ooked steadily into eyes so calm and
blank that they seemed like the eyes of a child lost in some dreamy
wonderland barred forever to adult understanding.

For an instant her terror ebbed and she felt almost reassured. Then she
made the mistake of bending more closely above him, brushing his right
elbow with her sleeve.

* * * * *

That single light woman's touch unsettled him. He started to fall,
sideways and very fast. Topple a dead weight and it crashes with a
swiftness no opposing force can counter-balance.

It did Sally no good to clutch frantically at his arm as he fell, to tug
and jerk at the slackening folds of his suit. The heaviness of his
descending bulk dragged him down and away from her, the awful inertia of
lifeless flesh.

He thudded to the floor and rolled over on his back, seeming to shrink
as Sally widened her eyes upon him. He lay in a grotesque sprawl at her
feet, his jaw hanging open on the gaping black orifice of his mouth ...

Sally might have screamed and gone right on screaming--if she had been a
different kind of woman. On seeing her husband lying dead her impulse
might have been to throw herself down beside him, give way to her grief
in a wild fit of sobbing.

But where there was no grief there could be no sobbing ...

One thing only she did before she left. She unloosed the collar of the
unmoving form on the floor and looked for the small brown mole she did
not really expect to find. The mole she knew to be on her husband's
shoulder, high up on the left side.

She had noticed things that made her doubt her sanity; she needed to see
the little black mole to reassure her ...

She had noticed the difference in the hair-line, the strange slant of
the eyebrows, the crinkly texture of the skin where it should have been
smooth ...

Something was wrong ... horribly, weirdly wrong ...

Even the hands of the sprawled form seemed larger and hairier than the
hands of her husband. Nevertheless it was important to be sure ...

The absence of the mole clinched it.

Sally crouched beside the body, carefully readjusting the collar. Then
she got up and walked out of the office.

Some homecomings are joyful, others cruel. Sitting in the taxi,
clenching and unclenching her hands, Sally had no plan that could be
called a plan, no hope that was more than a dim flickering in a vast
wasteland, bleak and unexplored.

But it was strange how one light burning brightly