They did not come in words exactly, but as distorted images, one after the other after the other until she thought she would scream. Several times, she nearly got up and went to Bell to tell him that she was losing her mind or having a nervous breakdown, and she needed to get to the surface before her head blew apart.

But she never did.

She was a DSU diver. She was made of sterner stuff. If she gave into weakness or, God help her, admitted the same out loud, she was finished. She might still be in the DSU, but in a support position.

“I won’t,” she whispered to herself in the darkness. “I will not give in.”

Yes, you will, Regina’s shrewish voice told her. You’ll give in like the silly little girl you are, Alice. And when you do, it’ll be worse than anything you can imagine.

Javy felt herself burn with anger, with outrage, with a curious, unsettling combination of terror and rage. In the depths of her mind, she shouted, GO AWAY! GO AWAY, YOU NASTY FUCKING BITCH! LEAVE ME ALONE! DO YOU HEAR ME? LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE! But even as the words echoed with a grim finality in her mind, she knew that the attempted exorcism had been a glaring failure. Regina would not go away. So many, many years ago, she had locked the memory of her mother in the darkest trunk she could find and wound in chains. It had been sunk into the deepest, darkest pit of her psyche. But now…here in this place, at the very bottom of the world at the very bottom of this damned lake, the trunk had resurfaced, the chains and lock rusted away, and Regina had sprung out of it like a Jack-in-the-box, like a grinning Halloween skeleton from a coffin.

And I’ll never go away, you stupid girl. Never. Ever. Ever.

As she hovered at the outer edge of a troubled, tormented sleep, Javy’s mind went back again to her childhood.

Many months after Regina had disappeared, Javy had an episode in school that she had tried unsuccessfully to forget about. For weeks, she had been unable to sleep much. What there was of it was haunted by nightmares of her mother that she would wake from, sweating and shivering. She was worn out, both physically and mentally. She was losing weight, seeing shapes moving out of the corners of her eyes. Constantly haunted by the sense that she was never alone, that she was being watched and followed. It was a very bad time.

It all came to a sudden, screaming head in 3rd hour American Lit. She looked up from her textbook, her exhausted brain reeling as it tried to take in Thoreau’s life of seclusion at Walden’s Pond, and there was a shape standing in the corner.

It leered at her.

It chattered its teeth.