o escape with
you. I want you to escape, so that you can get back to life again."

"Oh, then I'm dead, am I?"

"Not exactly dead," she said, drying her eyes with the corner of her
black hood. "You've had a funny accident, you know. If your body gets
all right, so that you can go back and live in it again, then you're not
dead. But if it's so badly injured that you can't work in it any more,
then you are dead, and will have to stay dead. You're still joined to
the body in a fashion, you see."

He stared and listened, not understanding much. It all bored him. She
talked without explaining, he thought. An immense sponge had passed over
the slate of the past and wiped it clean beyond recall. He was utterly
perplexed.

"How funny you are!" he said vaguely, thinking more of her tears than
her explanations.

"Water won't stay in a cracked bottle," she went on, "and you can't stay
in a broken body. But they're trying to mend it now, and if we can
escape in time you can be an ordinary, happy little boy in the world
again."

"Then are you dead, too?" he asked, "or nearly dead?"

"I am out of my body, like you," she answered evasively, after a
moment's pause.

He was still looking at her in a dazed sort of way, when she suddenly
sprang to her feet and let the hood drop back over her face.

"Hush!" she whispered, "he's listening again."

At the same moment a sound came from beneath the floor on the other side
of the room, and Jimbo saw the trap-door being slowly raised above the
level of the floor.

"Your number is 102," said a voice that sounded like the rushing of a
river.

Instantly the trap-door dropped again, and he heard heavy steps rumbling
away into the interior of the house. He looked at his companion and saw
her terrified face as she lifted her hood.

"He always blunders along like that," she whispered, bending her head on
one side to listen. "He can't see properly in the daylight. He hates
sunshine, and usually only goes out after dark." She was white and
trembling.

"Is that the person who brought me in here this morning at such a
frightful pace?" he asked, bewildered.

She nodded. "He wanted to get in before it was light, so that you
couldn't see his face."

"Is he such a fright?" asked the boy, beginning to share her evident
feeling of horror.

"He _is_ Fright!" she said in an awed whisper. "But never talk about
him again unless you can't help it; he always knows when he's being
talked about,