Page:Fantastic Volume 08 Number 01.djvu/15

 nothing to fear. Besides, the Voice will leave me if I obey. Then I can run away, then I can sleep, then I can go back into the darkness where there is neither Voice nor dreams nor memory of pain.

I have to sleep. It's the only sure way. The only sure way to banish silver skeletons and yawning corridors and mummies grinning up into endless darkness—

"Now."

Besides, I won't be doing it. Only my hands. My restless, moving hands.

"Find, a pillow."

There is a pillow under the old man's head. There was a pillow.

Now it is above his head, over his face. My hands hold it there, until the eyes and the open mouth are blotted out. My hands press a whiteness into the darkness.

No sound. No movement. My hands press and press and my wrists ache, but the Voice wants to be sure, very sure.

A century later, I turn away and pick up the black case from the table. The moonlight is dimming and the darkness increases.

All at once the Voice is gone. There is only that insane jangling, that damnable clicking from the obscene little grotesque on the table.

My hands put a stop to the mummy-vision. I can end this torment, too.

I grasp the silver figure and hurl it to the floor. Let my feet put a stop to the skeleton-spectre. It's good to feel it crunch and splinter beneath my heel. See, I can dance too, now!

There, it's done. And I'm alone in the dark, at last. I must grope my way out of the room, ever so slowly. I must creep down the stairs, out of the house, back through the strangeness of the silent streets. But the Voice is gone and I shall sleep once more untormented sleep.

I turn at the doorway for a last look. Blur of moonlight, swirl of shadows. And in the center of the room, the broken jumbled heap of tiny silver bones

Somebody was poking me in the ribs. I opened my eyes.

Then I knew it was all right because I was in bed, in my own apartment, with the sunlight streaming through the blinds. I was back in the world of morning, and bacon-and-eggs, and Roxie.

Roxie was doing the poking, of course. Her slim arm extended from beneath the covers of the twin bed next to mine, as she jabbed the point- THE SCREAMING PEOPLE