By one o’clock everyone had gathered in the front rooms. The teacups had begun to steam, apparently of themselves, around midnight, and the house was full of the faint, thin fragrance that induced a sort of euphoria all through the rooms, breathed in with the perfume of the tea.
It made Oliver feel light and drowsy. He was determined to sit up as long as the others did, but he must have dozed off in his own room, by the window, an unopened book in his lap.
For when it happened he was not sure for a few minutes whether or not it was a dream.
The vast, incredible crash was louder than sound. He felt the whole house shake under him, felt rather than heard the timbers grind upon one another like broken bones, while he was still in the borderland of sleep. When he woke fully he was on the floor among the shattered fragments of the window.
How long or short a time he had lain there he did not know. The world was still stunned with that tremendous noise, or his ears still deaf from it, for there was no sound anywhere.
He was halfway down the hall toward the front rooms when sound began to return from outside. It was a low, indescribable rumble at first, prickled with countless tiny distant screams. Oliver’s eardrums ached from the terrible impact of the vast unheard noise, but the numbness was wearing off and he heard before he saw it, the first voices of the stricken city.
The door to Kleph’s room resisted him for a moment. The house had settled a little from the violence of the—the explosion?—and the frame was out of line. When he got the door open he could only stand blinking stupidly into the darkness within. All the lights were out, but there was a breathless sort of whispering going on in many voices.
The chairs were drawn around the broad front windows so that everyone could see out; the air swam with the fragrance of euphoria. There was light enough here from outside for Oliver to see that a few onlookers still had their hands to their ears, but all were craning eagerly forward to see.
Through a dreamlike haze Oliver saw the city spread out with impossible distinctness below the window. He knew quite well that a row of houses across the street blocked the view—yet he was looking over the city now, and he could see it in a limitless panorama from here to the horizon. The houses between had vanished.
On the far skyline fire was already a solid mass, painting the low clouds crimson. That sulphurous light reflecting back from the sky upon the city made clear the rows upon rows of flattened houses with flame beginning to lick up among them, and farther out the formless rubble of what had been houses a few minutes ago and was now nothing at all.
The city had begun to be vocal. The noise of the flames rose loudest, but you could hear a rumble of human voices like the beat of surf a long way off, and staccato noises of screaming made a sort of pattern that came and went continuously through the web of sound. Threading it in undulating waves the shrieks of sirens knit the web together into a terrible symphony that had, in its way, a strange, inhuman beauty.
Briefly through Oliver’s stunned incredulity went the memory of that other symphony Kleph had played there one day, another catastrophe retold in terms of music and moving shapes.
He said hoarsely, “Kleph—”
The tableau by the window broke. Every head turned, and Oliver saw the faces of strangers staring at him, some few in embarrassment avoiding his eyes, but most seeking them out with that avid, inhuman curiosity which is common to a type in all crowds at accident scenes. But these people were here by design, audience at a vast disaster timed almost for their coming.
Kleph got up unsteadily, her velvet dinner gown tripping her as she rose. She set down a cup and swayed a little as she came toward the door, saying, “Oliver…Oliver—” in a sweet, uncertain voice. She was drunk, he saw, and wrought up by the catastrophe to a pitch of stimulation in which she was not very sure what she was doing.
Oliver heard himself saying in a thin voice not his own, “W-what was it, Kleph? What happened? What—” But happened seemed so inadequate a word for the incredible panorama below that he had to choke back hysterical laughter upon the struggling questions, and broke off entirely, trying to control the shaking that had seized his body.
Kleph made an unsteady stoop and seized a steaming cup. She came to him, swaying, holding it out—her panacea for all ills.
“Here, drink it, Oliver—we are all quite safe here, quite safe.” She thrust the cup to his lips and he gulped automatically, grateful for the fumes that began their slow, coiling surcease in his brain with the first swallow.
“It was a meteor,” Kleph was saying. “Quite a small meteor, really. We are perfectly safe here. This house was never touched.”
Out of some cell of the unconscious Oliver heard himself saying incoherently, “Sue? Is Sue—” he could not finish.
Kleph thrust the cup at him again. “I think she may be safe—for awhile. Please, Oliver—forget about all that and drink.”
“But you knew!” Realization of that came belatedly to his stunned brain. “You could have given warning, or—”
“How could we change the past?” Kleph asked. “We knew—but could we stop the meteor? Or warn the city? Before we come we must give our word never to interfere—”
Their voices had risen imperceptibly to be audible above the rising volume of sound from below. The city was roaring now, with flames and cries and the crash of falling buildings. Light in the room turned lurid and pulsed upon the walls and ceiling in red light and redder dark.
Downstairs a door slammed. Someone laughed. It was high, hoarse, angry laughter. Then from the crowd in the room someone gasped and there was a chorus of dismayed cries. Oliver tried to focus upon the window and the terrible panorama beyond, and found he could not.
It took several seconds of determined blinking to prove that more than his own vision was at fault. Kleph whimpered softly and moved against him. His arms closed about her automatically, and he was grateful for the warm, solid flesh against him. This much at least he could touch and be sure of, though everything else that was happening might be a dream. Her perfume and the heady perfume of the tea rose together in his head, and for an instant, holding her in this embrace that must certainly be the last time he ever held her, he did not care that something had gone terribly wrong with the very air of the room.
It was blindness—not continuous, but a series of swift, widening ripples between which he could catch glimpses of the other faces in the room, strained and astonished in the flickering light from the city.
The ripples came faster. There was only a blink of sight between them now, and the blinks grew briefer and briefer, the intervals of darkness more broad.
From downstairs the laughter rose again up the stairwell. Oliver thought he knew the voice. He opened his mouth to speak, but a door nearby slammed open before he could find his tongue, and Omerie shouted down the stairs.
“Hollia?” he roared above the roaring of the city. “Hollia, is that you?”
She laughed again, triumphantly. “I warned you!” her hoarse, harsh voice called. “Now come out in the street with the rest of us if you want to see any more!”
“Hollia!” Omerie shouted desperately. “Stop this or—”
The laughter was derisive. “What will you do, Omerie? This time I hid it too well—come down in the street if you want to watch the rest.”
There was angry silence in the house. Oliver could feel Kleph’s quick, excited breathing light upon his cheek, feel the soft motions of her body in his arms. He tried consciously to make the moment last, stretch it out to infinity. Everything had happened too swiftly to impress very clearly on his mind anything except what he could touch and hold. He held her in an embrace made consciously light though he wanted to clasp her in a tight, despairing grip, because he was sure this was the last embrace they would ever share.
The eye-straining blinks of light and blindness went on. From far away below the roar of the burning city rolled on, threaded together by the long, lopped cadences of the sirens that linked all sounds into one.
Then in the bewildering dark another voice sounded from the hall downstairs. A man’s voice, very deep, very melodious, saying:
“What is this? What are you doing here? Hollia—is that you?”
Oliver felt Kleph stiffen in his arms. She caught her breath, but she said nothing in the instant while heavy feet began to mount the stairs, coming up with a solid, confident tread that shook the old house to each step.
Then Kleph thrust herself hard out of Oliver’s arms. He heard her high, sweet, excited voice crying, “Cenbe! Cenbe!” and she ran to meet the newcomer through the waves of dark and light that swept the shaken house.
Oliver staggered a little and felt a chair seat catching the back of his legs. He sank into it and lifted to his lips the cup he still held. Its steam was warm and moist in his face, though he could scarcely make out the shape of the rim.
