The Astral, or, Till the Day I Die. V. J. Banis

      Memories crowded in upon her, sweet, stinging. She had been seventeen when they had met. Eighteen when they first made love—the night of her eighteenth birthday, to be exact. His scruples, not hers. Certainly not hers. Despite her most ardent efforts to convince him otherwise, he had stubbornly insisted that he wanted her to be an adult when it happened. “I’m not robbing any cradles, my love,” he insisted. He was eight years older than she. Eight years wiser, she could see now, though at the time she had seen it only as sheer pigheadedness.

      Pigheadedness that somehow allowed her to convince herself that he didn’t love her when he said they would have to wait to get married.

      “Why do you have to go away, to the Middle East?” she demanded. “You could make a writing career here, couldn’t you?”

      “Because I plan to be a war correspondent.” He had been so calm, so reasonable, that it only enraged her all the more. “Iraq is where the war is going to be, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia. That’s where I have to be.”

      “Then I’ll go with you.”

      The tolerant smile he gave her infuriated her. “There’s no way I would take you there. The danger, the hardship—no, my darling, you will wait here until I come back. Assuming I do come back. There’s always that chance.”

      “And if I won’t wait?”

      “Kat, don’t be silly. If it will make you feel better, we’ll get married the first day I step on U.S. soil again, I promise.”

      “Why don’t we get married now, and you go do your Mid-East thing, and I’ll wait here for you. We have a week for a honeymoon, surely, before you have to leave.”

      There was that damned smile again. “Suppose I didn’t come back. Suppose I left you pregnant. What family do you have? Your mother, who is caring for a bed-ridden husband at the present? And I have a cousin in Oregon, who probably barely remembers me. Do you imagine I want the woman I love left with that sort of burden to bear alone? You’d be middle-aged by the time you worked through it all. No, you’re young, you’re single, I want you to enjoy your life, have fun. You’re still a kid. Go out with other guys if you feel like it. There’ll be plenty of time to work on marriage when I get back.”

      He went, and she sent his ring to him without even a note, and before six months had passed, she married Walter.

      She thought again of her husband and that futile effort at making love. Yes, now that she remembered, she could see that part of their marriage had begun to fade long ago. How many years could it have taken him to realize how much spite there had been in the hasty “yes” she gave him when, the field rid of his rival, he had once again pressed his suit?

      What a fool she had been. Now Jack McKenzie was back in the city. Somehow, knowing he was here, close by, made it all the worse.

      The shooting had left an ugly scar at her left temple. She tugged her hair down over it, pulling and fluffing until she had managed to hide it from sight. After a moment, she made a grimace of regret at herself and gathering her robe from the floor, tossed it about her shoulders. Before she turned the light out, she gave the image in the mirror one last glance.

      She could not help wondering: how would Jack McKenzie see her now?

      In the master bedroom, Walter heard the bathroom door open. He tensed, his hand paused in its ministrations. The door to Becky’s bedroom closed a moment later, and he let out the breath he had been holding. His hand began to move again. He closed his eyes and resumed the fantasies playing across the screen of his mind.

      His hand moved faster.

      * * * *

      It seemed to Catherine that she had barely closed her eyes when a voice said, “Wake up.”

      She opened her eyes but the white light that filled the room blinded her and she could see nothing.

      “You must come,” the voice said, “Come see.”

      The light faded, and she was standing in an unfamiliar room, a seedy room with faded wallpaper hanging loose from the ceiling and dust motes dancing in the pale light from a single overhead bulb. There were two men on a bed—and a little girl with them. They were...God in Heaven, what were they doing?

      On cue, the girl cried out with a sob, “Don’t, don’t, please.”

      A giant bear of a man, his back to Catherine, chuckled. The other one—long, skinny—said, “Shut up, or I’ll tape your mouth again.”

      Catherine tried to scream, to call out to them to leave the girl alone, but no sound came. She took a step toward the bed. She must make them stop. This was too horrible to bear.

      Despite her silence, perhaps because he sensed her presence, the skinny man raised his head and looked in her direction, looked directly at her. Her heart thudded. It was him: the man with the yellow beard. The beard was gone now, shaved off, making his face look different, but she would never forget those eyes; nothing could disguise that face from her.

      “What the hell?” he said. He jumped up from the bed and took a step in her direction. The other man looked too, she had a quick glimpse of his face as he said, “Trash can?”

      The next instant, she was back in bed in Becky’s room, lightning shards of pain crashing through her head.

      CHAPTER FOUR

      She leaped up and staggered to the bathroom, barely reaching the toilet bowl in time to vomit wildly into it. Even when her stomach was emptied the dry heaves continued for long minutes.

      Finally, weakly, she sat on the edge of the bathtub. As her head began to clear, she thought of Agent Chang. She ran to the den where she had left the F.B.I. agent’s card and was actually dialing the number before she thought to wonder what she was going to tell her. That she had seen her daughter’s kidnappers in a dream? With another little girl, perhaps the very one who had disappeared yesterday?

      She returned the receiver to its cradle. Chang would think she was insane. Maybe I am, she thought. How could she explain what had just happened? Who would believe her? I don’t believe it myself, she thought despairingly. Yet it had been so real.

      Had it been only a dream? Though it sickened her to imagine it, she summoned the scene she had witnessed back into mind. Even now, when she was awake, it was startlingly vivid. She saw Yellow Beard jump up from the bed, heard him exclaim. Heard the other man on the bed say, “trash can.” Which made no sense.

      Dreams didn’t, though, did they?

      * * * *

      She woke with the memory of that horrible nightmare still fresh in her mind. The Times had the story of the kidnapped child on the front page. Catherine looked long and intently at the grainy photo of a grinning twelve-year-old schoolgirl. Was it the girl she had seen in her dream? She couldn’t say with any certainty. She’d had only the briefest glimpse of the child’s tortured face before Yellow Beard had seen her and jumped from the bed.

      She wished she could share her experience with someone, and at once dismissed her husband. He would shrug it off as hysteria, hysteria and grief, which had brought on a terrible nightmare. Even she had to logically suppose that was the truth. If only it hadn’t seemed so vivid, so like she had actually been there.

      Her mother? As if that thought had communicated itself through space, the phone rang and it was her mother. “I have to do some shopping,” Sandra Dodd said, her tone making a question of it, a hopeful question, “And I thought you might join me? We could have lunch together.”

      Shopping and lunch had been a monthly ritual in the past, one of the many that had fallen by the wayside. “Dominique’s in the mall?” Catherine suggested. That had been their favorite spot.

      “At twelve?” Sandra was obviously delighted.

      After she had hung up the phone, however, Catherine was less sure. The thought of the mall crowds, the early Christmas crowds especially, intimidated her. She used