Like the rest of us, Annie was awakened by a loud explosion. She reports: "It was a bang.

Then I heard the scurry of little feet running across your bedroom upstairs. It must have been the cats."

"Annie, the cats were in the city. We don't take them weekends because they don't like the carrier."

"You're kidding! I always just assumed it was the cats. Anyway, I vaguely remember the light. Mostly I remember the noises. A few minutes after the scurrying, I heard you come downstairs. You said through the door not to worry. The next morning you told me that some people had come down from is spaceship to visit."

" What? Annie, I never said any such thing. I would never say anything like that."

"At the time I thought it must have been some kind of dream."

"You remember me saying it?"

"Well, now that I think of it, I don't know where I got the idea that anybody said that."

(Months later she recalled that I had not spoken about a visit. but had described the crystal. In any case, I certainly had a very strange explanation for the night's disturbances.) At that point I almost wished that I had never asked my witnesses anything. I said good-bye and put the phone down. I realized, finally and inescapably, that something very peculiar was going on. I could not deny it. I would have been a fool to deny it.

I went into my office and closed my door. It was evening, and Manhattan's few blind stars were shining in the sky. The world outside looked so normal, and that moment its very normality seemed to me to be the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

I thought back across the months to October The fall had been an awful time for me and my wife. Around the second week of October I had become extremely fearful about living in the New York area and decided to move.

Had my terror stemmed from that night? And what about all my nervousness, my secret searching under beds and in closets, my unreasonable fear of prowlers? It seemed to me that I had been growing increasingly uneasy with the passing months. I had awful dreams that I cannot remember. Again and again I woke up in the small hours of the morning feeling as if something dreadful had just happened.

The last week of October, still with no conscious memory of that night being in any way unusual, I decided that I couldn't live a moment longer in New York. The city streets seemed hideously dangerous. Our cabin was a dark, terrible place, one that I could not bear ever to enter again. I felt out of control, as if anything could happen, and might.