As she lay rigid, the pale figure, white-clad and masked, was at her bedside. Arms moved above her head in a ritual gesture like an obscene parody of a benediction. With an effort she tried to struggle up—the bedclothes seemed suddenly to weigh her down—and stretched out a hand for the bell pull and the lamp. The bell pull wasn’t there. Her hand found the light switch and clicked it on, but there was no light. Someone must have hooked the bell pull out of reach and taken the bulb from the lamp. She didn’t cry out. All those early years of self-control against betraying fear, against finding relief in shouting and yelling, had inhibited her power to scream. And she knew screaming would be ineffective; the dressing made even speech difficult. She struggled to get out of bed but found herself unable to move.

In the darkness she could vaguely make out the whiteness of the figure, the covered head, the masked face. A hand was passing across the pane of the half-open window—but it was not a human hand. No blood had ever flowed in those boneless veins. The hand, so pinkly white that it might have been severed from the arm, was moving slowly through space on its mysterious purpose. Soundlessly it closed the window latch and, with a gesture delicate and elegant in its controlled motion, it slowly drew the curtain across the window. The darkness in the room intensified, no longer just the shutting out of light, but an occluding thickening of the air which made it difficult to breathe. She told herself that it must be a hallucination conjured from her half-sleeping state, and for one blessed moment she gazed at it, all terror past, waiting for the vision to fade into the surrounding darkness. And then all hope faded.

The figure was at the bedside, looking down on her. She could discern nothing but a white formless shape; the eyes looking into hers might be merciless, but all she could make out was a black slit. She heard words, quietly spoken but she could make no sense of them. With an effort she raised her head from the pillow and tried to croak out a protest. Immediately time was suspended, and in her vortex of terror she was aware only of smell, the faintest smell of starched linen. Out of the darkness, leaning over her, was her father’s face. Not as she had remembered him for over thirty years, but the face she had briefly known in early childhood, young, happy, bending over her bed. She lifted her arm to touch the dressing but the arm was too weighty and fell back. She tried to speak, to move. She wanted to say, “Look at me, I’ve got rid of it.” Her limbs felt encased in iron, but now she managed, trembling, to lift her right hand and touched the dressing over the scar.