She couldn’t sleep. Not now, not after the last couple of days.

“Dammit,” Ilse murmured.

She tried to shift the other direction, pulling the comforter up to her ear. She tried turning the pillow on its cooler side. But try as she might, she couldn’t rest. Unwanted, horrible memories played like movies inside her eyelids.

She glanced toward the door to the bathroom, wondering if she still had some sleeping pills in the medicine cabinet.

Then, while trying to summon the energy to hop out of bed and retrieve the pills, there came a quiet tapping sound against the door.

Two quick knocks.

Ilse froze. The sound was a strange one, echoing in her room. Someone was knocking on the wooden door… But another sound was conjured in her mind. More a memory. She remembered the basement stairs back in Germany. Remembered the same tapping sound—footsteps against the floorboards above, a warning that her father was coming. She could remember the way her siblings, her brothers and sisters in the dark, had writhed and hidden behind the couch or moved to their sleeping bags. Others had grabbed the sparse books they’d been allowed, pretending to be deep in study.

Ilse snapped back to the present, breathing in shallow puffs and staring at her door.

“Yes?” Ilse called out.

“Dr. Beck?” came Samantha’s trembling voice. “I’m sorry, Dr. Beck. I, I—”

“Is everything all right?” Ilse said, strangely grateful to have someone else’s fears to worry about for a moment.

“I can’t sleep.”

You and me both, Ilse thought. Out loud, she said, “Did you try turning off the lamp?”

“It’s too scary out there. I don’t like being on my own. I-I can still feel them,” Samantha whispered. “The bodies in that basement. How they brushed against me. I can still feel them.”

Ilse winced, remembering the scene, the strange, gruesome smiley face created from corpses. Remembering where they had found Samantha, buried among the dead, left to bleed out in the pitch-black. She supposed she couldn’t blame her. “Do you think it would be better if—”

“Can I sleep in there?”

Ilse frowned. “I can take the couch if that would make it—”

“No! I don’t want to be alone.”

Then the door handle turned, and the door creaked slowly, with a quiet grating sound.

Everything remained plunged in darkness, and Ilse realized the hallway light was off, and all she could make out was Samantha’s silhouette against the doorway.

“I won’t bother you,” Sam whispered, desperately. “I promise. I just can’t be alone.” She stepped into the room.

Ilse frowned. “I don’t know if that’s—”

Before she could complete the sentence, the door clicked shut. Ilse listened to the sound of padding feet against the floor, and she glimpsed Samantha’s shadow caught by the faintest of lights through the shuttered curtains over the window. She watched as the woman then circled the bed, moving over toward the empty side of the queen-sized mattress.

“I can remember now,” Sam whispered.