I found myself wondering about that after I had said it half-aloud. I didn't know why I had put the emphasis on man. You might have thought I was a woman.
Going aimlessly up one street and down another, now staring ahead and now gazing up at the full moon riding in its field of India-ink sky, I eventually saw that I was near the museum again. Some obscure curiosity took me past its doors. Just as I passed them, craning my neck foolishly as though I could see through their oak and bronze, half a dozen men burst out into the street. Automatically I speeded my pace. Then they yelled, and were after me. I ran.
What smirking fate had pushed me back to the damned place? From my position on the sidewalk, my attitude of looking intently at the doors, my haste thereafter, they had leaped to the thought that I had just emerged from the museum. I thought of fingerprints, of all kinds of clues I might have left behind. I ran like a spooked steer.
Reason left me. I caught the last wisp of a fleeting amazement: could this murderous, panicky creature be Bill Cuff, hitherto a sane and sober pulp writer?
I turned a corner, vaulted over a hedge and flung myself prone behind it. The pursuers—museum guards, for evidently the police had not arrived—pounded by, yelling to each other. When they had gone I darted over to the building that shadowed this plot of earth, kicked in a window, knocked away shards of glass from the frame and let myself down into the basement of the museum. Swiftly I blundered my way between work-benches and unfinished exhibits until I had found the door. Down a long black hall I padded, snorting through my nose and peering back frequently. Like a beast, said a tiny voice in the depths of my brain; like a stalked beast.
I found a door, steps that led upward. I passed the first floor and then the second. My shins were barked, my nose bled from a smack against an unseen wall. I licked the blood off my lips. The stairs ended and I was on the third floor. Here the moon slanted its cool rays into the windows, unhampered by nearby buildings. I could see quite well. My feet seemed to know where they were going. I passed through the hall of mammals, glancing aside at the dusty elephants, the two giraffes in their great cage of glass, the family of sea lions frozen forever in attitudes of stuffy majesty. My leather heels tapped loudly in the thick silence. I bent and took off my shoes, stuffing them into the pockets of my coat. Then I came to the central well, and leaning over the balcony I looked down at the hall of dinosaurs. Their bizarre frames were jagged splotches of black in a lesser blackness. Then the lights went up on their floor, and as I, two stories above, drew back my head with an involuntary snarl, guards hurried across the floor between the fossils, calling back and forth. I heard them say something about the broken window. I had trapped myself. I did not consider that important. Something in me knew I was heading for sanctuary.
I thrust my head over the railing again, like a fox on a cliff regarding a pack of hounds at fault. Chance made one of the hounds peer upward. There was a loud shout from below as the guard saw me.
Dashing along the passage between rail and wall, I entered the art gallery, traversed it, and came to the geology hall. Here was a replica of a Pennsylvania cavern, through which visitors could wander to gawk at stalactites and artificial springs and plaster-and-plastic underworld creatures—dead-white salamanders, strange little blind bugs, crawling unnamed worms stuck to the synthetic rock with hidden adhesives. I dived through the mouth of this weird exhibit, bruising myself heedlessly; rounded heaps of faked stone, scraped skin off my knuckles as I fended off obstacles that seemed to hurl themselves at me in the murk, at last came to the back of the cave and turned and squatted there on my hams, fingertips trailing against the cool hardness of the sham rock floor.
The moon was dropping; now it looked in a window opposite the cave, finding its way between the icicle forms of stalactites, just grazing my dark blue suit here and there. I bent my head and stared at the ivory huntress of the skies. Her full round belly was gravid with portent. I felt that all sorts of shattering events were shaping within her, that something alien and terrible and withal glorious was about to be born.