There was the crackle of paper, the faint shuffling of feet, and then nothing but silence. Dave Dawson took that moment to turn his head slowly until he met Freddy Farmer's wide, angry eyes. But he gazed into Freddy's eyes for only an instant, for he suddenly noticed not four inches from the end of his nose a long quarter-inch crack between two of the wall boards. Young Farmer spotted it almost at the same time. And holding their breath, the two air aces inched over until they each could put an eye to the crack.
At first Dawson could see nothing but the shadowy interior of a filthy room. Dust, dirt, and dried yellow mud were everywhere. Scraps of rags were strewn all about. And there were several empty rusty cans lying about on the filthy floor. He gave all that but a passing glance, because as his eye became adjusted to the bad light inside he was able to see the head and shoulders of a uniformed figure. His heart leaped up to clog his throat when he saw that it was the uniform of a Naval Aviation Ensign. The man was standing side to, so Dave had only a profile view of the face. And it was a very ordinary face. No single feature stood out prominently. He had seen thousands of faces just like it. He could see, though, that the hair below the service cap was straw-colored, and he guessed that the eyes were sky blue. And the neck, perhaps, was just a little thicker than the average neck of a man of that height.
Of the other figure in the room, though, he could see nothing. No matter how hard he pressed his eye to the crack, a sliver of wood on the other side of the wall board blocked out everything else.
And then from out of nowhere, it came!
A sixth sense, more than his ears, told him that there was sound and swift movement behind him. He jerked his head around, caught a flash glimpse of Freddy Farmer turning his head, and then the California sky fell down on top of him. All the bombs in the world exploded inside his head, and the whole world was made up only of dazzling white flashes of lightning. But unconsciousness did not engulf him at once. He knew that he was lunging out with both hands, and clawing at rough coarse fabric. He even heard a snarl, a cry of pain, and the scream of a fiend gone completely berserk.
But whether that scream came from his own lips, or from another's, he did not know. A split second later, he didn't know anything at all. The California sky crashed down on him again and drove him deep into a yawning chasm of utter darkness and silence.
CHAPTER FOUR
Vanishing Death
For a long, long time Dave Dawson stared at the limitless expanse of cream white. And then little by little the throbbing ache ceased to befuddle his brain, and he became conscious of the fact that the expanse of cream white was the ceiling of a room. He also became conscious of the fact that he was flat on his back in a bed, and that the countless smells of a hospital were in his nostrils. To his right was a window, and when he slowly turned his head on the pillow he found himself staring out at the clear blue, cloudless California sky. He closed his eyes for a moment, but when he opened them again the scene was still the same.