The door from the hall into the kitchen flew open. Two indignant women stood there.
“Henry,” Beth said, firmly, “this is really too much!”
“Of all the idiotic ideas, on a Saturday, at dinnertime!” Huth added.
Jim Williams came through the living-room door. “You two stay right here, Hank. This damn fool defense thing has gone too far.”
“Long as I’m in it, I have no choice.” Henry was shrugging into his coat, the blue one with the velvet collar. He threw a meaningful glance at his older son. “I’ll rely on you, Chuck, for everything. Come on, Ted; get cracking.”
4
Below West Broad Street, the mammoth tile in which Nora walked became steadily darker. She had grown accustomed to the short spaces of darkness between the streets; each one, though inky enough to hide her feet from her own view, showed ahead the ever-brightening illumination from the next street. As she walked on from Broad, however, she remembered what a long distance it was to the Washington Avenue intersection. She couldn’t see any light at all. Yet she went ahead, believing the darkness would yield in the next few steps to at least the dim evidence of light from the manhole at Broad.
No such thing happened. The curved walls closed over her head, at a point about half again as high as she was. The darkness thickened, deepened, and the echoing sound of her arctic-shod feet came back in a muffled fashion from the distances. She looked back. The light from Broad was dim and far behind. A sense of compression, and with it a gnawing anxiousness, began to replace her eager determination. Still she went on, and steadily she lost the confidence that her progress had established.
Suppose, she thought, it suddenly drops. She went ahead cautiously after that notion, feeling with her foot before she stepped.
Traffic bumbled and shook the place. She put a hand out, touched the damp side of the tube, moved slower, slower. The tunnel was curving now, but the curve was so gradual that she could not discern it in the dark. She did not notice any change until she looked back-for the wan comfort of the distant light—and saw it had vanished.