It smelled as if there were something dead in here. She was aware of movement behind the light, then she could feel him at work on her nightgown. By looking down her front she could see his hands as he used the scalpel to cut away the cloth. That awful instrument could only be for one purpose; she just knew he was going to kill her. When she felt his hands pushing away the nightgown, exposing her nakedness, she moaned in misery—but also felt a horrible, unwanted tingle. This nightmare had another aspect. She began to anticipate seeing him, she visualized his sweating body plunging into the little pool of light. It made her angry. She had never imagined she could feel this debased, this betrayed.

As he bent toward her she caught a glimpse of him. At that moment Francie Parker, twenty-two years old, the frequent object of male desire, capable of eighty words a minute on an IBM Selectric, saw something that instantly and utterly shattered her.

The shock stopped her heart. All that escaped of the wild cry her mind had formed was a gurgling sigh.

When she died like that, before she should have, he growled his rage and stabbed wildly, hoping to get her before the last second.

He failed. Then he took her as best he could, keeping at it until she crackled like paper.

At four o’clock on a wet morning, Sutton Place was empty. Elegant windows were dark. Nothing moved except when an occasional gust of wind from the night’s storm stirred some bit of paper or a broken leaf. Behind one window in one of the charming little houses that line the east side of the street a figure stood, absolutely motionless. Miriam was rigid with concentration, feeling the eerie echo of a distant touch. It was a facility she shared only with her own race, and some of the higher primates. Man, while capable of learning touch from an adept, was normally mute. But this touch was real, pulsating on the darkness.

One of her own kind?

Since the bloodbath of the Middle Ages the remaining members of her race lived solitary lives, each wrapped in his own longings and tragedies, an autumnal species too frightened of persecution to dare to foregather.

“We are not evil,” she thought as the strange touch rose higher and higher, “we also are part of the justice of the earth.”

Fifty years ago she had seen one of her own kind, a tall figure alone at the railing of the liner Berengaria, looking toward her on the dock. For an instant they had touched, sharing their private hungers, and then it was lost, the ship’s whistle sounding, the wake disappearing in the moonlight, journey without end.

Her tragic human companions were her only comfort. They could not conceive of the loneliness that drove her to transform them, to create her own image within them.