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mouth and fall like a stone at her feet. The blood of sunset had been replaced by the cool gray ashes of twilight. For the first time it occurred to her that night might fall upon her here in Crouch End — if she was still indeed in Crouch End — and that thought brought fresh terror.
    She told Vetter and Farnham that there had been no reflection, no logical train of thought, on her part during the unknown length of time between their arrival at the call box and the final horror. She had simply reacted, like a frightened animal. And now she was alone. She wanted Lonnie, she was aware of that much but little else. Certainly it did not occur to her to wonder why this area, which must surely lie within five miles of Cambridge Circus, should be utterly deserted.
    Doris Freeman set off walking, calling for her husband. Her voice did not echo, but her footfalls seemed to. The shadows began to fill Norris Road. Overhead, the sky was now purple.
    It might have been some distorting effect of the twilight, or her own exhaustion, but the warehouses seemed to lean hungrily over the toad. The windows, caked with the dirt of decades
    — of centuries, perhaps — seemed to be staring at her. And the names on the signboards became progressively stranger, even lunatic, at the very least, unpronounceable. The vowels were in the wrong places, and consonants had been strung together in a way that would make it impossible for any human tongue to get around them. CTHULHU KRYON read one, with more of those Arabic pothooks beneath it. YOGSOGGOTH read another. R'YELEH said yet another. There was one that
    she remembered particularly: NRTESN NYARLAHOTEP.
    'How could you remember such gibberish?' Farnham asked her. Doris Freeman shook her head, slowly and tiredly. 'I don't know. I really don't. It's like a nightmare you want to forget as soon as you wake up, but it won't fade away like most dreams do; it just stays and stays and stays.'
    Norris Road seemed to stretch on into infinity, cobbled, split by tram tracks. And although she continued to walk — she wouldn't have believed she could run, although later, she said, she did
    — she no longer called for Lonnie. She was in the grip of a terrible, bone-rattling fear, a fear so great she would not have believed a human being could endure it without going mad or dropping dead. It was impossible for her to articulate her fear except in one way, and even this, she said, only began to bridge the gulf which had opened within her mind and heart. She said it was as if she were no longer on earth but on a different planet, a place so alien that the human mind could not even begin to comprehend it. The angles seemed different, she said. The colors seemed different. The . . . but it was hopeless.
    She could only walk under a gnarled-plum sky between the eldritch bulking buildings, and hope that it would end.
    As it did.
    She became aware of two figures standing on the sidewall ahead of her — the children she and Lonnie had seen earlier. The boy was using his claw-hand to stroke the little girl's ratty braids.
    'It's the American woman,' the boy said.
    'She's lost,' said the girl.
    'Lost her husband.'
    'Lost her way.'
    'Found the darker way.'
    'The road that leads into the funnel.'
    'Lost her hope.'
    'Found the Whistler from the Stars — '
    ' — Eater of Dimensions — '
    ' — the Blind Piper — '
    Faster and faster their words came, a breathless litany, a flashing loom. Her head spun with them. The buildings leaned. The stars were out, but they were not her stars, the ones she had wished on as a girl or courted under as a young woman, these were crazed stars in lunatic constellations, and her hands went to her ears and her hands did not shut out the sounds and finally she screamed at them:
    'Where's my husband? Where's Lonnie? What have you done to him?'
    There was silence. And then the girl said: 'He's gone beneath.'
    The boy: 'Gone to the Goat with a Thousand Young.'
    The girl smiled — a malicious