Hideaway

rapidly slowed down. On surface streets he made his way out of the area as swiftly as possible, obeying speed limits because any cop who stopped him would surely notice the blood splashed across the upholstery and glass of the passenger door.
     
    ----
     
    In the rearview mirror, Hatch saw the body tumbling along the pavement, vanishing into the fog. Then for a brief moment he saw his own reflection from the bridge of his nose to his eyebrows. He was wearing sunglasses even though driving at night. No. He wasn't wearing them. The driver of the car was wearing them, and the reflection at which he stared was not his own. Although he seemed to be the driver, he realized that he was not, because even the dim glimpse he got of the eyes behind the tinted lenses was sufficient to convince him that they were peculiar, troubled, and utterly different from his own eyes. Then—
    —he was standing at the kitchen sink again, breathing hard and making choking sounds of revulsion. Beyond the window lay only the backyard, blanketed by night and fog.
    “Hatch?”
    Startled, he turned.
    Lindsey was standing in the doorway, in her bathrobe. “Is something wrong?”
    Wiping his soapy hands on his sweatshirt, he tried to speak, but terror had rendered him mute.
    She hurried to him. “Hatch?”
    He held her tightly and was glad for her embrace, which at last squeezed the words from him. “I shot her, she flew out of the car, Jesus God Almighty, bounced along the highway like a rag doll!”

7
    At Hatch's request, Lindsey brewed a pot of coffee. The familiarity of the delicious aroma was an antidote to the strangeness of the night. More than anything else, that smell restored a sense of normalcy that helped settle Hatch's nerves. They drank the coffee at the breakfast table at one end of the kitchen.
    Hatch insisted on closing the Levolor blind over the nearby window. He said, “I have the feeling … something's out there … and I don't want it looking in at us.” He could not explain what he meant by “something.”
    When Hatch had recounted everything that had happened to him since waking from the nightmare of the icy blonde, the switchblade, and the mutilated eye, Lindsey had only one explanation to offer. “No matter how it seemed at the time, you must not have been fully awake when you got out of bed. You were sleepwalking. You didn't really wake up until I stepped into the kitchen and called your name.”
    “I've never been a sleepwalker,” he said.
    She tried to make light of his objection. “Never too late to take up a new affliction.”
    “I don't buy it.”
    “Then what's your explanation?”
    “I don't have one.”
    “So sleepwalking,” she said.
    He stared down into the white porcelain cup that he clasped in both hands, as if he were a Gypsy trying to foresee the future in the patterns of light on the surface of the black brew. “Have you ever dreamed you were someone else?”
    “I suppose so,” she said.
    He looked hard at her. “No supposing. Have you ever seen a dream through the eyes of a stranger? A specific dream you can tell me about?”
    “Well … no. But I'm sure I must've, at one time. I just don't remember. Dreams are smoke, after all. They fade so fast. Who remembers them for long?”
    “I'll remember this one for the rest of my life,” he said.
     
    ----
     
    Although they returned to bed, neither of them could get to sleep again. Maybe it was partly the coffee. She thought he had wanted the coffee precisely because he hoped that it would prevent sleep, sparing him a return to the nightmare. Well, it had worked.
    They both were lying on their backs, staring at the ceiling.
    At first he had been unwilling to turn off the bedside lamp, though he had revealed his reluctance only in the hesitancy with which he clicked the switch. He was almost like a child who was old enough to know real fears from false ones but not quite old enough to escape all of the latter, certain that some monster lurked under the bed but ashamed to say as much.
    Now, with the lamp off and with only the indirect glow of distant streetlamps piercing the windows between the halves of the drapes, his anxiety had infected her. She found it easy to imagine that some shadows on the ceiling moved, bat-lizard-spider forms of singular stealth and malevolent purpose.
    They talked softly, on and off, about nothing special. They both knew what they wanted to talk about, but they were afraid of it. Unlike the creepy-crawlies on