THE MASK

                                    DEAN
                                   KOONTZ



              This book is dedicated to Willo and Dave Roberts

             and to Carol and Don McQuinn who have no faults—

                 except that they live too far away from us






        A dirge for her, the doubly dead, in that she died so young.

                         —Edgar Allan Poe. “Lenore”



   And much of Madness, and more of Sin, And Horror the soul of the plot.

                   —Edgar Allan Poe, “The Conqueror Worm”



        Extreme terror gives us back the gestures of our childhood.

                                  —Chazal

                                  Prologue



LAURA was in the cellar, doing some spring cleaning and hating every minute
of it. She didn’t dislike the work itself; she was by nature an industrious
girl who was happiest when she had chores to do. But she was afraid of the
cellar.

For one thing, the place was gloomy. The four narrow windows, set high in
the walls, were hardly larger than embrasures, and the dust-filmed panes of
glass permitted only weak, chalky light to enter. Even brightened by a pair
of lamps, the big room held on tenaciously to its shadows, unwilling to be
completely disrobed. The flickering amber light from the lamps revealed
damp stone walls and a hulking, coal-fired furnace that was cold and unused
on this fine, warm May afternoon. On a series of long shelves, row upon row
of quart jars reflected splinters of light, but their contents—home-canned
fruit and vegetables that had been stored here for the past nine
months—remained unilluminated. The corners of the morn were all dark, and
the low, open-beamed ceiling was hung with shadows like long banners of
funeral crepe.

The cellar always had a mildly unpleasant odor, too. It was musty, rather
like a limestone cave. In the spring and summer, when the humidity was
high, a mottled gray-green fungus sometimes sprang up in the corners, a
disgusting scablike growth, fringed with hundreds of tiny white spores that
resembled insect eggs; that grotesquery added its own thin but nonetheless
displeasing fragrance to the cellar air.

However, neither the gloom nor the offending odors nor the fungus gave rise
to Laura’s fears; it was the spiders that frightened her. Spiders ruled the
cellar. Some of them were small, brown, and quick; others were charcoal
gray, a bit bigger than the brown ones, but just as fast-moving as their
smaller cousins. There were even a few blue-black giants as large as
Laura’s thumb.

As she wiped dust and a few cobwebs from the jars of home-canned food,
always alert for the scuttling movement of spiders, Laura grew increasingly
angry with her mother. Mama could have let her clean some of the upstairs
rooms instead of the cellar Aunt Rachael or Mama herself could have cleaned
down here because neither of them worried about spiders. But Mama knew that
Laura was afraid of the cellar, and Mama was in the mood to punish her. It
was a terrible mood, black as thunderclouds. Laura had seen it before. Too
often. It descended over Mama more frequently with every passing year, and
when she was in its thrall, she was a different person from the smiling,
always singing woman that she was at other times. Although Laura loved her
mother, she did not love the short-tempered, mean-spirited woman that her
mother sometimes became. She did not love the hateful woman who had sent
her down into the cellar with the spiders.

Dusting the jars of peaches, pears, tomatoes, beets, beans, and pickled
squash, nervously awaiting the inevitable appearance of a spider, wishing
she were grown up and married and on her own, Laura was startled by a
sudden, sharp sound that pierced the dank basement air. At first it was
like the distant, forlorn wail of an exotic bird, but it quickly became
louder and more urgent. She stopped dusting, looked up at the dark ceiling,
and listened closely to the eerie ululation that came from overhead. After
a moment she realized that it was her Aunt Rachael’s voice and that it was
a cry of alarm.

Upstairs, something fell over with a crash. It sounded like shattering
porcelain. It must have been Mama’s peacock vase, If it was the vase, Mama
would be in an extremely foul mood for the rest of the week.

Laura stepped away from the shelves of canned goods and started toward the
cellar stairs, but she stopped abruptly when she heard Mama scream. It
wasn’t a scream of rage over the loss of the vase; there was a note of
terror in it.

Footsteps thumped across the living room floor, toward the front door of
the house. The screen door opened with the familiar singing of its long
spring, then banged shut. Rachael was outside now, shouting, her words
unintelligible but still conveying her fear.

Laura smelled smoke.

She hurried to the stairs and saw pale tongues of fire at the top. The
smoke wasn’t heavy, but it had an acrid stench.

Heart pounding, Laura climbed to the uppermost step. Waves of heat forced
her to squint, but she could see into the kitchen. The wall of fire wasn’t
solid. There was a narrow route of escape, a corridor of cool safety; the
door to the back porch was at the far end.

She lifted her long skirt and pulled it tight across her hips and thighs,
bunching it in both hands to prevent it from trailing in the flames. She
moved gingerly onto the fire-ringed landing, which creaked under her, but
before she reached the open door, the kitchen exploded in yellow-blue
flames that quickly turned orange. From wall to wall, floor to ceiling, the
room was an inferno; there was no longer a path through the blaze. Crazily,
the fire-choked doorway brought to Laura’s mind the image of a glittering
eye in a jack-o’-lantern.

In the kitchen, windows exploded, and the fire eddied in the sudden change
of drafts, pushing through the cellar door, lashing at Laura. Startled, she
stumbled backwards, off the landing. She fell. Turning, she grabbed at the
railing, missed it, and stumbled down the short flight, cracking her head
against the stone floor at the bottom.

She held on to consciousness as if it were a raft and she a drowning
swimmer. When she was certain she wouldn’t faint, she got to her feet. Pain
coruscated across the top of her head. She raised one hand to her brow and
found a trickle of blood, a small abrasion. She was dizzy and confused.

During the minute or less that she had been incapacitated, fire had spread
across the entire landing at the head of the stairs. It was moving down
onto the first step.

She couldn’t keep her eyes focused. The rising

stairs and the descending fire repeatedly blurred together in an orange
haze.

Ghosts of smoke drifted down the stairwell. They reached out with long,
insubstantial arms, as if to embrace Laura.

She cupped her hands around her mouth. “Help!”

No one answered.

“Somebody help me! I’m in the cellar!”

Silence.

“Aunt Rachael! Mama! For God’s sake, somebody help me!”

The only response was the steadily increasing roar of the fire.

Laura had never felt so alone before. In spite of the tides of heat washing
over her, she felt cold inside. She shivered.

Although her head throbbed worse than ever, and although the abrasion above
her right eye continued to weep blood, at least she was having less trouble
keeping her eyes focused. The problem was that she didn’t like what she
saw.

She stood statue-still, transfixed by the deadly spectacle of the flames.
Fire crawled lizardlike down the steps, one by one, and it slithered up the
rail posts, then crept down the rail with a crisp, chuckling sound.

The smoke reached the bottom of the steps and enfolded her. She coughed,
and the coughing aggravated the pain in her head, making her dizzy again.
She put one hand against the wall to steady herself.

Everything was happening too fast. The house was going up like a pile of
well-seasoned tinder.

I’m going to die here.

That thought jolted her out of her trance. She wasn’t ready to die. She was
far too young. There

was so much of life ahead of her, so many wonderful things to do, things
she had long dreamed about doing. It wasn’t fair. She refused to die.

She gagged on the smoke. Turning away from the burning stairs, she put a
hand over her nose and mouth, but that didn’t help much.

She saw flames at the far end of the cellar, and for an instant she thought
she was already encircled and that all hope of rescue was gone. She cried
out in despair, but then she realized the blaze hadn’t found its way into
the other end of the room after all. The two points of fire that she was
seeing were only the twin oil lamps that had provided her with light. The
flames in the lamps were harmless, safely ensconced in tall glass chimneys.

She coughed violently again, and the pain in her head settled down behind
her eyes. She found it difficult to concentrate. Her thoughts were like
droplets of quicksilver, sliding over one another and changing shape so
often and so fast that she couldn’t make sense of some of them.

She prayed silently and fervently.

Directly overhead, the ceiling groaned and appeared to shift. For a few
seconds she held her breath, clenched her teeth, and stood with her hands
fisted at her sides, waiting to be buried in rubble. But then she saw that
the ceiling wasn’t going to collapse— not yet.

Trembling, whimpering softly, she scurried to the nearest of the four
high-set windows, It was rectangular, approximately eight inches from sill
to top and eighteen inches from sash to sash, much too small to provide her
with a means of escape. The other three windows were identical to the
first; there was no use even taking a closer look at them.

The air was becoming less breathable by the second. Laura’s sinuses ached
and burned. Her mouth was filled with the revulsive, bitter taste of the
smoke.

For too long she stood beneath the window, staring up in frustration and
confusion at the meager, milky light that came through the dirty pane and
through the haze of smoke that pressed tightly against the glass. She had
the feeling she was overlooking an obvious and convenient escape hatch; in
fact she was sure of it. There was a way out, and it had nothing to do with
the windows, but she couldn’t get her mind off the windows; she was fixated
on them, just as she had been fixated on the sight of the advancing flames
a couple of minutes ago. The pain in her head and behind her eyes throbbed
more powerfully than ever, and with each agonizing pulsation, her thoughts
became more muddled.

I’m going to die here.

A frightening vision flashed through her mind. She saw herself afire, her
dark hair turned blond by the flames that consumed it and standing straight
up on her head as if it were not hair but the wick of a candle. In the
vision, she saw her face melting like wax, bubbling and steaming and
liquefying, the features flowing together until her face no longer
resembled that of a human being, until it was the hideously twisted
countenance of a leering demon with empty eye sockets.

No!

She shook her head, dispelling the vision.

She was dizzy and getting dizzier. She needed a draught of clean air to
rinse out her polluted lungs, but with each breath she drew more smoke than
she had drawn last time. Her chest ached.

Nearby, a rhythmic pounding began; the noise was

even louder than her heartbeat, which drummed thunderously in her ears.

She turned in a circle, gagging and. coughing, searching for the source of
the hammering sound, striving to regain control of herself, struggling hard
to think.

The hammering stopped.

‘‘Laura . .

Above the incessant roar of the tire, she heard someone calling her name.

“Laura. .

“I’m down here.. . in the cellar!” she shouted. But the shout came out as
nothing more than a whispered croak. Her throat was constricted and already
raw from the harsh smoke and the fiercely hot air.

The effort required to stay on her feet became too great for her. She sank
to her knees on the stone floor, slumped against the wall, and slid down
until she was lying on her side.

“Laura..." . .

The pounding began again. A fist beating on a door.

Laura discovered that the air at floor level was cleaner than that which
she had been breathing. She gasped frantically, grateful for this reprieve
from suffocation.

For a few seconds the throbbing pain behind her eyes abated, and her
thoughts cleared, and she remembered the outside entrance to the cellar, a
pair of doors slant-set against the north wall of the house. They were
locked from the inside, so that no one could get in to rescue her, in the
panic and confusion she had forgotten about those doors. But now, if she
kept her wits about her, she would be able to save herself.

“Laura!” It was Aunt Rachael’s voice.

Laura crawled to the northwest corner of the room, where the doors sloped
down at the top of a short flight of steps. She kept her head low,
breathing the tainted but adequate air near the floor. The edges of the
mortared stones tore her dress and scraped skin off her knees.

To her left, the entire stairwell was burning now, and flames were
spreading across the wooden ceiling. Refracted and diffused by the smoky
air, the firelight glowed on all sides of Laura, creating the illusion that
she was crawling through a narrow tunnel of flames. At the rate the blaze
was spreading, the illusion would soon be fact.

Her eyes were swollen and watery, and she wiped at them as she inched
toward escape. She couldn’t see very much. She used Aunt Rachael’s voice as
a beacon and otherwise relied on instinct.

“Laura!” The voice was near. Right above her.

She felt along the wall until she located the setback in the stone. She
moved into that recess, onto the first step, lifted her head, but could see
nothing: the darkness here was seamless.

“Laura, answer me. Baby, are you in there?“

Rachael was hysterical, screaming so loudly and pounding on the outside
doors with such persistence that she wouldn’t have heard a response even if
Laura had been capable of making one.

Where was Mama? Why wasn’t Mama pounding on the door, too? Didn’t Mama
care?

Crouching in that cramped, hot, lightless space, Laura reached up and put
her hand against one of the two slant-set doors above her bead. The sturdy
barrier quivered and rattled under the impact of Rachael’s

small fists. Laura groped blindly for the latch. She put her hand over the
warm metal fixture—and squarely over something else, too. Something strange
and unexpected. Something that squirmed and was alive. Small but alive. She
jerked convulsively and pulled her hand away. But the thing she touched had
shifted its grip from the latch to her flesh, and it came away from the
door when she withdrew her hand. It skittered out of her palm and over her
thumb and across the back of her hand and along her wrist and under the
sleeve of her dress before she could brush it away.

A spider.

She couldn’t see it, but she knew what it was. A spider. One of the really
big ones, as large as her thumb, a plump black body that glistened like a
fat drop of oil, inky black and ugly. For a moment she froze, unable even
to draw a breath.

She felt the spider moving up her arm, and its bold advance snapped her
into action. She slapped at it through the sleeve of her dress, but she
missed. The spider bit her above the crook of her arm, and she winced at
the tiny nip of pain, and the disgusting creature scurried into her armpit.
It bit her there, too, and suddenly she felt as though she was living
through her worst nightmare, for she feared spiders more than she feared
anything else on earth—certainly more than she feared fire, for in her
desperate attempt to kill the spider, she had forgotten all about the
burning house that was dissolving into ruin above her— and she flailed in
panic, lost her balance, rolled backwards off the steps, into the main room
of the cellar, cracking one hip on the stone floor. The spider tickled its
way along the inside of her bodice until it was

between her breasts. She screamed but could make no sound whatsoever. She
put a hand to her bosom and pressed hard, and even through the fabric she
could feel the spider squirming angrily against the palm of her hand, and
she could feel its frenzied struggle even more directly on her bare breast,
to which it was pressed, but she persisted until at last she crushed it,
and she gagged again, but this time not merely because of the smoke.

For several seconds after killing the spider, she lay on the floor in a
tight fetal position, shuddering violently and uncontrollably. The
repulsive, wet mass of the smashed spider slid very slowly down the curve
of her breast. She wanted to reach inside her bodice and pluck the foul wad
from herself, but she hesitated because, irrationally, she was afraid it
would somehow come to life again and sting her fingers.

She tasted blood. She had bitten her lip.

Mama...

Mama had done this to her. Mama had sent her down here, knowing there were
spiders. Why was Mama always so quick to deal out punishment, so eager to
assign penance?

Overhead, a beam creaked, sagged. The kitchen floor cracked open. She felt
as though she were staring up into Hell. Sparks showered down. Her dress
caught fire, and she scorched her hands putting it out.

Mama did this to me.

Because her palms and fingers were blistered and peeling, she couldn’t
crawl on her hands and knees any longer, so she got to her feet, although
standing up required more strength and determination than she had thought
she possessed. She swayed, dizzy and weak.

Mama sent me down here.

Laura could see only pulsing, all-encompassing orange luminescence, through
which amorphous smoke ghosts glided and whirled. She shuffled toward the
short flight of steps that led to the outside cellar doors, but after she
had gone only two yards, she realized she was headed in the wrong
direction. She turned back the way she had come—or back the way she thought
she had come—but after a few steps she bumped into the furnace, which was
nowhere near the outside doors. She was completely disoriented.

Mama did this to me.

Laura squeezed her ruined hands into raw, bloody fists. In a rage she
pounded on the furnace, and with each blow she fervently wished that she
were beating her mother.

The upper reaches of the burning house twisted and rumbled. In the
distance, beyond an eternity of smoke, Aunt Rachael’s voice echoed
hauntingly: “Laura... Laura. . .“

Why wasn’t Mama out there helping Rachael break down the cellar doors?
Where in God’s name was she? Throwing coal and lamp oil on the fire?

Wheezing, gasping, Laura pushed away from the furnace and tried to follow
Rachael’s voice to safety.

A beam tore loose of its moorings, slammed into her back, and catapulted
her into the shelves of home canned food. Jars fell, shattered. Laura went
down in a rain of glass. She could smell pickles, peaches.

Before she could determine if any bones were broken, before she could even
lift her face out of the spilled food, another beam crashed down, pinning
her legs.

There was so much pain that her mind simply blanked it out altogether. She
was not even sixteen years old, and there was only so much she could bear.
She sealed the pain in a dark corner of her mind; instead of succumbing to
it, she twisted and thrashed hysterically, raged at her fate, and cursed
her mother.

Her hatred for her mother wasn’t rational, but it was so passionately felt
that it took the place of the pain she could not allow herself to feel.
Hate flooded through her, filled her with so much demonic energy that she
was nearly able to toss the heavy beam off her legs.

Damn you to Hell, Mama.

The top floor of the house caved in upon the ground floor with a sound like
cannons blasting.

Damn you, Mama! Damn you!

The first two floors of flaming rubble broke through the already weakened
cellar ceiling.

Mama—



                                  PART ONE





                         Something Wicked This Way

                                  Comes...





                       By the pricking of my thumbs,

                      Something wicked this way comes.

                                Open, locks,

                              whoever knocks!

                           —Shakespeare, Macbeth





                                     1

ACROSS the somber gray clouds, lightning followed a jagged course like
cracks in a china plate. In the unsheltered courtyard outside Alfred
O’Brian’s office, the parked cars glimmered briefly with hard-edged
reflections of the storm light. The wind gusted, whipping the trees. Rain
beat with sudden fury against the three tall office windows, then streamed
down the glass, blurring the view beyond.

O’Brian sat with his back to the windows. While thunder reverberated
through the low sky and seemed to hammer on the roof of the building, he
read the application that Paul and Carol Tracy had just submitted to him.

He’s such a neat little man, Carol thought as she watched O’Brian. When he
sits very still like that, you’d almost think he was a mannequin.

He was exceedingly well groomed. His carefully combed hair looked as if it
had received the attention of a good barber less than an hour ago. His
mustache was so expertly trimmed that the halves of it appeared to be
perfectly symmetrical. He was wearing a gray suit with trouser creases as
tight and straight as blades, and his black shoes gleamed. His fingernails
were manicured, and his pink, well-scrubbed hands looked sterile.

When Carol had been introduced to O’Brian less than a week ago, she had
thought he was prim, even prissy, and she had been prepared to dislike him.
She was quickly won over by his smile, by his gracious manner, and by his
sincere desire to help her and Paul.

She glanced at Paul, who was sitting in the chair next to hers, his own
tensions betrayed by the angular position of his lean, usually graceful
body. He was watching O’Brian intently, but when he sensed that Carol was
looking at him, he turned and smiled. His smile was even nicer than
O’Brian’s, and as usual, Carol’s spirits were lifted by the sight of it. He
was neither handsome nor ugly, this man she loved; you might even say he
was plain, yet his face was enormously appealing because the pleasing, open
composition of it contained ample evidence of his gentleness and
sensitivity. His hazel eyes were capable of conveying amazingly subtle
degrees and mixtures of emotions. Six years ago, at a university symposium
entitled “Abnormal Psychology and Modem American Fiction,” where Carol had
met Paul, the first thing that had drawn her to him had been those warm,
expressive eyes, and in the intervening years they had never ceased to
intrigue her. Now he winked, and with that wink he seemed to be saying:
Don’t worry;

O’Brian is on our side; the application will be accepted; everything will
turn out all right; I love you.

She winked back at him and pretended to be confident, even though she was
sure he could see through her brave front.

She wished that she could be certain of winning Mr. O’Brian’s approval. She
knew she ought to be overflowing with confidence, for there really was no
reason why O’Brian would reject them. They were healthy and young. Paul was
thirty-five, and she was thirty-one, and those were excellent ages at which
to set out upon the adventure they were contemplating. Both of them were
successful in their work. They were financially solvent, even prosperous.
They were respected in their community. Their marriage was happy and
trouble-free, stronger now than at any time in the four years since their
wedding. In short, their qualifications for adopting a child were pretty
much impeccable, but she worried nonetheless.

She loved children, and she was looking forward to raising one or two of
her own. During the past fourteen years—in which she had earned three
degrees at three universities and had established herself in her
profession—she had postponed many simple pleasures and had skipped others
altogether. Getting an education and launching her career had always come
first. She had missed too many good parties and had foregone an
unremembered number of vacations and getaway weekends. Adopting a child was
one pleasure she did not want to postpone any longer.

She had a strong psychological need—almost a physical need—to be a mother,
to guide and shape children, to give them love and understanding. She was
intelligent enough and sufficiently self-aware to

realize that this deep-seated need arose, at least in part, from her
inability to conceive a child of her own flesh and blood.

The thing we want most, she thought, is always the thing we cannot have.

She was to blame for her sterility, which was the result of an unforgivable
act of stupidity committed a long time ago; and of course her culpability
made her condition harder to bear than it would have been if nature—rather
than her own foolishness—had cursed her with a barren womb. She had been a
severely troubled child, for she had been raised by violent, alcoholic
parents who had frequently beaten her and who had dealt out large doses of
psychological torture. By the time she was fifteen, she was a hellion,
engaged in an angry rebellion against her parents and against the world at
large. She hated everyone in those days, especially herself. In the
blackest hours of her confused and tormented adolescence, she had gotten
pregnant. Frightened, panicky, with no one to turn to, she tried to conceal
her condition by wearing girdles, by binding herself with elastic cloth and
tape, and by eating as lightly as possible to keep her weight down.
Eventually, however, complications arose because of her attempts to hide
her pregnancy, and she nearly died. The baby was born prematurely, but it
was healthy. She had put it up for adoption and hadn’t given it much
thought for a couple of years, though these days she often wondered about
the child and wished she could have kept it somehow. At the time, the fact
that her ordeal had left her sterile did not depress her, for she didn’t
think she would ever want to be pregnant again. But with a lot of help and
love from a child psychologist named Grace Mitowski,

who did charity work among juvenile wards of the court, Carol had turned
her life completely around.

She had learned to like herself and, years later, had come to regret the
thoughtless actions that had left her barren.

Fortunately, she regarded adoption as a more-than-adequate solution to her
problem. She was capable of giving as much love to an adopted child as she
would have given to her own offspring. She knew she would be a good and
caring mother, and she longed to prove it—not to the world but to herself;
she never needed to prove anything to anyone but herself, for she was
always her own toughest critic.

Mr. O’Brian looked up from the application and smiled. His teeth were
exceedingly white. “This looks really fine,” he said, indicating the form
he had just finished reading. “In fact, it’s splendid. Not everyone that
applies to us has credentials like these.”

“It’s kind of you to say so,” Paul told him.

O’Brian shook his head. “Not at all. It’s simply the truth. Very
impressive.”

Carol said, “Thank you.”

Leaning back in his chair, folding his hands on his stomach, O’Brian said,
“I do have a couple of questions. I’m sure they’re the same ones the
recommendations committee will ask me, so I might as well get your
responses now and save a lot of back-and-forth later on.”

Carol stiffened again.

O’Brian apparently noticed her reaction, for he quickly said, “Oh, it’s
nothing terribly serious. Really, it isn’t. Believe me—I won’t be asking
you half as many questions as I ask most couples who come to see us.”

In spite of O’Brian’s assurances, Carol remained tense.

Outside, the storm-dark afternoon sky grew steadily darker as the
thunderheads changed color from gray to blue black, thickened, and pressed
closer to the earth.

O’Brian swiveled in his chair to face Paul. “Dr. Tracy, would you say
you’re an overachiever?”

Paul seemed surprised by the question. He blinked and said, “I’m not sure
what you mean.”

“You are the chairman of the department of English at the college, aren’t
you?”

“Yes. I’m on sabbatical this semester, and the vice-chairman is handling
most things for the time being. Otherwise, I’ve been in charge of the
department for the past year and a half.”

“Aren’t you rather young to hold such a post?”

“Somewhat young,” Paul admitted. “But that’s no credit to me. You see, it’s
a thankless position, all work and no glory. My senior colleagues in the
department craftily maneuvered me into it so that none of them would be
stuck with the job.”

“You’re being modest.”

“No, I’m really not,” Paul said. “It’s nothing much.”

Carol knew that he was being modest. The departmental chairmanship was a
prized position, an honor. But she understood why Paul was playing it down;
he had been unsettled by O’Brian’s use of the word overachiever. She had
been unsettled by it, too. Until this moment she had never thought that an
unusually long list of achievements might count against them.

Beyond the tall windows, lightning zigzagged

down the sky. The day flickered and, just for a second or two, so did the
electric lights in O’Brian’s office.

Still addressing Paul, O’Brian said, “You’re also an author.”

“Yes.”

“You’ve written a very successful textbook for use in American literature
courses. You’ve turned out a dozen monographs on a variety of subjects, and
you’ve done a local history of the county. And two children’s books, and a
novel

“The novel was about as successful as a horse trying to walk a tightrope,”
Paul said. “The New York Times critic said it was ‘a perfect example of
academic posturing, stuffed full of themes and symbols, utterly lacking in
substance and narrative drive, infused with ivory-tower naiveté.”

O’Brian smiled. “Does every writer memorize his bad reviews?”

“I suppose not. But I have that one engraved on my cerebral cortex because
there’s an uncomfortable amount of truth in it.”

“Are you writing another novel? Is that why you’ve taken a sabbatical?”

Paul was not surprised by the question. Clearly he now understood what
O’Brian was digging for. “Yes, in fact I am writing a new novel. This one
actually has a plot.” He laughed with easy self-deprecation.

“You’re also involved in charity work.”

“Not much.”

“Quite a lot,” O’Brian disagreed. “The Children’s Hospital Fund, the
Community Chest, the student scholarship program at the college—all of that
in addition to your regular job and your writing. Yet you don’t think
you’re an overachiever?”

“No, I really don’t think I am. The charity work

amounts to just a couple of meetings a month. It’s no big thing. It’s the
least I can do, considering my own good fortune.” Paul edged forward on his
chair.

“Maybe you’re worried that I won’t have time to give to a child, but if
that’s what’s troubling you, then you can put your mind at rest. I’ll make
the time. This adoption is extremely important to us, Mr. O’Brian. We both
want a child very badly, and if we are lucky enough to get one, we
certainly won’t ever neglect it.”

“Oh, I’m sure you won’t,” O’Brian said quickly, raising his hands
placatingly. “That isn’t at all what I meant to imply. Oh, certainly not.
I’m on your side in this matter. I mean that very sincerely.” He swiveled
to face Carol. “Dr. Tracy—the other Dr. Tracy— what about you? Do you
consider yourself an overachiever?”

Lightning slashed through the panoply of clouds again, nearer this time
than before; it seemed to strike the ground no more than two blocks away.
The ensuing crash of thunder rattled the tall windows.

Carol used the interruption provided by the thunderclap to consider her
response, and she decided that O’Brian would appreciate forthrightness more
than modesty. “Yes. I’d say I’m an overachiever. I’m involved in two of the
three charities that Paul has his hand in. And I know I’m a bit young to
have established a psychiatric practice as successful as mine is. I’m also
a guest lecturer at the college on a fairly regular basis. And I’m doing
post-doctoral research on autistic children. During the summer I manage to
keep a little vegetable garden going, and I do some needlepoint in the
winter months, and I even brush

my           teeth three times a day, every day, without fail.” O’Brian
laughed. “Three times a day, huh? Oh,

you’re most definitely an overachiever.”

The warmth of his laughter reassured Carol, and with renewed confidence she
said, “I believe I understand what you’re concerned about. You’re wondering
if Paul and I might expect too much of our child.”

“Exactly,” O’Brian said. He noticed a speck of lint on his coat sleeve and
plucked it off. “Parents who are overachievers tend to push their kids too
hard, too fast, too soon.”

Paul said, “That’s a problem that arises only when parents are unaware of
the danger. Even if Carol and I are overachievers—which I’m not prepared to
admit just yet—we wouldn’t pressure our kids to do more than they were
capable of doing. Each of us has to find his own pace in life. Carol and I
realize that a child should be guided, not hammered into a mold.”

“Of course,” Carol said.

O’Brian appeared to be pleased. “I knew you’d say that—or something very
like it.”

Lightning flashed again. This time it seemed to strike even closer than
before, only a block away. Thunder cracked, then cracked again. The
overhead lights dimmed, fluttered, reluctantly came back to full power.

“In my psychiatric practice, I deal with a wide variety of patients who
have all kinds of problems,”

Carol told O’Brian, “but I specialize in the mental disorders and emotional
disturbances of children and adolescents. Sixty or seventy percent of my
patients are seventeen or younger. I’ve treated several kids who’ve
suffered serious psychological damage at the hands of parents who were too
demanding, who pushed them too hard in their schoolwork, in every aspect of
their intellectual and personal development. I’ve seen the wounded ones,
Mr. O’Brian, and I’ve nursed them as best I could, and because of those
experiences, I couldn’t possibly turn around and do to my children what
I’ve seen some parents do to theirs. Not that I won’t make mistakes. I’m
sure I will. My full share of them. But the one that you mentioned won’t be
among them.”

“That’s valid,” O’Brian said, nodding. “Valid and very well put. I’m sure
that when I tell the recommendations committee what you’ve just said,
they’ll be quite satisfied on this point.” He spotted another tiny speck on
his sleeve and removed it, frowning as if it were not merely lint, but
offal. “Another question they’re bound to ask: Suppose the child you adopt
turns out to be not only an underachiever but. . . well... basically less
intelligent than either of you. For parents as oriented toward an
intellectual life as you are, wouldn’t you be somewhat frustrated with a
child of just average—or possibly slightly below average— intelligence?”

“Well, even if we were capable of having a child of our own,” Paul said,
“there wouldn’t be any guarantee that he’d be a prodigy or anything of that
sort. But if he was. . . slow. . . we’d still love him. Of course we would.
And the same goes for any child we might adopt.”

To O’Brian, Carol said, “I think you’ve got too high an opinion of us.
Neither of us is a genius, for heaven’s sake! We’ve gotten as far as we
have primarily through hard work and perseverance, not be-

cause we were exceptionally bright. I wish it had come that easy, but it
didn’t.”

“Besides,” Paul said, “you don’t love a person merely because he’s
intelligent. It’s his entire personality that counts, the whole package,
and a lot of factors contribute to that package, a great many things other
than just intellect.”

“Good,” O’Brian said. “I’m glad to hear you feel that way. The committee
will respond well to that answer, too.”

For the past few seconds, Carol had been aware of the distant wail of
sirens. Fire engines. Now they were not as distant as they had been; they
were rapidly growing nearer, louder.

“I think maybe one of those last two bolts of lightning caused some real
damage when it touched down,” Paul said.

O’Brian swung his chair around toward the center window, which was directly
behind his desk. “It did sound as if it struck nearby.”

Carol looked at each of the three windows, but she couldn’t see any smoke
rising from behind the nearest rooftops. Then again, the view was blurred
and visibility was reduced by the water-spotted panes of glass and by the
curtains of mist and gray rain that wavered and whipped and billowed beyond
the glass.

The sirens swelled.

“More than one truck,” O’Brian said.

The fire engines were right outside the office for a moment—at least two
trucks, perhaps three—and then they passed, heading into the next block.

O’Brian pushed up from his chair and stepped to the window.

As the first sirens dwindled just a little, new ones shrieked in the street
behind them.

“Must be serious,” Paul said. “Sounds as if at least two engine companies
are responding.”

“I see smoke,” O’Brian said.

Paul rose from his chair and moved toward the windows to get a better look.

Something’s wrong here.

That thought snapped into Carol’s mind, startling her as if a whip had
cracked in front of her face. A powerful, inexplicable current of panic
surged through her, electrified her. She gripped the arms of her chair so
tightly that one of her fingernails broke.

Something. . . is.. . wrong.. . very wrong...

Suddenly the air was oppressively heavy—hot, thick, as if it were not air
at all but a bitter and poisonous gas of some kind. She tried to breathe,
couldn’t. There was an invisible, crushing weight on her chest.

Get away from the windows!

She tried to shout that warning, but panic had short-circuited her voice.
Paul and O’Brian were at different windows, but they both had their backs
to her, so that neither of them could see she had been gripped by sudden,
immobilizing fear.

Fear of what? she demanded of herself. What in the name of God am l so
scared of?

She struggled against the unreasonable terror that had locked her muscles
and joints. She started to get up from the chair, and that was when it
happened.

A murderous barrage of lightning crashed like a volley of mortar fire,
seven or eight tremendous bolts, perhaps more than that—she didn’t count
them, couldn’t count them—one right after the other, with-

out a significant pause between them, each fierce boom overlapping the ones
before and after it, yet each clearly louder than its predecessors, so loud
that they made her teeth and bones vibrate, each bolt smashing down
discernibly closer to the building than had the bolt before it, closer to
the seven-foot-high windows—the gleaming, flashing, rattling, now-black,
now-milky, now-shining, now-blank, now-silvery, now-coppery windows.

The sharp bursts of purple-white light produced a series of jerky,
stroboscopic images that were burned forever into Carol’s memory: Paul and
O’Brian standing there, silhouetted against the natural fireworks, looking
small and vulnerable; outside, the rain descending in an illusion of
hesitation; wind-lashed trees heaving in a strobe-choppy rage; lightning
blasting into one of those trees, a big maple, and then an ominous dark
shape rising from the midst of the explosion, a torpedo like thing,
spinning straight toward the center window (all of this transpiring in only
a second or two, but given a queer, slow-motion quality by the flickering
lightning and, after a moment, by the overhead electric light as well,
which began to flicker, too); O’Brian throwing one arm up in front of his
face in what appeared to be half a dozen disconnected movements; Paul
turning toward O’Brian and reaching for him, both men like figures on a
motion picture screen when the film slips and stutters in the projector;
O’Brian lurching sideways; Paul seizing him by a coat sleeve, pulling him
back and down toward safety (only a fraction of a second after the
lightning splintered the maple); a huge tree limb bursting through the
center window even as Paul was pulling O’Brian out of the way; one leafy
branch sweeping

across O’Brian’s head, ripping his glasses loose, tossing them into the
air—his face, Carol thought, his eyes!—and then Paul and O’Brian falling to
the floor, out of sight; the enormous limb of the shattered maple slamming
down on top of O’Brian’s desk in a spray of water, glass, broken mullions,
and smoking chips of bark; the legs of the desk cracking and collapsing
under the brutal impact of the ruined tree.

Carol found herself on the floor, beside her overturned chair. She couldn’t
remember falling.

The fluorescent tubes blinked off, stayed off.

She was lying on her stomach, one cheek pressed to the floor, staring in
shock at the shards of glass and the torn maple leaves that littered the
carpet. As lightning continued to stab down from the turbulent sky, wind
roared through the missing window and stirred some of the loose leaves into
a frantic, dervishlike dance; accompanied by the cacophonous music of the
storm, they whirled and capered across the office, toward a row of green
filing cabinets. A calendar flapped off the wall and swooped around on
wings of January and December, darting and soaring and kiting as if it were
a bat. Two paintings rattled on their wire hangers, trying to tear
themselves free. Papers were everywhere—stationery, forms, small sheets
from a note pad, bulletins, a newspaper—all rustling and skipping this way
and that, floating up, diving down, bunching together and slithering along
the floor with a snakelike hiss.

Carol had the eerie feeling that all of the movement in the room was not
solely the result of the wind, that some of it was caused by a . . .
presence. Something threatening. A bad poltergeist. Demonic spirits seemed

to be at work in the office, flexing their occult muscles, knocking things
off the walls, briefly taking up residence in a body composed only of
leaves and rumpled sheets of newsprint.

That was a crazy idea, not at all the sort of thing she would ordinarily
think of. She was surprised and disconcerted by a thrill of superstitious
fear that coursed through her.

Lightning flared again. And again.

Wincing at the painfully sharp sound, wondering if lightning could get into
a room through an open window, she put her arms over her head, for what
little protection they provided.

Her heart was pounding, and her mouth was dry.

She thought about Paul, and her heartbeat grew even more frantic. He was
over by the windows, on the far side of the desk, out of sight, under some
of the maple tree’s branches. She didn’t think he was dead. He hadn’t been
directly in the path of the tree. O’Brian might be dead, yes, depending on
how that small branch had struck his head, depending on whether he had been
lucky or not, because maybe a pointed twig had been driven deep into his
eye and his brain when his glasses had been knocked off, but Paul was
surely alive. Surely. Nevertheless, he could be seriously injured,
bleeding.

Carol started to push herself up onto her hands and knees, anxious to find
Paul and give him any first aid he might need. But another bolt of
blinding, ear shattering lightning spent itself just outside the building,
and fear turned her muscles into wet rags. She didn’t even have the
strength to crawl, and she was infuriated by her weakness, for she had
always

been proud of her strength, determination, and unflagging willpower.
Cursing herself, she slumped back to the floor.

Something’s trying to stop us from adopting a baby.

That incredible thought struck her with the same cold, hard force as had
the forewarning of the window's implosion, which had come to her an instant
before the impossible barrage of lightning had blasted into the courtyard.

Something’s trying to stop us from adopting a baby.

No. That was ridiculous. The storm, the lightning—they were nothing more
than acts of nature. They hadn’t been directed against Mr. O’Brian just
because he was going to help them adopt a child.

Absurd.

Oh, yeah? she thought as the deafening thunder and the unholy light of the
storm filled the room. Acts of nature, huh? When have you ever seen
lightning like this before?

She hugged the floor, shaking, cold, more afraid than she had been since
she was a little girl. She tried to tell herself that it was only the
lightning that she was afraid of, for that was very much a legitimate,
rational fear, but she knew she was lying. It was not just the lightning
that terrified her. In fact, that was the least of it. There was something
else, something she couldn’t identify, something formless and nameless in
the room, and the very presence of it, whatever the hell it was, pushed a
panic button deep inside her, on a sub-subconscious, primitive level; this
fear was gut-deep, instinctive.

A dervish of windblown leaves and papers whirled across the floor, directly
toward her. It was a big one:

a column about two feet in diameter, five or six feet

high, composed of a hundred or more pieces of this and that. It stopped
very near her, writhing, churning, hissing, changing shape, glimmering
silver-dark in the flashing storm light, and she felt threatened by it. As
she stared up at the whirlwind, she had the mad notion that it was staring
down at her. After a moment it moved off to the left a few feet, then
returned, paused in front of her again, hesitated, then scurried busily to
the right, but came back once more, looming above her as if it were trying
to make up its mind whether or not to pounce and tear her to shreds and
sweep her up along with the leaves, newspaper pages, envelopes, and other
flotsam by which it defined itself.

It’s nothing more than a whirlwind of lifeless junk! she told herself
angrily.

The wind-shaped phantom moved away from her.

See? she told herself scornfully. Just lifeless junk. What’s wrong with me?
Am I losing my mind?

She recalled the old axiom that was supposed to provide comfort in moments
like this: If you think you’re going mad, then you must be completely sane,
for a lunatic never has doubts about his sanity. As a psychiatrist, she
knew that hoary bit of wisdom was an oversimplification of complex
psychological principles, but in essence it was true. So she must be sane.

Nevertheless, that frightening, irrational thought came to her again,
unbidden, unwanted: Something’s trying to stop us from adopting a baby.

If the maelstrom in which she lay was not an act of nature, then what was
it? Was she to believe that the lightning had been sent with the conscious
intent of transforming Mr. O’Brian into a smoking heap of charred flesh?
That was a fruitcake notion, for sure.

Who could use lightning as if it were a pistol? God? God wasn’t sitting up
in Heaven, aiming at Mr. O’Brian, popping away at him with lightning bolts,
just to screw up the adoption process for Carol and Paul Tracy. The Devil?
Blasting away at poor Mr. O’Brian from the depths of Hell? That was a
looney idea. Jesus!

She wasn’t even sure she believed in God, but she knew she definitely did
not believe in the Devil.

Another window imploded, showering glass over her.

Then the lightning stopped.

The thunder decreased from a roar to a rumble, fading like the noise of a
passing freight train.

There was a stench of ozone.

The wind was still pouring in through the broken windows, but apparently
with less force than it had exerted a moment ago, for the whirling columns
of leaves and papers subsided to the floor, where they lay in piles,
fluttering and quivering as if exhausted.

Something...

Something...

Something’s trying to stop us from— She clamped off that unwanted thought
as though

it were a spurting artery. She was an educated woman, dammit. She prided
herself on her levelheadedness and common sense. She couldn’t permit
herself to succumb to these disturbing, uncharacteristic, utterly
superstitious fears.

Freaky weather—that was the explanation for the lightning. Freaky weather.
You read about such things in the newspapers every once in a while. A half
an inch of snow in Beverly Hills. An eighty-degree day in the middle of an
otherwise frigid Minnesota winter.

Rain falling briefly from an apparently cloudless blue sky. Although a
lightning strike of this magnitude and intensity was undoubtedly a rare
occurrence, it probably had happened before, sometime, somewhere, probably
more than once. Of course it had. Of course.

In fact, if you picked up one of those popular books in which the authors
compiled all kinds of world records, and if you turned to the chapter on
weather, and if you looked for a subsection entitled “Lightning,” you would
most likely find an impressive list of other serial lightning strikes that
would put this one to shame. Freaky weather. That’s what it was. That’s all
it was. Nothing stranger than that, nothing worse.

For the time being, at least, Carol managed to put aside all thoughts of
demons and ghosts and malign poltergeists and other such claptrap.

In the relative quiet that followed in the wake of the fast-diminishing
thunder, she felt her strength returning. She pushed up from the floor,
onto her knees. With the clinking sound of mildly disturbed wind chimes,
pieces of glass fell from her gray skirt and green blouse; she wasn’t cut
or even scratched. She was a bit dazed, however, and for a moment the floor
appeared to roll sickeningly from side to side, as if this were a stateroom
aboard a ship.

In the office next door, a woman began to cry hysterically. There were
shouts of alarm, and someone began calling for Mr. O’Brian. No one had yet
burst into the office to see what had happened, which meant that only a
second or two had elapsed since the lightning had stopped, although it
seemed to Carol as if a minute or two had passed.

Over by the windows, someone groaned softly.

‘Paul?” she said.

if there was an answer, it was drowned out by a sudden gust of wind that
briefly stirred the papers and leaves again.

She recalled the way that branch had whipped across O’Brian’s head, and she
shuddered. But Paul hadn’t been touched. The tree had missed him. Hadn’t
it?

“Paul !“

With renewed fear, she got to her feet and moved quickly around the desk,
stepping over splintered maple branches and an overturned wastebasket.

                                     2

THAT Wednesday afternoon, following a lunch of Campbell’s vegetable soup
and a grilled cheese sandwich, Grace Mitowski went into her study and
curled up on the sofa to sleep for an hour or so. She never napped in the
bedroom because that formalized it somehow, and though she had been taking
naps three or four days a week for the past year, she still had not
reconciled herself to the fact that she needed a midday rest. To her way of
thinking, naps were for children and for old, used-up, burnt-out people.
She wasn’t in her childhood any more—neither the first nor the second,
thank you—and although she was old, she certainly wasn’t used up or burnt
out. Being in bed in the middle of the day made her feel lazy, and she
couldn’t abide laziness in anyone, especially not in herself. Therefore,
she took naps on the study sofa, with her back to the shuttered windows,
lulled by the monotonous ticking of the mantel clock.

At seventy, Grace was still as mentally agile and energetic as she had ever
been. Her gray matter hadn’t begun to deteriorate at all; it was only her
treacherous body that caused her grief and frustration. She had a touch of
arthritis in her hands, and when the humidity was high—as it was today—she
also suffered from a dull but unrelenting ache of bursitis in her
shoulders. Although she did all of the exercises that her doctor
recommended, and although she walked two miles every morning, she found it
increasingly difficult to maintain her muscle tone. From the time she was a
young girl, throughout most of her life, she had been in love with books,
and she had been able to read all morning, all afternoon, and most of the
evening without eyestrain; nowadays, usually after only a couple of hours
of reading, her eyes felt grainy and hot. She regarded each of her
infirmities with extreme indignation, and she struggled against them, even
though she knew this was a war she was destined to lose.

That Wednesday afternoon she took a break from the battle, a brief period
of R and R. Two minutes after she stretched out on the sofa, she was
asleep.

Grace did not dream often, and she was even less often plagued by bad
dreams. But Wednesday afternoon, in the book-lined study, her sleep was
continuously disturbed by nightmares. Several times she stirred, came half
awake, and heard herself gasping in panic. Once, drifting up from some
hideous and threatening vision, she heard her own voice crying out
wordlessly in terror, and she realized she was thrashing on the couch,
twisting and torturing her

aching shoulders. She tried to come fully awake, but she could not;
something in the dream, something dark and menacing, reached up with icy,
clammy hands and pulled her down into deep sleep again, down and down, all
the way down into a lightless place where an unnamable creature gibbered
and muttered and chuckled in a mucous-wet voice.

An hour later, when she finally woke up and managed to cast off the
clutching dream, she was standing in the middle of the shadow-shrouded
room, several steps away from the sofa, but she had no memory of getting to
her feet. She was shaking, sheathed in sweat.

—I’ve got to tell Carol Tracy.

—Tell her what?

—Warn her.

—Warn her about what?

—It’s coming. Oh, God...

—What’s coming?

—Just like in the dream.

—What about the dream?

Already her memory of the nightmare had begun to dissolve; only fragments
of it remained with her, and each of those disassociated images was
evaporating as if it were a splinter of dry ice. All she could remember was
that Carol had been a part of it, and had been in awful danger. And somehow
she knew that the dream had been more than just an ordinary dream....

As the nightmare receded, Grace became uncomfortably aware of how gloomy
the study was. Before taking her nap, she had switched off the lamps. The
shutters were all closed, and only thin blades of light Were visible
between the wooden slats. She had the irrational but unshakable feeling
that something had followed her up from the dream, something vicious and
evil that had undergone a magical metamorphosis from a creature of the
imagination into one composed of solid flesh, something that was now
crouched in a corner, watching, waiting.

—Stop it!

—But the dream was...

—Only a dream.

Along the edges of the shutters, the taut threads of light abruptly
brightened, then dimmed, then grew bright again as lightning flashed
outside. A roof-rattling crash of thunder quickly followed, and more
lightning, too, an unbelievable amount of it, one blue-white explosion
after another, so that for at least half a minute the cracks in the
shutters looked like sputtering electrical wires, white-hot with sparking
current.

Still drugged with sleep and slightly confused, Grace stood in the middle
of the unlighted room, rocking from side to side, listening to the thunder
and the wind, watching the intense pulse of lightning. The extreme violence
of the storm seemed unreal, and she concluded that she was still under the
influence of the dream, misinterpreting what she was seeing. It couldn’t
possibly be as savage outside as it appeared to be.

“Grace..."

She thought she heard something call to her from over by the tallest set of
bookshelves, directly behind her. Judging from its slurred, distorted
pronunciation of her name, its mouth was severely malformed.

There’s nothing behind me! Nothing.

Nevertheless, she did not turn around.

When the lightning finally stopped and the long-sustained crescendo of
thunder subsided, the air seemed thicker than it had been a minute ago. She
had difficulty breathing. The room was darker, too.

‘Grace. .

A confining mantle of claustrophobia settled over her. The dimly visible
walls appeared to ripple and move closer, as if the chamber might shrink
around her until it was precisely the size and shape of a coffin.

“Grace. .

She stumbled to the nearest window, banging her hip against the desk,
nearly tripping over a lamp cord. She fumbled with the lever on the
shutters, her fingers stiff and unresponsive. At last the slats opened
wide; gray but welcome light poured into the study; forcing her to squint
but gladdening her as well. She leaned against the shutters and stared out
at the cloud-plated sky, resisting the insane urge to look over her
shoulder to see if there really was something monstrous lurking there with
a hungry grin on its face. She drew deep, gasping breaths, as if the
daylight itself—rather than the air—sustained her.

Grace’s house was atop a small knoll, at the end of a quiet street,
sheltered by several large pine trees and by one enormous weeping willow;
from her study window she could see the rain-swollen Susquehanna a couple
of miles away. Harrisburg, the state capital, huddled solemnly, drearily
along the river’s banks. The clouds hung low over the city, trailing
bedraggled beards of mist that obscured the upper floors of the tallest
buildings.

When she’d blinked the last grains of sleep out of her eyes, when her
nerves had stopped jangling, she turned around and surveyed the room. A
quiver of relief swept through her, unknotting her muscles.

She was alone.

With the storm temporarily quiet, she could hear the mantel clock again. It
was the only sound.

Hell, yes, you’re alone, she told herself scornfully. What did you expect?
A green goblin with three eyes and a mouthful of sharp teeth? You better
watch yourself, Grace Louise Mitowski, or you’ll wind up in a rest home,
sitting all day in a rocking chair, happily chatting with ghosts, while
smiling nurses wipe drool off your chin.

Having led an active life of the mind for so many years, she worried more
about creeping senility than about anything else. She knew she was as sharp
and alert as she had ever been. But what about tomorrow and the day after?
Because of her medical training, and because she had kept up with her
professional reading even after closing down her psychiatric practice, she
was up to date on all the latest findings about senility, and she knew that
only fifteen percent of all elderly people suffered from it. She also knew
that more than half of those cases were treatable with proper nutrition and
exercise. She knew her chances of becoming mentally incapacitated were
small, only about one in eighteen. Nevertheless, although she was conscious
of her excessive sensitivity regarding the subject, she still worried.
Consequently, she was understandably disturbed by this uncharacteristic
notion that something had been in the study with her a few moments ago,
something hostile and. . . supernatural. As a lifelong skeptic with little
or no patience for astrologers and psychics and their ilk, she could not
justify even a fleeting belief in such superstitious non-sense; to her way
of thinking, beliefs of that nature were. . . well. . . feebleminded.

But good, sweet God, what a nightmare that had been!

She had never before experienced a dream even one-tenth as bad as that one.
Although the grisly details had completely faded away, she could still
clearly remember the mood of it—the terror, the gut-wrenching horror that
had permeated every nasty image, every ticking sound.

She shivered.

The sweat that the dream had squeezed out of her was beginning to feel like
a thin glaze of ice on her skin.

The only other thing she remembered from the nightmare was Carol.
Screaming. Crying for help.

Until now, none of Grace’s infrequent dreams had included Carol, and there
was a temptation to view her appearance in this one with alarm, to see it
as an omen. But of course it wasn’t surprising that Carol should eventually
have a role in one of Grace’s dreams, for the loved-one-in-danger theme was
common in nightmares. Any psychologist would attest to that, and Grace was
a psychologist, a good one, although she was entering her third year of
retirement. She cared deeply about Carol. If she’d had a child of her own,
she couldn’t have loved it any more than she loved Carol.

She had first met the girl sixteen years ago, when Carol had been an angry,
obstinate, obstreperous fifteen-year-old delinquent who had recently given
birth to a baby that had nearly killed her, and who, subsequent to that
traumatic episode, had been remanded

to a juvenile detention facility for possession of marijuana and for a host
of other offenses. In those days, in addition to a private psychiatric
practice, Grace had performed eight hours a week of free service to assist
the overworked counseling staff at the reform school in which Carol was
held. Carol was incorrigible, determined to kick you in the teeth if you
smiled at her, but even then her intelligence and innate goodness were
there, to be seen by anyone who looked closely enough, beneath the rough
exterior. Grace had taken a very close look indeed, and had been intrigued,
impressed. The girl’s obsessively foul language, her vicious temper, and
her amoral pose had been nothing more than defense mechanisms, shields with
which she protected herself from the physical and psychological abuse
dished out by her parents.

As Grace gradually unearthed the horrendous story of Carol’s monstrous home
life, she became convinced that reform school was the wrong place for the
girl. She used her influence with the court to get Carol permanently
removed from the custody of her parents. Later, she arranged to serve as
Carol’s foster parent. She had watched the girl respond to love and
guidance, had watched her grow from a brooding, self centered,
self-destructive teenager into a warm, self-assured, admirable young woman
with hopes and dreams, a woman of character, a sensitive woman. Playing a
part in that exciting transformation had been perhaps the most satisfying
thing that Grace had ever done.

The only regret she had about her relationship with Carol was the role she
had played in putting the baby up for adoption. But there had been no
reasonable alternative. Carol simply hadn’t been financially or emotionally
or mentally capable of providing for the infant. With that responsibility
to attend to, she would never have had an opportunity to grow and change.
She would have been miserable all her life, and she would have made her
child miserable, too. Unfortunately, even now, sixteen years later, Carol
felt guilty about giving her baby away. Her guilt became overpowering on
each anniversary of the child’s birth. On that black day, Carol sank into a
deep depression and became uncharacteristically uncommunicative. The
excessive anguish that she suffered on that one day was evidence of the
deep-seated, abiding guilt that she carried with her, to a lesser degree,
during the rest of the year. Grace wished she had foreseen this reaction,
wished she had done more to assuage Carol’s guilt.

I’m a psychologist, after all, she thought. I should have anticipated it.

Perhaps when Carol and Paul adopted someone else’s child, Carol would feel
that the scales had at last been balanced. The adoption might relieve some
of her guilt, in time.

Grace hoped it would. She loved Carol like a daughter and wanted only the
best for her.

And of course she couldn’t bear the thought of losing Carol. Therefore,
Carol’s appearance in a nightmare wasn’t the least bit mysterious. It was
certainly not an omen.

Clammy with stale sweat, Grace turned to the study window again, seeking
warmth and light, but the day was ashen, chilly, forbidding. Wind pressed
on the glass, soughed softly under the eaves one floor above.

In the city, near the river, a roiling column of smoke rose into the rain
and mist. She had not noticed it a minute ago, but it must have been there;
it was too much smoke to have appeared in only a few seconds. Even from
this distance, she could see a glint of fire at the base of the dark
column.

She wondered if lightning had done the dirty work. She recalled the storm
flashing and roaring with extraordinary power in those first seconds after
she had awakened. At the time, groggy and bleary-eyed, she had thought her
sleep-dulled senses were misleading her and that the extreme violence of
the lightning was largely illusory or even imaginary. Could that
incredible, destructive barrage have been real after all?

She glanced at her wristwatch.

Her favorite radio station would carry its hourly newscast in less than ten
minutes. Maybe there would be a story about the fire and the lightning.

After she’d straightened the throw pillows on the sofa, she stepped out of
the study and spotted Aristophanes at the far end of the downstairs hall,
near the front door. He was sitting up straight and tall, his tail curled
forward and across his front paws, his head held high, as if he were
saying, “A Siamese cat is the very best thing on earth, and I am an
exceedingly handsome example of the species, and don’t you dare forget it.”

Grace held one hand toward him, rapidly rubbing her thumb against her
forefinger. “Kitty-kitty-kitty.”

Aristophanes didn’t move.

“Kitty-kitty-kitty. Come here, Ari. Come on, baby.”

Aristophanes got up and went through the archway on his left, into the dark
living room.

“Stubborn damn cat,” she said affectionately.

She went into the downstairs bathroom and washed her face and combed her
hair. The mundane task of grooming herself took her mind off the nightmare.
Gradually, she began to relax. Her eyes were watery and bloodshot. She
rinsed them out with a few drops of Murine.

When she came out of the bathroom, Aristophanes was sitting in the hallway
again, watching her.

“Kitty-kitty-kitty,” she coaxed.

He stared unblinkingly.

“Kitty-kitty-kitty.”

Aristophanes rose to his feet, cocked his head, and examined her with
curious, shining eyes. When she took a step toward him, he turned and
quickly slunk away, casting one backward glance, then disappearing into the
living room again.

“Okay,” Grace said. “Okay, buster. Have it your way. Snub me if you want.
But just see if there’s any Meow Mix in your bowl tonight.”

In the kitchen she snapped on the lights, then the radio. The station came
in clearly enough, though there was a continuous crackle of storm-generated
static.

While she listened to tales of economic crises and breathless accounts of
airplane hijackings and rumors of war, Grace put a clean paper filter in
the coffee machine, filled the brewing basket with drip-ground Colombian,
and added half a spoonful of chicory. The story of the fire came at the end
of the newscast, and it was only a sketchy bulletin. The reporter knew
nothing more than that lightning had struck a couple of buildings in the
heart of the city and that one of them, a church, was afire. He promised
more details on the half hour.

When the coffee was ready, Grace poured some for herself. She took her mug
to the small table by the kitchen’s only window, pulled out a chair, and
sat down.

In the backyard, the myriad roses—red, pink, orange, white, yellow—looked
preternaturally bright, almost phosphorescent, against the cinereous
backdrop of the rain.

Two psychology journals had arrived in the morning mail. Grace opened one
of them with pleasant anticipation.

Halfway through an article about new findings in criminal psychology, as
she finished her first mug of coffee, there was a pause between songs on
the radio, a few seconds of dead air, and in that brief quietude, she heard
furtive movement behind her. She turned in her chair and saw Aristophanes.

“Come to apologize?” she asked.

Then she realized that he appeared to have been sneaking up on her, and
that now, confronted, he was frozen; every lithe muscle in his small body
was spring-taut, and the fur bristled along his arched back.

“Ari? What’s wrong, you silly cat?”

He whirled and ran out of the kitchen.

                                     3

CAROL sat in a chrome chair with shiny black vinyl cushions, and she slowly
sipped whiskey from a paper cup.

Paul slumped in the chair next to hers. He didn’t sip his whiskey; he
gulped the stuff. It was an excellent bourbon, Jack Daniel’s Black Label,
thoughtfully provided by an attorney named Marvin Kwicker, who had offices
down the hail from Alfred O’Brian and Who realized that a restorative was
urgently needed. Pouring bourbon for Carol, Marvin had said, “Kwicker With
liquor,” which he had probably said ten thousand times before, but he still
enjoyed his own joke. “Kwicker with liquor,” he repeated when dispensing a
double shot to Paul. Although Paul wasn’t much of a drinker, he needed
every drop that the attorney gave him. His hands were still shaking.

The reception lounge that served O’Brian’s office was not large, but most
of the people who worked on the same floor had congregated here to talk
about the lightning that had shaken the building, to marvel that the place
hadn’t caught fire, to express surprise that the electric power had been
restored so quickly, and to wait their turns for a peek at the nibble and
ruin in O’Brian’s inner sanctum. The resultant roar of conversation did
nothing to soothe Paul’s nerves.

Every thirty seconds or so, a bleached blonde with a shrill voice repeated
the same words of amazement:

“I can’t believe nobody got killed in all that! I can’t believe nobody got
killed.” Each time she spoke, regardless of where she was in the room, her
voice carried over the din and made Paul wince. “I can’t believe nobody got
killed.” She sounded somewhat disappointed.

Alfred O’Brian was sitting at the reception desk. His secretary, a
prim-looking woman whose hair was drawn back in a tight bun, was trying to
apply Merthiolate to half a dozen scratches on her boss’s face, but O’Brian
seemed more concerned about the condition of his suit than he was about
himself. He plucked and brushed at the dirt, lint, and small fragments of
tree bark that clung to his jacket.

Paul finished his whiskey and looked at Carol. She was still badly shaken.
Contrasted with her glossy dark hair, her face was very pale.

Apparently, she saw the concern in his eyes, for she took his hand,
squeezed it, and smiled reassuringly. However, the smile didn’t set well on
her lips; it was tremulous.

He leaned close to her, so that she could hear him above the excited
chatter of the others. “Ready to get out of here?”

She nodded.

Over by the window, a young executive type raised his voice. “Hey! Hey,
everybody! Better look sharp. The TV news people just drove up to the front
door.”

“If we get trapped by reporters,” Carol said, “we’ll be here an hour or
more.”

They left without saying goodbye to O’Brian. In the hall, as they headed
toward a side entrance, they slipped into their raincoats. Outside, Paul
opened his umbrella and put one arm around Carol’s waist. They hurried
across the slippery macadam parking lot, stepping gingerly around huge
puddles. The gusting wind was chilly for early September, and it kept
changing direction until it finally got under the umbrella and turned it
inside out. The cold, wind-driven rain was falling so hard that it stung
Paul’s face. By the time they reached the car, their hair was plastered to
their heads, and a lot of water had found its way down the backs of their
necks, under the collars of their coats.

Paul half expected the Pontiac to be lightning-damaged, but it was just as
they had left it. The engine turned over without protest.

Leaving the parking lot, he started to turn left but put his foot on the
brake pedal when he saw that the street was sealed off by police cars and
fire trucks just half a block away. The church was still ablaze, in spite
of the pouring rain and in defiance of the big streams of water that the
firemen directed onto it.

Black smoke billowed into the gray day, and behind the blasted windows,
flames spurted and churned.

Clearly, the church was going to be a total loss.

He turned right, instead, and drove home through rain-choked streets. where
the gutters overflowed and where every depression in the pavement had been
transformed into a treacherous lake that had to be negotiated with utmost
caution to avoid drowning the engine and stalling out.

Carol slouched in her seat and huddled against the passenger-side door,
hugging herself. Although the heater was on, she was obviously cold.

Paul realized his teeth were chattering.

The trip home took ten minutes. and during that time neither of them said a
word. The only sounds were the whispery hiss of the tires on the wet
pavement and the metronomic thump of the windshield wipers. The silence was
not uncomfortable or strained, but there was a peculiar intensity about it,
an aura of tremendous, pent-up energy. Paul had the feeling that if he did
speak, the surprise would send Carol straight through the roof of the car.

They lived in a Tudor-style house, which they had painstakingly restored,
and as always. the sight of it—the stone walk, the big oak doors framed by
carriage lamps, the leaded-glass windows, the gabled roofline—pleased Paul
and gave him the warm feeling that this was where he belonged. The
automatic garage door rolled up, and he pulled the Pontiac inside, next to
Carol’s red Volkswagen Rabbit.

In the house, they maintained their silence.

Paul’s hair was wet, and the legs of his trousers clung damply to him, and
the back of his shirt was still soaked. He figured he was going to come
down with a nasty cold if he didn’t get into some dry clothes right away.
Apparently, Carol had the same thought, and they went straight upstairs to
the master bedroom.

She opened the closet doors, and he switched on a bedside lamp. Shivering,
they stripped out of their wet clothes.

When they were nearly undressed, they glanced at each other. Their eyes
locked.

Still, they didn’t speak. They didn’t need to.

He took her in his arms, and they kissed lightly at first, tenderly. Her
mouth was warm and soft and vaguely flavored with whiskey.

She clutched him, pulled him closer, her fingertips digging into the
muscles of his back. She pushed her mouth hard against his, scraped his lip
with her teeth, thrust her tongue deep, and abruptly their kisses grew hot,
demanding.

Something seemed to snap in him, and in her, too, for their desire was
suddenly marked by animal urgency. They responded to each other in a
hungry, almost frenzied fashion, hastily casting off the last of their
clothes, pawing at each other, squeezing, stroking. She nipped his shoulder
with her teeth. He gripped her buttocks and kneaded them with
uncharacteristic crudity, but she didn’t wince or try to pull away; indeed,
she pressed even more insistently against him, rubbing her breasts over his
chest and grinding her hips against his. The soft whimpers that escaped
from her were not sounds of pain; they clearly expressed her eagerness and
need. In bed, his energy was manic, and his staying power amazed him. He
was insatiable, and so was she. They thrust and thrashed and flexed and
tensed in perfect harmony, as if they were not only joined but fused, as if
they were a single organism, shaken by only one set of stimuli instead of
two. Every vestige of civilization slipped from them, and for a long while
the only noises they made were animal sounds: panting; groaning; throaty
grunts of pleasure; short, sharp cries of excitement. At last Carol uttered
the first word to pass between them since they had left O’Brian’s office:

“Yes.” And again, arching her slender, graceful body, tossing her head from
side to side on the pillow: “Yes, yes!” It was not merely an orgasm to
which she was saying yes, for she’d already had a couple of those and had
announced them with only ragged breathing and soft mewling. She was saying
yes to life, yes to the fact that she still existed and was not just a
charred and oozing lump of unanimated flesh, yes to the miraculous fact
that they had both survived the lightning and the deadly, splintered
branches of the toppling maple tree. Their unrestrained, fiercely
passionate coupling was a slap in Death’s face, a not wholly rational but
nevertheless satisfying denial of the grim specter’s very existence. Paul
repeated the word as if chanting an incantation—”Yes, yes, yes!”—as he
emptied himself into her a second time, and it seemed as though his fear of
death spurted out of him along with his seed.

Spent, they stretched out on their backs, side by side on the disheveled
bed. For a long time they listened to the rain on the roof and to the
persistent thunder, which was no longer loud enough to rattle the windows.

Carol lay with her eyes closed, her face completely relaxed. Paul studied
her, and, as he had done on countless other occasions during the past four
years, he wondered why she had ever consented to marry him. She was
beautiful. He was not. Anyone putting together a dictionary could do worse
than to use a picture of his face as the sole definition of the word plain.
He had once jokingly expressed a similar opinion of his physical
appearance, and Carol had been angry with him for talking about himself
that way.

But it was true, and it didn’t really matter to him that he was not Burt
Reynolds, just so long as Carol didn’t notice the difference. It was not
only his plainness of which she seemed unaware; she could not comprehend
her own beauty, and she insisted she was actually rather plain, or at least
no more than “a little bit pretty, no, not even pretty, just sort of cute,
but kind of funny-looking cute.” Her dark hair—even now, when it was matted
and curled by rain and sweat—was thick, glossy, lovely. Her skin was
flawless, and her cheekbones were so well sculpted that it was difficult to
believe the clumsy hand of nature could have done the job. Carol was the
kind of woman you saw on the arm of a tall, bronzed Adonis, not with the
likes of Paul Tracy. Yet here she was, and he was grateful to have her
beside him. He never ceased to be surprised that they were compatible in
every respect—mentally, emotionally, physically.

Now, as rain began to beat on the roof and windows with renewed force,
Carol sensed that he was staring at her, and she opened her eyes. They were
so brown that, from a distance of more than a few inches, they looked
black. She smiled. “I love you.”

“I love you,” he said.

“I thought you were dead.”

“Wasn’t.”

“After the lightning stopped, I called you, but you didn’t answer for the
longest time.”

“I was busy with a call to Chicago,” he said, grinning.

“Seriously.”

“Okay. It was San Francisco."

“I was scared.”

“I couldn’t answer you right away,” he said soothingly. “In case you’ve
forgotten, O’Brian fell on top of me, Knocked the wind right out. He
doesn’t look so big, but he’s as solid as a rock. I guess he builds a lot
of muscles by picking lint off his suits and shining his shoes nine hours a
day.”

“That was a pretty brave thing you did.”

“Making love m you? Think nothing of it.”

Playfully, she slapped his face. “You know what I mean. You save O’Brian’s
life.”

“Nope.”

“Yes, you did. He thought so, too.”

“For God’s sake, I didn’t step in front of him and shield him from the tree
with mine own precious bod! I just pulled him out of the way. Anyone would
have done the same.”

She shook her head. “Wrong. Not everyone thinks as fast as you do.”

“A fast thinker, huh? Yeah. That’s something I’ll admit to being. I’m a
fast thinker, but I’m sure no hero. I won’t let you pin that label on me
because then you’ll expect me to live up to it. Can you just imagine what a
hell on earth Superman’s life would be if he ever married Lois Lane? Her
expectations would be so high!”

“Anyway,” Carol said, “even if you won’t admit it, O’Brian knows you saved
his life, and that’s the important thing.”

“It is?”

“Well, I was pretty sure the adoption agency would approve us. But now
there’s not the slightest doubt about it.”

“There’s always a slim chance—”

“No,” she said, interrupting him. “O’Brian’s not going to fail you after
you saved his life. Not a chance.

He’s going to wrap the recommendations committee around his finger.”

Paul blinked, then slowly broke into a smile. “I’ll

be damned. I didn’t think of that.”

“So you’re a hero, Papa.”

“Well.. . maybe I am, Mama.”

“I think I prefer ‘Mom.”

“And I prefer ‘Dad.”

“What about ‘Pop’?”

“Pop isn’t a name. It’s a sound a champagne cork makes.”

“Are you suggesting a celebration?” she asked.

“I thought we’d put on our robes, mosey down to the kitchen, and whip up an
early dinner. If you’re hungry, that is.”

“Famished.”

“You can make a mushroom salad,” he said. “I’ll whip up my famous
fettuccine Alfredo. We’ve got a bottle or two of Mumm’s Extra Dry we’ve
been saving for a special occasion. We’ll open that, pile our plates high
with fettuccine Alfredo and mushrooms, come back up here, and have dinner
in bed.”

“And watch the TV news while we eat.”

“Then pass the evening reading thrillers and sipping champagne until we
can’t keep our eyes open.”

“Sounds wonderfully, sinfully lazy,” she said.

More evenings than not, he spent two hours proofreading and polishing his
novel. And it was an unusual night when Carol didn’t have some paperwork to
catch up on.

As they dressed in robes and bedroom slippers,

Paul said, “We’ve got to learn to take most evenings off. We’ll have to
spend plenty of time with the kid. We’ll owe it to him.”

“Or her.”

“Or them,” he said.

Her eyes shone. “You think they’ll let us adopt more than one?”

“Of course they will—once we’ve proven we can handle the first. After all,”
he said self-mockingly, “am I not the hero who saved good old Al O’Brian’s
life?”

On their way to the kitchen, halfway down the stairs, she stopped and
turned and hugged him. ‘We’re really going to have a family.”

“So it seems.”

“Oh, Paul, I don’t remember when I’ve ever been so happy. Tell me this
feeling’s going to last forever.”

He held her, and it was very fine to have her in his arms. When you got
right down to it, affection was even better than sex; being needed and
loved was better than making love.

“Tell me nothing can go wrong,” she said.

“Nothing can go wrong, and that feeling you have will last forever, and I’m
glad you’re so happy. There.

How’s that?”

She kissed his chin and the corners of his mouth, and he kissed her nose.

“Now,” he said, “can we please get some fettuccine before I start chewing
my tongue?”

“Such a romantic.”

“Even romantics get hungry.”

As they reached the bottom of the steps, they were startled by a sudden,
loud hammering sound. It was

steady but arrhythmic: Thwsk, thunk, thunk-thunkthunk, thunk-thunk...

Carol said, “What the devil’s that?”

“It’s coming from outside.. . and above us.”

They stood on the last step, looking up and back toward the second floor.

Thunk, thunk-thunk, thunk, thunk...

“Damn,” Paul said. “I’ll bet one of the shutters came loose in the wind.”
They listened for a moment, and then he sighed. “I’ll have to go out and
fix it,”

“Now? In the rain?”

“If I don’t do anything, the wind might tear it clean off the house. Worse
yet, it might just hang there and clatter all night. We won’t get any
sleep, and neither will half the neighborhood.”

She frowned. “But the lightning. . .Paul, after everything that’s happened,
I don’t think you should risk climbing around on a ladder in the middle of
a storm.”

He didn’t like the idea, either. The thought of being high on a ladder in
the middle of a thunderstorm made his scalp prickle.

She said, “I don’t want you to go out there if—”

The hammering stopped.

They waited.

Wind. The patter of rain. The branches of a tree scraping lightly against
an outside wall.

At last, Paul said, “Too late. If it was a shutter, it’s been torn off.”

“I didn’t hear it fall.”

“It wouldn’t make much noise if it dropped in the grass or the shrubbery.”

“So you don’t have to go out in the rain,” she said, crossing the foyer
toward the short hall that led to the kitchen.

He followed her. “Yeah, but now it’s a bigger repair job.

As they entered the kitchen, their footsteps echoing hollowly off the
quarry-tile floor, she said, “You don’t have to worry about it until
tomorrow or the day after. Right now, all you’ve got to worry about is the
sauce for the fettuccine. Don’t let it curdle.”

Taking a copper saucepan from a rack of gleaming utensils that hung over
the center utility island, he pretended to be insulted by her remark. “Have
I ever curdled the sauce for the fettuccine?”

“Seems to me the last time you made it, the stuff

was—”

“Never!”

“Yes,” she said teasingly. “Yes, it definitely wasn’t up to par the last
time.” She took a plastic bag of mushrooms from the big, stainless-steel
refrigerator. “Although it breaks my heart to tell you this, the last time
you made fettuccine Alfredo, the sauce was as lumpy as the mattress in a
ten-dollar-a-night motel.”

“What a vile accusation! Besides, what makes you such an expert on
ten-dollar-a-night motels? Are you leading a secret life I ought to know
about?”

Together, they prepared dinner, chatting about this and that, bantering a
lot, flying to amuse each other and to elicit a laugh now and then. For
Paul, the world dwindled until they were the only two people in it. The
universe was no larger than the warm, familiar kitchen.

Then lightning flickered, and the cozy mood was broken. It was soft
lightning, nothing as dazzling and destructive as the bolts that had struck
outside of

O’Brian’s office a few hours ago. Nevertheless, Paul stopped talking in
midsentence, his attention captured by the flash, his eyes drawn to the
long, many-paned window behind the sink. On the rear lawn, the trees
appeared to writhe and shimmer and ripple in the fluttering storm light, so
that it seemed he was looking not at the trees themselves but at their
reflections in the surface of a lake.

Suddenly, another movement caught his eye, though he wasn’t sure what he
was seeing. The afternoon, which had been gray and dark to begin with, was
now gradually giving away to an early night, and thin fog was drifting in.
Shadows lay everywhere.

The meager daylight was deceptive, muddy; it distorted rather than
illuminated those things it touched. In that penumbral landscape, something
abruptly darted out from behind the thick trunk of an oak tree, crossed a
stretch of open grass, and quickly disappeared behind a lilac bush.

Carol said, “Paul? What’s wrong?”

“Someone’s out on the lawn.”

“In this rain? Who?”

“I don’t know.”

She joined him by the window. “I don’t see anybody.”

“Someone ran from the oak to the lilac bush. He was hunched over and moving
pretty fast.”

“What’s he look like?”

“I can’t say. I’m not even sure it was a man. Might have been a woman.”

“Maybe it was just a dog.”

“Too big.”

“Could’ve been Jasper.”

Jasper was the Great Dane that belonged to the

Hanrahan family, three doors down the street. He was a large,
piercing-eyed, friendly animal with an amazing tolerance for small children
and a liking for Oreo cookies.

“They wouldn’t let Jasper out in weather like this,” Paul said. “They
pamper that mutt.”

Lightning pulsed softly again, and a violent gust of wind whipped the trees
back and forth, and rain began to fall harder than before—and in the middle
of that maelstrom, something rushed out from the lilac bush.

“There!” Paul said.

The intruder crouched low, obscured by the rain and the mist, a shadow
among shadows. It was illuminated so briefly and strangely by the lightning
that its true appearance remained tantalizingly at the edge of perception.
It loped toward the brick wall that marked the perimeter of the property,
vanished for a moment in an especially dense patch of fog, reappeared as an
amorphous black shape, then changed direction, paralleling the wall now,
heading toward the gate at the northwest corner of the rear lawn. As the
darkening sky throbbed with lightning once more, the intruder fled through
electric-blue flashes, through the open gate, into the street, and away.

“Just the dog,” Carol said.

Paul frowned. “I thought I saw... .

“What?’

“A face. A woman looking back. . . just for a second, just as she went
through the gate.”

“No,” Carol said. “It was Jasper.”

“You saw him?”

“Clearly?”

“Well, no, not clearly. But I could see enough to tell that it was a dog
the size of a small pony, and Jasper’s the only pooch around who fits that
description.”

“I guess Jasper’s a lot smarter than he used to be.”

Carol blinked. “What do you mean?”

“Well, he had to unlatch the gate to get into the yard. He never used to be
able to do that trick.”

“Oh, of course he didn’t. We must have left the gate open.”

Paul shook his head. “I’m sure it was closed when we drove up a while ago.”

“Closed, maybe—but not latched. The wind pushed it open, and Jasper
wandered in.”

Paul stared out at the rain-slashed fog, which glowed dully with the last
somber rays of the fading twilight. “I guess you’re right,” he said, though
he was not entirely convinced. “I better go latch the gate.”

“No, no,” Carol said quickly. “Not while the storm’s on.”

“Now look here, sugarface, I’m not going to jump into bed and pull the
blankets over my head every time there’s a little thunder—just because of
what happened this afternoon.”

“I don’t expect you to,” she said. “But before you start dancing in the
rain like Gene Kelly, you’ve got to let me get over what happened today.
It’s still too fresh in my mind for me to stand here watching you while you
cavort across the lawn in the lightning.”

“it’ll only take a moment and—”

“Say, are you trying to get out of making that fettuccine?” she asked,
cocking her head and looking at him suspiciously.

"Certainly not. I’ll finish making it as soon as I’ve gone and closed the
gate.”

“I know what you’re up to, mister,” she said smugly. “You’re hoping you
will be struck by lightning because you know your sauce is going to turn
out lumpy, and you simply can’t take the humiliation.”

“That’s a base canard,” he said, falling easily into their game again. “I
make the silkiest fettuccine Alfredo this side of Rome. Silkier than Sophia
Loren’s thighs.”

“All I know is, the last time you made it, the stuff was as lumpy as a bowl
of oatmeal.”

“I thought you said it was as lumpy as a mattress in a ten-dollar-a-night
motel.”

She lifted her head proudly. “I’m not just a one-simile woman, you know.”

“How well I know.”

“So are you going to make fettuccine—or will you take the coward’s way out
and get killed by lightning?”

“I’ll make you eat your words,” he said.

Grinning, she said, “That’s easier than eating your lumpy fettuccine.”

He laughed. “All right, all right. You win. I can latch the gate in the
morning.”

He returned to the stove, and she went back to the cutting board where she
was mincing parsley and scallions for the salad dressing.

He knew she was probably right about the intruder. Most likely, it had been
Jasper, chasing a cat or looking for an Oreo handout. The thing he’d
thought he had seen—the slightly twisted, moon-white face of a woman,
lightning reflected in her eyes, her mouth curled into a snarl of hatred or
rage—had surely been a trick of light and shadow. Still, the incident left
him uneasy. He could not entirely regain the warm, cozy feeling he’d had
just before he’d looked out the window.





Grace Mitowski filled the yellow plastic bowl with Meow Mix and put it in
the corner by the kitchen door.

“Kitty-kitty-kitty.”

Aristophanes didn’t respond.

The kitchen wasn’t Ari’s favorite place in the house, for it was the only
room in which he was not permitted to climb wherever he wished. He wasn’t
actually much of a climber anyway. He lacked the spirit of adventure that
many cats had, and he usually stayed on the floor. However, even though he
had no burning desire to scamper up on the kitchen counters, he didn’t want
anyone telling him he couldn’t do it.

Like most cats, he resisted discipline and despised all rules.
Nevertheless, as little as he liked the kitchen, he never failed to put in
an appearance at mealtime. In fact, he was often waiting impatiently by his
bowl when Grace came to fill it.

She raised her voice. “Kitty-kitty-kitty.”

There was no answering meow. Aristophanes did not, as expected, come
running, his tail curled up slightly, eager for his dinner.

“Ari-Ari-Ari! Soup’s on, you silly cat.”

She put away the box of cat food and washed her hands at the sink.

Thunk, thunk-thunk!

The hammering sound—one hard blow followed by two equally hard blows struck
close together—was

so sudden and loud that Grace jerked in surprise and almost dropped the
small towel on which she was drying her hands. The noise had come from the
front of the house. She waited a moment, and there was only the sound of
the wind and falling rain, and then— Thunk! Thunk!

She hung the towel on the rack and stepped into the downstairs hallway.

Thunk-thunk-thunk!

She walked hesitantly down the hail to the front door and snapped on the
porch light. The door had a peephole, and the fish-eye lens provided a wide
view. She couldn’t see anyone; the porch appeared to be deserted.

THUNK!

That blow was delivered with such force that Grace thought the door had
been torn from its hinges. There was a splintering sound as she jumped
back, and she expected to see chunks of wood exploding into the hall. But
the door still hung firmly in place, though it vibrated noisily in its
frame; the deadbolt rattled against the lock plate.

THUNK! THUNK! THUNK!

“Stop that!” she shouted. “Who are you? Who’s there?”

The pounding stopped, and she thought she heard

adolescent laughter.

She had been on the verge of either calling the police or going for the
pistol she kept in her nightstand, but when she heard the laughter, she
changed her mind. She could certainly handle a few kids without help. She
wasn’t so old and weak and fragile that she needed to call the cops to deal
with a bunch of ornery little pranksters.

Cautiously, she drew aside the curtain on the long, narrow window beside
the door. Tense, ready to step away quickly if someone made a threatening
move toward the glass, she looked out. There was no one on the porch.

She heard the laughter again. It was high-pitched, musical, girlish.

Letting the curtain fall back into place, she turned to the door, unlocked
it, and stepped onto the threshold.

The night wind was raw and wet. Rain drizzled off the scalloped eaves of
the porch.

The immediate area in front of the house offered at least a hundred hiding
places for the hoaxers. Bristling shrubbery rustled in the wind, just the
other side of the railing, and the yellowish glow from the insect-repelling
bulb in the porch ceiling illuminated little more than the center of the
porch. The walkway that led from the bottom of the porch steps to the
street was flanked by hedges that looked blue black in the darkness. Among
the many shades of night, none of the pranksters were visible.

Grace waited, listened.

Thunder rumbled in the distance, but there was no laughter, no giggling in
the darkness.

—Maybe it wasn’t kids.

—Who else?

—You see them on TV news all the time. The ironeyed ones who shoot and stab
and strangle people for the fun of it. They seem to be everywhere these
days, the misfits, the psychopaths.

—That was not adult laughter. This is kids’ work.

—Still, maybe! better get inside and lock the door.

—Stop thinking like a frightened old lady, dammit!

It was odd that any of the neighborhood children would harass her, for she
was on excellent terms with all of them. Of course, maybe these weren’t
kids from the immediate neighborhood. Just a couple of streets away,
everyone was a stranger to her.

She turned and examined the outer face of the front door. She could find no
indication that it had been struck repeatedly and violently only moments
ago. The wood was not chipped or cracked; it wasn’t even slightly marred.

She was amazed because she was certain she had heard the wood splintering.
What would kids use that would make a lot of noise while leaving absolutely
no marks on the door? Bean bags or something of that nature? No. A bean bag
wouldn’t have made such a horrendous racket; the impact of the bag against
the door might have been loud, yes, very loud indeed, if it had been swung
with sufficient force, but the sound wouldn’t have been so hard, so sharp.

Again, she slowly scanned the yard. Nothing moved out there except the
wind-stirred foliage.

For nearly a minute she watched and listened. She would have waited longer,
if only to prove to any mischievous young observers that she was not a
frightened old lady who could be easily intimidated; but the air was damp
and chilly, and she began to worry about catching a cold.

She went inside and closed the door.

She waited with her hand on the knob, expecting the kids to return shortly.
The first time they hit the door, she would jerk it open and catch them
red-handed, before they could dart off the porch and hide.

Two minutes passed. Three minutes. Five.

No one hammered on the door, which was distinctly strange. To pranksters,
the fun wasn’t in the first assault so much as in the second and third and
fourth; their intent was not to startle but to torment.

Apparently, the defiant stance she had taken in the doorway had discouraged
them. Very likely, they were on their way to another house, seeking a more
excitable victim.

She snapped the lock into place.

What kind of parents would allow their children to be out playing in an
electrical storm like this?

Shaking her head in dismay at the irresponsibility of some parents, Grace
headed back the hail, and with each step she half expected the hammering to
start again. But it didn’t.

She had planned to have a light, nutritious dinner of steamed vegetables
covered with Cheddar cheese, accompanied by a slice or two of home-baked
cornbread, but she wasn’t hungry yet. She decided to watch the ABC evening
news before preparing dinner—although she knew that, with the world in the
state it was, the news might put her off her dinner altogether.

In the study, before she had a chance to turn on the television set and
hear the latest atrocity stories, she found a mess on the seat of her big
armchair. For a moment she could do nothing but stare at the ruin in
disbelief: hundreds of feathers; shreds of cloth; colorful, unraveled
threads that had once constituted a needlework pattern, but which now lay
in a bright, meaningless tangle amidst drifts of goosedown. A couple of
years ago, Carol Tracy had given her a set of three small, exceedingly
lovely, handmade needlework throw pillows. It was one of those gifts that
had been clawed to pieces and left on the armchair.

Aristophanes.

Ari hadn’t ripped up anything important since he was a kitten. An act as
destructive as this was quite out of character for him, but he was surely
the culprit. There was not really another suspect to be seriously
considered.

“Ari! Where are you hiding, you sneaky Siamese?”

She went to the kitchen.

Aristophanes was standing at the yellow bowl, eating his Meow Mix. He
glanced up as she entered the room.

“You fur-footed menace,” she said. “What in the world has gotten into you
today?”

Aristophanes blinked, sneezed, rubbed his muzzle with one paw, and returned
to his dinner with lofty, catlike indifference to her exasperation and
puzzlement.





Later that night, in her darkened bedroom, Carol Tracy stared at the
adumbral ceiling and listened to her husband’s soft, steady breathing. He
had been asleep for only a few minutes.

The night was quiet. The rain had stopped, and the sky was no longer shaken
by thunder. Occasionally, wind brushed across the shingled roof and sighed
wearily at the windows, but the fury had gone out of it.

Carol teetered pleasantly on the edge of sleep. She was a bit lightheaded
from the champagne she had been slowly sipping throughout the evening, and
she felt as if she were floating in warm water, with gentle waves lapping
at her sides.

She thought dreamily about the child they would adopt, tried to envision
its appearance. A gallery of sweet young faces filled her imagination. If
it was an infant, rather than a three- or four-year-old, they would name it
themselves: Jason, if a boy; Julia, if a girl. Carol rocked herself on the
thin line between wakefulness and dreams by rolling those two names back
and forth in her mind: Jason, Julia, Jason, Julia, Jason...

Falling off the edge, dropping into a well of sleep, she had the ugly,
unwelcome thought she had resisted so strenuously earlier in the day:
Something’s trying to stop us from adopting a baby.

Then she was in a strange place where there was not much light, where
something hissed and murmured sullenly just out of sight, where the
purple-amber shadows had substance and crowded close with menacing intent.
In that unknown place, the nightmare unrolled with the frantic,
nerve-jarring rhythm of player-piano music.

At first she was running in utter lightlessness, and then she was suddenly
running from one room to another in a large house, weaving through a forest
of furniture, knocking over a floor lamp, banging one hip against the sharp
corner of a credenza, stumbling and nearly falling over the loose edge of
an oriental carpet. She plunged through an archway, into a long hall, and
turned and looked back into the room from which she had come, but the room
wasn’t there any longer. The house existed only in front of her; behind,
there was perfect, featureless blackness.

Blackness. . . and then a glimmer of something. A glint. A splinter of
light. A silvery, moving object. The thing swung from side to side,
vanishing into darkness, reappearing with a gleam a second later, vanishing
again, back and forth, back and forth, rather like a pendulum, never
visible long enough to be identified. Although she couldn’t quite see what
the silvery thing was, she could tell that it was moving toward her, and
she knew she must get away from it or die. She ran along the hail to the
foot of the stairs, climbed quickly to the second floor. She glanced back
and down, but the stairs were not there any more. Just an inky pit. And
then the brief flash of something swinging back and forth in that pit. . .
again. . . again

like a ticking metronome. She rushed into the bedroom, slammed the door,
grabbed a chair with the intention of bracing it under the knob—and
discovered that, while her back was turned, the door had disappeared, as
had the wail in which it had been set.

Where the wall had been, there was subterranean gloom. And a silvery
flicker. Very close now. Closer still. She screamed but made no sound, and
the mysteriously gleaming object arced over her head and— (Thunk!)

—This is more than just a dream, she thought desperately. Much more than
that. This is a memory, a

prophecy, a warning. This is a— (Thunk!)

—She was running in another house that was altogether different from the
first. This place was smaller, the furnishings less grand. She did not know
where she was, yet she knew she had been here before. The house was
familiar, just as the first place had been. She hurried through a doorway,
into a kitchen.

Two bloody, severed heads were on the kitchen table. One of them was a
man’s head, and the other was a woman’s. She recognized them, felt that she
knew them well, but was unable to think of their names.

The four dead eyes were wide but sightless; the two mouths gaped, the
swollen tongues protruding over the purple lips. As Carol stood transfixed
by that grisly sight, the dead eyes rolled in their sockets and focused on
her. The cold lips twisted into icy smiles. Carol turned, intending to
flee, but there was only a void behind her and a glint of light off the
hard surface of something silvery and then— (Thunk!)

-She was running through a mountain meadow in reddish, late-afternoon
light. The grass was knee-high, and the trees loomed ahead of her. When she
looked over her shoulder, the meadow was no longer back there. Only
blackness, as before. And the rhythmically swinging, shimmering, steadily
approaching thing to which she was unable to fix a name. Gasping, her heart
racing, she ran faster, reached the trees, glanced back once more, saw that
she had not run nearly fast enough to escape, cried out and— (Thunk!)

For a long time the nightmare shifted from one of

those three dreamscapes to the other—from the first house to the meadow to
the second house to the meadow to the first house again—until at last she
woke with an unvoiced scream caught in her throat.

She sat straight up, shuddering. She was cold and yet slick with sweat; she
slept in just a T-shirt and panties, and both garments clung to her skin,
unpleasantly sticky. The frightening sound from the nightmare continued to
echo in her mind—thunk, thunk, thunk

thunk, thunk—and she realized that her subconscious had borrowed. that
noise from reality, from the wind-loosened shutter that had startled her
and Paul earlier.

Gradually, the pounding noise faded and blended with the thumping of her
heart.

She drew back the covers and swung her bare legs out of bed. She sat on the
edge of the mattress, hugging herself.

Dawn had come. Gray light seeped in around the drapes; it was too dim to
reveal the details of the furniture, but it was just bright enough to
deepen the shadows and distort the shapes of everything, so that the room
seemed like an alien place.

The rain had stopped a couple of hours before she’d gone to bed, but the
storm had returned while she’d been sleeping. Rain pattered on the roof and
gurgled through the gutters and the downspouts. Low thunder rumbled like a
distant cannonade.

Paul was still asleep, snoring softly.

Carol knew she wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep. Like it or not,
rested or not, she was up for the day.

Without turning on a light, she went into the master bathroom. In the weak
glow of dawn, she stripped out of her damp T-shirt and panties. While
soaping herself in the shower, she thought about the nightmare, which had
been considerably more vivid than any dream she’d ever had before.

That strange, jarring sound—thunk, :hunk—had been the most frightening
thing in the dream, and the memory of it still nagged her. It wasn’t just
an ordinary hammering noise; there was an odd echo to it, a hardness and
sharpness she couldn’t quite define. She decided it was not only a case of
her subconscious mind borrowing the noise the shutter had made earlier. The
terrifying sound in the dream was caused by something considerably more
disturbing than the mere banging of an unmoored shutter. Furthermore, she
was sure she had heard precisely that sound on another occasion, too. Not
in the nightmare. In real life. In another place. . . a long time ago...

As she let the hot water stream over her, sluicing away the soap, she tried
to recall where and when she had heard exactly that same unsettling sound,
for it suddenly seemed important for her to identify it. Without
understanding why, she felt vaguely threatened as long as she could not
recall the source of the sound. But remembrance hung tantalizingly beyond
the limits of her reach, like the title of a hauntingly familiar but
unnamable piece of music.

                                     4

AT 8:45, after breakfast, Carol left for work, and Paul went upstairs to
the rear bedroom that he had converted into an office. He had created a
Spartan atmosphere in which to write without distraction. The off-white
walls were bare, unadorned by even a single painting. The room contained
only an inexpensive desk, a typist’s chair, an electric typewriter, a jar
bristling with pens and pencils, a deep letter tray that now contained
nearly two hundred manuscript pages of the novel he had started at the
beginning of his sabbatical, a telephone, a three-shelf bookcase filled
with reference works, a bottled-water dispenser in one corner, and a small
table upon which stood a Mr. Coffee machine.

This morning, as usual, he prepared a pot of coffee first thing. Just as he
pressed the switch labeled BREWER and poured water into the top of the Mr.

Coffee, the telephone rang. He sat on the edge of the desk, picked up the
receiver. “Hello.”

“Paul? Grace Mitowski.”

“Good morning, love. How are you?”

“Well, these old bones don’t like rainy weather, but otherwise I’m coping.”

Paul smiled. “Listen, I know you can still run circles around me any time.”

“Nonsense. You’re a compulsive worker with a guilt complex about leisure.
Not even a nuclear reactor has your energy.”

He laughed. “Don’t psychoanalyze me, Grace. I get enough of that from my
wife.”

“Speaking of whom. .

“Sorry, but you just missed her. You ought to be able to catch her at the
office in half an hour.”

Grace hesitated.

Hot coffee began to drizzle into the Pyrex pot, and the aroma of it swiftly
filled the room.

Sensing tension in Grace’s hesitation, Paul said, “What’s wrong?”

“Well. . .“ She cleared her throat nervously. “Paul, how is she? She’s not
ill or anything?”

“Carol? Oh, no. Of course not.”

“You’re sure? I mean, you know that girl’s like a daughter to me. if
anything was wrong, I’d want to know.”

“She’s fine. Really. In fact she had a physical exam last week. The
adoption agency required it. Both of us passed with flying colors.”

Grace was silent again.

Frowning, Paul said, “Why are you worried all of a sudden?”

“Well. . . you’ll think old Gracie is losing her marbles, but I’ve had two
disturbing dreams, one during a nap yesterday, the other last night, and
Carol was in both. I seldom dream, so when I have two nightmares and wake
up both times feeling I’ve got to warn Carol. .

“Warn her about what?”

“I don’t know. All I remember about the dreams is that Carol was in them. I
woke up thinking: it’s coming. I’ve got to warn Carol that it’s coming. I
know that sounds silly. And don’t ask me what ‘it’ might be. I can’t
remember. But I feel Carol’s in danger. Now Lord knows, I don’t believe in
dream prophecies and garbage like that. I think I don’t believe in them—yet
here I am calling you about this.”

The coffee was ready. Paul leaned over, turned off the brewer. “The strange
thing is—Carol and I were nearly hurt in a freak accident yesterday.” He
told her about the damage at O’Brian’s office.

“Good God,” she said, “I saw that lightning when I woke up from my nap, but
it never occurred to me that you and Carol.. . that the lightning might be
the very thing I was. . . the very thing my dream oh, hell! I’m afraid to
say it because I might sound like a superstitious old fool, but here goes
anyway:

Was there actually something prophetic about that dream? Did I foresee the
lightning strike a few minutes before it happened?”

“If nothing else,” Paul said uneasily, “it’s at least a remarkable
coincidence.”

They were silent for a moment, wondering, and then she said, “Listen, Paul,
I don’t recall that we’ve ever discussed this subject much before, but tell
me— do you believe in dream prophecies, clairvoyance, things of that
nature?”

“I don’t believe, and I don’t disbelieve. I’ve never really made up my
mind.”

“I’ve always been so smug about it. Always considered it a pack of lies,
delusions, or just plain nonsense. But after this—”

“You’re reconsidering.”

“Let’s just say a tiny doubt has cropped up. And now I’m more worried about
Carol than I was when I called you.”

“Why? I told you she wasn’t even scratched.”

“She escaped once,” Grace said, “but I had two dreams, and one of them came
to me hours after the lightning. So maybe the ‘it’ is something else. I
mean, if the first dream had some truth in it, then maybe the second does,
too. God, isn’t this crazy? If you start believing in just a little bit of
this nonsense, you get carried away with it real fast. But I can’t help it.
I’m still concerned about her.”

“Even if your first dream was prophetic,” Paul said, “the second one was
probably just a repeat of it, an echo, not a whole new dream.”

“You think so?”

“Sure. This never happened to you before, so why should it happen again?
Most likely, it was just a freak thing.. . like the lightning yesterday.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re probably right,” she said, sounding somewhat
relieved. “Maybe it could happen once. Maybe I can accept that. But I’m not
Edgar Cayce or Nostradamus. And I can guarantee you I’m never going to be
writing a weekly column of predictions for the National Enquirer.”

Paul laughed.

“Still,” she said, “I wish I could remember exactly what happened in both
those nightmares.”

They talked a while longer, and when Paul finally hung up, he stared at the
receiver for a moment, frowning. Although he was pretty much convinced that
the timing of Grace’s dream had been merely a strange coincidence, he was
nonetheless affected by it, more profoundly affected than seemed
reasonable.

it’s coming.

The moment Grace had voiced those two words, Paul had felt a gut-deep,
bone-deep chill.

it’s coming.

Coincidence, he told himself. Sheer coincidence and nonsense. Forget about
it.

Gradually he became aware, once again, of the rich aroma of hot coffee. He
rose from the edge of the desk and filled a mug with the steaming brew.

For a minute or two he stood at the window behind the desk, sipping coffee,
staring out at the dirty, scudding clouds and at the incessant rain.
Eventually he lowered his gaze and looked down into the rear yard,
instantly recalling the intruder he had seen last evening while he and
Carol had been making dinner:

that briefly glimpsed, pale, distorted, lightning-illuminated face; a
woman’s face; shining eyes; mouth twisted into a snarl of rage or hatred.
Or perhaps it had just been Jasper, the Great Dane, and a trick of light.

THUNK!

The sound was so loud and unexpected that Paul jumped in surprise. If his
mug hadn’t been half empty, he would have spilled coffee all over the
carpet.

THUNK! THUNK!

It couldn’t be the same shutter they’d heard last

evening, for it would have continued banging all night. Which meant there
were now two of them to repair.

Jeez, he thought, the old homestead is falling down around my ears.

THUNK!

The source of the sound was nearby; in fact it was so close that it seemed
to originate within the room. Paul pressed his forehead against the cool
window glass, peered out to the left, then to the right, trying to see if
that pair of shutters was in place. As far as he could see, they were both
properly anchored. Thwzk, thunk-thunk, thunk, thunk...

The noise grew softer but settled into a steady, arhythmical beat that was
more irritating than the louder blows had been. And now it seemed to be
coming from another part of the house.

Although he didn’t want to get up on a ladder and fix a shutter in the
rain, that was exactly what had to be done, for he couldn’t get any writing
accomplished with that constant clattering to distract him. At least there
hadn’t been any lightning this morning.

He put his mug on the desk and started out of the room. Before he reached
the door, the telephone rang.

So it’s going to be one of those days, he thought wearily.

Then he realized that the shutter had stopped banging the moment the phone
had rung. Maybe the wind had wrenched it loose of the house, in which case
repairs could wait until the weather improved.

He returned to his desk and answered the telephone. It was Alfred O’Brian,
from the adoption agency. Initially, the conversation was awkward, and Paul
was embarrassed by it. O’Brian insisted on ex

pressing his gratitude: “You saved my life; you really did!” He was equally
insistent about repeatedly and quite unnecessarily apologizing for his
failure to express that gratitude yesterday, immediately following the
incident in his office: “But I was so shaken, stunned, I just wasn’t
thinking clearly enough to thank you, which was unforgivable of me.” Each
time Paul protested at the mention of words like “heroic,” and “brave,”
O’Brian became even more vociferous than before. At last, Paul stifled his
objections and allowed the man to get it out of his system; O’Brian was
determined to cleanse his conscience in much the same way that he fussed
with the minute specks of lint on his suit jacket. Finally, however, he
seemed to feel he had atoned for his (largely imaginary) thoughtlessness,
and Paul was relieved when the conversation changed directions.

O’Brian had a second reason for calling, and he got straight to it now, as
if he, too, was suddenly embarrassed. He could not (he explained with more
apologies) locate the application form that the Tracys had brought to his
office the previous day. “Of course, when that tree crashed through the
window, it scattered a lot of papers all over the floor. A terrible mess.
Some of them were rumpled and dirty when we gathered them up, and a great
many of them were damp from the rain. In spite of that, Margie. my
secretary, was able to put them in order—except, of course, for your
application. We can’t find it anywhere. I suppose it might have blown out
through one of the broken windows. I don’t know why your papers should be
the only ones we’ve lost, and of course we must have a completed, signed
application before we can present your names to the recommendations
committee. I’m extremely sorry about this inconvenience, Mr. Tracy, I truly
am.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Paul said. “I’ll just stop in

later today and pick up another form. Carol and I can fill it out and sign
it tonight.”

“Good,” O’Brian said. “I’m glad to hear that. It has to be back in my hands
early tomorrow morning if we’re going to make the next meeting of the
committee. Margie needs three full business days to run the required
verifications on the information in your application, and that’s just about
how much time we have before next Wednesday’s committee meeting.

If we miss that session, there’s not another one for two weeks.”

“I’ll be in to pick up the form before noon,” Paul assured him. “And I’ll
have it back to you first thing Friday morning.”

They exchanged goodbyes, and Paul put down the phone.

THUNK!

When he heard that sound, he sagged, dispirited.

He was going to have to fix a shutter after all. And then drive into the
city to pick up the new application. And then drive home. And by the time
he did all of that, half the day would be shot, and he wouldn’t have
written a single word.

THUNK! TRUNK!

“Dammit,” he said.

Thunk, thunk-thunk, thunk-thunk...

It definitely was going to be one of those days.

He went downstairs to the hail closet where he kept his raincoat and
galoshes.



                                    ***



The windshield wipers flogged back and forth, back and forth, with a short,
shrill squeak that made Carol grit her teeth. She hunched forward a bit,
over the steering wheel, squinting through the streaming rain.

The streets glistened; the macadam was slick, greasy looking. Dirty water
raced along the gutters and formed filthy pools around clogged drainage
grids.

At ten minutes past nine, the morning rush hour was just over. Although the
streets were still moderately busy, traffic was moving smoothly and
swiftly. In fact everyone was driving too fast to suit Carol, and she hung
back a little, watchful and cautious.

Two blocks from her office, her caution proved justified, but it still
wasn’t enough to avert disaster altogether. Without bothering to look for
oncoming traffic, a young blond woman stepped out from between two vans,
directly into the path of the VW Rabbit.

“Christ!” Carol said, ramming her foot down on the brake pedal so hard that
she lifted herself up off the seat.

The blonde glanced up and froze, wide-eyed.

Although the VW was moving at only twenty miles an hour, there was no hope
of stopping it in time. The brakes shrieked. The tires bit—but also
skidded—on the wet pavement.

God, no! Carol thought with a sick, sinking feeling.

The car hit the blonde and lifted her off the ground, tossed her backwards
onto the hood, and then the rear end of the VW began to slide around to the
left, into the path of an oncoming Cadillac, and the Caddy swerved, brakes
squealing, and the other driver hit his horn as if he thought a sufficient
volume of sound

might magically push Carol safely out of his way, and for an instant she
was certain they would collide, but the Caddy slid past without scraping,
missing her by only an inch or two—all of this in two or three or four
seconds—and at the same time the blonde rolled off the hood, toward the
right side, the curb side, and the VW came to a full stop, sitting aslant
the street, rocking on its springs as if it were a child’s hobby horse.



                                    ***





None of the shutters was missing. Not one. None of them was loose and
flapping in the wind, as Paul had thought.

Wearing galoshes and a raincoat with a hood, he walked all the way around
the house, studying each set of shutters on the first and second floors,
but he couldn’t see anything amiss. The place showed no sign of storm
damage.

Perplexed, he circled the house again, each step resulting in a squishing
noise as the rain-saturated lawn gave like a sodden sponge beneath him.
This time around, he looked for broken tree limbs that might be swinging
against the walls when the wind gusted. The trees were all intact.

Shivering in the unseasonably chilly autumn air, he just stood on the lawn
for a minute or two, cocking his head to the right and then to the left,
listening for the pounding that had filled the house moments ago. He
couldn’t hear it now. The only sounds were the soughing wind, the rustling
trees, and the rain driving into the grass with a soft, steady hiss.

At last, his face numbed by the cold wind and by

the heat-leaching rain, he decided to halt his search until the pounding
started again and gave him something to get a fix on. Meanwhile, he could
drive downtown and pick up the application form at the adoption agency. He
put one hand to his face, felt his beard stubble, remembered Alfred
O’Brian’s compulsive neatness, and figured he ought to shave before he
went.

He reentered the house by way of the screened-in rear porch, leaving his
dripping coat on a vinyl-upholstered glider and shedding his galoshes
before going into the kitchen. Inside, he closed the door behind him and
basked for a moment in the warm air.

THUNK! THUNK! THUNK!

The house shuddered as if it had received three extremely hard, rapid blows
from the enormous fist of a giant. Above the kitchen’s central utility
island, where a utensil rack was suspended from the ceiling, copper pots
and pans swung on their hooks and clattered against one another.

THUNK!

The wall clock rattled on its hook; if it had been any less firmly attached
than it was, it would have flung itself off the wall, onto the floor.

Paul moved toward the middle of the room, trying to ascertain the direction
from which the pounding was coming.

THUNK! THUNK!

The oven door fell open.

The two dozen small jars nestled in the spice rack began to clink against
one another.

What the hell is happening here? he wondered uneasily.

THUNK!

He turned slowly, listening, seeking.

The pots and pans clattered again, and a large ladle slipped from its hook
and fell with a clang to the butcher-block work surface that lay under it.

Paul looked up at the ceiling, tracking the sound.

THUNK!

He expected to see the plaster crack, but it didn’t.

Nevertheless, the source of the sound was definitely overhead.

Thwzk, thunk-thunk, thunk...

The pounding suddenly grew quieter than it had been, but it didn’t fade
away altogether. At least the house stopped quivering, and the cooking
utensils stopped banging together.

Paul headed for the stairs, determined to track down the cause of the
disturbance.





The blonde was in the gutter, flat on her back, one arm out at her side
with the palm up and the hand slack, the other arm draped across her belly.
Her golden hair was muddy. A three-inch-deep stream of water surged

around her, carrying leaves and grit and scraps of paper litter toward the
nearest storm drain, and her long hair fanned out around her head and
rippled silkily in those filthy currents.

Carol knelt beside the woman and was shocked to

see that the victim wasn’t actually a woman at all. She was a girl, no
older than fourteen or fifteen. She was exceptionally pretty, with delicate
features, and at the moment she was frighteningly pale.

She was also inadequately dressed for inclement weather. She wore white
tennis shoes, jeans, and a blue and white checkered blouse. She had neither
a raincoat nor an umbrella.

With trembling hands, Carol lifted the girl’s right arm and felt the wrist
for a pulse. She found the beat at once; it was strong and steady.

“Thank God,” Carol said shakily. “Thank God, thank God.”

She began to examine the girl for bleeding. There did not seem to be any
serious injuries, no major blood loss, just a few shallow cuts and
abrasions. Unless, of course, the bleeding was internal.

The driver of the Cadillac, a tall man with a goatee, stepped around the
end of the VW Rabbit and looked down at the injured girl. “Is she dead?”

“No,” Carol said. She gently thumbed back one of the girl’s eyelids, then
the other. “Just unconscious.

Probably a mild concussion. Is anyone calling an ambulance?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Then you call one. Quickly.”

He hurried away, splashing through a puddle that was deeper than the tops
of his shoes.

Carol pressed down on the girl’s chin; the jaw was slack, and the mouth
fell open easily. There was no visible obstruction, no blood, nothing that
might choke her, and her tongue was in a safe position.

A gray-haired woman in a transparent plastic raincoat, carrying a red and
orange umbrella, ‘appeared out of the rain. “It wasn’t your fault,” she
told Carol.

“I saw it happen. I saw it all. The child darted out in front of you
without looking. There wasn’t a thing you could have done to prevent it.”

“I saw it, too,” said a portly man who didn’t quite fit under his black
umbrella. “I saw the kid walking

down the street like she was in a trance or something.

No coat, no umbrella. Eyes kind of blank. She stepped off the curb, between
those two vans, and just stood there for a few seconds, like she was just
waiting for someone to come along so she could step out and get herself
killed. And by God, that’s what happened.”

“She’s not dead,” Carol said, unable to keep a tremor out of her voice.
“There’s a first-aid kit on the back seat of my car. Will one of you get it
for me?”

“Sure,” the portly man said, turning toward the vw.

The first-aid kit contained, among other things, a packet of tongue
depressors, and Carol wanted to have those handy. Although the unconscious
girl didn’t appear to be headed for imminent convulsions, Carol intended to
be prepared for the worst.

A crowd had begun to gather.

A siren sounded a couple of blocks away, approaching fast. It was probably
the police; the ambulance couldn’t have made it so fast.

“Such a pretty child,” the gray-haired woman said, staring down at the
stricken girl.

Other onlookers murmured in agreement.

Carol stood up and stripped out of her raincoat.

There was no point in covering the girl, for she was already as wet as she
could get. Instead, Carol folded the coat, knelt down again, and carefully
slipped the makeshift pillow under the victim, elevating her head just a
bit above the gushing water.

The girl didn’t open her eyes or stir in any way whatsoever. A tangled
strand of golden hair had fallen across her face, and Carol carefully
pushed it aside for her. The girl’s skin was hot to the touch, fevered, in
spite of the cold rain that bathed it.

Suddenly, while her fingers were still touching the

girl’s cheek, Carol felt dizzy and was unable to get her breath. For a
moment she thought she was going to pass out and collapse on top of the
unconscious teenager. A black wave rose behind her eyes, and then in that
darkness there was a brief flash of silver, a glint of light off a moving
object, the mysterious thing from her nightmare.

She gritted her teeth, shook her head, and refused to be swept away in that
dark wave. She pulled her hand away from the girl’s cheek, put it to her
own face; the dizzy spell passed as abruptly as it had come. Until the
ambulance arrived, she was responsible for the injured girl, and she was
determined not to fail in that responsibility.

Huffing slightly, the portly man hurried back with the first-aid kit. Carol
took one of the tongue depressors out of its crisp cellophane wrapper—just
in case.

A police car rounded the corner and stopped behind the Volkswagen. Its
revolving emergency beacons splashed red light across the wet pavement and
appeared to transform the puddles of rainwater into pools of blood.

As the squad car’s siren died with a growl, another, more distant siren
became audible. To Carol, that warbling, high-pitched wail was the sweetest
sound in the world.

The horror is almost over, she thought.

But then she looked at the girl’s chalk-white face, and her relief was
clouded with doubt. Perhaps the horror wasn’t over after all; perhaps it
had only just begun.

Upstairs, Paul walked slowly from room to room, listening to the hammering
sound.

Thunk. . . thunk...

The source was still overhead. In the attic. Or on the roof.

The attic stairs were behind a paneled door at the end of the second-floor
hallway. They were narrow, unpainted, and they creaked as Paul climbed
them.

Although the attic had full flooring, it was not otherwise a finished room.
The construction of the walls was open for inspection; the pink fiber glass
insulation, which somewhat resembled raw meat, and the regularly spaced
supporting studs, like ribs of bone, were visible. Two naked, hundred-watt
bulbs furnished light, and shadows coiled everywhere, especially toward the
eaves. For all of its length and for half of its width, the attic was high
enough to allow Paul to walk through it without stooping.

The patter of rain on the roof was more than just a patter up here. It was
a steady hissing, a soft, all-encompassing roar.

Nevertheless, the other sound was audible above the drumming of the rain:
Thunk.. . thunk-thunk...

Paul moved slowly past stacks of cardboard cartons and other items that had
been consigned to storage: a pair of large touring trunks; an old
six-pronged coat rack; a tarnished brass floor lamp; two busted-out,
cane-bottomed chairs that he intended to restore some day. A thin film of
whitish dust draped shroudlike over all the contents of the room.

Thunk. . . thunk...

He walked the length of the attic, then slowly returned to the center of it
and stopped. The source of the sound seemed to be directly in front of his
face, only inches away. But there was nothing here that could possibly be
the cause of the disturbance; nothing moved.

Thunk.. . thunk. . thunk. . . thunk...

Although the hammering was softer now than it had been a few minutes ago,
it was still solid and forceful; it reverberated through the frame of the
house. The pounding had acquired a monotonously simple rhythm, too; each
blow was separated from the ones before and after it by equal measures of
time, resulting in a pattern not unlike the beating of a heart.

Paul stood in the attic, in the dust, smelling the musty odor common to all
unused places, trying to get a fix on the sound, trying to understand how
it could be coming out of thin air, and gradually his attitude toward the
disturbance changed. He had been thinking of it as nothing more than the
audible evidence of storm damage to the house, as nothing more than tedious
and perhaps expensive repairs that might have to be made, an interruption
in his writing schedule, an inconvenience, nothing more. But as he turned
his head from side to side and squinted into every shadow, as he listened
to the relentless thudding, he suddenly perceived that there was something
ominous about the sound.

Thunk. . . thunk.. . thunk...

For reasons he could not define, the noise now seemed threatening,
malevolent.

He felt colder in this sheltered place than he had felt outside in the wind
and rain.



                                    ***



Carol wanted to ride to the hospital in the ambulance with the injured
girl, but she knew she would only be in the way. Besides, the first police
officer on the scene, a curly-headed young man named Tom Weatherby, needed
to get a statement from her.

They sat in the front seat of the patrol car, which smelled like the
peppermint lozenges on which Weatherby was sucking. The windows were made
opaque by shimmering streams of rain. The police radio sputtered and
crackled.

Weatherby frowned. “You’re soaked to the skin. I’ve got a blanket in the
trunk. I’ll get it for you.”

“No, no,” she said. “I’ll be fine.” Her green knit suit had become
saturated. Her rain-drenched hair was pasted to her head and hung slackly
to her shoulders.

At the moment, however, she didn’t care about her appearance or about the
goosebumps that prickled her skin. “Let’s just get this over with.”

“Well. . . if you’re sure you’re okay.”

“I’m sure.”

As he turned up the thermostat on the car heater, Weatherby said, “By any
chance, do you know the kid who stepped in front of your car?”

“Know her? No. Of course not.”

“She didn’t have any ID on her. Did you notice if she was carrying a purse
when she walked into the street?”

“I can’t say for sure.”

“Try to remember.”

“I don’t think she was.”

“Probably not,” he said. “After all, if she goes walking in a storm like
this without a raincoat or an umbrella, why would she bother to take a
purse? We’ll search the street anyway. Maybe she dropped it somewhere.”

“What happens if you can’t find out who she is?

How will you get in touch with her parents? I mean, she shouldn’t be alone
at a time like this.”

“No problem,” Weatherby said. “She’ll tell us her name when she regains
consciousness.’

“If she does.”

“Hey, she will. There’s no need to be concerned about that. She didn’t seem
seriously injured.”

Carol worried about it nonetheless.

For the next ten minutes, Weatherby asked questions, and she answered them.
When he finished filling out the accident report, she quickly read over it,
then signed at the bottom.

“You’re in the clear,” Weatherby said. “You were driving under the speed
limit, and three witnesses say the girl stepped out of a blind spot right
in front of you, without bothering to look for traffic. It wasn’t your
fault.”

“I should have been more careful.”

“I don’t see what else you could have done.”

“Something. Surely I could have done something,”

she said miserably.

He shook his head. “No. Listen, Dr. Tracy, I’ve seen this sort of thing
happen before. There’s an accident, and somebody’s hurt, and nobody’s
really to blame—yet one of the people involved has a misplaced sense of
responsibility and insists on feeling guilty. And in this case, if there is
anybody to blame, it’s the kid herself, not you. According to the
witnesses, she was behaving strangely just before you turned the corner,
almost as if she intended to get herself run down.”

“But why would such a pretty girl want to throw herself in front of a car?”

Weatherby shrugged. “You told me you were a psychiatrist. You specialize in
children and teenagers, right?”

“So you must know all the answers better than I do. Why would she want to
kill herself? Could be trouble at home—a father who drinks too much and
makes heavy passes at his own little girl, a mother who doesn’t want to
hear about it. Or maybe the kid was just jilted by her boyfriend and thinks
the world is coming to an end. Or just discovered she was pregnant and
decided she couldn’t face her folks with the news. There must be hundreds
of reasons, and I’m sure you’ve heard most of them in your line of work.”

What he said was true, but it didn’t make Carol feel better.

If only I’d been driving slower, she thought. If only I’d been quicker to
react, maybe that poor girl wouldn’t be in the hospital now.

“She might have been on drugs, too,” Weatherby said. “Too damned many kids
fool around with dope these days. I swear, some of they'll swallow any pill
they’re given. If it isn’t something that can be swallowed, they’ll sniff
it or stick it in a vein. This kid you hit might have been so high she
didn’t even know where she was when she stepped in front of your car.

Now, if that’s the case, are you going to tell me it’s still somehow your
fault?”

Carol leaned back in the seat, closed her eyes, and let her breath out with
a shudder. “God, I don’t know what to tell you. All I know is. . .I feel
wrung out.”

“That’s perfectly natural, after what you’ve just been through. But it
isn’t natural to feel guilty about this. It wasn’t your fault, so don’t
dwell on it. Put it behind you and get on with your life.”

She opened her eyes, looked at him, and smiled. “You know, Officer
Weatherby, I have a hunch you’d make a pretty good psychotherapist.”

He grinned. “Or a terrific bartender.”

Carol laughed.

“Feeling better?” he asked.

“A little bit.”

“Promise me you won’t lose any sleep over this.”

“I’ll try not to,” she said. “But I’m still concerned about the girl. Do
you know which hospital they’ve taken her to?”

“I can find out,” he said.

“Would you do that for me? I’d like to go talk to the doctor who’s handling
her case. If he tells me she’s going to be all right, I’ll find it a whole
lot easier to take your advice about getting on with my life.”

Weatherby picked up the microphone and asked the police dispatcher to find
out where the injured girl had been taken.





The television antenna!

Standing in the attic, staring up at the roof above his head, Paul laughed
out loud when he realized what was causing the pounding noise. The sound
wasn’t coming out of the empty air in front of his face, which was what he
had thought for one unsettling moment. It was coming from the roof, where
the television antenna was anchored. They had subscribed to cable TV a year
ago, but they hadn’t removed the old antenna. It was a large, directional,
remote-control model affixed to a heavy brace-plate; the plate was bolted
through the shingles and attached directly to a roof beam. Apparently, a
nut or some other fastener

had loosened slightly, and the wind was tugging at the antenna, rocking the
brace-plate up and down on one of its bolts, slamming it repeatedly against
the roof. The solution to the big mystery was amusingly mundane.

Or was it?

Thunk. . . thunk. . . thunk...

The sound was softer now than ever before, barely

audible above the roar of the rain on the roof, and it was easy to believe
that the antenna could be the cause of it. Gradually, however, as Paul
considered this answer to the puzzle, he began to doubt if it was the
correct answer. He thought about how loud and violent the pounding had been
a few minutes ago when he had been in the kitchen: the entire house
quivering, the oven door falling open, bottles rattling in the spice rack.
Could a loose antenna really generate so much noise and vibration?

Thunk. . . thunk...

As he stared up at the ceiling, he tried to make himself believe
unequivocally in the antenna theory. If it was striking a roof beam in
precisely the right way, at a very special angle, so that the impact was
transmitted through the entire frame of the house, perhaps a loose antenna
could cause the pots and pans to clatter against one another in the kitchen
and could make it seem as if the ceilings were about to crack. After all,
if you set up exactly the right vibrations in a steel suspension bridge,
you could bring it to ruin in less than a minute, regardless of the number
of bolts and welds and cables holding it together. And although Paul didn’t
believe there was even a remote danger of a loose antenna causing that kind
of apocalyptic destruction to a wood-frame house, he knew

that moderate force, applied with calculation and pinpoint accuracy, could
have an effect quite out of proportion to the amount of energy expended.
Besides, the TV antenna had to be the root of the disturbance, for it was
the only explanation he had left.

The hammering noise became even softer and then faded altogether. He waited
for a minute or two, but the only sound was the rain on the shingles
overhead.

The wind must have changed direction. In time it would change back again,
and the antenna would begin to rock on its brace-plate, and the pounding
would start once more.

As soon as the storm was over, he would have to get the extension ladder
out of the garage, go up onto the roof, and dismantle the antenna. He
should have taken care of that chore shortly after they had subscribed to
the cable television service. Now, because he had delayed, he was going to
lose precious writing time—and at one of the most difficult and crucial
points in his manuscript. That prospect frustrated him and made him
nervous.

He decided to shave, drive downtown, and pick up the new set of application
papers at the adoption agency. The storm might pass by the time he got home
again. If it did, if he could be on the roof by eleven-thirty, he ought to
be able to tear down the antenna, then have a bite of lunch, and work on
his book all afternoon, barring further interruptions. But he suspected
there would be further interruptions. He had already resigned himself to
the fact that it was one of those days.

As he left the attic and turned out the lights, the house quivered under
another blow.

THUNK’

Just one this time.

Then all was quiet again.



                                    ***





The visitors’ lounge at the hospital looked like an explosion in a clown’s
wardrobe. The walls were canary yellow; the chairs were bright red; the
carpet was orange; the magazine racks and end tables were made of heavy
purple plastic; and the two large abstract paintings were done primarily in
shades of blue and green.

The lounge—obviously the work of a designer who had read too much about the
various psychological mood theories of color—was supposed to be positive,
life-affirming. It was supposed to lift the spirits of visitors and take
their minds off sick friends and dying relatives. In Carol, however, the
determinedly cheery decor elicited the opposite reaction from that which
the designer had intended, It was a frenetic room; it abraded the nerves as
effectively as coarse sandpaper would abrade a stick of butter.

She sat on one of the red chairs, waiting for the doctor who had treated
the injured girl. When he came, his stark white lab coat contrasted so
boldly with the flashy decor that he appeared to radiate a saintlike aura.

Carol rose to meet him, and he asked if she was Mrs. Tracy, and he said his
name was Sam Hannaport. He was tall, very husky, square-faced, florid, in
his early fifties. He looked as if he would be loud and gruff, perhaps even
obnoxious, but in fact he was soft-spoken and seemed genuinely concerned
about how the accident had affected Carol both physically and emotionally.
It took her a couple of minutes to assure him that she was all right on
both counts, and then they sat down on facing red chairs.

Hannaport raised his bushy eyebrows and said,

“You look as if you could use a hot bath and a big glassful of warm
brandy.”

“I was soaked to the skin,” she said, “but I’m pretty well dried out now.
What about the girl?”

“Cuts, contusions, abrasions,” he said.

“Internal bleeding?”

“Nothing showed up on the tests.”

“Fractures?”

“Not a broken bone in her body. She came through it amazingly well. You
couldn’t have been driving very fast when you hit her.”

“I wasn’t. But considering the way she slipped up onto the hood and then
rolled off into the gutter, I thought maybe. . .“ Carol shuddered,
unwilling to put words to what she had thought.

“Well, the kid’s in good condition now. She regained consciousness in the
ambulance, and she was alert by the time I saw her.”

“Thank God.”

“There’s no indication that she’s even mildly con-cussed. I don’t foresee
any lasting effects.”

Relieved, Carol sagged back in the red chair. “I’d like to see her, talk to
her.”

“She’s resting now,” Dr. Hannaport said. “I don’t want her disturbed at the
moment. But if you’d like to come back this evening, during visiting hours,
she’ll be able to see you then.”

“I’ll do that. I’ll definitely do that.” She blinked.

“Good heavens, I haven’t even asked you what her name is.”

His bushy eyebrows rose again. “Well, we’ve got a small problem about
that.”

“Problem?” Carol tensed up again. “What do you mean? Can’t she remember her
name?”

“She hasn’t remembered it yet, but—”

“Oh, God.”

“—she will.”

“You said no concussion—”

“I swear to you, it isn’t serious,” Hannaport said. He took her left hand
in his big hard hands and held it as if it might crack and crumble at any
moment.

“Please don’t excite yourself about this. The girl is going to be fine. Her
inability to remember her name isn’t a symptom of severe concussion or any
serious brain injury; not in her case, anyway. She isn’t confused or
disoriented. Her field of vision is normal, and she has excellent depth
perception. We tested her thought processes with some math
problems—addition, subtraction, multiplication—and she got them all
correct. She can spell any word you throw at her; she’s a damn good
speller, that one. So she’s not severely concussed. She’s simply suffering
from mild amnesia. It’s selective amnesia, you understand, just a loss of
personal memories, not a loss of skills and education and whole blocks of
social concepts. She hasn’t forgotten how to read and write, thank God;
she’s only forgotten who she is, where she came from, and how she got to
this place. Which sounds more serious than it really is. Of course, she’s
disconcerted and apprehensive. But selective amnesia is the easiest kind to
recover from.”

“I know,” Carol said. “But somehow that doesn’t make me feel a whole hell
of a lot better.”

Hannaport squeezed her hand firmly and gently.

“This kind of amnesia is only very, very rarely permanent or even
long-lasting. She’ll most likely remember who she is before dinnertime.”

“If she doesn’t?”

"Then the police will find out who she is, and the minute she hears her
name, the mists will clear.”

“She wasn’t carrying any ID.”

“I know,” he said. “I’ve talked to the police.”

“So what happens if they can’t find out who she is?”

“They will.” He patted her hand one last time, then let go.

“I don’t see how you can be so sure.”

“Her parents will file a missing-persons report. They’ll have a photograph
of her. When the police see the photograph, they’ll make a connection.
It’ll be as simple as that.”

She frowned. “What if her parents don’t report her missing?”

“Why wouldn’t they?”

“Well, what if she’s a runaway from out of state? Even if her folks did
file a missing-persons report back in her hometown, the police here
wouldn’t necessarily be aware of it.”

“The last time I looked, runaway kids favored New York City, California,
Florida—just about any place besides Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.”

“There’s always an exception to any rule.”

Hannaport laughed softly and shook his head. “If pessimism were a
competitive sport, you’d win the world series.”

She blinked in surprise, then smiled. “I’m sorry. I guess I am being
excessively gloomy.”

Glancing at his watch, getting up from his chair, he said, “Yes, I think
you are. Especially considering how well the girl came through it all. It
could have been a lot worse.”

Carol got to her feet, too. In a rush, the words falling over one another,
she said, “I guess maybe the reason it bothers me so much is because I deal
with disturbed children every day, and it’s my job to help them get well
again, and that’s all I ever wanted to do since I was in high school—work
with sick kids, be a healer—but now I’m responsible for all the pain this
poor girl is going through.”

“You mustn’t feel that way. You didn’t intend to harm her.”

Carol nodded. “I know I’m not being entirely rational about the situation,
but I can’t help feeling the way I feel.”

“I have some patients to see,” Hannaport said, glancing at his watch again.
“But let me leave you with one thought that might help you handle this.”

“I’d like to hear it.”

“The girl suffered only minor physical injuries. I won’t say they were
negligible injuries, but they were damned close to it. So you’ve got
nothing to feel guilty about on that score. As for her amnesia.. . well,
maybe the accident had nothing to do with it.”

“Nothing to do with it? But I assumed that when she hit her head on the car
or on the pavement—”

“I’m sure you know a blow on the head isn’t the only cause of amnesia,” Dr.
Hannaport said. “It’s not even the most common factor in such cases.
Stress, emotional shock—they can result in loss of memory. In fact we don’t
yet understand the human mind well enough to say for sure exactly what
causes most cases of amnesia. As far as this girl is concerned, everything
points to the conclusion that she was in her current state even before she
stepped in front of your car.”

He emphasized each argument in favor of his theory by raising fingers on
his right hand. “One: She wasn’t carrying any ID, Two: She was wandering
around in the pouring rain without a coat or an umbrella, as if she was in
a daze. Three: From what I understand, the witnesses say she was acting
very strange before you ever came on the scene.” He waggled his three
raised fingers. "Three very good reasons why you shouldn’t be so eager to
blame yourself for the kid’s condition.”

“Maybe you’re right, but I still—”

“I am right,” he said. “There’s no maybe about it. Give yourself a break,
Dr. Tracy.”

A woman with a sharp, nasal voice paged Dr. Hannaport on the hospital’s
tinny public address system.

“Thank you for your time,” Carol said. “You’ve been more than kind.”

“Come back this evening and talk to the girl if you want. I’m sure you’ll
find she doesn’t blame you one bit.”

He turned and hurried across the gaudy lounge, in answer to the page’s
call; the tails of his white lab coat fluttered behind him.

Carol went to the pay phones and called her office. She explained the
situation to her secretary, Thelma, and arranged for the rescheduling of
the patients she had intended to see today. Then she dialed home, and Paul
answered on the third ring.

“You just caught me as I was going out the door,” he said. “I’ve got to
drive down to O’Brian’s office and pick up a new set of application papers.
Ours

were lost in the mess yesterday. So far, this has been a day I should have
slept through.”

“Ditto on this end,” she said.

“What’s wrong?”

She told him about the accident and briefly summarized her conversation
with Dr. Hannaport.

“It could have been worse,” Paul said. “At least we can be thankful no one
was killed or crippled.”

“That’s what everyone keeps telling me: ‘It could have been worse, Carol.’
But it seems plenty bad enough to me.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah. I told you. I wasn’t even scratched.”

“I don’t mean physically. I mean, are you together emotionally? You sound
shaky.”

“I am. Just a little.”

“I’ll come to the hospital,” he said.

“No, no. That’s not necessary.”

“Are you sure you should drive?”

“I drove here after the accident without trouble, and I’m feeling better
now than I did then. I’ll be okay. What I’m going to do is, I’m going over
to Grace’s house. She’s only a mile from here; it’s easier than going home.
I have to sponge off my clothes, dry them out, and press them. I need a
shower, too. I’ll probably have an early dinner with Grace, if that’s all
right by her, and then I’ll come back here during visiting hours this
evening.”

“When will you be home?”

“Probably not until eight or eight-thirty.”

“I’ll miss you.”

“Miss you, too.”

“Give my best to Grace,” he said. “And tell her I think she is the next
Nostradamus.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Grace called a while ago. Said she had two nightmares recently, and you
figured in both. She was afraid something was going to happen to you.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. She was embarrassed about it. Afraid I’d think she was getting
senile or something.”

“You told her about the lightning yesterday?”

“Yeah. But she felt something else would happen, something bad.”

“And it did.”

“Creepy, huh?”

“Decidedly,” Carol said. She remembered her own nightmare: the black void;
the flashing, silvery object drawing nearer, nearer.

“I’m sure Grace’ll tell you all about it,” Paul said. “And I’ll see you
this evening.”

“I love you,” Carol said.

“Love you, too.”

She put down the phone and went outside to the parking lot.

Gray-black thunderheads churned across the sky, but only a thin rain was
falling now. The wind was still cold and sharp; it sang in the power lines
overhead, sounding like a swarm of angry wasps.

                                    ***





The semiprivate room had two beds, but the second one was not currently in
use. At the moment, no nurse was present either. The girl was alone.

She lay under a crisp white sheet and a creamcolored blanket, staring at
the acoustic-tile ceiling. She had a headache, and she could feel each
dully throbbing, burning cut and abrasion on her battered body, but she
knew she was not seriously hurt.

Fear, not pain, was her worst enemy. She was frightened by her inability to
remember who she was. On the other hand, she was plagued by the
inexplicable yet unshakable feeling that it would be foolish and
exceedingly dangerous to remember her past. Without knowing why, she
suspected that full remembrance would be the death of her—an odd notion
that she found more frightening than anything else.

She knew her amnesia wasn’t the result of the accident. She had a misty
recollection of walking along the street in the rain a minute or two before
she had blundered in front of the Volkswagen. Even then, she had been
disoriented, afraid, unable to remember her name, utterly unfamiliar with
the strange city in which she found herself and unable to recall how she
had gotten there. The thread of her memory definitely had begun unraveling
prior to the accident.

She wondered if it was possible that her amnesia was like a shield,
protecting her from something horrible in the past. Did forgetfulness
somehow equal safety?

Why? Safety from what?

What could- I be running from? she asked herself.

She sensed that recovery of her identity was possible. In fact her memories
seemed almost within her grasp. She felt as though the past lay at the
bottom of a dark hole, close enough to touch; all she had to do was summon
sufficient strength and courage to poke her hand into that lightless place
and grope for the truth, without fear of what might bite her.

However, when she tried hard to remember, when she probed into that hole,
her fear grew and grew until it was no longer just ordinary fear; it became
incapacitating terror. Her stomach knotted, and her throat swelled tight,
and she broke out in a greasy sweat, and she became so dizzy that she
nearly fainted.

On the edge of unconsciousness, she saw and heard something disturbing,
alarming—a fuzzy fragment of a dream, a vision—which she couldn’t quite
identify but which frightened her nonetheless. The vision was composed of a
single sound and a single, mysterious image. The image was hypnotic but
simple:

a quick flash of light, a silvery glimmer from a not-quite-visible object
that was swinging back and forth in deep shadows; a gleaming pendulum,
perhaps. The sound was hard-edged and threatening but not identifiable, a
loud hammering noise, yet more than that.

Thunk! Thunk! Thunk!

She jerked, quivered, as if something had struck her.

Thunk!

She wanted to scream, couldn’t.

She realized that her hands were fisted and that they were full of twisted,
sweat-soaked sheets.

Thunk!

She stopped trying to remember who she was.

Maybe it’s better that I don’t know, she thought.

Her heartbeat gradually slowed to normal, and she was able to draw her
breath without wheezing. Her stomach unknotted.

The hammering sound faded.

After a while she looked at the window. A flock of large, black birds
reeled across the turbulent sky.

What’s going to happen to me? she wondered.

Even when the nurse came in to see how she was doing, and even when the
doctor joined the nurse a moment later, the girl felt utterly,
dishearteningly alone.

                                     5

GRACE’S kitchen smelled of coffee and warm spice cake. Rain washed down the
window, obscuring the view of the rose garden that lay behind the house.

“I’ve never believed in clairvoyance or premonitions.”

“Neither have I,” Grace said. “But now I wonder. After all, I have two
nightmares about you getting hurt, and the next thing I hear is that you’ve
had two close calls, just as if you were acting out a script or something.”

They sat at the small table by the kitchen window. Carol was wearing one of
Grace’s robes and a pair of Grace’s slippers while her own clothes finished
drying out.

“Only one close call,” she told Grace. “The lightning. That was a
gut-wrencher, all right. But I wasn’t really in any danger this morning.
That poor girl was the one who nearly got killed.”

Grace shook her head. “No. It was a close call for you, too. Didn’t you
tell me you slid toward the oncoming traffic when you braked to avoid the
girl? And didn’t you say the Cadillac missed you by an inch or less? Well,
what if it hadn’t missed? If that Caddy had rammed your little VW, you
certainly wouldn’t have walked away without a scratch.”

Frowning, Carol said, “I hadn’t looked at it that way.”

“You’ve been so busy worrying about the girl that you haven’t had a chance
to think about yourself.”

Carol ate a bite of spice cake and washed it down with coffee. “You’re not
the only one having nightmares.” She summarized her own dream: the severed
heads, the houses that dissolved behind her as she passed through them, the
flickering, silvery object.

Grace clasped her hands around her coffee cup and hunched over the table.
There was worry in her blue eyes. “That’s one nasty dream. What do you make
of it?”

“Oh, I don’t think it’s prophetic.”

“Why couldn’t it be? Mine appear to have been.”

“Yes, but—it doesn’t follow that both of us are turning into soothsayers.
Besides, my dream didn’t make a whole lot of sense. It was just too wild to
be taken seriously. I mean, severed heads that suddenly come to life—that
sort of thing isn’t really going to happen.”

“It could be prophetic without being literally prophetic. I mean, it might
be a symbolic warning.”

“Of what?”

“I don’t see any easy interpretation of it. But I

really think you ought to be extra careful for a while. God, I know I’m
starting to sound like a phony gypsy fortune-teller, like Maria Ouspenskya
in all those old monster movies from the thirties, but I still don’t think
you should dismiss it as just an ordinary dream. Especially not after
what’s already happened.”



                                    ***





Later, after lunch, as Grace squirted some liquid soap into the sinkful of
dirty dishes, she said, “How’s the situation with the adoption agency? Does
it look like they’ll give you and Paul a child soon?”

Carol hesitated.

Grace glanced at her. “Something wrong?”

Taking the dish towel from the rack and unfolding it, Carol said, “No. Not
really. O’Brian says we’ll be approved. It’s a sure thing, he says.”

“But you’re still worried about it.”

“A little,” Carol admitted.

“Why?”

“I’m not sure. It’s just that.. I’ve had this feeling...”

“What feeling?”

“That it won’t work out.”

“Why shouldn’t it?”

“I can’t shake the idea that somebody’s trying to stop us from adopting.”

“Who?”

Carol shrugged.

“O’Brian?” Grace asked.

“No, no. He’s on our side.”

“Someone on the recommendations committee?”

“I don’t know. I don’t actually have any evidence of ill will toward Paul
and me. I can’t point my finger at anyone.”

Grace washed some silverware, put it in the drainage rack, and said,
“You’ve wanted to adopt for so long that you can’t believe it’s finally
happening, so you’re looking for boogeymen where there aren’t any.”

“Maybe.”

“You’re just spooked because of the lightning yesterday and the accident
this morning.”

“Maybe.”

“That’s understandable. It spooks me, too. But the adoption will go through
as smooth as can be.”

“I hope so,” Carol said. But she thought about the lost set of application
forms, and she wondered.



                                    ***



By the time Paul got back from the adoption agency, the rain had stopped,
though the wind was still cold and damp.

He got the ladder out of the garage and climbed onto the least slanted
portion of the many-angled roof. The wet shingles squeaked under his feet
as be moved cautiously across the slope toward the television antenna,
which was anchored near a brick chimney.

His legs were rubbery. He suffered from a mild case of acrophobia, a fear
that had never become incapacitating because he occasionally forced himself
to challenge and overcome it, as he was doing now.

When he reached the chimney, he put a hand against it for support and
looked out across the roofs of the neighboring homes. The storm-dark
September sky had settled lower, lower, until it appeared to be

only six or eight feet above the tallest houses. He felt as if he could
raise his arm and rap his knuckles on the bellies of the clouds, eliciting
a hard, ironlike clank.

He crouched with his back to the chimney and inspected the TV antenna. The
brace-plate was held down by four bolts that went through the shingles,
either directly into a roof beam or into a stud linking two beams. None of
the bolts was missing. None of them was loose. The plate was firmly
attached to the house, and the antenna was anchored securely to the plate.
The antenna could not possibly have been responsible for the hammering
sound that had shaken the house.

                                    ***





After washing the dishes, Grace and Carol went into the study. The room
reeked of cat urine and feces. Aristophanes had made his toilet on the seat
of the big easy chair.

Stunned, Grace said, “I don’t believe it. Ari always uses the litter box
like he’s supposed to do. He’s never done anything like this before.”

“He’s always been a fussy cat, hasn’t he? Fastidious.”

“Exactly. But now look what he’s done. That chair’ll have to be
reupholstered. I guess I’d better find the silly beast, put his nose to
this mess, and give him a good scolding. I don’t want this to become a
habit, for God’s sake.”

They looked in every room, but they couldn’t find Aristophanes. Apparently,
he had slipped out of the house by way of the pet door in the kitchen.

Returning to the study with Grace, Carol said, “Earlier, you mentioned
something about Ari tearing up a few things.”

Grace winced. “Yes. I didn’t want to have to tell you—but he shredded two
of those lovely little needlepoint pillows you made for me. I was sick
about it. After all the work you put into those, and then he Just—,’

“Don’t worry about it,” Carol said. “I’ll make you a couple of new pillows.
I enjoy doing it. Needlepoint relaxes me. I only asked because I thought
maybe, if Ari’s been doing a lot of things that’re out of character, it
might be a sign that he isn’t well.”

Grace frowned. “He looks healthy. His coat’s glossy, and he’s certainly as
spry as ever.”

“Animals are like people in some ways. And when a person suddenly starts
behaving strangely, that can

be an indication of a physical malady, anything from a brain tumor to an
inbalanced diet.”

“I suppose I ought to take him to the vet.”

Carol said, “While there’s a break in the rain, why don’t we go outside and
see if we can find him?”

“Wasted effort. When a cat doesn’t want to be found, it won’t be found.
Besides, he’ll come back by dinnertime: I’ll keep him in all night, and
take him to the vet’s in the morning.” Grace looked at the mess on the easy
chair, grimaced, and shook her head. “This isn’t like my Ari,” she said
worriedly. “It’s just not like him at all.”

                                    ***





The number on the open door was 316.

Hesitantly, Carol stepped into the white and blue hospital room and stopped
just past the threshold. The place smelled vaguely of Lysol.

The girl was sitting up in the bed nearest the window, her face averted
from the door, staring out at the twilight-shrouded hospital grounds. She
turned her head when she realized she was no longer alone, and when she
looked at Carol there was no recognition in her blue-gray eyes.

“May I come in?” Carol asked.

“Sure.”

Carol went to the foot of the bed. “How are you feeling?”

“Okay.”

“With all the scrapes and cuts and bruises, it must be hard to get
comfortable.”

“Gee, I’m not banged up all that bad. I’m just a little sore. It’s nothing
that’s going to kill me. Everyone's so nice; you’re all making too much of
a fuss about me.”

“How’s your head feel?”

“I had a headache when I first came to, but it’s been gone for hours.”

“Double vision?”

“Nothing like that,” the girl said. A strand of golden hair slipped from
behind her ear and fell across her cheek; she tucked it back in place. “Are
you a doctor?”

“Yes,” Carol said. “My name’s Carol Tracy.”

“You can call me Jane. That’s the name on my chart. Jane Doe. I guess it’s
as good as any. It might even turn out to be a lot nicer than my real name.
Maybe I’m actually Zelda or Myrtle or something like that.” She had a
lovely smile. “You’re the umpteenth doctor who’s been in to see me. How
many do I have, anyway?”

“I’m not one of yours,” Carol said. “I’m here because ... well. . . it was
my car you stepped in front of.”

“Oh. Hey, gee, I’m awfully sorry. 1 hope there wasn’t a lot of damage.”

Surprised by the girl’s statement and by the genuine look of concern on her
face, Carol laughed. “For heaven’s sake, honey, don’t worry about my car.
it’s your health that’s important, not the VW. And I’m the one who should
be apologizing. I feel terrible about this.”

“You shouldn’t,” the girl said. “I still have all my teeth, and none of my
bones are broken, and Dr. Hannaport says the boys will still be interested
in me.” She grinned self-consciously.

“He’s certainly right about the boys,” Carol said.

“You’re a very pretty girl.”

The grin became a shy smile, and the girl looked down at the covers on her
lap, blushing.

Carol said, “I was hoping I’d find you here with your folks.”

The girl tried to maintain a cheerful facade, but when she looked up, fear
and doubt showed through the mask. “I guess they haven’t filed a
missing-persons report yet. But it’s only a matter of time.”

“Have you remembered anything at all about your past?”

“Not yet. But I will.” She straightened the collar of her hospital gown and
smoothed the covers over her lap as she talked. “Dr. Hannaport says
everything’ll probably come back to me if I just don’t push too hard at
remembering. He says I’m lucky I don’t have global amnesia. That’s when you
even forget how to read and write. I’m not that bad off! Heck, no. Boy,
wouldn’t that be something? What if I had to learn to read, write, add,
subtract, multiply, divide, and spell all over again? What a bore!” She
finished smoothing her covers and looked up again. “Anyway, I’ll most
likely have my memory back in a day or two.,,

“I’m sure you will,” Carol said, though she wasn’t sure at all. “Is there
anything you need?”

“No. They supply everything. Even tiny tubes of toothpaste.”

“What about books, magazines?”

The girl sighed. “I was bored out of my skull this afternoon. You think
they might keep a pile of old magazines for the patients?”

“Probably. What do you like to read?”

“Everything. I love to read; I remember that much. But I can’t remember the
titles of any books or magazines. This amnesia sure is funny, isn’t it?”

“Hilarious,” Carol said. “Sit tight. I’ll be right back.”

At the nurses’ station at the end of the hail, she explained who she was
and arranged to rent a small television set for Jane Doe’s room. An orderly
promised to hook it up right away.

The chief RN on duty—a stocky, gray-haired woman who wore her glasses on a
chain around her neck—said, “She’s such a sweet girl. She’s charmed
everyone. Hasn’t complained or uttered a cross word to a soul. There aren’t
many teenagers with her composure.”

Carol took the elevator down to the ground-floor lobby and went to the
newsstand. She bought a Hershey bar, an Almond Joy, and six magazines that
looked as if they would appeal to a young girl. By the time she got back to
room 316, the orderly had just finished installing the TV.

“You shouldn’t have done all this,” the girl said.

“When my parents show up, I’ll make sure they pay you back.”

“I won’t accept a dime,” Carol said.

“But—”

“No buts.”

“I don’t need to be pampered. I’m fine. Really. If you—”

“I’m not pampering you, honey. Just think of the magazines and the
television as forms of therapy. In fact, they might be precisely the tools
you need to break through this amnesia.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if you watch enough television, you might see a show you remember
seeing before. That might spark a sort of chain reaction of memories.”

“You think so?”

“It’s better than just sitting and staring at the walls or out the window.
Nothing in this place is going to spark a memory because none of it is
related to your past. But there’s a chance the TV will do the trick.”

The girl picked up the remote-control device that the orderly had given
her, and she switched on the television set. A popular situation comedy was
on.

“Familiar?” Carol asked.

The girl shook her head: no. Tears glistened in the corners of her eyes.

“Hey, don’t get upset,” Carol said. “It would be amazing if you remembered
the first thing you saw. It’s bound to take time.”

She nodded and bit her lip, trying not to cry.

Carol moved close, took the girl’s hand; it was cool.

“Will you come back tomorrow?” Jane asked shakily.

“Of course I will.”

“I mean, if it’s not out of your way.”

“It’s no trouble at all.” “Sometimes.. .“

“What?”

The girl shuddered. “Sometimes I’m so afraid.”

“Don’t be afraid, honey. Please don’t. It’ll all work out. You’ll see.
You’re going to be back on the track in no time,” Carol said, wishing she
could think of something more reassuring than those few hollow platitudes.
But she knew her inadequate response was occasioned by her own nagging
doubts.

The girl pulled a tissue out of the Kleenex dispenser that was built into
the side of the tall metal nightstand. She blew her nose, used another
tissue to daub at her eyes. She had slumped down in the bed; now she sat up
straight, lifted her chin, squared her slender shoulders, and readjusted
her covers. When she looked up at Carol, she was smiling again. “Sorry,”
she said. “I don’t know what got into me. Being a crybaby isn’t going to
solve anything. Anyway, you’re right. My folks will probably show up
tomorrow, and everything’ll work out for the best. Look, Dr. Tracy, if you
come to see me tomorrow—”

“I will .“

“If you do, promise not to bring me any more candy or magazines or
anything. Okay? There’s no reason for you to spend your money like that.
You’ve already done too much for me. Besides, the best thing you could do
is just come. I mean, it’s nice to know someone outside the hospital cares
about me. It’s nice to know I haven’t been lost or forgotten in here. Oh,
sure, the nurses and the doctors are swell. They really are, and I’m
grateful. They care about me, but it’s

sort of their job to care. You know? So that’s not exactly the same thing,
is it?” She laughed nervously. “Am I making sense?”

“I know exactly what you’re feeling,” Carol assured her. She was achingly
aware of the girl’s profound loneliness, for she had been lonely and
frightened when she was the same age, before Grace Mitowski had taken
custody of her and had given her large measures of guidance and love.

She stayed with Jane until visiting hours were over. Before she left, she
planted a motherly kiss on the girl’s forehead, and it seemed like a
perfectly natural thing to do. A bond had formed between them in a
surprisingly short time.

Outside, in the hospital parking lot, the sodium-vapor lights leached the
true colors from the cars and made them all look yellowish.

The night was chilly. No rain had fallen during the afternoon or evening,
but the air was heavy, damp. Thunder rumbled in the distance, and a new
storm appeared to be on the way.

She sat for a moment behind the wheel of the VW, staring up at the
third-floor window of the girl’s room.

‘What a terrific kid,” she said aloud.

She felt that someone quite special had come unexpectedly into her life.



                                    ***







Near midnight, a river-cold wind came out of the west and made the trees
dance. The starless, moonless, utterly lightless night pressed close around
the house and seemed to Grace to be a living thing; it snuffled at the
doors and windows.

Rain began to fall.

She went to bed as the hail clock was striking twelve, and twenty minutes
later she began to drift over the edge of sleep as if she were a leaf borne
by cool currents toward a great waterfall. On the brink, with only darkness
churning under her, she heard movement in the bedroom and instantly came
awake again.

A series of stealthy sounds. A soft scrape. A rattle that died even as it
began. A silken rustle.

She sat up, heart quickening, and opened the nightstand drawer. With one
hand she felt blindly for the .22 pistol she kept in the drawer, and with
the other hand she groped silently for the lamp switch. She touched the gun
and lamp at the same moment.

With light, the source of the noise was clearly visible. Ari was crouched
atop the highboy, staring down at her, as if he had been about to spring
onto the bed.

“What are you doing in here? You know the rules.”

He blinked but didn’t move. His muscles were bunched and taut; his fur was
standing up on the back of his neck.

For sanitary reasons, she would allow him to climb neither onto the kitchen
counters nor into her bed; generally, she kept the master bedroom door
firmly shut, day and night, rather than tempt him. Already, housecleaning
required extra hours each week because of him, for she was determined that
the air should not contain even the slightest trace of cat odor; likewise,
she was not about to subject her visitors to furniture covered with loose
animal hairs. She loved Ari, and she thought him fine company, and for the
most part she gave him the run of the house in spite of the extra work he
caused her. But she was not prepared to live with cat hairs in her food or
in her sheets.

She got out of bed, stepped into her slippers.

Ari watched.

“Come down from there this instant,” Grace said, looking up at him with her
sternest expression.

His shining eyes were gas-flame blue.

Grace went to the bedroom door, opened it, stepped out of the way, and
said, “Shoo.”

The cat’s muscles relaxed. He slumped in a furry puddle atop the highboy,
as if his bones had melted. He yawned and began to lick one of his black
paws.

“Hey!” she said.

Aristophanes raised his head languidly, peered down at her.

“Out,” she said gruffly. “Now.”

When he still didn’t move, she started toward the highboy, and he was at
last encouraged to obey. He jumped down and darted past her so fast she
didn’t have time to swat him. He went into the hall, and she closed the
door.

In bed again, with the lights out, she remembered the way he had looked as
he perched atop the highboy:

facing her, aimed at her, shoulders drawn up, head held low, haunches
tense, his fur electrified, his eyes bright and slightly demented. He had
intended to jump onto the bed and scare the bejesus out of her; there was
no doubt about that. But such schemes were a kitten’s games; Ari had not
been playful in that fashion for the past three or four years, ever since
he had

attained a rather indolent maturity. What on earth had gotten into him?

That settles it, she told herself. We’ll pay a visit to the veterinarian
first thing in the morning. Good Lord, I might have a schizophrenic cat on
my hands!

Seeking rest, she let the night embrace her again. She allowed herself to
be carried along by the riverlike sound of the soughing wind. Within a few
minutes she was once more being borne toward the waterfall of sleep. She
trembled on the edge of it, and a quiver of uneasiness passed through her,
a chill that nearly broke the spell, but then she dropped down into
darkness.

She dreamed that she was trekking across a vast underwater landscape of
brilliantly colored coral and seaweed and strange, undulating plants. A cat
lurked among the plants, a big one, much bigger than a tiger, but with the
coloring of a Siamese. It was stalking her. She could see its saucer eyes
peering at her through the murky sea, from among wavering stalks of marine
vegetation. She could hear and feel its low purr transmitted by the water.
She paused repeatedly during her suboceanic trek so that she could fill a
series of yellow bowls with generous portions of Meow Mix in the hope of
pacifying the cat, but she knew in her heart that the beast would not be
content until it had sunk its claws into her. She moved steadily past
towers of coral, past grottoes, across wide aquatic plains of shifting
sand, waiting for the cat to snarl and lunge from concealment, waiting for
it to rip open her face and gouge out her eyes.

Once, she woke and thought she heard Aristophanes scratching insistently on
the other side of the

closed bedroom door. But she was groggy and couldn’t trust her senses; she
wasn’t able to wrench herself fully awake, and in a few seconds she sank
down into the dream once more.





At one o’clock in the morning, the third floor of the hospital was so quiet
that Harriet Gilbey. the head nurse on the graveyard shift, felt as though
she was deep underground, in some kind of military complex, tucked into the
stony roots of a mountain, far from the real world and the background
noises of real life. The only sounds were the whisper of the heating system
and the occasional squeak of the nurses’ rubber-soled shoes on the highly
polished tile floors.

Harriet—a small, pretty, neatly uniformed black woman—was at the nurses’
station, around the corner from the bank of elevators, entering data on
patients’ charts, when the tranquility of the third floor was abruptly
shattered by a piercing scream. She moved out from behind the reception
desk and hurried along the hall, following the shrill cry. It came from
room 316. When Harriet pushed open the door, stepped into the room, and
snapped on the overhead lights, the screaming stopped as suddenly as it had
begun.

The girl they called Jane Doe was in bed, flat on her back, one arm raised
and angled across her face as if she were warding off a blow, the other
hand hooked on to one of the safety rails. She had kicked the sheets and
the blanket into a tangled wad at the foot of the bed, and her hospital
gown was nicked up over her hips. She tossed her head violently from side
to side, gasping, pleading with an imaginary assailant:

“No. . . no. . . no. Don’t! Please don’t kill me! No!” With gentle hands, a
gentle voice, and patient insistence, Harriet tried to quiet the girl. At
first Jane resisted all ministrations. She had been given a sedative
earlier. Now she was having trouble waking up. Gradually, however, she
shook off the nightmare and calmed down.

Another nurse, Kay Hamilton, appeared at Harriet’s side. “What happened?
Must’ve woke up half the floor.”

“Just a bad dream,” Harriet said.

Jane blinked sleepily at them. “She was trying to kill me.”

“Hush now,” Harriet said. “It was only a dream.

No one here will hurt you.”

“A dream?” Jane asked, her voice slurred. “Oh. Yeah. Just a dream. Whew!
What a dream.”

The girl’s thin white gown and the tangled sheets were damp with
perspiration. Harriet and Kay replaced them with fresh linens.

As soon as the bed had been changed, Jane succumbed to the lingering tug of
the sedative. She turned onto her side and murmured happily in her sleep;
she even smiled.

“Looks like she switched to a better channel,” Harriet said.

“Poor kid. After what she’s been through, the least she deserves is a good
night’s sleep.”

They watched her for a minute, then left the room, turning off the lights
and closing the door.

Alone, deep in sleep, transported into a different dream from the one that
had elicited her screams, Jane sighed, smiled, giggled quietly.

“The ax,” she whispered in her sleep. “The ax. Oh, the ax. Yes. Yes.”

Her hands curled slightly, as if she were clutching a solid but invisible
object.

“The ax,” she whispered, and the second of those two words reverberated
softly through the dark room.





Thunk!

Carol ran through the huge living room, across the oriental carpet, banging
her hip against the edge of the credenza.

Thank! Thunk!

She dashed through the archway, into a long hall, headed toward the stairs
that led to the second floor.

When she glanced behind her, she saw that the house had vanished in her
wake and had been replaced by a pitch-black void in which something silvery
flickered back and forth, back and forth.

Thunk!

Understanding came with a flash; she knew what the glimmering object was.
An ax. The blade of an ax. Glinting as it swung from side to side.

Thunk. . . thunk-thunk...

Whimpering, she climbed the stairs toward the second floor.

Thunk.. thank...

At times the blade seemed to be biting into wood; the sound of it was dry,
splintery. But at other times the sound had a subtly different quality, as
if the blade were slicing brutally into a substance much softer than wood,
into something wet and tender.

Into flesh?

Thank!

Carol groaned in her sleep, turned restlessly, flinging off the sheets.

Then she was running across the high meadow.

The trees ahead. The void behind. And the ax. The ax.

                                     6

FRIDAY morning, there was another break in the rain, but the day was
dressed in fog. The light coming through the hospital window was wintry,
bleak.

Jane had only a hazy recollection of the nurses changing her sheets and her
sweat-soaked bed gown during the night. She vaguely recalled having a
frightening dream, too, but she couldn’t bring to mind a single detail of
it.

She was still unable to remember her name or anything else about herself.
She could cast her mind back as far as the accident yesterday morning,
perhaps even to a point a minute or so on the other side of the accident,
but beyond that there was only a blank wall where her past should have
been.

During breakfast, she read an article in one of the magazines that Carol
Tracy had bought for her. Although there were no visiting hours until this
afternoon, Jane was already looking forward to seeing the woman again. Dr.
Hannaport and the nurses were nice, every one of them, but none of them
affected her as positively as Carol Tracy did. For reasons she could not
understand, she felt more secure, more at ease, less frightened by her
amnesia when she was with Dr. Tracy than when she was with the others.
Maybe that was what people meant when they said a doctor had a good bedside
manner.





Shortly after nine o’clock, when Paul was on the freeway, headed downtown
to deliver the new set of application papers to Alfred O’Brian’s office,
the Pontiac's engine cut out. It didn’t sputter or cough; the pistons
simply stopped firing while the car was hurtling along at nearly fifty
miles an hour. As the Pontiac's speed plummeted, its power steering began
to freeze up. Traffic whizzed past on both sides at sixty and sixty-five,
faster than the speed limit, too fast for the misty weather. Paul
maneuvered the car across two lanes, toward the right-hand shoulder of the
road. Second by second, he expected to hear a short squeal of brakes and
feel the sickening impact of another car against his, but amazingly, he was
able to avoid a collision. Wrestling with the stiffening steering wheel, he
brought the Pontiac to a full stop on the berm.

He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes until he had regained his
composure. When at last he leaned forward and twisted the key in the
ignition, the starter didn’t make the slightest response; the battery had
no juice to offer. He tried a few more times, then gave up.

A freeway exit was just ahead, and there was a service station less than a
block from the off-ramp. Paul walked to it in ten minutes.

The station was busy, and the owner couldn’t spare his young assistant—a
big, redheaded, open-faced kid named Corky—until the stream of customers
subsided to a trickle shortly before ten o’clock. Then Paul and Corky rode
back to the crippled Pontiac in a tow truck.

They tried jump-starting the car, but the battery wouldn’t hold a charge.
The Pontiac had to be towed back to the station.

Corky intended to replace the battery and have the car running in half an
hour. But it wasn’t the battery after all, and the estimated time for
completion of the repairs was extended again and again. Finally, Corky
found a problem with the electrical system and fixed it.

Paul was stranded for three hours, always sure he would be on his way in
just another twenty or thirty minutes. But it was one-thirty when he
finally parked the revitalized Pontiac in front of the adoption agency’s
offices.

Alfred O’Brian came out to the reception lounge to greet Paul. He was
wearing a well-tailored brown suit, a neatly pressed, cream-colored shirt,
a neatly arranged, beige display handkerchief in the breast pocket of his
suit jacket, and a pair of neatly shined, brown wing-tip shoes. He accepted
the application, but he wasn’t optimistic about the possibility of making
all the required verifications prior to the recommendations committee’s
meeting next Wednesday morning.

“We’ll try to do a rush job on your papers,” he told Paul. “I owe you that
much at least! But in getting these verifications, we have to deal with
people outside this office, and some of them won’t get back to us right
away or won’t like being hurried. It always takes a minimum of three full
business days to run a complete verification, sometimes four or five days,
sometimes even longer, so I very much doubt that we’ll be ready for this
session of the recommendations committee, even though I want to be. We’ll
probably have to submit your application at the second September meeting,
at the end of the month. I feel terrible about that, Mr. Tracy. I’m more
sorry than I can say.

I truly am. If we hadn’t lost those papers in the turmoil yesterday—”

“Don’t worry about it,” Paul said. “The lightning wasn’t your doing, and
neither was the problem with my car. Carol and I have waited a long, long
time to adopt a child. Another two weeks isn’t much in the scheme of
things.”

“When your papers are presented to the committee, you’ll be approved
quickly,” O’Brian said. “I’ve never been more sure about a couple than I am
about you. That’s what I’m going to tell them.”

“I appreciate that,” Paul said.

“If we can’t make Wednesday’s meeting—and I assure you we’ll try our
best—then it’s only a minor, temporary setback. Nothing to be concerned
about. Just a bit of bad luck.”



                                    ***

Dr. Brad Templeton was a fine veterinarian. However, to Grace, he always
looked out of place when he was ministering to a cat or dog. He was a big
man who would have looked more at home treating horses and farm animals in
a country practice, where his massive shoulders and muscular arms would be
of more use. He stood six-five, weighed about two hundred and twenty
pounds, and had a ruddy, rugged, but pleasing face. When be plucked
Aristophanes out of the padded travel basket, the cat looked like a toy in
his enormous hands.

“He looks fit,” Brad said, putting Ari on the stainless-steel table that
stood in the middle of the sparkling clean surgery.

“He’s never been one to tear up the furniture, not since he was just a
kitten,” Grace said. “He’s never been a climber, either. But now, every
time I turn around, he’s perched on top of something, peering down at me.”

Brad examined Ari, feeling for swollen glands and enlarged joints. The cat
cooperated docilely, even when Brad used a rectal thermometer on him.
"Temperature’s normal.”

“Something’s wrong,” Grace insisted.

Aristophanes purred, tolled onto his back, asking for his belly to be
rubbed.

Brad rubbed him and was rewarded with an even louder purr. “Is he off his
food?”

“No,” Grace said. “He stills eats well.”

“Vomiting?”

“No.”

“Diarrhea?”

“No. He hasn’t shown any symptoms like those.

It’s just that he’s.. . different. He’s not at all like he was. Every
symptom I can point to is a symptom of a personality change, not an
indication of physical deterioration. Like destroying the pillows. Leaving
the mess on the armchair. The sudden interest he’s taken in climbing. And
he’s gotten very sneaky lately, always creeping around, hiding from me,
watching me when be thinks I don’t see him.”

“All cats are a bit sneaky,” Brad said, frowning. “That’s the nature of the
beast.”

“Ari didn’t used to sneak,” Grace said. “Not like he’s been doing the last
couple of days. And he’s not as friendly as he used to be. The last two
days, he hasn’t wanted to be petted or cuddled.”

Still frowning, Brad lifted his gaze from the cat and met Grace’s eyes.
“But dear, look at him.”

Ari was still on his back, getting his belly rubbed, and clearly relishing
all the attention being directed at him. His tail swished back and forth
across the steel table. He raised one paw and batted playfully at the
doctor’s large, leathery hand.

Sighing, Grace said, “I know what you’re thinking. I’m an old woman. Old
women get funny ideas.”

“No, no, no. I wasn’t thinking any such thing.”

“Old women become obsessively attached to their pets because sometimes
their pets are the only company they have, their only real friends.”

“I am perfectly aware that doesn’t apply to you, Grace. Not with all the
friends you’ve got in this town. I merely—”

She smiled and patted his cheek. “Don’t protest too strongly, Brad. I know
what’s going through your mind. Some old women are so afraid of losing
their pets that they think they see signs of illness where there are none.
Your reaction is understandable. It doesn’t offend me. It does frustrate me
because I know something is wrong with Ari.”

Brad looked down at the cat again, continued stroking its belly, and said,
“Have you changed his diet in any way?”

“No. He gets the same brand of cat food, at the same times of day, in the
same quantities he’s always gotten it.”

“Has the company changed the product recently?”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, does the package say ‘new, improved,’ or

‘richer flavor,’ or anything like that?”

She thought about it for a moment, then shook her head. “I don't think so.”

“Sometimes, when they change a formula, they add a new preservative or a
new artificial flavoring or coloring agent, and some pets have an allergic
reaction to it.”

“But wouldn’t that be a physical reaction? Like I said, this seems to be
strictly a personality change.”

Brad nodded. “I’m sure you know food additives can cause behavioral
problems in some children. A lot of hyperactive kids calm down when they’re
put on a diet free of the major additives. Animals can be affected by these
things, too. From what you’ve told me, it sounds like Aristophanes is
intermittently hyperactive and may be responding to a subtle change in the
formulation of his cat food. Switch him to another brand, wait a week for
his system to purge itself of whatever additives have offended it, and
he’ll probably be the old Ari again.”

“If he isn’t?”

“Then bring him in, leave him with me for a couple of days, and I’ll give
him a really thorough going over. But I strongly recommend that we try
changing his diet first, before we go to all that trouble and expense.”

You are humoring me, Grace thought. Just coddling an old lady.

“Very well,” she said. “I’ll try changing his food. But if he’s still not
himself a week from now, I’ll want you to give him a complete battery of
tests.”

“Of course.”

“I’ll want an answer.”

On the stainless-steel table, Aristophanes purred, happily twitched his
long tail, and looked infuriatingly normal.

                                    ***

Later, at home, just inside the front door, when Grace slipped the latch on
the padded travel basket and opened the lid, Aristophanes exploded out of
confinement with a hiss and a snarl, his fun bristling, his ears laid back
against his head, eyes wild. He clawed her hand and squealed as she thrust
him away from her. He sprinted down the hall, disappeared into the kitchen,
where the pet door gave him access to the rear yard.

Shocked, Grace stared at her hand. Ari’s claws had made three short furrows
in the meaty edge of her palm. Blood welled up and began to trickle down
her wrist.





Carol’s last appointment on Friday was at one o’clock: a fifty-minute
session with Kathy Lombino, a fifteen-year-old girl who was gradually
recovering from anorexia nervosa. Five months ago, when she had first been
brought to Carol, Kathy had weighed only seventy-five pounds, at least
thirty pounds below her ideal weight. She had been teetering on the edge of
starvation, repelled by the sight and even the thought of food, stubbornly
refusing to eat more than an occasional soda cracker or slice of bread,
often gagging on even those bland morsels. When she was put in front of a
mirror and forced to confront the pathetic sight of her emaciated body, she
still berated herself for being fat and could not be convinced that she
was, in fact, frighteningly thin. Her prospects for survival had seemed
slight. Now she weighed ninety pounds, up fifteen, still well below a
healthy weight for a girl of her height and bone structure, but at least
she was no longer in danger of dying. A loss of self-respect and
self-confidence was nearly always the seed from which anorexia nervosa
grew, and Kathy was beginning to like herself again, a sure sign that she
was on her way back from the brink. She hadn’t yet regained a normal
appetite; she still experienced mild revulsion at the sight and taste of
food; but her attitude was far better than it had been, for now she
recognized the need for food, even though she didn’t have any desire for
it. The girl had a long way to go before she would be fully recovered, but
the worst was past for her; in time she would learn to enjoy food again,
and she would gain weight more rapidly than she had done thus far,
stabilizing around a hundred and five or a hundred and ten pounds. Kathy’s
progress had been immensely satisfying to Carol, and today’s session only
added to that satisfaction. As had become customary, she and the girl
hugged each other at the end of the session, and Kathy held on tighter and
longer than usual. When the girl left the office, she was smiling.

A few minutes later, at two o’clock, Carol went to the hospital. In the
gift shop off the lobby, she bought a deck of playing cards and a miniature
checkerboard with nickle-sized checkers that all fit neatly into a vinyl
carrying case.

Upstairs, in 316, the television was on, and Jane was reading a magazine.
She looked up when Carol entered, and she said, “You really came.”

“Said I would, didn’t I?”

“What’ve you got?”

“Cards, checkers. I thought maybe they’d help you pass the time.”

“You promised you wouldn’t buy me anything else.”

“Hey, did I say I was giving these to you? No way. You think I’m a soft
touch or something? I’m lending them, kid. I expect them back. And whenever
you return them, they’d better be in as good condition as they are now, or
I’ll take you all the way to the Supreme Court to get compensated for the
damage.”

Jane grinned. “Boy, you’re tough.”

“I eat nails for breakfast.”

“Don’t they get stuck in your teeth?”

“I pluck ‘em out with pliers.”

“Ever eat barbed wire?”

“Never for breakfast. I have it for lunch now and then.”

They both laughed, and Carol said, “So do you play checkers?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

The girl shrugged.

“Nothing’s come back yet?” Carol asked.

“Not a thing.”

“Don’t worry. It will.”

“My folks haven’t shown up, either.”

“Well, you’ve only been missing for one day. Give them time to find you.
It’s too soon to start worrying about that.”

They played three games of checkers. Jane remembered all of the rules, but
she couldn’t recall where or with whom she had played before.

The afternoon passed quickly, and Carol enjoyed every minute of it. Jane
was charming, bright, and blessed with a good sense of humor. Whether the
game was checkers, hearts, or five-hundred rummy, she played to win, but
she never pouted when she lost. She was very good company.

The girl’s charm and pleasing personality made it highly unlikely that she
would go unclaimed for long. Some teenagers are so self-centered, spaced
out on drugs, bullheaded, and destructive that when one of them decides to
run away from home, his decision often elicits only a sigh of relief from
his mother and father. But when a good kid like Jane Doe disappears, a lot
of people start sounding alarms.

There must be a family that loves her, Carol

thought. They’re probably crazy with worry right now. Sooner or later
they’ll turn up, crying and laughing with relief that their girl has been
found alive. So why not sooner? Where are they?





The doorbell rang at precisely three-thirty. Paul answered it and found a
pallid, gray-eyed man of about

fifty. He wore gray slacks, a pale gray shirt, and a dark gray sweater.

“Mr. Tracy?”

“Yes. Are you from Safe Homes?”

“That’s right,” the gray man said. “Name’s Bill Alsgood. I am Safe Homes.
Started the company two years ago.”

They shook hands, and Alsgood entered the foyer, looking with interest at
the interior of the house. “Lovely place. You’re lucky to get same-day
service. Usually, I’m scheduled three days in advance. But when you called
this morning and said it was an emergency, I’d just had a cancellation.”

“You’re a building inspector?” Paul asked, closing the door.

“Structural engineer, to be precise. What our company does is inspect the
house before it’s sold, usually on behalf of the buyer, at his expense. We
tell him if he’s buying into a heartache of any sort—a leaky roof, a cellar
that floods, a crumbling foundation, faulty wiring, bad plumbing, that kind
of thing. We’re fully bonded, so even if we overlook something, our client
is protected. Are you the buyer or the seller?”

“Neither,” Paul said. “My wife and I own the place, but we aren’t ready to
sell it. We’re having a problem with the house, and I can’t pinpoint the
cause of it. I thought you might be able to help.”

Alsgood raised one gray eyebrow. “May I suggest that what you need is a
good handyman. He’d be considerably cheaper, and once he’d found the
trouble, he could fix it, too. We don’t do any repair work, you know. We
only inspect.”

“I’m aware of that. I’m pretty handy myself, but I haven’t figured out
what’s wrong or how to fix it.

I think I need the kind of expert advice that no handyman can give me.’

“You do know we charge two hundred and fifty dollars for an inspection?”

“I know,” Paul said. “But this is an extremely annoying problem, and it
might be causing serious structural damage.”

“What is it?”

Paul told him about the hammering sounds that occasionally shook the house.

“That’s peculiar as hell,” Alsgood said. “I’ve never heard a complaint like
it before.” He thought for a moment, then said, “Where’s your furnace?”

“In the cellar.”

“Maybe it’s a heating duct problem. Unlikely. But we can start down there
and work our way up to the roof until we’ve found the cause.”

For the next two hours, Alsgood looked into every cranny of the house,
poked and probed and rapped and visually inspected every inch of the
interior, then every inch of the roof, while Paul tagged along, assisting
wherever he could. A light rain began to fall when they were still on the
roof, and they were both soaked by the time they finished the job and
climbed down. Alsgood’s left foot slipped off the last rung of the ladder,
just as he was about to step onto the waterlogged lawn, and he twisted his
ankle painfully. All that risk and inconvenience was for nothing because
Alsgood didn’t find anything out of the ordinary.

At five-thirty, in the kitchen, they warmed up with coffee while Alsgood
filled out his report. Wet and bedraggled, he looked even more pallid than
when Paul had first seen him. The rain had transformed his gray
clothes—once a variety of shades — into a single, dull hue, so that he
appeared to be wearing a drab uniform. “It’s basically a solid house, Mr.
Tracy. The condition is really topnotch.”

“Then where the devil did that sound come from? And why was the whole house
shaken by it?”

“I wish I’d heard it.”

“I was sure it’d start up at least once while you were here.”

Alsgood sipped his coffee, but the warm brew added no color to his cheeks.
“Structurally, there’s not a thing wrong with this house. That’s what my
report will say, and I’d stake my reputation on it.”

“Which puts me right back at square one,” Paul said, folding his hands
around his coffee cup.

“I’m sorry you spent all this money without getting an answer,” Alsgood
said. “I really feel bad about that.”

“It isn’t your fault. I’m convinced you did a thorough job. In fact, if I
ever buy another house, I’ll definitely want you to inspect it first. At
least I now know the trouble isn’t structural, which rules out
possibilities and narrows the field of inquiry.”

“Maybe you won’t even hear it again. It might stop just as suddenly as it
started.”

“Somehow, I suspect you’re wrong about that,” Paul said.

Later, at the front door, as Alsgood was leaving, he said, “One thought has
occurred to me, but I hesitate to mention it.”

“Why?”

“You might think it’s off the wall.”

“Mr. Alsgood, I’m a desperate man. I’m willing to consider anything, no
matter how farfetched it might be.”

Alsgood looked at the ceiling, then at the floor, then back along the hail
that lay behind Paul, then down at his own feet. “A ghost,” he said
quietly.

Paul stared at him, surprised.

Alsgood cleared his throat nervously, shifted his eyes to the floor again,
then finally raised them and met Paul’s gaze. “Maybe you don’t believe in
ghosts.”

“DO you?” Paul asked.

“Yes. I’ve been interested in the subject most of my life. I have a large
collection of publications dealing with spiritualism of all sorts. I’ve had
some personal experiences in haunted houses, too.”

“You’ve seen a ghost”

“I believe I have, yes, on four occasions. Ectoplasmic apparitions.
Insubstantial, manlike shapes drifting in the air. I’ve also twice
witnessed poltergeist phenomena. As far as this house is concerned..

His voice trailed away, and he licked his lips nervously. “If you find this
boring or preposterous, I don’t want to waste your time.”

“Quite frankly,” Paul said, “I can’t picture myself calling an exorcist in
to deal with this. But I’m not entirely close-minded where ghosts are
concerned. I find it hard to accept, but I’m certainly willing to listen.”

“Reasonable enough,” Alsgood said. For the first time since he had rung the
doorbell more than two hours ago, color rose into his milky complexion, and
his watery eyes brightened with a spark of enthusiasm. “All right. Here’s
something to consider. From what you’ve told me, I’d say there might be a
poltergeist at work here. Of course, no objects have been hurled around by
an unseen presence; there’s been no breakage, and poltergeists dearly love
to break things. But the shaking of the house, the clattering pots and
pans, the little bottles clinking against one another in the spice
rack—those are all indications of a poltergeist at work, one that’s just
beginning to test its powers. If it is a poltergeist, then you can expect
worse to come. Oh, yes. Definitely. Furniture moving across the floor all
by itself. Pictures flung off the walls, lamps knocked down and broken.
Dishes flying around the room as if they were birds.” His wan countenance
flushed with excitement as he considered the supernatural destruction.
“Levitations of heavy objects like sofas and beds and refrigerators. Now
mind you, there are some recorded cases of people being plagued by benign
poltergeists that don’t break much of anything, but the overwhelming number
of them are malign, and that’s what you’ll most likely have to deal with—if
indeed you’ve got one here at all.’, Having warmed to his subject, he
finished in an almost breathless rush of words: “In its most active form,
even a benign poltergeist can completely disrupt a household, interfere
with your sleep, and keep you so on edge that you don’t know whether you’re
coming or going.”

Startled by Alsgood’s passionately delivered speech

and by the odd new light in the man’s eyes, Paul said, “Well.. . uh. . .
it’s really not that bad. Not nearly that bad. Just a hammering sound and—”

“It’s not that bad yet,” Alsgood said somberly.

“But if you have a poltergeist here, the situation could deteriorate
rapidly. If you’ve never seen one in action, Mr. Tracy, you simply can’t
understand what it’s like.”

Paul was disconcerted by the change in the man. He felt as if he had opened
the door to one of those

wholesome-looking types who turned out to be pushing crackpot religious
pamphlets and who proclaimed the imminence of Judgment Day in the same
bubbly, upbeat tone of voice that Donny Osmond might use to introduce his
cute little sister, Marie, to a panting audience of Osmond fans. There was
a disquieting zeal in Alsgood’s manner.

“If it does turn out to be a poltergeist,” Alsgood said, “if things do get
a lot worse, will you call me right away? I’ve been fortunate enough to
observe two poltergeists, as I said. I’d like nothing better than to see a
third going through its tricks. The opportunity doesn’t arise very often.”

“I guess not,” Paul said.

“So you’ll call me?”

“I very much doubt there’s a poltergeist involved here, Mr. Alsgood. If I
keep looking long enough and hard enough, I’ll find a perfectly logical
explanation for what’s been happening. But on the off-chance that it is a
malign spirit, rest assured I’ll give you a call the moment the first
refrigerator or chiffonier levitates.”

Alsgood wasn’t able to see anything amusing about their conversation. He
frowned when he detected levity in Paul’s voice, and he said, “I didn’t
really expect you to take me seriously.”

“Oh, please don’t think I’m not grateful for—”

“No, no,” Alsgood said, waving him to silence.

“I understand. No offense taken.” The excitement had gone out of his watery
eyes. “You’ve been raised to believe strictly in science. You’ve been
taught to put your faith only in things that can be seen and touched and
measured. That’s the modem way.” His shoulders slumped. The color in his
face faded, and his skin became pale, grayish, and slack, as it had been a
few minutes ago. “Asking you to be open-minded about ghosts is as pointless
as trying to convince a deep-sea creature that there are such things as
birds. It’s sad but true, and I have no reason to be angry about it.”

He opened the front door, and the sound of the rain grew louder. “Anyway,
for your sake, I hope it isn’t a poltergeist you’ve got here. I hope you
find that logical explanation you’re looking for. I really do, Mr. Tracy.”

Before Paul could respond, Alsgood turned and walked out into the rain. He
no longer seemed like a zealot; there was no trace of passion in him. He
was just a thin, gray man, shuffling through the gray mist, head slightly
bowed against the gray rain, illuminated by the gray light of the storm; he
almost seemed like a ghost himself;

Paul closed the door, put his back against it, and looked around the hall,
through the nearest archway, which opened onto the living room.
Poltergeist? Not very damned likely.

He preferred Alsgood’s other suggestion: that the hammering might simply
stop as suddenly and inexplicably as it had started, without the cause ever
being known.

He glanced at his watch. 6:06.

Carol had said she would remain at the hospital until eight o’clock and
would then come home for a late meal. That gave him an hour or so to work
on his novel before he had to start cooking dinner— broiled chicken
breasts, steamed vegetables, and rice with bits of green pepper.

He went upstairs to his office and sat down at the typewriter. He picked up
the last page he had written, intending to reread it a few times and get
back into the mood and tone of the story he was telling.

THUNK! THUNK!

The house shook. The windows rattled.

He bolted up from his chair.

THUNK!

On his desk, the jar full of pens and pencils toppled over, cracked into
several pieces, and spilled its contents onto the floor.

Silence.

He waited. One minute. Two minutes.

Nothing.

There was no sound except the snapping of the rain against the windows and
the drumming of it on the roof.

Only three hammer blows this time. Harder than any that had come before.
But only three. Almost as if someone were playing games with him, taunting
him.



                                    ***





Shortly before midnight, in room 316, the girl laughed softly in her sleep.

Outside her window, lightning pulsed, and the night flickered, and the
darkness seemed to gallop for a moment, as if it were a huge and eager
beast.

The girl turned onto her stomach without waking, murmured into her pillows.
“The ax,” she said with a wistful sigh. “The ax. ..."

On the stroke of midnight, just forty minutes after she had fallen asleep,
Carol bolted up from her pillows, trembling violently. As she struggled out
of the grip of her nightmare, she heard someone say, “It’s coming! It’s
coming!” She stared wildly, blindly into the lightless room until she
realized the panic-stricken voice had been her own.

Suddenly she could not tolerate the darkness one second longer. She fumbled
desperately for the switch on the bedside lamp, found it, and sagged with
relief.

The light didn’t disturb Paul. He mumbled in his sleep but didn’t wake.

Carol leaned back against the headboard and listened to her racing heart as
it gradually slowed to a normal beat.

Her hands were icy. She put them under the covers and curled them into
warming fists.

The nightmares have got to stop, she told herself. I can’t go through this
every night. I need my sleep.

Perhaps a vacation was called for. She had been working too hard for too
long. The accumulated weariness was probably partly to blame for her bad
dreams. She had also been under a great deal of unusual stress lately: the
pending adoption, the near-tragic events in O’Brian’s office on Wednesday,
the accident just yesterday morning, the girl’s amnesia for which she felt
responsible. .. . Living with too much tension could cause exceptionally
vivid nightmares of the sort she was experiencing. A week in the mountains,
away from everyday problems, seemed like the perfect medicine.

In addition to all the other sources of stress, that day was approaching,
the birthday of the child she had put up for adoption. A week from
tomorrow, the

Saturday after next, would mark sixteen years since she had relinquished
the baby. Already, eight days in advance of that anniversary, she was
burdened by a heavy mantle of guilt. By the time next Saturday rolled
around, she would most likely be thoroughly depressed, as usual. A week in
the mountains, away from everyday problems, might be the perfect medicine
for that ailment, too.

Last year, she and Paul had purchased a vacation cabin on an acre of
timbered land in the mountains. It was a cozy place—two bedrooms, one bath,
a living room with a big stone fireplace, and a complete kitchen—a retreat
that combined all the comforts of civilization with the clean air,
marvelous scenery, and tranquility that could not be found in the city.

They had planned to get away to the cabin at least two weekends every month
during the summer, but they had made the trip only three times in the past
four months, less than half as often as they had hoped.

Paul had labored hard to meet a series of self-imposed deadlines on his
novel, and she had taken on more patients—a couple of really troubled kids
who simply could not be turned away—and for both herself and Paul, work had
expanded to fill every spare moment. Perhaps they were the overachievers
that Alfred O’Brian had thought they might be.

But we’ll change when we have a child, Carol told herself. We’ll make lots
of time for leisure and for family outings because creating the best
environment for our child is the job we’re looking forward to more than any
other.

Now, sitting up in bed, the grisly nightmare still chillingly fresh in her
mind, she decided to start changing her life from this moment on. They
would take off a few days, maybe a whole week, and go to the mountains
before the recommendations committee's meeting at the end of the month, so
they would be rested and composed when at last they met the child who would
be theirs. They couldn’t take off this coming week, of course. She would
need time to reschedule her appointments. Besides, she didn’t want to leave
town until Jane Doe’s parents showed up and properly identified the girl;
that might take a few more days. But they ought to be able to carve a large
chunk of time out of the week after next, and she made up her mind to start
nudging Paul about it first thing in the morning.

Having reached that decision, she felt better. The mere prospect of a
vacation, even a brief one, relieved much of her tension.

She looked at Paul and said, “I love you.”

He continued to snore softly.

Smiling, she clicked off the light and settled under the covers again. For
a couple of minutes she listened to the rain and to her husband’s rhythmic
breathing; then she drifted into a sound, satisfying sleep.



                                    ***





Rain fell throughout Saturday, rounding out a monotonously watery, sunless
week. The day was cool, too, and the wind had teeth.

Carol visited Jane in the hospital on Saturday afternoon. They played cards
and talked about some of the articles the girl had read in the magazines
Carol had bought for her. Through every conversation, regardless of the
subject, Carol probed continuously but subtly at the girl’s amnesia,
prodded her memory without letting her see that she was being prodded.

But it was all wasted effort, for Jane’s past remained beyond her grasp.

At the end of the afternoon visiting hours, as Carol was heading toward the
elevators on the third floor, she encountered Dr. Sam Hannaport in the
corridor.

“Haven’t the police come up with any leads at all?” she asked.

He shrugged his burly shoulders. “Not yet.”

“It’s been over two days since the accident.”

“Which isn’t all that long.”

“It seems like an eternity to that poor kid in there,” Carol said,
gesturing toward the door of 316.

“I know,” Hannaport said. “And I feel just as bad about it as you do. But
it’s still too soon to be pessimistic.”

“If I had a girl like her, and if my kid turned up missing for even one
day, I’d be pushing the police hard, and I’d make damned sure the story was
in all the papers, and I’d be pounding on doors and making a nuisance of
myself all over the city.”

Hannaport nodded. “I know you would. I’ve seen how you operate, and I
admire your style. And listen, I think your visits with the girl have an
awful lot to do with keeping her spirits up. It’s good of you to take all
this time with her.”

“Well, I’m not angling for a testimonial dinner,”

Carol said. “I don’t think I’m doing any more than I have to do. I mean,
I’ve got a responsibility here.”

A nurse came along, pushing a patient in a wheelchair. Carol and Hannaport
stepped out of the way.

“At least Jane seems to be in good physical shape,” Carol said.

“Like I told you on Wednesday—there were no

serious injuries. In fact, because she is in such good condition, she
presents us with a problem. She doesn’t really belong in a hospital. I just
hope her parents show up before I’m forced to discharge her.”

“Discharge her? But you can’t do that if she has nowhere to go. She can’t
cope outside. For God’s sake, she doesn’t even know who she is!”

“Naturally, I’ll keep her here as long as I possibly can. But by late
tonight or tomorrow morning, all of our beds are probably going to be full.
Then, if the number of emergency admissions is greater than the number of
discharges already scheduled, we’ll have to look around for a few other
patients who can be safely released. Jane’s bound to be one of them. If
some guy’s brought in here with a cracked skull from an auto accident, or
if an ambulance delivers a woman who’s been stabbed by a jealous boyfriend,
I can’t justify turning away seriously injured people while I’m keeping a
perfectly healthy girl whose worst physical problem is a contusion on her
left shoulder.”

“But her amnesia—”

“Is something we can’t treat anyway.”

“But she has nowhere to go,” Carol said. “What would happen to her?”

In his calm, soft, reassuring voice, Hannaport said, “She’ll be okay.
Really. We’re not going to just abandon her. We’ll petition to have her
declared a ward of the court until her parents show up. In the meantime,
she’ll do just as well at some minimal-care facility as she would do here.”

“What facility are you talking about?”

“Just three blocks from here, there’s a borne for runaway and pregnant
teenage girls, and it’s far

cleaner and better managed than the average state institution.”

“The Polmar Home,” Carol said. “I know it.”

“Then you know it’s not a dungeon or a dump.”

“I still don’t like moving her out of here,” Carol said. “She’s going to
feel as if she’s being shunted aside, forgotten, and left to rot. She’s on
very shaky ground already. This’II scare her half to death.”

Frowning, Hannaport said, “I don’t like it much myself, but! truly don’t
have an option. If we’re short on bed space, the law says we’ve got to
consider degrees of need and take in those patients who have the most to
lose by being denied care or by having treatment delayed. I’m in a bind.”

“I understand. I’m not blaming you. Dammit, if someone would just come
forward to claim her!”

“Someone might, any minute.”

Carol shook her head. “No. I’ve got a feeling it’s not going to be that
easy. Have you told Jane yet?”

“No. We won’t make the petition to the court sooner than Monday morning, so
I might as well wait until tomorrow to explain it to her. Maybe
something'll happen between now and then to make it unnecessary. No use
worrying her until we have to.”

Carol was depressed, remembering her own days in a state-run institution,
before Grace had come along to rescue her. She had been a tough kid,
street-smart, but the experience had nevertheless scarred her. Jane was
bright and spunky and strong and sweet, but she wasn’t rough, not like
Carol had been at her age. What would institutional living do to her if she
had to endure it for more than a day or two? If she was simply dropped in
among kids who were street-smart, among kids who had drug and behavioral
problems, she would most likely be victimized, perhaps even violently. What
she needed was a real home, love, guidance— “Of course!” Carol said. She
grinned.

Hannaport looked at her questioningly.

“Why can’t she come with me?” Carol asked.

“What?”

“Look, Dr. Hannaport, if it’s all right with Paul, my husband, why couldn’t
you recommend to the court that I be awarded temporary custody of Jane
until someone shows up who can identify her?”

“You really better think twice about that,” Hannaport said. “Taking her in,
disrupting your lives—”

“It won’t be a disruption,” Carol said. “It’ll be a pleasure. She’s a
delightful kid.”

Hannaport stared at her a long moment, searching her face and her eyes.

“After all,” Carol argued as persuasively as she could, “the only kind of
doctor who might be able to cure Jane’s amnesia is a psychiatrist. And in
case you’ve forgotten, that’s what I am. I’d not only be able to provide a
decent home for her; I’d also be able to treat her rather intensively.”

Finally, Hannaport smiled. “I think it’s a grand and generous offer, Dr.
Tracy.”

“Then you’ll make the recommendation to the court?”

“Yes. Of course, you never can be sure what a judge will do. But I think
there’s a pretty good chance he’ll see where the best interests of the girl
lie.”

A few minutes later, in the hospital lobby, Carol used

a pay phone to call Paul. She recounted the conversation she’d had with Dr.
Hannaport, but before she

got to the big question, Paul interrupted her. “You want to make a place
for Jane,” he said.

Surprised, Carol said, “How’d you guess?”

He laughed. “I know you, sugarface. When it comes to kids, you’ve got a
heart the consistency of vanilla pudding.”

“She won’t be in your way,” Carol said quickly. “She won’t distract you
from your writing. And now that O’Brian won’t be able to present our
application for the adoption until the end of the month, there’s no chance
we’ll have two kids to take care of. In fact maybe the delay at the agency
was meant to be—so we’d have a place for Jane until her folks show up. It’s
only temporary, Paul. Really. And we—”

“Okay, okay,” he said. “You don’t have to sell me on it. I approve of the
plan.”

“If you’d like to come here and meet Jane first, that’s—”

“No, no. I’m sure she’s everything you’ve said she is.                Don’t
forget, though, you were planning to go to the mountains in a week or so.”

“We might not even have Jane that long. And if we do, we can probably take
her with us, so long as we let the court know where we’re going.”

“When do we have to appear in court?”

“I don’t know. Probably Monday or Tuesday.”

“I’ll be on my best behavior,” Paul said.

“Scrub behind your ears?”

“Okay. And I’ll also wear shoes.”

Grinning, Carol said, “Don’t pick your nose in front of the judge.”

“Not unless he picks his first.”

She said, “I love you, Dr. Tracy.”

“I love you, Dr. Tracy.”

When she put down the receiver and turned away from the pay phone, she felt
wonderful. Not even the gaudy decor of the visitors’ lounge could get on
her nerves now.

                                    ***

That night, there was no hammering sound in the Tracy house, no evidence of
the poltergeist that Mr.

Alsgood had warned Paul about. There was no disturbance the following day,
either, and none the day after that. The strange noise and the vibrations
had ceased as inexplicably as they had begun.

Carol stopped having nightmares, too. She slept deeply, peacefully, without
interruption. She quickly forgot about the flickering, silvery blade of the
ax swinging back and forth in the strange void.

The weather improved, too. The clouds dissipated on Sunday. Monday was
summery, blue.





Tuesday afternoon, while Paul and Carol were in court trying to obtain
temporary custody of Jane Doe, Grace Mitowski was cleaning her kitchen. She
had just finished dusting the top of the refrigerator when the telephone
rang.

“Hello.”

No one answered her. “Hello,” she said again.

A thin, whispery, male voice said, “Grace..

“Yes?”

His words were muffled, and there was an echo on the line, as if he were
talking into a tin can.

“I can’t understand you,” she said. “Can you speak up?”

He tried, but again the words were lost. They seemed to be coming from an
enormous distance, across an unimaginably vast chasm.

“We have a terrible connection,” she said. “You’ll have to speak up.”

“Grace,” he said, his voice only slightly louder. “Gracie it’s almost too
late. You’ve got to . . . move fast. You’ve got to stop it... from
happening .. again.”

It was a dry, brittle voice; it cracked repeatedly, with a sound like dead
autumn leaves underfoot. “It’s almost. . . too late. . . too late

She recognized the voice, and she froze. Her hand tightened on the
receiver, and she couldn’t get her breath.

“Gracie.. . it can’t go on forever. You’ve got to put an end to it. Protect
her, Gracie. Protect her

The voice faded away.

There was only silence. But not the silence of an open phone line. There
was no hissing. No electronic beeping in the background. This was perfect
silence, utterly unmarred by even the slightest click or whistle of
electronic circuitry. Vast silence. Endless.

She put the phone down.

She started to shake.

She went to the cupboard and got down the bottle of Scotch she kept for
visitors. She poured herself a double shot and sat down at the kitchen
table.

The liquor didn’t warm her. Chills still shook her.

The voice on the phone had belonged to Leonard. Her husband. He had been
dead for eighteen years.















                                  PART TWO





                           Evil Walks Among Us...





      Evil is no faceless stranger, living in a distant neighborhood.

  Evil has a wholesome, hometown face, with many eyes and an open smile.

    Evil walks among us, wearing a mask which looks like all our faces.

                        —The Book of Counted Sorrows







                                     7

TUESDAY, after winning temporary custody of Jane Doe, Paul went home to
work on his novel, and Carol took the girl shopping. Because Jane had no
clothes except those she’d been wearing when she’d stepped in front of the
Volkswagen last Thursday morning, she needed a lot of things, even for just
a few days. She was embarrassed about spending Carol’s money, and at first
she was reluctant to admit that she liked anything she saw or that anything
fit her well enough to buy it.

At last Carol said, “Honey, you need this stuff, so please just relax and
let me buy it for you. Okay? the long run, it won’t be coming out of my
pocket anyway. I’ll most likely be reimbursed either by your parents, by
the foster children program, or by some other county agency.”

That argument worked. They quickly purchased a couple of pairs of jeans, a
few blouses, underwear, a good pair of sneakers, socks, a sweater, and a
windbreaker.

When they got home, Jane was impressed by the Tudor house with its
leaded-glass windows, gabled roof, and stonework. She fell in love with the
guest room in which she was to stay. It had a cove ceiling, a long window
seat inset in a bay window, and a wall of mirrored closet doors. It was
done in deep blue and pale beige, with Queen Anne furniture of lustrous
cherrywood. “It’s really just a guest room?” Jane asked, incredulous. “You
don’t use it regularly? Boy, if this were my house, I’d come in here all
the time! I’d just sit and read for a little while every day—read and sit
there in the window and soak up the atmosphere.”

Carol had always liked the room, but through Jane’s eyes she achieved a new
perception and appreciation of it. As she watched the girl inspecting
things—sliding open the closet doors, checking the view from each angle of
the bay window, testing the firmness of the mattress on the queen-sized
bed— Carol realized that one advantage of having children was that their
innocent, fresh reactions to everything could keep their parents young and
open-minded, too.

That evening, Carol, Paul, and Jane prepared dinner together. The girl fit
in comfortably and immediately, in spite of the fact that she was somewhat
shy. There was a lot of laughter in the kitchen and at the dinner table.

After dinner, Jane started washing dishes while Carol and Paul cleared the
table. When they were separated from the girl for a moment, alone in the

dining room, Paul said quietly, “She’s a terrific kid.”

“Didn’t I tell you so?”

“Funny thing, though.”

“What?”

“Ever since I saw her this afternoon, outside the courtroom,” Paul said,
“I’ve had the feeling that I’ve seen her somewhere before.”

“Where?”

He shook his head. “I’ll be damned if I know. But there’s something
familiar about her face.”





Throughout Tuesday afternoon, Grace expected the phone to ring again.

She dreaded having to answer it.

She tried to work off her nervous energy by cleaning the house. She
scrubbed the kitchen floor, dusted the furniture in every room, and swept
all the carpets.

But she couldn’t stop thinking about the call: the paper-dry,
echo-distorted voice that had sounded like Leonard; the odd things he had
said; the eerie silence when he had finished speaking; the disquieting
sense of vast distances, an unimaginable gulf of space and time.

It had to be a hoax. But who could be responsible for it? And why torment
her with an imitation of Leonard’s voice, eighteen years after the man had
died? What was the point of playing games like this now, after so much time
had passed?

She tried to get her mind off the call by baking apple dumplings. Thick,
crusty dumplings—served with cinnamon, milk, and just a bit of sugar—were a
suppertime favorite of hers, for she had been born and raised in Lancaster,
the heart of the Pennsylvania Dutch country, where that dish was considered
a meal in itself. But Tuesday evening, she had no appetite, not even for
dumplings. She ate a few bites, but she couldn’t even finish half of one
dumpling, though she usually ate two whole ones in a single meal.

She was still picking disinterestedly at her food when the telephone rang.

Her head jerked up. She stared at the wall phone that was above the small,
built-in desk beside the refrigerator.

It rang again. And again.

Trembling, she got up, went to the phone, and lifted the receiver.

“Gracie. .

The voice was faint but intelligible.

“Gracie. . . it’s almost too late.”

It was him. Leonard. Or someone who sounded exactly like Leonard had
sounded.

She couldn’t respond to him. Her throat clutched tight.

“Gracie.. .“

Her legs seemed to be melting under her. She

pulled out the chair that was tucked into the kneehole

of the desk, and she sat down quickly.

“Gracie. . . stop it from happening again. It mustn’t. . . go on forever..
. time after time. . . the blood. . . the murder. . .”

She closed her eyes, forced herself to speak. Her voice was weak, quavery.
She didn’t even recognize it as her own. It was the voice of a stranger—a
weary, frightened, frail old woman. “Who is this?”

The whispery, vibrative voice on the telephone said, “Protect her, Oracle.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Protect her.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Protect her.”

“Protect who?” she demanded.

“Willa. Protect Willa.”

She was still frightened and confused, but she was beginning to be angry,
too. “I don’t know anyone named Willa, dammit! Who is this?”

“Leonard.”

“No! Do you think I’m a doddering, senile old fool? Leonard’s dead.
Eighteen years! You’re not Leonard. What kind of game are you playing?”

She wanted to hang up on him, and she knew that was the best thing to do
with a crank like this, but she couldn’t make herself put down the
receiver. He sounded so much like Leonard that she was mesmerized by his
voice.

He spoke again, much softer than before, but she could still hear him.
“Protect Willa.”

“I tell you, I don’t know her. And if you keep calling me with this
nonsense, I’m going to tell the police that some sick practical joker is—”

“Carol. . . Carol,” the man said, his voice fading syllable by syllable.
“Willa. . . but you call her. . . Carol.”

“What the hell is going on here?”

“Beware.. .the. . .cat.”

“What?”

The voice was so distant now that she had to strain to hear it. “The .. .
cat ...”

“Aristophanes? What about him? Have you done something to him? Have you
poisoned him? Is that what’s been wrong with him lately”

No response.

“Are you there”

Nothing.

“What about the cat?” she demanded.

No answer.

She listened to the pure, pure silence, and she began to tremble so
violently that she had trouble holding the phone. “Who are you? Why do you
want to torment me like this? Why do you want to hurt Aristophanes?”

Far, far away, the achingly familiar voice of her long-dead husband uttered
a few final, barely audible words. “Wish. . .1 was there.. . for the.. .
apple dumplings.”



                                    ***





They had forgotten to buy pajamas for Jane. She went to bed in knee socks,
panties, and one of Carol’s T-shirts, which was a bit large for her.

“What happens tomorrow?” she asked when she was tucked in, her head raised
on a plump pillow.

Carol sat on the edge of the bed. “I thought we might start a program of
treatment designed to pry open your memory.”

“What kind of treatment?”

“Do you know what hypnotic regression therapy is?”

Jane was suddenly frightened. Several times since the accident, she had
made a conscious, concerted effort to remember who she was, but on each
occasion, as she felt herself coming close to a disturbing revelation, she
had become dizzy, disoriented, and panicky. When she pressed her mind back,
back, back toward the truth, a psychological defense mechanism cut off her
curiosity as abruptly as a strangler’s garrote might have cut off her air
supply. And every time, on the edge of unconsciousness, she saw a strange,
silvery object swinging back and forth through blackness, an utterly
indecipherable yet blood-chilling vision. She sensed there was something
hideous in her past, something so terrible that she would be better off no:
remembering. She had just about made up her mind not to seek what had been
lost, to accept her new life as a nameless orphan, even though it might be
filled with hardships. But through hypnotic regression therapy, she could
be forced to confront the specter in her past, whether she wanted to or
not. That prospect filled her with dread.

“Are you all right?” Carol asked.

The girl blinked, licked her lips. “Yeah. I was just thinking about what
you said. Hypnotic regression. Does that mean you’re going to put me in a
trance and make me remember everything?”

“Well, it isn’t that easy, honey. There’s no guarantee it’ll work. I’ll
hypnotize you and ask you to think back to the accident on Thursday
morning; then I’ll nudge you further and further into the past. If you’re a
good subject, you might remember who you are and where you come from.
Hypnotic regression is a tool that comes in handy sometimes when I’m trying
to get a patient to relive a deeply hidden, severely regressed trauma. I’ve
never used the technique on an amnesia victim, but I know it’s applicable
to a case like yours. Of course, it only works about half the time. And
when it does work, it takes more than one or two sessions. It can be a
tedious, frustrating process. We’re not going to get much of anywhere
tomorrow, and in fact your parents will probably show up before I’ve been
able to help you remember. But we might as well make a start. That is, if
it’s all right with you.”

She didn’t want Carol to know that she was afraid to remember, so she said,
“Oh, sure! It sounds fascinating.”

“I’ve got four patients scheduled for tomorrow, but I can work you in at
eleven o’clock. You’ll have to spend a lot of time in the waiting room,
before and after your session, so first thing in the morning, we’ll find a
book for you to take along. Do you like to read mystery stories?”

“I guess so.”

“Agatha Christie?”

“The name’s familiar, but I don’t know whether I’ve ever read any of her
books.”

“You can try one tomorrow. If you were a big fan of mysteries, maybe Agatha
Christie will open your memory for you. Any stimulus, any connection
whatsoever with your past can act like a doorway.” She leaned down, kissed
Jane’s forehead. “But don’t worry about it now. Just get a good night’s
sleep, kiddo.”

After Carol left the room, closing the door behind her, Jane didn’t
immediately switch off the light. She let her gaze travel slowly around the
room and then slowly back again, her eyes resting on each point of beauty.

Please, God, she thought, let me stay here. Somehow, some way, let me stay
in this house forever and ever. Don’t make me go back where I came from,
wherever that might be. This is where I want to live. This is where I want
to die, it’s so pretty.

Finally, she reached out and snapped off the bedside lamp.

Darkness folded in like bat wings.





Using a piece of Masonite and four nails, Grace Mitowski fixed a temporary
seal over the inside of the pet door.

Aristophanes stood in the center of the kitchen, his head cocked to one
side, watching her with bright-eyed interest. Every, few seconds, he meowed
in what seemed to be an inquisitive tone.

When the last nail was in place, Grace said, “Okay, cat. For the time
being, your license to roam has been suspended. There might be a man out
there who’s been feeding you small amounts of drugs or poison of some sort,
and maybe that’s been the cause of your bad behavior. We’ll just have to
wait and see if you improve. Have you been flying high on drugs, you silly
cat?”

Aristophanes meowed questioningly.

“Yes,” Grace said. “I know it sounds bizarre. But if it’s not some kook
I’ve got to deal with, then it really must’ve been Leonard on the phone.
And that’s even more bizarre, don’t you think?”

The cat turned his head from one side to the other, as if he really were
flying to make sense of what she was saying.

Grace stopped, held out her hand, and rubbed her thumb and forefinger
together. “Here, kitty. Here, kitty-kitty-kitty.”

Aristophanes hissed, spat, turned, and ran.

For a change, they made love with the lights off.

Carol’s breath was hot against his neck. She pressed close, rocked and
tensed and twisted and flexed in perfect harmony with him; her exquisite,
pneumatic movements were as fluid as currents in a warm river. She arched
her elegant back, lifted and subsided in tempo with his measured strokes.
She was as pliant, as silken, and eventually as all-encompassing as the
darkness.

Afterwards, they held hands and talked about inconsequential things,
steadily growing drowsy. Carol fell asleep while Paul was talking. When she
failed to respond to one of his questions, he gently disentangled his hand
from hers.

He was tired, but he couldn’t find sleep as quickly as she had found it. He
kept thinking about the girl. He was certain he had seen her prior to their
meeting outside the courtroom this morning. During dinner, her face had
grown more and more familiar. It continued to haunt him. But no matter how
hard he tried, he couldn’t recall where else he had seen her.

As he lay in the dark bedroom, paging through his memory, he gradually
became uneasy. He began to feel—utterly without reason—that his previous
encounter with Jane had been strange, perhaps even unpleasant. Then he
wondered if the girt might actually pose some sort of threat to Carol and
himself.

But that’s absurd, he thought. Doesn’t make any sense at all. I must be
even more tired than I thought.

Logic seems to be slipping out of my grasp. What possible threat could Jane
pose? She’s such a nice kid. An exceptionally nice kid.

He sighed, rolled over, and thought about the plot of his first novel (the
failed one), and that quickly put him to sleep.





At one o’clock in the morning, Grace Mitowski was sitting up in bed,
watching a late movie on the Sony portable. She was vaguely aware that
Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall were engaged in witty repartee, but she
didn’t really hear anything they said. She had lost track of the film’s
plot only minutes after she had turned it on.

She was thinking about Leonard, the husband she had lost to cancer eighteen
years ago. He had been a good man, hard-working, generous, loving, a grand
conversationalist. She had loved him very much.

But not everyone had loved Leonard. He had had his faults, of course. The
worst thing about him had been his impatience—and the sharp tongue that his
impatience had encouraged. He couldn’t tolerate people who were lazy or
apathetic or ignorant or foolish. “Which includes two-thirds of the human
race,” he had often said when he was feeling especially curmudgeonly.
Because he was an honest man with precious little diplomacy in his bones,
he had told people exactly what he thought of them. As a result, he had led
a life remarkably free of deception but rich in enemies.

She wondered if it had been one of those enemies who had called her,
pretending to be Leonard. A sick man might get as much pleasure from
tormenting

Leonard’s widow as he would have gotten from tormenting Leonard himself. He
might get a thrill from poisoning her cat and from harassing her with weird
phone calls.

But after eighteen years? Who would have remembered Leonard’s voice so well
as to be able to imitate it perfectly such a long time later? Surely she
was the only person in the world who could still recognize that voice upon
hearing it speak only a word or two. And why bring Carol into it? Leonard
had died three years before Carol had entered Grace’s life; he had never
known the girl. His enemies couldn’t possibly have anything against Carol.
What had the caller meant when he’d referred to Carol as “Willa”? And, most
disturbing of all, how did the caller know she had just made apple
dumplings?

There was another explanation, though she was loath to consider it. Perhaps
the caller hadn’t been an old enemy of Leonard’s. Maybe the call actually
had come from Leonard himself. From a dead man.

—No. Impossible.

—A lot of people believe in ghosts.

—Not me.

She thought about the strange dreams she’d had last week. She hadn’t
believed in dream prophecies then. Now she did. So why not ghosts, too?

No. She was a level-headed woman who had lived a stable, rational life, who
had been trained in the sciences, who had always believed that science held
all the answers. Now, at seventy years of age, if she made room for the
existence of ghosts within her otherwise rational philosophy, she might be
opening the floodgates on madness. If you truly believed in ghosts, what
came next? Vampires? Did you have to

start carrying a sharp wooden stake and a crucifix everywhere you went?
Werewolves? Better buy a box of silver bullets! Evil elves who lived in the
center of the earth and caused quakes and volcanoes? Sure! Why not?

Grace laughed bitterly.

She couldn’t suddenly become a believer in ghosts, because acceptance of
that superstition might require the acceptance of countless others. She was
too old, too comfortable with herself, too accustomed to her familiar ways
to reconsider her entire view of life. And she certainly wasn’t going to
contemplate such a sweeping reevaluation merely because she had received
two bizarre phone calls.

That left only one thing to be decided: whether or not she should tell
Carol that someone was harassing her and had used Carol’s name. She tried
to hear how she would sound when she explained the telephone calls and when
she outlined her theory about Aristophanes being drugged or poisoned. She
couldn’t hope to sound like the Grace Mitowski that everyone knew. She’d
come off like an hysterical old woman who was seeing nonexistent
conspirators behind every door and under every bed.

They might even think she was going senile.

Am I? she wondered. Did I imagine the telephone calls? No. Surely not.

She wasn’t imagining Aristophanes’s changed personality, either. She looked
at the claw marks on the palm of her hand; although they were healing, they
were still red and puffy. Proof. Those marks were proof that something was
wrong.

I’m not senile, she told herself. Not even a little bit. But I sure don’t
want to have to convince Carol or Paul that I’ve got all my marbles, once
I’ve told them that I’m getting phone calls from Leonard. Better go easy
for the time being. Wait. See what happens next. Anyway, I can figure this
out on my own. I can handle it.

On the Sony, Bogart and Bacall grinned at each other.





When Jane woke up in the middle of the night, she discovered she had been
sleepwalking. She was in the kitchen, but she couldn’t recall getting out
of bed and coming downstairs.

The kitchen was silent. The only sound was from the softly purring
refrigerator. The only light was from the moon, but because the moon was
full and because the kitchen had quite a few windows, there was enough
light to see by.

Jane was standing at a counter near the sink. She had opened one of the
drawers and had taken a butcher knife out of it.

She stared down at the knife, startled to find it in her hand.

Pale moonlight glinted on the cold blade.

She returned the knife to the drawer.

Closed the drawer.

She had been gripping the knife so tightly that her hand ached.

Why did! want a knife?

A chill skittered like a centipede along her spine.

Her bare arms and legs broke out in gooseflesh, and she was suddenly very
aware that she was wearing only a T-shirt, panties, and knee socks.

The refrigerator motor shut off with a dry rattle that made her jump and
turn.

Now the house was preternaturally silent. She could almost believe that she
had gone deaf.

What was I doing with the knife?

She hugged herself to ward off the chills that kept wriggling through her.

Maybe she had dreamed about food and had come down here in her sleep to
make a sandwich. Yes. That was probably what had happened. In fact she was
a bit hungry. So she had gotten the knife out of the drawer in order to
slice some roast beef for a sandwich. There was a butt end of a roast in
the refrigerator. She had seen it earlier, when she had been helping Carol
and Paul make dinner.

But now she didn’t think she could eat a sandwich or anything else. Her
bare legs were getting colder by the moment, and she felt immodestly
exposed in just flimsy panties and a thin T-shirt. All she wanted now was
to get back to bed, under the covers.

Climbing the steps in the darkness, she stayed close to the wall, where the
treads were less likely to creak. She returned to her room without waking
anyone.

Outside, a dog howled in the distance.

Jane burrowed deeper in her blankets.

For a while she had trouble getting to sleep because she felt guilty about
prowling through the house while the Tracys slept. She felt sneaky. She
felt as if she had been taking advantage of their hospitality.

Of course, that was silly. She hadn’t been nosing around on purpose. She
had been sleepwalking, and there was no way a person could control
something like that.

Just sleepwalking.

                                     8

THE focal point of Carol Tracy’s office was Mickey Mouse. One long wall of
the room was fitted with shelves on which were displayed Mickey Mouse
memorabilia. There were Mickey Mouse buttons, Mickey Mouse pins, a
wristwatch, belt buckles, a Mickey Mouse phone, drinking glasses bearing
the famous mouse’s countenance, a beer mug on which there was a likeness of
Mickey dressed in lederhosen and a Tyrolean hat. But mostly there were
statuettes of the cartoon star: Mickey standing beside a little red car;
Mickey curled up in striped pajamas. sleeping; Mickey dancing a jig; Mickey
with Minnie; Mickey with Goofy; Mickey holding barbells; Mickey with Pluto;
Mickey and Donald Duck with their arms around each other’s shoulders,
looking like the best of friends; Mickey riding a horse, with a cowboy hat

raised in one white-gloved, four-fingered hand; Mickey dressed like a
soldier, a sailor, a doctor; Mickey in swimming trunks, clutching a
surfboard. There were wooden, metal, chalk, porcelain, plastic, glass, and
clay statuettes of Mickey; some of them were a foot high, and some were no
more than one inch tall, though most were in between. The only thing those
hundreds of Mickeys had in common was the fact that every one of them was
smiling broadly.

The collection was an icebreaker with patients of all ages. No one could
resist Mickey Mouse.

Jane responded as scores of patients had done before her. She said “oooh”
and “aaah” a lot, and she laughed happily. By the time she had finished
admiring the collection and had sat down in one of the big leather
armchairs, she was ready for the therapy session; her tension and
apprehension had disappeared. Mickey had worked his usual magic.

Carol didn’t have an analyst’s couch in her office.

She preferred to conduct sessions from a large wing chair, with the patient
seated in an identical chair on the other side of the octagonal coffee
table. The drapes were always kept tightly shut; soft, golden light was
provided by shaded floor lamps. Except for the wall of Mickey Mouse images,
the room had a nineteenth-century air.

They chatted about the collection for a couple of minutes, and then Carol
said, “Okay, honey. I think we ought to begin.”

Worry lines appeared on the girl’s forehead. “You really think this
hypnosis is a good idea?”

“Yes. I think it’s the best tool we have for restoring your memory. Don’t
worry. It’s a simple process. Just relax and flow with it. Okay?”

“Well. . . okay.”

Carol got up and stepped around the coffee table, and Jane started to get
up, too. “No, you stay there,” Carol said. She moved behind the wing chair
and put her fingertips against the girl’s temples. “Relax, honey. Lean
back. Hands in your lap. Palms up, fingers slack. That’s fine. Now close
your eyes. Are they closed?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Very good. Now I want you to think of a kite. A large,
diamond-shaped kite. Picture it in your mind. It’s an enormous, blue kite
sailing high in the blue sky. Can you see it?”

After a brief hesitation, the girl said, “Yes.”

“Watch the kite, honey. See how gently it rises and falls on the currents
of air. Rises, falls, up and down, up and down, side to side, sailing so
gracefully, far above the earth, halfway between the earth and the clouds,
far above your head,” Carol said in a mellow, soothing, rhythmic voice as
she stared down at the girl’s thick blond hair. “While you’re watching the
kite, you’ll gradually become as light and as free as it is. You’ll learn
to soar up and up into the blue sky, just like the kite.” With her
fingertips, she lightly traced circles on the girl’s temples. “All the
tension is leaving you, all the worries and cares are floating away, away,
until the only thought in your head is the kite, the sailing kite in the
blue sky. A great weight has been removed from your skull, from your
forehead and your temples. Already, you feel much lighter.” She moved her
hands down to the girl’s neck. “The muscles in your neck are relaxing.
Tension is dropping away. A great weight is dropping away. You are so much
lighter now that you can almost feel yourself rising up toward the kite. .
. almost.. . almost. . She moved her hands down, touched the girl’s
shoulders. “Relax. Let the tension fall away. Like blocks of concrete.
Making you lighter, lighter. A weight is falling off your chest, too. And
now you’re floating. Just a few inches off the ground, but you are
floating.”

“Yes.. . floating. . .“ she said, her voice thick.

“The kite is gliding far above, but you are slowly, slowly moving up to
join it.. .

She went on like that for a minute, then returned to her own chair and sat
down.

Jane was slumped in the other wing chair, head tilted to one side, eyes
closed, face soft and slack, breathing softly.

“You are in a very deep sleep,” Carol told her. “A very relaxed, very deep,
deep sleep. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” the girl murmured.

“You will answer a few questions for me.”

“Okay.”

“You will remain in your deep sleep, and you will answer my questions until
I tell you it’s time to wake up. Understood?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Very good. Now tell me—what is your name?”

The girl was silent.

“What is your name, honey?”

“Jane.”

“Is that your real name?”

“No.’’

“What is your real name?”

Jane frowned. “I. . . don’t remember.”

“Where did you come from?”

“The hospital.”

“Before that””

“Nowhere.”

A bead of saliva glistened at the corner of the girl’s

mouth. Languorously, she licked it away before it could drool down her
chin.

Carol said, “Honey, do you remember the Mickey Mouse watch you saw a few
minutes ago?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’ve taken that watch from the shelf,” Carol said, though she hadn’t
moved from her chair. “And now I’m turning the hands on it backwards,
around and around the dial, always backwards. Can you see the hands moving
backwards on that Mickey Mouse watch?”

“Yes.”

“Now something amazing is happening. As I turn those hands backwards and
backwards, time itself begins to flow in reverse. It isn’t a quarter past
eleven any more. It’s now eleven o’clock. This is a magic watch. It governs
the flow of time. And now it’s ten o’clock in the morning. . . nine
o’clock. . . eight o’clock.... Look around you. Where are you now?”

The girl opened her eyes. They were fixed on a distant point. She said,
“Ummm. . . the kitchen. Yeah. The breakfast nook. Boy, the bacon’s nice and
crisp.”

Gradually, Carol moved her back in time, back through the days she had
spent in the hospital, finally regressing to the accident last Thursday
morning. The girl winced as she relived the moment of impact, and cried
out, and Carol soothed her, and then they went back a few minutes further.

“You’re standing on the sidewalk,” Carol said.

“You’re dressed only in a blouse and jeans. It’s raining. Chilly.”

The girl closed her eyes again. She shivered.

“What’s your name?” Carol asked. Silence.

“What’s your name, honey?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where have you just come from?”

“Nowhere.”

“You mean you have amnesia?” “Yes.”

“Even before the accident?’

“Yes.”

Although she was still very concerned about the girl, Carol was relieved to
hear that she wasn’t responsible for Jane’s condition. For a moment she
felt like that blue kite, capable of soaring up and away.

Then she said, “Okay. You’re about to step into the street. Do you just
want to cross it, or do you intend to walk in front of a car?’

“I. . . don’t. . . know.”

“How do you feel? Happy? Depressed? Indifferent?”

“Scared,” the girl said in a small, shaky voice.

“What are you scared of?” Silence.

“What are you scared of?” “It’s coming.”

“What’s coming?” “Behind me!” “What’s behind you?”

The girl opened her eyes again. She was still staring at a distant point,
but now there was stark terror in her eyes.

“What’s behind you?” Carol asked again.

“Oh God,” the girl said miserably.

“What is it?”

“No, no.” She shook her head. Her face was bloodless.

Carol leaned forward in her chair. “Relax, honey.”

You will relax and be calm. Close your eyes.

Calm. . . like the kite.. . far above everything... floating. . . warm.”

The tension went out of Jane’s face.

“All right,” Carol said. “Staying calm, always relaxed and calm, you will
tell me what you’re afraid of.”

The girl said nothing.

“Honey, what are you scared of? What’s behind you?”

“Something...”

“What?”

“Something...”

Patiently, Carol said, “Be specific.”

“I. . . don’t know what it is. . . but it’s coming. . . and it scares me.”

“Okay. Let’s go back a bit further.” Using the image of the
backwards-moving hands on the Mickey Mouse wristwatch, she regressed the
girl another full day into the past. “Now look around. Where are you?”

“Nowhere.”

“What do you see?”

“Nothing.”

“You must see something, honey.”

“Darkness.”

“Are you in a dark room?”

“No.”

“Are there walls in the darkness?”

“No.”

“Are you outdoors at night?”

"No."

She regressed the girl another day. “Now what do you see?”

“Just the darkness.”

“There must be something else.”

“No.”

“Open your eyes, honey.”

The girl obeyed. Her blue eyes were vacant, glassy. “Nothing.”

Carol frowned. “Are you sitting or standing in that dark place?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you feel under you? A chair? A floor? A bed?”

“Nothing.”

“Reach down. Touch the floor.”

“There isn’t a floor.”

Uneasy about the direction the session was taking, Carol shifted in her
chair and stared at the girl for a while, wondering what to try next.

After a few seconds, Jane’s eyes fluttered and went shut.

Finally, Carol said, “All right. I’m turning the hands of the watch
counterclockwise again. Time is flowing in reverse. It will continue to
flow backwards, hour by hour, day by day, faster and faster, until you stop
me. I want you to stop me only when you come out of the darkness and can
tell me where you are. I’m turning the hands now. Backwards... backwards..
.“

Ten seconds passed in silence. Twenty. Thirty.

After a full minute, Carol said, “Where are you?”

“Nowhere yet.”

“Keep going. Backwards.. . back in time. .

After another minute, Carol began to think something was wrong. She had the
disquieting feeling that she was losing control of the situation and
placing her patient in some kind of danger that could not be foreseen. But
as she was about to call a halt to the regression and bring the girl
forward again, Jane spoke at last.

The girl shot up out of the chair, onto her feet, flailing and screaming.
“Somebody help me! Mama! Aunt Rachael! For God’s sake, help me!”

The voice wasn’t Jane’s. It came from her mouth, through her tongue and
lips, but it didn’t sound at all like her. It wasn’t merely distorted by
panic. It was an entirely different voice from Jane’s. It had its own
character, its own accent and tone.

“I’m going to die here’ Help! Get me out of here!”

Carol was on her feet, too. “Honey, stop it. Calm down.”

“I’m on fire! I’m on fire!” the girl screamed, and she slapped at her
clothes as if trying to put out the flames.

“No!” Carol said sharply. She stepped around the coffee table and managed
to seize the girl’s arm, taking several glancing blows in the process.

Jane thrashed, tried to break loose.

Carol held on and began to talk softly but insistently to her, calming her
down.

Jane stopped struggling, but she began to gasp and wheeze. “Smoke,” she
said, gagging. “So much smoke.”

Carol talked her out of that, too, and gradually brought her down from the
peak of hysteria.

At last Jane sank back into the wing chair. She was wan, and her forehead
was strung with beads of sweat. Her blue eyes, staring into a distant place
and time, looked haunted.

Carol knelt beside the chair and held the girl’s hand. “Honey, can you hear
me?”

“Yes.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m afraid

“There is no fire.”

“There was. Everywhere,” the girl said, still speaking with the unfamiliar
voice.

“There isn’t any more. No fire anywhere.”

“If you say so.”

“I do. I say so. Now tell me your name.”

“Laura.”

“Do you remember your last name?”

“Laura Havenswood.”

Carol flushed with triumph. “Very good. That’s just fine. Where’s your
home, Laura?”

“Shippensburg.”

Shippensburg was a small town less than an hour from Harrisburg. It was a
quiet, pleasant place that existed to serve a flourishing state college and
a large number of surrounding farms.

“Do you know the address where you live in Shippensburg?” Carol asked.

“There’s no street name. It’s a farm. Just outside of town, off Walnut
Bottom Road.”

“So you could take me there if you had to?”

“Oh, yes. It’s a pretty place. There are a pair of stone gateposts by the
verge of the county lane; they mark the entrance to our land. And there’s a
long drive flanked by maples, and there are big oaks around

the house. It’s cool and breezy in the summer with all those shade trees.”

“What’s your father’s first name?”

“Nicholas.”

“And his phone number?”

The girl frowned. “His what?”

“What’s the telephone number at your house?”

The girl shook her head. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Don’t you have a telephone?”

“What is a telephone?” the girl asked.

Carol stared at her, puzzled. It wasn’t possible for a person under
hypnosis to be coy or to make jokes of this sort. As she considered her
next move, she saw that Laura was becoming agitated again. The girl’s brow
furrowed, and her eyes widened. She started breathing hard again.

“Laura, listen to me. You will be calm. You will relax and—”

The girl writhed uncontrollably in her chair.

Squealing and gasping, she slid off the chair, rolled onto the floor,
bumping the coffee table and pushing it aside. She twisted and shuddered
and wriggled as if she were having a severe epileptic fit, though she was
not; she brushed frantically at herself, for again she seemed to believe
she was on fire. She called for someone named Rachael and choked on
nonexistent smoke.

Carol required almost a minute to talk her down, which was a serious loss
of control; a hypnotist could usually calm a subject in only seconds.
Apparently, Laura had lived through an extremely traumatic tire or had lost
a loved one in a blaze. Carol wanted to pursue the matter and learn what
was at the root of it, but this wasn’t the right time. After taking so long
to quiet her patient, she knew the session should be ended quickly.

When Laura was seated in the wing chair again, Carol crouched beside her
and instructed her to remember everything that had happened and everything
that had been said during the session. Then she led the girl forward
through time to the present and brought her out of the trance.

The girl wiped at the moist corner of one eye, shook her head, cleared her
threat. She looked at Carol and said, “I guess it didn’t work, huh?” She
sounded like Jane again; the Laura voice was gone.

But why the hell had her voice changed in the first place? Carol wondered.

“You don’t remember what happened?” Carol asked.

“What’s to remember? All that talk about a blue kite? I could see what you
were trying to do, how you were trying to lull me into a trance, so I guess
that’s why it didn’t work.”

“But it did work,” Carol assured her. “And you should be able to recall all
of it.”

The girl looked skeptical. “All of what? What happened? What did you find
out?’

Carol stared at her. “Laura.”

The girl didn’t even blink. She merely looked perplexed.

“Your name is Laura.”

“Who said”

“You did.”

“Laura? No. I don’t think so.”

“Laura Havenswood,” Carol said.

The girl frowned. “It doesn’t ring any bells at all.”

Surprised, Carol said, “You told me you live in Shippensburg.”

“Where’s that?”

“About an hour from here.”

“I never heard of it.”

“You live on a farm. There are stone gateposts to mark the entrance to your
father’s property, and there’s a long driveway flanked by maple trees.
That’s what you told me, and I’m sure it’ll turn out to be just like you
said. It’s virtually impossible to answer questions incorrectly or
deceptively while you’re hypnotized. Besides, you don’t have any reason to
deceive me. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain if we break
through this memory block.”

“Maybe I am Laura Havenswood,” the girl, said. “Maybe what I told you in
the trance was true. But I can’t remember it, and when you tell me who I
am, it doesn’t mean a thing to me. Boy, I thought if I could just remember
my name, then everything would fall into place. But it’s still a blank.
Laura, Shippensburg, a farm—I can’t connect with any of it.”

Carol was still crouched beside the girl’s chair. She rose and flexed her
stiff legs. “I’ve never encountered anything quite like this. And so far as
I know, a reaction like yours hasn’t ever been reported in any of the
psychology journals. Whenever a patient is susceptible to hypnosis, and
whenever a patient can be regressed to a moment of trauma, there’s always a
profound effect. Yet you weren’t touched at all by it. Very odd. If you
remembered while you were under hypnosis, you ought to be able to remember
now. And Just hearing your name ought to open doors for you.”

“But it doesn’t.”

“Strange. .

The girl looked up from the wing chair. “What now?’

Carol thought for a moment, then said, “I suppose we ought to have the
authorities check out the Hayenswdod identity.”

She went to her desk, picked up the phone, and called the Harrisburg
police.

The police operator referred her to a detective named Lincoln Werth, who
was in charge of a number of conventional missing-persons files as well as
the Jane Doe case. He listened to Carol’s story with interest, promised to
check it out right away, and said he would call her back the instant he
obtained confirmation of the Havenswood identity.





Four hours later, at 3:55, after Carol’s last appointment for the day, as
she and the girl were about to leave the office and go home, Lincoln Werth
rang back as promised. Carol took the call at her desk, and the girl
perched on the edge of the desk, watching, clearly a bit tense.

“Dr. Tracy,” Werth said, “I’ve been back and forth on the phone all
afternoon with the police in Shippensburg and with the county sheriff’s
office up there.

I’m afraid I have to report it’s all been a wild-goose chase.”

“There must be some mistake.”

“Nope. We can’t find anyone in Shippensburg or the surrounding county with
the name Havenswood. There’s no telephone listed for anyone of that name,
and-”

“Maybe they just don’t have a phone.”

“Of course, we considered that possibility,” Werth said. “We didn’t jump to
conclusions, believe me. For instance, when we checked with the power
company, we discovered they don’t have a customer named Havenswood anywhere
m Cumberland County, but that didn’t discourage us either. We figured these
people we’re looking for might be Amish. Lots of Amish in that neck of the
woods. If they were Amish, of course, they wouldn’t have electricity in
their house. So next we went to the property-tax rolls at the county
offices up there. What we found was that nobody named Havenswood owns a
house, let alone a farm, in that whole area.”

“They could be tenants,” Carol said.

“Could be. But what I really think they are is nonexistent. The girl
must’ve been lying.”

“Why would she?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the whole amnesia thing is a hoax. Maybe she’s just an
ordinary runaway.”

“No. Definitely not.” Carol looked up at Laura— no, her name was still
Jane—looked into those clear, bottomless blue eyes. To Werth, she said,
“Besides, it just isn’t possible to lie that well or that blatantly when
you’re hypnotized.”

Although Jane could hear only half of the conversation, she had begun to
perceive that the Havenswood name wasn’t going to check out. Her face
clouded. She got up and went to the display shelves to study the statuettes
of Mickey Mouse.

“There is something damned odd about the whole thing,” Lincoln Werth said.

“Odd?” Carol asked.

“Well, when I passed along the description of the farm that the girl
gave—those stone gateposts, the long driveway with the maples —and when I
said it was off Walnut Bottom Road, the Cumberland County

sheriff and the various Shippensburg policemen I talked to all recognized
the place right off the bat. It actually does exist.”

“Well, then—”

“But nobody named Havenswood lives there,” Detective Werth said. “The
Ohlmeyer family owns that spread. Really well known around those parts.
Highly thought of, too. Oren Ohlmeyer, his wife, and their two sons. Never
had a daughter, so I’m told. Before Oren owned the farm, it belonged to his
daddy, who bought it seventy years ago. One of the sheriff’s men went out
there and asked the Ohlmeyers if they’d ever heard of a girl named Laura
Havenswood or anything even similar to that. They hadn’t. Didn’t know
anyone fitting our Jane Doe’s description, either.”

“Yet the farm is there, just like she told us it was.”

“Yeah,” Werth said. “Funny, isn’t it?”





In the Volkswagen, on the way home from the office, as they drove along the
sun-splashed autumn streets, the girl said, “Do you think I was faking the
trance?”

“Heavens, no! You were very deeply under. And I’m quite sure you aren’t a
good enough actress to fake that business about the fire.”

“Fire?”

“I guess you don’t remember that, either.” Carol told her about Laura’s
screaming fit, the desperate cries for help. “Your terror was genuine. It
came from experience. I’d bet anything on that.”

“I don’t remember any of it. You mean I really was in a fire once?”

“Could be.” Ahead, a traffic light turned red. Carol stopped the car and
looked at Jane. “You don’t have any physical scars, so if you were in a
fire, you escaped unharmed. Of course, it might be that you lost someone in
a fire, someone you loved very much, and maybe you weren’t actually in a
fire yourself. If that’s the case, then when you were hypnotized, you might
have confused your fear for that person with fear for your own life. Am I
making myself clear?”

“I think I get what you mean. So maybe the fire— the shock of it—is
responsible for my amnesia. And maybe my parents haven’t shown up to claim
me because. . . they’re dead, burned to death.”

Carol took the girl’s hand. “Don’t worry about it now, honey. I may be all
wrong. I probably am. But I think it’s a possibility you ought to be
prepared for.”

The girl bit her lip, nodded. “The idea scares me a little. But I don’t
exactly feel sad. I mean, I don’t remember my folks at all, so losing them
would almost be like losing strangers.”

Behind them, the driver of a green Datsun blew his horn.

The light had changed. Carol let go of the girl’s hand and touched the
accelerator. “We’ll probe into the fire during tomorrow’s session.”

"You still think I am Laura Havenswood?”

“Well, for the time being, we’ll keep calling you Jane. But I don’t see why
you’d come up with the name Laura if it wasn’t yours.”.

“The identity didn’t check out,” the girl reminded her.

Carol shook her head. “That’s not exactly true. We haven’t proved or
disproved the Havenswood identity. All we know for sure is that you never
lived in Shippensburg. But you must have been there at least once because
the farm exists; you’ve seen it, if only in passing. Apparently, even under
hypnosis, even regressed beyond the onset of your amnesia, your memories
are tangled. I don’t know how that’s possible or why. I’ve never
encountered anything quite like it. But we’ll work hard at untangling them
for you.

The problem might lie in the questions I asked and the way I asked them.
We’ll just have to wait and see.”

They rode in silence for a moment, and then the girl said, “I half hope we
don’t get things untangled too quickly. Ever since you told me about your
cabin in the mountains, I’ve really been looking forward to going up
there.”

“Oh, you’ll get to go. Don’t worry about that.

We’re leaving on Friday, and even if tomorrow’s session goes well, we won’t
be able to untangle this Laura Havenswood thing that fast. I warned you,
this could be a slow, complicated, frustrating process. I’m surprised we
made any progress at all today, and I’ll be twice as surprised if we make
even half as much headway tomorrow.”

“I guess you’ll be stuck with me for a while.”

Carol sighed and pretended weariness. “Looks that way. Oh, you’re such a
terrible, terrible, terrible burden. You’re just too much to bear.” She
took one hand off the steering wheel long enough to clutch her heart in a
melodramatic gesture that made Jane giggle. “Too much! Oh, oh!”

“You know what?” the girl asked.

“What?”

“I like you, too.”

They looked at each other and grinned.

At the next red light, Jane said, “I’ve got a feeling about the mountains.”

“What’s that?”

“I have this strong feeling that it’s going to be a lot of fun up there.
Really exciting. Something special. A real adventure.” Her blue eyes were
even brighter than usual.





After dinner, Paul suggested they play Scrabble. He set up the board on the
game table in the family room, while Carol explained the rules to Jane, who
couldn’t remember whether or not she had ever played it before.

After winning the starting lottery, Jane went first with a twenty-two-point
word that took advantage of a double-count square and the automatic double
score for the first word of the game.

                                   BLADE

“Not a bad start,” Paul said. He hoped the girl would win, because she got
such a kick out of little things like that. The smallest compliment, the
most modest triumph delighted her. But he wasn’t going to throw the game
just to please her; she would have to earn it, by God. He was incapable of
giving the match away to anyone; regardless of the kind of game he was
playing, he always put as much effort and commitment into it as he put into
his work. He didn’t indulge in leisure activities; he attacked them. To
Jane, he said,. “I have a hunch you’re the kind of kid who says she’s never
played poker before—and quickly proceeds to win every pot in the game.”

“Can you bet on Scrabble?” Jane asked.

“You can, but we won’t,” Paul said.

“Scared?”

“Terrified. You’d wind up with the house.”

“I’d let you stay.”

“How decent of you.”

“For very low rent.”

“Ah, this child truly has a heart of gold!”

While he bantered with Jane, Carol studied her own group of letters. “Hey,”
she said, “I’ve got a word that ties right in with Jane’s.” She added LOOD
to the B in BLADE, forming BLOOD.

“Judging from your words,” Paul said, “I guess you two intend to play a
cutthroat game.”

Carol and Jane groaned dutifully at his bad joke and refilled their letter
trays from the stock in the lid of the game box.

To Paul’s surprise, when he looked at his own seven letters, he saw that he
had a word with which to continue the morbid theme that had been
established. He added EATH to the D at the end of BLOOD, creating DEATH.

“Weird,” Carol said.

“Here’s something weirder still,” Jane said, taking her second turn by
adding OMB to the T in DEATH.

BLADE

L

O

O

DEATH

         O

        M

         B

Paul stared at the board. He was suddenly uneasy.

What were the odds that the first four words in a game would be so closely
related in theme? Ten thousand to one? No. It had to be much higher than
that. A hundred thousand to one? A million to one?

Carol looked up from her unusual letters. “You aren’t going to believe
this.” She added three letters to the board.


  BLADE

           KILL

                  O

  O


  DEATH


          O


          M


           B

“Kill’?” Paul said.. “Oh, come on. Enough’s enough. Take it away and make
another word.”

“I can’t,” Carol said. “That’s all I have. The rest of my letters are
useless.”

“But you could have put ‘lik’ above the ‘e’ in

‘blade,” Paul said. “You could have spelled ‘like’ instead of ‘kill.”

“Sure, I could have done that, but I’d have gotten fewer points if! had.
You see? There’s no square with a double-letter score up there.”

As he listened to Carol’s explanation, Paul felt strange. Bitterly cold
inside. Hollow. As if he were balancing on a tightrope and knew he was
going to fall and fall and fall...

He was gripped by déjà vu, by such a strikingly powerful awareness of
having lived through this scene before that, for a moment, his heart seemed
to stop beating. Yet nothing like this had ever happened in any other
Scrabble game he’d ever played. So why was he so certain he had witnessed
this very thing on a previous occasion? Even as he asked himself that
question, he realized what the answer was. The seizure of déjà vu wasn’t in
reference to the words on the Scrabble board; not directly anyway. The
thing that was so frighteningly familiar to him was the unusual,
soul-shaking feeling that the coincidental appearance of those words
aroused in him; the iciness that came from within rather than from without;
the awful hollowness deep in his guts; the sickening sensation of teetering
on a high wire, with only infinite darkness below. He had felt exactly the
same way in the attic last week, when the mysterious hammering sound had
seemed to issue out of the thin air in front of his face, when each thunk!
had sounded as if it were coming from a sledge and anvil in another
dimension of time and space. That was how he felt now, at the Scrabble
board: as if he were confronted with something extraordinary, unnatural,
perhaps even supernatural.

To Carol, he said, “Listen, why don’t you just take those last three
letters off the board, put them back in the box, choose three brand-new
letters, and make some other word besides ‘kill.”

He could see that his suggestion startled her.

She said, “Why should I do that?”

Paul frowned. “Blade, blood, death, tomb, kill— what kind of words are they
for a nice, friendly, peaceable game of Scrabble?”

She stared at him for a moment, and her piercing eyes made him a bit
uncomfortable. “It’s only coincidence,” she said, clearly puzzled by his
tenseness.

“I know it’s only coincidence,” he said, though he didn’t know anything of
the sort. He was simply un

able to explain rationally the eerie feeling that the words on the board
were the work of some force far stronger than mere coincidence, something
worse. “It still gives me the creeps,” he said lamely. He turned to Jane,
seeking an ally. “Doesn’t it give you the creeps?’

“Yeah. It does. A little,” the girl agreed. “But it’s also kind of
fascinating. I wonder how long we can keep going with words that fit this
pattern.”

“I wonder, too,” Carol said. Playfully, she slapped Paul’s shoulder. “You
know what your trouble is, babe? You don’t have any scientific curiosity.
Now come on. It’s your turn.”

After putting DEATH on the board, he hadn’t replenished his supply of
letter tiles. He drew four of the small wooden squares from the lid of the
game box, put them on the rack in front of him.

And froze.

Oh God.

He was on that tightrope again, teetering over a great abyss.

“Well?” Carol asked.

Coincidence. It had to be just coincidence.

“Well?”

He looked up at her.

“What have you got?” she asked.

Numb, he shifted his eyes to the girl.

She was hunched over the table, as eager as Carol to hear his response,
anxious to see if the macabre pattern would continue.

Paul lowered his eyes to the row of letters on the wooden rack. The word
was still there. Impossible. But it was there anyway, possible or not.

“Paul?”

He moved so quickly and unexpectedly that Carol and Jane jumped. He scooped
up the letters on his rack and nearly flung them back into the lid of the
box. He swept the five offensive words off the board before anyone could
protest, and he returned those nineteen tiles to the box with all the
others.

“Paul, for heaven’s sake!”

“We’ll start a new game,” he said. “Maybe those words didn’t bother you,
but they bothered me. I’m here to relax. If I want to hear about blood and
death and killing, I can switch on the news.”

Carol said, “What word did you have?”

“I don’t know,” he lied. “I didn’t work with the letters to see. Come on.
Let’s start all over.”

“You did have a word,” she said.

“No.”

“It looked to me like you did,” Jane said.

“Open up,” Carol said.

“All right, all right. I had a word. It was obscene. Not something a
gentleman like me would use in a refined game of Scrabble, with ladies
present.”

Jane’s eyes sparkled mischievously. “Really? Tell us. Don’t be stuffy.”

“Stuffy? Have you no manners, young lady?”

“None!”

“Have you no modesty?”

“Nope.”

“Are you just a common broad?”

“Common,” she said, nodding rapidly. “Common to the core. So tell us what
word you had.”

“Shame, shame, shame,” he said. Gradually, he cajoled them into dropping
their inquiry. They started a new game. This time all the words were
ordinary, and they did not come in any unsettling, related order.

Later, in bed, he made love to Carol. He wasn’t particularly horny. He just
wanted to be as close to her as he could get.

Afterwards, when the murmured love talk finally faded into a companionable
silence, she said, “What was your word?”

“Hmmmm?” he said, pretending not to know what she meant.

“Your obscene word in the Scrabble game. Don’t try to tell me you’ve
forgotten what it was.”

“Nothing important.”

She laughed. “After everything we just did in this bed, surely you don’t
think I need to be sheltered!”

“I didn’t have an obscene word.” Which was the truth. “I didn’t really have
any word at all.” Which was a lie. “It’s just that.. .I thought those first
five words on the board were bad for Jane.”

“Bad for her?”

“Yes. I mean, you told me it’s quite possible she lost one or both of her
parents in a fire. She might be on the brink of learning about or
remembering a terrible tragedy in her recent past. Tonight she just needed
to relax, to laugh a bit. How could the game have been fun for her if the
words on the board started to remind her that her parents might be dead?”

Carol turned on her side, raised herself up a bit, leaned over him, her
bare breasts grazing his chest, and stared into his eyes. “is that really
the only reason you were so upset?”

“Don’t you think I was right? Did I overreact?”

“Maybe you did. Maybe you didn’t. It was Creepy.” She kissed his nose. “You
know why I love you so much?”

“Because I’m such a great lover?”

“You are, but that’s not why I love you.” “Because I have tight buns?”

“Not that.”

“Because I keep my fingernails so neat and clean?”

“Not that.”

“I give up.”

“You’re so damned sensitive, so caring about other people. How typical of
my Paul to worry about the Scrabble game being fun for Jane. That’s why I
love you.”

“I thought it was my hazel eyes.”

“Nah.”

“My classic profile.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Or the way my third toe on my left foot lays half under the second toe.”

“Oh, I’d forgotten about that. Hmmmmmmmm. You’re right. That’s why I love
you. Not because you’re sensitive. It’s your toes that drive me wild.”

Their teasing led to cuddling, and the cuddling led to kissing, and the
kissing led to passion again. She reached her peak only a few seconds
before he spurted deep within her, and when they finally parted for the
night, he felt pleasantly wrung out.

Nevertheless, she was asleep before he was. He stared at the dark ceiling
of the dark bedroom and thought about the Scrabble game.

BLADE, BLOOD, DEATH, TOMB, KILL...

He thought about the word he had hidden from Carol and Jane, the word that
had compelled him to end the game and start another. After adding EATH to
the D in BLOOD, he’d been left with just three letter tiles on his rack: X,
U, and C. The X and the

U had played no part in what was to follow. But when he had drawn four new
letters, they had gone disconcertingly well with the C. First he’d picked
up an A, then an R. And he had known what was going to happen. He hadn’t
wanted to continue; he’d considered throwing all the tiles back into the
box at that moment, for he dreaded seeing the word that he knew the last
two letters would spell. But he hadn’t ended it there. He had been too
curious to stop when he should have stopped. He had drawn a third tile,
which had been an 0, and then a fourth, L.

C...A. ..R...O...L...

BLADE, BLOOD, DEATH, TOMB, KILL, CAROL.

Of course, even if he was able to fit it in, he couldn’t put CAROL on the
board, for it was a proper name, and the rules didn’t allow the use of
proper names. But that was a moot point. The important thing was that her
name had been spelled out so neatly, so boldly on his rack of letters that
it was uncanny. He had drawn the letters in their proper order, for God’s
sake! What were the odds against that?

It seemed to be an omen. A warning that something was going to happen to
Carol. Just as Grace Mitowski’s two nightmares had turned out to be
prophetic.

He thought about the other strange events that had transpired recently: the
unnaturally violent lightning strikes at Alfred O’Brian’s office; the
hammering sound that had shaken the house; the intruder on the rear lawn
during the thunderstorm. He sensed that all of it was tied together. But
for Christ’s sake, how?

BLADE, BLOOD.

DEATH, TOMB.

KILL, CAROL.

If the series of words on the Scrabble tiles had constituted a prophetic
warning, what was he supposed to do about it? The omen, if it was an omen,
was too vague to have any value. There was nothing specific to guard
against. He couldn’t protect Carol until he knew from which direction the
danger was coming. A car wreck? A plane crash. A mugger? Cancer? It could
be anything. He could see nothing to be gained by telling Carol that her
name had turned up on his rack of Scrabble tiles; there was nothing she
could do, either, nothing except worry about it.

He didn’t want to worry her.

Instead, lying in the darkness, feeling icy even under the covers, he
worried for her.





At two o’clock in the morning, Grace was still reading in the study. There
wasn’t any point in going to bed for at least another hour or two. The
events of the last week had turned her into an insomniac.

The day just past had been relatively uneventful.

Aristophanes was still behaving oddly—hiding from her, sneaking about,
watching her when he thought she didn’t know he was there—but he hadn’t
torn up any more pillows or furniture, and he had used his litter box as he
was supposed to do, which were encouraging signs. She hadn’t received any
more telephone calls from the man who had pretended to be Leonard, and for
that she was grateful. Yes, it had been pretty much an ordinary day.

And yet...

She was still tense and unable to sleep because she sensed that she was in
the eye of the hurricane. She sensed that the peace and quiet in her house
were deceptive, that thunder and lightning raged on all sides of her, just
beyond the range of her hearing and just out of sight. She expected to be
plunged back into the storm at any moment, and that expectation made it
impossible for her to relax.

She heard a furtive sound and glanced up from the novel she was reading.

Aristophanes appeared at the open study door, peering in from the hallway.
Only his elegant Siamese head was visible as he craned it cautiously around
the doorframe.

Their eyes met.

For an instant, Grace felt that she was not looking into the eyes of a dumb
animal. They seemed to contain intelligence. Wisdom. Experience. More than
mere animal intent and purpose.

Aristophanes hissed.

His eyes were cold. Twin balls of crystal-clear, blue-green ice.

“What do you want, cat?”

He broke the staring contest. He turned away from her with haughty
indifference, padded past the doorway, and went softly down the hail,
pretending that he hadn’t been spying on her, even though they both knew he
had been doing exactly that.

Spying? she thought. Am I crazy? Who would a cat be spying for?
Catsylvania? Great Kitten? Purrsia?

She could think of other puns, but none of them brought a smile to her
lips.

Instead, she sat with the book on her lap, wondering about her sanity.

                                     9

THURSDAY AFTERNOON.

The office drapes were tightly closed as usual. The light from the two
floor lamps was golden, diffuse. Mickey Mouse was still smiling broadly in
all his many incarnations.

Carol and Jane sat in the wing chairs.

The girl slipped into a trance with only a little assistance from Carol.
Most patients were more susceptible to hypnosis the second time than they
had been the first, and Jane was no exception.

Again using the imaginary wristwatch, Carol turned the hands of time
backwards and regressed Jane into the past. This time the girl didn’t need
two minutes to get beyond her amnesia. In only twenty or thirty seconds,
she reached a point at which memories existed for her.

She twitched and suddenly sat up ramrod-straight in her chair. Her eyes
popped open like the eyes on a doll; she was looking through Carol. Her
face was twisted with terror.

“Laura?” Carol asked.

Both of the girl’s hands flew up to her throat. She clutched herself,
gasping, gagging, grimacing in pain. She appeared to be reliving the same
traumatic experience that had panicked her during yesterday’s sessions, but
today she did not scream.

“You can’t feel the fire,” Carol told her. “There is no pain, honey. Relax.
Be calm. You can’t smell the smoke, either. It doesn’t bother you at all.
Breathe easily, normally. Be calm and relax.”

The girl didn’t obey. She quivered and broke out in a sweat. She retched
repeatedly, dryly, violently, yet almost silently.

Afraid that she had lost control again, Carol redoubled her efforts to
soothe her patient, without success.

Jane began to gesture wildly, her hands cutting and stabbing and tugging
.and hammering at the air.

Abruptly, Carol realized the girl was trying to talk, but for some reason
had lost her voice.

Tears welled up and slid down Jane’s face. She was moving her mouth without
the slightest result, desperately trying to force out words that refused to
come. In addition to the terror in her eyes, there was now frustration.

Carol quickly fetched a notebook and a felt-tipped pen from her desk. She
put the notebook on Jane’s lap and pressed the pen into her hand.

“Write it for me, honey.”

The girl squeezed the pen so hard that her knuckles were white and nearly
as sharp as the knuckles on a skeleton’s fleshless hand. She looked down at
the notebook. She stopped retching, but she continued to quiver.

Carol crouched beside the wing chair, where she could see the notebook.
“What is it you want to say?”

Her hand shaking like that of a palsied old woman, Jane hurriedly scrawled
two words that were barely legible: Help me.

“Why do you need help?”

Again:    Help me.

“Why can’t you speak?”

Head.

“Be more specific.”

My head.

“What about your head?”

The girl’s hand began to form a letter, then jumped down one line and made
another false start, jumped to a third line—as if she couldn’t figure out
how to express what she wanted to say. At last, in a frenzy, she started
slashing at the paper with the felt-tipped pen, making a meaningless
crosshatching of black lines.

“Stop it!” Carol said. “You will relax, dammit. Be calm.”

Jane stopped slashing at the paper. She was silent, staring down at the
notebook on her lap.

Carol tore off the smeared page and threw it on the floor. “Okay. Now
you’re going to answer my questions calmly and as fully as you can. What is
your name?”

Millie.

Carol stared at the handwritten name, wondering what had happened to Laura
Havenswood. “Millie?

Are you sure that’s your name?” Millicent Parker.

“Where is Laura?”

Who’s Laura?

Carol stared at the girl’s drawn face. The perspiration was beginning to
dry on her porcelain-smooth skin. Her blue eyes were blank, unfocused. Her
mouth was slack.

Carol abruptly flashed a hand past the girl’s face. Jane didn’t flinch. She
wasn’t faking the trance.

“Where do you live, Millicent?”

Harrisburg.

“Right here in town. What’s your address?”

Front Street.

“Along the river? Do you know the number?” The girl wrote it down.

“What’s your father’s name?”

Randolph Parker.

“What’s your mother’s name?”

The pen made a meaningless squiggle on the notebook page.

“What’s your mother’s name?” Carol repeated.

The girl surrendered to a new series of spasmic tremors. She retched
soundlessly and put her hands to her throat once more. The felt-tipped pen
made a black mark on the underside of her chin.

Apparently, the mere mention of her mother frightened her. That was
territory that would have to be explored, though not right now.

Carol talked her down, calmed her, and asked a new question. “How old are
you, Millie?”

Tomorrow’s my birthday.

“Is it really? How old will you be?”

I won’t make it.

“What won’t you make?”

Sixteen.

“Are you fifteen now?”

Yes.

“And you think you won’t live to be sixteen? Is that it?”

Won’t live.

“Why not?”

The sheen of sweat had nearly evaporated from the

girl’s face, but again perspiration popped out along

her hairline.

“Why won’t you live to see your birthday?” Carol persisted.

As before, the girl used the felt-tipped pen to slash angrily at the
notebook.

“Stop that,” Carol said firmly. “Relax and be calm and answer my question.”
She tore the ruined page out of the book and tossed it aside, then said,
“Why won’t you live to see your sixteenth birthday, Millie?”

Head.

So we’re back to this, Carol thought. She said,

“What about your head? What’s wrong with it?”

Cut off.

Carol stared at those two words for a moment, then looked up at the girl’s
face.

Millie-Jane was struggling to remain calm, as Carol had told her she must.
But her eyes jiggled nervously, and there was horror in them. Her lips were
utterly colorless, tremulous. Beneath the rivulets of sweat that coursed
down her forehead, her skin was waxy and mealy white.

She continued to scribble frantically in the note-

book, but all she wrote was the same thing over and over again: Cut cut
off, cut off cut off... She was bearing down on the page with such great
pressure that the head of the felt-tipped pen was squashed into shapeless
mush.

My God, Carol thought, this is like a live report from the bottom of Hell.

Laura Havenswood. Millicent Parker. One girl screaming in pain as fire
consumed her, the other a victim of decapitation. What did either of those
girls have to do with Jane Doe? She couldn’t be both of them. Perhaps she
wasn’t either of them. Were they people she had known? Or were they only
figments of her imagination?

What in Christ’s name is happening here? Carol wondered.

She put her own hand over the girl’s writing hand and stilled the squeaking
pen. Speaking gently, rhythmically, she told Millie-Jane that everything
was all right, that she was perfectly safe, and that she must relax.

The girl’s eyes stopped jiggling. She sagged back in her chair.

“All right,” Carol said. “I think that’s enough for today, honey.”

Employing the imaginary wristwatch, she brought the girl forward in time.

For a few seconds everything went well, but then, without warning, the girl
erupted from her chair, knocking the notebook off her lap and flinging the
pen across the room. Her pale face flushed red, and her placid expression
gave way to a look of pure rage.

Carol rose from beside the girl’s chair and stepped in front of her.
“Honey, what’s wrong?”

The girl’s eyes were wild. She began to shout with such force that she
sprayed Carol with spittle. “Shit! The bitch did it! The rotten, goddamn
bitch!”

The voice wasn’t Jane’s.

It wasn’t Laura’s either.

It was a new voice, a third one, with its own special character, and Carol
had a hunch it didn’t belong to Millicent Parker, the mute. She suspected
that an entirely new identity had surfaced.

The girl stood very stiff and straight, her hands fisted at her sides,
staring off into infinity. Her face was distorted by anger. “The stinking
bitch did it! She did it to me again!”

The girl continued to shout at the top of her voice, and half of the words
she blurted out were obscene. Carol tried to soothe her, but this time it
wasn’t easy. For at least a minute the girl continued to wail and curse. At
last, however, at Carol’s urging, she got control of herself. She stopped
shouting, but there was still anger in her face.

Holding the girl by the shoulders, face to face with her, Carol said,
“What’s your name?’

“Linda.”

“What’s your last name?”

“Bektermann.”

It was yet another identity, as Carol had thought. She had the girl spell
the name.

Then:      “Where do you live, Linda?”

“Second Street.”

“In Harrisburg?”

“Yes.”

Carol asked for the exact address, and the girl responded. ft was only a
few blocks from the Front Street address that Millicent Parker had
provided.

“What’s your father’s name, Linda?”

“Herbert Bektermann.”

“What’s your mother’s name?”

That question had the same effect on Linda as it had had on Millie. She
rapidly became agitated and began to shout again. “The bitch! Oh, God, what
she did to me. The slimy, rotten bitch! I hate her. I hate her!”

Chilled by the combination of fury and agony in the girl’s tortured voice,
Carol quickly quieted her.

Then:      “How old are you, Linda?”

“Tomorrow’s my birthday.”

Carol frowned. “Am I talking to Millicent now?”

“Who’s Millicent?”

“Is this still Linda I’m talking to?’

“Yes.”

“And your birthday is tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“How old will you be?”

“I won’t make it.”

Carol blinked. “You mean you won’t live to see your birthday?”

"That’s right.”

“Is it your sixteenth birthday?”

“Yes.”

“You’re fifteen now?”

“Yes.”

“Why are you worried about dying?”

“Because I know I will.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I already am.”

“You’re already dying?”

“Dead.”

“You’re already dead?”

“I will be.”

“Please be specific. Are you telling me that you’re already dead? Or are
you saying that you’re merely afraid you’re going to die sometime soon?’

“Yes.”

“Which is it?”

“Both.”

Carol felt as if she were in the middle of a tea party at the Mad Hatter’s
house.

“How do you think you’re going to die, Linda?”

“She’ll kill me.”

“Who?”

“The bitch.”

“Your mother?”

The girl doubled over and clutched at her side, as if she had been struck.
She screamed, turned, staggered two steps, and fell with a crash. On the
floor she still clutched her side, and she kicked her legs, writhed. She
was obviously in unendurable pain. It was only imaginary pain, of course,
but to the girl it was indistinguishable from the real thing.

Frightened, Carol knelt beside her, held her hand, and urged her to be
calm. When the girl eventually relaxed, Carol quickly brought her all the
way back to the present and out of the trance.

Jane blinked, stared up at Carol, and put one hand on the floor beside her,
as if testing the truth of what her eyes told her. “Wow, what am I doing
down here?”

Carol helped her to her feet. “I suppose you don’t remember?”

“No. Did I tell you anything more about myself?’

“No. I don’t think so. You told me you were a girl named Millicent Parker,
and then you told me you were a girl named Linda Bektermann, but obviously
you can’t be both of them and Laura, too. So I suspect that you aren’t any
of them.”

“I don’t think so, either,” Jane said. “Those two new names don’t mean
anything more to me than

Laura Havenswood did. But who are those people?

Where did I get their names, and why did I tell you I was any of them?”

“I’ll be damned if I know,” Carol said. “But sooner or later, we’ll figure
it out. We’ll get to the bottom of all this, kiddo. I promise you that.”

But what in God’s name will we find at the bottom, down there in the dark?
Carol wondered. Will it be something we’ll wish we’d left buried forever?



                                    ***





Thursday afternoon, Grace Mitowski worked in the rose garden behind her
house. The day was warm and clear, and she felt the need for some exercise.
Besides, in the garden she wouldn’t be able to hear the telephone ringing
and wouldn’t be tempted to answer it. Which was fine, because she wasn’t
psychologically prepared to answer the phone just yet; she hadn’t decided
how to deal with the hoaxer the next time he called and pretended that he
was her long-dead husband.

Because of last week’s torrential rains, the roses were past their prime.
The last flowers of the season should have been at the peak of their beauty
right now, but many of the big blooms had lost a fifth or even a fourth of
their petals under the lashing of the wind-whipped rain. Nevertheless, the
garden was still a colorful, cheery sight.

She had let Aristophanes out for some exercise.

She kept an eye on him, intending to call him back the moment he headed off
the property. She was determined to keep him away from whoever had poisoned
or drugged him. But he didn’t seem to be in a rambling mood; he stayed
nearby, creeping among the roses, stirring up a moth or two and chasing
them with catlike single-mindedness.

Grace was on her hands and knees in front of a row of intermingled yellow
and crimson and orange flowers, hand-spading the earth with a trowel, when
someone said, “You have a magnificent garden.”

Startled, she looked up and saw a thin, jaundice-skinned man in a rumpled
blue suit that hadn’t been in fashion for many years. His shirt and tie
were hopelessly out of style, too. He looked as if he had stepped out of a
photograph taken in the 1940s. He had thinning hair the color of summer
dust, and his eyes were an unusual shade of soft brown, almost beige. His
face was composed entirely of narrow features and sharp angles that gave
him a look halfway between that of a hawk and that of a parsimonious
moneylender in a Charles Dickens novel. He appeared to be in his early or
middle fifties.

Grace glanced at the gate in the white board fence that separated her
property from the street. The gate was standing wide open. Evidently, the
man had been strolling by, had seen the roses through a gap in the
poplar-tree hedge that stood on the outside of the fence, and had decided
to come in and have a closer look.

His smile was warm, and there was kindness in his eyes, and he seemed not
to be intruding, even though he was. “You must have two dozen varieties of
roses here.”

“Three dozen,” she said.

“Truly magnificent,” he said, nodding approval.

His voice wasn’t thin and sharp like the rest of him. It was deep, mellow,
friendly, and would have seemed more fitting if it had issued from a
brawny, hearty fellow half again this man’s size. “You take care of the
entire garden yourself?”

Grace sat back on her heels, still holding the trowel in one gloved hand.
“Sure. I enjoy it. And somehow. . . it just wouldn’t be my garden if I
hired someone to help me with it.”

“Exactly!” the stranger said. “Yes, I can understand how you feel.”

“Are you new in the neighborhood?” Grace asked.

“No, no. Used to live just a block from here, but that was a long, long
time ago.” He took a deep breath and smiled again. “Ah, the wonderful aroma
of roses!

Nothing else smells half so pretty. Yes, you’ve got

a superb garden. Really superb.”

“Thank you.”

He snapped his fingers as a thought occurred to him. “I ought to write
something about this. It might make a first-rate human-interest piece. This
fantasy-land tucked away in an ordinary backyard. Yes, I’m sure it would be
just the thing. A nice change of pace for me.”

“Are you a writer?”

“Reporter,” he said, still taking deep breaths and savoring the aroma of
the blooms.

“Are you with a local paper?”

“The Morning News. Name’s Palmer Wainwright”

“Grace Mitowski.”

“I hoped you might recognize my byline,” Wainwright said, grinning.

“Sorry. I don’t read the Morning News. I take the

Patriot-News from the delivery boy every morning.” “Ah, well,” he said,
shrugging, “that’s a good paper, too. But of course, if you don’t read the
Morning News, you never saw my story about the Bektermann case.”

As Grace realized that Wainwright intended to hang around awhile, she got
off her haunches, stood up, and flexed her rapidly stiffening legs. “The
Bektermann case? That sounds familiar.”

“All the papers reported it, of course. But I did a five-part series. Good
stuff, even if I do say so myself. I got a Pulitzer nomination for it. Did
you know that? An honest-to-God Pulitzer nomination.”

“Really? Why, that’s something,” Grace said, not sure if she should take
him seriously but not wanting to offend him. “That is really something.
Imagine. A Pulitzer nomination.”

It seemed to her that the conversation had suddenly taken an odd turn. It
wasn’t casual any longer. She sensed that Wainwright had come into the yard
not to admire her roses and not to have a friendly chat, but to tell her, a
complete stranger, about his Pulitzer nomination.

“Didn’t win,” Wainwright said. “But the way I look at it, a nomination is
almost as good as the prize itself. I mean, out of the tens of thousands of
newspaper articles that’re published in a year, only a handful are up for
the prize.”

“Refresh my memory, if you will,” Grace said.

“What was the Bektermann case about?”

He laughed good-naturedly and shook his head. “Wasn’t about what I thought
it was about. That’s for damned sure. I wrote it up as a tangled, Freudian

puzzle. You know—the iron-willed father, with perhaps an unnatural
attraction for his own daughter, the mother with a drinking problem, the
poor girl caught in the middle. The victimized young girl subjected to
hideous psychological pressures beyond her understanding, beyond her
tolerance, until at last she simply—snapped. That’s how I saw it. That’s
how I wrote it up. I thought I was a brilliant detective, digging to the
deepest roots of the Bektermann tragedy.

But all I ever saw was the window-dressing. The real story was far stranger
than anything I ever imagined. Hell, it was too strange for any serious
reporter to risk handling it. No reputable paper would have printed it as
news. If had known the truth, and if! had somehow gotten it published, I’d
have destroyed my career.”

What the devil’s going on? Grace wondered. He seems obsessed with telling
me about this in detail, compelled to tell me, even though he’s never even
seen me before. Is this life imitating art—Coleridge’s poem reset in a rose
garden? Am I the partygoer and Wainwright the Ancient Mariner?

As she looked into Wainwright’s beige eyes, she suddenly realized how alone
she was, even here in the yard. Her property was ringed by trees,
sheltered, private.

“Was it a murder case?” she asked.

“Was and is,” Wainwright said. “It didn’t end with the Bektermanns. It’s
still going on. This damned, endless pursuit. It’s still going on, and it’s
got to be stopped this time around. That’s why I’m here. I’ve come to tell
you that your Carol is in the middle of it. Caught in the middle. You’ve
got to help her. Get her out of the girl’s way.”

Grace gaped at him, reluctant to believe that she

had heard what she knew she had heard.

“There are certain forces, dark and powerful forces,” Wainwright said
calmly, “that want to see— Shrieking angrily, Aristophanes sprang at
Wainwright with berserk passion. He landed on the man’s chest and scrambled
onto his face.

Grace screamed and jumped back in fright.

Wainwright staggered to one side, grabbed the cat with both hands, and
tried unsuccessfully to wrench it off his face.

“Ari!” Grace cried. “Stop it!”

Aristophanes had his claws in the man’s neck and was biting his cheek.

Wainwright wasn’t screaming as he ought to have been. He was eerily silent
as he wrestled with the cat, even though the creature seemed determined to
tear off his face.

Grace moved toward Wainwright, wanting to help, not knowing what to do.

The cat was squealing. It bit off a gobbet of flesh from Wainwright’s
cheek.

Oh Jesus, no!

Grace moved in quickly, raising the trowel, but hesitated. She was afraid
of hitting the man instead of the cat.

Wainwright suddenly turned away from her and stumbled through the rose
bushes, past white and yellow blooms, the cat still clinging to him. He
walked into a waist-high hedge, fell through it, onto the lawn On the other
side, out of sight.

Grace hurried to the end of the hedgerow, stepped around it, heart
hammering, and discovered that

Wainwright had vanished. Only the cat was there, and it bolted past her,
sprinted across the garden, up the back porch steps, and into the house
through the half-open rear door.

Where was Wainwright? Had he crawled away, dazed, wounded? Had he passed
out in some sheltered corner of the garden, bleeding to death?

The yard contained half a dozen shrubs large and dense enough to conceal
the body of a man Wainwright’s size. She looked around all of them, but she
could find no trace of the reporter.

She looked toward the garden gate that led to the street. No. He couldn’t
have gone that far without drawing her attention.

Frightened, confused, Grace blinked at the sun-dappled garden, trying to
understand.





The Harrisburg telephone book contained neither a listing for Mr. Randolph
Parker nor one for Herbert Bektermann. Carol was perplexed but not
surprised.

After she saw her final patient of the day, she and Jane drove to the
address on Front Street where Millicent Parker had claimed to live. It was
a huge, impressive Victorian mansion, but it hadn’t been anyone's home for
a long time. The front lawn had been paved over for a parking lot. There
was a small, tasteful sign by the entrance drive:

                          MAUGHAM & CRICHTON, INC.

                           A MEDICAL CORPORATION

Many years ago, this portion of Front Street had been one of the most
elegant neighborhoods in Pennsylvania’s capital city. During the past
couple of decades, however, many of the riverfront boulevard’s grand old
houses had been razed to make room for sterile, modem office buildings. A
few of the rambling houses had been preserved, at least after a fashion—
the exteriors beautifully restored, the interiors gutted and converted to
various commercial uses. Farther north, there was still a section of Front
Street that was a desirable residential area, but not here, not where
Millicent Parker had sent them.

Maugham & Crichton was a group medical practice that included seven
physicians: two general internists and five specialists. Carol had a chat
with the receptionist, a henna-haired woman named Polly, who told her that
none of the doctors was named Parker. Likewise, no one of that name was
employed as a nurse or as a member of the clerical staff. Furthermore,
Maugham & Crichton had been at their current address for nearly seventeen
years.

It had occurred to Carol that Jane might once have been a patient of one of
Maugham & Crichton’s physicians, and that her subconscious mind had made
use of the firm’s address to flesh out the Millicent Parker identity. But
Polly, who had worked for Maugham & Crichton ever since they’d opened their
doors, was sure she had never seen the girl. However, intrigued by Jane’s
amnesia and sympathetic by nature, Polly agreed to check the files to see
if Maugham & Crichton had ever treated anyone named Laura Havenswood,
Millicent Parker, or Linda Bektermann. It was a fruitless search; none of
those names appeared in the patient records.

                                    ***

Grace stepped through the gate, into the street, and looked both ways.
There was no sign of Palmer Wainwright.

She returned to her own backyard, closed and latched the gate, and walked
toward the house.

Wainwright was sitting on the porch steps, waiting for her.

She stopped fifteen feet from him, amazed, confused.

He got up from the steps.

“Your face,” she said numbly.

His face was unscarred.

He smiled as if nothing had happened and took two steps toward her.
“Grace—”

“The cat,” she said. “I saw your cheek.. . your neck. . . it’s claws tore
out. .

“Listen,” he said, taking another step toward her, “there are certain
forces, dark and powerful forces, that want to see this played out the
wrong way. Dark forces that thrive on tragedy. They want to see it end in
senseless violence and blood. That mustn’t be allowed to happen, Grace. Not
again. You’ve got to keep Carol out of the girl’s way, for her sake and for
the sake of the girl, too.”

Grace gaped at him. “Who the hell are you?”

“Who are you?” Wainwright asked, raising one eyebrow quizzically. “That is
the important question right now. You aren’t only who you think you are.
You aren’t only Grace Mitowski.”

He’s mad, she thought. Or I’m mad. Or we both are. Stark, raving mad.

She said, “You’re the one on the phone. You’re the creep who imitates
Leonard’s voice.”

“No,” he said. “I am—”

“No wonder Ari attacked you. You’re the one who’s been giving him drugs or
poison or something like that. You’re the one, and he knew.”

But what about the facial wounds, the gouged neck? she asked herself. How
in the name of God did those injuries heal so quickly?

How?

She pushed those thoughts out of her mind, refused to think about such
things. She must have been mistaken. She must have imagined that Ari had
actually hurt the man.

“Yeah,” she said, “you’re the one who’s behind all of these weird things
that’ve been happening. Get off my property, you son of a bitch.”

“Grace, there are forces aligned. . .“ He looked no different now from the
way he had looked when he’d first spoken to her, several minutes ago. He
hadn’t looked crazed then; he didn’t look crazed now. He didn’t look
dangerous, and yet he continued to babble about dark forces. “. . . good
and evil, right and wrong. You’re on the right side, Grace. But the cat—
ah, the cat’s a different story. At all times, you must be wary of the
cat.”

“Get out of my way,” she said.

He took a step toward her.

She slashed at him with the gardening trowel, missing his face by just an
inch or two. She slashed again and again and again, cutting only empty air,
not really wanting to cut anything else unless she had no choice, just
hoping to keep him at bay until she could slip around him, for he was
between her and the house. And then she was around him; she turned and ran
for the kitchen door, painfully aware that her legs were old and arthritic.
She went only a few steps before she realized she shouldn’t have turned her
back on the lunatic, and she wheeled to confront him, gasping, certain that
he was leaping toward her, perhaps with a knife in his hand— But he was
gone.

Vanished. Again.

He hadn’t had time to reach any of the shrubs that were large enough to
conceal a man, not during the split second her back had been turned. Even
if he had been a much younger man than he was, in the very best condition,
a trained runner—even then he couldn’t have gone more than halfway to the
gate in such a short time.

So where was he?

Where was he?





From the offices of Maugham & Crichton on Front Street, Carol and Jane
drove a few blocks to the Second Street address that was supposed to be the
home of Linda Bektermann. It was in a good neighborhood; a lovely French
country house, at least fifty years old, in fine condition. No one was at
home, but the name on the mailbox was Nicholson, not Bektermann.

They rang the bell at the house next door and talked to a neighbor, Jean
Gunther, who confirmed that the French country place was owned and occupied
by the Nicholson family.

“My husband and I have lived here for six years,”

Mrs. Gunther said, “and the Nicholsons were next door when we moved in. I
think I once heard them say they’d lived in that house since 1965.”

The name Bektermann meant nothing to Jean Gunther.

In the car again, on the way home, Jane said, “I’m really a lot of trouble
for you.”

“Nonsense,” Carol said. “I kind of enjoy playing detective. Besides, if I
can help you break through your memory block, if I can uncover the truth
behind all the sleight-of-hand tricks that your subconscious is playing,
then I’ll be able to write about this case for any psychology journal I
choose. It’ll definitely make my name in the profession. I might even wind
up with a book out of it. So you see, because of you, kiddo, I could become
rich and famous some day.”

“When you’re rich and famous, will you still talk to me?” the girl teased.

“Certainly. Of course, you’ll have to make an appointment a week in
advance.”

They grinned at each other.

                                    ***





Using the kitchen phone, Grace called the offices of

the Morning News.

The switchboard operator at the newspaper didn’t have an extension number
listed for Palmer Wainwright. She said, “So far as I know, he don’t even
work here. And I’m sure he’s no reporter. Maybe one of the new copy editors
or somebody like that.”

“Could you connect me with the managing editor’s office?” Grace asked.

“That would be Mr. Quincy,” the operator said. She buzzed the proper
extension.

Quincy wasn’t in his office, and his secretary didn’t know whether or not
the paper employed a man named Palmer Wainwright. “I’m new here,” she said
apologetically. “I’ve only been Mr. Quincy’s secretary since Monday, so I
don’t know everybody yet. If you’ll leave your name and number, I’ll have
Mr. Quincy return your call.”

Grace gave her the number and said, “Tell him Dr. Grace Mitowski wishes to
speak with him and that I’ll only need a few minutes of his time.” She
seldom used the honorific in front of her name, but it came in handy in
cases like this, for a doctor’s phone calls were always returned.

“Is this an emergency, Dr. Mitowski? I don’t think that Mr. Quincy’s going
to be back until tomorrow morning.”

“That’ll be good enough,” she said. “Have him call me first thing, no
matter how early he gets in.”

After she hung up, she went to the kitchen and stared out at the rose
garden.

How could Wamwright vanish like that?





For the third evening in a row, Paul and Carol and Jane prepared dinner
together. The girl was fitting in better day by day.

If she stays with us just another week, Paul thought, it’ll seem like she’s
always been here.

The salad consisted of hearts of palm and iceberg lettuce. That was
followed by eggplant Parmigiana with spaghetti on the side.

As they were starting dessert—small dishes of

richly flavored spumoni—Paul said, “Any chance we

could postpone the trip to the mountains for two days?”

“Why?” Carol asked

“I’m a bit behind in my writing schedule, and I’m at a very critical point
in the book,” he said. “I’ve written two-thirds of the toughest scene in
the story, and I hate to leave it unfinished just to go on vacation.

I won’t enjoy myself. If we left Sunday instead of tomorrow, that would
give me time to polish off the end of the chapter. And we’d still have
eight days at the cabin.”

“Don’t look at me,” Jane said. “I’m just excess baggage. I’ll go wherever
you take me, whenever you take me.”

Carol shook her head. “Just last week, when Mr. O’Brian said we were
compulsive overachievers, we made up our minds to change our ways, didn’t
we? We’ve got to learn to make time for leisure and not let our work
encroach on that.”

“You’re right,” Paul said. “But just this once—”

He broke off in midsentence because he saw that Carol was determined. She
was rarely intractable, but when she did decide not to compromise on. an
issue, she was about as movable as Gibraltar. He sighed. “Okay. You win.
We’ll leave tomorrow morning. I’ll just bring along the typewriter and the
manuscript. I can finish the scene up at the cabin and—”

“Nothing doing,” Carol said, emphasizing each word by tapping her spoon
against her ice cream dish.

“If you bring it along, you won’t stop when you’ve reached the end of the
scene you’re working on. You’ll keep going. You know you will. Having the
typewriter within easy reach will just be too much of a temptation. You
won’t be able to resist it. The whole vacation will go down the drain.”

“But I just can’t put that scene on hold for ten days,” he said pleadingly.
“By the time I get back to it, the tone and the spontaneity will be lost.”

Carol ate a spoonful of spumoni and said, “All right. Here’s what we’ll do.
Jane and I will leave for the mountains first thing in the morning, just as
we planned. You stay here, finish your scene, and then drive up to join us
whenever you’re ready.”

He frowned. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

“Why not?”

“Well, is it really wise for the two of you to go up there alone? I mean,
the summer season is over. Theme aren’t going to be many campers in the
woods now, and most of the other cabins will be deserted.”

“For heaven’s sake,” Carol said, “there’s no

Abominable Snowman lurking around in those mountains, Paul. We’re in
Pennsylvania, not Tibet.” She smiled. “It’s nice to know you’re so
concerned about us, darling. But we’ll be perfectly safe.”

                                    ***





Later, after Jane had gone to bed, Paul made one last attempt to change
Carol’s mind, although he knew the effort would be wasted.

He leaned against the frame of the closet door and watched as Carol
selected clothes for the suitcases.

“Listen, be straight with me, okay?”

“Aren’t I always? Straight about what?”

“The girl. Is there any chance she’s dangerous?”

Carol turned from the clothes rack and stared at him, obviously surprised
by his question. “Jane? Dangerous? Well, a girl as pretty as she is will
probably

break a lot of hearts over the years. And if cuteness could kill, she’d
leave the streets littered with bodies behind her.”

He refused to be amused. “I don’t want you to be flippant about this. I
think it’s important. I want you to give it careful thought.”

“I don’t need to give it a lot of thought, Paul. She’s lost her memory,
sure. But she’s a stable, mentally healthy kid. In fact, it takes an
amazingly stable personality to handle amnesia the way she’s handled it. I
don’t know that I’d do half as well if I were in her shoes right now. I’d
either be a nervous wreck or sunk neck-deep in depression. She’s resilient,
flexible. Resilient and flexible people aren’t dangerous.”

“Never?”

“Hardly ever. It’s the rigid ones who crack.”

“But after what’s happened in your therapy sessions with her, isn’t it
reasonable to wonder about what she might be capable of doing?” he asked,

“She’s a tortured girl. I believe she’s been through a truly terrifying
experience, something so awful that she refuses to relive it, even under
hypnosis. She obfuscates, misdirects, and holds back vital information, but
that doesn’t mean she’s the least bit dangerous. Just scared. It seems
evident to me that she was the victim of either physical or psychological
violence at some time in her life. The victim, Paul, not the perpetrator.”

She carried a few pairs of jeans to the suitcases that were open on the
bed.

Paul followed her. “Are you going to continue her therapy while you’re at
the cabin?”

Yes. I think it’s best to keep chipping away at the Wall of confusion she’s
thrown up.”

“No fair.”

“Huh?’

“That’s work,” he said. “I’m not allowed to take my work up to the cabin,
but you’re going to work.

That’s a double standard, Dr. Tracy.”

“Double standard, my ass, Dr. Tracy. I’ll need only half an hour a day for
Jane’s therapy. That’s a lot different than lugging an IBM Selectric into
the piny woods and pounding on the keys ten hours a day. Don’t you realize
that all the squirrels and deer and bunny rabbits would complain about the
noise?”



                                    ***





Later still, when they were in bed and the lights were out, he said, “Hell,
I’m letting this book take possession of me. Why can’t I let the scene lie
unfinished for ten days? I might even do a better job with it if I take the
time to think about it. I’ll come along with you and Jane tomorrow, and I
won’t bring the typewriter. Okay? I won’t even bring a pencil.”

“No,” Carol said.

“No?”

“When you do get to the mountains, I want you to be able to put the book
completely out of your mind. I want us to take long walks in the forest. I
want us to go boating on the lake and do some fishing and read a couple of
books and act like bums who never even heard the word ‘work.’ if you don’t
finish that scene before you go, you’ll just brood about it during the
entire vacation. You won’t have a moment's real peace, which means I won’t
have a moment's peace, either. And don’t tell me I’m wrong. I know you
better than I know myself, buster: You

stay here, write the end of that scene, and then join us on Sunday.”

She kissed him goodnight, fluffed her pillows, and settled down to sleep.

He lay in the dark, thinking about the words in yesterday’s Scrabble game.




 BLADE

           KILL

  O

  O


  DEATH


           O


           M


            B

And the one word he had refused to reveal:

CAROL...

He still didn’t think anything would be gained by telling her what the last
of those six words had been. What could she do about it other than worry?
Nothing. She could do nothing, and he could do nothing. Except wait and
see. A threat—if one actually arose—could come from any of ten thousand or
a hundred thousand sources. It could come anytime, anywhere. At home or in
the mountains. One place was as safe—or as dangerous—as the other.

Anyway, maybe the appearance of those six words had been merely
coincidence. An incredible but meaningless coincidence.

He stared into the darkness, trying hard to convince himself that there
were no such things as spirit messages, omens, and clairvoyant prophecies.
Only a week ago, he wouldn’t have needed convincing.



                                    ***





Blood.

Get it off, scrub it off, every sticky drop of it, wash it off, quickly,
quickly, down the drain, every incriminating drop of it, off, before
someone finds out, before someone sees and knows what’s been done, wash it
off, off...

The girl woke in the bathroom, in a fluorescent glare. She had been
sleepwalking again.

She was surprised to find that she was nude. Her knee socks, panties, and
T-shirt were scattered on the floor around her.

She was standing in front of the sink, scrubbing herself with a wet
washcloth. When she looked at her reflection in the mirror, she was briefly
paralyzed by what she saw.

Her face was smeared with blood.

Her arms were spattered with blood.

Her sweetly uptilted, bare breasts glistened with blood.

And she knew instantly that it wasn’t her own. She had not been slashed or
stabbed. She was the one who had done the slashing, the stabbing.

Oh God.

She stared at her gruesome reflection, morbidly fascinated by the sight of
her blood-moistened lips.

What have I done?

She slowly lowered her gaze along her crimsoned neck, looked down at the
reflection of her right nipple, on which hung a very fat, carmine droplet
of gore.

The gleaming pearl of blood quivered for an instant on the tip of her erect
nipple; then it succumbed to gravity and fell away from her.

She pulled her gaze from the mirror, lowered her head to see where the
droplet had struck the floor.

There was no blood.

When she looked directly at herself, rather than at her reflection, she
discovered that her body was not covered with blood after all. She touched
her bare breasts. They were damp because she had been scrubbing them with
the washcloth, but the dampness was nothing more than water. Her arms
weren’t spattered with blood, either.

She squeezed the washcloth. Clear water dripped from it; the cloth bore no
grisly stains.

Confused, she raised her eyes to the mirror once more and saw the blood, as
before.

She held out her hand. In reality it was not bloody, but in the mirror it
was sheathed in a glove of gore.

A vision, she thought. A weird illusion. That’s all. I didn’t hurt anyone.
I didn’t spill anyone’s blood.

As she struggled to understand what was happening. her mirror image faded,
and the glass in front of her turned black. It seemed to have been
transformed into a window that looked out onto another dimension, for it
reflected nothing that was in the bathroom.

This is a dream, she thought. I’m really snug in bed, where I belong. I’m
only dreaming that I’m in the bathroom I can put a stop to this just by
waking up.

On the other hand, if it was a dream, would she be able to feel the cold
ceramic floor beneath her bare feet as vividly as she could fuel it now? If
it was really only a dream, would she be aware of the cold water on her
bare breasts?

She shivered.

In the lightless void on the other side of the mirror, something flickered
far off in the darkness.

Wake up!

Something silvery. It flashed again and again, back and forth, the image
growing steadily larger.

For God’s sake, wake up!

She wanted to run. Couldn’t.

She wanted to scream. Didn’t.

In seconds the flickering object filled the mirror, pushing back the
darkness out of which it had come, and then somehow it burst out of the
mirror without shattering the glass, exploded out of the void and into the
bathroom with one final, murderous swing, and she saw that it was an ax,
bearing down on her face, the steel blade gleaming like the finest silver
under the fluorescent lights. As the wickedly sharp edge of the ax swept
inexorably toward her head, her knees buckled, and she fainted.





                                    ***



Near dawn, Jane woke again.

She was in bed. She was nude.

She threw the covers back, sat up, and saw her 1-shirt, panties, and knee
socks on the floor beside the bed. She dressed quickly.

The house was silent. The Tracys weren’t up yet.

Jane hurried quietly down the hallway to the guest bathroom, hesitated on
the threshold, then stepped

inside and snapped on the lights.

There was no blood, and the mirror above the sink was only an ordinary
mirror, reflecting her worried face but contributing no bizarre images of
its own.

Okay, she thought, maybe I was sleepwalking. And maybe I was actually here
without any clothes on, trying to scrub nonexistent blood off my body. But
the rest of it was just part of the nightmare. It didn’t happen. It
couldn’t. Impossible. The mirror couldn’t really change like that.

She stared into her own blue eyes. She wasn’t sure what she saw in them.

“Who am I?” she asked softly.





All week, Grace’s sleep—what little she had managed to get between bouts of
insomnia—had been dreamless. But tonight she thrashed for hours in the
sheets, trying to fight her way out of a nightmare that seemed to last an
eternity.

In the dream, a house was on fire. A big, beautifully ornamented Victorian
house. She was standing outside the blazing structure, pounding on a pair
of slant-set cellar doors and calling a name over and over again. “Laura!
Laura!” She knew that Laura was trapped in the cellar of the burning house
and that these doors were the only way out, but the doors were latched on
the inside. She hammered on the wood with her bare hands until each blow
sent a cruel bolt of pain the length of her arms, through her shoulders,
and up the back of her neck. She wished desperately that she had an ax or a
pry-bar or some other tool with which she could smash through the cellar
doors, but she had nothing other than her fists, so she pounded and pounded
until her flesh bruised and split and bled, and she kept on pounding even
then, all the while screaming for Laura. Windows exploded on the second
floor, showering glass down over her, but she didn’t turn away from the
slant-set cellar doors; she didn’t run. She continued to slam her bloodied
fists into the wood, praying that the girl would answer at any moment. She
ignored the sparks that showered down on her and threatened to set her
gingham dress afire. She wept, and she coughed when the wind blew the acrid
smoke in her direction, and she cursed the wood that so easily resisted her
fierce but ineffectual attack.

The nightmare had no climax, no peak of terror. It simply went on all night
long at a continuously breathless pace until, a few minutes after dawn,
Grace finally wrenched herself out of the hot, clutching arms of sleep and
woke with a wordless cry, flailing at the mattress.

She sat up on the edge of the bed and held her throbbing head in her hands.

Her mouth was filled with the taste of ashes and bile.

The dream had been so vivid that she had even felt the high-necked,
long-sleeved, blue and white gingham dress binding at her shoulders and
across her bust as she had hammered on the cellar doors. Now, wide awake,
she could still feel the dress binding her, even though she was wearing a
loose nightgown, and even though she had never worn such a dress in her
entire life.

Worse, she could smell the house burning.

The smoke odor lingered so long after she had awakened that she became
convinced that her own house was ablaze. Quickly, she pulled on a robe,
stepped into her slippers, and went from one room to another, searching for
the fire.

There was no fire.

Yet for almost an hour, the stench of burning wood and tar stayed with her.

                                     10

FRIDAY morning at nine o’clock, Paul sat down at his writing desk, picked
up the phone, and called Lincoln Werth, the police detective in charge of
the Jane Doe case. He told Werth that Carol was taking the girl out of town
for a few days of rest and recreation.

“Might as well,” Werth said. “We don’t have any leads, and I sure don’t
think this is going to break wide open anytime soon. We keep expanding the
search area, of course. At first we just put the kid’s photo and
description out to authorities in the surrounding counties. When that
didn’t do us any good, we put it on the wire to police agencies all over
the State. Yesterday morning we took another step and Wired the same data
to seven neighboring states. But I’ll tell you something, just between you
and me. Even if we expand the search area all the way to Hong

Kong, I got a feeling we ain’t never going to find anyone who knows the
kid. I just have a hunch. We’re going to keep coming up empty-handed.”

After talking to Werth, Paul went down to the garage, where Carol and Jane
were putting their gear in the trunk of the Volkswagen. To spare the girl
grief, Paul didn’t pass along Werth’s pessimistic assessment of the
situation. “He said it’s all right to leave town for a few days. The court
didn’t restrict you to Harrisburg. I told him where the cabin is, so if
anyone turns up to claim our girl here, the Harrisburg police will contact
the county sheriff out that way, and he or one of his deputies will drop by
the cabin and let you know you’ve got to come back.”

Carol kissed him goodbye. Jane kissed him, too; hers was a shy, chaste
kiss, lightly planted on his cheek, and when she got into the car, she was
blushing brightly.

He stood in front of the house and watched them drive away until the red
Volkswagen Rabbit was out of sight.

After almost a week of blue skies, clouds had drifted in again. They were
flat, slate gray. They matched Paul’s mood.

                                    ***





When the kitchen phone rang, Grace steeled herself for the sound of
Leonard’s voice. She sat down in the chair at the small built-in desk,
reached up, put her hand on the receiver that hung on the wall, let it ring
once more, then picked it up. To her relief, it was Ross Quincy, the
managing editor of the Morning

News, returning the call she’d made late yesterday afternoon.

“You were inquiring about one of our reporters, Dr. Mitowski?”

“Yes. Palmer Wainwright.”

Quincy was silent.

“He does work for you, doesn’t he?” Grace asked.

“Uh.. Palmer Wainwnght has been an employee of the Morning News, yes.”

“I believe he nearly won a Pulitzer Prize.”

“Yes. But of course. . . that was quite a while back.”

“Oh?”

“Well, if you know about the Pulitzer nomination, you must know it was for
the series he did on the Bektermann murders.”

“Yes.”

“Which was back in 1943.”

“That long ago?”

“Uh. . . Dr. Mitowski, exactly what is it you wanted to know about Palmer
Wainwright?”

“I’d like to talk with him,” she said. “We’ve met, and we have some
unfinished business that I’m rather anxious to take care of. It’s a.. .
personal matter.”

Quincy hesitated. Then: “Are you a long-lost relative?”

“Of Mr. Wainwright’s? Oh, no.”

“A long-lost friend?”

“No. Not that either.”

“Well, then, I guess I don’t have to be delicate about this. Dr. Mitowski,
I’m afraid that Palmer Wainwright is dead.”

“Dead!” she said, astounded.

“Well, surely you realized there was that possibility. He was never a well
man, downright sickly. And you’ve obviously been out of touch with him for
a long time.”

“Not all that long,” she said.

“Must be at least thirty-five years,” Quincy said. “He died back in 1946.”

The air at Grace’s back seemed suddenly colder than it had been an instant
ago, as if a dead man had expelled his icy breath against the nape of her
neck.

“Thirty-one years,” she said numbly. “You must be wrong.”

“Not a chance. I was just a green kid back then, a copyboy. Palmer
Wainwright was one of my heroes. I took it pretty hard when he went.”

“Are we talking about the same man?” Grace asked. “He was quite thin, with
sharp features, pale brown eyes, and a rather sallow complexion. His voice
was several notes deeper than you’d expect from just looking at him.”

“That was Palmer, all right.”

“About fifty-five?”

“He was thirty-six when he died, but he did look twenty years older,”
Quincy said. “It was that string of illnesses, one thing right after
another, with cancer at the end. Jt just wore him down, aged him fast. He
was a fighter, but he just couldn’t hold on any longer.”

Thirty-one years in the grave? she thought. But I saw him yesterday. We had
a strange conversation in the rose garden. What do you say to that, Mr.
Quincy?

“Dr. Mitowski? Are you still there?”

“Yes. Sorry. Listen, Mr. Quincy, I hate to take your valuable time, but
this is really important. I believe the Bektermann case had a lot to do
with the personal business I wanted to discuss with Mr. Wainwright. But I
don’t really know anything about those murders. Would you mind telling me
what it was all about?”

“Family tragedy,” Quincy said. “The Bektermanns’ daughter went berserk the
day before her sixteenth birthday. Her mind just snapped. Apparently, she
got it in her head that her mother intended to kill her before she turned
sixteen, which was not true, of course. But she thought it was true, and
she went after her mother with an ax. Her father and a visiting cousin got
in the way, and she killed them. Her mother actually managed to wrench the
ax out of the girl’s hands. But that didn’t stop the kid. She just picked
up a fireplace poker and kept coming. When the mother, Mrs. Bektermann, was
backed into a corner and was about to have her skull cracked open with the
poker, she didn’t have any choice but to swing the ax at her daughter. She
hit the girl once, in the side. A pretty deep cut. The kid died in the
hospital the next day. Mrs. Bektermann only killed in self-defense, and no
charges were brought against her, but she felt so guilty about killing her
own child that she had a complete breakdown and eventually wound up in an
institution.”

“And that’s the story that won Mr. Wainwright his Pulitzer nomination?”

“Yeah. In the hands of a lot of reporters, the piece Would have been
nothing but sensationalistic garbage. But Palmer was good. He wrote a
sensitive, well-researched study of a family with serious emotional,
interpersonal problems. The father was a domineering man who set extremely
high standards for his daughter and very likely had an unnatural attraction
to her. The mother was always competing with the father for the girl’s
heart, mind, and loyalty, and when she saw she was losing that battle, she
turned to drink. There were extraordinary psychological pressures brought
to bear on the daughter, and Palmer made the reader feel and understand
those pressures.”

She thanked Ross Quincy for his time and consideration. She hung up the
phone.

For a while she just sat there, staring at the softly humming refrigerator,
trying to make sense of what she had been told. If Wainwright had died in
1946, whom had she talked to in the garden yesterday?

And what did the Bektermann murders have to do with her? With Carol?

She thought of what Wainwright had told her: This damned, endless pursuit.
It’s still going on, and it’s got to be stopped this tune around ye come to
tell you that your Carol is in the middle of it.

You’ve got to help her. Get her out of the girl’s way.

She felt she was on the verge of understanding what he had meant. And she
was scared.

Even though a number of impossible things had transpired within the past
twenty-four hours, she no longer questioned either her sanity or her
perceptions.

She was sane, perfectly sane, and in command of all her faculties. Senility
was not even a remote possibility any longer. She sensed that the
explanation for these events was far more frightening, more soul-shattering
even than the prospect of senility, which had once terrified her.

She recalled something else that Palmer Wainwright had said yesterday in
the garden: You aren’t only who you think you are. You aren’t only Grace
Mitowski.

She knew the solution to the puzzle was within her grasp. She sensed a dark
knowledge within her, long-forgotten memories waiting to be tapped. She was
afraid to tap them, but she knew she must do precisely that, for Carol’s
sake, and perhaps for her own sake as well.

Suddenly, the air in the kitchen, though still quite clear, reeked of wood
and tar smoke. Grace could hear the crackle of fire, although there were no
flames here, now, in this place and time.

Her heart pounded frantically, and her mouth turned dry and sour.

She closed her eyes and could see the burning house as vividly as she had
seen it in the dream. She could see the cellar doors, and she could hear
herself screaming, calling Laura.

She knew it hadn’t been only a dream. It had been a memory, lost for ages,
surfacing now, reminding her that, indeed, she was not only Grace Mitowski.

She opened her eyes.

The kitchen was hot, stifling.

She felt herself being pulled along by forces she could not comprehend, and
she thought: Is this what I want? Do I really want to flow with this and
discover the truth and turn my little world upside down? Can

I handle it?

The stench of nonexistent smoke grew stronger.

The roar of nonexistent flames grew louder.

I guess there’s no turning back now, she thought.

She held her hands up in front of her face and Stared at them, amazed. Her
flesh had been miraculously disfigured by stigmata. Her hands were bruised,
abraded, bloody. There were splinters of wood embedded in her palms,
splinters from the cellar doors

on which she had pounded such a long, long time ago.



                                    ***





At ten o’clock, when the phone rang, Paul had been at his desk, writing,
for almost an hour. The work had just begun to flow smoothly. He snatched
up the receiver and said, a bit impatiently, “Yes?”

An unfamiliar female voice said, “Could I speak to Dr. Tracy, please?”

“Speaking.”

“Oh. Uh.. no.. . the Dr. Tracy I’m looking for is a woman.”

“It’s my wife you want,” he said. “She’s out of town for a few days. Can I
take a message?”

“Yes, please. Would you tell her that Polly called from Maugham &
Crichton?”

He jotted the name down on a note pad. “And what’s this in reference to?”

“Dr. Tracy was here yesterday afternoon with a young girl who’s suffering
from amnesia. . .

“Yes,” Paul said, suddenly more interested than he had been. “I know the
case.”

“Dr. Tracy was asking if we’d ever heard of anyone named Millicent Parker.”

“That’s right. She told me about it last evening. It was another dead end,
I gather.”

“It seemed to be a dead end yesterday,” Polly said, “but now it turns out
that one of our doctors is familiar with the name. Dr. Maugham himself, in
fact.”

“Listen, rather than waiting for my wife to call you back, why don’t you
just tell me what you’ve come up with, and I can pass the information along
to her.”

“Well, sure, why not? See, Dr. Maugham is the senior partner in the
practice. He bought this property eighteen years ago and personally oversaw
the restoration of the outside and the renovation of the interior. He’s a
history bug, so it was natural for him to want to know the history of the
building he purchased. He says this place was built in 1902 by a man named
Randolph Parker. Parker had a daughter named Millicent.”

“1902?”

“That’s right.”

“Interesting.”

“You haven’t heard the best part,” Polly said, the eagerness of a
gossip-monger in her voice. “Seems that back in 1905, the night before
Millie’s sixteenth birthday party, Mrs. Parker was in the kitchen,
decorating a big cake for the girl. Millie snuck in behind her and stabbed
her in the back four times.”

Unthinking, Paul snapped the pencil he’d been holding ever since he’d
written Polly’s name on the note pad. One broken piece popped out of his
hand, spun across the top of the desk, and fell to the floor.

“She stabbed her own mother?” he asked, hoping that he had not heard
correctly.

“Isn’t that something?”

“Kill her?” he asked numbly.

“No. Dr. Maugham says that according to the newspaper accounts at that
time, the girl used a short bladed knife. It didn’t sink in far enough to
do really major damage. No vital organs or blood vessels were affected.
Louise Parker—that was the mother’s flame—managed to grab a meat cleaver
from a kitchen rack. She tried to hold the girl off with that. But I guess
Millie must have been completely off her rocker, ‘cause she charged
straight at Mrs. Parker again, and Mrs. Parker had to use that cleaver.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah,” Polly said, obviously enjoying his shocked reaction. “Dr. Maugham
says she put that cleaver right into her daughter’s throat. Pretty much cut
the girl’s head clear off. Isn’t that a terrible thing? But what else could
she do? Just let the kid go on jabbing that knife into her?”

Stunned, Paul thought about yesterday’s hypnotic regression therapy
session, which Carol had recounted for him in some detail. He remembered
the part about how Jane had claimed to be Millicent Parker and had insisted
on writing out her answers to questions and had written that she was unable
to talk because her head had been cut off.

“Are you still there?” Polly asked.

“Oh. Uh. . . sorry. Is there more to the story?”

“More?” Polly asked. “Wasn’t that enough?”

“Yes,” he said. “You’re absolutely right. That was enough. More than
enough.”

“I don’t know if this information is of any help to Dr. Tracy.”

“I’m sure it will be.”

“I don’t see how it could have anything to do with the girl she brought in
here with her yesterday.”

“Neither do I,” Paul said.

“I mean, that girl can’t be Millicent Patter. Millicent Parker has been
dead for seventy-six years.”



                                    ***

In the study, Grace stood at her desk, looking down at the open dictionary.



REINCARNATION (re’-in-kár-na’shen), n. 1. the doctrine that the soul, upon
death of the body, comes back to earth in another body or form. 2. rebirth
of the soul in a new body. 3. a new incarnation or embodiment, as of a
person.



Bunk? Nonsense? Superstition? Bullshit?

At one time, not long ago, those were all the words she would have used to
write her own irreverent definition of reincarnation. But not now. Not any
longer.

She closed her eyes, and with only the slightest effort, she was able to
bring back the image of the burning house. She wasn’t just envisioning it;
she was there, hammering with her fists on the cellar door. She was not
Grace Mitowski now; she was Rachael Adams, Laura’s aunt.

The fire scene was not the only part of Rachael’s life that she could
recall with perfect clarity. She knew the woman’s most intimate thoughts,
her hopes and dreams and hates and fears, shared her most closely held
secrets, for those thoughts and hopes and dreams and fears and secrets had
been her own.

She opened her eyes and needed a moment to refocus them on the present-day
world.

                               REINCARNATION

She closed the dictionary.

God help me, she thought, do I really believe it? Can it be true that I’ve
lived before? And that Carol’s lived before? And the girl they’re calling
Jane Doe?

If it was true—if she had been permitted to recall her previous existence
as Rachael Adams in order to save Carol’s life in this incarnation—then she
was wasting valuable time.

She picked up the phone to call the Tracys, wondering how in God’s name she
was going to make them believe her.

There was no dial tone.

She jiggled the receiver-cradle buttons.

Nothing.

She put the receiver down and followed the cord around the side of the desk
to the wall, to see if it had come unplugged. It wasn’t unplugged; it was
chewed.

Bitten in two.

Aristophanes.

She remembered other things that Palmer Wainwright had said in the garden:
There are certain forces, dark and powerful forces, that want to see this
played out the wrong way. Dark forces that thrive on tragedy. They want to
see it end in senseless violence and blood. . . There are forces aligned. .
. good and evil, right and wrong. You’re on the right side, Grace. But the
cat—ah, the cat’s a different story. A: all times, you must be wary of the
cat.

She also remembered when the series of paranormal events had begun, and she
realized that the cat had been an integral part of it all, from the very
start. Wednesday of last week. When she had suddenly awakened from her
afternoon nap that day—catapulted out of a nightmare about Carol—there had
been an incredibly brilliant and violent barrage of Lightening beyond the
study windows. She had staggered to the nearest window, and while she had
stood there on unsteady, arthritic legs, half-awake and half-asleep, she’d
had the eerie feeling that something monstrous had followed her up from the
world of her nightmare, something demonic with a hungry grin on its face.
For a few seconds that feeling had been so strong, so real, that she had
been afraid to turn around and look into the shadowy room behind her. But
then she had dismissed that weird thought as nothing more than the cold
residue of the nightmare. Now, of course, she knew she shouldn’t have
dismissed it so quickly. Something strange had been in the room with her—a
spirit; a presence; call it what you will. It had been there. And now it
was in the cat.

She left the study and hurried down the hall.

In the kitchen, she found that phone cord also chewed apart.

There was no sign of Aristophanes.

Nevertheless, Grace knew he was nearby, perhaps even close enough to be
watching her. She sensed his—or its—presence.

She listened. The house was too silent.

She wanted to cross the few feet of open floor to the kitchen door, open it
boldly, and walk away from the house. But she strongly suspected that any
attempt to leave would trigger an immediate and vicious attack.

She thought about the cat’s claws, teeth, fangs. It wasn’t merely a house
pet, not just an amusing Siamese with a cute, furry face. It was actually a
tough little killing machine, too; its feral impulses lay beneath a thin
veneer of domestication. It was both respected and dreaded by mice and
birds and squirrels. But could it kill a grown woman?

Yes, she thought uneasily. Yes, Aristophanes could kill me if he caught me
by surprise and if he went for either my throat or my eyes.

The best thing she could do was stay within the house and not antagonize
the cat until she had armed herself and could feel confident of winning any
battle.

The only other telephone was in the second-floor bedroom. Wary, she went
upstairs, even though she knew the third extension would be out of order,
too.

It was.

But there was something in the bedroom that made the journey up the stairs
worthwhile. The gun. She pulled open the top drawer of her nightstand and
took out the loaded pistol she kept there. She had a hunch she would need
it.

A hiss. A rustle.

Behind her.

Before she could swing around and confront her adversary, he was on her. He
vaulted from the floor to the bed, sprang from the bed to her back, landing
with nearly enough force to knock her off balance. She tottered for a
moment and almost fell forward into the bedside lamp.

Aristophanes hissed and spat and scrambled for purchase on her back.

Fortunately, she kept her feet under her. She spun around and shook
herself, frantically attempting to throw him off before he could do any
damage.

His claws were hooked in her clothes. Although she was wearing both a
blouse and a sweater, she felt a couple of his razor-tipped nails
puncturing her skin—hot little points of pain. He wouldn’t let go.

She drew her shoulders up and tucked her head down, pulling her chin in
tight against her chest, protecting her neck as best she could. She swung
one fist up behind her back, struck only air, tried again, and hit the cat
with a blow that was too weak to have done any harm.

Nevertheless, Aristophanes squealed with rage and snapped at her neck. He
was foiled by her hunched shoulders and by her thick hair, which got in his
mouth and gagged him.

She had never wanted anything half so much as she wanted to kill the little
bastard. He was no longer the familiar pet she had loved; he was a strange
and hateful beast, and she harbored no ghost of affection for him.

She wished she could use the gun she was clutching in her right hand, but
there was no way she could shoot him without shooting herself, too.

She struck at him repeatedly with her left hand, her arthritic shoulder
protesting sharply, painfully when she twisted her arm up and backwards at
such an unnatural angle.

At least for a moment, the cat abandoned its relentless but thus far
ineffective attack on her neck. It slashed its claws across her flailing
fist, slicing open the skin on her knuckles.

Her fingers were instantly slick with blood. They stung so badly that her
eyes started to water.

Either the sight or the odor of the blood encouraged the cat. It shrieked
with savage glee.

Grace began to think the unthinkable—that she was going to lose this fight.

No!

She struggled against the grip of fear that threatened to incapacitate her,
tried to clear her panic-befuddled mind, and suddenly had an idea that she
thought might save her life. She stumbled toward the nearest stretch of
open wall, to the left of the dresser. The cat clung tenaciously to her
back, insistently pressing its snout against the base of her skull, hissing
and snarling. It was determined to force its way to her sheltered neck and
rip open her jugular vein.

When Grace reached the wall, she turned her back to it, then fell against
it with all her weight, slamming the cat into the plaster behind her,
pinning it hard between her body and the wall, hoping to break its spine.
The jolt brought a flash of pain through her shoulders and drove the
animal’s claws deeper into her back muscles. The cat’s scream was nearly
shrill enough to shatter fine crystal, and it sounded almost like the wail
of a human infant. But its grip on her didn’t weaken. Grace pushed away
from the wall, then slammed into it a second time, and the cat wailed as
before, but still held fast. She thrust herself off the wall, intending to
make a third attempt to crush her adversary, but before she could fall back
on him, the cat let go of her. He dropped to the floor, rolled, sprang to
his feet, and scurried away from her, favoring his right foreleg.

Good. She had hurt him.

She sagged against the wall, raised the .22 pistol that was stilt in her
right hand, and squeezed the trigger.

Nothing.

She had forgotten to switch off the safeties.

The cat hurried through the open door and disappeared into the upstairs
hail.

Grace went to the door, closed it, leaned wearily against it. Gasping.

Her left hand was scratched and bleeding, and her back bore half a dozen
claw punctures, but she had won the first round. The cat was limping; he
was injured, perhaps as badly as she was, and he was the one who had
retreated.

No celebration, though. Not yet.

Not until she had gotten out of the house alive. And not until she was
certain that Carol was safe, too.





After the unsettling telephone conversation he’d had with the receptionist
at Maugham & Crichton, Paul didn’t know what the hell to do.

He couldn’t write. That was for sure. He couldn’t get his mind off Carol
long enough to advance the plot of his novel by so much as even one
sentence.

He wanted to call Lincoln Werth, at police headquarters, and arrange to
have a sheriff’s deputy waiting at the cabin when Carol and Jane arrived up
there. He wanted them brought home. But he could imagine the conversation
he would have with Detective Werth, and the thought of it daunted him:

“You want a deputy to meet them at the cabin?”

“That’s right.”

“Why?”

“1 think my wife’s in danger.”

“What kind of danger?”

“1 think the girl, Jane Doe, might be violent. Maybe even homicidal.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because under hypnosis she claimed to be Millie Parker.”

“Who’s that?”

“Millie Parker once tried to kill her mother.”

“She did? When was that?”

“Back in 1905.”

“Then she’d be a little old lady today, for Christ’s sake. The kid’s only
fourteen or fifteen.”

“You don’t understand. Millie Parker’s been dead for about seventy-six
years and—”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute! What the hell are you saying? That your wife
might be murdered by some kid who’s been dead for most of the century?”

“No. Of course not.”

“Then what do you mean?”

“F. . . don’t know.”

Werth would think that he had been out boozing all night, or that he had
started the morning with a couple of joints of good grass.

Besides, it wasn’t fair to Jane to accuse her publicly of being a potential
killer. Perhaps Carol was right. Maybe the kid was just a victim. Except
for what she said under hypnosis, she certainly seemed to be incapable of
violence.

On the other hand, of all the people she could have claimed to be, why had
she said that she was Millicent Parker, the would-be murderess? Where had
she heard that name before. Didn’t the use of it indicate latent hostility?

Paul swiveled his typing chair away from the desk and stared out the window
at the gray sky. The wind was picking up by the minute. The clouds were
racing westward across the sky, as if they were enormous, swift, dark ships
with billowing sails the color of thunderstorms.

BLADE, BLOOD, DEATH, TOMB, KILL, CAROL.

I’ve got to go to the cabin, he thought with sudden decisiveness, and he
got to his feet.

Maybe he was overreacting to this Millicent Parker business, but he
couldn’t just sit here, wondering....

He went into the master bedroom to throw some things into a suitcase. After
only a brief hesitation, he decided to pack his .38 revolver.





The girl said, “How much farther to the cabin?”

“Another twenty minutes,” Carol said. “The whole drive usually takes just
about two hours and fifteen minutes, and we’re pretty much on schedule.”

The mountains were cool and green. Some trees had already been touched by
the artful hand of autumn, and most—all but the evergreens—would change the
color of their leaves during the next few weeks. Today, however, the
predominant shade was still green, with a smattering of gold here and
there, an occasional touch of red. The edge of the forest— wherever the
meadow or the roadway met the trees— was decorated with a few
end-of-the-season wildflowers, blue and white and purple.

“It’s beautiful up here,” Jane said as they followed the two-lane county
road around a curve. The right-hand bank, which sloped down to the macadam,
was covered with vividly green clusters of rhododendron shrubs.

“I love the Pennsylvania mountains,” Carol said. She felt more relaxed now
than she had in weeks. “It’s so peaceful here. Wait till you’ve been at the
cabin a day or two. You’ll forget the rest of the world exists.”

They came out of the curve onto an ascending straightaway, where the
interlocking branches of the trees formed a tunnel over portions of the
lane. At those points where the trees parted sufficiently to provide a
glimpse of the sky, there was nothing to be seen but massive, gray-black
clouds clotted together in surging, ugly, threatening formations.

“I sure hope it doesn’t rain and spoil our first day here,” Jane said.

“Rain won’t spoil anything,” Carol assured her. “If we’re forced to stay
inside, we’ll just throw a whole bunch of logs in the big stone fireplace
and roast some hot dogs indoors. And we have a closetful of games to help
us pass rainy days. Monopoly, Scrabble, Clue, Risk, Battleship, and at
least a dozen others. I think we’ll be able to avoid cabin fever.”

“It’s going to be fun,” Jane said enthusiastically.

The canopy of trees parted overhead, and the September sky churned darkly.

                                     11

GRACE sat on the edge of the bed, holding the .22 pistol, considering her
options. She didn’t have many.

In fact, the more she thought about it, the more it seemed to her that the
cat had a better chance of winning this duel than she did.

If she attempted to leave the house by way of the bedroom window, she would
surely break a leg and probably her neck as well. If she had been only
twenty years younger, she might have tried it. But at seventy, with her
swollen joints and brittle bones, jumping from a second-floor window onto a
concrete patio could only end in misery. Anyway, the point wasn’t just to
get out of the house, but to get out in one piece, so she could make it
across town to Carol’s and Paul’s place.

She could open the window and start screaming for help. But she was afraid
that Aristophanes—or the thing using Aristophanes' body—would attack anyone
who showed up and tried to assist her, and she didn’t want a neighbor’s
death on her conscience.

This was her battle. No one else’s. She would have to fight it alone.

She considered all the routes by which she might possibly leave the house
once she had reached the bottom floor—if she reached the bottom floor—but
no particular route seemed less dangerous than any other. The cat could be
anywhere. Everywhere. The bedroom was the only safe place in the house. If
she ventured out of this sanctuary, the cat would be waiting for her and
would attack her, regardless of whether she tried to exit the house by the
front door, the kitchen door, or one of the ground-floor windows. It would
be crouched in one shadow or another, perhaps perched atop a bookcase or
cupboard or hutch, tensed and ready to launch itself down onto her
startled, upturned face.

She had the gun, of course. But the cat, stealthy by nature, would always
have the advantage of surprise. If it got just a two- or three-second lead
on her, if she was only that little bit slower to react than was the cat,
it would have ample time to fasten onto her face, tear open her throat, or
gouge her eyes out with its quick, stiletto claws.

Strangely, though she had accepted the doctrine of reincarnation, though
she now knew beyond doubt that there was some kind of life after death, she
nevertheless feared dying. The certainty of eternal life in no way
diminished the value of this life. Indeed, now that she could discern
godlike machinery just below the visible surface of the world, her life
seemed to have more meaning and purpose than ever before.

She didn’t want to die.

However, although the odds of her leaving the house alive were, at best,
only fifty-fifty, she couldn’t stay in the bedroom indefinitely. She had no
water, no food. Besides, if she didn’t get out of’ here in the next few
minutes, she might be too late to be of any help to Carol.

If Carol is killed simply because I lack the courage to face that damned
cat, she thought, then I might as well be dead anyway.

She switched off the two safeties on the pistol.

She got up and went to the door.

For nearly a minute she stood with one ear pressed to the door, listening
for scratching noises or other indications that Aristophanes was nearby.
She heard nothing.

Holding the pistol in her right hand, she used her bloody, claw-torn left
hand to turn the knob. She opened the door with the utmost caution, half an
inch at a time, expecting the cat to dart through the opening the instant
it was wide enough to admit him. But he didn’t.

Finally, reluctantly, she poked her head out into the hall. Looked left.
Right.

The cat wasn’t anywhere in sight.

She stepped into the hail and paused, afraid to move away from the bedroom
door.

Go! she told herself angrily. Move your ass, Gracie!

She took a step toward the head of the stairs. Then another step. Trying to
be quiet.

The stairs appeared to be a mile away.

She looked behind her.

Still no Aristophanes.

Another step.

This was going to be the longest walk she had ever taken.





Paul latched his suitcase, picked it up, turned away from the bed—and
jumped, startled, when the entire house shook as if a wrecker’s ball had
struck the side of it.

THUNK!

He looked up at the ceiling.

THUNK! THUNK! THUNK!

During the past five days there had been no hammering to disturb the peace.
He hadn’t entirely forgotten about it, of course; he still occasionally
wondered where that mysterious sound had come from. For the most part,
however, he had put it out of his mind; there had been other things to
worry about. But now— THUNK! THUNK! THUNK!

The nerve-fraying noise reverberated in the windows and bounced off the
walls. It seemed to vibrate in Paul’s teeth and bones, too.

THUNK!

After spending days trying to identify the source of that sound,
understanding came to him unexpectedly, in a flash. It was an ax. It was
not a hammering, which was how he had been thinking of it. No. There was a
sharp edge to it, a brittle, cracking quality at the end of each blow. It
was a chopping sound.

THUNK!

Being able to identify the noise did absolutely nothing to help him
understand where it was coming from.

So it was an ax instead of a hammer. So what? He still couldn’t make sense
of it. Why were the blows shaking the entire house? It would have to be the
mythical Paul Bunyan’s ax to have such a tremendous impact. And regardless
of whether it was a hammer or an ax or even, for Christ’s sake, a salami,
how could the sound of it issue from thin air?

Suddenly, inexplicably, he thought of the meat cleaver that Louise Parker
had buried in the throat of her maniacal daughter back in 1905. He thought
about the freakish lightning strikes at Alfred O’Brian’s office; the
strange intruder he had seen on the rear lawn during the thunderstorm that
evening; the Scrabble game two nights ago (BLADE, BLOOD, DEATH, TOMB, KILL,
CAROL); Grace’s two prophetic dreams. And he knew beyond doubt—without
understanding how he knew—that the sound of the ax was the thread that
sewed together all these recent extraordinary events. Intuitively, he knew
that an ax would be the instrument by which Carol’s life would be
endangered. He didn’t know how. He didn’t know why. But he knew.

THUNK! THUNK!

A painting popped off its wall hook and clattered to the floor.

The river of blood in Paul’s veins turned winter-cold.

He had to get to the cabin. Fast.

He started toward the bedroom door, and it slammed shut in front of him. No
one had touched it. There had been no sudden draft that might have moved
it. One moment the door was standing wide Open, and the next instant it was
flung shut as if it had been shoved hard by an invisible hand.

Out of the corner of his eye, Paul saw something move. Heart banging,
breath trapped in his constricted throat, he twisted around toward the
movement and instinctively raised his suitcase to partially shield himself.

One of the two heavy, mirrored closet doors was sliding open. He expected
someone to step out of the closet, but when the door was all the way open,
he could see nothing in there except clothes on hangers.

Then it slid shut, and the other door slid open. Then both of them started
sliding at the same time, one crossing behind the other, back and forth,
back and forth on their silent plastic wheels.

THUNK! THUNK!

A lamp crashed over on one of the nightstands.

Another painting fell off the wall.

THUNK!

On the dresser, two porcelain figurines—a ballerina and her male dancing
partner—began to circle one another, almost as if they had come to life and
were performing for Paul. They moved slowly at first, then faster, faster,
until they were swept into the air and tossed halfway across the room and
dashed to the floor.



                                    ***





The cabin was constructed of logs and was nestled in the cool shadows
beneath the trees. it had a long, covered, screened porch out front and an
excellent view of the lake.

It was one of ninety vacation cabins tucked into the scenic mountain
valley, each on an acre or half-acre of its own. They were all built along
the south shore of the lake and were reachable only by way of a private,
gated, gravel-surfaced road that curved around the water. Some of the
cabins were made of logs, like the one Paul and Carol had bought, but there
were also white clapboard New England models, modern A-frames, and a few
that resembled small Swiss chalets.

At the end of her own graveled drive, which branched off the community
road, Carol parked the car near the front door of the cabin. She and Jane
got out and stood for a moment in companionable silence, listening to the
stillness, breathing the wonderfully fresh air.

“It’s lovely,” Jane said at last.

“Isn’t it, though?”

“So quiet.”

“It isn’t always. Not when most of the cabins are in use. But right now
there’s probably no one here except Peg and Vince Gervis.”

“Who’re they?” Jane asked.

“The caretakers. The homeowner’s association pays their salaries. They live
year-round in the last cabin, out at the end of the lake. In the off
season, they run a couple of inspection tours every day, just keeping a
lookout for fire and vandals and whatnot. Nice people.”

Above the distant north shore of the lake, lightning blazed across the
malevolent sky. A clap of thunder fell from the clouds and rolled across
the water.

“We better get the suitcases and the food out of the car before we have to
unload everything in the rain,” Carol said.

Grace expected to be attacked on the stairs, for that was where she would
find it most difficult to defend herself. If the cat frightened her and
caused her to lose her balance, she might fall. If she fell, she would
probably break a leg or a hip, and while she was temporarily stunned by the
shock and pain of the fall, the cat would be all over her, tearing, biting.
Therefore, she descended the stairs sideways, with her back against the
wail, so she could look both ahead and behind.

But Aristophanes did not show up. Grace reached the downstairs hail without
incident.

She looked both ways along the hail.

To reach the front door, she had to pass the open door of the study and the
archway that led to the living room. The cat could bolt out of either place
as she was passing by and could leap for her face before she would have
time to spot him, aim the pistol, and pull the trigger.

To reach the other door, the one at the back of the house, she had to go
right, along the hallway, past the open dining room door, into the kitchen.
That route didn’t look any less dangerous.

The rock and the hard place, she thought unhappily. The devil and the deep
blue sea.

Then she remembered that her car keys were in the kitchen, hanging on the
pegboard beside the back door, and that settled it. She would have to leave
through the kitchen.

She moved cautiously along the hall until she came to a wall mirror,
beneath which stood a narrow, decorative table. There were two tail vases
on the table, bracketing the mirror. She picked up one of them in her
injured left hand and sidled toward the open dining room door.

She paused before reaching the doorway, listened.

Silence.

She leaned forward and risked her eyes by peering into the dining room. She
could not see any sign of the cat. That didn’t mean it wasn’t in there, The
drapes were half drawn, and the day was gloomy; there were lots of shadows,
many places where a cat could hide.

For the purpose of creating a diversion in the- event that Aristophanes was
in one of those shadows, Grace pitched the vase inside. As it landed with a
loud crash, she stepped across the threshold just far enough to grasp the
doorknob, then pulled the door shut as she backed quickly into the hallway
again. Now, if the cat was in there, it would bloody well have to stay in
there.

She heard no noise from the dining room, which probably meant she hadn’t
managed to trap the elusive beast. If he’d been in there, he would have
been squealing with rage and scratching at the inside of the closed door by
now. Most likely, she had only wasted time and energy with her little
trick. But at least there was now one downstairs room to which she could
turn her back with impunity.

Repeatedly glancing left and right, forward and back, she crept to the
kitchen door, hesitated, then stepped through it, the gun thrust out in
front of her. She looked the room over slowly, thoroughly, before venturing
farther. The small table and chairs. The humming refrigerator. The
dangling, cat-chewed phone cord. The gleaming chrome fixtures on the oven.
The double sinks. The white countertops. The small countertop wine rack.
The cookie jar and the breadbox lined up beside the wine.

Nothing moved.

The refrigerator motor shut off, and the subsequent quiet was deep,
unbroken.

Okay, she thought. Grit your teeth and move, Gracie.

She walked silently across the room, her eyes sweeping every niche, every
nook: the opening under the built-in writing desk, the narrow space beside
the refrigerator, the blind spot beyond the end of one row of cabinets. No
cat.

Maybe I hurt him worse than I thought I did, she told herself hopefully.
Maybe I didn’t just lame the bastard. Maybe he crawled away and died.

She reached the back door.

She didn’t dare breathe for fear her own breathing would mask whatever
furtive sounds the cat might make.

A ring of keys, including those for the car, hung on a small oval pegboard
beside the door. She slipped it off the hook.

She reached for the doorknob.

The cat hissed.

Grace cried out involuntarily and swung her head to the right, in the
direction of the sound.

She was standing at one end of the long row of cabinets. At the far end,
the wine rack and the bread-box and the cookie jar were lined up side by
side; she had seen them from a front-on angle when she had first come into
the room. Now she had a side view. From this angle she saw something she
couldn’t have seen from in front: The cookie jar and breadbox, which
usually rested snug against the wall behind the counter, had been moved out
a few inches. The cat had squeezed in behind those two objects, muscling
them slowly out of its way. It had crouched in that hiding place, its butt
against the wine rack, facing out toward the kitchen door. It was
approximately twelve feet from her, and then it wasn’t even that far away
because it launched itself across the counter, hissing.

The confrontation was over in a few seconds, but during those seconds, time
seemed to slow to a crawl, and Grace felt as if she were trapped in a
slow-motion film. She stumbled backwards, away from the counter and the
cat, but she didn’t get far before she collided with a wall; as she moved,
she raised the gun and fired two rounds in quick succession. The cookie jar
exploded, and wood chips flew off one of the cabinet doors. But the cat
kept coming, coming, in slow-motion strides across the slippery tile
countertop, its mouth gaping and its fangs bared. She realized that hitting
such a small, quick target was not easy, even at such short range as this.
She fired again, but she knew the gun was wavering in her hand, and she
wasn’t surprised when she heard the bullet ricochet— making a high,
piercing eeeee—off something wide of the mark. To her terror-heightened
perceptions, the echoes of the ricochet continued to infinity: eeeee,
eeeee, eeeee, eeeee, eeeee.... Then the cat reached the end of the counter
and leapt into the air, and Grace flied again. This time she hit the mark.
The cat yelped. The bullet had sufficient impact to deflect the animal only
an instant before it would have landed, scratching and biting, on her face.
It was pitched back and to the left as if it were a bundle of rags. It
slammed into the kitchen door and dropped stonelike to the floor, where it
lay silent and motionless

                                    ***



Paul couldn’t decide what the poltergeist intended to accomplish by its
impressive displays of power. He didn’t know whether or not he had anything
to fear

from it. Was it trying to delay him, trying to keep him here until it was
too late for him to help Carol? Or perhaps it was urging him on, trying its
best to convince him that he must go to the cabin immediately.

Still holding the suitcase in one hand, he approached the bedroom door that
had been flung shut by the unseen presence. As he reached for the knob, the
door began to rattle in its frame—gently at first, then fiercely.

Thunk... thunk.. . thunk... TRUNK!

He jerked his hand back, unsure what he ought to do.

THUNK!

The sound of the ax was coming from the door now, not from overhead, as it
had been. Although the solid-core, raised-panel, fir door was a formidable
barrier rather than just a flimsy Masonite model, it shook violently and
then cracked down the middle as if it were constructed of balsa wood.

Paul backed away from it.

Another crack appeared, parallel to the first, and chips of wood flew into
the room.

Sliding closet doors and flying porcelain figurines might be the work of a
poltergeist, but this was something else again. Surely no spirit could chop
apart a heavy door like this. There had to be someone swinging a very real
ax against the other side.

Paul felt defenseless. He scanned the room for makeshift weapons, but he
saw nothing useful.

The .38 revolver was in the suitcase. He wouldn’t be able to get to it in
time to defend himself with it, and he wished fervently that he had kept
the gun in his hand.

THUNKTHUNKTHUNKTHUNK!

The bedroom door exploded inward in half a dozen large pieces and countless
smaller chunks and scraps.

He threw one arm over his face to protect his eyes. Wood rained down on all
sides of him.

When he lowered his arm, he saw there was no one standing beyond the
doorway, no man with an ax. The chopper-of-doors was, after all, the unseen
presence.

THUNK!

Paul stepped over a shattered section of the door and went out into the
hallway



                                    ***





The fuse box was in the kitchen pantry. Carol engaged all the breaker
switches, and the lights came on.

There was no telephone. That was virtually the only modern convenience the
cabin lacked.

“Do you think it’s chilly in here?” Carol asked.

“A little.”

“We have a bottled-gas furnace, but unless it’s really cold, the fireplace
is nicer. Let’s bring in some firewood.”

“You mean we’ve got to cut down a tree?”

Carol laughed. “That won’t be necessary. Come see.”

She led the girl outside, to the rear of the cabin, where an open porch
ended in steps leading down to a short rear yard. The yard met the edge of
a small meadow where the grass was knee-deep, and the meadow climbed up
toward a wall of trees fifty yards away.

When Carol saw that familiar landscape, she stopped, surprised, remembering
the dream that had spoiled her sleep several nights last week. In the
nightmare, she had been running through one house, then through another
house, then across a mountain meadow, while something silvery flickered in
the darkness behind her. At the time, she had not realized that the meadow
in the dream was this meadow.

“Something wrong?” Jane asked.

“Huh? Oh. No. Let’s get that firewood.”

She led the girl down the porch steps and to the left, to where a woodshed
was attached to the southwest corner of the cabin.

Thunder rumbled in the distance. The rain hadn’t

begun to fall yet.

Carol keyed open the heavy-duty padlock on the woodshed, took it off the
hasp, and slipped it in her jacket pocket. There would be no need to
replace it until they were ready to return to Harrisburg, nine or ten days
from now.

The woodshed door creaked open on unoiled hinges. Inside, Carol tugged on
the chain-pull light, and a bare hundred-watt bulb revealed stacks of dry
cordwood being protected from inclement weather.

A scuttle for carrying firewood hung from a ceiling hook. Carol got it down
and handed it to the girl. “If you fill it up four or five times, we’ll
have more than enough wood to last us until tomorrow morning.”

By the time Jane returned from taking the first scuttle-load into the
cabin, Carol was at the chopping block, using an ax to split a short log
into four sticks.

“What’re you doing?” the girl asked, stopping well

out of the way and staring warily at the ax.

“When I build a fire,” Carol said, “I put kindling on the bottom, a layer
of these splits on top of that, and then the full logs to crown it off. It
never fails to bum well that way. See? I’m a regular Daniel Boone.”

The girl scowled. “That ax looks awful sharp.”

“Has to be.”

“Are you sure it’s safe?”

“I’ve done it lots of times before, here and at home,” Carol said. “I’m an
expert. Don’t worry, honey. I’m not going to accidentally amputate my
toes.”

She picked up another short log and started to split it into quarters.

Jane went to the woodshed, giving the chopping block a wide berth. When she
returned, carrying her second scuttle-load to the house, she repeatedly
glanced over her shoulder, frowning.

Carol began quartering another log.

THUNK!

                                    ***





Carrying his suitcase, Paul walked down the second-floor hall to the
stairway, and the poltergeist went with him. On both sides, doors opened
and slammed shut, opened and slammed shut, again and again, all by
themselves and with such tremendous force that it sounded as if he were
walking through a murderous barrage of cannon fire.

As he descended the stairs, the chandelier at the top of the well began
describing wide circles on the end of its chain, stirred by a breeze that
Paul could not feel or moved by a hand that had no substance.

On the first floor, paintings were flung off walls as he passed by. Chairs
toppled over. The living room sofa rocked wildly on its four graceful
wooden legs. In the kitchen, the overhead utensil rack shook; pots and pans
and ladles banged against one another.

By the time he reached the Pontiac in the garage, he knew he didn’t have to
bother taking the entire suitcase to the mountains. He hadn’t wanted to go
charging into the cabin with just a gun and the clothes on his back, for if
nothing had been wrong, he would have looked like an idiot, and he would
have done Jane a grave injustice. But now, because of the call from Polly
at Maugham & Crichton, and because of the astounding display put on by the
poltergeist, be knew that everything was wrong; there was no chance
whatsoever that he would reach the cabin only to discover that all was
peaceful. He would be walking into a nightmare of one kind or another. No
doubt about it. So he opened the suitcase on the garage floor beside the
car, took out the loaded revolver, and left the rest of his stuff behind.

As he was backing out of the driveway, he saw Grace Mitowski’s blue Ford
turn the corner, too fast. It angled toward the curb in front of the house,
scraping its sidewalls so badly that blue-white smoke rose from them.

Grace was out of the car the instant it stopped. She rushed to the Pontiac,
moving faster than Paul had seen her move in years. She pulled open the
front, passenger-side door and leaned in. Her hair was in complete
disarray. Her face was eggshell white and spattered with blood.

“Good God, Grace, what’s happened to you?”

“Where’s Carol?”

“She went to the cabin.”

“Already?”

“This morning.”

“Damn? Exactly when?’

"Three hours ago.”

Grace’s eyes contained a haunted expression. “The girl went with her?”

“Yes.”

She closed her eyes, and Paul could see she was on the edge of panic,
trying to deal with it and calm herself. She opened her eyes and said,
“We’ve got to go after them.”

“That’s where I’m headed.”

He saw her eyes widen as she noticed the revolver lying on the car seat
beside him, the muzzle pointed forward, toward the dashboard.

She raised her eyes from the gun to his face. “You know what’s happening?”
she asked, surprised.

“Not really,” he said, putting the gun in the glove compartment. “All I
know for sure is that Carol’s in trouble. Damned serious trouble.”

“It’s not just Carol we’ve got to worry about,” Grace said. “It’s both of
them.”

“Both? The girl, you mean? But I think the girl’s the one who’s going to—”

“Yes,” Grace said. “She’s going to try to kill Carol. But she might be the
one who ends up dead. Like before.”

She got in the car and pulled the door shut.

“Like before?” Paul said. “I don’t—” He saw her blood-crusted hand. “That
needs medical attention.”

“There’s no time.”

“What the hell’s happening?” he demanded, his fear for Carol briefly giving
way to frustration.” I know something strange is going on, but I don’t know
what in Christ’s name it is.”

“I do,” she said. “I know. In fact I know a lot more than maybe I want to
know.”

“If you’ve got anything that makes sense, anything concrete,” he said, “we
should call the cops. They can put in a call to the sheriff’s department up
there and get help sent out to the cabin real fast, faster than we can get
there.”

“What I’ve got, my information, is harder than concrete, so far as I’m
concerned,” Grace said. “But the police wouldn’t see it the same way I do.
They’d say I was just a senile old fool. They’d want to lock me up in a
nice safe place for my own good. At best, they’d laugh at me.”

He thought about the poltergeist—the sound of the ax, the splintering door,
the airborne ceramic figurines, the toppling chairs—and he said, “Yeah. I
know exactly what you mean.”

“We’ll have to handle this ourselves,” Grace said. “Let’s get rolling. I
can tell you everything I know on the way. Each minute we waste, I just get
sicker and sicker, thinking about what might be happening in the
mountains.”

Paul backed the car into the street and drove away from the house, heading
for the nearest freeway entrance. When he was on the open highway, he
floored the accelerator, and the car rocketed ahead.

“How long does it usually take to get there?” Grace asked.

“About two hours and fifteen minutes.”

“Too long.”

“We’ll do better than that.”

The speedometer needle touched eighty.

                                     12

THEY had brought a lot of food in cardboard cartons and ice chests. They
transferred all of those items to the cupboards and refrigerator, agreeing
to forgo lunch altogether in order to indulge themselves guiltlessly in a
glutton’s dinner.

“All right,” Carol said, producing a list from one of the kitchen drawers,
“here’s what we need to do to make this place livable.” She read from the
list:

“Remove plastic dropcloths from furniture; dust

everything; scrub the kitchen sink; clean the bathroom; and put sheets and
blankets on the beds.”

“You call this a vacation?” Jane asked.

“What’s wrong? Doesn’t that sound like a fun agenda to you?”

“Thrilling.”

“Well, the cabin’s not enormous. The two of us will go through the list of
chores in an hour or an hour and a half.”

They had barely started when they were interrupted by a knock at the door.
It was Vince Gervis, the colony’s caretaker. He was a big, barrel-chested
man with enormous shoulders, enormous biceps, enormous hands, and a smile
to match the rest of him.

“Just makin’ my rounds,” he said. “Saw your car. Thought I’d say hello.”
Carol introduced him to Jane and said she was a niece (a convenient white
lie), and there was some polite chitchat, and then Gervis said, “Dr. Tracy,
where’s the other Dr. Tracy? I’d like to give him my best, too.”

“Oh, he isn’t with us right now,” Carol said. “He’s coming up on Sunday,
after he finishes some important work he couldn’t just put aside.”

Gervis frowned.

Carol said, “Is something wrong?”

“Well. . . me and the missus was plannin’ to go into town to do some
shoppin’, maybe see a movie, eat a restaurant meal. It’s what we generally
do on Friday afternoons, you see. But there isn’t another soul up here
besides you and Jane. Will be tomorrow, bein’ as it’s a Saturday, and seem’
as if the weather don’t get too bad so that everybody stays to home. But
there’s no one else so far today except you.”

“Don’t worry about us,” Carol said. “We’ll be fine.

You and Peg go on into town like you planned.”

“Well.. . I’m not sure I like the idea of you two ladies out here all by
your lonesome, twenty miles from other folks. No sir, I don’t like it
much.”

“Nobody’s going to bother us, Vince. The road’s gated; you can’t even get
in without a key card.”

“Anybody can walk in if he’s willin’ to go overland just a little ways.”

Carol required several minutes and a lot of words to reassure him, but at
last he decided that he and his wife would keep to their usual Friday
schedule.

Shortly after Vince left, the rains came. The soft roar of a hundred
million droplets striking a hundred million rustling leaves was soothing to
Carol.

But Jane found the noise somewhat unpleasant.

“I don’t know why,” she said, “but the sound makes me think of fire.
Hissing. . . just like a lot of flames eating up everything in sight.
Sizzle, sizzle, sizzle.. .“





The rain forced Paul to slow down to sixty, which was still too fast for
highway conditions, but the situation called for the taking of some risks.

The windshield wipers thumped metronomically, and the tires sang softly on
the wet macadam.

The day was dark and growing darker. It looked more like twilight than like
midday. The wind blew obscuring curtains of rain across the treacherously
wet pavement, and the gray-brown road spray flung up by other traffic hung
in the air, a thick and dirty mist.

It seemed almost as if the Pontiac were a tiny vessel sailing through the
deep currents of a vast, cold sea, the only pocket of warmth and light
within a million miles.

Grace said, “You probably won’t believe what I’ve got to tell you, and that
would be understandable.”

“After what’s happened to me today,” Paul said, “I’m ready to believe
anything.”

And maybe that’s what the poltergeist meant to do, he thought. Maybe it
meant to prepare me for whatever story Grace has to tell. In fact, if I
hadn’t been delayed by the poltergeist, I would have left the house before
Grace arrived.

“I’ll keep it as simple and straightforward as I can,” Grace said. “But
it’s not a simple and straightforward matter.” She cradled her torn left
hand in her right hand; the bleeding had stopped, and the cuts were all
crusty, clotted. “It starts in 1865, in Shippensburg. The family was named
Havenswood.”

Paul glanced her, startled by the name.

She looked straight ahead, at the rain-sodden land through which they were
rushing. “The mother was Willa Havenswood, and the daughter’s name was
Laura. Those two didn’t get along well. Not well at all. The fault was on
both sides, and the reasons for their constant bickering aren’t really
important here. What’s important is that one day in the spring of 1865,
Willa sent Laura into the cellar to do some spring cleaning, even though
she knew perfectly well that the girl was deathly afraid of the cellar. It
was punishment, you see. And while Laura was down there in the cellar, a
fire broke out upstairs. She was trapped and burned to death. She must have
died blaming her mother for putting her in that trap in the first place.
Maybe she even blamed Willa for starting the fire— which she didn’t. It was
accidentally started by Rachael Adams, Laura’s aunt. It’s even possible
that Laura wondered if her mother had started the fire on purpose, just to
get rid of her. The child had emotional problems; she was capable of
melodramatic notions of that sort. The mother had emotional problems, too;
she was capable of inspiring paranoia, for sure. Anyway, Laura died a
gruesome death, and we can be pretty certain that her last thought was an
ardent wish for revenge. There was no way she could have known that her
mother perished in that fire, too!”

So that’s why the Havenswood identity didn’t check out when Carol put the
police on to it, Paul thought. They’d have had to go all the way back to
the 1800s in order to find the Havenswood family.

County records for that period probably don’t even exist any more.

A slow-moving truck appeared out of the mists ahead, and Paul passed it.
For a moment the filthy spray from the truck’s big tires drummed on the
side of the Pontiac, and the noise was too loud for Grace to speak above
it.

When they had passed the truck, she said, “Since 1865, Laura has been
pursuing revenge through at least two and probably three other lives.
Reincarnation, Paul. Can you believe in that? Can you believe that in 1943,
Laura Havenswood was a fifteen-year-old girl named Linda Bektermann and
that the night before her sixteenth birthday she tried to kill her mother,
who was Willa Havenswood reincarnated?

It’s a true case. Linda Bektermann went berserk and tried to ax her mother
to death, but her mother turned the tables and killed the girl instead.
Laura didn’t get her revenge. And can you believe that Willa is now alive
again and that she’s our Carol this time? And that Laura is alive again,
too?”

“Jane?”

“Yes.”

Together, Carol and Jane cleaned the cabin in an hour and fifteen minutes.
Carol was delighted to see that the girl was an industrious worker who took
great pleasure in doing even a menial job well.

When they were finished, they poured two glasses of Pepsi to reward
themselves, and they sat in the two big easy chairs that faced the mammoth
fireplace.

“It’s too early to start cooking dinner,” Jane said.

“And it’s too wet out there to go for a walk, so what game do you want to
play?”

“Anything that looks good to you is fine with me. You can look over all the
stuff in our game closet and take your pick. But first, I think we really
should get the therapy session out of the way.”

“Are we going to keep that up even on vacation?”

the girl asked. She was clearly uneasy about it, though she had not been
noticeably uneasy before, even on the occasion of the first session, the
day before yesterday.

“Of course we’ve got to keep on with it,” Carol said. “Now that we’ve made
a start, it’s best to continue working at it, pushing and probing a little
bit every day.”

“Well. . . all right.”

“Good. Let’s turn these chairs around to face each other.”

The fire flickered off to one side, creating dancing shadows on the hearth.

Outside, the rain rattled ceaselessly through the trees and pattered on the
roof, and Carol realized that it did sound like even more fire, as Jane had
said, so that they seemed to be totally surrounded by the hiss and crackle
of flames.

She needed only a few seconds to put Jane into a trance this time. But as
had happened during the first session, the girl needed almost two minutes
to regress to a period at which memories existed for her. This time the
long silence didn’t disturb Carol as it had done before.

When the girl spoke at last, she used the Laura voice. “Mama? Is that you?
Is that you, Mama?”

“Laura?”

The girl’s eyes were squeezed shut. Her voice was tight, tense. “Is that
you? Is it you, Mama? Is it?”

“Relax,” Carol said.

Instead of relaxing, the girl became visibly more tense. She hunched her
shoulders, fisted her hands in her lap. Lines of strain appeared in her
forehead and at the corners of her mouth. She leaned away from the back of
her chair, toward Carol.

“I want you to answer some questions,” Carol said. “But you must be calm
and relaxed first. Now, you will do exactly as I say. You will unclench
your fists. You will—”

“I won’t!”

The girl’s eyes popped open. She leapt up out of her chair and stood before
Carol, quivering.

“Sit down, honey.”

“I won’t do what you say! I’m sick of doing what you tell me to do, sick of
your punishments.”

“Sit down,” Carol said softly but forcefully.

The girl glared at her. “You did it to me,” she said in the Laura voice.
“You put me down there in that awful place.”

Carol hesitated, then decided to flow with it. “What place do you mean?”

“You know,” the girl said accusingly. “I hate you.”

“Where is this awful place you spoke of?” Carol persisted.

“The cellar.”

“What’s so awful about the cellar?”

Hatred seethed in the girl’s eyes. Her lips were peeled back from her teeth
in a feral snarl.

“Laura? Answer me. What’s so awful about the cellar?”

The girl slapped her across the face.

The blow stunned Carol. It was sharp, painful, unexpected. For an instant
she simply couldn’t believe that she actually had been hit.

Then the girl hit her again. Backhanded.

And again. Harder than before.

Carol grabbed her adversary’s slender wrists, but the girl wrenched loose.
She kicked Carol in the shins, and when Carol cried out and sagged for an
instant, the girl went for her throat. Carol fended her off, though not
easily, and attempted to get up from the armchair. Jane pushed her down and
fell on top of her. She felt the girl bite her shoulder, and suddenly her
shock and confusion turned to fear. The chair tipped over, and they both
rolled onto the floor, flailing.





The flat land through which they had been driving began to rise and form
itself into gently rolling hills, but the mountains were still a long way
off.

If there had been any change in the weather during the last half hour, it
had been for the worse. Rain was falling harder than ever; the hard, fat
pellets of water shattered like glass on the roadway, and the amorphous
fragments bounced high. Paul kept the speedometer needle at eighty.

“Reincarnation,” he said thoughtfully. “Just a few minutes ago, I told you
that I could believe anything today, but that’s wild. Reincarnation? Where
in the devil did you come by this theory?”

As the windshield wipers continued to thump, and as the tires sang a shrill
dirge on the rain-puddled pavement, Grace told him about the telephone
calls from Leonard, the visit from the long-dead reporter, the prophetic
dreams; she told him about the grim battle with Aristophanes. “I am Rachael
Adams, Paul. That other life had been revealed to me so that I can stop
this murderous cycle. Willa did not start the fire. I started it
accidentally. There is no reason for the girl to seek revenge. It’s all a
mistake, a dark misunderstanding. If I can talk to the girl, Jane, while
she’s regressed to her Laura phase, I can persuade her of the truth. I know
I can. I can stop all of this here, now, once and forever. Do you think I’m
babbling? Senile? I don’t believe I am. In fact, I know I’m not. And I
suspect you’ve had some strange experiences recently that confirm what I’m
telling you.”

“You hit that one on the head, all right,” he told her.

Nevertheless, reincarnation—being born again in a new body—it was a
stunning, soul-shaking thing to accept. There is no lasting death. Yes,
that was much harder to accept than the existence of poltergeists.

“Do you know about Millicent Parker?” he asked her.

“Never heard the name,” Grace said.

The rain started falling even harder. He turned the windshield wipers up to
their highest speed.

“In 1905,” he told Grace, “Millie Parker attempted to kill her mother—on
the night before her sixteenth birthday. Like the Linda Bektermann case,
the mother ended up killing Millie, instead of the other way around. Purely
self-defense. And here’s what you might not realize: Under hypnosis, Jane
claimed to be Laura, Millie, and then Linda Bektermann. But the names meant
nothing to us.”

“And again, in the Millicent Parker case,” Grace said, “the girl’s desire
for revenge was frustrated. Yes. I knew there must be another life between
Laura and Linda.”

“But why this night-before-the-birthday thing that keeps cropping up?”

“Laura was looking forward to her sixteenth birthday with great eagerness,”
Grace-Rachael said. “It was going to be the best day of her life, she said.
She had all sorts of plans for it—and for how her life would be changed
after she attained that magical age.

I think, somehow, she felt her mother’s treatment of her would change once
she was ‘grown up.’ But she died in the fire before her birthday.”

“And in life after life, as her sixteenth birthday approaches, the fear of
her mother and the hatred of her mother wells up from her subconscious.”

Grace nodded. “From the subconscious of the girl she was in 1865, the
girl—the identity—who is buried down at the bottom of Jane’s psyche.”

They rode in silence for a minute or two.

Paul’s hands were sweaty on the steering wheel.

His mind spun as he tried to absorb the story she had told, and he had that
old feeling of balancing on a tightrope high above a deep, deep, dark
chasm.

Then he said, “But Carol isn’t Jane’s mother.”

“You’ve forgotten something,” Grace said.

“What?”

“Carol had a child out of wedlock when she was a teenager. I know she told
you all about it. I’m giving away no secrets.”

Paul’s stomach quivered. He was cold all the way into the marrow of his
bones. “My God. You mean. . . Jane is the child that Carol put up for
adoption.”

“I have no proof of it,” Grace said. “But I bet that when the police spread
their search nets wide enough, when they finally locate the girl’s parents
in some other state, we’ll learn that she’s adopted. And that Carol is her
natural mother.”





For what seemed like an eternity, they struggled on the floor by the
hearth, grunting, twisting, the girl throwing punches, Carol trying to
resist without hurting her. At last, when it became clear that Carol was
unquestionably the stronger of the two and would eventually gain control of
the situation, the girl shoved away from her, scrambled up, kicked her in
the thigh, and ran out of the room, into the kitchen.

Carol was shocked and dazed both by the girl’s unexpected violence and by
the maniacal power of the blows. Her face stung, and she knew her cheeks
were going to bruise. Her bitten shoulder was bleeding; a large, damp, red
stain was spreading slowly down the from of her blouse.

She got up, swayed unsteadily for a moment. Then she went after the girl.
“Honey, wait!”

In the distance, outside the house, Laura’s voice rose in a sharp, shrill
scream: “I haaaaaate you!”

Carol reached the kitchen, leaned against the refrigerator. The girl was
gone. The back door was open.

The sound of the rain was very loud.

She hurried to the door and looked out at the rear lawn, at the small
meadow, at the forest that crowded in at the edge of the meadow. The girl
had disappeared.

“Jane! Laura!”

Millicent? She wondered. Linda? What on earth should I call her?

She crossed the porch and went down the steps into the yard, into the
pelting, cold rain. She turned right, then left, not sure where to look
first.

Then Jane appeared. The girl came out of the woodshed at the southwest
corner of the cabin. She was carrying an ax.

                                    ***





“... and Carol is her natural mother.”

Grace’s words echoed and reechoed in Paul’s head.

For a moment he was incapable of speech.

He stared ahead, shocked, not really seeing the road, and he nearly ran up
the back end of a sluggishly moving Buick. He jammed on his brakes. He and
Grace were thrown forward, testing their seat belts. He slowed down until
he could regain control of himself.

Finally, the words burst out of him like machine-gun fire: “But how in the
hell did the kid find out who her real mother was, they don’t give out that
kind of information to children her age, how did she get here from whatever
state she was living in, how did she track us down and make it all happen
like this? Good Christ, she did step in front of Carol’s car on purpose. It
was a setup. The whole damned thing was a setup!”

“I don’t know how she found her way to Carol,” Grace said. “Maybe her
parents knew who the child’s natural mother was, and kept the name around
in the family records, in case the girl ever wanted to know it when she
grew up. Perhaps not. Perhaps anything. Maybe she was simply drawn to Carol
by the same forces that tried to get to me through Aristophanes. That might
explain why she appeared to be in a daze before she stepped in front of the
car. But I don’t really know. Maybe we’ll never know.”

“Oh, shit,” Paul said, and his voice wavered. “Oh, no, no. Goddamn!”

“What?”

“You know how Carol is on that day,” he said shakily. “The day her baby was
born, the baby she gave up. She’s different from the way she is every other
day of the year. Depressed, withdrawn. It’s always such a bad day for her
that the date’s engraved on my memory.”

“On mine, too,” Grace said.

“It’s tomorrow,” he said. “If Jane is Carol’s child, she’ll be sixteen
tomorrow.”

“Yes.”

“And she’ll try to kill Carol today.”



                                    ***



Sheets of dark rain rippled and flapped like wind-whipped canvas tents.

Carol stood on the soggy lawn, unable to move, numbed by fear, frozen by
the cold rain.

Twenty feet away, the girl stood with the ax, gripping it in both hands.
Her drenched hair hung straight to her shoulders, and her clothes were
pasted to her.

She appeared to be oblivious to the storm and the chilly air. Her eyes were
owlish, as if she were high on amphetamine, and her face was distorted by
rage.

“Laura?” Carol said at last. “Listen to me. You will listen to me. You will
drop the ax.”

“You stinking, rotten bitch,” the girl said through tightly clenched teeth.

Lightning cracked open the sky, and the falling rain glittered for a moment
in the stroboscopic flashes that came through from the other side of the
heavens.

When the subsequent thunder rolled away and Carol could be heard, she said,
“Laura, I want you to—’,

“I hate you!” the girl said, She took one step toward Carol.

“Stop this right now,” Carol said, refusing to retreat. “You will be calm.
You will relax.”

The girl took another step.

“Drop the ax,” Carol insisted. “Honey, listen to me. You will listen to me.
You are only in a trance. You are—”

“I’m going to get you this time, Mama. This time I’m not going to lose.”

“I’m not your mother,” Carol said. “Laura, you are-”

“I’m going to cut your goddamn head off this time, you bitch!”

The voice had changed.

It wasn’t Laura’s now.

It belonged to Linda Bektermann, the third identity.

“I’m going to cut your goddamn head off and put it on the kitchen table
with Daddy’s.”

With a jolt, Carol recalled last week’s nightmare.

There had been a moment in the dream when she had stepped into the kitchen
and had encountered two severed heads on the table, a man’s and a woman’s.
But how could Jane know what had been in that nightmare?

Carol finally took a step backwards, then another. Although the rain was
cold, she began to sweat.

“I’m only going to tell you one more time, Linda. You must put the ax down
and—”

“I’m going to cut your head off and chop you into a thousand little
pieces,” the girl said.

And the voice now belonged to Jane.

It wasn’t the voice of an identity heretofore only evident in a trance.
This was Jane’s voice. She had come out of the trance on her own power. She
knew who she was. She knew who Carol was. And she still wanted to use the
ax.

Carol edged toward the back porch steps.

The girl quickly circled in that direction, blocking access to the cabin.
Then she started toward Carol, moving fast, grinning.

Carol turned and ran toward the meadow.





In spite of the pounding rain, which snapped with bulletlike power into the
windshield, in spite of the dirty mist that hung over the road, in spite of
the treacherously greasy pavement, Paul slowly pressed the accelerator all
the way to the floor and swung the Pontiac into the passing lane.

“It’s a mask,” he said.

Grace said, “What do you mean?”

“The Jane Doe identity, the Linda Bektermann and Millie Parker
identities—each of them was just a mask. A very real, very convincing mask.
But a mask nonetheless. Behind the mask there was always the same face, the
same person. Laura.”

“And we’ve got to put an end to the masquerade once and for all,” Grace
said. “If I can just talk to her as her Aunt Rachael, I’ll be able to stop
this madness. I’m sure I will, She’ll listen to me.. . to Rachael. That’s
who she was closest to. Closer than she was to her mother. I can make her
understand that her mother, Willa, didn’t intentionally or even
accidentally start that fire back in 1865. At last she’ll understand.
She’ll see that there’s no justification for revenge. The cycle will come
to an end.”

“If we’re in time,” Paul said.

“If,” Grace said.





                                    ***





Carol ran through the stinging rain and through the knee-high grass. She
ran up the sloping meadow, her arms tucked in close to her side, legs
pumping high, gasping for breath, each stride jarring her to the bones.

Ahead lay the forest, which seemed to be her only salvation. There were
thousand of places to hide in the wilderness, countless trails on which she
could lose the girl. After all, she was somewhat familiar with the land,
but to the girl it was a strange place.

Halfway across the meadow, she risked a glance behind her. The girl was
only fifteen feet away.

Lightning slashed through the bellies of the clouds, and the blade of the
ax flashed once, twice, with a brilliant reflection of that icy electric
glow.

Carol looked straight ahead once more and redoubled her efforts to reach
the trees. The meadow was wet, spongy, and in some places slippery. She
expected to fall or at least twist an ankle, but she reached the perimeter
of the forest without trouble.

She plunged in among the trees, among the purple and brown and black
shadows, into the lush undergrowth, and she began to think there was a
chance— maybe only a very small chance, but a chance nonetheless—that she
would come out of this alive.





                                    ***





Hunching over the steering wheel, squinting at the ram-swept highway, Paul
said, “I want one thing perfectly clear between us.”

Grace said, “What’s that?”

“Carol’s my first concern.”

“Of course.”

“If we walk into the middle of a nasty situation at the cabin, I’ll do
whatever’s necessary to protect Carol.”

Grace glanced at the glove compartment. “You mean. . . the gun.”

“Yes. If! have to, if there’s no other way, I’ll use it, Grace. I’ll shoot
the girl if there’s no other choice.”

“It’s unlikely that we’ll walk into the middle of a

confrontation,” Grace said. “Either it won’t have begun yet—or it’ll all be
over with by the time we get there.”

“I won’t let her hurt Carol,” he said grimly. “And if worse comes to worst,
I don’t want you trying to stop me.”

“There are some things you should consider,”

Grace said.

“What?”

“First of all, it’ll be just as tragic if Carol kills the girl. And that’s
the pattern, after all. Both Millie and Linda attacked their mothers, but
they were the ones killed. What if that happens this time? What if Carol is
forced to kill the girl in self-defense? You know she’s never stopped
feeling guilty about putting the baby up for adoption. She carries that on
her shoulders sixteen years after the fact. So what will happen when she
discovers she’s killed her own daughter?”

“It’ll destroy her,” he said without hesitation.

“I think it very well might. And what’ll it do to your relationship with
Carol if you kill her daughter, even if you do it to save Carol’s life?”

He thought about that for a moment. Then he said,

“It might destroy us, and he shuddered.





                                    ***





For a while, no matter how tortuous the path she followed through the
woods, Carol could not lose the girl. She switched from one natural trail
to another, crossed a small stream, doubled back the way she had come. She
moved in a crouch at all times, staying out of sight below the brush line.
She made no sound that could be heard above the constant hissing of the
rain Most of the time she carefully stepped on old leaves or made her way
from stone to stone, from log to log, leaving no footprints, in the damp,
bare earth. Yet Jane pursued her with uncanny confidence, without
hesitation, as if she were part bloodhound.

At last, however, Carol was certain she had lost the girl. She squatted
under a huge pine, leaned back against the damp bark, and breathed deeply,
rapidly, raggedly, while waiting for her heart to stop racing.

A minute passed. Two. Five.

The only sound was the rain drizzling down through the leaves and through
the interlaced pine needles.

She became aware of the dank odor of heavy vegetation—moss and fungus and
forest grass and more.

Nothing moved.

She was safe, at least for now.

But she couldn’t just sit beneath the tall pine, waiting for help to
arrive. Eventually, Jane would stop searching for her and would try to find
a way back to the cabin. If the girl didn’t get lost—which she most likely
would do—if she somehow managed to return to the cabin, and if she was
still in a psychotic fugue when she got there, she might murder the first
person she encountered. If she took Vince Gervis by surprise, even his
great size and impressive muscles would be of no use against the blade of
an ax.

Carol stood up, moved away from the tree, and began to circle back toward
the cabin. The keys to the Volkswagen were in her purse, and her purse was
in one of the bedrooms. She had to get the keys, drive into town, and ask
the county sheriff for assistance.

What went wrong? she wondered. girl shouldn’t have become violent. There
was no indication that she was capable of such a thing. The potential to
kill simply was not a part of her psychological profile. Paul was right to
be worried. But why?

Proceeding with utmost caution, expecting the girl to leap at her from
behind every tree and bush, Carol needed fifteen minutes to reach the edge
of the forest at a point not far from the place at which she had

entered the trees with the girl in hot pursuit. The meadow was deserted. At
the bottom of the slope, the cabin huddled in the pouring rain.

The kid’s lost, Carol thought. All of that twisting and turning and
doubling back through unfamiliar territory was too much for her. She’ll
never find the way home by herself.

The sheriff’s men weren’t going to like this one: a search in the rain, in
the forest, for a violent girl who was armed with an ax. No, they weren’t
going to like this one at all.

Carol navigated the meadow at a run.

The rear door of the cabin was standing open, just as she had left it.

She hurried inside, slammed the door, and threw the bolt. Relief swept
through her.

She swallowed a couple of times, caught her breath, and crossed the kitchen
to the door that led into the living room. She was about to step across
that threshold when she was stopped by a sudden, terrible certainty that
she was not alone.

She jumped back, spurred by intuition more than anything else, and even as
she moved, the ax swung in from the left, through the doorway. It sliced
the air where she had been. If she hadn’t moved, she would have been cut in
half.

The girl stepped into the room, brandishing the ax. “Bitch.”

Carol backed to the door that she had just latched.

She fumbled behind her for the bolt. Couldn’t find it.

The girl closed in.

Whimpering, Carol turned to the door, seized the

latch. She sensed the ax rising, into the air behind her and knew she
wouldn’t have time to open the door, and she jerked to one side, and the
blade bit into the door just where her head would have been.

With superhuman strength, the girl wrenched the ax out of the wood.

Gasping, Carol ducked past her and ran into the living room. She looked for
something with which to defend herself. The only thing available was a
poker in the rack of fireplace tools. She grabbed it.

Behind her, Jane said, “I hate you!”

Carol whirled.

The girl swung the ax.

Carol brought the poker up without any time to spare, and it rang against
the gleaming, viciously sharp blade, deflecting the blow.

The impact rang back the length of the poker, into Carol’s hands, numbing
them. She couldn’t maintain her grip on the iron rod; it fell from her
tingling hands.

The impact did not ring back along the wooden handle of the ax, and Jane
still held that weapon with firm determination.

Carol backed up onto the wide hearth of the stone fireplace. She could feel
the heat against her legs.

She had nowhere else to run.

“Now,” Jane said. “Now. At last.”

She lifted the ax high, and Carol cried out in anticipation of the pain,
and the front door was flung open. It crashed against the wall. Paul was
there. And Grace.

The girl glanced at them but was not going to be distracted; she brought
the ax down toward Carol’s face.

Carol collapsed onto the hearth.

The ax struck the stone mantel over her head; sparks flew.

Paul rushed at the girl, but she sensed him coming. She turned toward him,
slashed with the ax, and drove him back.

Then turned on Carol again.

“Cornered rat,” she said, grinning.

The ax came up.

This time it won’t miss, Carol thought.

Someone said, “Spiders!”

The girl froze.

The ax was suspended in midair.

“Spiders!” It was Grace. “There are spiders on your back, Laura. Oh God,
they’re all over your back. Spiders! Laura, look out for the spiders!”

Carol watched, bewildered, as a look of stark terror took possession of the
girl’s face.

“Spiders!” Grace shouted again. “Big, black, hairy spiders, Laura. Get them
off! Get them off your back. Quick!”

The girl screamed and dropped the ax, which clattered against the stone
hearth. She brushed frantically at her back, twisting her arms up behind
her. She was snuffling and squealing like a very small child. “Help me!”

“Spiders,” Grace said again, as Paul picked up the ax and put it out of the
way.

The girl tried to tear off her blouse. She dropped to her knees, then fell
onto her side, gibbering in terror. She writhed on the floor, brushing
imaginary spiders off her body. Within a minute she seemed to be in a state
of shock; she lay shuddering, weeping.

“She was always afraid of spiders,” Grace said. “That was why she hated the
cellar.”

"The cellar?” Carol asked.

“Where she died,” Grace said.

Carol didn’t understand. But at the moment she didn’t care. She watched the
girl writhing on the floor, and she suddenly felt overwhelming pity for
her. She knelt beside Jane, lifted her up, hugged her.

“You okay?” Paul asked her.

She nodded.

“Spiders,” the girl said, quivering uncontrollably.

“No, honey,” Carol said. “No spiders. There aren’t any spiders on you. Not
now. Not any more.” And she looked at Grace, wondering.