The Mask

PART TWO Evil Walks Among Us…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.