The House That Time Forgot by Robert F. Young

Author:Robert F. Young [Young, Robert F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Speculative Fiction, (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9781605435947
Google: -h-VpwAACAAJ
Amazon: 1605435937
Goodreads: 14454509
Publisher: Ramble House
Published: 2011-12-10T00:00:00+00:00

Standing there, she became aware of the intense cold. Had the furnace gone out? Slipping into her blue dressing gown, she hurried downstairs. The living room was like an ice box, the kitchen was like a deepfreeze. Holding her candle before her, she descended the basement stairs. The electric furnace had vanished. So had the electric hot-water tank. So had the water pipes and the wiring.

Well anyway, her teakettle was full.

She was trembling now, partly from fright, but mostly from the cold. Returning to the kitchen, she built a fire in the wood stove and when it was going good she went into the living room and built another one in the fireplace. As warmth rose around her, some of her confidence returned. Remembering that there was snow on the ground, she found a pan in the kitchen and stepped out onto the back porch. Instantly, the candlelight shrank into a tiny sphere of wan light and she found that she couldn’t see beyond a radius of two feet. The cold was unbearable, the blackness terrifying. She had a sudden, horrible conviction that the house no longer rested on solid earth and that if she were to step down from the porch, she would step into nothingness. Shuddering, she went back into the kitchen and closed the door.

The cordwood, she thought numbly. If I can’t get to the garage, how am I going to keep my fires going?

There could be only one answer, and presently it came to her : By burning the furniture.

Thus far, she had not reacted to the situation the way a normal person would have reacted. Living alone for so long, she had failed to consider the possibility that the catastrophe that had overtaken her might have overtaken others as well, that it might, in fact, have overtaken the entire world. When the thought finally occurred to her, she hurried back into the living room, hungry for the first time in years for the sound of a human voice. However, her hunger was not appeased. There wasn’t even an outline in the dust on the Sheraton sofa table to show where the phone had been.

She stood very still and clenched her hands into fists. “I won’t scream,” she said. “I won’t.”

Maybe somewhere in the house there was a transistor radio which she might have overlooked and which might still have enough power in its batteries to enable her to pick up a nearby station. It was a bright and shining hope while it lasted, but it didn’t last long. She knew without even having to think that if there had been such a radio, it no longer existed any more than the phone did, any more than anything else that was endemic to the house and in the least incongruous with the Nelson-and Nora period. Besides, even if one did exist and even if its batteries still had power in them, what good would it be to her? Radio waves couldn’t penetrate where light waves couldn’t.

_____________

PENETRATE? Penetrate what? She frowned, trying to think.

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