first in the title. What do you think of when you read the title “The Frontier Guards”? Do you expect a story about the military, perhaps a tale about a unit camped out in the borderlands, guarding their home against an enemy? Yet that is certainly not what this story is about. Wakefield's frontier is the boundary between the visible world and an invisible, mysterious world that exists inside Pailton, a little house that looks charming from the outside but has proven “malignant and fatal” within. This invisible world, Lander warns, is “a region with its own laws of time and space, and where the seemingly impossible can happen.” Who are the guards that stand watch at this frontier? The story suggests that psychics like Lander may be those guards, straddling the two worlds and sometimes coming face to face, so to speak, with an unknown enemy.

Once we begin reading the story (perhaps still wondering what it has to do with frontier guards), we don't notice much in the way of distortion for quite some time. We listen in on the conversation between Lander and his friend Brinton as they discuss the events at Pailton and the nature of ghosts and psychics. The mysterious occurrences at Pailton may seem odd and frightening to us, but if we have read other ghost stories, they are not too unexpected.

Even as Lander and Brinton enter Pailton and begin to move around the house, nothing seems too exciting at first. Lander merely points out places of interest. But then everything changes. Lander turns around to speak to Brinton only to discover that “it wasn't Brinton standing at his elbow.” He hears some strange words: “What's the matter, Willie? Can't you find the keyhole?” Lander is stunned speechless, and perhaps we readers are, too, for this is definitely not what we have been expecting. A ghostly apparition perhaps, scream in the darkness, but not Brinton (or is it Brinton at all?) asking these odd questions. Lander's first name isn't even Willie; it's Bo!

Then the perspective shifts to that of Jim Brinton. He is looking at the motionless figure in front of him. Is he aware of what he has just said? Did he say it at all? He lights a match, looks at the figure, and then starts back. “Who, in God's name, are you?” he yells. Then the story ends.

This last scene is distortion at its finest. Reality has twisted. We readers know no more of what is going on than the characters in the story do. Like them, we are startled and confused. Have they crossed the frontier into that other world? Did they both cross or only one of them? Whom are they seeing? Does Brinton really ask the questions? Does Lander disappear? What has happened? We don't know, but reality is certainly not at all what we thought it was. It has becoming completely distorted.