The Whole Town’s Sleeping

The courthouse clock chimed seven times. The echoes of the chimes faded.

Warm summer, twilight here in upper Illinois country in this little town deep far away from everything, kept to itself by a river and a forest and a meadow and a lake. The sidewalks still scorched. The stores closing and the streets shadowed. And there were two moons; the clock moon with four faces in four night direction above the solemn black courthouse, and the real moon rising in vanilla whiteness from the dark east.

They stood upon the edge of the ravine that cut the town half in two. Behind them were the lit houses and music, ahead was deepness, moistness, fireflies and dark.

“Maybe we shouldn’t go to the show tonight,” said Francine. “The Lonely One might follow and kill us. I don’t like that ravine. Look at it, will you!”

Lavinia looked and the ravine was a dynamo that never stopped running, night or day; there was a great moving hum, a bumbling and murmuring of creature, insect, or plant life. It smelled like a greenhouse, of secret vapors and ancient, washed shales and quicksands.

[…]

“Bosh!” said Lavinia Nebbs.

The three women moved along the street under the black trees, past suddenly locked houses. How soon the news had spread outward from the ravine, from house to house, porch to porch, telephone to telephone. Now, passing, the three women felt eyes looking out at them from curtained windows as locks rattled into place. How strange the popsicle, the vanilla night, the night of close-packed ice cream of mosquito-lotioned wrists, the night of running children suddenly veered from their games and put away behind glass, behind wood, the popsicles melting puddles of lime and strawberry where they fell when the children were scooped indoors. Strange the hot rooms with the sweating people pressed tightly back into them behind the bronze knobs and knockers.

[…]

“We’re crazy being out on a night like this,” said Helen.

“We’re all overwrought,” said Lavinia. “I simply won’t take a taxi if you get one. If I’m the next victim, let me be the next. There’s all too little excitement in life, especially for a maiden lady thirty-three years old, so don’t you mind if I enjoy it.”

Outside, the streets were swept clean and empty of cars or trucks or people. Bright lights still burned in the small store windows where the warm wax dummies lifted pink wax hands fired with blue-white diamond rings, or flourished orange wax legs to reveal hosiery. The hot blue-glass eyes of the mannequins watched as the ladies drifted down the empty river bottom street, their images shimmering in the windows like blossoms seen under darkly moving waters.

Now the lights were going, going, gone. The little house lights and big house lights and yellow lights and green hurricane lights, the candles and oil lamps and porch lights, and everything felt locked up in brass and iron steel, everything, thought Lavinia, is boxed and locked and wrapped and shaded. She imagined the people in their moonlit beds. And their breathing in the summer-night rooms, safe and together. And here we are, thought Lavinia, our footsteps on along the baked summer evening sidewalk.

“Sometimes I think people want to die. You’ve acted odd all evening.”

“I’m just not afraid,” said Lavinia. “And I’m curious, I suppose. And I’m using my head. Logically, the Lonely One can’t be around. The police and all. […] Let’s just say I’m enjoying myself, precariously but safely. If there was any real chance of anything happening to me, I’d stay here with you, you can be sure of that.”

“Maybe part of you doesn’t want to live anymore.”

The ravine was deep, black and black, black! And the world was gone behind, the world of safe people in bed, the locked doors, the town, the drugstore, the theater, the lights, everything was gone. Only the ravine existed and lived, black and huge, about her.

She heard music. In a mad way, in a silly way, she heard the great surge of music that pounded at her, and she realized as she ran, as she ran in panic and terror, that some part of her mind was dramatizing, borrowing from the turbulent musical score of some private drama. […] She told her legs what to do, her arms, her body, her terror; she advised all parts of herself in this white and terrible moment, over the roaring creek waters, on the hollow, thudding, swaying almost alive, resilient bridge planks she ran, followed by the wild footsteps behind, behind, with the music following, too, the music shrieking and babbling.

There was nobody following me at all. Nobody running after me. She got her breath and almost laughed at herself. It stands to reason if a man had been following me, he’d have caught me! […] How silly of me. I wasn’t running from anything. That ravine’s as safe as anyplace. Just the same, it’s nice to be home. Home’s the really good warm place, the only place to be.

She put her hand out to the light switch and stopped.

“What?” she asked. “What, what?”

Behind her in the living room, someone cleared his throat.