"No painting," the echo said, but West knew it was no echo, just his brain clicking off endlessly the words his lips had said.
"No painting," the echo said, but West was in some other world, some other place, some otherwhere. A machine that broke down the spacetime continuum or whatever it was that separated Man's universe from other, stranger universes.
No wonder the fruit upon the tree had looked like the fruit upon the table. No wonder he had thought that he heard the wind in the leaves.
West stood up and moved to the wall behind him. He found a tumbler and thumbed it up and the lights came on.
In the light the smashed other-world machine was a sagging piece of wreckage. Cartwright's body lay in the center of the room. A chittering thing ran across the floor and ducked into the dark beneath a table. A grinning face peeped out from behind a chair and squalled at West in cold-boned savagery.
And it was nothing new, for he had seen those faces before. Pictures of them in old books and in magazines that published tales of soul-shaking horror, tales of things that come from beyond, of entities that broke in from outside.
He had seen those faces before ... things that came from beyond, entities that broke in from the outside....