That night she dreamed the dream once again. There was no rhyme or reason to it, and yet it terrified her each time. This time she awoke before the dream could end; awoke with her forehead damp with cool beads of perspiration, awoke with her heart hammering furiously, and her eyes staring, and her hands-small hands, narrow fingers, nails immaculately manicured-curled into tight little fists, with the nails digging harshly into the palms of her hands.

A dream of flight, of a chase with her own self cast as victim, as person pursued. And with the pursuer unknowable. In the dream she was running eternally down an endless hallway, a hallway which grew gradually but inexorably narrower as she raced through it, the walls closing slowly on her.

The walls, an ivory white, were unbroken by windows or doors. Sometimes, smoking a cigarette in the sweaty aftermath of the nightmare, she would force herself back over the dream and try to figure out its setting, and try to establish what sort of hallway she ran through night after endless night. A hospital? But hospital walls were always that weak gray-green of impending death, and the walls in the dream were white. And the floor was black, not tile or linoleum or wood or stone-an endless ribbon of black which seemed to be made of no particular material at all.

And she ran in the dream, ran until her legs ached, ran while her heart pounded, ran with a whirlwind behind her, and her mouth parted for a scream that never came, and something, something, behind her and coming ever closer.

She had dreamed the dream a countless number of times. She had never been caught. She had never reached the end of the corridor, if indeed it had an end. Each time she awoke with terror shrieking through her body.

Now she sat very still in the narrow bed.