Dream Eyes

corridor through which he was swimming narrowed drastically. He was forced to take off his tank and push it into and beyond the choke point. He barely managed to squeeze through after it. The nightmare scenario of getting stuck—unable to go forward or back—sent his heart rate climbing. He was suddenly using air at an even faster rate.
    And then he was on the other side. The passage widened once more. Gradually, he got his breathing back under control. But the damage had been done. He had used up a lot of air.
    He got the first clue that the current was guiding him in the right direction when he noticed that the once crystal-clear water was starting to become somewhat murky. It was an indication that he had reached the point where the freshwater of the underground river was converging with seawater. That still left a lot of room for things to go wrong. It was entirely possible that he would discover the exit only to find out that he could not fit through it. If that happened, he would spend his last minutes as a condemned man gazing upward through the stone bars of his cell at the summer sunlight filtering through the tropical sea.
    The second flashlight slowly died, plunging him into absolute darkness. Instinctively he tried to heighten his talent. Nothing happened. He was still psi-blind.
    All he could do now was try to follow the current. He swam slowly, his hands outstretched in an attempt to ward off a close encounter with the rocky walls of the cave.
    At one point, to keep his spirits up more than anything else, he took the regulator out of his mouth long enough to taste the water. It was unmistakably salty. He was now in a sea cave.
    When he perceived the first, faint glow infusing the endless realm of night, he considered the possibility that he was hallucinating. It was a reasonable assumption, given the sensory disorientation created by the absolute darkness and the fact that he knew he was sucking up the last of his air. Maybe this was the mysterious bright light that those who had survived near-death experiences described. In his case, it would be followed by for-real death.
    One thing was certain. If he survived, he would never again take the light of a summer day for granted.
    The pale glow brightened steadily. He swam faster. Nothing to lose.

Two
    Y ou’re too late,” the ghost in the mirror said. “I’m already dead.”
    There was no accusation in the words, just a calm statement of fact. Dr. Evelyn Ballinger had always been logical and even-tempered in life, reserving her deepest passions for her work. There was no reason why death would give her a personality transplant. But knowing that did nothing to temper the terrible sense of dread and guilt that chilled Gwen Frazier’s blood. If only she had opened the e-mail last night instead of this morning.
    If only
. The two most despairing words in the English language.
    She crossed the cluttered, heavily draped room that Evelyn had converted into an office. All of the rooms in the house were dark. Evelyn had never liked sunlight. She claimed it interfered with her work.
    Gwen’s movement through the room stirred the still air. The crystal wind chimes suspended from the ceiling shivered, producing an eerie music that seemed to come from beyond the grave. The sound raised the hair on the back of Gwen’s neck.
    In the doorway behind her, Max, Evelyn’s burly gray cat, meowed plaintively as if demanding that Gwen fix the situation. But there was no fixing death.
    The body was crumpled on the floor beside the desk. Evelyn had been in her early seventies, a large, generously proportioned woman who had been caught in a fashion time warp like so many others who resided in the small town of Wilby, Oregon. With her long gray hair, voluminous tie-dyed skirts, and crystal jewelry, she had been a model of the proudly eccentric look that Gwen privately labeled
Hippie Couture
.
    Evelyn’s blue eyes stared lifelessly at the ceiling. Her reading glasses lay on the floor. A photo had fallen beside one hand. The pinhole at the top of the picture indicated it had come from the corkboard over the desk. There was no blood or obvious bruising on the body.
    “No sign of an injury, you’ll notice,” the mirror ghost said. “What does that tell us?”
    “Always the instructor,” Gwen said. “You can’t help yourself, can you?”
    “No point changing now, is there, dear? I repeat my question. What does the lack of an obvious injury indicate?”
    “Could be