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.