ed me. Then, abruptly I sensed movement behind me. I
turned....

Over the blue moss the seventh Indio girl was coming toward us.
"Miranda!" I said. "Can you hear me?" Fra Rafael had told me her name.
Her feet, I saw, were bare and white frost-bite blotches marked them.
But she did not seem to feel any pain as she walked.

Then I became aware that this was not a simple Indio girl. Something
deep within my soul suddenly shrank back with instinctive revulsion.
My skin seemed to crawl with a sort of terror. I began to shake so
that it was difficult to draw my gun from its holster.

There was just this young native girl walking slowly toward me, her
face quite expressionless, her black eyes fixed on emptiness. Yet she
was not like other Indios, not like the six other girls sitting behind
me. I can only liken her to a lamp in which a hot flame burned. The
others were lamps that were dead, unlit.

The flame in her was not one that had been kindled on this earth, or
in this universe, or in this space-time continuum, either. There was
life in the girl who had been Miranda Valle--but it was not _human_
life!

Some distant, skeptical corner of my brain told me that this was pure
insanity, that I was deluded, hallucinated. Yes, I knew that. But it
did not seem to matter. The girl who was walking so quietly across the
blue yielding moss had wrapped about her, like an invisible,
intangible veil, something of the alienage that men, through the eons,
have called divinity. No mere human, I thought, could touch her.

* * * * *

But I felt fear, loathing--emotions not associated with divinity. I
watched, knowing that presently she would look at me, would realize my
presence. Then--well, my mind would not go beyond that point....

She came forward and quietly seated herself with the others, at the
end of the line. Her body stiffened rigidly. Then, the veil of terror
seemed to leave her, like a cloak falling away. Abruptly she was just
an Indio girl, empty and drained as the others, mindless and
motionless.

The girl beside her rose suddenly with a slow, fluid motion. And the
crawling horror hit me again.... The Alien Power had not left! It had
merely transferred itself to another body!

And this second body was as dreadful to my senses as the first had
been. In some subtly monstrous way its terror impressed itself on my
brain, though all the while there was nothing overt, nothing _visibly_
wrong.