The Mask

she gave him the run of the house in spite of the extra work he caused her. But she was not prepared to live with cat hairs in her food or in her sheets.
    She got out of bed, stepped into her slippers.
    Ari watched.
    “Come down from there this instant,” Grace said, looking up at him with her sternest expression.
    His shining eyes were gas-flame blue.
    Grace went to the bedroom door, opened it, stepped out of the way, and said, “Shoo.”
    The cat’s muscles relaxed. He slumped in a furry puddle atop the highboy, as if his bones had melted. He yawned and began to lick one of his black paws.
    “Hey!” she said.
    Aristophanes raised his head languidly, peered down at her.
    “Out,” she said gruffly. “Now.”
    When he still didn’t move, she started toward the highboy, and he was at last encouraged to obey. He jumped down and darted past her so fast she didn’t have time to swat him. He went into the hall, and she closed the door.
    In bed again, with the lights out, she remembered the way he had looked as he perched atop the highboy: facing her, aimed at her, shoulders drawn up, head held low, haunches tense, his fur electrified, his eyes bright and slightly demented. He had intended to jump onto the bed and scare the bejesus out of her; there was no doubt about that. But such schemes were a kitten’s games; Ari had not been playful in that fashion for the past three or four years, ever since he had attained a rather indolent maturity. What on earth had gotten into him?
    That settles it, she told herself. We’ll pay a visit to the veterinarian first thing in the morning. Good Lord, I might have a schizophrenic cat on my hands!
    Seeking rest, she let the night embrace her again. She allowed herself to be carried along by the riverlike sound of the soughing wind. Within a few minutes she was once more being borne toward the waterfall of sleep. She trembled on the edge of it, and a quiver of uneasiness passed through her, a chill that nearly broke the spell, but then she dropped down into darkness.
    She dreamed that she was trekking across a vast underwater landscape of brilliantly colored coral and seaweed and strange, undulating plants. A cat lurked among the plants, a big one, much bigger than a tiger, but with the coloring of a Siamese. It was stalking her. She could see its saucer eyes peering at her through the murky sea, from among wavering stalks of marine vegetation. She could hear and feel its low purr transmitted by the water. She paused repeatedly during her suboceanic trek so that she could fill a series of yellow bowls with generous portions of Meow Mix in the hope of pacifying the cat, but she knew in her heart that the beast would not be content until it had sunk its claws into her. She moved steadily past towers of coral, past grottoes, across wide aquatic plains of shifting sand, waiting for the cat to snarl and lunge from concealment, waiting for it to rip open her face and gouge out her eyes.
    Once, she woke and thought she heard Aristophanes scratching insistently on the other side of the closed bedroom door. But she was groggy and couldn’t trust her senses; she wasn’t able to wrench herself fully awake, and in a few seconds she sank down into the dream once more.
     
    At one o’clock in the morning, the third floor of the hospital was so quiet that Harriet Gilbey, the head nurse on the graveyard shift, felt as though she was deep underground, in some kind of military complex, tucked into the stony roots of a mountain, far from the real world and the background noises of real life. The only sounds were the whisper of the heating system and the occasional squeak of the nurses’ rubber-soled shoes on the highly polished tile floors.
    Harriet—a small, pretty, neatly uniformed black woman—was at the nurses’ station, around the corner from the bank of elevators, entering data on patients’ charts, when the tranquility of the third floor was abruptly shattered by a piercing scream. She moved out from behind the reception desk and hurried along the hall, following the shrill cry. It came from room 316. When Harriet pushed open the door, stepped into the room, and snapped on the overhead lights, the screaming stopped as suddenly as it had begun.
    The girl they called Jane Doe was in bed, flat on her back, one arm raised and angled across her face as if she were warding off a blow, the other hand hooked on to one of the safety rails. She had kicked the sheets and the blanket into a tangled wad at the foot