“Not really. Still as baffled as you are.” Eph crossed his arms. Nora had switched on her Luma light and was going over Redfern’s arms with it. “Which is why your agreeing to stay is so critical right now. I want to run a full battery of tests on you.”

Captain Redfern watched the indigo light shine over his flesh. “If you think you can figure out what happened, I’ll be your guinea pig.”

Eph nodded their appreciation.

“When did you get this scar?” asked Nora.

“What scar?”

She was looking at his neck, the front of his throat. He tipped his head back so that she could touch the fine line that showed up deep blue under her Luma. “Looks almost like a surgical incision.”

Redfern felt for it himself. “There’s nothing.”

Indeed, when she switched off the lamp, the line was all but invisible. She turned it back on and Eph examined the line. Maybe a half inch across, a few millimeters thick. The tissue growth over the wound appeared quite recent.

“We’ll do some imaging later tonight. MRI should show us something.”

Redfern nodded, and Nora turned off her light wand. “You know…there is one other thing.” Redfern hesitated, his airline pilot’s confidence fading for a moment. “I do remember something, but it won’t be of any use to you, I don’t think…”

Eph shrugged almost imperceptibly. “We’ll take anything you can give us.”

“Well, when I blacked out…I dreamed of something—something very old…” The captain looked around, almost ashamedly, then started talking in a very low voice. “When I was a kid…at night…I used to sleep in this big bed in my grandmother’s home. And every night, at midnight, as the bells chimed in the church nearby, I used to see a thing come out from behind a big old armoire. Every night, without fail—it would poke out its black head and long arms and bony shoulders…and stare at me…”

“Stare?” asked Eph.

“It had a jagged mouth, with thin, black lips…and it would look at me, and just…smile.”

Eph and Nora were both transfixed, the intimacy of the confession and its dreamlike tone both unexpected.

“And then I would start screaming, and my grandmother would turn on the light and take me to her bed. It went on for years. I called him Mr. Leech. Because his skin…that black skin looked just like the engorged leeches we used to pick up in a nearby stream. Child psychiatrists looked at me and talked to me and called it ‘night terrors’ and gave me reasons not to believe in him, but…every night he came back. Every night I would sink under my pillows, hiding from him—but it was useless. I knew he was there, in the room…” Redfern grimaced. “We moved out some years later and my grandmother sold the armoire and I never saw it again. Never dreamed of it again.”

Eph had listened carefully. “You’ll have to excuse me, Captain…but what does this have to do with…?”