The Key to Midnight

smell antiseptics. Imagination. Nothing to fear. Nothing to fear at Nijo Castle.
        Lysol.
        Alcohol.
        No. Nothing to fear. The one-handed Korean was a stranger, a kindly little ojii-san who couldn't possibly hurt anyone. She had to get a grip on herself.
        Lysol.
        Alcohol.
        'Joanna? What's happening. What's wrong?' Alex asked, touching her shoulder.
        The elderly Korean seemed to advance with the slow-motion single-mindedness of a monster in a horror film or in a nightmare. Joanna felt trapped in the unearthly, oppressive gravity of her dream, in that same syrupy flow of time.
        Her tongue was thick. A bad taste filled her mouth, the coppery flavor of blood, which was no doubt as imaginary as the miasma of antiseptics, although it was as sickening as if it had been real. Her throat was constricted. She felt as if she might begin to gag. She heard herself straining for air.
        Lysol.
        Alcohol.
        She blinked, and the flutter of her eyelids magically altered reality even further, so the Korean's pinkish stump now ended in a mechanical hand. Incredibly, she could hear the compact servo-mechanisms purring with power, the oiled push-pull rods sliding in their tracks, and the gears click-click-clicking as the fingers opened from a clenched fist.
        No. That was imagination too.
        'Joanna?'
        When the Korean was less than three yards from her, he raised his twisted limb and pointed with the mechanical hand that wasn't really there. Intellectually Joanna knew that he was interested only in the mural that she and Alex had been studying, but on a more primitive and affecting emotional level, she reacted with the certainty that he was pointing at her, reaching for her with unmistakably malevolent purpose.
        'Joanna.'
        It was Alex speaking her name, but she could almost believe that it had been the Korean.
        From the deepest reaches of memory came a frightening sound: a gravelly, jagged, icy voice seething with hatred and bitterness. A familiar voice, synonymous with pain and terror. She wanted to scream. Although the man in her nightmare, the faceless bastard with steel fingers, had never spoken to her in sleep, she knew this was his voice. With a jolt, she realized that while she had never heard him speak in the nightmare, she had heard him when she was awake, a long time ago… somehow, somewhere. The words he spoke to her now were not imagined or dredged up from her worst dreams, but recollected. The voice was a cold, dark effervescence bubbling up from a long-forgotten place and time: 'Once more the needle, my lovely little lady. Once more the needle.' It grew louder, reverberating in her mind, a voice to which the rest of the world was deaf - 'Once more the needle, once more the needle, once more the needle' - booming with firecracker repetitiveness, until she thought her head would explode.
        The Korean stopped two feet from her.
        Lysol.
        Alcohol.
         Once more the needle, my lovely little lady…
        Joanna ran. She cried out like a wounded animal and turned away from the startled Korean, pushed at Alex without fully realizing who he was, pushed so hard that she almost knocked him down, and darted past him, her heels tapping noisily on the hardwood floor. She hurried into the next chamber, trying to scream but unable to find her voice, ran without looking back, convinced that the Korean was pursuing her, ran past the dazzling seventeenth-century artworks of the master Kano Tan'yu and his students, fled between strikingly beautiful wood sculptures, and all the while she struggled to draw a breath, but the air was like a thick dust that clogged her lungs, She ran past richly carved transoms, past intricate scenes painted on sliding doors, footsteps echoing off the coffered ceilings, ran past a surprised guard who called to her, dashed through an exit into cool November air, started across the big courtyard, heard a familiar voice calling her name, not the cold voice of the man with the steel hand, so she finally stopped, stunned, in the center of the Nijo garden, shaking, shaking.

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    10
        
        Alex led her to a garden bench and sat beside her in the brisk autumn breeze. Her eyes were unnaturally wide, and her face was as pale and fragile as bridal lace. He held her hand. Her fingers were cold and chalky white, and she squeezed his hand so hard that her