Part 3 (1/2)

It was as though someone had sh.o.r.ed up the house with a frame of metal and then laboriously concealed the evidence.

The biggest surprise was the upside-down boat hull that blocked the rear half of the cellar, relic of a brief home workshop period that Burckhardt had gone through a couple of years before. From above, it looked perfectly normal. Inside, though, where there should have been thwarts and seats and lockers, there was a mere tangle of braces, rough and unfinished.

”But I _built_ that!” Burckhardt exclaimed, forgetting his thumb. He leaned against the hull dizzily, trying to think this thing through.

For reasons beyond his comprehension, someone had taken his boat and his cellar away, maybe his whole house, and replaced them with a clever mock-up of the real thing.

”That's crazy,” he said to the empty cellar. He stared around in the light of the flash. He whispered, ”What in the name of Heaven would anybody do that for?”

Reason refused an answer; there wasn't any reasonable answer. For long minutes, Burckhardt contemplated the uncertain picture of his own sanity.

He peered under the boat again, hoping to rea.s.sure himself that it was a mistake, just his imagination. But the sloppy, unfinished bracing was unchanged. He crawled under for a better look, feeling the rough wood incredulously. Utterly impossible!

He switched off the flashlight and started to wriggle out. But he didn't make it. In the moment between the command to his legs to move and the crawling out, he felt a sudden draining weariness flooding through him.

Consciousness went--not easily, but as though it were being taken away, and Guy Burckhardt was asleep.

III

On the morning of June 16th, Guy Burckhardt woke up in a cramped position huddled under the hull of the boat in his bas.e.m.e.nt--and raced upstairs to find it was June 15th.

The first thing he had done was to make a frantic, hasty inspection of the boat hull, the faked cellar floor, the imitation stone. They were all as he had remembered them--all completely unbelievable.

The kitchen was its placid, unexciting self. The electric clock was purring soberly around the dial. Almost six o'clock, it said. His wife would be waking at any moment.

Burckhardt flung open the front door and stared out into the quiet street. The morning paper was tossed carelessly against the steps--and as he retrieved it, he noticed that this was the 15th day of June.

But that was impossible. _Yesterday_ was the 15th of June. It was not a date one would forget--it was quarterly tax-return day.

He went back into the hall and picked up the telephone; he dialed for Weather Information, and got a well-modulated chant: ”--and cooler, some showers. Barometric pressure thirty point zero four, rising ...

United States Weather Bureau forecast for June 15th. Warm and sunny, with high around--”

He hung the phone up. June 15th.

”Holy heaven!” Burckhardt said prayerfully. Things were very odd indeed. He heard the ring of his wife's alarm and bounded up the stairs.

Mary Burckhardt was sitting upright in bed with the terrified, uncomprehending stare of someone just waking out of a nightmare.

”Oh!” she gasped, as her husband came in the room. ”Darling, I just had the most _terrible_ dream! It was like an explosion and--”

”Again?” Burckhardt asked, not very sympathetically. ”Mary, something's funny! I _knew_ there was something wrong all day yesterday and--”

He went on to tell her about the copper box that was the cellar, and the odd mock-up someone had made of his boat. Mary looked astonished, then alarmed, then placatory and uneasy.

She said, ”Dear, are you _sure_? Because I was cleaning that old trunk out just last week and I didn't notice anything.”

”Positive!” said Guy Burckhardt. ”I dragged it over to the wall to step on it to put a new fuse in after we blew the lights out and--”

”After we what?” Mary was looking more than merely alarmed.