n turned around and went
back to Grant again and on to Lexington. Then back to Grant
again, where he stood astounded while a single, incredible fact
grew slowly in his brain:

_There wasn't any confectionery! The block from Marshall to Grant
had disappeared!_

Now he understood why he had missed the store on the night
before, why he had arrived home fifteen minutes early.

On legs that were dead things he stumbled back to his home. He
slammed and locked the door behind him and made his way
unsteadily to his chair in the corner.

What was this? What did it mean? By what inconceivable
necromancy could a paved street with houses, trees and buildings
be spirited away and the space it had occupied be closed up?

Was something happening in the world which he, in his secluded
life, knew nothing about?

Mr. Chambers shivered, reached to turn up the collar of his coat,
then stopped as he realized the room must be warm. A fire blazed
merrily in the grate. The cold he felt came from something ...
somewhere else. The cold of fear and horror, the chill of a half
whispered thought.

A deathly silence had fallen, a silence still measured by the
pendulum clock. And yet a silence that held a different tenor than
he had ever sensed before. Not a homey, comfortable silence ... but
a silence that hinted at emptiness and nothingness.

There was something back of this, Mr. Chambers told himself.
Something that reached far back into one corner of his brain and
demanded recognition. Something tied up with the fragments of
talk he had heard on the drugstore corner, bits of news
broadcasts he had heard as he walked along the street, the
shrieking of the newsboy calling his papers. Something to do with
the happenings in the world from which he had excluded himself.

* * * * *

He brought them back to mind now and lingered over the one
central theme of the talk he overheard: the wars and plagues.
Hints of a Europe and Asia swept almost clean of human life, of
the plague ravaging Africa, of its appearance in South America,
of the frantic efforts of the United States to prevent its spread
into that nation's boundaries.

Millions of people were dead in Europe and Asia, Africa and South
America. Billions, perhaps.

And somehow those gruesome statistics seemed tied up with his own
experience. Something, somewhere, some part of his earlier life,
seemed to hold an explanation. But try as he would his befud