Chapter Twenty-one

name.
As gingerly as a frightened little cat, her everyday reality would come creeping back.
"I'm Patricia," she would say into the dark. "I'm Patri­cia!" And the summer wind would whisper no
more. Slowly the image of the evil being would fade.
Since Patricia Murray had left the shelter of the institution where she had been raised she had been
tortured by this dream. It had emerged into her days to the point that her life was choked by it, for it carried
with it fear as destructive as a lethal bacterium.
Sometimes she discovered tears on her cheeks even when a happy moment seemed to have banished the
fear away. She suspected that her inner self never escaped, not even for a moment. Fear and cold and
dread must be the only signposts on the landscape of her deepest being, a landscape of trampled, rotting
wheat.
Why was she like this inside?
As if her love, the very fruit of her body, was diseased. She would touch her belly, smooth and flat,
feeling how soft her skin, imagining how empty her womb, dark and silent beneath the wall of flesh.
The image of the snake would glisten in her mind.
Only once had she actually seen the terrible, slithering creature of the dream. It had been sliding through
the field, withering the wheat. Every stalk 1 destroy, it had said as it swept and curled along, is a million
human lives.
She had seen that it had the face of Death, if Death had one: green-eyed and grinning and very still.
Come, lover, and dance with me.
The sun of morning was her best friend. Fresh light brought the familiar old world back. Reaping with the
Reaper, indeed. She was twenty-two years old and people called her beautiful. Her business was life, not
death. She was an ordinary, decent girl, full of youth and life and, people said, beauty.
She wanted to believe that her dream was no more than an expression of her perfectly natural fear of
beginning a new life. She was in fact loveless; she wanted friends of the opposite sex; she had almost none.
Dates, laughter, fun— she wanted all the pleasures that came with men.
She was even lonelier living in her own apartment than she had been in the orphanage, and the therapy
for both this and the nightmare was to meet people.
She was shy. Normal, under the circumstances. She was unsure. And who wouldn't be, given her
inexperience?
No matter how odd and outcast she felt, she kept insisting to herself that she was perfectly normal.
She sat at her makeup mirror revising her looks for a date. It was to be a late meeting, drinks and talk.
Getting ac­quainted. Patricia had become skilled at arranging these dates for herself. She would not spend
too much time with a man she had never met before.
Her makeup light flickered. She jiggled it and it almost fell apart. Things like that were always happening
here; this was not the most spectacular apartment in Queens. But it was her first place and she loved every
inch of it. She loved the furniture she had managed to collect—the big couch, the Indian rug, the bed with
its pretty yellow coverlet. She loved the idea that this place, which had been bare walls and a dirty floor
when she moved in, was now a home. A charm­ing, comfortable, quiet little home.
But not as quiet as it should be.
She stopped applying her eyeshadow and listened. Hadn't she heard just then the scrape of a window
being raised?
Patricia felt she lived on a thin edge of normality. She was given to hysteria and night terrors. But she
wasn't really worried about herself. She hadn't always been this way. It was just a reaction to moving out
into the world on her own, she told herself. The nightmares and the forebodings and the unexplained tears
would all pass.
The television suddenly went on in the living room. She was astonished, her heart thundered, she leaped
up. The raucous sound of canned laughter resounded through the apartment, so loud that she could not
ignore it. She hurried into the living room and turned off the set.
Her next impulse was to rush to the door. But she forced presence of mind—she was good at that. She
stayed where she was. A robber or a rapist wouldn't announce himself by turning on the TV. Then the set
flickered as she removed her fingers from the button. She smiled. Her heart stopped pounding. Silly
woman, afraid of a loose switch on a TV set. Some errant tremble must have jarred a loose connection.
"All in the Family" was no longer on. Now the screen glowed with a strange, pulsating light. The whisper
of the static became low and deep, so deep it was felt rather than heard.
For a few moments Patricia stared at this peculiar phe­nomenon, fascinated by the sound and the
shadowy move­ments on the screen.