«Yes?» Lotte stopped, breathless.
«Did you see anyone on your way up here? A woman? Running on the road?»
«What? I drove so fast! A woman? Yes! I almost hit her. Then she was gone! Why?»
«Well…»
«She's not dangerous?»
«No, no.»
«It is all right, my being here?»
«Yes, fine, fine. Sit back. We'll fix some coffee―»
«Wait! I'll check!» And before they could stop her, Lotte ran to the front door, opened it a crack, and peered out. They stood with her and saw distant headlights flourished over a low hill and gone into a valley. «They're coming,» whispered Lotte. «They might search here. God, where can I hide?»
Martha and Robert glanced at each other.
No, no, thought Robert Webb. God, no! Preposterous, unimaginable, fantastic, so damned coincidental the mind raves at it, crows, hoots, guffaws! No, none of this! Get oft' circumstance! Get away with your goings and comings on not neat, or too neat, schedules. Come back, Lotte, in ten years, five years, maybe a year, a month, a week, and ask to hide. Even tomorrow show up! But don't come with coincidence in each hand like idiot children and ask, only half an hour after one terror, one miracle, to test our disbelief! I'm not, after all, Charles Dickens, to blink and let this pass.
«What's wrong?» said Lotte.
«I―» said Robert.
«No place to hide me?»
«Yes,» he said. «We've a place.»
«Well?»
«Here.» He turned slowly away, stunned.
They walked down the hall to the half-open paneling.
«This?» Lotte said. «Secret? Did you-7»
«No' it's been here since the house was built long ago.» Lotte touched and moved the door on its hinges. «Does it work? Will they know where to look and find it?»
«No. It's beautifully made. Shut, you can't tell it's there.» Outside in the winter night, cars rushed, their beams flashing up the road, across the house windows.
Lotte peered into the Witch Door as one peers down a deep, lonely well.
A filtering of dust moved about her. The small rocking chair trembled.
Moving in silently, Lotte touched the half-burned candle.
«Why, it's still warm!»
Martha and Robert said nothing. They held to the Witch Door, smelling the odor of warm tallow.
Lotte stood rigidly in the little space, bowing her head beneath the beamed ceiling.
A horn blew in the snowing night. Lotte took a deep breath and said, «Shut the door.»
They shut the Witch Door. There was no way to tell that a door was there.
They blew out the lamp and stood in the cold, dark house, waiting.
The cars rushed down the road, their noise loud, and their yellow headlights bright in the falling snow. The wind stirred the footprints in the yard, one pair going out, another coming in, and the tracks of Lotte's car fast vanishing, and at last gone.
«Thank God,» whispered Martha.
The cars, honking, whipped around the last bend and down the hill and stopped, waiting, looking in at the dark house. Then, at last, they started up away into the snow and the hills.
Soon their lights were gone and their sound gone with them.
«We were lucky,» said Robert Webb.
«But she's not.»
«She?»
«That woman, whoever she was, ran out of here. They'll find here. Some body'll find her.»
«Christ, that's right.»
«And she has no I.D., no proof of herself. And she doesn't know what's happened to her. And when she tells them who she is and where she came from!»
«Yes, yes.»
«God help her.»
They looked into the snowing night but saw nothing. Everything was still. «You can't escape,» she said. «No matter what you do, no one can escape.»
They moved away from the window and down the hall to the Witch Door and touched it.
«Lotte,» they called.
The Witch Door did not tremble or move. «Lotte, you can come out now.» There was no answer; not a breath or a whisper. Robert tapped the door. «Hey in there.» «Lotte!»
He knocked at the paneling, his mouth agitated. «Lotte!»
«Open it!»
«I'm trying, damn it!»