Will said, "The strangeness is leaving us. I'm tired—I wish I did not have to talk, but I feel that I should."
He told us then what he had learned from Ala. This Big-City was the most populous place of the realm. Ala's parent—I might say her father, to make the term more specific—was leader of the Big-City people. One among them—one whom they called Brutar—had found a way to get into the Borderland. He had gone there—and I think that it was he whom we termed the first of the ghosts—whom we had seen that night on the little Vermont farm. He had returned, with tales of an outer world ... tales of the consciousness of a different body ... a physical being with pleasures unimagined....
The craze to follow him spread. An element undesirable among the people seemed most inspired to join him.
"Ala told me little more than that," Will went on. "The method they are using to get to the Borderland—I do not yet know. But I know that this Brutar—he would sweep with his followers into our world. Physically possessed, in a fashion they could not understand...."
He stopped with the sentence unfinished; it left me with a memory of that Kansas farmhouse, and of the young girl who had died of fright.
Bee asked, "What do they call themselves—these people? This race—beings—" She floundered. "There are no words, yet I have so much to ask."
He shook his head. "All that we have to learn. There is a civilization here—a mental existence in which we'll soon be taking a rational part. For myself, it is less strange every moment."
I nodded. "And Ala's people—they refuse to join in this invasion of our world?"
"Yes," he said. "They deplore it—they're trying to stop it. A meeting is to be held—Ala is coming to take us to it."
I drifted off into a reverie; and Ala came. I glanced up to see her beside us.