Free Invasion of the Body Snatchers by Jack Finney

then stubbed it out in the dirt beside him. "But I've been doing some reading lately, refreshing my mind on certain things I should have remembered before. Did you ever hear of the Mattoon Maniac?"
    We just shook our heads and waited.
    "Well" - Mannie clasped one knee between his interlocked fingers - "Mattoon is a town in Illinois, of maybe twenty thousand people, and something happened there that you can find described in textbooks on psychology.
    "On September 2, 1944, in the middle of the night, a woman phoned the police; someone had tried to kill her neighbour with poison gas. This neighbour, a woman, had awakened around midnight; her hushand was at work on the night shift of a factory. The woman's room was filled with a peculiar, sweet-smelling, sickening odour. She tried to get up, but her legs were paralyzed. She managed to crawl to the phone and call her neighbour, who notified the police.
    "The police arrived, and did what they could; they found a door unlocked, by which someone could have entered, but of course there was no one else around the house any more. A night or so later, the police got another call, and again found a partly paralyzed, very sick woman; someone had tried to kill her with poison gas. That same night, the same thing happened again, in another part of town. And when a dozen or more women were attacked in the same way on following nights, each sick and partly paralyzed from a sicklysmelling gas pumped into their rooms while they slept, the police knew they had a psychopath to find; a maniac, as the newspapers were calling him."
    Mannie plucked a weed, and began stripping the leaves from the stem." One night a woman saw the man. She awoke to see him silhouetted against her open bedroom window, and he was pumping something like an insecticide spray into her room. She got a whiff of the gas, screamed, and the man ran. But as he turned from the window, she got a good look at him; he was tall, quite thin, and was wearing what looked like a black skull cap.
    "Now the State Police were called in, because in only a single night, seven more women were gassed and partly paralyzed. Reporters were in town too, from the press services, and most of the Chicago newspapers; you can find accounts of all this in their files. At night now, in Mattoon, Illinois, in 1944, cars patrolled the streets filled with men carrying shotguns; neighbours organized into squads, patrolling their own blocks in shifts; and the attacks continued, and the maniac wasn't found.
    "Finally, one night, there were eight state squad cars in town, and a mobile radio unit. A doctor, prepared and waiting, was at the local Methodist hospital. That night, the police got a call, as usual; a woman, hardly able to speak, had been gassed by the madman. In less than a minute, one of the roving squad cars was at her house; she was rushed to the hospital and examined by the doctor." Mannie smiled. "He found absolutely nothing wrong with her; nothing. She was sent home, another call came in, and the second woman was rushed to the hospital, examined, and again there was nothing wrong with her. All night long that happened. The calls came in, the women were examined at the hospital within minutes, and every single one of them was sent back home."
    For a long moment Mannie studied our faces, then he said, "The cases that night were the last that ever happened in Mattoon; the epidemic was over. There was no maniac; there never had been one." He shook his head in puzzlement. "Mass hysteria, auto-suggestion, whatever you want to call it - that's what happened to Mattoon. Why? How?" Mannie shrugged. "I don't know. We give it names, but we don't really understand it. All we know for sure is that these things actually happen."
    I think Mannie saw, in my face and Jack's, a sort of stubborn unwillingness to accept the implications of what he was saying, because he turned to me and, voice patient, said, "Miles, you must have read, in med. school, about the Dancing