have a cigarette and just talk?”

I watched her with horror. She calmly lit a cigarette and leaned back against the chair, doubling her legs under her. She paid no attention to the fact that she had on nothing beneath that flimsy robe.

“It’s nice here, isn’t it?” she said quietly.

So I thought I could make her crack? Somewhere deep inside me I could feel myself beginning to come unstuck. I sat still and clenched my jaws together to keep my teeth from chattering. I was shaking as if with a chill.

She opened the scissors, playing with them in her hands. She balanced one slender, shining blade on her fingertip, like a child enchanted with some new toy, and looked from it to me and smiled.

“It’s so peaceful. It makes you want to stay forever. Do you remember ‘The Lotos-Eaters’?”

Light flickered and gleamed along the blades.

“There is sweet music here that softer falls

Than petals from blown roses on the grass,

Or night-dews on still waters between walls

Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass.”

She paused. “How does it go? Something about sleep, isn’t it? Oh, yes.”

She let her head tilt back and watched me dreamily. Smoke from the cigarette in her hand curled upward around the wicked and tapering steel.

“Music that gentler on the spirit lies

Than tir’d eyelids upon tir’d eyes;

Music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies.”

She smiled. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

I could feel myself beginning to slip over the edge. I fought it.

It wasn’t that I was afraid of a 125-pound woman with a pair of drugstore scissors in her hand. It was that she wasn’t human. She was invulnerable. She was unbeatable. Nothing could touch her.

There was a wild, crazy blackness foaming up inside me, urging me to leap up and run, or to lunge for her and tear the scissors away and take her throat in my hands and see if she could be killed.

I hung poised over empty nothing. I slipped a little.

She stood up. “I won’t bother you any longer, if you’re sleepy,” she said. “I think I’ll go back to bed.”

She knew just how much to turn the screw each time.

* * *

Sunday…

Sunday was the slow thickening of horror.

It wasn’t a day, beginning at one point and ending at another. There were no days now. Time had melted and run together into one endless and unmarked second of waiting for an explosion when the fuse was always burning and forever a quarter of an inch long.

Midnight came, and I knew I could no longer stay awake. I had to get out. I walked downstairs and around to the car and drove it slowly out of the city and along the beach. When I was far out I pulled off into the dunes and stopped.

I got out. It was black, and the breeze was cool coming in off the sea. I walked five steps away from the car and fell forward onto the sloping edge of a dune. Even as I was falling I was losing consciousness, and the last thing before I blacked out I was running alongside the spinning outer edge of a giant carousel loaded with fat bundles of money and red-haired girls with cool, mocking eyes.

* * *

I awoke all at once, like a jungle animal. I turned my head. A car had stopped nearby in the darkness.

A spotlight burst from it. The hot beam swung just above my head and spattered against the side and the open door of the Pontiac. I lay still, afraid even to breathe.

It shifted, searching the ground. He had seen there was no one in the car. The light moved again, just above my head. Then it went off abruptly. I heard a car door open and shut. I held rigid. There was no chance to run. But he might miss me in the darkness.

The beam of a flashlight hit the ground a few feet to my left. He walked forward. He was nearly on top of me now. The beam flipped upward toward the car, and then swung back. It hit me right in the face. I stared into it, blinded.

“What are you doing here?” a voice growled. “You hurt? Or drunk?” Then I heard the sharp intake of breath. “Hey!”

I came off the ground, right into the light. He hadn’t had time to pull the gun. I caught part of his uniform, pulling him down to me and clubbing for his face with my fist. We were in the sand together. He kicked backward. I