They turned their heads at the sound of rushing footsteps; they motioned her to move on; believing her mad, they gave her a chance, for in the East you dare not turn your hand against the mentally afflicted.
She ran.
And after her came the pack in full cry.
Across great rooms, lit by hanging lamps, scented with brasiers of perfumed wood, she fled, slipping upon chinchilla rug or glaring monstrous hearthrug of Berlin wool, in her desperate haste to quit the house.
Out into the air she must get; under the trees in the garden; under the moon; down the broad paths to the wall at the end.
There was no wall too high for her to climb in her extremity. Her face was grey; her eyes sunk in black: orbits; her nose pinched, with nostrils which blew and flattened like bellows to her laboured breathing.
A hand clutched at her streaming hair and missed it as she sped down the garden; they were upon her heels, dogs jumping at her face as she ran.
She was blind, deaf, almost dead when the great gorilla-shaped arms of
Bes closed about her.
She made no sound as she hurtled through the air. Mercifully perhaps was she dead, as she crashed down into the pit at the bottom of which great shapes prowled hungrily.
They did not stay to watch, not one of them.