The Nightmare Sonata II

She hugged him to her, glad she had woken him in time. His mind had been falling, spinning like a plate, but she caught it, she did, before it cracked against this disease. No respecter of cleanliness or isolation was this plague of the soul, contracted by sharing vibrations. Everyone suffered, from its first night onwards. Nobody knew how or why it....

"Why?" murmured Jessica as she started to doze, moving her head to Luke's lap. He shushed and began to stroke her hair. How beautiful it had been! Spun gold, maybe, but that wasn't doing it justice. He remembered how it soaked up some essence of Jessica from the roots and lived in the air when she turned her head sharply. He remembered the sun catching it last August, bouncing off it to his eyes as if it could not spread the story of her quickly enough. He remembered all this as he fingered the lank strands, not washed since they had last found running water two weeks ago. Frowning he tried to love her hair again, and smiled a little when a tiny glow answered from deep inside himself.

There were shrieks outside. Marauding ranks of the now near-mad (for who of the truly mad would fancy himself in a group of crazy people?) were looting nearby houses. But this wreck, with its two wrecks, had already been stripped. Luke worried every time he heard sounds outside, but always had to agree with himself that they were safe here. In contrast Jessica only knew safety, wrapped up in his warmth and already asleep.

... As a child Jessica had grown up on a country estate, and now inside the ropes and sinews of her head Jessica was as a child. She tripped lightly up the grand steps of her parents' estate, kept paved, carpeted, cleaned by her parents equally grand income. Over the grey stone, dusty even when it was not, she skipped towards her father. Dead for ten years but now here, he hugged her close and told her how much he missed her. She had been away, must have been somewhere, with friends or---

Crying silently. There were always tears, Luke thought. That bit she always said she couldn't remember. The fear and shock---the sickness---always blotted out what had made her cry.

"He's in the billiard room," her father said, leading her by the elbow. He was always costume-dramatic, and she caught the bug from him and started thinking the same way. "A suitor?" she thought. "A tutor? A pop star? She knew he'd been doing work for Apple---those haircuts, the clothes, the rich voices that drove a spike into her belly---and maybe he'd got talking over some... barristery thing. He'd come round for a drink of tea and a look round the grounds, or maybe the other one, the one she fancied less.... Bewildered (but not to the point of wakefulness) she let herself be steered to the doors. Standing before them and seeing their tallness, twice as tall as Denise her younger sister and dark with the wood of local trees, she suddenly realized who was beyond the doors. The notion opened in her mind like a container of ice, chilling her and freezing her feet to the floor, no, no, Daddy, no, it's not---

---whimpering and wrinkling her nose, that was the cue, but how could he wake her now, God, she was pretty when she could get some rest. If he sat here and just stroked her hair, led a finger along her jawline, whispered he loved her: would that be enough? Would that seep into her skull and cleanse her? But as the doors creaked open and her father pushed her forward and the man in black came towards her and stabbed towards her heart, she only had time to feel the point of the blade against the skin of her belly when

Luke woke her, wriggling her shoulders which wriggled back. She always woke in a foul temper, but still kissed him, to tell him, "it's all right, I understand. Thank you. I'll thank you when I've woken up some more," the kiss said, but did not add that she might never be that awake again.