Elizabeth’s eyes snapped open when she heard the click of her bedroom door closing. She didn’t know why she had pretended to be asleep when her mother opened the door. Usually she would have spoken, if only to say good night But she had kept her eyes closed, and maintained the slow, steady, rhythmic breath of sleep. And now, with the door closed again, and her eyes open, she still maintained that slow, steady rhythm. She lay quietly, listening to the night sounds, and heard the purring of her mother’s car as it moved quickly down the driveway.
When the sound of the engine faded from her hearing, she rose and went to the window. She stared off across the field, and almost felt that she could see into the woods that stood darkly in the night For a long time she remained at the window, and a strange feeling came over her, a feeling of oneness with the forest and the trees and a desire to be closer to the sea beyond the woods. She turned away from the window and, her eyelids fluttering strangely, began to dress.
A few moments later she left her room and moved to the top of the stairway. She paused there, seeming to listen to the silence, then began to descend, as silently as the night She passed the grandfather clock without even noticing its loud ticking. At the bottom of the stairs she turned and began making her way toward the kitchen.
She didn’t hear the droning of the television set in the little room next to the kitchen; if she had, she might have tapped at the door, then opened it to see Mrs. Goodrich dozing fitfully in her chair.
Elizabeth opened the refrigerator and stared blankly into its depths for a moment Then her hand moved out and her fingers closed on a small package wrapped in white paper. She closed the refrigerator door and left the kitchen. In the little room next door Mrs. Goodrich’s sleep was not disturbed by the soft clicking of the front door, or by the heavy chiming of the clock as it struck midnight.
Elizabeth moved across the field quickly and faded into the woods. Once she was there, hidden by the trees, her pace increased.
The lights of the searchers bobbed in the darkness around her, but if she was aware of them she gave no sign. Twice Elizabeth disappeared into the shadow of a tree only seconds before one of the searchers would have discovered her, and just before she emerged from the woods onto the embankment she passed within ten feet of her father. She neither noticed him nor made any sound that could have penetrated Jack’s concentration. He was too intent on overcoming his fear of the forest to have heard. He forged on, stolid in his grim search for Kathy Burton.
Soon Elizabeth was once again on the embankment over the sea. She listened to the surf, and it seemed to her to be a sound she was used to, a sound she had lived with for much longer than she could remember. She began making her way down the embankment, until she disappeared into the black shadow behind the boulder.
The sounds of the surf, or something else, prevented her from hearing the snapping of twigs and the breaking of branches behind her as others fought a path through the woods above.
Kathy Burton wasn’t at all sure she was hearing anything, she had been hearing so much in the past hours. First there had been the sound of her own screams, echoing back at her like some vile, dying creature, hammering into her ears. She had screamed until her voice gave out, then had lain on the floor of the pit for a long time, crying to herself, her body heaving with exhaustion and fear. Then the panic had passed and she had begun listening to the muffled sound of the surf, which made a soft backdrop of noise, preventing silence from multiplying the terror of the unrelieved blackness. And then she had begun hearing the small sounds, the tiny scurrying sounds to which she had at first been able to attach no meanings. Her mind began producing images in the darkness, images of rats chasing each other around the cavern, circling just beyond her reach. As the images in her imagination grew stronger, she began to feel the rats, if rats they were, moving closer to her, sniffing the