Because I COULD NOT STOP FOR DEATH

There was a knock at the door.

She had been laying on the bed, sprawled there, her hands behind her head. The television was on, but she had not been watching it-just using it to drown out the silence of the little motel room.

The knock startled her; she sat up with a jerk and stared at the door's painted rectangle, squinting at it as if by doing so, she could see the person behind it.

"Who's there, please?" She struggled to keep her voice even. Be normal, she told herself. She swung her legs off the bed.

"Manager." The voice answered. "We mischarged you for the room. I came to . . ."

It was not his voice. The fear left her. "Just a moment!" She called. She padded across the carpet in her bare feet. Reaching the door, she leaned heavily against it for a moment. Would it always be like this? She looked out through the spy-hole-she had to stand on the balls of her feet to do it. She was short-only five feet tall. Her husband liked that about her.

The man outside the door was youngish-in his late twenties. He had wide-set eyes, almost horse-like, exaggerated by the fisheye lens of the spy-hole. There was a piece of cloth in one of his hands-a dust-rag? He tapped his foot impatiently. He probably had better things to do than wait for a frightened woman to open the door. Determined now, she took a step back, grabbed the handle, and swung the door open. The man took a step into the room.

"Mrs. Cunningham?"

That wasn't the name she had registered under. She turned, took a running step into the room-but he was on top of her, pressing the cloth to her face. She kicked backwards at him, aiming for his crotch, but her foot hit his knee, instead. The cloth smelled of some chemical. She tensed against him-useless. He was strong, and much bigger than her. The colors bled out of the room. Everything fogged over. He was saying something into her ear, trying to tell her something...

"I guess you're scared-but you have nothing to worry about. I'm not here to hurt you ..." The voice came out of darkness. It was a moving darkness, full of shapes, but nothing that made any sense-just forms rushing past her, and a vaguely human shape on her left. But it was not his voice that was speaking, and so she was not scared. She drifted, dreamily. "There was no time to explain it to you. He was right behind me. He was pulling into the parking lot. I had to grab you and get you in the car. I'm sorry about the chloroform. But there was no time, and if you had gotten away from me, he could have had time to shoot us both. Your husband is a very dangerous man, Mrs. Cunningham."

My husband, she thought, is death himself. She pictured her husband in a cloak, holding a scythe. She could sense the person next to her moving, doing something. She shook her head from side to side, sharply, trying to clear it. She was in a car. She could see the headlights. They hardly managed to push back the darkness of the road. The trees all around them cast darkness down from their branches-a blackness like ink. The road was narrow, and there was nothing to either side but the trees. She turned and looked at the man next to her. He had a long face, a heavy, square jaw, wide-set eyes. He looked simple-like a baseball bat looks simple, she thought.

He glanced at her sideways. "My name is Eliot O'Ryan. Your husband hired me to find you, when you ran away. I am a private detective. I followed you here from Los Angeles. I've been close to you, the whole time."

"My husband . . ." she said. "My husband . . . wants to kill me."

"I know," he said. "I know that now. Do you see those headlights? In the mirror?"

She looked up at the rear view. She could see the headlights. They were small, distant. Now and then, as the road went down into a dip, they would slip out of view. But they always came back again. She watched them for a long minute.

"Yes."

"That's him."

She looked at the side of O'Ryan's face. "Isn't there somewhere we could go?" He blinked, glanced into the rear view. "Not with him that close, no. Just forward. Here he comes! Down!"

She heard the growl of the speeding engine behind them. She slid down, her head just touching the outside of O'Ryan's leg. She could feel the muscles in his thigh tense as his foot came down on the accelerator pedal, hard. The engine roared, and she was pressed backwards by the inertia. Through the body of the car she heard the tires squealing on the pavement as they rounded a sharp curve that pressed her bare feet against the passenger door. There was a crack! and glass rained down on her face. A piece cut her. She reached her hand up to feel the warm blood on her cheek. She sat up with a jerk and looked out the back window. It was gone. The headlights were right behind them now, on high, flooding their car with light. The lights seemed less than ten feet from them. There was another crack! But nothing happened-he must have missed. O'Ryan stepped on the brakes, and the headlights behind them seemed to run right onto their trunk before they twisted sideways with a jerk and shuddered, flashing up and down. The car had run off the road. She watched as they put distance between themselves and the lights. She watched the car roll to a stop, and then start forward again, its engine screaming.

O'Ryan was talking to her. "You see, he doesn't care anymore. I could stop somewhere, a police station or something . . ."

"But there isn't anything like that out here, anyway," She said.

'Even a farmhouse. You would think that you should be safe, if you could find a well-lit little farm house to stop at-somewhere to call the police from. But he'll shoot us as soon as we get out of the car. And anyone else around, besides."

She thought that she wouldn't really feel safe at a farmhouse-that was such an odd thing to say. That you would feel safe at a place, just because it was well lit. She thought of Glen, and how one morning she had been carrying a plate of food to the breakfast table. A plate of his food. They had fought the night before. It had started over nothing; she had wanted to go out to a movie with her friend. It had ended with him raising his hand. But he had not struck her-not then. She had tried to forget about it, the next morning. She was carrying a plate full of scrambled eggs and bacon, and a piece of wheat toast with butter on it, and jam. She was leaning over, setting it in front of him. They hadn't been talking, that morning. He was still angry. But she had wanted them to. It had been like such a nice day-it was a Saturday, with sun coming in through the curtains in the kitchen, and she hadn't wanted to waste it fighting with Glen. And then, just before she had set the plate down, he'd punched her in the mouth so hard that everything flashed white, and when she opened her eyes again, she was laying in the middle of the floor, and there were scrambled eggs everywhere. And in the middle of one of the piles of scrambled eggs, a tooth. Her tooth. Glen was standing over her, looking down at her. The first thing that had come into her head as her mouth filled up with blood was: how strange! You wouldn't think that someone would hit you while you were holding a plate of their food. You would think that you were safe, with their food in your hands, on such a nice day.

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