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was apparently not at home—so he gathered, though he didn’t get out of the car, much less go up onto the wide, shaded porch and knock. From beyond the largest of the barns, behind him, across the road from the house, came the roar of a waterfall.
    He slid out a cigarette, tamped it on the dashboard, cupped his hands around the end, and lit it.
    Everything below the porch roof lay in shadow, and the gables, now that he looked at them more closely, had a knife-cut sharpness of outline that touched him with foreboding. Beyond the gables the wooded mountain was as gray as a chalkboard, rising into mist. He noticed now for the first time—or anyway for the first time consciously registered—the Pennsylvania-Dutch hex signs on the barns.
    The design of the spindles on the porch balusters, just visible in the dark, still wedge of shadow, was unusually complex, as if the spindles had been wrought for some old-world mansion, perhaps some grand old Victorian hotel for the very rich when they retreated for a weekend to the mountains. It was a beautiful place, no question about it, but the longer he looked the more ambivalent his sense of it became. Over by the plank bridge spanning the creek, just beyond a startling splash of lighted ferns, lay a shape he thought at first to be a bright clump of heather, until it moved, turning into a cat, gray and white, stalking.
    The light changed again. The shadows behind the house and the darkening barns, spilling out across the valley, filling it like a cup, were more blue now, growing darker and bluer by the minute. It was that early span of twilight his father had called “cockshut,” back in that lost age when every slightest flicker of reality had a name—birds, grasses, weathers, times of day and season. The moon had grown brighter, as if sneaking in close. He waited on, breathing in the scents of new-mown hay and honeysuckle. His thoughts drifted. A faint chest-pain brought it to his attention that he was thinking of the student Michael Nugent. Already, it was clear, the boy had decided to make demands on him, urged on by Tillson, probably Dean Blickstein too, and whoever it was that had persuaded Nugent that he, Mickelsson, was the only “real” philosopher. I know how you live. I know how much —Mickelsson sucked in breath and moved the palm of his right hand on his chest. Surely the past should be sufficient trouble, his children and ex-wife; but no, the inevitable future must nag him too, pull like quicksand. Mickelsson had nothing but scorn for the so-called Me generation, emotivism at plague proportions; nonetheless it was true that there were times when a man could help no one. Here stood this house, possibility of escape—increasingly sombre in the deepening twilight—and there, all around it, to his imagination, were the stretched-out bony arms of those with legitimate demands.
    He forgot what he’d been thinking.
    The seeming timelessness was part of it, all right. (The thought welled up into his consciousness abruptly, after a lapse of perhaps minutes.) Dropped out of nowhere into this still shade, one couldn’t have known it wasn’t 1940—or even 1840, except for the electric and telephone lines, harsh against the sky.
    Now the windows of the house were just darker places in the ghostly walls. The steep, stern gables, raised like old shields or defenseworks, dark against the darker mountainside, the darkening sky, had a look both forbidding and forlorn, the look of a stronghold that has outlasted its occupants by centuries. It was now no longer cockshut but purple dusk edging into night.
    â€œInteresting,” he said aloud. Quite suddenly, all around him, as if they’d leaped out of nowhere, there were shadows cast by the moon. The same instant that he noticed the shadows, he caught, out of the corner of his eye, some movement on the porch. He definitely saw the thing, he would have said, though he