The Key to Midnight

----

    1
        
        In the dark, Joanna Rand went to the window. Naked trembling, she peered between the wooden slats of the blind.
        Wind from the distant mountains pressed coldly against the glass and rattled a loose pane.
        At four o'clock in the morning, the city of Kyoto was quiet, even in Gion, the entertainment quarter crowded with nightclubs and geisha houses. Kyoto, the spiritual heart of Japan, was a thousand years old yet as new as a fresh idea: a fascinating hodgepodge of neon signs and ancient temples, plastic gimcrackery and beautifully hand-carved stone, the worst of modern architecture thrusting up next to palaces and ornate shrines that were weathered by centuries of hot, damp summers and cold, damp winters. By a mysterious combination of tradition and popular culture, the metropolis renewed her sense of humanity's permanence and purpose, refreshed her sometimes shaky belief in the importance of the individual.
         The earth revolves around the sun; society continuously changes; the city grows; new generations come forth… and I'll go on just as they do.
        That was always a comforting thought when she was in darkness, alone, unable to sleep, morbidly energized by the powerful yet indefinable fear that came to her every night.
        Calmed somewhat but not anxious to go to bed, Joanna dressed in a red silk robe and slippers. Her slender hands were still shaking, but the tremors were not as severe as they had been.
        She felt violated, used, and discarded - as though the hateful creature in her nightmare had assumed a real physical form and had repeatedly, brutally raped her while she'd slept.
         The man with the steel fingers reaches for the hypodermic syringe…
        That single image was all that she retained from the nightmare. It had been so vivid that she could recall it at will, in unsettling detail: the smooth texture of those metal fingers, the clicking and whirring of gears working in them, the gleam of light off the robotic knuckles.
        She switched on the bedside lamp and studied the familiar room. Nothing was out of place. The air contained only familiar scents. Yet she wondered if she truly had been alone all night.
        She shivered.

----

    2
        
        Joanna stepped out of the narrow stairwell into her ground-floor office. She switched on the light and studied the room as she had inspected those upstairs, half expecting the fearsome phantom of her dream to be waiting somewhere in the real world. The soft glow from the porcelain lamp didn't reach every corner. Purple shadows draped the bookshelves, the rosewood furniture, and the rice-paper scroll paintings. Potted palms cast complex, lacy shadows across one wall. Everything was in order.
        Unfinished paperwork littered the desk, but she wasn't in a bookkeeping frame of mind. She needed a drink.
        The outer door of the office opened on the carpeted area that encircled the long cocktail bar at one end of the Moonglow Lounge. The club wasn't completely dark: Two low-wattage security lights glowed above the smoky blue mirrors behind the bar and made the beveled edges of the glass gleam like the blades of well-stropped knives. An eerie green bulb marked each of the four exits. Beyond the bar stools, in the main room, two hundred chairs at sixty tables faced a small stage. The nightclub was silent, deserted.
        Joanna went behind the bar, took a glass from the rack, and poured a double shot of Dry Sack over ice. She sipped the sherry, sighed - and became aware of movement near the open door to her office.
        Mariko Inamura, the assistant manager, had come downstairs from the apartment that she occupied on the third floor, above Joanna's quarters. As modest as always, Mariko wore a bulky green bathrobe that hung to the floor and was two sizes too large for her; lost in all that quilted fabric, she seemed less a woman than a waif. Her black hair, usually held up by ivory pins, now spilled to her shoulders. She went to the bar and sat on one of the stools.
        'Like a drink?' Joanna asked.
        Mariko smiled. 'Water would be nice, thank you.'
        'Have something stronger.'
        'No, thank you. Just water, please.'
        'Trying to make me feel like a lush?'
        'You aren't a lush.'
        'Thanks for the vote of confidence,' Joanna said. 'But I wonder. I seem to wind up here at the bar more nights than not, around