The Key to Midnight

whatsoever to Joanna. Nevertheless, the young girl herself - blond. with a full but lithe figure - was as familiar as the image in any mirror. As Joanna stared in disbelief at the face of the missing woman, a chill crept along her spine.
        Finally she got up and retrieved half a dozen photographs of her own from a box in the bedroom closet. These shots had been taken the first year she'd lived in Japan, when she'd been working in Yokohama. She spread them on the coffee table, next to the old photos from the Chelgrin file. As she studied the resemblance between Lisa's face and her own as she had looked more than a decade ago, a dynamic but formless fear stirred in her.
        'It's a remarkable likeness, isn't it?' Alex asked.
        'Identical,' she said weakly.
        'You can see why I was convinced almost from the moment I saw you in the Moonglow.'
        Suddenly the air seemed too thick to breathe comfortably. The room was warm. Hot. She stood, intending to open a window to get a breath of fresh air, but she sat down again at once, too dizzy to remain on her feet. The walls moved in and out like living membranes, and the ceiling was descending, coming down, slowly but relentlessly down. Although she knew the shrinkage of the room was occurring only in her imagination, she was nevertheless terrified of being crushed to death.
        'Joanna?'
        She closed her eyes.
        'Is something wrong?' he asked.
        She was overcome by an irrational urge to tell him to pack up his pictures and his reports, and get out. His presence now seemed to be a terrible intrusion into her life, an unconscionable intimacy, and a flutter of nausea went through her at the thought that he might touch her. He's dangerous, she thought.
        'Joanna?'
        Restraining herself from lashing out at him, she said in a whisper: 'The walls are closing in again.'
        'Walls?' Alex looked around, perplexed.
        To her, the room appeared to be only a third of its former size.
        The air was so hot and dry that it scorched her lungs, parched her lips.
        'And the ceiling,' she said. 'Coming lower.'
        She broke into a sweat. Dissolving in the heat. Melting. As if made of wax. Unable to breathe. The heat was going to kill her.
        'Is that really what you see?' he asked. 'Walls closing in?'
        'Y-yes.'
        She stared at the walls, trying to make them roll back, willing the room to return to its former proportions. She was determined not to let fear get the better of her this time.
        'You're hallucinating,' Alex said.
        'I know. Because of you. Because of feeling… too close to you. This is always what happens. I've never told anyone… not even Mariko. I've never told anyone about the spells of paranoia either. Sometimes I think the whole world's against me, out to get me. Seems like nothing's real, all just a clever stage setting. When I start thinking like that, I want to run off and hide where no one can find me, hurt me.' She was speaking rapidly, in part because she was afraid that she would lose the courage she needed to reveal these things, and in part because she hoped that talking would distract her from the advancing walls and the steadily lowering ceiling. 'I've never told anyone about it because I've been afraid people will think I'm crazy. But I'm not nuts. If I were crazy, I'd accept paranoia as a perfectly normal state of mind. I wouldn't even realize I was having spells of paranoia.'
        The hallucinations grew worse. Although she was sitting, the ceiling appeared to be no more than ten or twelve inches above her head. The walls were only a few feet away on every side, rolling closer on well-oiled tracks. The atmosphere was being compressed within this space, molecules jamming against molecules, until the air ceased to be a gas and became a liquid, first as dense as water, then syrup. When she breathed, she was convinced against all reason that her throat and lungs were filled with fluid. She heard herself whimpering, and she despised her weakness, but she couldn't silence herself.
        Alex took her hand. 'None of it's real. You can turn it off if you try.'
        The air became so thick that she choked on it. She bent forward, coughed, gagged.
        Alex tried to guide her through the seizure. 'You've been brainwashed, Joanna. That's got to be it. The answer. Somehow. All the memories of your true past have been eradicated,