navigated past that obstacle, he groped around a corner into the dining room and went through into the kitchen. Here he could turn on a light without any possibility of disturbing Stella's sleep; the next time he could do that was at the top of the house, in the dressing room which along with the horrid sleek Italian coffee table had been his wife's latest brainstorm. As she had pointed out, their closets were too crowded, there was no place to store their unseasonal clothes, and the small bedroom next to theirs wasn't likely to be used ever again, now that Robert and Jane were gone; so for a cost of eight hundred dollars, they'd had it converted into a dressing room, with clothes rails and mirrors and a thick new carpet. The dressing room had proved one thing to Ricky: as Stella had always said, he actually did own as many clothes as she did. That had been rather a surprise to Ricky, who was so without vanity that he was unconscious of his own occasional dandyism.
A more immediate surprise was that his hands were shaking. He had been going to make a cup of chamomile tea, but when he saw how his hands trembled, he took a bottle out of a cabinet and poured a small amount of whiskey into a glass. Skittish old idiot. But calling himself names did not help, and when he brought the glass to his lips his hand still shook. It was this damned anniversary. The whiskey, when he took it into his mouth, tasted like diesel oil, and he spat it out into the sink. Poor Edward. Ricky rinsed out his glass, turned off the light and went up the stairs in the dark.
In his pajamas, he left the dressing room and crossed the hall to his bedroom. Quietly he opened the door. Stella lay, breathing softly and rhythmically, on her side of the bed. If he could make it around to his side without knocking into the chair or kicking over her boots or brushing against the mirror and making it rattle he could get into bed without disturbing her.
He gained his side of the bed without waking her and quietly slipped under the blankets. Very gently, he stroked his wife's bare shoulder. It was quite likely that she was having another affair, or at least one of her serious flirtations, and Ricky thought that she had probably taken up again with the professor she'd met a year ago-there was a breathy silence on the phone that was peculiarly his; long ago Ricky had decided that many things were worse than having your wife occasionally go to bed with someone else. She had her life, and he was a large part of it. Despite what he sometimes felt and had said to Sears two weeks before, not being married would have been an impoverishment.
He stretched out, waiting for what he knew would happen. He remembered the sensation of having the eyes boring into his back; he wished that Stella could help, could comfort him in some way; but not wishing to alarm or distress her, thinking that they would end with every new day and thinking also that they were uniquely, privately his, he had never told her of his nightmares. This is Ricky Hawthorne preparing for sleep: lying on his back, his clever face showing no sign of the emotions behind it, his hands behind his head, his eyes open; tired, uneasy, jealous; fearful.
2
In her room at the Archer Hotel, Anna Mostyn stood at a window and watched individual snowflakes drift down toward the street. Though the overhead light was off and it was past twelve, she was fully dressed. The long coat was thrown over the bed, as if she had just come in or was just going out.
She stood at the window and smoked, a tall attractive woman with dark hair and long blue eyes. She could see down nearly the entire length of Main Street the deserted square to one side with its empty benches and bare trees, the black fronts of shops and the Village Pump restaurant and a department store; two blocks on, a traffic light turned green over an empty street. Main Street continued for eight blocks, but the buildings were visible only as dark shopfronts or office buildings. On the opposite side of the square she could see the dark facades of two churches looming above the tops of the bare trees. In the square a bronze Revolutionary War general made a grandiose gesture with a musket.
3
When sleep finally came to Ricky Hawthorne, it was as if he were not merely dreaming, but had in fact been lifted bodily and still awake into another room in another building. He was lying in bed in a strange room, waiting for something to happen. The room seemed deserted, part of an abandoned house. Its walls and floor were bare planks; the window was only an empty frame, sunlight leaked in through a dozen cracks. Dust particles swirled in these stark rays of light. He did not know how he knew it, but he knew that something was going to happen, and that he was afraid of it. He was unable to leave the bed; but even if his muscles were working, he knew with the same knowledge that he would not be able to escape whatever was coming. The room was on an upper floor of the building: through the window he saw only gray clouds and a pale blue sky. But whatever was coming was going to come from inside, not out there.
His body was covered with an old quilt so faded that some of its squares were white. Beneath it, his legs lay paralyzed, two raised lines of fabric. When Ricky looked up, he realized that he could see every detail of the wooden planks on the wall with a more than usual clarity: he saw how the grain flowed down each board, how the knotholes were formed, the way the nailheads stood out at the tops of certain, boards. Breezes filled the room flicking the dust here and there.
From down at the bottom of the house, he heard a crash-it was the noise of a door being thrown open, a heavy cellar door banging against a wall. Even his upstairs room shook with it. As he listened, he heard some complex form dragging itself out of the cellar: it was a heavy form, animal-like, and it had to squeeze through the doorframe. Wood splintered, and Ricky heard the creature thud against a wall. Whatever it was began to investigate the ground floor, moving slowly and heavily. Ricky could picture what it saw-a series of bare rooms exactly like his. On the ground floor, tall grass and weeds would be growing up through the cracks in the floorboards. The sunlight would be touching the sides and back of whatever was moving heavily, purposefully through these deserted rooms. The thing downstairs made a sucking noise, then a high-pitched squeal. It was looking for him. It was snuffling through the house, knowing he was there.
Ricky tried again to force his legs to move, but the two lumps of fabric did not even twitch. The thing downstairs was brushing against walls as it passed through the rooms, making a scratchy noise; the wood creaked. He thought he heard it break through a rotten floorboard.
Then he heard the noise he had been dreading: it shouldered through another doorway. The noises from downstairs were suddenly louder-he could hear the thing breathing. It was at the bottom of the staircase.
He heard it hurl itself at the stairs.
It thumped up what sounded like a half dozen stairs, and then slipped back down. Then it went more slowly, whining with impatience, taking the stairs two or three at a time.
Ricky's face was wet with perspiration. What most frightened him was that he couldn't be sure if he were dreaming or not: if he could be certain that this was only a dream, then he had only to suffer through it, to wait until whatever it was down there got up to the top of the stairs and burst into the room-the scare would wake him up. But it did not feel at all like a dream. His senses were alert, his mind was clear, the entire experience lacked the rather disembodied, disconnected atmosphere of a dream. In no dream had he ever sweated. And if he was wide awake, then the thing banging and thundering on the stairs was going to get him, because he couldn't move.
The noises changed, and then Ricky realized that he was indeed on the third floor of the abandoned building, because the thing looking for him was on the second. Its noises were much louder: the whining, the slithery sound as its body rubbed through doors and against walls. It was moving faster, as if it smelled him.
The dust still circled in the random beams of sun; the few clouds still drifted through a sky that looked like early spring. The floor rattled as the creature thrust impatiently back onto the landing.
Now he could hear its breathing very clearly. It threw itself at the last staircase, making a noise like a wrecking ball hitting the side of a building. Ricky's stomach seemed packed with ice; he was afraid he would
