People lay sleeping in those buildings, thousands of them, each locked in his own dreams, vulnerable and quiet.

Sarah walked softly along, full of an obscure and subtle longing. She felt a lust for all things beautiful, reflected that there was no such thing as an ugly human being.

She wanted to get into one of their apartments, to touch their belongings, to listen to their soft breathing.

She found herself standing on one of the benches. With her arms raised to their full length the lowest balcony was three feet above her. She crouched down on the bench. By springing straight up she might just be able to catch the edge of the balcony.

Do what? This was absurd. Aberrant behavior. Psychopathic. Still, her muscles were tensing, her hands stretching to grasp, her eyes measuring the distance. There wasn’t a trace of psychopathic behavior in her personality. If anything, she was too civilized.

Then she was hanging on the edge of the terrace, her fingers grasping, her legs swinging. It was impossible and yet she had done it.

Her arms and fingers did not ache as they should. Rather they felt like steel. She raised herself to the edge and looked onto the terrace itself. There was a barbeque, a couple of canvas chairs, a tricycle. Her right hand grasped one of the iron bars that formed the railing of the terrace.

She was beginning to feel a strange aggressive anger, an eagerness to get in there and—

She dropped to the ground, the thud echoing up and down the esplanade. The image that had made her release her grip now made her hunch her shoulders and clasp her arms around herself, hugging herself against its ugliness.

She didn’t feel things like that! She loved mankind, that was the foundation of her life. How could she possibly, even for an instant, have wanted to kill innocent human beings, to crack them open like—like she had imagined.

It was as if somebody else was living in her body, some wild being, driven by needs of which she herself was ignorant.

“Has this always been in me, deep back behind the me I know?”

Yes. Hidden, but there.

Now given life. Something enormous was stirring and waking in her, she felt. It was as old as life, perhaps, but also new. It was what had driven her out here in the middle of the night, had converted a simple thing such as hunger into a gluttonous lust, had made her so abnormally interested in the people in the apartments.

She began to walk quickly along the esplanade, seeking a more open area, a place where she would be less tempted to this behavior.

As she moved she had the uncanny sensation that somebody or something was moving with her, walking as she walked, breathing as she breathed.

Something not quite of this world.

It was tall and pale and as quick as a hawk.