“To feed Ichabod. His supper is overdue and he has a hungry look. Haven’t you, old fellow?”
The dog lopped out his tongue and whined under his breath. “See?” Wes smiled. “He agrees.”
Linc watched him go helplessly. Wes invariably turned to his dog for comfort, carrying on one-sided conversations with the mongrel. Linc had never cared much for the animal. The energy Wes spent on him seemed a waste.
“Kelly?” he asked, and turned her face up to his own.
She looked like a frightened child, her green eyes red-rimmed.
“Where’s the old Irish?” he asked her. “Come on, honey, take a deep breath and pull yourself together.”
“Give her a few minutes,” Wes called from the kitchen. “We all need a chance to calm down.”
“But we can’t waste time rallying our nerves,” Linc protested. “We’ve got to find out what’s happening and make plans.”
“What plans?” Kelly cried. “What were those things, Linc? What were they doing to those people? Did you see them? They walked as though they were dead.”
She broke off shivering, and Linc left her, unable to bear the impatience of listening to her cry, while incapable of doing anything about it.
“Let’s get some news,” he growled, and snapped on the radio.
Ichabod waddled back into the room, and Wes followed, to resume patting the dog’s head. A lethargy had settled over him, and Linc felt suddenly alone. Kelly was hysterical, Wes was numb, and he was alone with the terrible need for action.
The radio sputtered to life with the frantic voice of an announcer:
“…and people are following them—where, no one knows—why, no one knows. They just follow. The giant Eyes are sailing out from the stadium. Two of them are in the downtown shopping area, and two more at the Recreation Center. The city has gone wild. There was no estimate of anything. There is no one sane enough to estimate. And still people follow the Eyes. I’ve seen them, ladies and gentlemen. Right now, looking out of the window here on top of the Garner Building, I can see one of them. It’s a great, blue Eye—just an Eye—and it hovers above the street and blinks its giant lids and stirs up papers on the street with the sweep of its lashes. There’s something ominous in it aside from its immensity—something that looks out of it, weird and foreign. It has no expression. It is just pure horror, and it—”
Linc snapped the set off angrily. “That guy should be horse-whipped for putting out a broadcast like that. He’s scaring hundreds of people to death who haven’t even seen the things.”
Wes’ tone was gentler. “He has one of the things staring him in the face and he’s letting out his fear in words.”
Linc turned in annoyance and strode to the window and looked out at the quiet street. Birds whistled and fluttered in the trees. The neighbor’s cat sat on the porch, washing its face with an orange paw, oblivious to anything out of the ordinary. It was impossible to believe what he had seen less than an hour ago when he viewed it from this vantage point. It was impossible, and the memory of it was so distorted with fear and frenzy that he welcomed the doubts that assailed him. Unanswered questions—mysteries—always infuriated him. The world was a sensible, ordered place with an answer for everything, if sane men would only search for it. There had to be an answer for this, too.
He swung from the window. “We’ve let ourselves be made fools of. We saw something unusual, and we panicked and built it all out of proportion. We were too blind with panic even to know what we saw.”
“I know what I saw,” Kelly said huskily. “A little girl—somebody stepped on her face.”
“Don’t focus on those things! They were the result, not the cause. I’m talking about those eyes. Our own panic made them grow, made them appear menacing.”
“We saw them before the panic started,” Wes argued.
“I wonder. Maybe the panic really started the first second you pointed them out. You know what terror can do. Light a match in a crowded theater—make a little smoke and smell—then yell ‘Fire!’ and people will stampede. They’ll run and crush each other, and later report that they saw flames jumping, when there was nothing there but a little smoke and somebody yelling.”
Wes was doubtful. “Then what do you think it was?”
“I don’t know.” Linc turned away. “But unless we suppose it was something perfectly normal, and examine it from that viewpoint, we’ll never get anywhere except deeper in fear. Eyes. What could they have been? Machines? A publicity stunt? Big balloons, sent over the stadium? Or what about mass hallucination?”
“No!” Kelly’s shout quavered with her voice. “Balloons or hallucinations don’t make people walk like zombies.”
“And the announcer on the radio?” Wes asked. “Hallucination is contagious—fear is contagious.”
“I can’t go along with you,” Wes answered. “Everything you say about the psychology of terror is true, I admit that, but this was something else again. This terror had a basis.”
“Look out the window!” Linc commanded. “Where’s the terror on Colt Street? It hasn’t spread here yet, and it won’t, if somebody has the sense to muzzle that announcer.”
“The Eyes haven’t spread here either. You’re reaching too hard, Linc. You want this thing explained, so you’re explaining it any way you can.”
“I’ll prove it to you,” Linc said. “I’m going to the lab. Iverson has probably started to figure it out already.”
“You can’t go outside!” Kelly stood up. “You’re not foolhardy enough to go out there with those Eyes?”
“You stay here—let Wes hold your hand. You’ll be safe here. I’ve got to move.”
He started for the door, but Wes was quickly beside him. “If you feel you have to go, then I’ll go with you.”
Linc looked at him, his dark eyes and well-planed face, and all he could manage was a nod of consent. He went through the door and toward the car, admitting that he was angry and argumentative because he was mad at himself. As for Kelly, he was sure she would be safe in the house, and just as sure that she wouldn’t venture out.
As he pulled open the car door, the neighbor’s orange cat suddenly darted from the porch, beneath the car, and out the other side, headed for the shelter of its hiding place tinder the back shed. Inside the house, Ichabod set up a howl. Wes looked at Linc over the roof of the car, his eyes questioning.
The question was swiftly answered. A stirring of the fall-colored leaves drew their attention upward, and there, sailing over Colt Street was the six-foot length of an Eye. The skin of the lids was a monstrous rubbery mass, the pores visible holes, and the lash-hairs were as big around as matchsticks at the roots.
“Do you want to go back?” Wes asked in a low voice.
The Eye had passed their house, and now the back of it was visible. Linc’s heart sank as all of his speculations
