Strangers

sentence, repeated hundreds of times:
        I'm scared. I'm scared. I'm scared. I'm scared.
        Double-spacing, quadruple indentation, four sentences to a line, thirteen lines on page six, twenty-seven lines on page seven, another twenty-seven on page eight - that made 268 repetitions of the sentence. The machine had not created them by itself, for it was merely an obedient slave that did precisely what it was told. And it made no sense to speculate that someone had broken into the house during the night to tamper with his electronically stored manuscript. There were no signs of a break-in, and he could not think of anyone who would play such a prank. Clearly, he had come to the word processor while sleepwalking and had obsessively typed in this sentence 268 times, though he had absolutely no recollection of having done it.
        I'm scared.
        Scared of what - sleepwalking? It was a disorienting experience, at least on the morning end, but it was not an ordeal that would cause such terror as this.
        He was frightened by the quickness of his literary ascent and by the possibility of an equally swift descent into oblivion. Yet he could not completely dismiss the nagging thought that this had nothing to do with his career, that the threat hanging over him was something else altogether, something strange, something his conscious mind did not yet see but which his subconscious perceived and which it had tried to convey to him by means of this message left while he was sleeping.
        No. Nonsense. That was only the novelist's overactive imagination at work. Work. That was the best medicine for him.
        Besides, from his research into the subject, he knew that most adult sleepwalkers made short careers of it. Few experienced more than half a dozen episodes, usually contained within a time span of six months or less. Chances were good that his sleep would never again be complicated by midnight ramblings and that he would never again wake huddled and tense in the back of a closet.
        He deleted the unwanted words from the disk and went to work on chapter eighteen.
        When he next looked at the clock, he was surprised to see that it was past one and that he had labored through the lunch hour.
        Even for southern California, the day was warm for early November, so he ate lunch on the patio. The palm trees rustled in a mild breeze, and the air was scented with autumn flowers. With style and grace, Laguna sloped down to the shores of the Pacific. The ocean was spangled with sunlight.
        Finishing his last sip of Coke, Dom suddenly tilted his head back, looked straight up into the brilliantly blue sky, and laughed. "You see - no falling safe. No plummeting piano. No sword of Damocles."
        It was November 7.
        

    2.
        
        Boston, Massachusetts
        Dr. Ginger Marie Weiss never expected trouble in Bernstein's Delicatessen, but that was where it started, with the incident of the black gloves.
        Usually, Ginger could deal with any problems that came her way. She relished every challenge life presented, thrived on trouble. She would have been bored if her path had been always easy, unobstructed. However, it had never occurred to her that she might eventually be confronted with trouble she could not handle.
        As well as challenges, life provides lessons, and some are more welcome than others. Some lessons are easy, some difficult.
        Some are devastating.
        Ginger was intelligent, pretty, ambitious, hard-working, and an excellent cook, but her primary advantage in life was that no one took her seriously on first encounter. She was slender, a wisp, a graceful sprite who seemed as insubstantial as she was lovely. Most people underestimated her for weeks or months, only gradually realizing that she was a formidable competitor, colleague - or adversary.
        The story of Ginger's mugging was legend at Columbia Presbyterian, in New York, where she had served her internship four years prior to the trouble at Bernstein's Delicatessen. Like all interns, she had often worked sixteen-hour shifts and longer, day after day, and had left the hospital with barely enough energy to drag herself home. One hot, humid Saturday night in July, after completing an especially grueling tour of duty, she headed for home shortly after ten o'clock - and was accosted by a hulking Neanderthal with hands as big as shovel blades, huge arms, no neck,