The Mask

of the bed, and her hospital gown was nicked up over her hips. She tossed her head violently from side to side, gasping, pleading with an imaginary assailant:
    “No… no… no. Don’t! Please don’t kill me! No!” With gentle hands, a gentle voice, and patient insistence, Harriet tried to quiet the girl. At first Jane resisted all ministrations. She had been given a sedative earlier. Now she was having trouble waking up. Gradually, however, she shook off the nightmare and calmed down.
    Another nurse, Kay Hamilton, appeared at Harriet’s side. “What happened? Must’ve woke up half the floor.”
    “Just a bad dream,” Harriet said.
    Jane blinked sleepily at them. “She was trying to kill me.”
    “Hush now,” Harriet said. “It was only a dream. No one here will hurt you.”
    “A dream?” Jane asked, her voice slurred. “Oh. Yeah. Just a dream. Whew! What a dream.”
    The girl’s thin white gown and the tangled sheets were damp with perspiration. Harriet and Kay replaced them with fresh linens.
    As soon as the bed had been changed, Jane succumbed to the lingering tug of the sedative. She turned onto her side and murmured happily in her sleep; she even smiled.
    “Looks like she switched to a better channel,” Harriet said.
    “Poor kid. After what she’s been through, the least she deserves is a good night’s sleep.”
    They watched her for a minute, then left the room, turning off the lights and closing the door.
    Alone, deep in sleep, transported into a different dream from the one that had elicited her screams, Jane sighed, smiled, giggled quietly.
    “The ax,” she whispered in her sleep. “The ax. Oh, the ax. Yes. Yes.”
    Her hands curled slightly, as if she were clutching a solid but invisible object.
    “The ax,” she whispered, and the second of those two words reverberated softly through the dark room.
     
    Thunk!
    Carol ran through the huge living room, across the oriental carpet, banging her hip against the edge of the credenza.
    Thunk! Thunk!
    She dashed through the archway, into a long hall, headed toward the stairs that led to the second floor.
    When she glanced behind her, she saw that the house had vanished in her wake and had been replaced by a pitch-black void in which something silvery flickered back and forth, back and forth.
    Thunk!
    Understanding came with a flash; she knew what the glimmering object was. An ax. The blade of an ax. Glinting as it swung from side to side.
    Thunk… thunk-thunk…
    Whimpering, she climbed the stairs toward the second floor.
    Thunk… thunk…
    At times the blade seemed to be biting into wood; the sound of it was dry, splintery. But at other times the sound had a subtly different quality, as if the blade were slicing brutally into a substance much softer than wood, into something wet and tender.
    Into flesh?
    Thunk!
    Carol groaned in her sleep, turned restlessly, flinging off the sheets.
    Then she was running across the high meadow.
    The trees ahead. The void behind. And the ax. The ax.

6
    FRIDAY morning, there was another break in the rain, but the day was dressed in fog. The light coming through the hospital window was wintry, bleak.
    Jane had only a hazy recollection of the nurses changing her sheets and her sweat-soaked bed gown during the night. She vaguely recalled having a frightening dream, too, but she couldn’t bring to mind a single detail of it.
    She was still unable to remember her name or anything else about herself. She could cast her mind back as far as the accident yesterday morning, perhaps even to a point a minute or so on the other side of the accident, but beyond that there was only a blank wall where her past should have been.
    During breakfast, she read an article in one of the magazines that Carol Tracy had bought for her. Although there were no visiting hours until this afternoon, Jane was already looking forward to seeing the woman again. Dr. Hannaport and the nurses were nice, every one of them, but none of them affected her as positively as Carol Tracy did. For reasons she could not understand, she felt more secure, more at ease, less frightened by her amnesia when she was with Dr. Tracy than when she was with the others. Maybe that was what people meant when they said a doctor had a good bedside manner.
     
    Shortly after nine o’clock, when Paul was on the freeway, headed downtown to deliver the new set of application papers to Alfred O’Brian’s office, the Pontiac's engine cut out. It didn’t sputter or cough; the pistons simply stopped firing