Hand on the knob, he paused.

"Oh, Nugent," he called, "if you can't see the story I bring back, just
remember: it's in another dimension."

He slammed the door on Nugent's anger.

* * * * *

Early evening traffic was heavy as he pulled into the quiet,
old-fashioned street where Ewing lived.

Sober brownstone houses, their front steps rising steeply to stain-glass
paneled doors; heavily curtained bay windows; weather-stained and
rotting gingerbread; an atmosphere of reluctant decay and genteel
senescence. Ewing's house was like a dozen others in the same block.

Joey was not a man given to hunches, and yet, as he climbed out of his
car and stood staring up at the silent house, he could not repress a
shiver of apprehension.

He looked up the street. Nothing marred the quiet. A middle-aged woman
hurried home with her armload of groceries. A man paraded an ancient dog
on a leash.

Slowly, Joey climbed the steps. His apprehension was no more than the
resentment he felt for the assignment. He yanked the old-fashioned bell
and listened for its echoes dying deep in the house.

He fidgeted impatiently. Perhaps old Ewing wasn't at home. Or, maybe he
was so eccentric he no longer answered the bell. Joey jerked it again.

On the traffic-noisy boulevard a block away, he heard a raw squealing of
brakes.

Joey sighed and turned away. He'd wasted an hour. He started down the
steps. And the door opened.

Jason Ewing was very old. His incredibly blue eyes seemed alien in the
yellow parchment face. His clothing, his manner, even his speech were
archaic.

As Joey shook the bony hand, Ewing was apologizing for the delay.

"I was in my dark-room," he said--the voice strangely resonant to come
from so frail a chest--"and I had to get the developer off my hands."

Joey nodded and stepped inside. The atmosphere of the house was a
curious mixture of chemical and decay. There was a layer of dust on the
bric-a-brac, and as Joey followed the stooped figure from the entry-hall
into the living-room, he saw Ewing as a kind of insubstantial ghost,
moving through the deserted rooms so carefully that the dust was not
disturbed.

Ewing gestured to a chair which looked prim and uncomfortable in its
yellowed antimacassars. "Sit down, please, Mr. Barrett." He switched on
an ornate table lamp. "It's most kind of you to be interested in my
work."

Joey gave him the automatic smile. The room was a combinati