The Darrell Schweitzer MEGAPACK ®. Darrell Schweitzer

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      “Yeah,” I said, and hurried over to the pay phone, which was in the back by the store’s single video-game machine.

      I hesitated for a moment, as if before some irrevocable decision, and then dialed Joe’s number. Luck was with me. He was the one who answered the phone.

      “Very funny,” I said.

      “What? What’s funny?”

      “Joe, this is Alan Summers.”

      “Alan! I hope Martina told you about the party. Come on over, old pal, old buddy! Fred’s here, and Roger, and Bob Steele. You know how hard it is to make them wait on a good poker game.”

      “Look,” I said as slowly and deliberately as I could. “I’m at the grocery down the street. I have already been to your house, but you turned me away like I was a complete stranger barging in uninvited. Now would you mind telling me why?”

      There was a pause.

      “Joe?”

      “Alan…I don’t get what you’re saying. I have been here all along, with the others, and no one has come to the door since half an hour ago, when Roger arrived. I think you are the one who needs to explain.”

      “I can’t,” I said. “I’ll be right over, okay? Then maybe this’ll make some sort of sense.”

      “Okay.” His voice was cold, uncertain.

      I hung up and leaned against the wall by the phone, swaying, both hands pressed against my temples. I wondered if I had gone completely mad. But that was a feeble excuse, too. I knew perfectly well I hadn’t. Nobody who is crazy thinks he is crazy. The complete raving loony thinks he is the only sane person in the world, surrounded by nut cases too stupid to understand him. I was beginning to be genuinely afraid.

      “You all right?” the clerk at the counter asked. “Yeah, sure. Thanks.”

      I hurried from the store.

      When I got back to Joe’s house, my gut-level instinct told me that the most sensible thing to do, the safest thing, the way to escape, was to just get into my car and drive home and tell myself lies over and over until I was convinced this had never happened.

      But it had happened, and I knew it had, and something else inside me drove me to walk up to that door and ring the bell again. I rang it. Once more the dog enthusiastically announced my arrival.

      The door opened, and there was Joe again, holding the dog by the collar. I stared, sure I was seeing things.

      It wasn’t the same dog. It wasn’t Woof at all, but a large, purebred, yellow-and-white collie which also, somehow, seemed to know me.

      “Why have you come back?”

      I pushed my way past him, into the living room. He had his hands full trying to restrain the dog, which was still trying to lick my face, yelping excitedly all the while.

      “Joe,” I said, turning to him. “I don’t know if I’ve done something wrong, but if I have, I’m sorry. Still, no matter what it was, you don’t have to treat me like I’m some bum in off the street. What the hell is going on?”

      I felt the fear again, the cords of the elevator cable snapping one by one, faster now, the plunge beginning.

      He was obviously afraid too.

      “I don’t know how you know my name,” he said, “and maybe this is a mistake of some sort, but I still don’t know who you are, mister, or why you are here or what you want, but I want you out of my house right now!”

      “Joe! It’s me, Alan Summers, your friend! What is this?”

      “Joe? Who’s at the door?” a woman called from the next room. I knew the voice, of course. It belonged to Alice, Joe’s wife. I’d known her as long as I’d known Joe, eight or nine years. She was my one hope.

      “Alice!” I yelled. “Alice, come here please.” She came, saw me, and stopped.

      “Joe, who is this man? Some friend of yours?”

      “I swear to God,” he said. “I’ve never seen him before in my life. Only he was here five minutes ago, trying to get in like he owned the place.”

      She began to back away, one hand over her mouth, staring at me wide-eyed. “Do you want me to call the police?” she said.

      “No,” I said softly. “You don’t have to do that. It’s all a mistake. I’ll go. I’m sorry to have disturbed you.”

      A minute later I was on the sidewalk, making my way slowly back to the grocery store, running my hand along the wooden fence in the front of my friend’s yard. I wanted to go back to the store, to call him on the phone again and plead with him, but I couldn’t. I just stood there, cold and wet and afraid. I must have stood still for five or ten minutes. Then I was in my car, completely drenched, my teeth chattering, crying like a lost child.

      * * * *

      I got home very late that night. It must have been past two. I spent the hours just driving aimlessly, trying to think, to make sense out of what was happening to me. I kept coming back to the fact that the dog knew me, as if that meant something, as if that were the key, but it meant nothing and there was no key. And the dog had changed between one time and the next, which was completely impossible, of course, but no more impossible than the idea that some malign, cosmic equivalent of Nixon’s secretary Rosemary Woods had performed incredible contortions to erase part of my life, leaving these inexplicable eighteen-minute gaps. No, it wasn’t that.

      I remember sitting at a stoplight on an empty, rain-slick street, gazing up at Billy Penn’s statue atop City Hall, wondering if it really was the same statue I’d always known, or one which was, somehow, different.

      When I finally turned the bolt on the door and stood in my own living room, Martina called down from the top of the stairs. “Alan? Is that you?”

      “I…think so.”

      “Alan, are you all right? I got worried, so I called the Meeses, and Joe said you’d called once but never showed up. I didn’t know what to do next.”

      “I don’t know what to do next either,” I said softly.

      “What?”

      I took off my raincoat and my regular coat, which was also wet, and looked around for a place to put them. There was none, so I hung them on the doorknob.

      “Martina…Marty…please come down and talk to me. Just come down.” My voice broke. I was crying again.

      She came down, in curlers and bathrobe and slippers, a concerned expression on her face. For an instant I felt the most hopeless, helpless terror I had ever known, as I was certain she didn’t recognize me and was about to run up the stairs and call the police. But she merely paused, two steps from the bottom, then continued cautiously, startled, bewildered, but not acting at all like a woman who confronts a total stranger in her house late at night.

      “What’s wrong, Alan?”

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