It didn’t slip away. It shone steady, and grew till the trees stood out against it, a broad beacon of normality – street lights, maybe. All I could hear was my blood and breath, labouring both; steel bands squeezed at my chest and head. But the tombstones were thinning, opening out; there was a wall here, and beyond it more fence, less dilapidated than the rest. Without breaking stride I sprang up onto one of the stones ranged against the wall, from that to the wall and clutched at the wires. Fortunately they weren’t electrified or barbed, and with my last burning breath I swung myself up, over, crashed down among rough weeds some twelve feet below and ran, ran until I tripped over something hard and fell sobbing to my knees at the margins of the light.
Then I cowered down, shrank back, as the ground quivered. With a rushing, hissing rumble and clack and a lonely, hooting cry something vast went flicking across my sight, an endless phalanx of speeding shadows, blotting out the light, the world.
When the thunder passed and the light was clear again, some fragment of my wits came slinking back. I looked up, gasping, and began to pick myself up, rather shamefaced. Pure luck that freight train hadn’t come up this track instead of the other; next time it might. I’d blundered into some kind of marshalling yard, well lit but no safe place to wander. Miles better than that damn cemetery, though. Part of my mind was threshing furiously, fighting to rationalize what I’d just seen, to explain it away – an earth tremor, overheated imagination, anything. I ignored it. I was just too glad to be out of it. Then I froze; I heard a voice, not close, not far, clear and vehement in the still night.
I knew what that meant; I was off even before the doors slammed, the lights swung around towards me, the siren came on. I heard the tyres crunch across the gravel, and it was time to bolt again before I’d even got my breath.
I couldn’t run much longer, but nothing would get me back into that graveyard. Somewhere in the yard another train was coming. I limped across the tracks, into the shadow of some standing freight cars; I thought of getting into one, if only to grab a few minutes’ rest, but they were very securely chained up, and the shadow seemed like no shelter at all. I ducked over the coupling and through, landed right in the path of the oncoming train and found a new turn of speed; behind me I heard gravel spray as the squad car swerved aside. Across more tracks I ran, between stolid lines of silent cars, until suddenly I was at another fence – and not more than a hundred yards up, an open gate. Wouldn’t the cops head for it? I took the chance, there weren’t any others. I made it, and suddenly I was free of all fences, running like a madman through an empty street; but behind me the siren was getting louder. And was that another ahead, around the corner of this tall building? I could turn this way – or that. Towards the sound – or away. That was no siren. I made my choice, and turned the corner.
I could have laughed, if my aching lungs had let me. The street was wide, glistening in the night-haze as if from recent rains; tall buildings, featureless in the night, loomed over it like chasm walls. In one narrow side doorway an old man stood, the only living soul in all that great gorge of a place, a black man in a shabby overcoat, playing a mournful trumpet; and that was the sound. I ran down towards him, and saw the heavy dark glasses he wore, the placard in front of him, the tin cup. He stopped playing suddenly, lowered his trumpet, and I swerved wide so as not to frighten him, wishing I could call out to him. But he called out to me instead.
