This was worse than the other, this stillness.
He started up jerkily, at varying sharply arrested levels; at elbow height above the bed, then at full arm’s length, then sitting erect, then turning to drop legs to floor, at last upright at full height upon his feet.
Something rustled slightly, as though there were a bird trapped in his room, winging around trying to find its way out. The sound came at about mid-height between floor and ceiling, at about the height of his own head, as he stood now at the bedside. He even turned his head in various directions, trying to orient his detection of the sound. He lost it. Then it came again, the feathered whisper.
There was someone in the room with him. He could hear breath, all but feel it, stirring toward him in the night-clogged air.
Maybe it was—
“Mallory, is it my time yet?” he said softly.
He reached for his matches, plucked one, fumbled to locate the lamp where he had left it, close beside his bed. He took the chimney off, set it down, struck the match, and put it to the wick, bending down close as he did so to turn it up. Yellow light came on, sluicing waveringly up the wall from below, at the level at which the lamp stood. It spread out sideward too, like a slow tide rolling back in the dark. It revealed Mitty’s dark hair spilled upon her pillow, her half-hidden face inert in sleep against the cleft of one arm.
He saw that much, that was the last image of normalcy he was to see, and then he turned, and reason was shattered; a series of delirium flashes took its place. Visual explosions, one crowding upon the other, vivid, immediate, but unreal for all that, undecipherable, impossible to translate into meaning.
His eyes struck the feathered thing that had rustled first of all. They saw it immobile, suspended in air before him. Loosely flared feathers of a parakeet, yellow, green, vivid scarlet. Then under it a face, dark of color and darker of mien, nightmare-threatening. A face that could not be alive, that surely must be a mask in its balefulness of lineament, and yet whose black-pitted eyes were quick with light and whose nostrils dilated and contracted even as he watched with the suppressed breathing of animosity.
And under it, giving it foundation to the floor of reality, the coppery torso of a man, the distended, graduated breast structure rising and falling with that same leashed, treacherous breath.
He tried to assimilate what he was looking at, and couldn’t. It was coming toward him, creeping frontally upon him, growing larger, nearer, even in the act of his looking.
Along the side wall, where the backthrow of the lamp was, its grotesque shadow sidled along in company with it, crouched for the spring, a gray hallucination of a bird perched atop a human figure. Yet one was no more unreal than the other was; of the two, the shadow was more readily understandable that the substance, for at least it had the substance to give it explanation. The substance had nothing to give it explanation.
He heard a frightened cry from Chris, over at the other side of the house. “Father! Daddy! They’re in here!” The voice was that of a child. She was a little girl again in that moment; her smiles and simperings at him, her borrowed lipstick were forgotten. And perhaps for the last time she was a little girl. It was more than a cry of fright. It was death of a little girl, in a woman’s body.
And in its wake, behind him, he heard the sudden stirring of Mitty, coming awake.
But there was no more time for these last fragments of the former mold of rationality that had encased things, flying about in disintegration now; the new nightmare flux was too close upon him now, pressing him back, overthrowing him, engulfing him. He threshed helplessly with a weight that was no dream heavy upon him, a sinewy arm hooked about his throat from behind. Other feather-sprouting figures were slinking in the doorway, one by one. His flailing arms were caught separately, drawn together behind his back, thongs whipped around them holding them fast. He lay there loglike, immobile, face down and staring up around his shoulder at something that he couldn’t understand.
Mitty had half gained her feet. She stood there at bay, in a frozen tableau of fear. She pressed her back to the wall beside her bed, unable to retreat from them farther than that. One leg supported her on the floor; the other bent double, still rested on the bed from which she had just now risen. Even her hands had crystallized, arrested in the half-completed gesture of donning the pink silk wrapper she habitually made use of on rising, and which instinctive habit had made her seek now, even at this moment of final catastrophe. Her fingers were riveted to its edges, one at the turn of her shoulder, the other down lower at her waist, on the opposite side, so that its incompleted concealment was biased, one shoulder and the upper arm on that side left completely bare. Below, of course, peered the filmy insubstantiality of her nightdress, talcuming the exactly defined contour of her body rather than veiling it.
Her hair was still aslant as the pillows had cast it, pressed back on one side, revealing her ear, dropping too far forward on the other side of her face. One foot had gained the sanctuary of one of her steep-arched bedside slippers. The other slipper lay untenanted on its side. The rays of the oil lamp, dull and tarnished on all the other surfaces they revealed, flashed dazzlingly back from the turquoise-studded circlet on her upper arm, which she had not removed for many days, and which had grown burnished with continual wear. It created a zone of blurred sheen that refused to come into focus to the eye.
Her fear was less an active pang, such as had caused Chris to cry out in the other room, than a sort of hypnotic awe. Even Jones, in his distorted position on the floor, looking back and upward at the pale halo of her face, could sense in it something less than the stark unbridled terror that was to have been expected. A degree less only, perhaps, but a degree less. Though her lips were parted, it was not with effort to cry out; she made no sound. It was rather puzzlement, a sort of mesmerized regard that held them that way. Though her eyes were wide, showing more white than he ever remembered having seen them show before, they were not dilated with panic so much as with a bemused retrospection, which held them steady and almost dreamy in their fixity.
They closed in upon her, and he saw their dark arms go out to seize her, crossbarring the pink-and-white cameo she made in his view beyond their outlines. He floundered in his bound position on the floor, seeking to rise and throw himself over there, snarling unheeded threats in a choked voice. “Get away from her! Keep your hands off, you hear me?” A weight held him crushed to the floor, pressing upon his back until he thought his spine were shattered; it was a foot planted on him to hold him down, by one of them who had been left to guard him. It ground him flat again with brutal inexorability. A hand snaked to the back of his neck, gripped it as in a vise, and forced his upreared head down, so that it struck the ground and water was dashed from his eyes. It relented again only as he lay quiescent.
And then suddenly something had happened, lost to him in the throes of his own struggle. The vignette had changed. They were all frozen now, she and they alike. The foremost of the predatory hands, which had already fastened on her shoulder, wrenching at it, ripping at her clothing, had fallen loosely away and she was untouched again. The dislodged outer garment fell to the floor at her feet. The circlet on her bared arm flickered in coruscation. They drew slowly back, a step at a time. The grouping that had been about to enclose her widened again. The hands that had reached out graspingly remained extended, pointing. The indicating fingers were like the spokes of a wheel, and the hub of it was that prismatic light that fumed upon her arm.