She wondered if it was possible that her amnesia was like a shield, protecting her from something horrible in the past. Did forgetfulness somehow equal safety?
Why? Safety from what?
What could I be running from? she asked herself.
She sensed that recovery of her identity was possible. In fact her memories seemed almost within her grasp. She felt as though the past lay at the bottom of a dark hole, close enough to touch; all she had to do was summon sufficient strength and courage to poke her hand into that lightless place and grope for the truth, without fear of what might bite her.
However, when she tried hard to remember, when she probed into that hole, her fear grew and grew until it was no longer just ordinary fear; it became incapacitating terror. Her stomach knotted, and her throat swelled tight, and she broke out in a greasy sweat, and she became so dizzy that she nearly fainted.
On the edge of unconsciousness, she saw and heard something disturbing, alarming—a fuzzy fragment of a dream, a vision—which she couldn’t quite identify but which frightened her nonetheless. The vision was composed of a single sound and a single, mysterious image. The image was hypnotic but simple: a quick flash of light, a silvery glimmer from a not-quite-visible object that was swinging back and forth in deep shadows; a gleaming pendulum, perhaps. The sound was hard-edged and threatening but not identifiable, a loud hammering noise, yet more than that.
Thunk! Thunk! Thunk!
She jerked, quivered, as if something had struck her.
Thunk!
She wanted to scream, couldn’t.
She realized that her hands were fisted and that they were full of twisted, sweat-soaked sheets.
Thunk!
She stopped trying to remember who she was.
Maybe it’s better that I don’t know, she thought.
Her heartbeat gradually slowed to normal, and she was able to draw her breath without wheezing. Her stomach unknotted.
The hammering sound faded.
After a while she looked at the window. A flock of large, black birds reeled across the turbulent sky.
What’s going to happen to me? she wondered.
Even when the nurse came in to see how she was doing, and even when the doctor joined the nurse a moment later, the girl felt utterly, dishearteningly alone.
5
GRACE’S kitchen smelled of coffee and warm spice cake. Rain washed down the window, obscuring the view of the rose garden that lay behind the house.
“I’ve never believed in clairvoyance or premonitions.”
“Neither have I,” Grace said. “But now I wonder. After all, I have two nightmares about you getting hurt, and the next thing I hear is that you’ve had two close calls, just as if you were acting out a script or something.”
They sat at the small table by the kitchen window. Carol was wearing one of Grace’s robes and a pair of Grace’s slippers while her own clothes finished drying out.
“Only one close call,” she told Grace. “The lightning. That was a gut-wrencher, all right. But I wasn’t really in any danger this morning. That poor girl was the one who nearly got killed.”
Grace shook her head. “No. It was a close call for you, too. Didn’t you tell me you slid toward the oncoming traffic when you braked to avoid the girl? And didn’t you say the Cadillac missed you by an inch or less? Well, what if it hadn’t missed? If that Caddy had rammed your little VW, you certainly wouldn’t have walked away without a scratch.”
Frowning, Carol said, “I hadn’t looked at it that way.”
“You’ve been so busy worrying about the girl that you haven’t had a chance to think about yourself.”
Carol ate a bite of spice cake and washed it down with coffee. “You’re not the only one having nightmares.” She summarized her own dream: the severed heads, the houses that dissolved behind her as she passed through them, the flickering, silvery object.
Grace clasped her hands around her coffee cup and hunched over the table. There was worry in her blue eyes. “That’s one nasty dream. What do you make of it?”
“Oh, I don’t think it’s prophetic.”
“Why couldn’t it be? Mine appear to have been.”