The following morning, Jill made an appointment at the beauty parlor. She was exhausted, and under the warm, comfortable hum of the hair drier, she dozed off, and the nightmare began. She was in bed, asleep. She could hear Toby come into her bedroom in his wheelchair…creak…creak. Slowly, he got out of the chair and rose to his feet and moved toward her, grinning, his skeletal hands reaching for her throat. Jill awoke screaming wildly, throwing the beauty shop into an uproar. She fled without even having her hair combed out.
After that experience, Jill was afraid to leave the house again.
And afraid to remain in it.
Something seemed to be wrong with her head. It was no longer just the headaches. She was beginning to forget things. She would go downstairs for something and walk into the kitchen and stand there, not knowing what she had come for. Her memory began to play strange tricks on her. Once, Nurse Gordon came in to speak to her; Jill wondered what a nurse was doing there, and then she suddenly remembered. The director was waiting on the set for Jill. She tried to recall her line. Not very well, I’m afraid, Doctor. She must speak to the director and find out how he wanted her to read it. Nurse Gordon was holding her hand, saying. “Mrs. Temple! Mrs. Temple! Are you feeling all right?” And Jill was back in her own surroundings, again in the present, caught up in the terror of what was happening to her. She knew she could not go on like this. She had to find out whether there was something wrong with her mind or whether Toby was able to somehow move, whether he had found a way to attack her, to try to murder her.
She had to see him. She forced herself to walk down the long hall toward Toby’s bedroom. She stood outside a moment, steeling herself, and then Jill entered Toby’s room.
Toby was lying in his bed, and the nurse was giving him a sponge bath. She looked up, saw Jill and said, “Why, here’s Mrs. Temple. We’re just having a nice bath, aren’t we?”
Jill turned to look at the figure on the bed.
Toby’s arms and legs had shriveled into stringy appendages attached to his shrunken, twisted torso. Between his legs, like some long, indecent snake, lay his useless penis, flaccid and ugly. The yellow cast had gone from Toby’s face, but the gaping idiotic grin was still there. His body was dead, but the eyes were frantically alive. Darting, seeking, weighing, planning, hating; cunning blue eyes filled with their secret plans, their deadly determination. It was Toby’s mind she was seeing. The important thing to remember is that his mind is unimpaired, the doctor had told her. His mind could think and feel and hate. That mind had nothing to do but plan its revenge, figure out a way to destroy her. Toby wanted her dead, as she wanted him dead.
As Jill looked down at him now staring into those eyes blazing with loathing, she could hear him saying, I’m going to kill you, and she could feel the waves of abhorence hitting her like physical blows.
Jill stared into those eyes, and she remembered the broken vase and she knew that none of the nightmares had been illusions. He had found a way.
She knew now that it was Toby’s life against hers.
34
When Dr. Kaplan finished his examination of Toby, he went to find Jill. “I think you should stop the therapy in the swimming pool,” he said. “It’s a waste of time. I was hoping we might get some slight improvement in Toby’s musculature, but it’s not working. I’ll talk to the therapist myself.”
“No!” It was a sharp cry.
Dr. Kaplan looked at her in surprise. “Jill, I know what you did for Toby last time. But this time it’s hopeless. I—”
“We can’t give up. Not yet.” There was a desperation in her voice.
Dr. Kaplan hesitated, then shrugged. “Well, if it means that much to you, but—”
“It does.”
At that moment, it was the most important thing in the world. It was going to save Jill’s life.