The sign flicked off again, in a way which Arthur was not at all certain he liked. It flicked off with a sort of contemptuous flourish. Arthur then tried to assure himself that this was just a ridiculous trick of his imagination. A neon sign is either on or off, depending on whether it has electricity running through it or not. There was no way, he told himself, that it could possibly effect the transition from one state to the other with a contemptuous flourish. He hugged himself tightly in his dressing gown and shivered, nevertheless.
The neon sign in the depths now suddenly lit up, bafflingly, with just three dots and a comma. Like this:
…,
Only in green neon.
It was trying, Arthur realized after staring at this perplexedly for a second or two, to indicate that there was more to come, that the sentence was not complete. Trying with almost superhuman pedantry, he reflected. Or at least, inhuman pedantry.
The sentence then completed itself with these two words:
Arthur Dent.
He reeled. He steadied himself to have another clear look at it. It still said Arthur Dent, so he reeled again.
Once again, the sign flicked off, and left him blinking in the darkness with just the dim red image of his name jumping on his retina.
Welcome, the sign now suddenly said.
After a moment, it added:
I Don’t Think.
The stone-cold fear which had been hovering about Arthur all this time, waiting for its moment, recognized that its moment had now come and pounced on him. He tried to fight it off. He dropped into a kind of alert crouch that he had once seen somebody do on television, but it must have been someone with stronger knees. He peered huntedly into the darkness.
Er, hello? he said.
He cleared his throat and said it again, more loudly and without the “er”. At some distance down the corridor it seemed suddenly as if somebody started to beat on a bass drum.
He listened to it for a few seconds and realized that it was just his heart beating.
He listened for a few seconds more and realized that it wasn’t his heart beating, it was somebody down the corridor beating on a bass drum.
Beads of sweat formed on his brow, tensed themselves, and leapt off. He put a hand out on the floor to steady his alert crouch, which wasn’t holding up very well. The sign changed itself again. It said:
Do Not be Alarmed.
After a pause, it added:
Be Very Very Frightened, Arthur Dent.
Once again it flicked off. Once again it left him in darkness. His eyes seemed to be popping out of his head. He wasn’t certain if this was because they were trying to see more clearly, or if they simply wanted to leave at this point.
Hello? he said again, this time trying to put a note of rugged and aggressive self-assertion into it. Is anyone there?
There was no reply, nothing.
This unnerved Arthur Dent even more than a reply would have done, and he began to back away from the scary nothingness. And the more he backed away, the more scared he became. After a while he realized that the reason for this was because of all the films he had seen in which the hero backs further and further away from some imagined terror in front of him, only to bump into it coming up from behind.
Just then it suddenly occurred to him to turn round rather quickly.
There was nothing there.
Just blackness.
This really unnerved him, and he started to back away from that, back the way he had come.
After doing this for a short while it suddenly occurred to him that he was now backing towards whatever it was he had been backing away from in the first place.
This, he couldn’t help thinking, must be a foolish thing to do. He decided he would be better off backing the way he had first been backing, and turned around again.
It turned out at this point that his second impulse had been the correct one, because there was an indescribably hideous monster standing quietly behind him. Arthur yawed wildly as his skin tried to jump one way and his skeleton the other, whilst his brain tried to work out which of his ears it most wanted to crawl out of.
Bet you weren’t expecting to see me again, said the monster, which Arthur couldn’t help thinking was a strange remark for it to make, seeing as he had never met the creature before. He could tell that he hadn’t met the creature before from the simple fact that he was able to sleep at nights. It was… it was… it was…
Arthur blinked at it. It stood very still. It did look a little familiar.
A terrible cold calm came over him as he realized that what he was looking at was a six-foot-high hologram of a housefly.
He wondered why anybody would be showing him a six-foot-high hologram of a housefly at this time. He wondered whose voice he had heard.
It was a terribly realistic hologram.
It vanished.