stepped out, the woman's fury seemed suddenly to vanish. Her voice was no longer shrill; it was flat, listless. "When will you be back, Ralph?"

He shrugged. "Can't say, exactly. We might go on a rat kill. Take a couple hours. Maybe we'll poke around for stuff till dark. Maybe just gab over a can of mulligan." He closed the door.

From the window, she watched him cross the littered back yard and disappear in the adjacent cattails.

Supper time came and went and he had not returned. She had a cup of tea and a biscuit and then sat up, trying to read, but found herself unable to concentrate. Finally she crossed to the kitchen window.

Darkness had fallen, but the Enemy was still visible, revealed in the lurid flickering light of towering trash fires. At night the dump seemed even more forbidding. You never knew what that flame-riven darkness might conceal.

As she stood at the window, she imagined that the approaches to Hell itself might resemble the scene before her--fires circling the night and beyond in the deeper darkness terrors and frights unspeakable.

At last, wearily, she undressed for bed. But she did not sleep peacefully. This evening the nightmare came swiftly. There were variations, but the essential outline was nearly always the same.

From the outside darkness, from above and below and from all sides, came subdued but ominous whispers of sound--gnawing, scraping, squeaking, scuttling. And then the house began to settle, literally to sink, like a ship in the sea. The busy rats had eaten away its foundations and now it was being engulfed in great tides of trash. The dump was closing in on it, like a monstrous growth. Soon it would disappear out of sight in the slimy darkness. As it slipped into the sour earth, the rats broke through. They poured through the windows, the doors, down the chimney--huge, hairy creatures with red eyes and yellow flashing fangs. They leaped upon the bed, lunged for her throat.

She was sitting up in bed, screaming, bathed in sweat, when she finally awoke.

Ralph had not yet returned. She got up, drank tea, and went back to bed for a few minutes' fitful sleep in the hour or two before dawn.

She was sitting in the kitchen when Ralph returned. Grey light was filtering over the cattails. In the distance a sea gull squealed.

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