Black Curtain Read Online Free PDF Page A

possibility. It's not a mistake in identity. He really knows me. But I don't know him. He's someone from the Three Forgotten Years." And that, he knew, was why he was really afraid. It was the aura of the unknown. He was no more of a coward than the next; he wasn't really afraid of the man, he would have braved him before now if that had been all there was to it. It wasn't physical cowardice, it was mental.
     
    This man came out of the shadows, bringing them with him. This man was armed with an unknown weapon. There was a terrible remorselessness about his pursuit. Townsend could not bring himself to meet the challenge. He had just experienced a deep-reaching psychic shock, hadn't had time fully to get over it yet. He probably wouldn't get over it completely for years to come.
     
    He was handicapped in being called on to meet fresh tests of spiritual courage at such a time. He needed peace; he needed safety. His lacerated psyche required time to knit itself together again. It was still jittery, sensitized, it needed a chance to convalesce undisturbed.
     
    No one noticed Townsend sitting on the park bench all that day. A quiet figure, desperately trying to pierce the curtain that hid the past.
     
    It grew later. The children began to hurry out of the park.
     
    A random, homeward-bound nursemaid or two, wheeling her charges, followed after that, at intervals. The birds seemed to go too, or at least become voiceless. The sunlight itself started to withdraw from around him. The whole world was leaving the scene. The park became still, hushed, with a sort of macabre expectancy. The daily death of light was about to occur.
     
    The things of the night began to slink into view. Blue shadows, like tentatively clutching fingers, began a slow creep toward Townsend out from under the trees. Deepening, advancing only furtively when they weren't watched closely, pretending to be arrested when they were. At first azure, scarcely visible in the still-strong light of day. Then dark blue, like ink rolling sluggishly amidst the grass blades and dyeing them from the roots up. At last, freed of the vigilance of the closing red eye of the sun, turning black, showing their true color.
     
    One, the longest, boldest of them all, like an active agency trying to overtake him, to trap him fast there where he was, pointed itself straight across the path, advancing upon him by crafty, insidious degrees like a slithering octopus tentacle. He drew his foot hastily back out of its reach, as though it were something malign, with an intelligence of its own. He stared down at it with cold mistrust, watched it waver there frustrated, like a snake whose strike has fallen short.
     
    Night. That meant night, that little brush stroke of black lying there athwart the ground. Night, the time of fear, the enemy.
     
    He wanted to get out of here. He wanted to put walls around himself, light lights, shut doors. In palpitant awareness of the unseen he got up and moved along the winding path through the twilight. Only the slow dignity of his outer step was adult; inside he was a lost child moving through a scary array of goblin trees. with a lighted cigarette for protective talisman instead of crossed fingers.
     
    4
     
    He didn't like having to fool Virginia like this. He wanted to tell her. Several times he almost did, but then he checked himself each time, He hated to dump this on her, particularly because it was such a sketchy, formless danger. She'd had so much trouble already. Three years of it. Across the dinner table he could still see the traces of what she'd been through. Her eyes were sad. And she still didn't laugh as she had before he went away. You couldn't go through anything like that and not have it do something to you.
     
    So he didn't tell her. Let her enjoy her peace while she had it.
     
    Then, with a soundless flash that should have lighted up the silverware and dishes around him, came a sudden realization of renewed danger that bad escaped