The Mask

did.”
    “Creepy, huh?”
    “Decidedly,” Carol said. She remembered her own nightmare: the black void; the flashing, silvery object drawing nearer, nearer.
    “I’m sure Grace’ll tell you all about it,” Paul said. “And I’ll see you this evening.”
    “I love you,” Carol said.
    “Love you, too.”
    She put down the phone and went outside to the parking lot.
    Gray-black thunderheads churned across the sky, but only a thin rain was falling now. The wind was still cold and sharp; it sang in the power lines overhead, sounding like a swarm of angry wasps.
     
----
     
    The semiprivate room had two beds, but the second one was not currently in use. At the moment, no nurse was present either. The girl was alone.
    She lay under a crisp white sheet and a creamcolored blanket, staring at the acoustic-tile ceiling. She had a headache, and she could feel each dully throbbing, burning cut and abrasion on her battered body, but she knew she was not seriously hurt.
    Fear, not pain, was her worst enemy. She was frightened by her inability to remember who she was. On the other hand, she was plagued by the inexplicable yet unshakable feeling that it would be foolish and exceedingly dangerous to remember her past. Without knowing why, she suspected that full remembrance would be the death of her—an odd notion that she found more frightening than anything else.
    She knew her amnesia wasn’t the result of the accident. She had a misty recollection of walking along the street in the rain a minute or two before she had blundered in front of the Volkswagen. Even then, she had been disoriented, afraid, unable to remember her name, utterly unfamiliar with the strange city in which she found herself and unable to recall how she had gotten there. The thread of her memory definitely had begun unraveling prior to the accident.
    She wondered if it was possible that her amnesia was like a shield, protecting her from something horrible in the past. Did forgetfulness somehow equal safety?
    Why? Safety from what?
    What could I be running from? she asked herself.
    She sensed that recovery of her identity was possible. In fact her memories seemed almost within her grasp. She felt as though the past lay at the bottom of a dark hole, close enough to touch; all she had to do was summon sufficient strength and courage to poke her hand into that lightless place and grope for the truth, without fear of what might bite her.
    However, when she tried hard to remember, when she probed into that hole, her fear grew and grew until it was no longer just ordinary fear; it became incapacitating terror. Her stomach knotted, and her throat swelled tight, and she broke out in a greasy sweat, and she became so dizzy that she nearly fainted.
    On the edge of unconsciousness, she saw and heard something disturbing, alarming—a fuzzy fragment of a dream, a vision—which she couldn’t quite identify but which frightened her nonetheless. The vision was composed of a single sound and a single, mysterious image. The image was hypnotic but simple: a quick flash of light, a silvery glimmer from a not-quite-visible object that was swinging back and forth in deep shadows; a gleaming pendulum, perhaps. The sound was hard-edged and threatening but not identifiable, a loud hammering noise, yet more than that.
    Thunk! Thunk! Thunk!
    She jerked, quivered, as if something had struck her.
    Thunk!
    She wanted to scream, couldn’t.
    She realized that her hands were fisted and that they were full of twisted, sweat-soaked sheets.
    Thunk!
    She stopped trying to remember who she was.
    Maybe it’s better that I don’t know, she thought.
    Her heartbeat gradually slowed to normal, and she was able to draw her breath without wheezing. Her stomach unknotted.
    The hammering sound faded.
    After a while she looked at the window. A flock of large, black birds reeled across the turbulent sky.
    What’s going to happen to me? she wondered.
    Even when the nurse came in to see how she was doing, and even when the doctor joined the nurse a moment later, the girl felt utterly, dishearteningly alone.

5
    GRACE’S kitchen smelled of coffee and warm spice cake. Rain washed down the window, obscuring the view of the rose garden that lay behind the house.
    “I’ve never believed in clairvoyance or premonitions.”
    “Neither have I,” Grace said. “But now I wonder. After all, I have two nightmares about you getting hurt, and the next thing I hear is that you’ve had two close calls, just as if you were acting out a