Thomas thought about the back room of the Herbert L. Jones Funeral Parlor and the blue-and-white neon sign above its door and the Barefoot Lady, with feet caked with dirt and long yellow and black toenails, standing under that neon light. He had only seen her once in the day; but that once had been enough. She wore rags and an old black hat, and her nose and lips were huge and pink, and her hair was long and stringy and hanging far below her shoulders, and she had been drooling. He had come across her one morning digging into their garbage can for scraps. He had felt sorry for her because he and his brother and his mother threw out very few scraps, and had gone back up the stairs to ask his mother for something to give her. His mother had sent down some fresh biscuits and fried bacon, and watching her eat it with her dirty hands with their long black fingernails had made him sick. Now, in his bed, he could still see her eating the biscuits, flakes of the dough sticking to the bacon grease around her mouth. It was a bad picture to see above his bed in the shadows on the ceiling. And it did not help to close his eyes; because then he could see her more vividly, with all the horrible dirty colors of her rags and face and feet made sharper in his mind. He could see her the way he could see the bad men and monsters from The Shadow and Suspense and Gangbusters and Inner Sanctum every night after his mother had made him turn off the big brown radio in the living room. He could see these figures, men with long faces and humps in their backs and old women with streaming hair dressed all in black and cats with yellow eyes and huge rats, on the walls in the living room when it was dark there; and when he got into bed and closed his eyes they really came alive and frightened him, the way the present picture in his mind of the Barefoot Lady, her long toenails scratching on the thirty-two stairs as she came up to make him give her more biscuits and bacon, was frightening him. He did not know what to do, and so he moved closer to his brother, who was asleep now. Thomas wanted to wake him up so that he would have help against the Barefoot Lady. He wanted to cut on the light but he was afraid the light would show her where he was. He sweated, and waited. And downstairs, from below the blue-and-white lighted sign above the locked door to the funeral parlor, he heard her scream again; a painful sound, lonely, desperate, threatening, impatient, angry, hungry, he had no word to place it.

“Mr. Jones! I love you, Mr. Jones!”

III