The man reeled on his feet. He smiled at what he was seeing, knowing at once the incontrovertible truth: He was still drunk as a pig, and imagining it all! He’d had his share of worse nightmares. What about the time he had fallen out of the airplane and kept tumbling head over heels over head over heels in time with the screams of Blanche looking out of the plane at him tumbling to hell, as she was screaming at him now in this tumbled air that was thick with a rotten smell of something acid? His own bile coming up. Good, if he vomited his head would clear, Blanche would stop screaming, and his feet wouldn’t be sliding out from under him on the slippery pools of blood trickling from the jerking body beside which he thumped, losing his balance. Without her eyes, Blanche Tinton could not see the quick ravaging of her husband’s face, his own blinding, and the quick, precise stripping of his flesh. She was screaming so loud in her own agony that she could not hear, even without the roaches eating through her ears to her tender brain, the cries of the sobered man realizing his incomprehensible doom and hers.

The distant screams of Blanche and Harvey Tinton reached Hilda Cannon only faintly. She was nearly asleep at the wheel. She needed to get some sleep, badly. The foul episode from which she had finally run was the last straw. She had been prancing around the island like a harpooned whale all day and night. She had to guess the girls had simply taken one of the Cannon boats and gone fishing, deciding to spend the night on the water. Meantime not to worry. The girls knew the sea and handling boats. The weather would hold until late afternoon. As for the beast in the woods, she could set Amos Tarbell after him first thing in the morning.

Mrs. Cannon was glad she could now see the start of her own new white picket fence. It was spanking fresh, had cost a bundle, like everything else these inflation days, but the old one hadn’t been mended for fifty years, and had been broken down all around the Cannon family graves. Beyond the plot, the woman could make out the high chicken wire that protected her precious herb garden. She particularly liked the Cape Cod custom of dropping herbs on the kitchen floor for people to walk on. It sent a fresh sachet fragrance through the whole house. This year she had santolina and dill, lavender and fennel, basil and sage, savory and thyme. Next season she planned tarragon and bee balm, with more varieties of thyme for the prettiness of the border they made.