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side.”
    Cautiously, Joe stepped into the opening. It was clear now. The rustling sound and the heavy wet breathing had faded into silence. He stood where he was. After a moment there was light, and he found himself in a featureless corridor again, facing the young man with glasses.
    There were fangs three inches long thrusting down the young man’s lower lip. The front of his white coat was soaked red with fresh blood. The sickly smell came clearly to Joe’s nostrils.
    He said after a moment, “Very funny. Good gag.”
    The young man recorded another comment, moved his arms upwards across his body and face, and threw the disguise aside into a corner. He said, “You have no reaction to blood as far as you know?”
    “My reaction is to reach for bandages,” said Joe.
    “Fair enough.” The young man repeated his faint smile. “I imagine by now you’re thinking this is some kind of ghost train you’re riding.”
    “Approximately,” agreed Joe after a fractional pause.
    “Why do you think we’re fooling around this way?”
    “You’ve already made it clear to me. You’re trying to trip me into revealing any phobias I carry around with me.”
    “Correct. So there’s more to come, I’m afraid. We have to take an elevator for the next test. That door there, marked in red.”
    Joe glanced around. It was an ordinary elevator door,with five floor-signal buttons on a panel beside it. “Which floor?” he said.
    “Ground.”
    Joe pushed the button. The door slid open. He stepped into the car.
    Behind him the door shut with a click. He had half turned before the lights went out. When he did turn, he saw luminous lettering on the door.
    YOU HAVE TWELVE HOURS TO WAIT.
    After a little while, the letters faded. They were hardly more than mist at their brightest, not bright enough for him to read the hands of his watch before they vanished.
    The elevator car was about seven feet high, five feet wide and five deep. It was just long enough in the diagonal for him to stretch out at full length. His first resolution was to do so. He was certainly being watched.
    How to occupy his mind for twelve hours? He thought of Maggie, staring into the darkness. He spent what seemed a very long time thinking of Maggie.
    His eyes began to draw pictures for him on the darkness. He began to pick out individual sounds he had hardly realized were there. A susurrus of air—air-conditioning, for sure. The tumult of blood in his own ears. His heart beating. The noise of breath in his windpipe and lungs.
    He began to recognize hunger. Once it had impinged upon his mind, it could not be dislodged. The sourness in the pit of his stomach indicated that his digestion was operating on nothing.
    He was getting irregular colored patterns before his eyes. He tried to organize them into some formal design—a chessboard occurred to him, and then the idea of playing an imaginary game. He struggled to visualize opening moves. But his mind distracted itself after a few minutes, and he lost track.
    Misty luminous letters drifted into his field of vision. It was a long time before he realized they were really there, not supplied by his imagination.
    They read YOU HAVE ELEVEN HOURS TO WAIT.
    One hour gone?
    A disturbing quiver of alarm drifted through his mind. Hefelt that much more than an hour had passed. It was nearer three, surely?
    By the time the luminous letters had informed him that he still had five hours to wait, he was sure that the lettering was only a trick of his eyes, wishful thinking on the part of his imagination, and that actually they hadn’t been there and any moment now the elevator car door would open and he would get clumsily to his feet and walk out.
    The last hour went like a glacier. Reason informed him that time could not stop. But he could feel that it had limped down to a slow crawl. He counted his pulse beats, wondering if he was on his average of sixty-six beats a minute. Then he fancied he detected irregularities, a speeding up