Sweet Lamb of Heaven (67)

My gaze hit the wall tiles. I’d thought they were so clean, but now I saw some of the caulked cracks between them contained lines of mildew. I’d get the maids in here first thing tomorrow, I’d get down on my own hands and knees . . . wait. My fingernails were almost as long as the toes. Hard to believe I hadn’t cut up my scalp with them while I was lathering. My gaze flicked back to the wall tiles and I saw a line of mildew was creeping up the grout.

It was visibly extending itself before my eyes, indeed all over the white surface of miniature tiles on the shower wall mildew was creeping along the lines of caulking. In a grid of right angles a black mold was spiking out farther and farther along the network of tiles, straight angles in every direction.

“What is this,” I said, “what is this,” and tore the curtain back without even turning the water off. Wait—the water had flooded, the floor was soaked, and everything was damp. A lightbulb flickered above the vanity. In passing I noticed the tub was full, backed up, the water a sludgy gray, and a rim of scum ran around the tub over the waterline. I panicked, throwing a towel around my middle, tying it over my chest—it too smelled stale, possibly moldy. I pulled the door open and ran out into the room: there were Will and Lena reading on the bed, pillows propped behind them, with a picture book open across their laps.

Relief: she was there. She was safe.

But all around us the room seemed to be changing, though I couldn’t put my finger on it at first.

“Goodnight, little house. Goodnight, mouse,” read Lena. Her voice was muffled.

“Goodnight, comb. Goodnight, brush,” read Will. His voice, too, sounded like it was coming through a barrier.

They looked relaxed, as I’d left them, but around the bed they lay on other features shifted and altered. The desk lamp turned off and on rapidly, at irregular intervals; dust piled on surfaces and then seemed to go away, as though either blown or wiped; an object vanished and reappeared somewhere else, a toy on the round table, a glass. They didn’t take notice. Through a chink in the drapes I saw flashes of light outside. But it was night, and there shouldn’t have been light on that ocean side—so I ran past the foot of the bed to pull the drapes open where the big picture window looked over the cliffs and sea.

And I saw it was day. But then it was night, again, night in the sky and rapidly back to day. Boats appeared on the surface of the water, both far and nearer, then disappeared in an eye-blink, only to reappear elsewhere; the sky switched from morning to midday to evening to night within the space of seconds, and then did it again—this time with different cloud formations, other ships.

“Will, Will! What’s happening?” I shrieked, turning to look at him and Lena where they sat with their backs against the headboard, their legs stretched out on the bedspread.

But they seemed to be walled off. When I leaned over the bed to reach out to them something in the air resisted me. I couldn’t punch through the space around them, though I tried, increasingly desperate. Lena and Will looked the same as ever but I could see my hair growing in front of my eyes, my hair was getting longer and longer on my shoulders, inch by inch it moved down the front of my shirt, my hairs were visibly lengthening.

My little girl was looking calmly at her picture book, touching the drawings. She looked so normal, just here, just the way she should be. But I—I looked up at myself in the mirror. There was an ominous element to the growth of my hair, the choppy, almost digital-looking growth of the ends, so fast it was visible to the naked eye. There was something badly wrong. I wasn’t myself, but the image of me.

Lena’s fingernails were normal where they lay on the bottom edge of the pages of her book, bitten off a bit but normal: Goodnight, nobody, said the text on the page.

Beneath my own lengthening fingernails a line of dirt crept, growing along with the keratin.

I’d seen this somewhere, I thought, seen this somewhere before.

“OK,” I said, and made myself take deep breaths, count slowly. One of the hypnotic visions or a vivid nightmare—in any case nothing physically real, that was clear from the nails, from the hair—impossibility. I had to figure out the rules of the nightmare; possibly I could control it and wake myself up. I turned my back on Will and Lena and walked to the window again, where birds appeared on the cliff edge and then flicked away. The grass was greener, yes, the ice melted and springtime was here, even the color of the ocean changed from gray to a bluer hue, even the color of the sky.

I heard a voice in the other bedroom and went back through the interior door, reluctant to let Lena and Will out of my sight but pulled there somehow—still, all this was an effect, wasn’t it? An effect, I remember telling myself as the light kept changing up around me, lights shifted and went from dark to dim to bright. It was disorienting. But part of me also worried that I’d been drugged again and this would turn out to be another kidnapping, so I made sure the chain was on the room door. Dream or not, lock the door, I said as I went. Dream or not, lock the door.

The voice was coming from my laptop, open on the bed where I’d left it during my shower. I came up beside it and I could see the screen: Ned’s face. It was a video call, his head in a window on the screen—talking to someone else as I came up, his face in profile, but he turned and looked at me.

“A little fast-forwarding,” he said.

“What? What do you mean?”

“I hit the fast-forward button,” he repeated. “Didn’t you see? The kid. Your boy in there. They’re not going so fast, are they? You’re all alone.”