This is a dream, she thought. I’m really snug in bed, where I belong. I’m only dreaming that I’m in the bathroom I can put a stop to this just by waking up.
On the other hand, if it was a dream, would she be able to feel the cold ceramic floor beneath her bare feet as vividly as she could fuel it now? If it was really only a dream, would she be aware of the cold water on her bare breasts?
She shivered.
In the lightless void on the other side of the mirror, something flickered far off in the darkness.
Wake up!
Something silvery. It flashed again and again, back and forth, the image growing steadily larger.
For God’s sake, wake up!
She wanted to run. Couldn’t.
She wanted to scream. Didn’t.
In seconds the flickering object filled the mirror, pushing back the darkness out of which it had come, and then somehow it burst out of the mirror without shattering the glass, exploded out of the void and into the bathroom with one final, murderous swing, and she saw that it was an ax, bearing down on her face, the steel blade gleaming like the finest silver under the fluorescent lights. As the wickedly sharp edge of the ax swept inexorably toward her head, her knees buckled, and she fainted.
* * *
Near dawn, Jane woke again.
She was in bed. She was nude.
She threw the covers back, sat up, and saw her T-shirt, panties, and knee socks on the floor beside the bed. She dressed quickly.
The house was silent. The Tracys weren’t up yet.
Jane hurried quietly down the hallway to the guest bathroom, hesitated on the threshold, then stepped inside and snapped on the lights.
There was no blood, and the mirror above the sink was only an ordinary mirror, reflecting her worried face but contributing no bizarre images of its own.
Okay, she thought, maybe I was sleepwalking. And maybe I was actually here without any clothes on, trying to scrub nonexistent blood off my body. But the rest of it was just part of the nightmare. It didn’t happen. It couldn’t. Impossible. The mirror couldn’t really change like that.
She stared into her own blue eyes. She wasn’t sure what she saw in them.
“Who am I?” she asked softly.
All week, Grace’s sleep—what little she had managed to get between bouts of insomnia—had been dreamless. But tonight she thrashed for hours in the sheets, trying to fight her way out of a nightmare that seemed to last an eternity.
In the dream, a house was on fire. A big, beautifully ornamented Victorian house. She was standing outside the blazing structure, pounding on a pair of slant-set cellar doors and calling a name over and over again. “Laura! Laura!” She knew that Laura was trapped in the cellar of the burning house and that these doors were the only way out, but the doors were latched on the inside. She hammered on the wood with her bare hands until each blow sent a cruel bolt of pain the length of her arms, through her shoulders, and up the back of her neck. She wished desperately that she had an ax or a pry-bar or some other tool with which she could smash through the cellar doors, but she had nothing other than her fists, so she pounded and pounded until her flesh bruised and split and bled, and she kept on pounding even then, all the while screaming for Laura. Windows exploded on the second floor, showering glass down over her, but she didn’t turn away from the slant-set cellar doors; she didn’t run. She continued to slam her bloodied fists into the wood, praying that the girl would answer at any moment. She ignored the sparks that showered down on her and threatened to set her gingham dress afire. She wept, and she coughed when the wind blew the acrid smoke in her direction, and she cursed the wood that so easily resisted her fierce but ineffectual attack.
The nightmare had no climax, no peak of terror. It simply went on all night long at a continuously breathless pace until, a few minutes after dawn, Grace finally wrenched herself out of the hot, clutching arms of sleep and woke with a wordless cry, flailing at the mattress.