people in bed. The locked doors, the town, the drug store, the theater, the lights, everything was gone. Only the ravine existed and lived, black and huge about her.
“Nothing’s happened, has it? No one around, is there? Twenty-four, twenty-five steps. Remember that old ghost story you told each other when you were children?”
She listened to her feet on the steps.
“The story about the dark man coming in your house and you upstairs in bed. And now he’s at the first step coming up to your room. Now he’s at the second step. Now he’s at the third and the fourth and the fifth step! Oh, how you laughed and screamed at that story! And now the horrid dark man is at the twelfth step, opening your door, and now he’s standing by your bed. I got you!”
She screamed. It was like nothing she’d ever heard, that scream. She had never screamed that loud in her life. She stopped, she froze, she clung to the wooden banister. Her heart exploded in her. The sound of its terrified beating filled the universe.
“There, there!” she screamed to herself. “At the bottom of the steps. A man, under the light! No, now he’s gone! He was waiting there!”
She listened.
Silence. The bridge was empty.
Nothing, she thought, holding her heart. Nothing. Fool. That story I told myself. How silly. What shall I do?
Her heartbeats faded.
Shall I call the officer, did he hear my scream? Or was it only loud to me? Was it really just a small scream after all?
She listened. Nothing. Nothing.
I’ll go back to Helen’s and sleep there tonight. But even while she thought this she moved down again. No, it’s nearer home now. Thirty-eight, thirty-nine steps, careful, don’t fall. Oh, I am a fool. Forty steps. Forty-one. Almost halfway now. She froze again.
“Wait,” she told herself. She took a step.
There was an echo.
She took another step. Another echo—just a fraction of a moment later.
“Someone’s following me,” she whispered to the ravine, to the black crickets and dark-green frogs and the black stream. “Someone’s on the steps behind me. I don’t dare turn around.”
Another step, another echo.
Every time I take a step, they take one.
A step and an echo.
Weakly she asked of the ravine, “Officer Kennedy, is that you?”
The crickets were suddenly still. The crickets were listening. The night was listening to her. For a moment all the far summer-night meadows and close summer-night trees were suspending motion. Leaf, shrub, star, and meadowgrass had ceased their particular tremors and were listening to Lavinia Nebbs’s heart. And perhaps a thousand miles away, across locomotive-lonely country, in an empty way-station, a lonely night traveler reading a dim newspaper under a naked light-bulb might raise his head, listen, and think, What’s that?—and decide, Only a woodchuck, surely, beating a hollow log. But it was Lavinia Nebbs, it was the heart of Lavinia Nebbs.
Faster. Faster. She went down the steps.
Run!
She heard music. In a mad way, in a silly way, she heard the huge surge of music that pounded at her, and she realized as she ran—as she ran in panic and terror—that some part of her mind was dramatizing, borrowing from the turbulent score of some private film. The music was rushing and plunging her faster, faster, plummeting and scurrying, down, and down into the pit of the ravine!
“Only a little way,” she prayed. “One hundred ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen steps! The bottom! Now, run! Across the bridge!”
She spoke to her legs, her arms, her body, her terror; she advised all parts of herself in this white and terrible instant. Over the roaring creek waters, on the swaying, almost-alive bridge planks she ran, followed by the wild footsteps behind, with the music following too, the music shrieking and babbling.
He’s following. Don’t turn, don’t look—if you see him, you’ll not be able to move! You’ll be frightened, you’ll freeze! Just run, run, run!
She ran across the bridge.
Oh, God! God, please, please let me get up the hill! Now up, up the path, now between the hills. Oh, God, it’s dark, and everything so far away! If I screamed now it wouldn’t help; I can’t scream anyway! Here’s the top of the path, here’s the street. Thank God I wore my low-heeled shoes, I can run, I can run! Oh, God, please let me be safe. If I get home safe I’ll never go out alone, I was a fool, let me admit it, a fool! I didn’t know what terror was! I wouldn’t let myself think, but if you let me get home from this I’ll never go out without Helen or Francine again! Here’s the street. Across the street now!