I roamed restlessly, numbed by the desolation which surrounded me, yet perversely unwilling to leave. The mist thickened and full darkness fell and I remained.
In spite of the darkness I could see remarkably well. I linked this abnormal ability with my eyes' unusual sensitivity to strong light; I felt that both conditions stemmed from the inflamed state of the optic nerves, an affliction I have already mentioned.
I passed an alley, glittering strangely with bits of scattered window glass, and stood surveying an adjacent house which leaned crazily with a collapsed roof. It was a small white frame house, inexpensively built, and yet I saw that someone had once tended it carefully. The paint was bright; the little mailbox looked as if it had been scrubbed; and the trampled remains of a once-neat garden surrounded the place.
As, musing, I stared at this wrecked house through the growing mist, I saw a face at one of the two front ground-floor windows. It was the face of an old man, white, mournful, filled with an ineffable desolation.
I gazed at it in astonishment. My first thought was that an elderly vagrant had crept into the wreckage of the white house in order to pass the night. The dampness, probably, made his old bones ache.
The face continued to look out at me; I walked away with some uneasiness. I shivered, blaming it on the cold mist.
I had gone less than a half block when I saw the woman. Enormously fat, she sat in a wicker chair on the half-demolished veranda of a two-story house. She wore very thick-lensed glasses which seemed to reflect light from some hidden source. There was no moon, certainly, and I saw no artificial lights nearby.
I was startled, but I supposed that a few people must still be clinging illegally to old homes in the area, pending final arrangements for the occupancy of a new residence.
Some impulse urged me to hurry past, to move straight ahead without looking aside. Stubbornly, however, and against my own best judgement, I refused.
Instead, I paused, cleared my throat and spoke. "Good evening," I said.