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he’d talked about it, the more stupid the whole thing had sounded. And yet, the face seemed to be coming to him more and more lately.
    He studied the mirror for a few seconds, now consciously willing the image to reappear, as if to convince himself that the specter existed only in his own imagination. But except for his own face, the mirror reflected only white, shiny tile.
    Leaving the bathroom to Jenny, he hurried down the stairs and out into the heat of the morning. But as hestarted toward the garage and his motorcycle, he glanced back at the house.
    What was the truth of the face he’d seen in the mirror?
    Was it in the house, or was it in his own mind?
    As he mounted his bike and rode away, he decided that he didn’t really want to know the answer to his own question, for one answer was as frightening as the other.

3

    K elly Anderson sat silently in the backseat of the Chrysler, staring unseeingly out the window. Though the scenery had slowly changed from the red earth and pine trees of Georgia to the marshy flatland of Florida, Kelly had been unaware of it. Her thoughts had been turned inward, remembering the two weeks she’d spent in the hospital.
    She hadn’t needed to be there—her wounds had healed quickly, and even the stitches in her stomach had been removed after only a week. What they’d really been trying to do was to figure out if she was crazy. She’d convinced them she wasn’t, although she herself wasn’t at all sure it was true. But the idea of being locked up in a hospital somewhere had terrified her even more than the image of the old man that she’d seen in the bathroom mirror the night she’d tried to kill herself, so instead of telling the psychiatrist about it, she’d made up a story. And the story wasn’t really a lie, because she
had
been worried about her father notworking, and she
had
felt she could never do anything right. So when she told them she’d just decided that maybe it would be easier for everyone if she weren’t around anymore, they’d believed her.
    She hadn’t told them about the nightmare man—she knew better than that.
    She’d talked her way out of telling Dr. Hartman about thinking she was pregnant, too. That hadn’t been too hard—she just said she’d been feeling really bad lately, and when she missed her period, she automatically thought she must be pregnant. She even claimed she’d been drinking with some friends one night, didn’t remember what had happened, and just assumed she must have gone to bed with someone. That part hadn’t been true at all—she hated the taste of liquor—but they’d believed her.
    And they hadn’t locked her up.
    They sent her home instead, and a week later her mother told her they were moving to Villejeune.
    There’d been a long story about the job her grandfather had found for her father, but Kelly knew it wasn’t true. Or even if it was, it still wasn’t the real reason they were moving.
    What they really wanted to do was get her out of Atlanta, and away from her friends.
    Her friends, she thought hollowly. It was kind of funny, really, since she never thought of the kids in her crowd as friends. They were just other kids, people to hang out with so she wouldn’t have to be by herself all the time. She never really talked to any of them very much.
    If she had, they might have found out how crazy she really was.
    Maybe she should have let them lock her up after all. At least that way her mother wouldn’t have had to move back to Villejeune. She recalled her mother’s words, last week: “I always hated it. It always felt like everyone there was just waiting to die. Nothing ever changed, nothing ever happened. And it wasn’t just me. A lot of the otherkids felt the same way. Most of us could hardly wait to get out, and a lot of us did. There wasn’t any reason to stay—Villejeune was just like all those other little towns on the edge of the swamp. Nobody had any ambition, nobody had any dreams.” Then, as