Black Alibi by Cornell Woolrich

were rustling and hissing, like living things stalking her, from back there.
    She heeled her hands to her eyes, held them tightly pressed there to try to shut out the terrible sights she had not seen yet, but was afraid she might have to see at any minute. Her teeth were chattering with terror, and with the nervous chill induced by it. She took her hands away from her eyes at length, and found she had begun to move again, without knowing it, in the meantime. Slowly now, uncertainly, erratically, without purpose or destination. She was meandering down the center of the avenue, with the wavering gait of someone about to drop in a heap at any moment. Still in the direction in which she had been going all along, for she could still go forward if not back. Her jerky, unpredictable progress was that of something bereft of all reason. Which, temporarily, she was.
    A bench edged up beside her along the perimeter of the lane, bleached white, cadaverous against the gloom, like something with an invisible spotlight trained on it. She turned aside, fell rather than walked over to it, and, as though its presence and support were some sort of emotional release, flung the upper part of her body prone against the seat of it, legs trailing out behind her along the ground, and exploded into a cataclysm of sobbing that was so violent it couldn’t by its very nature have lasted long without rendering her unconscious.
    It didn’t. She stopped again, from sheer rib stricture and breath stoppage, and remained there quiescent. But not unaware. Fear was creeping back over her again, like a thin glazed coating, even while she huddled there without moving. It touched off reflex action, finally. She scissored her legs suddenly, like a swimmer on dry ground; switched her head around, looked behind her. The instinctive reaction of those in the dark, afraid of the dark. A scream of dismay wrenched through her stiffened lips, and she tried to burrow her head and shoulders into the furthermost inner corner of the bench seat and back with such spasmodic terror that she struck her forehead violently against the cold hard stone and still didn’t even feel the blow.
    There was something creeping up along one side of the blurred gray pathway upon her. Something black, sinuous, belly-flat, tail snaking. Sometimes the offside gloom effaced it, sometimes the lighter tone of the path outlined its undulation. But on one side only. There was a wink, a tiny flash too dull to be called bright, every now and again from its forepart, as a ray from some star high overhead struck some glistening or liquefied beadlike area receptive to light.
    Its advance was irregular, with the irregularity of stealth. It would undulate quickly, covertly, forward; so quickly the ripple it made seemed almost an optical illusion. Then it would stop short, seem lifeless, nothing but a shadow, gathering itself for the next treacherous little creep. Even while she looked, eyes huge with brain-turning horror, she saw its tail, its slender ropelike after appendage, give a little flirt upward, a twitch, then flatten again. It made another little stealthy, squirming run, stopped again with hair-trigger timing.
    She was paralyzed. Approaching dissolution robs the body of movement. She was cataleptically silent, after that first scream of discovery, for the same reason. There is a depth of fright beyond screaming that is silent. She had heaved herself upward off the ground without use of her arms, climbing up the joint between bench back and side arm by motion of her shoulders alone, without turning to look at it. That was the most she could do to try to get away from it, wedge herself distortedly into the shallow indentation of a low stone bench, arched backbreakingly at the waist around its seat. Her face was a frozen grimace of convulsive anticipation.
    It gave no warning. It was as unpredictable as mercury or lightning. Suddenly it sprang, streaked out at her feet—and a little beyond, as though