Perhaps she should stir herself from this unwonted lassitude and get up to close the window. The effort seemed beyond her. She had declined the offer of a sedative and found it strange, but not worrying, that she should feel this heaviness, this urge to stay where she was, cocooned in warmth and comfort, awaiting the soft boom of the next gust of wind, her eyes fixed on that narrow oblong of starlight. She felt no pain and, putting up her left hand, gently touched the padded dressing and the adhesive tape which secured it. She was used now to the weight and stiffness of the dressing, and would find herself touching it with something like a caress, as if it were becoming as much a part of her as the imagined wound which it covered.

And now, in a lull in the wind, she heard a sound so faint that only the stillness of the room could have made it audible. She sensed rather than heard a presence moving round the sitting room. At first, in her sleepy half-consciousness, she felt no fear, only a vague curiosity. It must be early morning. Perhaps it was seven o’clock and the arrival of her tea. And now there was another sound, no more than a gentle squeak but unmistakable. Someone was closing the bedroom door. Curiosity gave way to the first cold clutch of unease. No one spoke. No light was turned on. She tried to call out, in a cracked voice made ineffectual by the obstructive dressing, “Who are you? What are you doing? Who is it?” There was no reply. And now she knew with certainty that this was no friendly visitor, that she was in the presence of someone or something whose purpose was malignant.

As she lay rigid, the pale figure, white-clad and masked, was at her bedside. Arms moved above her head in a ritual gesture like an obscene parody of a benediction. With an effort she tried to struggle up—the bedclothes seemed suddenly to weigh her down—and stretched out a hand for the bell pull and the lamp. The bell pull wasn’t there. Her hand found the light switch and clicked it on, but there was no light. Someone must have hooked the bell pull out of reach and taken the bulb from the lamp. She didn’t cry out. All those early years of self-control against betraying fear, against finding relief in shouting and yelling, had inhibited her power to scream. And she knew screaming would be ineffective; the dressing made even speech difficult. She struggled to get out of bed but found herself unable to move.

In the darkness she could vaguely make out the whiteness of the figure, the covered head, the masked face. A hand was passing across the pane of the half-open window—but it was not a human hand. No blood had ever flowed in those boneless veins. The hand, so pinkly white that it might have been severed from the arm, was moving slowly through space on its mysterious purpose. Soundlessly it closed the window latch and, with a gesture delicate and elegant in its controlled motion, it slowly drew the curtain across the window. The darkness in the room intensified, no longer just the shutting out of light, but an occluding thickening of the air which made it difficult to breathe. She told herself that it must be a hallucination conjured from her half-sleeping state, and for one blessed moment she gazed at it, all terror past, waiting for the vision to fade into the surrounding darkness. And then all hope faded.