The Ghost of a Model T: And Other Stories

  The light through the windows slowly grew brighter. Mr. Chambers slid out of bed, slowly crossed to the window, the cold of the floor biting into his bare feet. He forced himself to look out.

  There was nothing outside the window. No shadows. As if there might be a fog. But no fog, however thick, could hide the apple tree that grew close against the house.

  But the tree was there … shadowy, indistinct in the gray, with a few withered apples still clinging to its boughs, a few shriveled leaves reluctant to leave the parent branch.

  The tree was there now. But it hadn’t been when he first had looked. Mr. Chambers was sure of that.

  And now he saw the faint outlines of his neighbor’s house … but those outlines were all wrong. They didn’t jibe and fit together … they were out of plumb. As if some giant hand had grasped the house and wrenched it out of true. Like the house he had seen across the street the night before, the house that had painfully righted itself when he thought of how it should look.

  Perhaps if he thought of how his neighbor’s house should look, it too might right itself. But Mr. Chambers was very weary. Too weary to think about the house.

  He turned from the window and dressed slowly. In the living room he slumped into his chair, put his feet on the old cracked ottoman. For a long time he sat, trying to think.

  And then, abruptly, something like an electric shock ran through him. Rigid, he sat there, limp inside at the thought. Minutes later he arose and almost ran across the room to the old mahogany bookcase that stood against the wall.

  There were many volumes in the case: his beloved classics on the first shelf, his many scientific works on the lower shelves. The second shelf contained but one book. And it was around this book that Mr. Chambers’ entire life was centered.

  Twenty years ago he had written it and foolishly attempted to teach its philosophy to a class of undergraduates. The newspapers, he remembered, had made a great deal of it at the time. Tongues had been set to wagging. Narrow-minded townsfolk, failing to understand either his philosophy or his aim, but seeing in him another exponent of some anti-rational cult, had forced his expulsion from the school.

  It was a simple book, really, dismissed by most authorities as merely the vagaries of an over-zealous mind.

  Mr. Chambers took it down now, opened its cover and began thumbing slowly through the pages. For a moment the memory of happier days swept over him.

  Then his eyes focused on the paragraph, a paragraph written so long ago the very words seemed strange and unreal:

  Man himself, by the power of mass suggestion, holds the physical fate of this earth … yes, even the universe. Billions of minds seeing trees as trees, houses as houses, streets as streets … and not as something else. Minds that see things as they are and have kept things as they were. … Destroy those minds and the entire foundation of matter, robbed of its regenerative power, will crumple and slip away like a column of sand. …

  His eyes followed down the page:

  Yet this would have nothing to do with matter itself … but only with matter’s form. For while the mind of man through long ages may have moulded an imagery of that space in which he lives, mind would have little conceivable influence upon the existence of that matter. What exists in our known universe shall exist always and can never be destroyed, only altered or transformed.

  But in modern astrophysics and mathematics we gain an insight into the possibility … yes probability … that there are other dimensions, other brackets of time and space impinging on the one we occupy.

  If a pin is thrust into a shadow, would that shadow have any knowledge of the pin? It would not, for in this case the shadow is two dimensional, the pin three dimensional. Yet both occupy the same space.

  Granting then that the power of men’s minds alone holds this universe, or at least this world in its present form, may we not go farther and envision other minds in some other plane watching us, waiting, waiting craftily for the time they can take over the domination of matter? Such a concept is not impossible. It is a natural conclusion if we accept the double hypothesis: that mind does control the formation of all matter; and that other worlds lie in juxtaposition with ours.

  Perhaps we shall come upon a day, far distant, when our plane, our world will dissolve beneath our feet and before our eyes as some stronger intelligence reaches out from the dimensional shadows of the very space we live in and wrests from us the matter which we know to be our own.

  He stood astounded beside the bookcase, his eyes staring unseeing into the fire upon the hearth.

  He had written that. And because of those words he had been called a heretic, had been compelled to resign his position at the university, had been forced into this hermit life.

  A tumultuous idea hammered at him. Men had died by the millions all over the world. Where there had been thousands of minds there now were one or two. A feeble force to hold the form of matter intact.

  The plague had swept Europe and Asia almost clean of life, had blighted Africa, had reached South America … might even have come to the United States. He remembered the whispers he had heard, the words of the men at the drugstore corner, the buildings disappearing. Something scientists could not explain. But those were merely scraps of information. He did not know the whole story … he could not know. He never listened to the radio, never read a newspaper.

  But abruptly the whole thing fitted together in his brain like the missing piece of a puzzle into its slot. The significance of it all gripped him with damning clarity.

  There were not sufficient minds in existence to retain the material world in its mundane form. Some other power from another dimension was fighting to supersede man’s control and take his universe into its own plane!

  Abruptly Mr. Chambers closed the book, shoved it back in the case and picked up his hat and coat.

  He had to know more. He had to find someone who could tell him.

  He moved through the hall to the door, emerged into the street. On the walk he looked skyward, trying to make out the sun. But there wasn’t any sun … only an all pervading grayness that shrouded everything … not a gray fog, but a gray emptiness that seemed devoid of life, of any movement.

  The walk led to his gate and there it ended, but as he moved forward the sidewalk came into view and the house ahead loomed out of the gray, but a house with differences.

  He moved forward rapidly. Visibility extended only a few feet and as he approached them the houses materialized like two dimensional pictures without perspective, like twisted cardboard soldiers lining up for review on a misty morning.

  Once he stopped and looked back and saw that the grayness had closed in behind him. The houses were wiped out, the sidewalk faded into nothing.

  He shouted, hoping to attract attention. But his voice frightened him. It seemed to ricochet up and into the higher levels of the sky, as if a giant door had been opened to a mighty room high above him.

  He went on until he came to the corner of Lexington. There, on the curb, he stopped and stared. The gray wall was thicker there but he did not realize how close it was until he glanced down at his feet and saw there was nothing, nothing at all beyond the curbstone. No dull gleam of wet asphalt, no sign of a street. It was as if all eternity ended here at the corner of Maple and Lexington.

  With a wild cry, Mr. Chambers turned and ran. Back down the street he raced, coat streaming after him in the wind, bowler hat bouncing on his head.

  Panting, he reached the gate and stumbled up the walk, thankful that it still was there.

  On the stoop he stood for a moment, breathing hard. He glanced back over his shoulder and a queer feeling of inner numbness seemed to well over him. At that moment the gray nothingness appeared to thin … the enveloping curtain fell away, and he saw. …

  Vague and indistinct, yet cast in stereoscopic outline, a gigantic city was limned against the darkling
sky. It was a city fantastic with cubed domes, spires, and aerial bridges and flying buttresses. Tunnel-like streets, flanked on either side by shining metallic ramps and runways, stretched endlessly to the vanishing point. Great shafts of multicolored light probed huge streamers and ellipses above the higher levels.

  And beyond, like a final backdrop, rose a titanic wall. It was from that wall … from its crenelated parapets and battlements that Mr. Chambers felt the eyes peering at him.

  Thousands of eyes glaring down with but a single purpose.

  And as he continued to look, something else seemed to take form above that wall. A design this time, that swirled and writhed in the ribbons of radiance and rapidly coalesced into strange geometric features, without definite line or detail. A colossal face, a face of indescribable power and evil, it was, staring down with malevolent composure.

  Then the city and the face slid out of focus; the vision faded like a darkened magic-lantern, and the grayness moved in again.

  Mr. Chambers pushed open the door of his house. But he did not lock it. There was no need of locks … not any more.

  A few coals of fire still smouldered in the grate and going there, he stirred them up, raked away the ash, piled on more wood. The flames leaped merrily, dancing in the chimney’s throat.

  Without removing his hat and coat, he sank exhausted in his favorite chair, closed his eyes, then opened them again.

  He sighed with relief as he saw the room was unchanged. Everything in its accustomed place: the clock, the lamp, the elephant ash tray, the marine print on the wall.

  Everything was as it should be. The clock measured the silence with its measured ticking; it chimed abruptly and the vase sent up its usual sympathetic vibration.

  This was his room, he thought. Rooms acquire the personality of the person who lives in them, become a part of him. This was his world, his own private world, and as such it would be the last to go.

  But how long could he … his brain … maintain its existence?

  Mr. Chambers stared at the marine print and for a moment a little breath of reassurance returned to him. They couldn’t take this away. The rest of the world might dissolve because there was insufficient power of thought to retain its outward form.

  But this room was his. He alone had furnished it. He alone, since he had first planned the house’s building, had lived here.

  This room would stay. It must stay on … it must. …

  He rose from his chair and walked across the room to the book case, stood staring at the second shelf with its single volume. His eyes shifted to the top shelf and swift terror gripped him.

  For all the books weren’t there. A lot of books weren’t there! Only the most beloved, the most familiar ones.

  So the change already had started here! The unfamiliar books were gone and that fitted in the pattern … for it would be the least familiar things that would go first.

  Wheeling, he stared across the room. Was it his imagination, or did the lamp on the table blur and begin to fade away?

  But as he stared at it, it became clear again, a solid, substantial thing.

  For a moment real fear reached out and touched him with chilly fingers. For he knew that this room no longer was proof against the thing that had happened out there on the street.

  Or had it really happened? Might not all this exist within his own mind? Might not the street be as it always was, with laughing children and barking dogs? Might not the Red Star confectionery still exist, splashing the street with the red of its neon sign?

  Could it be that he was going mad? He had heard whispers when he had passed, whispers the gossiping housewives had not intended him to hear. And he had heard the shouting of boys when he walked by. They thought him mad. Could he be really mad?

  But he knew he wasn’t mad. He knew that he perhaps was the sanest of all men who walked the earth. For he, and he alone, had foreseen this very thing. And the others had scoffed at him for it.

  Somewhere else the children might be playing on a street. But it would be a different street. And the children undoubtedly would be different too.

  For the matter of which the street and everything upon it had been formed would now be cast in a different mold, stolen by different minds in a different dimension.

  Perhaps we shall come upon a day, far distant, when our plane, our world will dissolve beneath our feet and before our eyes as some stronger intelligence reaches out from the dimensional shadows of the very space we live in and wrests from us the matter which we know to be our own.

  But there had been no need to wait for that distant day. Scant years after he had written those prophetic words the thing was happening. Man had played unwittingly into the hands of those other minds in the other dimension. Man had waged a war and war had bred a pestilence. And the whole vast cycle of events was but a detail of a cyclopean plan.

  He could see it all now. By an insidious mass hypnosis minions from that other dimension … or was it one supreme intelligence … had deliberately sown the seeds of dissension. The reduction of the world’s mental power had been carefully planned with diabolic premeditation.

  On impulse he suddenly turned, crossed the room and opened the connecting door to the bedroom. He stopped on the threshold and a sob forced its way to his lips.

  There was no bedroom. Where his stolid four poster and dresser had been there was greyish nothingness.

  Like an automaton he turned again and paced to the hall door. Here, too, he found what he had expected. There was no hall, no familiar hat rack and umbrella stand.

  Nothing. …

  Weakly Mr. Chambers moved back to his chair in the corner.

  “So here I am,” he said, half aloud.

  So there he was. Embattled in the last corner of the world that was left to him.

  Perhaps there were other men like him, he thought. Men who stood at bay against the emptiness that marked the transition from one dimension to another. Men who had lived close to the things they loved, who had endowed those things with such substantial form by power of mind alone that they now stood out alone against the power of some greater mind.

  The street was gone. The rest of his house was gone. This room still retained its form.

  This room, he knew, would stay the longest. And when the rest of the room was gone, this corner with his favorite chair would remain. For this was the spot where he had lived for twenty years. The bedroom was for sleeping, the kitchen for eating. This room was for living. This was his last stand.

  These were the walls and floors and prints and lamps that had soaked up his will to make them walls and prints and lamps.

  He looked out the window into a blank world. His neighbors’ houses already were gone. They had not lived with them as he had lived with this room. Their interests had been divided, thinly spread; their thoughts had not been concentrated as his upon an area four blocks by three, or a room fourteen by twelve.

  Staring through the window, he saw it again. The same vision he had looked upon before and yet different in an indescribable way. There was the city illumined in the sky. There were the elliptical towers and turrets, the cube-shaped domes and battlements. He could see with stereoscopic clarity the aerial bridges, the gleaming avenues sweeping on into infinitude. The vision was nearer this time, but the depth and proportion had changed … as if he were viewing it from two concentric angles at the same time.

  And the face … the face of magnitude … of power of cosmic craft and evil. …

  Mr. Chambers turned his eyes back into the room. The clock was ticking slowly, steadily. The greyness was stealing into the room.

  The table and radio were the first to go. They simply faded away and with them went one corner of the room.

  And then the elephant ash tray.

  “Oh, well,” said Mr. Chambers, “I never did like that very well.”

 
Now as he sat there it didn’t seem queer to be without the table or the radio. It was as if it were something quite normal. Something one could expect to happen.

  Perhaps, if he thought hard enough, he could bring them back.

  But, after all, what was the use? One man, alone, could not stand off the irresistible march of nothingness. One man, all alone, simply couldn’t do it.

  He wondered what the elephant ash tray looked like in that other dimension. It certainly wouldn’t be an elephant ash tray nor would the radio be a radio, for perhaps they didn’t have ash trays or radios or elephants in the invading dimension.

  He wondered, as a matter of fact, what he himself would look like when he finally slipped into the unknown. For he was matter, too, just as the ash tray and radio were matter.

  He wondered if he would retain his individuality … if he still would be a person. Or would he merely be a thing?

  There was one answer to all of that. He simply didn’t know.

  Nothingness advanced upon him, ate its way across the room, stalking him as he sat in the chair underneath the lamp. And he waited for it.

  The room, or what was left of it, plunged into dreadful silence.

  Mr. Chambers started. The clock had stopped. Funny … the first time in twenty years.

  He leaped from his chair and then sat down again.

  The clock hadn’t stopped.

  It wasn’t there.

  There was a tingling sensation in his feet.

  The Ghost of a Model T

  This story first appeared in 1975 in the original anthology Epoch, edited by Robert Silverberg and Roger Elwood; and Cliff considered it one of his best. As he said in the afterword to that publication, it was “pure nostalgia” (and he added that people of later times have misinterpreted what the “Roaring Twenties” were all about …).