or
changed expression.

Panic seized Miller. His voice hit a high hysterical tenor as he called
to his soda-jerker.

"Pete! _Pete!_" he shouted. "What in God's name is wrong here!"

The blond youngster, with a towel wadded in a glass, did not stir.
Miller rushed from the back of the store, seized the boy by the
shoulders, tried to shake him. But Pete was rooted to the spot.

Miller knew, now, that what was wrong was something greater than a
hallucination or a hangover. He was in some kind of trap. His first
thought was to rush home and see if Helen was there. There was a great
sense of relief when he thought of her. Helen, with her grave blue eyes
and understanding manner, would listen to him and know what was the
matter.

* * * * *

He left the haunted drug store at a run, darted around the corner and up
the street to his car. But, though he had not locked the car, the door
resisted his twisting grasp. Shaking, pounding, swearing, Miller
wrestled with each of the doors.

Abruptly he stiffened, as a horrible thought leaped into his being. His
gaze left the car and wandered up the street. Past the intersection,
past the one beyond that, on up the thoroughfare until the gray haze of
the city dimmed everything. And as far as Dave Miller could see, there
was no trace of motion.

Cars were poised in the street, some passing other machines, some
turning corners. A street car stood at a safety zone; a man who had
leaped from the bottom step hung in space a foot above the pavement.
Pedestrians paused with one foot up. A bird hovered above a telephone
pole, its wings glued to the blue vault of the sky.

With a choked sound, Miller began to run. He did not slacken his pace
for fifteen minutes, until around him were the familiar, reassuring
trees and shrub-bordered houses of his own street. But yet how strange
to him!

The season was autumn, and the air filled with brown and golden leaves
that tossed on a frozen wind. Miller ran by two boys lying on a lawn,
petrified into a modern counterpart of the sculptor's "The Wrestlers."
The sweetish tang of burning leaves brought a thrill of terror to him;
for, looking down an alley from whence the smoke drifted, he saw a man
tending a fire whose leaping flames were red tongues that did not move.

Sobbing with relief, the young druggist darted up his own walk. He tried
the front door, found it locked, and jammed a thumb against the
doorbell. But