Then, very suddenly, Joel woke up. She came wide, staring wide, awake. The library was dark. It hadn’t been dark when she fell asleep. Something had waked her. Was it the snapping of the electric switch? Was it the closing of a door—the door must be shut for there wasn’t a glimmer of light? Was it the Presence by its mere presence? For there was a Presence. As sure as death there was Someone in the room with her. She could almost, her nerves were so tense, so painfully sensitive, tell exactly at what spot the Someone was. Her nerves were like the antennÆ of a beetle or the searchlight rays of a battleship, reaching out and feeling It somewhere between her and the terrace windows. She couldn’t move her eyeballs in that direction—not that she could have seen It if she had. But without hearing It she knew It moved, and without hearing It she knew It breathed. Her flesh experienced such a pain of terror that it stung even the inner membrane of her nostrils, like intense cold, and brought the tears of intense cold under her eyelids. If she could scream or move! But she was incapable of either. Except for the waves of fear that went over her in pain, her body was detached and subject to no sweating exertion of the will. Her brain alone was active, in a strangely shrunken but vivid way. Like a little cornered rodent, very small but very much alive, it tore quivering about in a tiny brightly lighted trap. It had static, feverish, stricken eyes and it ran up one side of its cage only to fall back and hysterically attempt the other. If something would mercifully happen—instantaneous death instead of waiting for it in a condemned cell.

She remembered! How much she remembered, in flashes, with the clarity of flying bird shadows on sunlit snow; and in bitter irony watched herself remembering, realizing it was what one conventionally did during numbered seconds. There was that terrible hanging story of Ambrose Bierce’s when you didn’t know until the last sentence that the whole action took place in the man’s mind between the tightening of the noose and the extinction of life. She herself had had a somewhat similar experience on a bobsled run on an icy hill that led across a river at the foot, when it became certain that a skid on a turn was going to throw them clear of the bridge into the gorge. Her soul had deserted the doomed ship and calmly watched the end of her body. That she lived through it wasn’t by her soul’s grace! Hadn’t she heard of a preposterous religious notion that dying a violent death, smashing up the body, meant the soul was a long time making Heaven, being slow to extricate itself from the flesh? Why, at this moment her spirit had walked out on her and was leaving her body to encounter the dreadful thing unattended. Too dreadful—she fled it down the nights and down the days.

She remembered climbing a big maple when she was a child—a maple in autumn leaf—and being drowned in a wave of pure, translucent color, and lost to the world until she emerged on the crest of the wave to a new world, seen from a great height, and by new, color-stained eyes. She remembered, as a test of courage, being made by her father to traverse a grove of pines alone at night and being frozen stone cold by the approach of what proved to be pastured cattle. Uncle Bertrand was sending them all through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. How few of them—It moved! Her mind sprang from this hiding place of memories and fled precipitously to crouch in an opposite corner: she remembered a cool summer evening when she and her girlhood friend raced around the block on bicycles, and the horror that burst between them when a monster car, in the days when cars were few and monstrous, caught Margaret, and instantly killed her. She remembered picking English cowslips, unlike our American cowslip, in a Gloucestershire meadow, when she wore a pink muslin dress with white polka dots, and the yellow flowers with their imperishable, indescribable scent drew her on like Persephone from field to field. She remembered being dragged screaming from her first moving picture, a silent picture except for the gun fired point blank at her by a Western desperado in a close-up of face and gun-muzzle. If she could scream like that now! She screamed inside until her throat ached—and not a sound came. She sprang to her feet and fled to the door, stumbling, falling, stumbling—and yet she had not moved by the fraction of an inch. Her mind, unable to face things, again escaped. She remembered spearing for suckers on a spring night, wading up a wide, slow brook, and the way they were all, with spears unlifted, fitfully illumined in the light of oil-soaked torches. She remembered the day on the beach at Shelter Island when Jerry had said, “Your wedding, you mean” to her “Is this making two ends meet, when you spend more money than we possess, always to be my funeral?” She remembered her black-and-red anger when he had laughingly mocked her; “Come now, my dear, I admit you’re a sweet bluffer, but for God’s sake don’t try being European with me. A duel? I know you too well. You haven’t the lightness of touch to get away with it.” Jerry! She mustn’t think of Jerry now or she would find herself between two fires—this new outer terror and the old inner one. Jerry’s face as—

Oh my God, It moved again! Too close this time for any escape. Of course It knew she was there. That’s what It was here for. Where was Julian? Why had he left her? The last image of her open eyes had been of Julian sitting near her—the last image of her mind’s eye had been of him still leaning over her, watching her drift into sleep. For one flash she considered It as Julian. No-no-no-no-no. No, he may have been a murderer once, but he wasn’t doing this to her now—he wasn’t, he wasn’t. It was—was the one she knew had killed the others: Blake, Romany, her uncle. It was— And then, with relief not even to have to think the name, she suddenly yielded, and gratefully drank in the faint sweet odor of a cloth that was thrown across her face and bound at the back of her head. The little rodent, with its petrified eyes and thudding heart, couldn’t have stood the thudding, as of a motor too powerful for the body, another conscious second.