Otherworldly Maine by Noreen Doyle

and there was much too little of the schematic to infer anything meaningful. (This was confirmed by the International Institute of Scientific Phenomena in New York, to whom we later turned it over.) So the editors of this magazine contacted the Washington County sheriff’s office by telephone, requesting permission to inspect the cylinder in person. Deputy Durham Stone told us:
    â€œSave yourself the trip. Thing’s missing. Me and the sheriff, we went back to the office to get the pickup truck, so’s we could haul it to the compound, but when we got back up to the house it was gone. Plain disappeared! . . . Say, how come you city folks want to come all the way out to these parts to see that thing anyway? It’s just an old liquid propane gas tank, if you ask me.”
    The deputy’s comments made us all the more curious—not to mention suspicious—so our managing editor drove up anyway. And while he could not locate the cylinder at the compound, or at the ruins, or even in the nearby woods, the trip was amply rewarded. Through certain inducements, EQMM managed to borrow (and re-record) the tape of the official statement made to Sheriff Joe Bartheme by Beryl Ward the day she reported Masterson missing. In a quavering voice that frequently broke down (as indicated by ellipses), here’s what she said:
    â€œWhen Grist didn’t come upstairs for the dinner I left by the door—did that every day for him—I called but he didn’t answer. That got me worried . . . . He kept the basement door locked, so I went round to the side of the house to look in a window—but they were painted black. I’d never noticed that before. I knocked and knocked on the glass; still there was no answer. That really got me upset; I thought he’d had a heart attack or something so I got an axe out of the shed and started hitting the lock on the storm-shelter door. Finally the lock fell apart and I went in . . . . Didn’t see Griswold anywhere. All I found were a bunch of tubes and wires and gadgets, plus some weird charts on the wall . . . What really amazed me was the big Bible on the stand: It was opened to Genesis.” ( Editor’s note: no trace of a Bible was ever found .) “In the back room of the basement I found this . . . kind of a cylinder, I guess . . . set up on a log-cutting horse. And it was glowing. So help me! . . . Top and bottom were rounded off; looked like a huge vitamin pill, or a miniature rocket ship . . . . I did what I knew would’ve made Griswold very angry, but I couldn’t help myself. Guess I wanted to know once and for all what he was up to—why he stayed up night after night—why his work was more important to him than . . . anything else in the world. I started unscrewing the cap . . . . All of a sudden there was a tremendous whoosh and I heard this weird, high-pitched squeal: Scared the daylights out of me, but I looked inside and saw . . . I couldn’t believe it—I found a baby . . . . Just a few months old—a naked baby! It looked up at me as if I were its mother. I was confused, I was frightened . . . . First I wanted to run away, but instincts much deeper took hold of me, I guess. I reached in and pulled the baby out. A fine child, with purplish eyes and silky skin. It didn’t even cry. Just looked at me—poor thing!—and stopped breathing . . . . I wondered where Griswold had gotten the baby, what he was doing with it—all sorts of weird things I wondered until I spotted, off in a black corner. . . I saw Griswold’s gray trousers and lab smock, his underwear and socks all neatly folded on a bench . . . .”
    At this point Miss Ward became silent, and when Sheriff Bartheme asked (more than once) what she did next, she broke down and cried hysterically. Nothing else on the tape was coherent. Later that afternoon Beryl Ward had to be removed from the house in a state police straight-jacket, kicking and