Free Psyche by Phyllis Young

between her and her baby was eight hours wide. How much wider was it going to get? “Oh, God—God, in Your mercy, bring her back to us! Christ—help me to bear the unbearable!”
    Dwight, standing behind Sharon’s chair, bleak grey eyes fixed on the ashes
of
a
fire
that had died unattended nearly eight hours earlier, heard the clock, and thought: “She can’t go on much longer like this. God, show me how best I can help her.”
    The police inspector, sitting across the room
from
them, heard it, knew he should have been in bed long ago, and wondered what it was about these people that had brought him back to this house for the third time that night, when he could have delegated this last visit to a junior officer
.
    He ran his finger down the side
of
his long, deeply creased face, while he wished he had more and better news to give them
.
    Clearing his throat, the sound loud in a house too quiet since the tread
of
many feet had ceased soon after midnight, he told them that the kidnapper had been identified one hundred and forty miles north of the city. Speaking quickly and concisely, he gave them an account
of
the long-distance call received from a dark-haired waitress who had seen more than she had appeared to see, and whose photographic memory had produced a description even more exact than that on the nation-wide broadcast which she had picked up at two o’clock
.
    Dwight’s voice was steady. “Someone will see this girl personally?”
    â€œA special detective is already on his way.”
    â€œYou’re setting up road blocks?”
    The inspector nodded. “By seven o’clock this morning every car moving on a main road within four hundred miles of that lunch counter will be stopped and searched.”
    â€œIt can’t be done any faster?”
    The inspector did not resent the question. He had asked it himself, and with more heat, at headquarters. “It’s a big country, sir, and when you look at it where we’re looking, a very empty one. We’re moving men in as fast as we can.”
    Sharon saw an army of blue-coated men marching down into a gulf now nearly nine hours wide, and knew that she must go with them, down, down into the darkness——. With a whisper as meaningless as the soft whisper of her silk dress, she crumpled forward on to the
floor.
    The child’s frenzied, piteous crying was a steady assault on the man’s nerves for more than an hour and a half. Cursing himself for the crazy impulse which had moved him to throw away chloroform he would willingly have employed any number of times, he raved and shouted at her in a hoarse voice which occasionally rose to a scream. His black eyes, fixed on the narrow band of light always just in front of the car, were scarcely sane, and, at about the time when she finally became silent, he was very close to quieting her for good with a spanner that lay on the floor beside his feet. The ransom was all that had prevented him from doing so earlier. Money was his only remaining reality in a nightmare in which life and death had become equally inconsequential, in which there had never been a day, never anything but darkness and fear and an empty road that curved and twisted and straightened, only to curve and twist and straighten again.
    At first he had been relieved when he noticed how infrequent the towns were becoming, and how insignificant, no sooner approached than lost in the chasms of the night behind him. And trees, interspersed less and less often by clearings, had seemed to provide cover for a flight which would evade all pursuit. But now.the quiet black palisades of forest, pressing in on him from both sides, unbroken for miles by any sign of human habitation, became a menace in themselves. Born and bred in the noisy, never-sleeping heart of a great city, this vast silence appeared as inimical to him as the dark, unexplored silence of outer space.
    If he had been told then that a