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smile full of evil innocence. 'He couldn't well not go, could he?
    The mark was on him. You'll go, too.'
    'Lonnie! What have you done with — '
    The boy raised his hand and chanted in a high fluting language that she could not understand
    — but the sound of the words drove Doris Freeman nearly mad with fear.
    'The street began to move then,' she told Vetter and Farnham. 'The cobbles began to undulate like a carpet. They rose and fell, rose and fell. The tram tracks came loose and flew into the air — I remember that, I remember the starlight shining on them — and then the cobbles themselves began to come loose, one by one at first, and then in bunches. They just flew off into the darkness. There was a tearing sound when they came loose. A grinding, tearing sound . . . the way an earthquake must sound. And — something started to come through — '
    'What?' Vetter asked. He was hunched forward, his eyes boring into her. 'What did you see?
    What was it?'
    'Tentacles,' she said, slowly and haltingly. 'I think it was tentacles. But they were as thick as old banyan trees, as if each of them was made up of a thousand smaller ones . . . and there were pink things like suckers . . . except sometimes they looked like faces . . . one of them looked like Lonnie's face . . . and all of them were in agony. Below them, in the darkness under the street —
    in the darkness beneath — there was something else. Something like eyes . . . '
    At that point she had broken down, unable to go on for some time, and as it turned out, there was really no more to tell. The next thing she remembered with any clarity was cowering in the doorway of a closed newsagent's shop. She might be there yet, she had told them, except that she had seen cars passing back and forth just up ahead, and the reassuring glow of arc-sodium streetlights. Two people had passed in front of her, and Doris had cringed farther back into the shadows, afraid of the two evil children. But these were not children, she saw; they were a teenage boy and girl walking hand in hand. The boy was saying something about the new Martin Scorsese film.
    She'd come out onto the sidewalk warily, ready to dart back into the convenient bolthole of the newsagent's doorway at a moment's notice, but there was no need. Fifty yards up was a moderately busy intersection, with cars and lorries standing at a stop-and-go light. Across the way was a jeweler's shop with a large lighted clock in the show window. A steel accordion grille had been drawn across, but she could still make out the time. It was five minutes of ten.
    She had walked up to the intersection then, and despite the streetlights and the comforting rumble of traffic, she had kept shooting terrified glances back over her shoulder. She ached all over. She was limping on one broken heel. She had pulled muscles in her belly and both legs —
    her right leg was particularly bad, as if she had strained something in it.
    At the intersection she saw that somehow she had come around to Hillfield Avenue and Tottenham Road. Under a streetlamp a woman of about sixty with her graying hair escaping from the rag it was done up in was talking to a man of about the same age. They both looked at Doris as if she were some sort of dreadful apparition.
    'Police,' Doris Freeman croaked. 'Where's the police station? I'm an American citizen . . . I've lost my husband . . . I need the police.'
    'What's happened, then, lovey?' the woman asked, not unkindly. 'You look like you've been through the wringer, you do.'
    'Car accident?' her companion asked.
    'No. Not . . . not . . . Please, is there a police station near here?'
    'Right up Tottenham Road,' the man said. He took a package of Players from his pocket. 'Like a cig? You look like you c'd use one.'
    'Thank you,' she said, and took the cigarette although she I had quit nearly four years ago. The elderly man had to follow the jittering tip of it with his lighted match to get it going for her.
    He glanced at the