Seven kept trying to talk to her, but she didn’t hear him; she didn’t believe in spirits, except in Lawrence’s, and it seemed to have deserted her.

They finally caught up with her three days later, when Lawrence’s body had been traced. The police were very understanding. Lydia’s children came for her. She explained what had happened and they all pretended that the events were quite normal, so she saw that they didn’t believe a word that she said; and she didn’t much care. She eyed her offspring with great detachment. They seemed too … solid, unimaginative … limited.

For a week her daughter, Anna, took her. She left with the cats and Mr. George, carrying his bowl in her arms, while Anna was out at bridge. They found her within a few hours. Roger, her son, had her next. But she looked around the suburban home and garden, and the whole environment seemed too pat, unreal; no longer where she belonged. It seemed quite clear; she didn’t belong anyplace. Her interest in the world was fading. Vaguely she wondered that she’d ever taken it seriously at all.

They were giving her tranquilizers because every once in a while she kept talking about how Lawrence picked out the bench she’d left his body on, even though he’d been dead for hours. She thought it mystifying herself.

One night she didn’t take the tranquilizers, and sneaked out after everyone was asleep. It was early autumn. The orange leaves were all dull and soft and falling everywhere. She ran—agile for her age, she thought—through all the backyards, ducking under clotheslines, avoiding garbage cans, sprinting past lighted windows showing glimpses of glowing television sets.

A great exhilaration filled her. Her nightgown flapped at her ankles as she ran. She lost her slippers, and luxuriated in the wet grass against her bare feet. They’d raise hell if they found her. Dimly she wondered when and why she’d stopped doing things like this. When she was a child? From the distance she heard alarmed voices—probably Roger and his wife calling—but she ran on and on.

For a while she almost felt as if someone was running with her, or keeping up to her in some funny way, and once she would have fallen over an old tree stump, but a voice in her head said, “Look out,” or at least she thought that it did. She wasn’t aware of Oversoul Seven though. Actually, he kept calling her name, but this inner voice merged with the shouts of Lydia’s son and daughter-in-law, and in any case Seven kept feeling himself being pulled further and further away from Lydia, till he could hardly sense her at all. Instead, another scene was coming into reality for him. The backyards vanished, and shining mosaics took the place of the grass.

Chapter Eleven

Ma-ah in the Land of the Speakers