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

closed bedrooy and couldn’t trust her senses; she wasn’t able to wrench herself fully awake, and in a few seconds she sank down into the drea, the third floor of the hospital was so quiet that Harriet Gilbey the head nurse on the graveyard shift, felt as though she was deep underground, in some kind of military complex, tucked into the stony roots of a round noises of real life The only sounds were the whisper of the heating system and the occasional squeak of the nurses’ rubber-soled shoes on the highly polished tile floors

Harriet--a small, pretty, neatly uniformed black woman--was at the nurses’ station, around the corner fro data on patients’ charts, when the tranquility of the third floor was abruptly shattered by a piercing scream Shethe hall, following the shrill cry It came from room 316 When Harriet pushed open the door, stepped into the roo stopped as suddenly as it had begun

The girl they called Jane Doe was in bed, flat on her back, one ar off a blow, the other hand hooked on to one of the safety rails She had kicked the sheets and the blanket into a tangled wad at the foot of the bed, and her hospital goas nicked up over her hips She tossed her head violently froinary assailant:

"Nonono Don’t! Please don’t kill entle voice, and patient insistence, Harriet tried to quiet the girl At first Jane resisted all iven a sedative earlier Now she was having trouble waking up Gradually, however, she shook off the nightmare and calmed down

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

"Just a bad dream," Harriet said

Jane blinked sleepily at the to kill me"

"Hush now," Harriet said "It was only a dream

No one here will hurt you"

"A dream?" Jane asked, her voice slurred "Oh Yeah Just a dreaown and the tangled sheets were damp with perspiration Harriet and Kay replaced theed, Jane succu of the sedative She turned onto her side and murmured happily in her sleep; she even smiled

"Looks like she switched to a better channel," Harriet said

"Poor kid After what she’s been through, the least she deserves is a good night’s sleep"

They watched her for athe door

Alone, deep in sleep, transported into a different dreahed, sled quietly

"The ax," she whispered in her sleep "The ax Oh, the ax Yes Yes"

Her hands curled slightly, as if she were clutching a solid but invisible object

"The ax," she whispered, and the second of those tords reverberated softly through the dark roo rooe of the credenza

Thank! Thunk!

She dashed through the archway, into a long hall, headed toward the stairs that led to the second floor

When she glanced behind her, she saw that the house had vanished in her wake and had been replaced by a pitch-black void in which so silvery flickered back and forth, back and forth

Thunk!

Understanding ca object was An ax The blade of an ax Glinting as it swung fro, she climbed the stairs toward the second floor

Thunk thank

At ti into wood; the sound of it was dry, splintery But at other times the sound had a subtly different quality, as if the blade were slicing brutally into a substancewet and tender

Into flesh?

Thank!

Carol groaned in her sleep, turned restlessly, flinging off the sheets

Then she was running across the high meadow

The trees ahead The void behind And the ax The ax

6

FRIDAY , there was another break in the rain, but the day was dressed in fog The light coh the hospital as wintry, bleak

Jane had only a hazy recollection of the nurses changing her sheets and her sweat-soaked bed gown during the night She vaguely recalled having a frightening dreale detail of it

She was still unable to re else about herself She could cast her , perhaps even to a point a minute or so on the other side of the accident, but beyond that there was only a blank here her past should have been

During breakfast, she read an article in one of the h there were no visiting hours until this afternoon, Jane was already looking forward to seeing the woain Dr Hannaport and the nurses were nice, every one of them, but none of them affected her as positively as Carol Tracy did For reasons she could not understand, she felt htened by her amnesia when she ith Dr Tracy than when she ith the others Maybe that hat people ood bedside manner

Shortly after nine o’clock, when Paul was on the freeway, headed don to deliver the new set of application papers to Alfred O’Brian’s office, the Pontiac’s engine cut out It didn’t sputter or cough; the pistons si at nearly fifty miles an hour As the Pontiac’s speed pluan to freeze up Traffic whizzed past on both sides at sixty and sixty-five, faster than the speed limit, too fast for the misty weather Paul ht-hand shoulder of the road Second by second, he expected to hear a short squeal of brakes and feel the sickening ily, he was able to avoid a collision Wrestling with the stiffening steering wheel, he brought the Pontiac to a full stop on the berm

He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes until he had regained his composure When at last he leaned forward and twisted the key in the ignition, the starter didn’t htest response; the battery had no juice to offer He tried a few ave up

A freeway exit was just ahead, and there was a service station less than a block from the off-ramp Paul walked to it in ten minutes