Lavinia said, “When you ran up that aisle crying ‘Lights!’ I thought I’d die!”
“That poor man!”
“The theater manager’s brother from Racine!”
“I apologized,” said Helen.
“You
see
what panic can do?”
The great fans still whirled and whirled in the warm night air, stirring and restirring the smells of vanilla, raspberry, peppermint, and disinfectant in the drug store.
“We shouldn’t have stopped for these sodas. The police said—”
“Oh, bosh the police,” laughed Lavinia. “I’m not afraid of anything. The Lonely One is a million miles away now. He won’t be back for weeks, and the police’ll get him then, just wait. Wasn’t the film
funny!”
The streets were clean, and empty. Not a car or a truck or a person was in sight. The bright lights were still lit in the small store windows where the hot wax dummies stood. Their blank blue eyes watched as the ladies walked past them, down the night street.
“Do you suppose if we screamed they’d do anything?”
“Who?”
“The dummies, the window-people.”
“Oh, Fran
cine
.”
“Well …”
There were a hundred people in the windows, stiff and silent, and three people on the street, the echoes following like gunshots when they tapped their heels on the baked pavement.
A red neon sign flickered dimly, buzzing like a dying insect. They walked past it.
Baked and white, the long avenue lay ahead. Blowing and tall in a wind that touched only their leafy summits, the trees stood on either side of the three small women.
“First we’ll walk you home, Francine.”
“No, I’ll walk
you
home.”
“Don’t be silly. You live the nearest. If you walked me home, you’d have to come back across the ravine all by yourself. And if so much as a leaf fell on you, you’d drop dead.”
Francine said, “I can stay the night at your house. You’re the
pretty
one!”
“No.”
So they drifted like three prim clothes-forms over a moonlit sea of lawn and concrete and trees. To Lavinia, watching the black trees flit by, listening to the voices of her friends, the night seemed to quicken. They seemed to be running while walking slowly. Everything seemed fast, and the color of hot snow.
“Let’s sing,” said Lavinia.
They sang sweetly and quietly, arm in arm, not looking back. They felt the hot sidewalk cooling underfoot, moving, moving.
“Listen,” said Lavinia.
They listened to the summer night, to the crickets and the far-off tone of the courthouse clock making it fifteen minutes to 12.
“Listen.”
A porch swing creaked in the dark. And there was Mr. Terle, silent, alone on his porch as they passed, having a last cigar. They could see the pink cigar fire idling to and fro.
Now the lights were going, going, gone. The little house lights and big house lights, the yellow lights and green hurricane lights, the candles and oil lamps and porch lights, and everything felt locked up in brass and iron and steel. Everything, thought Lavinia, is boxed and wrapped and shaded. She imagined the people in their moonlit beds, and their breathing in the summer night, safe and together. And here we are, she thought, listening to our solitary footsteps on the baked summer-evening sidewalk. And above us the lonely street lights shining down, making a million wild shadows.
“Here’s your house, Francine. Good night.”
“Lavinia, Helen, stay here tonight. It’s late, almost midnight now. Mrs. Murdock has an extra room. I’ll make hot chocolate. It’d be ever such fun!” Francine was holding them both close to her.
“No, thanks,” said Lavinia.
And Francine began to cry.
“Oh, not
again
, Francine,” said Lavinia.
“I don’t want you dead,” sobbed Francine, the tears running straight down her cheeks. “You’re so fine and nice, I want you alive. Please, oh, please.”
“Francine, I didn’t realize how much this has affected you. But I promise you I’ll phone when I get home, right away.”
“Oh,
will
you?”
“And tell you I’m safe, yes. And tomorrow we’ll have a picnic lunch at Electric Park, all right? With ham sandwiches I’ll make myself. How’s that? You’ll see; I’m going to live forever!”
“You’ll phone?”
“I promised, didn’t I?”
“Good night, good night!” Francine was gone behind her door, locked tight in an instant.
“Now,” said Lavinia to Helen, “I’ll walk
you
home.”
The courthouse clock struck the hour.
The sounds went across a town that was empty, emptier than it had ever been before. Over empty streets and empty lots and empty lawns the sound went.
“Ten, eleven,
twelve,”
counted Lavinia, with Helen on her arm.
“Don’t you feel
funny?”
asked Helen.
“How do you mean?”
“When you think of us being out here on the sidewalk, under the trees, and all those people safe behind locked doors lying in their beds. We’re practically the only walking people out in the open in a thousand miles, I bet.” The sound of the deep warm dark ravine came near.
In a minute they stood before Helen’s house, looking at each other for a long time. The wind blew the odor of cut grass and wet lilacs between them. The moon was high in a sky that was beginning to cloud over. “I don’t suppose it’s any use asking you to stay, Lavinia?”
“I’ll be going on.”
“Sometimes …”
“Sometimes what?”
“Sometimes I think people
want
to die. You’ve certainly acted odd all evening.”
“I’m just not afraid,” said Lavinia. “And I’m curious, I suppose. And I’m using my head. Logically, The Lonely One can’t be around. The police and all.”
“Our
police?
Our
little old force? They’re home in bed too, the covers up over their ears.”
“Let’s just say I’m enjoying myself, precariously but safely. If there were any
real
chance of anything happening to me, I’d stay here with you, you can be sure of that.”
“Maybe your subconscious doesn’t want you to live any more.”
“You and Francine, honestly!”
“I feel so guilty. I’ll be drinking hot coffee just as you reach the ravine bottom and walk on the bridge in the dark.”
“Drink a cup for me. Good night.”
L
AVINIA
N
EBBS WALKED
down the midnight street, down the late summer night silence. She saw the houses with their dark windows and far away she heard a dog barking. In five minutes, she thought, I’ll be safe home. In five minutes I’ll be phoning silly little Francine. I’ll—
She heard a man’s voice singing far away among the trees. She walked a little faster. Coming down the street toward her in the dimming moonlight was a man. He was walking casually.
I can run and knock on one of these doors, thought Lavinia. If necessary.
The man was singing,
Shine On, Harvest Moon
, and he carried a long club in his hand. “Well, look who’s here! What a time of night for you to be out, Miss Nebbs!”
“Officer Kennedy!”
And that’s who it was, of course—Officer Kennedy on his beat.
“I’d better see you home.”
“Never mind, I’ll make it.”
“But you live across the ravine.”
Yes, she thought, but I won’t walk the ravine with
any
man. How do I know
who
The Lonely One is? “No, thanks,” she said.
“I’ll wait right here then,” he said. “If you need help give a yell. I’ll come running.”
She went on, leaving him under a light, humming to himself, alone.
Here I am, she thought.
The ravine.
She stood on the top of the 113 steps down the steep, brambled bank that led across the creaking bridge and up through the black hills to Park Street. And only one lantern to see by. Three minutes from now, she thought, I’ll be putting my key in my house door. Nothing can happen in just 180 seconds.
She started down the dark green steps into the deep ravine night.
“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine steps,” she whispered.
She felt she was running but she was not running.
“Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen steps,” she counted aloud.
The ravine was deep, deep and black, black. And the world was gone, the world of safe 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 had 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 steam. “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, 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! Across the street now!
She crossed the street and rushed up the sidewalk.
Oh, God, the porch! My house!
In the middle of her running, she saw the empty lemonade glass where she had left it hours before, in the good, easy, lazy time, left it on the railing. She wished she was back in that time now, drinking from it, the night still young and not begun.
“Oh, please, please, give me time to get inside and lock the door and I’ll be safe!”
She heard her clumsy feet on the porch, felt her hands scrabbling and ripping at the lock with the key. She heard her heart. She heard her inner voice shrieking.
The key fitted.
“Unlock the door, quick, quick!”
The door opened.
“Now inside.
Slam
it!”
She slammed the door.
“Now lock it, bar it, lock it!” she cried. “Lock it
tight!”
The door was locked and barred and bolted.
The music stopped. She listened to her heart again and the sound of it diminishing into silence.
Home.
Oh, safe at home. Safe, safe and safe at home! She slumped against the door. Safe, safe. Listen. Not a sound. Safe, safe, oh, thank God, safe at home. I’ll never go out at night again. Safe, oh, safe, safe, home, so good, so safe. Safe inside, the door locked. Wait. Look out the window.