The Visitors (v1.0)

48. WILDERNESS AREA

Norton steadied the canoe with choppy paddle strokes, staring at what the bend in the river had revealed. There, straight ahead of him, five masses of square blackness loomed above the deep green of the pines.

Visitors, he told himself. What would visitors be doing here, deep in the wilderness? Although, once he thought of it, he realized it might not be strange at all. More than likely many of the big black boxes had landed in areas where they would not readily be found.

He chuckled to himself and dipped the paddle deep, driving the canoe toward shore. The sun was dipping toward the western horizon and he'd been looking for a place to camp. This place, he told himself, would do as well as any. He'd beach the canoe and look over the visitors. After that, he'd build a fire and settle for the night. He was surprised to find that he was pleased at finding the visitors. There was, he thought, something companionable about them—as if unexpectedly he had come upon some neighbors whose existence he had not suspected.

He hauled the canoe up the shelving, pebbly beach and strode into the forest, heading for the visitors. There was, he thought, one strange thing about it—not the strangeness of finding the visitors here, but the fact that there was no racket. They were not sawing down or ingesting trees. More than likely they had processed all the cellulose they needed, had budded young and now were simply taking it easy, a time for resting once their chores were done.

He burst into the clearing they had made and skidded to a surprised halt. In front of him stood a house. It was a somewhat lopsided house, leaning drunkenly to one side, as if the builder had done a poor job of it and it had come unstuck. Just beyond it stood a second house. This one stood foursquare, but there was still a certain wrongness to it. It was a moment before he could make out what the wrongness was, and then he knew—it hadn't any windows.

Beyond the houses stood the visitors, so closely ranged together that they gave the impression of a group of great buildings clustered in a city's downtown district.

Norton stood undecided and confused. No one in their right mind, he told himself, would have come into this wilderness, built two houses, then gone away and left them. Nor would any builder construct a lopsided house and another without windows. And even if the hypothetical builder had wanted, for some unfathomable reason, to do so, he would have had no reasonable way in which to transport his materials to the building site.

The pines moaned softly as the wind blew through them. On the other side of the clearing in which the houses and the visitors stood, a small, bright bird flickered for a moment against the green wall of the encircling conifers. Other than the sound of the wind in the pines and the bright flash of the bird, the place stood unmoving and silent. The stillness and the brooding somberness of the primeval forest overshadowed all, serving to blot out and soak up even the wonder of the houses and the visitors.

With an effort, Norton uprooted himself and moved toward the first of the houses, the lopsided one. The front door was open, but it took him a moment to decide to enter. It was entirely possible, he thought, that the structure might collapse once he stepped inside of it. But he finally took the chance and went into the hall, which opened into a kitchen and what appeared to be a living room. He went into the kitchen, walking softly because he was afraid of jarring the house and hastening its collapse. Despite the house's structural oddity, the kitchen seemed quite normal. An electric stove and refrigerator stood against one wall. Starting at the stove and running around another wall were cabinets, with counter top, drawers, dish cupboards and a sink.

Norton turned a dial on the stove and held a palm above the burner. The burner heated quickly and he turned it off. At the sink, he turned a faucet and a small trickle of water ran out of the tap, then stopped. He turned the faucet further and the tap sputtered. Water finally gushed out, but again it stopped. He turned off the faucet.

He went into the living room and everything seemed all right except that the windows were set into the wall at an unusual angle. Down the hail he found three bedrooms and they seemed to be all right, although there were certain small peculiarities in the dimensions of the rooms that puzzled him. Thinking about it, he found himself unable to say exactly what was wrong.

It was with a sense of relief that he stepped out the front door and headed for the second house—the one that had no windows. There was something—something rather startling—that puzzled him about the lopsided house and he wondered what it was. Not the canted windows in the living room or the odd dimensional qualities of the bedrooms, or even the faulty faucet in the kitchen. It had been something else and it was important. Walking toward the other house and thinking about it, he suddenly knew what it was that had bothered him so deeply—the lopsided house didn't have a bathroom. He stopped short and pondered it. Could he be wrong? It was incomprehensible that someone should build a house and not put in a bathroom. Carefully he ran through an inventory of the rooms and was sure that he was right. He could not have overlooked a bathroom; if one had been there, he'd have seen it.

The front door of the second house was closed, but it opened easily and smoothly when he turned the knob. Because of the lack of windows, the interior of the house was dark, but not so dark as to interfere with vision. Swiftly he checked the rooms. There were four bedrooms and a den, a kitchen, a living room and dining room—and two bathrooms, one off the master bedroom. The floor in the first house had been of wood; here all the floors were carpeted. Drapes hung on the walls where windows should have been. He tried the kitchen appliances. They worked. The stove top heated when he turned on the burners, at the sink the water ran; when he opened the door of the refrigerator a gush of cold hit him in the face. In the bathrooms, the taps ran normally and the toilets flushed.

Everything seemed perfect. But why should someone build a perfect house and then forget the windows?

Or had someone built it?

Could the visitors.

He gulped at the idea and suddenly went cold.

If it were the visitors, then it did make sense. No human would have built two houses in the middle of a wilderness. To start with, it would have been all but impossible to do it.

But the visitors? Why would the visitors be building houses? Or practicing the art of building houses? For it was quite apparent that these were practice houses, constructed by someone who was not entirely clear on the matter of how houses should be built. The lopsided house probably had been the first one to be tried. The house in which he stood most likely was the second, considerably improved over the first one, but lacking windows.

He stood, shaken, in the middle of the kitchen, still not certain, questioning himself. The only answer, reluctant as he might be to accept it, was that the two houses had been fabricated by the visitors. But that left a second, even more puzzling, less easily answered question: Why should the visitors be building houses?

He groped his way out of the kitchen and across the living room, went into the hall and let himself out the door.

Long shadows had crept across the clearing. The tops of the picket fence of pines to the west cut a saw-toothed pattern into the reddening sun. A chill was beginning to move in and Norton shivered at the touch of it.

He ran his hand over the siding exterior of the house and it had a strange feel to it. Peering closely at it in the deepening dusk, he saw that it was not siding, not separate lengths of lumber, but that the exterior seemed to be molded in a single piece, like a preformed plastic.

Slowly he backed away from the house. Superficially, except for the lack of windows, there was nothing wrong with it. It was an almost exact copy of the kind of house that could be found in any suburb.

He ran his gaze from the rooftop down to the basement wall— and there was no basement wall. It was a detail that had escaped him—this lack of a basement wall. The house hovered half a foot or so above the ground, suspended in the air.

Suspended, Norton told himself, as the visitors were suspended. There was no question now—no question of how the houses had come into being.

He walked around the corner of the house and there they stood, the visitors, clumped together, like a massed group of darkened buildings standing in the center plaza of some futuristic city, the lower half of them blotted out in the forest dusk, the upper half highlighted by the dying rays of a setting sun.

From their direction came another house, floating along a foot or so above the ground, the whiteness of it ghostly in the twilight. As it approached, Norton backed away, apprehensively, ready to break and run. The house came up, then stopped, as if to determine its position. Then slowly, majestically, it wheeled into line with the other houses and came to a halt, the three of them standing in a row, somewhat closer together, it was true, than would be the ordinary case, but very much like three houses sitting on a street.

Norton took a slow step toward the third house and as he did, lights came on inside of it, with the windows gleaming. Inside it he saw a table in the dining room, set with glass and china and two candlesticks, with tall tapers in them waiting to be lighted. In the living room, the screen of a TV set glimmered and across from it stood a davenport and all about the room were chairs, with a curio cabinet, filled with dainty figurines, ranged against one wall.

Startled, he moved to turn away and as he did, he caught the hint of shadows, as if someone were moving in the kitchen, as if there was someone there taking up the dinner to be brought to the waiting table.

He cried out in terror and spun about, racing toward the river and the canoe that waited there.