Way Station Read Free Page B

the earth stood relaxed and hushed, waiting for the heat.
    He looked at his watch and he had forty minutes left, so he went up the steps and across the porch until he came to the door. Reaching out his hand, he grasped the knob and turned-except he didn’t turn it; the knob stayed exactly where it was and his clenched fingers went half around it in the motion of a turn.
    Puzzled, he tried again and still he didn’t turn the knob. It was as if the knob was covered with some hard, slick coating, like a coat of brittle ice, on which the fingers slipped without exerting any pressure on the knob.
    He bent his head close to the knob and tried to see if there were any evidence of coating, and there was no evidence. The knob looked perfectly all right-too all right, perhaps. For it was clean, as if someone had wiped and polished it. There was no dust upon it, and no weather specks.
    He tried a thumbnail on it, and the thumbnail slipped but left no mark behind it. He ran his palm over the outer surface of the door and the wood was slick. The rubbing of the palm set up no friction. The palm slid along the wood as if the palm were greased, but there was no sign of grease. There was no indication of anything to account for the slickness of the door.
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    Lewis moved from the door to the clapboard and the clapboard also was slick. He tried palm and thumbnail on it and the answer was the same. There was something covering this house which made it slick and smooth-so smooth that dust could not cling upon its surface nor could weather stain it.
    He moved along the porch until he came to a window, and now, as he stood facing the window, he realized something he had not noticed before, something that helped make the house seem gaunter than it really was. The windows were black. There were no curtains, no drapes, no shades; they were simply black rectangles, like empty eyes staring out of the bare skull of the house.
    He moved closer to the window and put his face up to it, shading the sides of his face, next to the eyes, with his upheld hands to shield out the sunlight. But even so, he could not see into the room beyond. He stared, instead, into a pool of blackness, and the blackness, curiously enough, had no reflective qualities. He could not see himself reflected in the glass. He could see nothing but the blackness, as if the light hit the window and was absorbed by it, sucked in and held by it. There was no bouncing back of light once it had hit that window.
    He left the porch and went slowly around the house, examining it as he went. The windows were all blank, black pools that sucked in the captured light, and all the exterior was slick and hard.
    He pounded the clapboard with his fist, and it was like the pounding of a rock. He examined the stone walls of the basement where they were exposed, and the walls were smooth and slick. There were mortar gaps between the stones and in the stones themselves one could see uneven surfaces, but the hand rubbed across the wall could detect no roughness.
    An invisible something had been laid over the roughness of the stone, just enough of it to fill in the pits and uneven surfaces. But one could not detect it. It was almost as if it had no substance.
    Straightening up from his examination of the wall, Lewis looked at his watch. There were only ten minutes left. He must be getting on.
    He walked down the hill toward the tangle of old orchard. At its edge he stopped and looked back, and now the house was different. It was no longer just a structure. It wore a personality, a mocking, leering look, and there was a malevolent chuckle bubbling inside of it, ready to break out.
    Lewis ducked into the orchard and worked his way in among the trees.
    There was no path and beneath the trees the grass and weeds grew tall. He ducked the