She sat straight up, shuddering. She was cold and yet slick with sweat; she slept in just a T-shirt and panties, and both garments clung to her skin, unpleasantly sticky. The frightening sound from the nightmare continued to echo in her mind—thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk—and she realized that her subconscious had borrowed that noise from reality, from the wind-loosened shutter that had startled her and Paul earlier.
Gradually, the pounding noise faded and blended with the thumping of her heart.
She drew back the covers and swung her bare legs out of bed. She sat on the edge of the mattress, hugging herself.
Dawn had come. Gray light seeped in around the drapes; it was too dim to reveal the details of the furniture, but it was just bright enough to deepen the shadows and distort the shapes of everything, so that the room seemed like an alien place.
The rain had stopped a couple of hours before she’d gone to bed, but the storm had returned while she’d been sleeping. Rain pattered on the roof and gurgled through the gutters and the downspouts. Low thunder rumbled like a distant cannonade.
Paul was still asleep, snoring softly.
Carol knew she wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep. Like it or not, rested or not, she was up for the day.
Without turning on a light, she went into the master bathroom. In the weak glow of dawn, she stripped out of her damp T-shirt and panties. While soaping herself in the shower, she thought about the nightmare, which had been considerably more vivid than any dream she’d ever had before.
That strange, jarring sound—thunk, thunk—had been the most frightening thing in the dream, and the memory of it still nagged her. It wasn’t just an ordinary hammering noise; there was an odd echo to it, a hardness and sharpness she couldn’t quite define. She decided it was not only a case of her subconscious mind borrowing the noise the shutter had made earlier. The terrifying sound in the dream was caused by something considerably more disturbing than the mere banging of an unmoored shutter. Furthermore, she was sure she had heard precisely that sound on another occasion, too. Not in the nightmare. In real life. In another place… a long time ago…
As she let the hot water stream over her, sluicing away the soap, she tried to recall where and when she had heard exactly that same unsettling sound, for it suddenly seemed important for her to identify it. Without understanding why, she felt vaguely threatened as long as she could not recall the source of the sound. But remembrance hung tantalizingly beyond the limits of her reach, like the title of a hauntingly familiar but unnamable piece of music.
4
AT 8:45, after breakfast, Carol left for work, and Paul went upstairs to the rear bedroom that he had converted into an office. He had created a Spartan atmosphere in which to write without distraction. The off-white walls were bare, unadorned by even a single painting. The room contained only an inexpensive desk, a typist’s chair, an electric typewriter, a jar bristling with pens and pencils, a deep letter tray that now contained nearly two hundred manuscript pages of the novel he had started at the beginning of his sabbatical, a telephone, a three-shelf bookcase filled with reference works, a bottled-water dispenser in one corner, and a small table upon which stood a Mr. Coffee machine.
This morning, as usual, he prepared a pot of coffee first thing. Just as he pressed the switch labeled BREWER and poured water into the top of the Mr. Coffee, the telephone rang. He sat on the edge of the desk, picked up the receiver. “Hello.”
“Paul? Grace Mitowski.”
“Good morning, love. How are you?”
“Well, these old bones don’t like rainy weather, but otherwise I’m coping.”
Paul smiled. “Listen, I know you can still run circles around me any time.”
“Nonsense. You’re a compulsive worker with a guilt complex about leisure. Not even a nuclear reactor has your energy.”
He laughed. “Don’t psychoanalyze me, Grace. I get enough of that from my wife.”
“Speaking of whom…”
“Sorry, but you just missed her. You ought to be able to catch her at the office in half an hour.”