ned home and found his Aunt Katisha still
out that his overworked nerves, punished outrageously by shock,
violence and confusion, composed themselves enough to permit him a
reasonable guess as to what actually had happened--and by that time
his conclusions had taken a turn so fantastically improbable that he
was lost again in a hopeless muddle of surmise.

He poured himself a glass of milk in the kitchen (he preferred coffee,
but his Aunt Katisha frowned on the habit) and took his grisly
suspicions down to the clinic, where he felt more at ease than in the
antimacassared austerity of the house. There he mulled them over
again, and time was able to weave into the pattern the disjointed
impressions carried over from his period of semi-consciousness and
dismissed until now as nightmare figments from the delirium of shock.
Their alignment with other evidence increased his conviction:

Mr. Furnay and Menage, Oliver concluded with a cold thrill of horror,
were not human beings at all but monsters.

* * * * *

The pattern became even more disturbing when he considered various
stories of local saucer-sightings and fireballs, which linked
themselves with chilling germanity to the events of the day.

First there had been Champ's instant distrust of Mr. Furnay and
Bivins, and his attempt to rout them for the aliens they were. There
had been Bivins' anomalous scream when bitten--a raucous sound
certainly not human--and Mr. Furnay's grittily inconsonant order,
spoken in no identifiable earthly tongue. The isolation of the Furnay
estate took on a sinister and significant logic, as did its
understaffed condition; there was the evident but baffling reluctance
of Mr. Furnay and his myrmidons (with the notable exception of the
golden-voiced Pearl) to approach even safely caged beasts, and the
greater mystery of why a man so terrified of wild animals should have
bought a menagerie in the first place.

Considering the part played by Perrl-high-C-trill-and-A-above in a
scheme of things so fantastic left Oliver more disturbed than ever,
but for a different reason. That she was unarguably as alien as the
others made her equally mysterious, but connoted no share in whatever
devious plot occupied the Furnay faction; a reexamination of Mr.
Furnay's harshly dictatorial attitude toward her, coupled with
Oliver's own uncertain memory of the moment when the girl had come to
his rescue, convinced him that she was