Ashley Bell. Dean Koontz
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her wonder or burst. Being named Bibi had encouraged her to chatter away because, even as a child, she had been determined to impress upon everyone that, in spite of her name, she wasn’t a toy, not frivolous, but a keen observer of the world, a philosopher by the time she graduated from the potty chair. She had never been for long struck speechless—until she received a diagnosis of brain cancer.
Her mother returned at five o’clock with everything that Bibi had requested, and her father phoned minutes later to say that the three of them should have dinner together in her room, not hospital food, but whatever outrageous high-calorie fat-rich takeout she wanted. Cheeseburgers and milk shakes. Burritos. Four-cheese pizza. Anything, anything.
“No, Dad. Mom’s exhausted.” Nancy began to protest, but Bibi raised one hand to quiet her. “You both are. These two days have been hard on all of us. You and Mom have dinner, just the two of you, with a good bottle of wine. I’m okay. I’m not going anywhere. I just want to do some research on my laptop while I eat, then early to bed. I hardly slept last night. I’ll ask for a sedative. I want to be dreaming about a certain Navy SEAL by seven o’clock at the latest.”
To get Nancy out of the room and off to dinner, Bibi had to escort her along the hallway to the elevators. Alert for any tendency of her left foot to drag, determined not to become Quasimodo with boobs, she walked with her shoulders back and her head up.
“What about the tingling?” her mother asked. “The fifty-cell-phones-on-mute head-to-foot thing?”
“It’s quieter. And I haven’t had that rancid taste all day.”
“Baby, I can see your left hand’s still weak.”
“So I’ll use the other one to scratch my butt.”
In the elevator alcove, the doors to one of the cabs slid open. Nancy didn’t get aboard. “This is so wrong. I can’t just leave.”
As the doors started to slide shut, Bibi blocked them. “Mom, we have to stay as normal as possible. The three of us can’t group-hug twenty-four/seven. We’ll melt down if we do.”
When Nancy tried to speak, she couldn’t. Her mouth trembled.
Bibi kissed her mother’s cheek. “You’re a sweetie. Now go. Eat too much. Drink too much. Live, Mom. Live. I sure intend to.”
In her hospital room again, she sat at the small table by the window and used her laptop to learn about anticancer and cytotoxic drugs. Alkylating agents. Nitrosoureas. Antimetabolites. Mitotic inhibitors. At least her disease was enhancing her vocabulary.
As the March afternoon dressed itself in scarlet to approach the evening, a nurses’ aide brought a dinner tray. Suitable reading with dinner did not include an article about the side effects of chemo. As she ate, Bibi watched amusing dog videos on YouTube.
The bad thing happened when she got up from her chair to wash her hands. A sudden pain of migraine intensity split her skull.
She almost dropped to her knees. She staggered, made her way onto the bed, and pressed the call button for a nurse.
Sudden headaches could be a symptom of gliomatosis cerebri, a consequence of pressure on the brain; however, they usually occurred in the morning. The tests she’d undergone the previous day had not revealed excess cerebrospinal fluid. “No hydrocephalus,” the doctor had said. Maybe that had changed.
Having raised the upper half of the bed, she sat with both hands clasped to her skull and imagined that she could feel the bone itself deforming with each throb. The nurse arrived, asked a few questions, and returned with aspirin plus another pill. Bibi didn’t ask about the second medication, just swallowed it with a long drink of water.
“I’ll keep checking on you,” the nurse promised. “Now rest.”
When the woman left, Bibi twice tried to recline, but both times she panicked when a vivid sense of falling overcame her. More than a mere feeling, it was an absolute conviction that she would tumble backward into a bottomless void, as if she were sitting on the brink of eternity. Besides, the very act of leaning backward as much as an inch or two intensified her headache. Even knowing that the inclined bed would prevent her from so much as lying full-length on her back, she made no third attempt. Sitting forward, head hung, eyes closed, she wrapped her arms around her torso as if to anchor herself.
To her surprise, in five minutes or less, the pain began to diminish. Aspirin didn’t work that quickly. Evidently, she owed her relief to the second medication.
When she opened her eyes, red radiance bathed everything, and she at first thought that she must be having vision problems again. Then she realized that none of the lights were on and that the room, previously brightened by only sunshine, was now illuminated by the sunset, which had melted the sky into a fire-shot river of molten glass slowly flowing west and away.
She reached for the lamp control that was clipped to the bedrail. The oval dimmer switch felt wrong in her fingers, felt soft and scaly, as if she had gripped the head of a living reptile, and the pale cord wriggled in protest. She dropped the switch and watched with astonishment as her suddenly stiff-fingered hand pecked at the air like a bird pecking at a tree trunk to feed on crawling insects, pecked violently, pecked and pecked, and she could not control it.
Seizure, she thought, and as if confirming her own diagnosis, she grunted and mewled like an animal, and made thin hacking sounds in the back of her throat.
The stiffness in her hand spread up the arm, through her body, and she fell backward against the inclined mattress, which stopped her, but she didn’t feel as if she had been stopped. The brink she had feared earlier was there, and she was overcome by a sensation of plunging into a void, down and down, plummeting, although the hospital room shimmering with crimson light did not recede, which it should have if she were really doing an Alice down a rabbit hole.
Several glossy spots of darkness appeared in her field of vision, floating like fat beads of black oil in the red radiance, first fewer than a dozen, then scores, then hundreds. As all light vanished and the glistening blackness flooded over her, she tried to cry out for help, but like all drowned girls before her, she had no voice.
Twelve Years Earlier
TWO WEEKS AFTER FLEEING FROM THE APARTMENT above the garage, four weeks before Olaf padded into her life, on another sleep-in Sunday for her parents, young Bibi rose and dressed while the last defenses of the night barely held off the advancing dawn. She tucked two granola bars into the pockets of her fleece-lined denim jacket and, as the morning spread its flamingo-pink wings across the east, she walked two and a half blocks to the park along Ocean Avenue.
She sat on a bench at Inspiration Point to watch the breaking surf and the dark sea as mottled green-greenblack as watermelon skin. From that perch, she sometimes imagined herself to be one of a pirate crew sailing on violent tides, or else a whale so big that she feared nothing in her shadowed watery world. This morning, she imagined life after death, not as it might be in Heaven, but as it might be here and now, in this world, if such things as ghosts were real.
After finishing the first granola bar and deciding not to linger long enough to eat the second, she returned home. If she was a girl of action, a girl of unshakeable intentions, like the girls whom she most admired in the books that she most enjoyed reading, she could no longer shrink from the mystery that demanded her attention.
By the alley gate, she let herself into the courtyard between garage and bungalow. Climbed the stairs. Hesitated on the balcony.
Two weeks earlier, the gray wet day had been appropriate to séances and conjurings—and to unsettling encounters with restless spirits. Under this bright and lively sky, with the warbling and clear, short