It was like a cave, a great vaulted cave which echoed back my first hesitant movements on the slab and tossed them from wall to wall until the darkness about me was all one vast rustling. I felt my skin prickle into gooseflesh. In that moment of waking I was oddly frightened. I had no memory of location. I might have been in a subterranean grotto, with enormous stalagmites of supergrotesque shape rising all about me in the thick gloom.

I sat up. The slab was cold beneath me. Directly in front of it towered a thing like a nightmare skeleton of stone.

It was just that: the fossil of a duckbilled dinosaur. I had gone to sleep on a marble bench in the palaeontology room of the museum.

I laughed. The panic that had touched me was gone, and I felt ashamed of myself. Not for falling asleep, because I had been very tired; but ashamed of the fear.

Lord knew how long I had slept. It was black night without and within, and no sound save that of my own movements came to me. The museum must have been closed for hours. The guards had missed me on my bench behind the dinosaur. I stood and shook myself and smoothed the rumpled suit, and began to grope my way between exhibits toward the entrance hall. I left the reptilian skeletons behind—not without a certain relief, for they were awesome sleepers to pass among—and was striding down a dim pathway between glass cases when I heard the footsteps.

A watchman was coming toward me. I could see the reflection of his flashlight. I halted indecisively, growled at myself, and went on. I had a perfectly valid excuse for being there. They could hardly do anything to me.

The guard was big, about my size, and his flash jumped in his hand when he saw me. Then he hurried forward. I grinned into the glare.

"Sorry to scare you—"

"What the hell you doing here, bud?"

I did not like him in the least. "I fell asleep in the bone room. Just woke up."

"That's what they say, bud, that's what they say." He was breathing in my face. I do not care for secondhand hamburg with onions. "Who are you?"

"Bill Cuff, I write for the adventure mags, maybe you've seen my yarns."

"No, I ain't. How come you fell asleep, bud?"

"Cuff," I said, "Bill Cuff. I was knocked out. I mean I was tired. Been working nights on a piece that doesn't want to jell."

"That's what they say, bud." I was getting good and sick of that line. Three times was more than enough. He didn't think so. "That's what they say. Fell asleep, huh? In a room full o' jewelry that'd bring a nice price even if you melted it down. Relics. We got a brooch over there that Napoleon gave to Catherine of Aragon. Make a nice haul by itself."

"I dare say, especially as she died some centuries before he was born. A unique bit of trinketry indeed." I disliked this guard more with each word. "You knucklehead," I said, "I told you I fell asleep. I was looking for a watchman just now."

"That's what they say. You come on with me. We got to see a cop, bud."

"For the love of—I can identify myself. Here's my driver's license."

"Stole, probably. We've had sneak-thieves in here before. You come on with me, bud."

I counted ten. "Cuff, Bill Cuff." His stupidity, his dark stolid bulk behind the persistent flashlight were angering me. "All right, lets see a cop."

He gripped my arm. "I don't like to be touched and handled." I said. I knocked his hand off. "Here, here," he yelped, "don't get tough or I'll have to rough you up a little."

He clutched my arm again. A scarlet curtain of rage shut down over my senses. I reached out and took his throat between my hands, dragged him to my chest, tightened my fingers and pressed and twisted till his flashlight dropped to the stone floor and went out with a pitiful tinkle. There in the unbroken dark of the deserted museum I held him until he was dead, until his head was turned over his shoulder and his popping eyes stared sightlessly down his backbone. Then I threw him into a case of snuff boxes, and went on to the entrance and let myself out and walked away down the moonlit street.

***

For a long while I walked alone with my cold rage. It was, well, most curious is a mild way to describe it. I had never been a man of violence and fury. Only in my adventure yarns had I spread gore and destruction abroad. I thought back over my twenty-eight years of life. I didn't believe I had ever even hit anyone before tonight. Yet I had taken enormous pleasure in the wanton brutality. Even after my anger had died, I felt no regret whatever for the murder of the guard. He had been a stupid man.

I found myself wondering about that after I had said it half-aloud. I didn't know why I had put the emphasis on man. You might have thought I was a woman.

Going aimlessly up one street and down another, now staring ahead and now gazing up at the full moon riding in its field of India-ink sky, I eventually saw that I was near the museum again. Some obscure curiosity took me past its doors. Just as I passed them, craning my neck foolishly as though I could see through their oak and bronze, half a dozen men burst out into the street. Automatically I speeded my pace. Then they yelled, and were after me. I ran.

What smirking fate had pushed me back to the damned place? From my position on the sidewalk, my attitude of looking intently at the doors, my haste thereafter, they had leaped to the thought that I had just emerged from the museum. I thought of fingerprints, of all kinds of clues I might have left behind. I ran like a spooked steer.

Reason left me. I caught the last wisp of a fleeting amazement: could this murderous, panicky creature be Bill Cuff, hitherto a sane and sober pulp writer?

I turned a corner, vaulted over a hedge and flung myself prone behind it. The pursuers—museum guards, for evidently the police had not arrived—pounded by, yelling to each other. When they had gone I darted over to the building that shadowed this plot of earth, kicked in a window, knocked away shards of glass from the frame and let myself down into the basement of the museum. Swiftly I blundered my way between work-benches and unfinished exhibits until I had found the door. Down a long black hall I padded, snorting through my nose and peering back frequently. Like a beast, said a tiny voice in the depths of my brain; like a stalked beast.

I found a door, steps that led upward. I passed the first floor and then the second. My shins were barked, my nose bled from a smack against an unseen wall. I licked the blood off my lips. The stairs ended and I was on the third floor. Here the moon slanted its cool rays into the windows, unhampered by nearby buildings. I could see quite well. My feet seemed to know where they were going. I passed through the hall of mammals, glancing aside at the dusty elephants, the two giraffes in their great cage of glass, the family of sea lions frozen forever in attitudes of stuffy majesty. My leather heels tapped loudly in the thick silence. I bent and took off my shoes, stuffing them into the pockets of my coat. Then I came to the central well, and leaning over the balcony I looked down at the hall of dinosaurs. Their bizarre frames were jagged splotches of black in a lesser blackness. Then the lights went up on their floor, and as I, two stories above, drew back my head with an involuntary snarl, guards hurried across the floor between the fossils, calling back and forth. I heard them say something about the broken window. I had trapped myself. I did not consider that important. Something in me knew I was heading for sanctuary.

I thrust my head over the railing again, like a fox on a cliff regarding a pack of hounds at fault. Chance made one of the hounds peer upward. There was a loud shout from below as the guard saw me.

Dashing along the passage between rail and wall, I entered the art gallery, traversed it, and came to the geology hall. Here was a replica of a Pennsylvania cavern, through which visitors could wander to gawk at stalactites and artificial springs and plaster-and-plastic underworld creatures—dead-white salamanders, strange little blind bugs, crawling unnamed worms stuck to the synthetic rock with hidden adhesives. I dived through the mouth of this weird exhibit, bruising myself heedlessly; rounded heaps of faked stone, scraped skin off my knuckles as I fended off obstacles that seemed to hurl themselves at me in the murk, at last came to the back of the cave and turned and squatted there on my hams, fingertips trailing against the cool hardness of the sham rock floor.

The moon was dropping; now it looked in a window opposite the cave, finding its way between the icicle forms of stalactites, just grazing my dark blue suit here and there. I bent my head and stared at the ivory huntress of the skies. Her full round belly was gravid with portent. I felt that all sorts of shattering events were shaping within her, that something alien and terrible and withal glorious was about to be born.

***

I could hear no sounds of pursuit as yet. I thought back over the past half hour. I still experienced no shred of remorse. The man had deserved to die. He had laid hands on me without provocation. He had been stupid. He had been a man.

Again that odd emphasis stirred a wonder in my mind, which vanished before I could grip it. I looked about me at what I could discern of the artificial cavern. I felt at home here. Then my memory played me a trick. I thought I had been in this place before, with others of my kind (my kind? what the hell?), and we had squatted thus and hearkened to the hunting cries of great carnivores and of—I grasped too quickly and too consciously for the rest of the thought and it was gone. But I could have sworn that I was going to remember the blood-roaring of a band of men.

What the hell, indeed! Had my wild adventure tales got under my skin and turned me lunatic?

That idea lasted for about a breath and a half. I knew I was cold sane. So, coldly and sanely, I groped in my memory for whatever experience I had turned up a fragment of. It was dim but it was certainly there, a scene painted in faded oils on dark canvas. I was in a cave with others of my kind, hulking broad-chested shapes in the gloom, and outside rose the howling of our pursuers. I felt the hair bristle on my neck and my forehead creased with rage. Then the lights went on in the geology hall, dispelling the picture.

I curled myself down behind the biggest of the stalagmites. I was wholly in shadow. I lay perfectly still, and my heart slowed its beat so that the blood hissed more quietly in my ears and I could hear with wonderful clarity. Guards spoke nearby. They were searching for me, checking methodically through every cranny of the hall. I flexed my fingers. A silent chuckle shook me.

One came cautiously to the entrance of the cave and bent and stared futilely. I saw him glance around for his companions, then advance slowly into the place. When he was nearly above me I rose as swiftly as a panther. He had no time to drag in breath for a yell. I clamped his mouth tight with one hand, broke his neck with the other. It was done beautifully. In that moment I found pride in my perfect coordination, in my excellence as a killing machine as deadly as a king cobra. I laid him down in shadow. I traded my coat for his uniform jacket, which was too snug in the shoulders but fitted well enough otherwise. I put on my shoes and his visored cap and walked out of the cave. I went along the aisle, face averted from the other guards, and found a stair well and slipped into it.

Up went the hue and cry before I was halfway down!

I leaped to the second floor entrance, feeling their eyes already on my back as I passed through it, and went loping for the nearest window, a tall square of moontouched glittering. I hurled the thing open, swung onto the sill, and launched myself into space without even looking at the ground. It rushed up at me. As naturally as a cat might have done it, I landed on toes and fingers. Then I was running.

No shouts broke out behind me. They had not seen my leap. I shed the jacket and cap as I ran. Then I remembered my coat, lying across the dead guard. No identification there—until they had time to check dry-cleaner's marks. I had an hour or two at least.

I headed for my hotel, a dingy, half-respectable pile on the edge of the downtown district. An hour to pack, and I would be on my way. There was something, or someone, calling to me from a great distance. I did not know what it was nor where.

My instincts would carry me to it. I wasted no time in wondering. I let my mind slip out of gear, put my whole energy into my traveling.

When I had run far enough, I found an owl cab and let it carry me the rest of the distance. It seemed oddly alien to me to trust to anything but my own powerful legs; but I forced myself to sit back and let the civilized habits of Bill Cuff take the upper hand. I would rest for a little while.