—
Foxy box has goat-like appetite
With maybe a cut of the thing munching a tin can. Barthemo felt he had it made.
Rumours came to meet him as he passed along Park Avenue, and more than rumours. Flying saucers, thousands of fire-breathing monsters were solemnly attested to by sober citizens.
Great
, he thought.
Next it’ll be a telepath as big as a house
. He gnashed his unfilled teeth on their silly rumours. Barthemo Beele considered himself a lover of truth, stranger to fiction.
Why, it’s as though it read my mind!
he thought, staring at the Ruyteck house. The poltergeist no longer haunted the building—it had
become
the building. Seemingly the crumbling grey castle had come to life; it tipped and swayed in a clumsy sort of dance. His mind refused to function—except to curse the loss of his camera. Here was a million-dollar picture, and it could only happen in the West, where monsters were monsters.
The worn edifice shivered and rattled obscenely—he thought of the rotting corpse of a dowager doing the twist—and stretched itself upwards, rising, as it were, on tiptoe. Its towers stopped slumping and actually towered, as nails screamed from boards,
mould-softened timbers flaked apart, and a century of dust boiled from every crack.
The old house gave a final shudder, shaking off ornaments and pieces of window as if they were drops of water, swayed, tipped up crazily on one corner and—
Disappeared. Came to pieces so suddenly and completely that it was like a vanishing trick. Turned in an instant from a solid building to a pile of flat lumber. A bouncing cluster of bright metal boxes exploded from the remains and skipped about aimlessly, as though getting their bearings. They broke apart and bounced off in different directions, then, but all with seeming purpose. The editor noted one peculiarity about this set of monsters—their surfaces seemed to be made of gas mantles, stuck together in some way.
MARTIAN MONSTERS THE MCCOY
—
Plunder house, don gas mantles
He followed one of the trundling boxes up Park Avenue to the corner of Broadway, where it paused at a fire hydrant.
DOGS WILL BE ALIENS
But the box was
surrounding
the hydrant. It split apart, then closed over it. A moment later there came a small geyser from the assembly. He saw a sort of crude water-wheel, fashioned like a child’s pinwheel, spinning in the middle of the jet. A small box detached itself from the assembly and dashed away. Part of its surface, he noted, was of red-painted cast iron.
INVADER WEDS FIREPLUG
—
Can this marriage last?
In the distance the water tower, a giant golf ball on a tee, began to wilt. He watched it dent and collapse, as grey shapes swarmed over it.
AU REVOIR, OUR RESERVOIR
He thought of simply filling up the headline with question marks, but there were not enough in the type case to do so. There were not even enough to take care of all the questions he wanted to put to his readership.
He turned and headed for the office. It was only by chance that he peered in the door of Smilax’s Hardware—after all, like all the other buildings on the block, its windows were smashed—but what he saw made him halt.
What he did not see, rather. The store was utterly empty, looted clean. He found the owner, Milo Smilax, lying on the floor at the back, weeping. The metal frames from the bottom halves of his glasses were missing, naturally. He babbled of washing machines. Never a coherent man at best, Milo was now gubbling :
‘I’m a dead man, they ruint me ! The washing goddamned machines boxes washing machines ruint me eating guns. Help me mama don’t tell boxes tell fare thee Wellington remington Washington ne’er-do-well. They eat the coal scuttling like grabs up anything handy saws gone screws gone knives gone fishing rods the …’
Dr. Trivian would have said the shelves were unfulfilled. In fact, about all that remained were the seed catalogues, the price tags, and a worn, scuffed cardboard sign. Milo
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