By the light of the moon

ought to be afraid, she had no fear.
She felt relaxed. She yawned.
    If the first brother was evil – and no doubt he was
– then the second must be good, so she was not without a
protector. In movies and often in books, moral character was
distributed in exactly that ratio between identical siblings: one
evil, one good.
    She'd never known twins in real life. If she ever met any, she
would not be able to trust both. Your trust ensured that you would
be bludgeoned to death, or worse, in Act 2 or in Chapter 12, or
certainly by the end of the story.
    These two guys looked equally benign, but one of them slipped
loose a rubber-tube tourniquet that had been knotted around Jilly's
arm, while the second appeared to be administering an injection.
Neither of these interesting actions could fairly be called evil,
but they were certainly unsettling.
    'Which of you is going to bludgeon me?' she asked, surprised to
hear a slur in her voice, as though she had been drinking.
    As one, with matching expressions of surprise, the twin salesmen
looked at her.
    'I should warn you,' she said, 'I know karaoke.'
    Each of the twins kept his right hand on the plunger of the
hypodermic syringe, but simultaneously each snatched up a white
cotton handkerchief with his left hand. They were exquisitely
choreographed.
    'Not karaoke,' she corrected herself. 'Karate.' This was a lie,
but she thought that she sounded convincing, even though her voice
remained thick and strange. 'I know karate.'
    The blurry brothers spoke in perfect harmony, their syllables
precisely matched. 'I want you to sleep a little more, young lady.
Sleep, sleep.'
    As one, the wonderfully synchronized twins swept the white
handkerchiefs through the air and dropped them on Jilly's face with
such panache that she expected the cloths to transform magically
into doves before they quite touched her skin. Instead, the damp
fabric, reeking with the pungent chemistry of forgetfulness, seemed
to turn black, like crows, like ravens, and she was borne away on
midnight wings, into darkness deep.
    Although she thought that she'd opened her eyes an instant after
closing them, a couple minutes must have passed in that blink. The
needle had been withdrawn from her arm. The twins no longer hovered
over her.
    In fact, only one of the men was present, and she realized that
the other had not actually existed, had been a trick of vision. He
stood at the foot of the bed, returning the hypodermic syringe to
the leather satchel, which she'd mistaken for a kit of salesman's
samples. She realized that it must be a medical bag.
    He droned on about his life's work, but nothing he said made any
sense to Jilly, perhaps because he was an incoherent psychopath or
perhaps because the fumes of nepenthe, still burning in her nose
and sinuses, rendered her incapable of understanding him.
    When she tried to rise from the bed, she experienced a wave of
vertigo that washed her back down onto the pillows. She clutched
the mattress with both hands, as a shipwrecked sailor might cling
to a raft of flotsam in a turbulent sea.
    This sensation of tilting and spinning at last stirred up the
fear that she knew she ought to feel but that until now had been an
inactive sediment at the bottom of her mind. As her breathing grew
shallow, quick, and frantic, her racing heart churned currents of
anxiety through her blood, and fear threatened to darken into
terror, panic.
    She had never been interested in controlling others, but she'd
always insisted on being the master of her own fate. She might make
mistakes, did make mistakes – lots, lots – but
if her life was destined to be screwed up, then she'd damn well do
the job herself. Control had been taken from her, seized by force,
maintained with chemicals, with drugs, for reasons that she could
not understand even though she strained to remain focused on her
tormentor's line of self-justifying patter.
    With the surge of fear came anger. In spite of her
karaoke-karate threat and her Southwest Amazon image, Jilly wasn't
by nature a butt-kicking warrioress. Humor and charm were her
weapons of choice. But here she saw an ample backside in which she
emphatically wanted to bury a boot. As the
salesman-maniac-doctor-whatever walked to the desk, to pick up his
cola and three bags of peanuts, Jilly tried once more to rise in
righteous rage.
    Again, her box-spring raft tossed in the flamboyant sea of bad
motel decor. A second attack of vertigo, worse than the first, spun
a whirlpool of