he, as observer, was now apparently separable from all events.
*
He sat brooding until almost dawn, but he did not see or hear anything of Seaforth. At last, worn out, he undressed and went to bed. A moment later he was deep in sleep.
Hanrahan woke to a silent world. The only sound he could hear was the one he himself made by sitting up in bed. Instantly he remembered the night before. He put on slippers and a dressing-gown, and knocked on Seaforth’s door. There was no answer. He turned the knob. The room was empty.
In the mirror over the chest of drawers he saw his worried face. “Steady, you fool,” he scolded himself. He glanced at the clock; it was ten minutes past ten. He grinned in relief. Monday mornings at ten Seaforth had a class in creative writing at State.
He wandered into the kitchen. Seaforth had been there, sure enough; the dishes from his breakfast were in the sink, and the pot was half full of cold coffee. Mrs. Beck would be in at eleven, to clean up; he’d better get himself shaved and dressed and have his own breakfast before she arrived. At 50, and with her face, she was still jittery about working in a bachelor apartment; it would never do to let her find him in his pajamas.
“Lord, what a nightmare that was!” he thought as he heated coffee and made toast. He tried to remember how much he had had to drink the night before.
By noon Mrs. Beck hadn’t come, and this was her payday. “To hell with it,” he grunted, wrote out a check for her and left it on the sink-board, and got his hat. He had an appointment for lunch with Rathbone, and just time enough to get to the magazine office to pick him up.
Hanrahan let himself out and down in the elevator. At the corner where the bus stopped realization struck him like a blow on the solar plexus.
There were no autos, no buses, no pedestrians. The street was absolutely empty.
He stood staring, fighting panic. With an effort he choked his terror down.
There was a drugstore on the corner. He opened the door and went in. The place was deserted—no clerks, no customers, the goods piled unguarded on the counters. Shaking, Hanrahan made it to a phone booth. He put in his dime, heard the dial tone, dialed Rathbone’s number, heard two rings. Then the ringing stopped.
There was no sound of a receiver’s being lifted, no voice, just silence. He waited a long time, then he hung up slowly. His money was not returned.
Stealthily, as if he were committing a crime, Hanrahan left the booth and moved to the next one. He looked up the number of the public library and dialed it. The same thing happened— three rings this time, then utter silence, no answer to his queries.
He would give it one more chance. All the phones couldn’t be out of order. This time he would call the police.
There had been three phone booths in a row when he went in to call Rathbone.
Now there was only the middle one from which he had just emerged. The two on either side of it had vanished.
*
Weak with fear, Hanrahan rushed from the store out into the unpopulated street, and stumbled back to his apartment.
The living room had been tidied and his bed had been made. Almost afraid to look, he went to the kitchen to see if Mrs. Beck was there. She wasn’t. Had she come and already gone again? He glanced at the sink-board to see if she had taken the check.
The check was gone. But so was the sink. There wasn’t any sink there anymore.
As he stared, the sink suddenly reappeared, with no check lying on the board. And the stove vanished instead. Then the stove popped into sight, and it was the refrigerator which disappeared. Hanrahan waited to see no more; he staggered into his bedroom and locked the door behind him. All the furniture was in its usual place, and stayed there.
For hours he sat by the window, unable to collect his thoughts. The window looked out on the back of another apartment house on the next street. Nobody showed his presence there, even through binoculars.
There was not a sound in his own apartment, or in the one next door through the thin connecting wall.
At three o’clock a thought struck him. He forced himself to unlock the door and go into the empty living room. He found a radio station with a news broadcast and tuned it in.
It was on, all right. The announcer was giving a baseball score.
So there was no unguessable calamity abroad. If anything was wrong, it must be with Hanrahan himself. He went back to his bedroom. He had had no lunch, but he could not make himself enter the kitchen again.
Seaforth was nearly always in by six, if only to get ready for a date. At six Hanrahan left his bedroom once more.
There was still no one in the living room. He decided to try the radio again; perhaps some incomprehensible disaster had been kept off the air so as not to alarm the listeners, but by this time it might be over and ready to be explained.
Halfway across the room he stopped. He fought down nausea.
The radio and the chair beside it had both gone.
Back in his bedroom Hanrahan had the thing out with himself.
There was his maternal grandmother who had heard the banshee and could see ghosts. There was his father’s cousin who had died after years in a mental hospital. There were the two months he himself had spent in a hospital, after Okinawa; “combat fatigue,” they called it now, and he had been discharged with a 30 per cent disability.
“So that’s that,” said Hanrahan grimly, and reached into the bureau drawer for his revolver.
The last thing he ever sensed was the shocking roar.
Seaforth searched for a while up and down the street, that Sunday night, and then decided Hanrahan had simply left and gone home. Hanrahan was getting too damned temperamental, he reflected; what innocent tiling had he said to set him off this time? Seaforth shrugged and walked leisurely homeward himself. The kitten scampered away.
Hanrahan wasn’t in the apartment. Walking off his peeve, presumably. Let him. Seaforth went straight to bed.
He overslept and barely had time in the morning to make himself some breakfast and get to his class. Hanrahan’s bedroom door was closed, and he was probably still asleep. Seaforth was in too much of a hurry to find out.
He got back about 12:30, and Mrs. Beck was there. She called to him from the kitchen, where she was washing dishes.
“Mr. Hanrahan left me my check, Mr. Seaforth,” she said.
“O.K.,” Seaforth answered. It was Hanrahan’s week to pay her. Doubtless he’d gone out by now.
The phone rang. It was Rathbone. “Seaforth?” he asked. “You know what’s happened to Hanrahan? He’s half an hour late for a luncheon date.”
“I haven’t seen him today,” Seaforth said. He felt a little uneasy. But he had an appointment himself, and he had to leave.
He returned shortly before six,
