The Key to Midnight

since the seizure had stricken her. Breathable. Sweet.
        'Eyes closed… closed… but see what's happening,' Alex said as softly and lullingly as a hypnotist. 'The ceiling is starting to withdraw… moving up where it belongs. The walls too… pulling back from you, back from us, away… slowly away. You understand? The room is getting larger… a lot of space now. Do you feel the room gradually getting bigger, Joanna?'
        'Yes,' she said, and though hot tears were still streaming from her eyes, she was no longer sobbing.
        Alex spoke to her in that fashion for several minutes, and Joanna listened closely to each word and visualized each statement. Eventually the air pressure returned to normal; she was no longer suffocating.
        When her tears had dried and when her breathing had become rhythmic, relaxed, almost normal, he said, 'Okay, open your eyes.'
        She opened them, although reluctantly. The living room was as it should be.
        'You made it all go away,' she said wonderingly. 'You made it right again.'
        He was still holding her hands. He gently squeezed them, smiled, and said, 'Not just me. We did it together. And from now on, I'm pretty sure you'll be able to do it alone.'
        'Oh, no. Never by myself.'
        'Yes, you will. Because this phobia isn't a natural part of your psychological makeup. I'd bet everything I own that it's just posthypnotic suggestion. You don't need psychoanalysis to get rid of it. From now on, when a seizure hits you, just close your eyes and picture everything opening up and moving away from you.'
        'But I've tried that before. It never worked… until now, until you…'
        'Just once, you needed someone to hold your hand and force you to face up to the fear, someone who wouldn't be driven away. Until tonight, you thought it was an interior problem, an embarrassing mental illness. Now you know it's an exterior problem, not your fault, like a curse someone placed on you.'
        Joanna looked at the ceiling, daring it to descend.
        Alex said, 'Subsequent attacks ought to be less and less fierce - until they finally stop altogether. Neither the paranoia nor the claustrophobia has any genuine roots in you. They were both grafted onto you by the bastards who transformed you from Lisa into Joanna. You've been programmed. Now you have the power to reprogram yourself to be like other people.'
         To be like other people…
        For the first time in more than a decade, Joanna felt that she had at least some control of her life. She could at last deal with the malignant forces that had made a loner of her. From this day forward, if she wanted an intimate relationship with Alex or with anyone else, nothing within her could prevent her from having what she wanted. The only obstacles remaining were external. That thought was exhilarating, like a rejuvenation drug, water from the fountain of youth. The years dropped from her. Time ran backward. She felt as though she were a girl again. She would never hereafter cringe in fear as the ceiling descended and the walls closed in on her, nor would spells of irrational paranoia keep her from the succor and sanctuary of her friends.
         To be like other people…
        The cage door had been opened. She was free.

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    27
        
        The photographs no longer disturbed Joanna. She studied them in the same spirit of awe that people must have known when gazing into the first mirrors many centuries ago -with a superstitious fascination but not with fear.
        Alex sat beside her on the sofa, reading aloud from some of the reports in the massive Chelgrin file. They discussed what he read, trying to see the information from every angle, searching for a perspective that might have been overlooked at the time of the investigation.
        As the evening wore on, Joanna made a list of the ways in which she and Lisa Chelgrin were alike. Intellectually, she was more than half convinced that Alex was right, that she was indeed the missing daughter of the senator. But emotionally, she lacked conviction. Could it really be possible that the mother and father she remembered so well - Elizabeth and Robert Rand - were merely phantoms, that they had never existed except in her mind? And the apartment in London - was it conceivable that she had never actually lived in that place? She needed to see the evidence in black and white, a list of reasons why she should seriously