Death Has a Small Voice by Frances Lockridge Page B

before she ran into, fell into, a newly dug hole. It was a large hole—large enough to be a grave. Pam skirted it, and ran down a hill, through an open meadow. Now the night was too bright with the little moon—too bright by far. She ran expecting, with each step, a blow in the back. She ran, not looking around at the dim house she had left behind.
    She came to a barbed wire fence and crawled under it. A barb caught her already ruined dress—where was her coat? Surely she had had a coat!—and the dress gave. The point of the barb raked, like a harsh fingernail, on Pam’s skin. She got up beyond the fence and went on down the hill, now among blueberry bushes and—yes—wild blackberry. Thorns grabbed at her, whipped at her. They lashed her legs. She kept on going.
    She went over a stone fence, clutching—she feared—ugly columns of poison ivy. If I live through this, I’ll be a mess for days, Pam North said, and stumbled on a hummock. She grabbed wildly, held a sapling briefly, plunged with both feet into water and almost fell. She was, she realized, in a swamp;
    It had been then that her mind, which before had been clear enough, if understandingly full of fears, began to scream. It had been then the nightmare started. Injustice such as this, Pam’s screaming mind insisted, was possible only in a nightmare. If you were fleeing for your life you deserved, at the very least, to flee in dignity. To begin flight with what amounted to a prat-fall, to snag oneself—just where one inevitably does—in going under a barbed wire fence, to be whipped by spiked bushes,’ now to fall into a swamp, probably full of unpleasant snakes—these things carried life’s irony to the point of burlesque. It was as if, facing a firing squad as bravely as possible, one were suddenly to fall uncontrollably to sneezing.
    She got hold of herself and began, in the dim light, to work her way to the left. She stumbled often, stepped several times more into cold water, once wrenched her ankle. She made many false turns, false steps, before she came again to firm ground. She then returned, or hoped she did, to her original course, away from the house. She had supposed that soon she would find a road.
    She could only guess, on the hilltop, starting down it, with no road yet in evidence, how long it had been since she left the house through the trap door and the little window. She thought it had been several hours and that now it was long after midnight. She was unbearably tired; her body ached. And she had still not found water she dared stop to drink. She came out of the woods and to a mowed field, and on the comparatively level surface Pam North staggered as she walked. Once she fell, catching herself without injury. She did not immediately get up again, but lay as she had fallen on the grass. But she began to feel cold, and managed to get back to her feet.
    She went under another barbed wire fence and beyond it came to a brook. It was not a wide brook; there were stones in it on which one could step. Pam lay down on the bank and drank from her cupped hands. No doubt cows drank there; in all likelihood cows waded there. It did not matter. The water was cold in her throat, cold on her face. She got up after a time and, absurdly, wanted a cigarette as she could not remember ever having wanted one. The spirit should flee death, if it must, along a beam of light, Pam thought, being, by then, light-headed. The body is ridiculous.
    She crossed the brook, climbed wearily over another stone wall, and stepped down into a lane. Without any hesitation, or any thought, Pam turned to her right and followed the little lane. Inevitably, it climbed a hill. Pam put one foot grimly in front of another.
    At the top of the hill, the lane pitched down. A hundred feet down the slope, on her left, there was a small house. Pam walked to the gap in the wall in front of the house and turned and walked up to the house,