For an hour I stood in the roaring blast staring back at all that darkness.
The Whole Town’s Sleeping
It was a warm summer night in the middle of Illinois country. The little town was deep far away from everything, kept to itself by a river and a forest and a ravine. In the town the sidewalks were still scorched. The stores were closing and the streets were turning dark. There were two moons: a clock moon with four faces in four night directions above the solemn black courthouse, and the real moon that was slowly rising in vanilla whiteness from the dark east.
In the downtown drugstore, fans whispered in the high ceiling air. In the rococo shade of porches, invisible people sat. On the purple bricks of the summer twilight streets, children ran. Screen doors whined their springs and banged. The heat was breathing from the dry lawns and trees.
On her solitary porch, Lavinia Nebbs, aged 37, very straight and slim, sat with a tinkling lemonade in her white fingers, tapping it to her lips, waiting.
“Here I am, Lavinia.”
Lavinia turned. There was Francine, at the bottom porch step, in the smell of zinnias and hibiscus. Francine was all in snow white and she didn’t look 35.
Ms. Lavinia Nebbs rose and locked her front door, leaving her lemonade glass standing half empty on the porch rail. “It’s a fine night for the movie.”
“Where you going, ladies?” cried Grandma Hanlon from her shadowy porch across the street.
They called back through the soft ocean of darkness: “To the Elite Theater to see Harold Lloyd in Welcome, Danger!”
“Won’t catch me out on no night like this,” wailed Grandma Hanlon. “Not with The Lonely One strangling women. Lock myself in with my gun!”
Grandma’s door slammed and locked.
The two maiden ladies drifted on. Lavinia felt the warm breath of the summer night shimmering off the oven-baked sidewalk. It was like walking on a hard crust of freshly warmed bread. The heat pulsed under your dress and along your legs with a stealthy sense of invasion.
“Lavinia, you don’t believe all that gossip about The Lonely One, do you?”
“Those women like to see their tongues dance.”
“Just the same, Hattie McDollis was killed a month ago. And Roberta Ferry the month before. And now Eliza Ramsell has disappeared…”
“Hattie McDollis walked off with a traveling man, I bet.”
“But the others—strangled—four of them, their tongues sticking out their mouths, they say.”
They stood on the edge of the ravine that cut the town in two. Behind them were the lighted houses and faint radio music; ahead was deepness, moistness, fireflies, and dark.
“Maybe we shouldn’t go to the movie,” said Francine. “The Lonely One might follow and kill us. I don’t like that ravine. Look how black, smell it, and listen.”
The ravine was a dynamo that never stopped running, night or day: there was a great moving hum among the secret mists and washed shales, and the odors of a rank greenhouse. Always the black dynamo was humming, with green electric sparkles where fireflies hovered.
“And it won’t be me,” said Francine, “coming back through this terrible dark ravine tonight, late. It’ll be you, Lavinia, you down the steps and over that rickety bridge and maybe the Lonely One standing behind a tree. I’d never have gone over to church this afternoon if I had to walk through here all alone, even in daylight.”
“Bosh,” said Lavinia Nebbs.
“It’ll be you alone on the path, listening to your shoes, not me. And shadows. You all alone on the way back home. Lavinia, don’t you get lonely living by yourself in that house?”
“Old maids love to live alone,” said Lavinia. She pointed to a hot shadowy path. “Let’s walk the short cut.”
“I’m afraid.”
“It’s early. The Lonely One won’t be out till late.” Lavinia, as cool as mint ice cream, took the other woman’s arm and led her down the dark winding path into cricket-warmth and frog-sound, and mosquito-delicate silence.
“Let’s run,” gasped Francine.
“No.”
If Lavinia hadn’t turned her head just then, she wouldn’t have seen it. But she did turn her head, and it was there. And then Francine looked over and she saw it too, and they stood there on the path, not believing what they saw.