Tupper, I recalled, had been something of a pest. He'd been a pest with everyone, of course, but especially with me. He loved flowers and he'd hung around the greenhouse that my father had, and my father, who was constitutionally unable to be unkind to anyone, had put up with him and his continual jabber. Tupper had attached himself to me and no matter what I did or said, he'd tag along behind me. The fact that he was a good ten years older than I was made no difference at all; in his own mind Tupper never had outgrown childhood. In the back of my mind I still could hear his jaunty voice, mindlessly happy over anything at all, cooing over flowers or asking endless, senseless questions. I had hated him, of course, but there was really nothing one could pin a good hate on.

Tupper was just something that one had to tolerate. But I knew that I never would forget that jaunty, happy voice, or his drooling as he talked, or the habit that he had of counting on his fingers — God knows why he did it as if he were in continual fear that he might have lost one of them in the last few minutes.

The sun had come up by now and the world was flooded with a brilliant light, and I was becoming more certain by the minute that the village was encircled and cut off, that someone or something, for no apparent reason, had dropped a cage around us. Looking back along the way that I had come, I could see that I'd been travelling on the inside of a curve.

Looking ahead, the curve wasn't difficult to plot.

And why should it be us, I wondered. Why a little town like ours? A town that was no different from ten thousand other towns.

Although, I told myself; that might not be entirely true. It was exactly what I would have said and perhaps everybody else. Everyone, that is, except for Nancy Sherwood — Nancy, who only the night before had told me her strange theory that this town of ours was something very special. And could she be right, I wondered? Was our little town of Millville somehow set apart from all other little towns?