Fear itself

8

Dorie opened her eyes and took stock. Her forehead hurt, and there was a little knot-she must have hit the floor with her head, or the corner of the table on her way down-but there was no blood and no egg, just a tender spot above the hairline. At least you didn’t break your nose again, she told herself-it’s already got all the character it can stand.

Shaken, she sat up slowly, careful to keep her back to the window. Dorie had been dreaming about masks, avoiding them, and fainting at the sight of them for as long as she could remember. But having hallucinations, fainting over masks that aren’t even there-that would be a new and disturbing development.

Unless of course there really was a mask in the window. But the only way to tell for sure would be to turn around, and she wasn’t ready for that, not with her head still pounding and her heart racing and the room spinning and her stomach…

Whoops, here it comes. Dorie turned her head to the side just in time to save her clothes. When she finished vomiting, she crawled a few feet away and collapsed full length onto her side, one arm extended like Adam’s on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Then she remembered reading someplace that headache, nausea, and dizziness were all symptoms of concussion, and that the last thing you should do was give in to the urge to sleep. She tried to raise herself up onto her hands and knees, but it felt as if she were fighting gravity on Jupiter-somehow the planet itself had grown impossibly heavy under her and was pulling her down toward that dreamless darkness.

Fight it, she told herself as she sank back down to the kitchen floor, her head pillowed on her folded arms. Got to fight it. But by then she could no longer remember what she was supposed to be fighting against, or why. Still, she felt vaguely guilty.

“Later, Mom,” she murmured as the darkness closed around her again. “I promise I’ll clean it up later.”

Later.

Still on the floor, but on her back now, with her head pillowed on someone’s lap. Cool damp cloth on her forehead, the rim of a glass touching her lips. She smelled the musty-sharp, cough-medicine smell of brandy, sipped, swallowed, coughed feebly. Then her eyes fluttered open, a man’s hand came over her mouth to stifle her scream, and although the shock to her system was so profound it jarred her down to her soul, Dorie was not terribly surprised to see that the face leaning over her, hovering upside down only inches above her own, was wearing a leering Kabuki mask. Somehow, in fact, it seemed almost inevitable.