"You know," said Phoebe. "The one with all those Greeks."

"They all have Greeks."

"It's Phaedra."

"Phaedra, "shouted Tim." Phaedra! Phaedra we don't have to worry about. A cultist picture, for Tony Perkins fans."

So the shot went on, and without much trouble. After finishing it, Tim decided that he would record some voice-over narration of Nora's.

As Tim and Nora went to the bedroom to go over the lines, I looked through the living room's glass doors. The clear night kept them from being opaque and black, as they had been the night before. And instead of seeing only reflections from the living room in the glass, I could see the stars, a crescent of a moon--and the quarry: a vague white cloud floating in the landscape.

SHORTLY after eleven, Tim decided to call it a night, leaving voice-overs to another time. The past hour or so had been boring to everybody, it seemed, and the frustrations of the day's shooting had taken its toll on the unit's vitality.

Still, this night had gone quicker than the previous one--or at least differently. The change in the weather, the fact that no one would have to spend the night in the cabin, the speed with which we moved through the shooting schedule--all these things made Saturday night closer to a working experience, and far removed from the ghosts that seemed to have taken over the night before.

When Tim decided to pack up, I expected that I would finally see these five people totally relaxed. I was wrong. As we started to pack up the lights in the big trunks, gather the camera and recording equipment together, and clean up the place, a pall fell over the cabin. No one spoke, except to ask Eric questions about the storage of the apparatus. There was no sense of relief in the air--even though all the interior shooting, at least, had been completed.

Each light was in turn dismantled and packed up. With each dismantling, the room got darker. Tim sat on a bench next to the nearly dead fire. He looked at no one. He said nothing. He was totally in shadows.

NORA, when she wasn't silently helping with the packing, sat on the other side of the fireplace, smoking and gazing. Tommy was going to take the first load of stuff on the ski-doo up to the cars. He asked Nora which trunks were ready. She pointed to some boxes which contained props. Tommy picked them up and started out the door. Nora smiled into space and said, "The world is a big box."

After several trips, Tommy had taken everything up to the road. Now the room was almost totally dark. We had found some tiny holes in the wooden ceiling, and it turned out that these holes were lights controlled by a dimmer near the door. We turned them on, and pools of pale light fell on the flagstone floor. No one spoke; everyone stared out the glass doors or at the floor or at nowhere in particular.

Gradually we left for the cars. One by one, the others filed out. I was the last one left in the cabin, and I was nervous about it. I turned off the lights and started out. I tripped in the snow, in my haste. My eyes did not adjust right away to the night, and now that the cabin was dark I could see nothing. I called to the others, but when they answered I could not determine where their voices came from or how far away they were. I took another couple of steps.

Then I looked up and saw the stars. Staring ahead of me again, I felt a bit relieved. The forest appeared: a nearly luminescent white earth, gigantic black trees spreading out before me like prison bars. I looked for the rest of the group, and slowly each of the five came into view. They were walking quickly. And no two of them walked together. I followed. I was frightened by the isolation. This forest in the middle of nowhere at midnight Saturday night. These people stalking through the snow, each man to himself. But I wouldn't let myself think about it. We were going home.

A COUPLE OF DAYS later I had coffee with Tim and Nora. We talked, and I tried to put the pieces together. What brought ghosts to this cabin in New Hampshire? Could making a movie require so much that one had to die a little to do it?