a vague but nauseating smell of rotting garbage in the dumpster. The
stench of decomposition filled him with thoughts of death, which seemed
to trigger a vague recollection that he was on the run from someone-or
something that wanted to kill him. When he tried to recall why he was
fleeing, and from whom, he could not further illuminate any scrap of
memory; in fact, it seemed more an awareness on instinct than a genuine
recollection.
A puff of wind swirled around him. Then calm returned as if the dead
night was trying to come back to life but had aged just one shuddering
breath. A single piece of waste paper, swept up by that suffocating air
clicked along the cement and scraped to a stop against his right shoe.
Then another puff.
The paper whirled away.
Again the night was dead calm.
Something was happening. Frank sensed that these silent whiffs of wind
had some malevolent source, or meaning.
Irrationally, he was sure that he was about to be crushed by a great
weight. He looked up into the clear sky, at the empty blackness of
space and at the malignant brilliant of the distant stars. If something
was descending toward Frank he could not see it.
The night exhaled once more. Harder this time. Its breath was sharp
and dank.
He was wearing running shoes, white athletic socks, and a long-sleeved
blue-plaid shirt. He had no jacket, an could have used one. The air
was not frigid, just mildly cooling. But a coldness was in him, too, a
staggering fear, and he shivered uncontrollably between the cool caress
of the night and that inner chill.
The gust of wind died.
Stillness reclaimed the night.
Convinced that he had to get out of there-and fast, he pushed away from
the dumpster. He staggered along the alley retreating from the end of
the block where the street lamp glowed, into darker realms, with no
destination in mind, directed only by the sense that this place was
dangerous and that was if indeed safety could be found, lay elsewhere.
The wind rose again, and with it, this time, came a whistling, barely
audible, like the distant music of a flute of some strange bone
instrument.
Within a few steps, as Frank became surefooted and as his eyes adapted
to the murky night, he arrived at a confluence of passageways.
Wrought-iron gates in pale stucco arches lay to his left and right.
He tried the gate on the left. It was unlocked, secured only by a
simple gravity latch. The hinges squeaked, eliciting a wince from
Frank, who hoped the sound had not been heard by his pursuer.
By now, although no adversary was in sight, Frank had no doubt that he
was the object of a chase. He knew it was surely as a hare knew when a
fox was in the field.
The wind shuttered again at his back, and the flowerlike music, though
barely audible and lacking a discernible melody, was haunting. It
pierced him. It sharpened his fear.
Beyond the black iron gate, flanked by feathery ferns and bushes, a
walkway led between a pair of two-story apartment buildings. Frank
followed it into a rectangular courtyard somewhat revealed by
low-wattage security lamps at each end. First-floor apartments opened
onto a covered promenade; the doors of the second-floor units were under
the tile roof of an iron-railed balcony. Lightless windows faced a
swath of grass, beds of azaleas and a few palms.
A frieze of spiky palm-frond shadows lay across one palely illuminated
wall, as motionless as if they were carved on a stone tablet. Then the
mysterious flute warbled softly again, the reborn wind huffed harder
than before, and the shadows danced, danced. Frank’s own distorted,
dark reflection whirled briefly over the stucco, among the silhouettes,
as he hurried across the courtyard. He found another walkway, another
gate, and ultimately the street on which the apartment complex faced.
It was a side street without lampposts. There, the reign of the night
was undisputed.
The blustery wind lasted longer than before, churned harder. When the
gust ended abruptly, with an equally abrupt cessation of the unmelodic
flute, the night seemed to have been left in a vacuum, as though the