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Then she began to hurry up, to go faster and faster— toward it, it is true, but in order to get through and out again at the other side as quickly as possible. The excuse she tried to give herself was that her father might be home by now, and she would get the broom for taking so long with the charcoal. But she knew that wasn’t the reason at all.
    She could have gone another way, up and over the boulevard. There was a place where there were stairs built into the side of the structure that carried it. But it would have taken her blocks out of her way, to reach it and then come back again on the Opposite side. Oh well, she’d been through here a dozen times before. Just once more couldn’t hurt. If she’d passed through it just now without having anything happen to her, then she could surely pass through a second time on her way back and nothing would happen either.
    While she was thus engaged in trying to rationalize her fear, the intervening space had petered out and the viaduct had started to climb the night sky mountainously before her, like a sheer cliff wall, blotting out the stars as it rose. High aloft on the top of it there was a faint powdery-blue haze from the arc lights strung out along it, and cars, she knew, were probably whistling by, all unwitting of the little dramatic adventure occurring below them in the shadowed depths of the ravine. That was the city; spiraling planes of existence that had no knowledge of one another.
    Here it came now. The stone oval—or rather half oval—swept over her like a black scythe. Again that hollow ringing beat came into her footsteps. She was not going to look, she was going to male sure of not seeing anything, when she came near the place where she had imagined seeing those twin phosphorescences the first time; she had made up her mind to this ahead of time. “If I don’t look,” she said to herself softly, “I won’t see it, and it can’t frighten me again. There is probably nothing there anyway; I just imagined it.” But the real reason was she was afraid it still would be there, if she did look.
    Since it was, presumably, ahead of her, and it would be difficult therefore to keep it Out of the corner of her eye, she advanced holding her face stiffly averted, turned to the other side, as she went by. She could not identify the exact spot at which it had been, in this all-erasing darkness. You couldn’t see your hand before your face in it. She had to judge more or less by the distance it had been from the entrance, the one she had just come in by, the first time. It had been very close to it; not more than fifteen or twenty paces in. This was about fifteen or twenty paces in now.
    Her neck ached with the rigid curvature she maintained it at. It was hard to walk with your head pointed one way, your body another. It kept trying to pull around of its own accord. She started to say the multiplication table over to herself, to keep her mind off it.
    She hadn’t stayed at school very long; she’d been working at the laundry since she was twelve or thirteen. But she could write a little, read a little—when the words weren’t too long—and she knew a few of the lower tables, the twos and threes, up to about twenty or so. Her breath started to simmer softly with it. “Three times one is three. Three times two is six. Three times three is—
    There, it must be behind her by now. See how easy? See how sensible to do it that way? She let her head swing slowly around to its natural position once more. Nothing ahead of her, nothing at the side; nothing but even, unadulterated black, no greenish glows, no glimmers. Behind her? Well—it was better not to try to find out, to let that alone. Even a little courage came back. A few steps more and she’d be out of the place altogether. She was a big coward to let herself get worked up like that. In a moment more now she’d see the first star out ahead at the other side, and then it would just be a matter of climbing the