It came to me that although this woman was in her thirties, she had the figure of a somewhat underweight but very good-looking fourteen-year-old girl. Her body had not matured, only her face. She had not developed beyond a certain point, and this top-heavy effect was not an illusion. If you noticed only her face she seemed absolutely ravishingly beautiful, but if your gaze took in all of her, then you were conscious that there was something wrong with her, something fundamentally out of proportion.

Her voice had a rasping, husky quality, very low-pitched. Like her eyes it had a strong and intense authority to it, and I found myself unable to break away from her gaze. Although she had never seen me before—laid eyes on me, as they say—she acted as if she had expected to see me, as if I was familiar to her. Her smile had a sly certitude to it. After a moment she started forward and I stood aside; she came on into the house, gliding with very small steps and making no sound at all. Apparently she had been there before because she went without hesitation into the living room and put her purse down on one of the tables there, the same table on which Fay always put her purse. Then she turned to look back at me and said,

“Have you been having any pains in your head lately? Around your temples?” She put up her hand and traced a line across her forehead from eye to eye. “I have. Do you know what that is?” She came gliding toward me and stopped a short distance away. “That’s the crown of thorns,” she said. “We all have to wear it before the world can end and a new world take its place. I’m wearing it now. I’ve been wearing it since last Friday, when I ascended the cross and was crucified and then spent a night in the tomb.” Smiling at me, and keeping her large brown eyes fixed on me, she continued, “I slept the whole night outdoors in the cold and never even knew it. My husband and children didn’t know I was missing; it was as if no time had passed. I had been transfigured into eternity. The whole house vibrated—I saw it vibrate, my god, as if it was going to fly up into the sky like a spaceship.”

“I see,” I said, unable to take my eyes away from hers.

“Over the house,” she continued, “there was a huge blue light hanging, like crackling electric fine. I laid on the ground and that fire consumed me, from that spaceship. The whole house became a spaceship ready to go into space.”

I couldn’t help nodding.

In the same tone of voice she went on, “I’m Mrs. Hambro. Claudia Hambro. I live over in Inverness Park. You’re Fay’s brother, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. “Fay isn’t here; she went into town.”

“I know,” Mrs. Hambro said. “I knew that when I woke up this morning.” She walked over to the window, looked out at the sheep, who were going by the fence. Then she turned and seated herself in a chain, crossing her bare legs and setting her purse on her lap; she opened her purse, got out a package of cigarettes, and lit up. “Why did you come here?” she said. “To Drake’s Landing. Do you know the reason?”

I shook my head.

“It’s the force that’s pulling us all together,” she said. “Throughout the world. There’s groups forming everywhere. The message is the same: suffer and die to save the world. Christ was not suffering for our sins, he was suffering to show us the way. We all have to suffer. We all have to ascend the cross to gain eternal life, each in his own way.” She blew smoke from her nostrils up at me. “Christ was from another planet. From a more evolved race. Earth is the most backward planet in the universe. At night I can lie awake—sometimes it really scares me—and listen to them talking. The other night they began to open my head. They cut a flap open this way and one that way.” With her hand she traced lines across her head. “And I heard this terrible noise; it was the loudest noise I have even heard. It absolutely deafened me. You know what it was? It was Aaron’s rod coming down; it appeared in the air before me. Since then I haven’t been able to look at the sun. The cosmic nay intensity is too great; it’s burning our minds out. By the end of May it’ll reach its ultimate and the world will come to an end, according to scientists. The poles are about to switch positions. Did you know that? San Francisco is getting closer to Los Angeles.”

“Yes,” I said. I remembered having read that in the newspaper.

“The most evolved beings of all live in the sun,” Mrs. Hambro went on. “They’ve been entering my head every night now. I’m an initiate. Soon I’ll know the whole mystery. It’s very exciting.” All at once she laughed, showing me her sharp-pointed teeth. “Do you think I’m out of my mind? Are you going to call the loony bin?”

“No,” I said.

She said, “I’ve suffered, but it’s worth it. None of us can hide from it; it’s destiny. You’ve been hiding all your life, haven’t you? But destiny brought you here. Look at this.” Putting her cigarette down on the edge of the coffee table she opened her manila envelope and brought out a folded-up paper; she unrolled it, and I saw an intricate pencil sketch of an old Chinaman. “That’s our guru,” she said. “We’ve never seen him, but Barbara Mulchy drew that under hypnotic suggestion when we asked to see He Who’s Leading us. No one has been able to read the inscription. It predates any known language.” She pointed to some Chinese-looking writing at the bottom of the picture. “He drew you up here to Drake’s Landing,” she said. “He’s been guiding you all your life.”

In many respects what she said was difficult to accept. But certainly it was true that I had felt that I did not understand the real purpose of my life. And certainly I had been brought to Drake’s Landing not of my own free will. -

“Our group has made several scientifically-authenticated sightings,” Mrs. Hambro continued. “We’ve established contact with these evolved superior beings who are in control of the universe and who are directing the cosmic radiation here in an effort to save us from our own anti-christ. I saw the anti-christ last night. They’s why I’m here. I knew then that I had to contact you and get you into our group. We’ve had eleven or twelve people contact us in the last week or so, due to various articles printed in newspapers, some of them facetious in tone.” From this manila envelope she got a newspaper clipping and passed it to me.

The clipping read:

Inverness Park. World War Three will begin before the end of May, and not to destroy man but to save him, according to Mrs. Edward Hambro of Inverness Park, Marin County. The flying saucer group of which she is the spokesman declares that several psychic contacts have been made with the “superior beings who are in control of our lives,” and who “are leading us to material destruction for the purpose of spiritual salvation,” Mrs. Hambro’s words. The group meets once a week to report sightings of UFOs, unidentified flying objects. There are twelve members of the group, from Inverness Park and surrounding towns of north west Marin County. They meet in Mrs. Hambro’s home. “Scientists know that the world is about to explode,” Mrs. Hambro declared. “Either from a build-up of internal pressures, or from man-made atomic radiation. In any case, man must prepare for the end of the world.”

I handed the clipping back to Mrs. Hambro and she returned it to her envelope. “That was in the San Rafael Journal,” she said. “It also appeared in Petaluma newspapers and Sacramento newspapers. They didn’t give a fair impression of what I said.”

“I see,” I said, feeling odd and weak. The strength of her gaze made my head hum. I have never met another person to this day who affected me as much as Claudia Hambro. The sunlight, when it reached her eyes, didn’t reflect in the usual way but was broken up into splinters. That fascinated me. Sitting across from her, not very far from her, I saw a portion of the room reflected in her eyes, and it was not the same; it became bits instead of a single plane of reality. As she talked I kept watching that fragmented light. And never once, in all the time that she talked, did she blink.