MISTAKE INSIDE
By JAMES BLISH
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Startling Stories, March 1948.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
This was England, two hundred years before bomb craters had become a fixed feature of the English landscape, and while the coffee house still had precedence over the pub. The fire roared, and the smoke from long clay church-warden pipes made a blue haze through which cheerful conversation struggled.
The door swung back, and the host stood in the opening, fat hands on hips, surveying the scene contentedly. Someone, invisible in the fog, drank a slurred uproarious toast, and a glass slammed into the fireplace, where the brandy-coated fragments made a myriad of small blue flames.
"Split me if that goes not in the reckoning!" the innkeeper bellowed. A ragged chorus of derision answered him. The inn cat shot down the stairs behind him, and its shadow glided briefly over the room as it passed the fire. It was an impossibly large, dark shadow, and for a moment it blacked out several of the booths in the rear of the chamber; the close, motionless air seemed to take on a chill. Then it was gone, and the cat, apparently annoyed by the noise, vanished into the depths of a heavy chair.
The host forgot about it. He was accustomed to its sedentary tastes. It often got sat on in the after-theater hilarity. He rolled good-naturedly across the room as someone pounded on a table for him.
But the cat, this time, had not merely burrowed into the cushions. It was gone. In the chair, in a curiously transparent condition which made him nearly invisible in the uncertain light, sat a dazed, tired figure in a Twentieth-Century Tux....
The radio was playing a melancholy opus called "Is You Is or Is You Ain't, My Baby," as the cab turned the corner. "Here you are, sir," croaked the driver in his three A.M. voice.