She knows then what will happen when she steps across the threshold to the cellar into which I force her. By entering, she is the one who lures me to my crime.

So she wants to convict me: I still haven’t revealed my intention and yet I am already in her hands.

Panic seizes me: only now does my vileness become manifest and grow in enormity. . .

I hold a coal shovel in my fist. It bears dreadful witness against me; I see it in her eyes, see myself in her eyes. By showing me myself, like a mirror, she forces me to admit to what I am. I have to murder her because I am a murderer.

I lift the shovel. I could put it down again, I could pretend I was indulging in a gross practical joke—but her eyes are relentless, they shriek out my condemnation. If I let her escape now, then I’ll be done for. The first stroke hits her across the skull and smears her gray oldcrone hair with brains and teeth, but does not snuff out her eyes. Now no amends can be made. Now she will merely testify the more dreadfully against me . . . I smash away at her in an impotent chaos of shame and pleasure and disgust. The more surely her bones break and her abominable and atrocious flesh becomes one with the tatters of her clothes, the more irrevocably I become one with myself; the more terrible is the truth that she has recognized in me . . .

And here my horror bursts through the dream. I know that I am just dreaming all this—and when I flee into awakening, I am attacked by recognition: I know that this once really happened.

And I have thereby lost it. Only its echo resounds in me.

•

I drove through one of those blue-and-gold autumn days that make us believe that the world of children’s picture books still exists. That we are capable of restoring this world. Somewhere in the countryside, where the high trees are reflected in a small pond at the edge of the fields, beyond which distant mountains stand blue, and where we shall all settle someday when we have had success in life and the condition of our coronary arteries has not yet forced us to live near a hospital: in some village that has remained as true to nature as possible, and that the influx of movie people and hit songwriters has preserved from violation by modern barbarity and refurbished with rustic authenticity . . . where the world shall once again be as it was in our childhood, though autumnally mellowed, wisely purged, days following one another as full and pure as the vesper bell tolling. Days of the harvest of life, in which the plain and simple things are gathered in, the things we take for granted. In the morning, the rooster on his command hill of dung greets the sun with the saber blade of his crowing, the barnyard dog stretches with a wagging tail, the ducks quack their way to the pond with wiggling asses. Noon light dapples the fieldstone pavement under the lime trees by the barn, the windowpanes reflect the rusty foliage of the walnut tree in the blue of the sky with its cumulus cloudlets, and the silvery threads of Indian summer drift over the fields. Behind the violet of the faraway mountain range, the evening kindles a cold glow, over which the bell of heaven tolls sootily. The lime trees swish, the cows moo in the byre, the farmhand leads Farmer Brown’s horse to the blacksmith—