"Don't think about what you're doing," he told them, repeating what he had told Diana privately the day before. "Let your thoughts wander. Just draw."

Diana resisted the impulse to once again sketch Quentin's face.

Instead, she thought about her predawn experience and the maybe-dream of the plea for help traced on a windowpane.

Help us.

Us? Who was "us"? No. Never mind. It was a dream. Only a dream.

Just another strange dream, another symptom, another sign she was getting worse instead of better.

It scared her. This illness of hers had disrupted her life from the time she was eight years old, and twenty-five years was a long time to deal with anything like that. But at least in those early years she had been able to function normally most of the time. There had been some dreams, scattered instances of thinking she had heard someone speaking to her when there had been no one nearby, even eerie glimpses of people or things, like a flicker of motion caught from the corner of her eye but gone when she tried to look straight at them.

Unsettling, to be sure, and it had worried her father when she had mentioned this or that occurrence. But it was only when Diana hit adolescence that the symptoms had begun to seriously interfere with her life.

The blackouts had been the most frightening. "Waking up" to find herself in a strange place or doing something she never would have done consciously. Dangerous things, sometimes. Once, she had opened her eyes to realize, to her terror, that she was up to her waist in the lake near her home.

Fully clothed. In the middle of the night. Just wading out toward the middle of the lake. And at the time, she hadn't been able to swim.