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sharp unpleasant taste, almost as if she had dosed with a strong mouthwash. The cobbles of Norris Road bled fresh blood in the sunset.
    They were approaching an underpass. And it was dark under there. I can't, her mind informed her matter-of-factly. I can't go under there, anything might be under there, don't ask me because I can't.
    Another part of her mind asked if she could bear for them to retrace their steps, past the empty shop with the travelling cat in it (how had it gotten from the restaurant to here? best not to ask, or even wonder about it too deeply), past the weirdly oral shambles of the launderette, past The Market of the Shrunken Heads. She didn't think she could.
    They had drawn closer to the underpass now. A strangely painted six-car train — it was bonewhite
    — lunged over it with startling suddenness, a crazy steel bride rushing to meet her groom.
    The wheels kicked up bright spinners of sparks. They both leaped back involuntarily, but it was Lonnie who cried out. She looked at him and saw that in the last hour he had turned into someone she had never seen before, had never even suspected. His hair appeared somehow grayer, and while she told herself firmly — as firmly as she could — that it was just a trick of the light, it was the look of his hair that decided her. Lonnie was in no shape to go back. Therefore, the underpass.
    'Come on,' she said, and took his hand. She took it brusquely so he would not feel her own trembling. 'Soonest begun, soonest done.' She walked forward and he followed docilely.
    They were almost out — it was a very short underpass, she thought with ridiculous relief —
    when the hand grasped her upper arm. She didn't scream. Her lungs seemed to have collapsed like small crumpled paper sacks. Her
    mind wanted to leave her body behind and just . . . fly. Lonnie's hand parted from her own. He seemed unaware. He walked out on the other side — she saw him for just one moment silhouetted, tall and lanky, against the bloody, furious colors of the sunset, and then he was gone.
    The hand grasping her upper arm was hairy, like an ape's hand.
    It turned her remorselessly toward a heavy slumped shape leaning against the sooty concrete wall. It hung there in the double shadow of two concrete supporting pillars, and the shape was she could make out . . . the shape, and two luminous green eyes
    'Give us a fag, love,' a husky cockney voice said, and she smelled raw meat and deep-fat-fried chips and something swee and awful, like the residue at the bottom of garbage cans.
    Those green eyes were cat's eyes. And suddenly she became horribly sure that if the slumped shape stepped out of the shadows, she would see the milky cataract of eye, the pink ridges off scar tissue, the tufts of gray hair.
    She tore free, backed up, and felt something skid through the air near her. A hand? Claws? A spitting, hissing sound —
    Another train charged overhead. The roar was huge, brain rattling. Soot sifted down like black snow. She fled in a blind panic, for the second time that evening not knowing where.. or for how long.
    What brought her back to herself was the realization that Lonnie was gone. She had half collapsed against a dirty brick wall, breathing in great tearing gasps. She was still in Morris Road (atleast she believed herself to be, she told the two constables; the wide way was still cobbled, and the tram tracks still ran directly down the center), but the deserted, decaying shops had given way to deserted, decaying warehouses. DAWGLISH & SONS, read the soot-begrimed signboard on one. A second had the name ALHAZRED emblazoned in ancient green across the faded brickwork.
    Below the name was a series of Arabic pothooks and dashes.
    'Lonnie!' she called. There was no echo, no carrying in spite of the silence (no, not complete silence, she told them; there was still the sound of traffic, and it might have been closer, but not much). The word that stood for her husband seemed to drop from her