Out of Their Minds Read Online Free PDF Page A

narrow notch that climbed up from the main valley. And there, down in the notch was the road that I had driven and there was my car as well, slanted across the road. But of the house that had been there the night before there was now no sign. Nor of the barn, nor the corral or woodpile. There was nothing at all. Between the road and where I lay stretched a hillside pasture spotted with clumps of heavy brush, tangles of blackberry thickets, and scattered groups of trees.
    I might have thought it was a different place entirely had it not been for my car down there on the road. The car’s being there meant this was the place, all right, and that whatever had happened to change it must have happened to the house. And that was crazier than hell, for things like that simply do not happen. Houses and haystacks, corrals and woodpiles, and cars with their rear ends jacked up do not disappear.
    Back in the rear of the cave I heard a slithering sound and a dry rustling and something went very swift and hard across my ankles and lit with a crunching noise in a pile of winter-dried leaves just outside the cave.
    My body rebelled. It had been held in fear too long. It acted by an instinct which my mind was powerless to counteract and even as the reasoning part of me protested violently, I had already jackknifed out of the cave and was on my feet, crouching, on the hillside. In front of me and slightly to my right a snake was streaking down the hillside, going very fast. It reached a blackberry thicket and whipped into it and the sound of its movement stopped.
    All movement stopped and all sound and I stood there on the hillside, tensed against the movement and listening for the sound.
    Swiftly I scanned the ground all around me, then went over it more slowly and carefully. One of the first things that I saw was my jacket, bunched upon the ground, as if I had dropped it there most carefully—as if, I thought with something of a shock, I had meant to hang it on the chair back, but there had been no chair. Up the hillside just a pace or two were my shoes, set neatly side by side, their toes pointing down the hill. And when I saw the shoes I realized, for the first time, that I was in my stocking feet.
    There was no sign of snakes, although there was something stirring around in the back of the cave, where it was too dark for me to see. A bluebird winged down and settled on an old dry mullen stalk and looked at me with beady eyes and from somewhere, far off across the valley, came the tinkling of a cowbell.
    I reached out with a cautious toe and prodded at the jacket. There seemed to be nothing under it or inside of it, so I reached down and picked it up and shook it. Then I picked up the shoes and without stopping to put them on beat a retreat down the hillside, but very cautiously, holding in check an overpowering urge to run and get it over with, to get off the hillside and down to the car as quickly as I could. I went slowly, watching closely for snakes every foot of the way. The hillside, I knew, must be crawling with them—there had been the one upon my chest and the one that went across my ankles and the one still messing around in the back of the cave, plus God knew how many others.
    But I didn’t see a one. I stepped on a thistle with my right foot and had to go on tiptoe with that foot the rest of the way so I wouldn’t drive the spines that were sticking in the sock into my flesh, but there weren’t any snakes—none visible, at least.
    Maybe, I thought, they were as afraid of me as I was of them. But I told myself they couldn’t be. I found that I was shaking and that my teeth were chattering and at the bottom of the hill, just above the road, I sat down weakly on a patch of grass, well away from any thicket or boulder where a snake might lurk and picked the thistle spines out of my sock. I tried to put on my shoes, but my hands were shaking so I couldn’t and it was then I realized how frightened