Page:Weird tales v36n07 1942-09.djvu/16

daddy and mother left it. I'll take you there."

Before driving from the square, Mulvaney cast a glance about in search of Joan. But she had slipped away with the dispersing crowd and he did not see her.

Mulvaney was not surprised to learn that the house his parents had occupied was vacant and waiting for him. He was not even surprised to discover that it was clean and well-kept in spite of the twenty years or more it had been separated from its owners. The people of the valley look after their own, he thought to himself.

"We figured they'd come back sooner or later," Jordan told him. "We kept it ready."

No, Mulvaney was not surprised. There was something about the atmosphere of this strange valley, its town and its people that precluded the possibility of such feeling.

Long shadows had begun to steal across the valley bottom when Jordan left him in the large, frame dwelling that was his by birthright. He stood in the middle of the worn carpet in the living room. Outside the window, the leaves of a dusty cottonwood fluttered in the evening breeze.

Mulvaney brought his glance inside with an effort. He looked lingeringly over the old-fashioned furnishings. A sofa, a platform rocker, a couple of straightback chairs, what-not shelves in the corners, loaded with bric-a-brac. It was here—in this very room, amid these same surroundings—he had played when he was a baby.

He was home. He took time out to think of that. Home. He had lived from his sixth to his eighteenth year in an orphanage. The following seven years he had spent wandering from job to job. Never long in one place, never one to make friends, he had always been restless, unquiet. Was this what he had hunted all those years—without knowing it? He was home now.

He sat suddenly on the sofa, and it creaked under his weight. He rubbed his hand over his eyes. He had driven quite a distance today. He was tired. He wasn't hungry at all.

Twilight came to the valley. Gloom rushed in to fill the corners of every room in the old house.

Mulvaney stood erect at last and groped his way to the lamp he had observed earlier on the dining table. He struck a light and held it to the oily wick.

Odd people—an odd place. He resented Bock Martin—the way he had looked at Joan. He saw the girl's lovely young face in his imagination. A pleasant tingle passed through his flesh.

He held the lamp high to light his passage up the creaking stairs. The whole place was wrong somehow. He felt it even more strongly now. He couldn't place the wrongness. Gave him an eerie feeling, though.

In a bedroom upstairs, he placed the lamp on a dresser. The wick flared, casting grotesque flickers throughout the room. He leaned forward and scanned himself in the glass. He was Kenneth Mulvaney, just as he always had been. He would not have been surprised to find himself different, too.

He recalled Joan telling the crowd to look at his eyes. He squinted, frowning. There was a difference there, somehow. They seemed to lack their normal luster. The look of them reminded him of—The valley people! It was the look that characterized their eyes!

He could not understand the significance of this fact, but it troubled him. He turned around to survey his surroundings and reeled with his discovery. Sweat gathered on his forehead as he recognized now the wrongness that had haunted him. It had been the same with Joan Jordan—with the valley people—and now—himself. His body, as hard, physical, opaque as ever