both worked on the farm till Sam fell for a town girl and took up sparkin’ instead. Worst thing about it was, the girl was Minnie McBain, and his brother, though he’d never got around to sayin’ anythin’ about it, had picked out Minnie to be his wife, whenever the farm got out from under the mortgage. It made bad blood between them, though it wasn’t much of a contest. Burl was the kind who looked at a woman and blushed, and pulled his hat off when one came in a room. Sam was a regular ladies’ man, they say, and could talk a wasp out of stingin’ him.”

“You seem to know a lot about them,” remarked Clayton, offering his host a cigarette.

“Old folks talk,” said the old man, shaking his head. “It was the talk of the country, seein’ what happened. Sam got the girl in the family way, got skeered of matrimony and left the country. Some said he joined the army, and I reckon he did. Burl, he married the girl and made that house for her instead of the cabin he and Sam had shared, but he didn’t have no luck.”

The old man stuffed tobacco in his pipe and spat in the fire.

“The girl, she died a-birthin’, and the little ’un too, and Burl kept pluggin’ along, makin’ a crop now and then, and everyone said he was waitin’ for his brother to come home. But far as anyone knowed, he never did come.”

From somewhere, miles away, came the cry of the hounds in the night. The pack ran echoing up a great hollow, where the sound was muffled in the big woods, and then crossed a ridge, where their plaintive buglings were clear; then they faded again and were gone. There remained only the brittle starlight and the humming silence of the fire.

Very slowly, but deliberately, Clayton turned from the fire and slid his rifle up until the muzzle was trained on the older man.

“I wondered,” he said, cocking the hammer, “why this strange insight had come to me, and why I saw these things. I was meant to catch a murderer.”

The old man looked at him bemused, and puffed his pipe.

“I believe you’re seein’ things again,” he said drily.

“The lilac bush,” said Clayton, with a tight mouth. “You said, ‘You had to look under the lilac bush,’ but I’d never mentioned what kind it was.”

He gained his feet carefully, and looked down on the old man. “You know why? Because there wasn’t any bush at all when I got back there in the daylight. It was only when I began to dig in the place where I’d seen the bush the night before that I found the old, gnarled roots of a lilac, dead for dozens of years.”

The old man sighed. “And just what would you aim to do, son, if you could get anybody to believe you?”

“I’ll do what I was meant to do, I suppose,” said Clayton calmly, “bring you to a justice you’ve escaped.”

He held the rifle in one hand, and digging in his coat pocket, pulled out a greenish object which he held to the firelight.

“Here’s the proof,” he said, “or part of it. A button from your brother’s coat.”

The old man stared up at him, and he smiled, showing rows of uneven, worn teeth. His eyes shone red as if the fire were contained in them.

“There’s a small mischance in your figurin’, young man,” he said, “and I’ll tell you where it lies. How old do you calculate me to be?”

“That’s not hard to guess,” said Clayton coldly, keeping the rifle trained. “You were thirty or thirty-five when I saw you bury your brother, and I reckon you’re near seventy-five now.”

The old man laughed, with a dry, wheezing sound. “That would make it forty years ago or so.” He chuckled. “No, no, that’ll never do. Sam Reese went off to the army in the summer of sixty-three, a hundred years ago last June, and he came back a year later, nearly to the day.”

“Prove it,” said Clayton.

“Prove it yourself,” said the old man, grinning. “Look at the button and use your eyes,” he added.

“Hardly,” said Clayton, getting a tighter grip on the rifle. He threw the button to the old man. “If there’s something to be proved, you show me.”

The old man held the button a moment, smiling, as if it warmed his hand, then he spat on it, keeping his eyes fixed on Clayton. He began to polish it on his ragged coat, and as he polished it he spoke.

“He killed her, as surely as I killed him, her havin’ a baby he didn’t care enough about even to give it a name. And after I married her she wasn’t happy with me; she kept waitin’ for him to come back. She didn’t say nothin’, but I could tell. Well, I was waitin’ too, and I had a lot of time to study about it after Minnie died. The night that horse come down the road, I killed my brother, with this gun you see here, and I’ve expected you, or someone like you, over the years. But it’ll be small satisfaction to you, young feller, and maybe I’ll have some peace. Here!”

He held up the button in the light, and Clayton bent a little to look at it, keeping his rifle pointed at the old man’s chest.

The button was nearly eaten away with corrosion, but the old man’s rubbing had brought some of the brassy metal to life, and Clayton could see clearly the three letters upon it.

“And now,” said the old man, “what do you see?”

“C,S,A,” read Clayton. “Confederate States of America.”

“And there’s your proof,” said the old man. He handed the button carefully to Clayton, and he took it as carefully and dropped it into his pocket, still keeping the gun trained on the old man. “There’s proof,” the old fellow repeated, “that you’re wrong, or that I’m 140 years old.

“You see, you found me all right, but you’re too late for it. Your glass wall lies between us, and you can’t touch me, only see me.”

Clayton blinked.

“Do you reckon,” said the old man, “that this is the end of it? Or do you reckon you’ll go on being able to see inside things for the rest of your life?”

He smiled with narrowed eyes at the flames, and in a motion quick for so old a man, swung up his rifle from the ground and pointed it at Clayton. “Or do you suppose,” he asked almost mischievously, “that it works the other way ’round?”

With the flash from the muzzle Clayton fired too, and the woods reverberated endlessly with the report. For a moment Clayton stood stock still, eyes squeezed shut with the sight of the muzzle blast in them.

And then he opened them slowly. There was nothing to see hut the empty clearing in the woods and the firelight winking among the tree trunks, and the drifting, acrid smoke from what had been the old man’s parting joke. Clayton shook his head slowly, trying to remember what he was doing standing in the woods in the middle of the night, but nothing would come, except that he must have fallen asleep by his fire.

“Deer hunting,” he thought, “you get so tired you go to sleep on your feet.” His hand in his pocket closed around a small metal object, which he absent-mindedly withdrew and pitched into a drift of leaves.