I kept remembering that old friend of mine and what he'd said to me that last time I had seen him. It had been only two days before he had been killed — on an open highway which, at the time of the accident, had not been as heavily traveled as it was at other times, his car a twisted block of wreckage and the tire marks showing how it all had happened, how his car had struck another which suddenly had swerved out of its lane into his path. Except that there had been no sign of that other car.

I tried to put it out of my mind and think of something else, but as the hours went by and the long ribbon of concrete kept unrolling ahead of me and the springtime countryside went flashing past, I found myself time and time again going back to that last evening I had seen him.

He had sat like a shrunken gnome in the great lounge chair which threatened to engulf him in its pattern of red and yellow tapestry, rolling the brandy glass between his palms and looking up at me.

"I think that we are haunted," he had said, "by all the fantasies, all the make-believe, all the ogres that we have ever dreamed, dating from that day when the caveman squatted in the dark beside his fire and stared out into the blackness of the night which lay beyond the cave. Imagining what might be out there. Knowing, of course, what might be out there, for he would have been the one to know — a hunter, a gatherer, a roamer of the wilderness. He had eyes to see and nose to smell and ears to hear and all these senses, more than likely, were much sharper than those we have today. So he would have known all the things that might be prowling in the darkness. He knew, of course, but he didn't trust himself, he didn't trust those senses. For that busy little brain of his, for all its brutish- ness, was busily conjuring up other forms and shapes, other kinds of life, other menaces…"