She was afraid to move lest he should move with her. The heaving of his shoulders terrified her.
One by one the lights in the side aisles were going out. The lights in the middle aisle would go next. They had gone. If she didn’t get away she would be shut up with him there, in the appalling darkness.
She turned and moved towards the north aisle, groping, steadying herself by the book ledge.
When she looked back, Oscar Wade was not there.
Then she remembered that Oscar Wade was dead. Therefore, what she had seen was not Oscar; it was his ghost. He was dead; dead seventeen years ago. She was safe from him for ever.
When she came out on to the steps of the church she saw that the road it stood in had changed. It was not the road she remembered. The pavement on this side was raised slightly and covered in. It ran under a succession of arches. It was a long gallery walled with glittering shop windows on one side; on the other a line of tall grey columns divided it from the street.
She was going along the arcades of the rue de Rivoli. Ahead of her she could see the edge of an immense grey pillar jutting out. That was the porch of the Hotel Saint Pierre. The revolving glass doors swung forward to receive her; she crossed the grey, sultry vestibule under the pillared arches. She knew it. She knew the porter’s shining, wine-coloured mahogany pen on her left, and the shining wine-coloured mahogany barrier of the clerk’s bureau on her right; she made straight for the great grey carpeted staircase; she climbed the endless flights that turned round and round the caged-in shaft of the well, past the latticed doors of the lift, and came up on to a landing that she knew, and into the long, ash-grey, foreign corridor lit by a dull window at one end.
It was there that the horror of the place came on her. She had no longer any memory of St. Mary’s Church, so that she was unaware of her backward course through time. All space and time were here.
She remembered she had to go to the left, the left. But there was something there; where the corridor turned by the window; at the end of all the corridors. If she went the other way she would escape it.