“Vintage Season” (1946)

[spoilers] On ISFDB this long story is credited to C.L. Moore and her husband and frequent collaborator Henry Kuttner, but the Alfred Hitchcock-branded anthology where I found it credits only Moore. Wikipedia says it’s mainly Moore. Both Moore and Kuttner won kudos for their work in horror and/or weird literature, together and apart, so it’s all the same to me. I’ve read some great stories by Kuttner and want to get to more by Moore. This one involves foreigners with indeterminate accents. They show up in New York City and want to rent a room in the main character’s place for the month of May. Others show up who want to buy it outright and name a way overvalued price. These are unusual tourists who say the attraction is to the fine spring weather. They turn out to be time travelers and disaster tourists, attending “vintage seasons” on vacation. They are coming from 14th-century Canterbury and headed next to 10th-century Rome. The story takes its time arriving at its points. For much of it the visitors are simply mysterious to the host and his girlfriend, who scheme to find a way to get the first group out and sell the place to the second. As I’ve already spoiled that part of the story—it’s absolutely done well enough that it remains worth reading for its own sake, and if you object to spoilers please stop reading now and look up the story—I will also mention the disaster the time travelers are there to witness is a meteor strike on the city, which destroys it. The reason for the popularity of our guy’s place is that the historical record showed it survived intact. There are enough clues here that I was pretty sure about the time travel aspect before it was revealed, or maybe I remembered it from reading the story as a kid, but I completely forgot and never saw coming a meteor strike, though I knew it was going to be something big. The foreshadowing is basically definitive that way. As with any time travel story, don’t think it through or everything starts to come apart. If time travel and disaster tourism were a thing, for example, you would expect to see a lot more people than this handful showing up for the target date. But never mind. It otherwise works spectacularly well, with a methodical build-up, intriguing ideas and tension, and a late-shot last sentence that defines the scope by unexpectedly enlarging it to vast proportions. Did I mention Moore and Kuttner specialized in cosmic horror?

Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories for Late at Night, ed. Robert Arthur
Listen to story online.