To his left was a sun porch with French doors leading to a garden. He stumbled toward the doors, grabbed the handle and jerked it at it. Locked.

He didn’t try to unlock the door, but took a chair and hurled it through.

He ran wildly across the garden, flailing in the shrubs, seeking some kind of a fence. At last he came to the edge of the property and climbed the brick wall he found there, cutting his fingers deeply on the shards of glass embedded in the top.

Atop the wall he paused, looked back at the house. There were no lights. Not far behind him the shrubbery was waving madly as something struggled through it.

He jumped six feet to the sidewalk.

Back in the world again. A woman walked toward him leading a dachshund. He brushed past her to the corner and hailed a cab.

“Riverside emergency,” he gasped out.

“You bet.”

They stitched him in the brightly lit emergency room and bandaged his hands. He told them a window had fallen out at his apartment.

What had actually happened he did not know. Perhaps it had been real, perhaps some kind of complex illusion designed to frighten him away.

He had them call over some detectives from the Twenty-third Precinct. Half an hour later he met them in his office.

“So you want us to go this house and get out your girl friend?”

“That’s right, officer. I have every reason to believe she’s there against her will.”

“Kidnapped?”

“Psychically kidnapped. Influenced.”

“It doesn’t sound like a crime. She’s not under age—”

“Of course not! You’re telling me I can’t get help.”

“Doctor Haver, you haven’t reported a crime.”

He let them leave. When the door closed he could contain himself no longer. In his defeat and loss he wept, muffling his face in his hands to deaden the sound.

Sarah had been at peace until she heard somebody call her name.

Tom?

She was drifting on the softest of waters, in the moonlit sea . . .

He screamed.

She opened her eyes. In her mind was a vivid image of Tom. “I love you.” The screams pealed again and again, so frantic that Sarah clapped her hands over her ears.

Abruptly it was over. After a moment Miriam’s voice drifted through the door. “It’s all right,” the voice said, “sleep now.”

“Thank you,” she replied. But she thought, ‘please don’t let him be dead.’ She had to go to him. For that she somehow had to get out of this bed. She swayed when she sat up, shook when she put her feet on the floor, had to grab the bedpost for support when she tried to move.

Helpless, almost overcome with sleep, she sank to the floor.