Yesterday House
By FRITZ LEIBER
Illustrated by ASHMAN
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Science Fiction August 1952.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Meeting someone who's been dead for twenty
years is shocking enough for anyone with a
belief in ghosts—worse for one with none!
I
The narrow cove was quiet as the face of an expectant child, yet sonear the ruffled Atlantic that the last push of wind carried the AnnieO. its full length. The man in gray flannels and sweatshirt let thesail come crumpling down and hurried past its white folds at a gaitmade comically awkward by his cramped muscles. Slowly the rocky ledgecame nearer. Slowly the blue V inscribed on the cove's surface by thesloop's prow died. Sloop and ledge kissed so gently that he hardly hadto reach out his hand.
He scrambled ashore, dipping a sneaker in the icy water, and threw theline around a boulder. Unkinking himself, he looked back through thecove's high and rocky mouth at the gray-green scattering of islandsand the faint dark line that was the coast of Maine. He almost laughedin satisfaction at having disregarded vague warnings and done the thingevery man yearns to do once in his lifetime—gone to the farthestisland out.
He must have looked longer than he realized, because by the time hedropped his gaze the cove was again as glassy as if the Annie O. hadalways been there. And the splotches made by his sneaker on the rockhad faded in the hot sun. There was something very unusual about thequietness of this place. As if time, elsewhere hurrying frantically,paused here to rest. As if all changes were erased on this one bit ofEarth.
The man's lean, melancholy face crinkled into a grin at the banalfancy. He turned his back on his new friend, the little green sloop,without one thought for his nets and specimen bottles, and set out toexplore. The ground rose steeply at first and the oaks were close, butafter a little way things went downhill and the leaves thinned and hecame out on more rocks—and realized that he hadn't quite gone to thefarthest one out.
Joined to this island by a rocky spine, which at the present low tidewould have been dry but for the spray, was another green, high islandthat the first had masked from him all the while he had been sailing.He felt a thrill of discovery, just as he'd wondered back in the woodswhether his might not be the first human feet to kick through theunderbrush. After all, there were thousands of these islands.
Then he was dropping down the rocks, his lanky limbs now movingsmoothly enough.
To the landward side of the spine, the water was fairly still. It evenbegan with another deep cove, in which he glimpsed the spiny spheresof sea urchins. But from seaward the waves chopped in, sprinkling histrousers to the knees and making him wince pleasurably at the thoughtof what vast wings of spray and towers of solid water must crash upfrom here in a storm.
He crossed the rocks at a trot, ran up a short grassy slope, racedthrough a fringe of trees—and came straight up against an eight-footfence of heavy mesh topped with barbed wire and backed at a shortdistance with high, heavy shrubbery.
Without pausing for surprise—in fact, in his holiday mood, usingsurprise as a goad—he jumped for the branch of an oak whose trunktouched the fence, scorning the easier lower branch on the other side