"I'm not afraid." But as she took a hesitating step forward, the lamplight darkened, and the whole room was lost to her sight in the foggy mazes of sleep.

Gil told no one about the third dream. She had spoken of the second one to a woman friend who had listened sympathetically but hadn't, she felt, understood. Indeed, she didn't understand it herself. But the third dream she mentioned to no one, because she knew that it had been no dream. The certainty troubled her. Maybe, she told herself, she would tell her friend about it one day, when enough time had passed so that it was no longer important. But for now she locked it away, with several other irrelevant matters, in her secret heart.

Then one night she woke from a sound sleep standing up. She saw, as her eyes cleared, that she was in a sunken courtyard in that deserted city. The great houses surrounded her like lightless cliffs, and moonlight drenched the square, throwing her shadow clearly on muddy and unwashed flagstones under her bare feet. The place was deserted, like a courtyard of the dead. Where the ghastly silver light blanched the facade of the east-facing house, she saw that its great doors had been blown off their hinges from within and lay in scattered pieces about her feet.

From out of that empty doorway, a sudden little wind stirred, restless and without direction, turning back on itself in a small scritching eddy of fallen leaves. She sensed beyond the blind windows and vacant doors of that house a sound, a fumbling movement, as if dark shifted through dark, bumbling eyelessly at the inner walls, seeking a way out. She swallowed hard, her breath quickening in fear, and she glanced behind her at the arched gateway that led out into the deserted street beyond. But the gate was dark, and she felt a clammy, unreasoning terror of walking beneath the clustered shadows in the high vault of the enclosed passage.