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grateful in a muddy way.
    Finished, Taine rose and picked up his shovel.
    â€œLet’s get to work,” he said.
    â€œBut you got all that stuff down in the basement.”
    â€œThat can wait,” said Taine. “This job we have to finish.”
    It was getting dusk by the time they finished.
    Taine leaned wearily on his shovel.
    Twelve feet by twenty across the top and ten feet deep – and all of it, every bit of it, made of the milk-glass stuff that sounded like a bell when you whacked it with a shovel.
    They’d have to be small, he thought, if there were many of them, to live in a space that size, especially if they had to stay there very long. And that fitted in, of course, for if they weren’t small they couldn’t now be living in the space between the basement joists.
    If they were really living there, thought Taine. If it wasn’t all just a lot of supposition.
    Maybe, he thought, even if they had been living in the house, they might be there no longer – for Towser had smelled or heard or somehow sensed them in the morning, but by that very night he’d paid them no attention.
    Taine slung his shovel across his shoulder and hoisted the pick.
    â€œCome on,” he said, “let’s go. We’ve put in a long, hard day.”
    They tramped out through the brush and reached the road.
    Fireflies were flickering off and on in the woody darkness and the street lamps were swaying in the summer breeze. The stars were hard and bright.
    Maybe they still were in the house, thought Taine. Maybe when they found out that Towser had objected to them, they had fixed it so he’d be aware of them no longer.
    They probably were highly adaptive. It stood to good reason they would have to be. It hadn’t taken them too long, he told himself grimly, to adapt to a human house.
    He and Beasly went up the gravel driveway in the dark to put the tools away in the garage and there was something funny going on, for there was no garage.
    There was no garage and there was no front on the house and the driveway was cut off abruptly and there was nothing but the curving wall of what apparently had been the end of the garage.
    They came up to the curving wall and stopped, squinting unbelieving in the summer dark.
    There was no garage, no porch, no front of the house at all. It was as if someone had taken the opposite corners of the front of the house and bent them together until they touched, folding the entire front of the building inside the curvature of the bent-together corners.
    He now had a curved-front house. Although it was, actually, not as simple as all that, for the curvature was not in proportion to what actually would have happened in case of such a feat. The curve was long and graceful and somehow not quite apparent. It was as if the front of the house had been eliminated and an illusion of the rest of the house had been summoned to mask the disappearance.
    Taine dropped the shovel and the pick and they clattered on the driveway gravel. He put his hand up to his face and wiped it across his eyes, as if to clear his eyes of something that could not possibly be there.
    And when he took the hand away it had not changed a bit.
    There was no front to the house.
    Then he was running around the house, hardly knowing he was running, and there was a fear inside of him at what had happened to the house.
    But the back of the house was all right. It was exactly as it had always been.
    He clattered up the stoop with Beasly and Towser running close behind him. He pushed open the door and burst into the entry and scrambled up the stairs into the kitchen and went across the kitchen in three strides to see what had happened to the front of the house.
    At the door between the kitchen and the living room he stopped and his hands went out to grasp the door jamb as he stared in disbelief at the windows of the living room.
    It was night outside. There could be no doubt of that. He had seen the fireflies