blood splashed across the upholstery and glass of the passenger door.
In the rearview mirror, Hatch saw the body tumbling along the pavement,
vanishing into the fog. Then for a brief moment he saw his own
reflection from the bridge of his nose to his eyebrows. He was wearing
sunglasses even though driving at night. No. He wasn’t wearing them.
The driver of the car was wearing them, and the reflection at which he
stared was not his own. Although he seemed to be the driver, he
realized that he was not, because even the dim glimpse he got of the
eyes behind the tinted lenses was sufficient to convince him that they
were peculiar, troubled, and utterly different from his own eyes.
Then-he was standing at the kitchen sink again, breathing hard and
making choking sounds of revulsion. Beyond the window lay only the
backyard, blanketed by night and fog.
“Hatch?”
Startled, he turned.
Lindsey was standing in the doorway, in her bathrobe. “Is something
wrong?”
Wiping his soapy hands on his sweatshirt, he tried to speak, but terror
had rendered him mute.
She hurried to him. “Hatch?”
He held her tightly and was glad for her embrace, which at last squeezed
the words from him.
“I shot her, she flew out of the car, Jesus God Almighty, bounced along
the highway like a rag doll!”
At Hatch’s request, Lindsey brewed a pot of coffee. The familiarity of
the delicious aroma was an antidote to the strangeness of the night.
More than anything else, that smell restored a sense of normalcy that
helped settle Hatch’s nerves. They drank the coffee at the breakfast
table at one end of the kitchen.
Hatch insisted on closing the Levolor blind over the nearby window. He
said, “I have the feeling… something’s out there … and I don’t
want it looking in at us.” He could not explain what he meant by
“something.”
When Hatch had recounted everything that had happened to him since
waking from the nightmare of the icy blonde, the switchblade, and the
mutilated eye, Lindsey had only one explanation to offer. “No matter
how it seemed at the time, you must not have been fully awake when you
got out of bed. You were sleepwalking. You didn’t really wake up until
I stepped into the kitchen and called your name.”
“I’ve never been a sleepwalker,” he said.
She tried to make light of his objection. “Never too late to take up a
new affliction.”
“I don’t buy it.”
“Then what’s your explanation?”
“I don’t have one.”
“So sleepwalking,” she said.
He stared down into the white porcelain cup that he clasped in both
hands, as if he were a Gypsy trying to foresee the future in the
patterns of light on the surface of the black brew. “Have you ever
dreamed you were someone else?”
“I suppose so,” she said.
He looked hard at her. “No supposing. Have you ever seen a dream
through the eyes of a stranger? A sic dream you can tell me about?”
“Well… no. But I’m sure I must’ve, at one time. I just don’t
remember.
dreams are smoke, after all. They fade so fast. Who remembers them for
long?”
“I’ll remember this one for the rest of my life,” he said.
Although they returned to bed, neither of them could get to sleep again.
Maybe it was partly the coffee. She thought he had wanted the coffee
precisely because he hoped that it would prevent sleep, sparing him a
return to the nightmare. Well, it had worked.
They both were lying on their backs, staring at the ceiling.
At first he had been unwilling to turn off the bedside lamp, though he
had revealed his reluctance only in the hesitancy with which he clicked
the switch. He was almost like a child who was old enough to know real
fears from false ones but not quite old enough to escape all of the
latter, certain that some monster lurked under the bed but ashamed to
say as much.
Now, with the lamp off and with only the indirect glow of distant
streetlamps piercing the windows between the halves of the drapes, his
anxiety had infected her. She found it easy to imagine that some